Inside Higher Ed: Alternative Approach for Adjuncts
Robert Zemsky is, as he himself puts it, “one hell of a dinosaur throwback.” He attended one college, went right to grad school, got a Ph.D. and spent a lifetime working for one and only one university. Forty years later, professors like Zemsky — full time, tenured — are on their way to extinction, making up only 30 percent of all college instructors.
Like many of the faculty members, union organizers and others who attended the annual meeting of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, held at City University of New York’s Baruch College this week, Zemsky, an education professor at the University of Pennsylvania who is widely recognized as one of the country’s best thinkers about higher education, doesn’t like that trend line. While academic unions are increasingly trying to rally part-time instructors to organize, partly for better part-time benefits but almost always with the goal of restoring more full-time faculty lines — seeking a “revolution,” as Zemsky termed it in the keynote speech he gave Tuesday — that horse has left the barn, he argued.
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