The Adjunct Underclass: How America's Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission by Herb Childress (review)
- The Adjunct Underclass: How America's Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission by Herb Childress
The growing reliance on contingency in academia, aside from the indisputable material and psychological toll it takes on instructors outside the tenure track, also represents an existential threat to academic freedom, the production of knowledge, and student learning at American universities and colleges. Herb Childress's study, therefore, is an important addition to work on this problem, and, for readers of this journal—given LAWCHA's Contingent Faculty Initiative—a necessary one.
The Adjunct Underclass is not a historical account. Instead, the book examines the problem of contingent labor in higher education today, including the ramifications for workers, students, and the broader community. Childress begins by showing that in the recent past there has been a drastic increase in the college instruction done by adjuncts, who make low wages, often lack healthcare and even basic necessities for the job (e.g., an office), and sometimes teach an unconscionable number of students across multiple institutions. For nonelite schools and especially community colleges, the problem is magnified. Many, perhaps most, first-year courses at these institutions are taught by adjunct labor, meaning that students who need the most mentoring are getting the least.
Childress also highlights the chasm in academia between tenure-track (TT) and non-tenure-track workers. The latter, he points out, lack an institution's investment in their permanence. Tenure-track faculty, on the other hand, contribute to knowledge production, curriculum construction, and governance and can access the professional development and research funds they need to do so. Childress explains the correlation between the broader hierarchy among colleges and universities and institutions' reliance on adjunct labor. Community colleges, serving the least empowered students, employ contingent faculty almost exclusively. The middle-class regional comprehensives rely on a majority-contingent faculty, while the upper-class liberal arts "monasteries" employ mostly tenure-line faculty. The elite institutions (Harvard, Yale, MIT) have lots of tenure-track faculty, but because their teaching loads are so low, there is also an army of contingent labor in the form of graduate students.
Childress also seems to direct his argument to prospective graduate students, arguing that job prospects are poor for those from nonelite institutions. The author chastises lower-level doctoral programs, which exist mostly "because of the benefits they confer on their institutions, and their TT faculty, far more than because of their benefits to grad-student consumers" (56). Chapter 5 includes the book's most historical analysis. Here Childress explains how the connection between the growing reliance on student tuition to [End Page 113] fund higher education has forced nonelite colleges and universities to employ more contingent labor. Of course, a major reason for this development stems from the sustained defunding of public universities; given the fluctuations of student numbers due to demographic shifts and the growing ease of transferring among institutions, colleges and universities have responded by giving themselves maximum flexibility. "Adjuncts," he points out, "are the shock absorbers that make the terrain possible" (75). Further, community colleges and regional comprehensives feel constant pressure to create new degrees that respond to the perceived (and sometimes demanded) needs of employers. Because of the contingent nature of these programs—institutions invest in lots of ideas, but only a few last—they don't put money in tenure lines.
Childress holds tenure-line faculty responsible for tacitly supporting this inequitable system. The author argues that TT faculty hold a "hindsight bias" convincing them that because they made it, the system must be based on merit (103). Finally, he examines some broader cultural and economic trends that have facilitated the contingency of academia. Here Childress rightly points to changes in the nature of work in the US: the excessive demands on the time of salaried workers and the rise of independent contracting and outsourcing, for instance. He largely concludes, however, that the underlying problem is cultural: "Americans are urged to define ourselves in terms...
