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Reforming Higher Education: Innovation and the Public Good
The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University
Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year--less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers.
In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators.
The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.
In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators.
The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.
- GenresEducationNonfiction
264 pages, Hardcover
Published October 29, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 24, 2021
I was disappointed. Very interested in the topic of employment trends in higher ed, for the narcissistic reason that I'm employed in higher ed, but didn't get much out of it.
They bill it as targeted to university workers, but I think it might really be of more interest to, and more informative for, the general-interest reader who doesn't work in this sector. I can think of several of my siblings, for instance, to whom I might recommend it -- generally curious people interested in economics but with no particular awareness/understanding of trends like the dramatic increase in deployment of contingent, non-tenure-track faculty, increasing unionization of grad students, etc.
Most of it was familiar and seemed on target (that is, I share their sense that hiring a million adjuncts on the cheap and reshuffling a good chunk of the money that used to pay for tenured faculty to increasing layers of administration are not positive developments for "student success"), but two specific quibbles:
1. in fairness they labeled it "aspirational" (p. 165), but when your list of proposed solutions includes demanding 15K/course for adjuncts [so that administrators would no longer be tempted to rely on this cheap source of labor so much], I can't take it seriously as being a constructive guide. I can just picture going to the Dean when i was department chair and opening with "I know we're hiring adjuncts every semester without ever having to advertise because so many people want to do it, and that zero have turned us down on account of money, but I'd like you to triple their pay immediately so as to stop yourself from continuing this exploitation. Get back to me by Friday!"
2. Understandable given the authors' backgrounds, but they seem much more familiar with faculty than with other campus roles. They try to tie it all together but do not [in my reading] make the case that outsourcing of, say, dining services or custodial work has much to do with the issues relating to teaching, research, and administrative roles.
There's a few of the "Betty from the cafeteria is so friendly and really brightens students' days" anecdotes that our campus newspaper loves to roll out at least every semester, but not much analysis of why those interactions would be improved were Betty to be employed directly by the university rather than by Macke or Bon Appetit or whatever the outsourced corporation is these days.
They bill it as targeted to university workers, but I think it might really be of more interest to, and more informative for, the general-interest reader who doesn't work in this sector. I can think of several of my siblings, for instance, to whom I might recommend it -- generally curious people interested in economics but with no particular awareness/understanding of trends like the dramatic increase in deployment of contingent, non-tenure-track faculty, increasing unionization of grad students, etc.
Most of it was familiar and seemed on target (that is, I share their sense that hiring a million adjuncts on the cheap and reshuffling a good chunk of the money that used to pay for tenured faculty to increasing layers of administration are not positive developments for "student success"), but two specific quibbles:
1. in fairness they labeled it "aspirational" (p. 165), but when your list of proposed solutions includes demanding 15K/course for adjuncts [so that administrators would no longer be tempted to rely on this cheap source of labor so much], I can't take it seriously as being a constructive guide. I can just picture going to the Dean when i was department chair and opening with "I know we're hiring adjuncts every semester without ever having to advertise because so many people want to do it, and that zero have turned us down on account of money, but I'd like you to triple their pay immediately so as to stop yourself from continuing this exploitation. Get back to me by Friday!"
2. Understandable given the authors' backgrounds, but they seem much more familiar with faculty than with other campus roles. They try to tie it all together but do not [in my reading] make the case that outsourcing of, say, dining services or custodial work has much to do with the issues relating to teaching, research, and administrative roles.
There's a few of the "Betty from the cafeteria is so friendly and really brightens students' days" anecdotes that our campus newspaper loves to roll out at least every semester, but not much analysis of why those interactions would be improved were Betty to be employed directly by the university rather than by Macke or Bon Appetit or whatever the outsourced corporation is these days.
August 6, 2020
The proletarians in the diploma factories crying about the strike breakers. Yet, the strike breakers just want to have their chance for the sinecure of the proletarians. So the fault must rest with the owners that exploit the poor proletarians and how they are forced to cut the same abject papers into many pieces so they would make their plan of "published works"
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews