ABSTRACT
The research that provides the foundation for this book, and the case studies that are featured in it, are an important advance in the movement to confront problems associated with contingent employment practices in higher education. Although the anti-contingency movement has existed for nearly as long as contingent hiring practices have been in place, the movement’s concerns — the need for equitable treatment and professional respect for all faculty — have been regarded, like the faculty who have led it, as essentially “adjunct” or “non-essential” to mainstream higher education concerns about such issues as curriculum, faculty professionalization, student success and access, diversity, campus – community relations and financial responsibility. Past and current crises have shown such neglect to be a serious mistake. While it may have been easy to dismiss the problem when the total number of contingent faculty was relatively small, the range of costs associated with the steady, well-documented growth of the contingent faculty population — in 2011, two-thirds to three-quarters of the total number of higher education faculty, depending on whether graduate students are included in the calculation — has made neglect of the issue both impossible and irresponsible.
