Adjuncting Until the End of Time (The Nation)
From an article in The Nation this weekend: “Universities now have more adjuncts than tenured and tenure-track professors combined. The conditions are unsustainable—for professors and students alike.”
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/adjuncting-until-the-end-of-time/
Depressing stuff, but a good read--the author makes great points about the giggification of higher ed. How academia used to be kind of like a patronage system, but with the decline of tenure-track roles, we all lose--professors, students, the culture at large.
I also appreciate her point about how, with so many of us being underpaid adjuncts, universities aren't investing enough in their instructors for us to be able to develop new curriculum that tackles the existential challenges AI poses to education. I'm an adjunct freshman comp professor, and last year a group of us ended up forming a sort of informal peer group to try to do this work together, but it's thankless (unpaid) labor with no institutional support.