Music for Deck Chairs:

Adjuncts want, most immediately, more pay – a livable wage. They want space on campus in which to work. They want benefits, of health insurance especially, and a budget for essential work-related expenses (such as computers and support for their maintenance and repair). They want job security: renewable contracts guaranteeing long-term or consistently longer-term employment; advance notice for teaching appointments. They wish, most broadly, for equality: a role in faculty governance; a stake in the curricular or operational decisions of the department; the respect and support of their tenured peers.
Noel Jackson, “A brief dispatch from Boston’s Adjunct Action Symposium”, this week

The US Campus Equity Week has just finished highlighting the working conditions of the off-track teachers who keep America’s higher education systems running. There are tropes here that don’t translate easily into the Australian context–working for Walmart wages, qualifying for food stamps, missing out on healthcare–but Rebecca Schuman’s drive to show search committees how bad things are is pretty frank. And it’s just as obvious here as there that the idea of graduate student teaching as a rite of passage towards a tenured career has become a redundant fantasy.
I think we’ve been slow to recognise this in universities because we’ve focused inwards and backwards, in the naive belief that things could be made better now just because they were different before. But the reality is that universities didn’t just lose their way momentarily; they are changing in step with the broader workforce, where middle class contingency is expanding beyond the traditional freelancing professions. As the 2010 Intuit Report intuited, it’s time to “imagine a world where contingent work is as common as traditional employment.”