The Hard Truths of the Academic-Labor Crisis

This week, about 48,000 academic workers at 10 University of California campuses went on strike. As Stella Chan and Taylor Romine of CNN reported, the two sides reached an impasse after more than a year of negotiation despite tentative agreements on some issues. As is customary in such situations, charges of bad faith are lobbed back and forth like a pickleball: It’s probably not wise to fully believe what you hear from management or the unions. But Chan and Romine’s reporting points us in another direction. They ask us to think about the striking workers, an adjunct army of talented, well-educated people, many working at or slightly above the poverty level, who make up the majority of workers at a modern research institution.

As Chan and Romine write:

The part-time faculty union (UAW Local 7902) at my institution, the New School, in New York City, has also called a strike this week. “AND NOW WE STRIKE!” the union tweeted on Tuesday night. “See you on the picket line tomorrow.”

These two universities seem to have little in common. The UC system is vast, fueled by California tax dollars and a river of public, foundation, and corporate money. In 2021-22, the University of California received 24 percent of its funding from California general funds and tuition and fees revenue, 12 percent from government grants and financial aid, and a whopping 36 percent from its medical centers — its largest income stream. Its $44 billion budget is $15 billion more than the GDP of El Salvador.

The New School is a very different financial animal, with a small endowment and a campus to maintain in one of the most expensive cities in the world. Revenues barely meet expenses. Heavily tuition-dependent, the New School is without the professional schools that bring in students whose enormous loans will be offset by large, postgraduation salaries. It has no hospitals or scientific research centers that can woo corporate dollars and federal grants. In fact, a terrifying 77 percent of the New School’s $426 million 2020 operating budget came from net tuition. That can’t go up indefinitely: The sticker cost of tuition is already about $26,000 per semester. This meant that when the pandemic hit in March 2020, the New School, like other tuition-dependent colleges, faced a potentially existential threat.

These differences between universities are no small thing: While a long strike at UC would be damaging, closing down the economically vulnerable New School for the same amount of time could be several orders of magnitude more damaging.

Yet these two strikes, happening almost simultaneously, tell a bigger story about how fragile the project of higher education has become. Surprisingly, the differences in wealth and size I have just described have produced similar faculties in one key regard. At both colleges, the best-compensated faculty — those who are tenured and tenure-eligible — represent only a small portion of the academic work force. According to its employee head count, the University of California employs roughly 75,000 academic workers in various roles, yet only 11,677 are tenure-ladder rank and equivalent. At the New School, founded in 1919 as a college without a full-time faculty, 87 percent of instructional faculty are part-timers.

These universities have an unwillingness to invest in people, either faculty members or, by extension, students, and that is accelerating a structural crisis in higher education. The crisis is one that, yes, requires better labor contracts in the short term. But it also demands a major reorganization and re-envisioning in the long term. Those changes will look different at different institutions. For example, the University of California could change very little but rebuild its faculty on the strength of taxes. The New School, which cannot raise tuition to meet the challenge of a much larger full-time faculty, may have to consider becoming smaller, doing less, and slashing administrative costs.

But regardless of size and wealth, it is hard to see any university surviving the challenges of the 21st century without rebuilding its faculty around full-time workers who are willing to commit to the institution in return for being treated fairly. Armies of contingent laborers will never align their interests with an institution built to serve the small sliver of tenured faculty, nor should they.

Solidarity is nice during moments of crisis. And unions help defend the dignity of all workers. But neither one deals with the problem: Precarious labor was sold to higher education as an economically and intellectually flexible vision for the future. Instead, it has made all universities more vulnerable, not just to labor actions, but to the illusion that contingent labor is a kind of piggy bank that can be raided when universities want to build new institutes, recruit star faculty, and expand their campuses.

The small sliver of the tenured and tenure-eligible academic elite have not allowed this to pass entirely unnoticed. And yet, we have also become ever-more divorced in our everyday interests from the intellectuals, artists, and practitioners who teach the vast majority of students. Go to any faculty meeting, and you will hear what the tenured truly believe: that if contract and contingent faculty deserved tenure-stream positions, they would have them. It is evidence of the failure of our system that contingent academic workers — even if their labor actions are completely successful — will still work to underwrite the salaries and benefits of the tenured elite.

Until we, the few tenured and tenure-track professors who remain, understand that quality education, and a just workplace, require opening the door of full academic citizenship and privilege to our contingent colleagues, we can’t begin to solve the problem that has put them on the picket lines.

A previous version of this essay ran on the author’s Substack, Political Junkie.