Contingent Labor in Classics: The New Faculty Majority?

The extinction of the traditional full-time tenure track/tenure secure faculty has entered an endgame phase, a half-century of ever-increasing exploitation of adjunct/contingent faculty now complicated by the rise of the largely anti-faculty CyberSage MOOC option favored by a strong coalition of higher education presidents, foundations, and politicians.

Just how different are the interests of Non Tenure-System faculty from those in the tenure system? So different that they should be covered by separate bargaining agreements? Or represented by different officers in the union - - or different negotiators at the bargaining table? University of Illinois at Chicago United Faculty believes that in most matters, from pay to pensions, the interests of NTS and TS faculty at UIC are one and the same.

The overwhelming trend to hire contingent faculty in lieu of tenured or tenure-track faculty is drastically changing the composition and nature of academia. It is incumbent for all academic disciplines to consider what this trend means, and it is particularly important for disciplines like Classics to address how this shift will affect the future of the discipline.

At my (large, public, research) institution, the non-tenure-track faculty unionized a little over ten years ago. In their first contract negotiation, they won an agreement in 2004 under which all lecturers (the standard title here for non-ladder teaching faculty) who had been teaching for a certain period, usually on one-year renewable contracts, obtained a high level of job security. Although they work on fixed-term contracts, in practice a lecturer who is successful in a major review, after eight consecutive terms, has a presumption of renewal.