The Adjunct Underclass

How America’s Colleges Betrayed Their Faculty, Their Students, and Their Mission

By: Herb Childress

Narrated by: Edward Bauer

Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car...to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.

Welcome to the life of the mind in the gig economy. Over the past few decades, the job of college professor has been utterly transformed - for the worse. America's colleges and universities were designed to serve students and create knowledge through the teaching, research, and stability that come with the longevity of tenured faculty, but higher education today is dominated by adjuncts. In 1975, only 30 percent of faculty held temporary or part-time positions. By 2011, as universities faced both a decrease in public support and ballooning administrative costs, that number topped 50 percent. Now, some surveys suggest that as many as 70 percent of American professors are working course-to-course, with few benefits, little to no security, and extremely low pay.

In The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress draws on his own firsthand experience and that of other adjuncts to tell the story of how higher education reached this sorry state.

©2019 The University of Chicago (P)2019 Tantor

Highly informative

if you are a scholar than this book is for you. It is more harrowing than any horror book you'll ever read/listen to and for that reason every single person who is looking to become a professor or is an adjunct should read this book.

Honest, intelligent, and, yes, hopeful

Childress has written a brilliant book here. It is striking how adjunct instructors, TAs, and non-TT (tenure track) positions predated things like supermarket cashiers and taxi drivers in their obsolescence. Yes, technology has had a part to play in struggle for the non-tenured college teacher to survive, but the ingredients which resulted in this supreme contingency have been a long time boiling on the stove. Childress points out that the attitude which relegates human lives and relationships to contingencies uses technology as a tool to exacerbate this problem. Given that this attitude existed long before the Internet 2.0, or self-driving cars, or Google ever really existed, our modern problem of unemployable (but highly capable) people was ripe for the making.

I especially liked the book in that it wasn't limited to a few pat solutions but honestly behooved any and all stakeholders in the college world, or anyone remotely related to it, to question the attitude which we take toward college, toward work, and toward our relationships with each other. Is there hope in this? Absolutely, in spite of and perhaps especially because of the challenge which Childress exhorts us to overcome.