The nature of the American academic workforce has fundamentally shifted over the past several decades. Whereas full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty were once the norm, more than two-thirds of the professoriate in non-profit postsecondary education is now comprised of non-tenure-track faculty. New hires across all institutional types are now…

The year 2007 marks forty years of indentured servitude on the part of parttime faculty teaching in the California Community College system. Approximately forty thousand dedicated, highly trained, and motivated teachers work alongside twelve thousand tenured full-time faculty. Sadly, for all their efforts, part-time faculty members receive little…

Although the continuity of faculty is an important factor in sustaining an institution's general education program, if the measure is attainment of learning outcomes, qualitative considerations, and not a faculty member's employment status, are more important in determining who should teach such courses. This author argues that relatively junior,…

Collective bargaining in higher education and a few other fields is examined in 21 papers from a 1986 conference of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions. After an introduction by Joel M. Douglas, the academic collective bargaining system is reexamined in four papers. Additional papers…