Inside Higher Ed: For Adjuncts, Progress and Complexities
A few years ago, sessions at gatherings of adjunct leaders featured a sort of one-upmanship of horror stories. Activists would trade tales of the worst abuses, the most impoverished scholars and so forth. On Saturday, at a national gathering of adjunct leaders, one session almost turned into a boasting session of how successful some unions have been in winning job security and other rights for faculty members off the tenure track.
At one point, those present talked about the problem of achieving job security close enough to tenure that it might be called “tenure light” or “de facto tenure” without using language that might upset those who have tenure.
Such conversations just didn’t used to happen at these meetings.
But even as participants at the biennial meeting of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, which took place over the weekend at San Diego State University, relished in these success stories, they considered real tensions in the movement.
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