Contingent Labor and Higher Education

Dell P. Champlin and Janet Knoedler

Review of Political Economy, 2017, vol. 29, issue 2, 232-248

Abstract: Over the past 30 years, the profession of college professor in the US has been changing from a high-status occupation, where faculty have extensive control over their job responsibilities, to a low-status contingent job in the peripheral labor market. This change mirrors the drift toward nonstandard employment in other sectors of the economy. Contingent and part-time faculty have grown at 10 times the rate of growth for tenure-track faculty, leading to a fundamental transformation in the nature of the professoriate. We review data related to these changes as well as the conventional explanations for this transformation. We conclude that the current system of academic labor is best understood within the core–periphery model of nonstandard employment. We conclude with some brief prospects for the future of the academic labor market and higher education.

Date: 2017
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DOI: 10.1080/09538259.2017.1316054

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