What is the academic labor movement?
This is the idea or recognition that “colleges and universities have increasingly taken corporations—premised on the idea of profitable efficiency—as their model for internal organization” and consequently seek to employ labor at the lowest possible cost (232). This model subverts the university in at least three areas. • Adjuncts: When a professor retires or moves, his tenure track job is often downsized, being split into adjunct positions for which the university does not have to worry about tenure or paying costly benefits. “In the mid-1990s, only one out of three tenure-track slots was replaced by another tenure-track appointment” (68). One of the authors tells us about the California State University system, “the largest public higher education system in the country,” which employs 22,000 faculty and staff, and enrolls 350,000 students (221). Between 1995 and 2000 “the number of full-time-equivalent students increased by thirty-five thousand. The net increase in tenure-track posit
