ABSTRACT
For the past three years, activists in Boston have been challenging the corporatization of higher education by developing innovative and successful approaches to organizing the most exploited layer of the higher education teaching workforce, the thousands of contingent, or adjunct, faculty members who work in the Greater Boston Area. The Boston Project of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) has developed a multicampus approach to organizing, an openness to solidarity with other campus workers, and a willingness to go beyond collective bargaining issues to address broad questions of equity and democratic power. Like living-wage campaigns and anti-sweatshop struggles, the Boston Project is an example of a bold new labor-based social movement emergent on America’s campuses.
