Last Wednesday, there was a piece in the Chronicle with some pretty shocking (and yet not surprising) numbers about how much contingent labour is used in the American university system. Now, I am too cheap to buy a web subscription to the Chronicle, so I chose not to pay to read the full article. But here’s part of the free bit:
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).
{ 2 comments }
