Enrolment at the University of Guelph is up, provincial funding is up but the administration plans to cut more than 100 sessional lecturer positions. Fewer sessional instructors means:

bigger class sizes
less time for individual students.

University of Guelph sessionals have won the undergraduate student association’s teaching excellence award five times in the past decade. Students value the experience and personal support sessionals provide. Sessionals are hired on four-month contracts and must apply for their jobs each semester. The university using the economic downturn as an excuse to target workers already in precarious positions.

Fore more info, go to the CUPE local’s site.

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At community colleges, four out of five instructors worked outside the tenure track in 2007. At public research institutions, graduate students made up 41 percent of the instructional staff that year. And at all institutions, the proportion of instructors working part time continued to grow.

The report, “The State of the Higher Education Workforce, 1997-2007,” shows that the proportion of instructional staff members not on the tenure track — including graduate students — increased from two-thirds to 73 percent over that period.

These numbers are pretty astonishing and are a confirmation of what a lot of people have been observing anecdotally for a while. I haven’t searched out equivalent numbers of Canada, but I would be surprised if they were much different.

But there was another really interesting aspect to this, too, that I found out when I checked out the report itself, conducted by the American Federation of Teachers. There is a rise in contingent labour in the university sector, and guess what correlates with that? A rise in the number of women in that pool of contingent labour!

Historically, men have represented the majority of higher education’s instructional workforce.  However, the number of women in the instructional workforce grew at a faster rate than men between 1997 and 2007; the number of women grew 48 percent compared with 21 percent for men (Table 3).  By 2007, women accounted for nearly one-half—46 percent—of faculty and instructor positions.  However, the growth was disproportionately in the area of contingent faculty positions, as both men and women saw an erosion of full-time tenured and tenure-track positions.

Like Marx’s reserve army of labour, women have been taking on a greater share of the exploited labour in academe. How surprising (note sarcasm).

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My situation was the latter. This is what I wrote on my old blog about that moment when I just decided to finally admit to myself that academia was not the path I wanted to take:

Here I am, looking at my stack of printouts of contract teaching jobs offered here in Toronto and in nearby cities. Part of me is just drawn to applying for these jobs like a caffeine addict is to Starbucks, because that’s simply what grad students do. When you finish your Ph.D., you either a) head off to your new tenure-track job that you freakishly managed to score before you even graduated, b) head off to your cushy, teaching-free post-doc that you freakishly managed to score whilst in the final throes of dissertating, or c) farm yourself out to whatever university (or, for the more desparate/less picky among us, college) will take you and hold your breath while you apply for tenure track jobs. THERE IS NO OTHER OPTION.

But contract teaching serves as a crutch, keeping you tied to academia in the most exploitive way possible. People who are talented and bright and could land themselves in satisfying careers in the non-academic world stay in the rut of contract teaching because it’s something they can rely on, without having to stand up and challenge themselves to move beyond it. Oh, wait a minute, is that ME?

Ok, ok, ok. I could very well be the aforementioned bright individual who could seek a satisfying career beyond academe. And I am! Sort of. I think. Yes! It’s just that, the idea of not applying for any more contract teaching jobs feels much more scary than I ever thought it would. It feels like it would be a major symbolic severing of me from academia.

It felt like it because it was. The moment I threw those contract teaching applications in the bin, I knew it was up to me now to find that first post-academic job (which I did, and I survived). This was simultaneously terrifying and thrilling–and you know when you have that feeling that you are doing something so right.

How do you feel about the prospect of leaving academia? Are you scared and thrilled, daunted and curious, tired and ready to go? Are you drifting away or will there be a moment of severance for you?

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