As public spending for higher education continues its decades-long decline (Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014), and university boards and administrators seek ways to balance their budgets, faculty (and staff) labor has been targeted as a way to make ends meet. Attacks on faculty labor can take different forms, such as reducing or eliminating liberal arts requirements, decreasing faculty need, especially in the humanities; increasing class sizes (requiring fewer instructors to cover individual sections); and the elimination or hollowing out of tenure through punitive post-tenure review policies. Penultimate in the drive for a more (in managerial-speak) "flexible labor" is the increasing reliance on contingent faculty--those with term-to-term or multiyear contracts, but no guarantee of long-term employment. The use, and abuse, of contingent labor in higher education is a multifaceted, long-entrenched practice, signifying its place as a "wicked problem" (Rittel & Webber, 1973), not only for those in these positions, but for the entire higher education system.