Part-Time Faculty Deserve Respect

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. . . Higher education institutions have become more reliant on adjuncts because they are cheaper than full-time, tenure and tenure-track faculty, and there is a glut of them, especially in the humanities — a byproduct of universities churning out graduate students who later return to academia for jobs because options in the private sector are limited.

When colleges shave costs, part-time faculty often bear the brunt.

Those forces have been colliding recently at the New School, a historically left-leaning, nonprofit university, when nearly 1,800 part-time faculty, backed by their union, went on strike to protest pay and working conditions. Negotiations quickly turned acrimonious and as of Monday, were locked in a stalemate as the strike entered its third week.


The school said it will begin withholding wages for strikers starting Wednesday, saying it could no longer afford to compensate faculty when classes were suspended

The walkout has followed a similar strike among 48,000 staff in the University of California system and as thousands of graduate students at Yale are planning to vote on whether to unionize. Adjuncts at the City University of New York are also closely watching how negotiations pan out ahead of their own contract negotiations with CUNY in February. . . .


from the New York Times, 6 December 2022

see this as well, from The New Republic, another set of part-time workers on strike, these in California

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