Given how negatively Adrianna Kezar portrays academe in The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University (Johns Hopkins University Press), it is striking to hear that she remains optimistic about improvement, albeit not overnight.
“I’m pretty realistic about change and how long it takes,” she says by phone from her office at the University of Southern California, where she is a professor of higher education. She and her two co-authors and colleagues, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott, draw on a vast array of their own and others’ research to detail labor practices that they believe jeopardize the goals of higher education.
“We are,” the authors write, “rapidly closing in on the institutional dystopia long feared by those who see universities as our only bulwark against the many forces that threaten free inquiry and undermine the democratic function of higher learning.”
They deplore academe’s embrace of jobs that do not offer a living wage or upward career paths, let alone shared governance. And they worry about the rapid shift from full-time, tenure-track positions to contingent ones.
For the 70 percent of the instructional staff members who are not on the tenure track, even a burdensome, unguaranteed schedule of eight courses a year would result in only a low-income wage, the authors say. That is just one of the book’s startling examples of “indignities caused or compounded by imposed economic insecurity.”
Graduate and postdoctoral instructors, too, now constitute a cheap, superabundant labor force, the authors write. Universities “discovered how to monetize their employees’ aspirations in order to produce academics with the discipline to tolerate gig work as long as possible before giving up on professional advancement.”
Similarly maltreated, the authors say, are the many tech-support, food-service, and other workers whose positions have been outsourced to companies that commonly scoff at once-standard labor safeguards.
Those and many other developments compose a comprehensive “neoliberal” turn in academe, in which individual freedoms take priority over the common good, the authors say. Jobs without labor protections “have been culturally reconfigured as virtuous markers of self-reliance.”
At the same time, succeeding or failing — for example, a scholar’s ability to survive on grants — is held to be “determined solely by level of dedication,” with no consideration of “the large patterns of labor and hiring.”
It all has to change soon, Kezar declares. What makes her optimistic that reform is possible, she says, are the forces she sees gathering: for example, the unionization of graduate students and faculty and staff members.
Unionization or the threat of it is unlikely to win the day alone, she says, but she believes it can prevail when joined with students’ and parents’ disgruntlement, legislators’ unease, and plain moral suasion. Together those factors can influence administrators to accommodate change and to reduce their control and reverse the swelling of their own ranks, she says.
“Every campus I go to, in every state, I hear people say, ‘We can’t do anything to improve employee-labor conditions on campus, because that will increase tuition.’ And I say, ‘No, no, that’s not the case — we need to redistribute funds within existing budgets.’ "
“Student learning,” she says, “is the most galvanizing rationale for reform.” She has seen that as a co-director of Southern California’s Pullias Center for Higher Education, where she is director of the Delphi Project on the Changing Faculty and Student Success.
The project brings together representatives of many higher-education constituencies to consider the phenomena that Gig Academy explores, including unions, policy makers, scholarly disciplinary societies, faculty groups, advocates for non-tenure-track instructors, and campus administrators.
“We’ve brought together all of those groups,” Kezar says, “because no single group can make the kinds of dramatic changes needed.”
Peter Monaghan is a correspondent for The Chronicle.
