Columbia Faculty Union banner declaring "I'm ready to fight for a fair contract."

Education as a Public Good: The Columbia College Faculty Union’s Strike

BY COLUMBIA FACULTY UNION, COLUMBIA COLLEGE CHICAGO This statement was submitted by the Columbia Faculty Union, Local 6602 IFT/AFT, representing part-time faculty at Columbia College Chicago, on Monday, October 30, as they began a strike.  In the heart of Chicago, the Columbia Faculty Union (CFAC) represents a diverse group of faculty members, many of whom…

Responding to Robert Kuttner

BY HANK REICHMAN I usually admire American Prospect editor Robert Kuttner’s writings, but a short piece published online today, “The Republican Attack on Tenure,” got my hackles up a bit.  Most of the piece is fine, calling appropriate attention to the assault on both tenure and academic freedom being waged by the GOP in red…

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Collective Bargaining to Reprofessionalize the Faculty

BY JORDAN HARPER AND ADRIANNA KEZAR In the winter 2023 issue of Academe, our article “Reprofessionalizing the Faculty” highlights campuses that are making systemic changes to better support non-tenure-track faculty, including Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Penn State, and the University of Denver. These institutions provided insights into why supporting non-tenure-track faculty is advantageous for student success…

The Material Conditions of Academic Labor

BY HANK REICHMAN “We are deeply concerned that the crisis of the American university–the decline of tenure-track jobs and universities’ eroding commitment to the humanities and social sciences–has created a structural crisis for scholarship.” So write the editors of the Journal of the Early Republic, published by the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic…

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The Poverty Crisis in Higher Education

BY DIANA C. SILVERMAN The poverty crisis in universities today has reached hallucinatory proportions. Fifty-eight percent of students were experiencing food insecurity, housing insecurity, or homelessness, in a survey of 200,000 students at 202 different institutions of higher education in the year 2020 by Temple University’s Hope Center for College, Community and Justice. At the…

Why Is My Professor Working at Two Other Universities? Awareness of Adjunct Labor among College Students

BY JASON PHILLIPS Most students do not understand the hierarchy of educators in academia. What they tend to imagine when they talk about professors are tenured, full-time professors. In reality, colleges and universities are predominantly staffed by contingent and adjunct faculty members. According to a 2018 report from the AAUP, “at all US institutions combined,…

A CLASS Exercise to Start the Semester!

BY JOSEPH G. RAMSEY Welcome back to school, faculty—and grad student teachers, too! Wondering how much your teaching labor is subsidizing the rest of your university (in other words: your basic rate of exploitation)? Try this fun back-to-school activity! Locate your school’s per course student tuition rate. (At my public university, in-state tuition per 3…