Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education

by Joe Berry

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower examines the situation of adjunct professors in U.S. higher education today, describes the process of organizing them to improve their conditions of work, and puts forward an agenda around which adjunct labor can mobilize and transform the universities.
In the last twenty years, higher education in the United States has been eroded by massive reliance on temporary academic labor—professors without tenure or prospect of tenure, without benefits, working without offices or research assistance, often commuting between several campuses, and paid a fraction of the salaries of the tenured colleagues. Contingent faculty now constitutes the majority of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities.
Analyzing the changing composition of the academic workforce, assessing the strength of new organizing initiatives among adjuncts, and weighing up their strategic options, this is the most comprehensive and engaged account to date of an issue that will become increasingly important for the future of higher education in the United States and in the global context.

Genres: Labor, Nonfiction, Education

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Sarah]

Half manifesto and half practical organizing handbook, this book made me quite a bit more hopeful about my own future in academia. The prospect of becoming an exploited, underpaid, and (perhaps worst of all) routinely disrespected adjunct has always terrified me and was one of the major reasons I hesitated so long to apply to grad school. Due to the state of the academic job market, I stand a very good chance of at least spending a few years as an adjunct before landing a tenure-track position, and while it wouldn't be nearly so bad if it were simply a case of "paying your dues" before moving up in your career, the conditions of adjuncting (the low pay, lack of benefits, and the lack of support for research) make it extremely difficult to actually research and publish enough to get out of adjuncting and into the tenure track. Meanwhile (and parents of college students should know this and be pissed), huge percentages of undergraduate courses are being taught by people who are severely underpaid, kept out of real participation in the university community, have no offices, have none of the academic freedom or freedom of speech that job security provides, and often have to teach multiple courses at different universities just to get by. Many are wonderful teachers despite all these setbacks, but it's obvious that nobody could do their very best under such circumstances. It's a huge problem. It needs to change.
It also sounds like a desperate and awful job to have to do. No wonder I'm terrified of it. But this book gave me a lot of hope, because it tells the stories of adjuncts who realized just how exploited their labor was, how much their working conditions were hurting them and their students, and that they did not deserve that kind of treatment.
Since I'm not (yet) an adjunct, this eminently practical book was mostly useful to me in that it got me thinking about academic labor in general, and has led me to start reading more on the topic. But it's full of case studies and organizing strategies that make it a great tool for any adjuncts fed up with their lot in academic life and eager to change it.