Contingent Academic Labor : Evaluating Conditions to Improve Student Outcomes

Contingent Academic Labor is a concise guide that offers higher education professionals a way to measure the degree of equality taking place in work environments for non-tenure track faculty across institutional settings. It frames the relevant issues and examines the nationwide situation facing contingent faculty across the professional landscape. The goal is to review contingent faculty treatment, and offer a standardized way to identify both equitable and unjust practices that impact adjunct faculty and their students by extension.

The main feature of this guide is The Contingent Labor Conditions Score, a tool to help evaluate current labor practices that impact adjuncts in both positive and negative ways. The report card measures 3 areas of labor conditions:

*Material Equity: Pay, job security and benefits
*Professional Equity: Opportunities for advancement, professional development, academic freedom, sense of professional inclusion, and job satisfaction
*Social Equity: Gender and race parity between contingent and non-contingent faculty in proportion to the population served

This book will be useful for administrators and labor organizers alike in assessing the degree of exploitation, or empowerment, in their own institution. The Contingent Labor Conditions Score, as a standardized tool, will serve audiences on both sides of the discussion in creating positive steps forward, improving not only contingent faculty working conditions, but ultimately improving student outcomes.

Daniel B. Davis is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of California, San Diego; a Kauffman Foundation Dissertation Fellow; half-time faculty at Point Loma Nazarene University and a lecturer at San Diego State University.

He has published articles on student college-to-career pathways in Sociology of Education and Research in the Sociology of Organizations. Davis previously researched undergraduate educational outcomes with CREATE (The Center for Research on Educational Equity, Assessment and Teaching Excellence) at UC San Diego. He has taught dozens of college courses in various settings, including private and public, community colleges and four-year universities, online and face-to-face.

Across these institutions, the range of working and learning conditions Davis encountered was vast, with the highest-paying campus offering compensation four times greater than the lowest-paying institution. Some of the positions had benefits and reasonable security of contract; others had neither. The sense of professional inclusion―through designated office space, invitations to department events, and more―was substantial at certain campuses and non-existent at others. It was the experience of these disparate working conditions, their impact on Davis’ sense of professional engagement, and their effect on his students that motivated him to write this guide.

Click here to visit Daniel's professional website.

Adrianna Kezar is a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and codirector of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. Kezar is a national expert of student success, equity and diversity, the changing faculty, change, governance, and leadership in higher education.

Kezar is well published with 18 books and monographs, more than 100 journal articles, and more than 100 book chapters and reports. Recent books include Envisioning the Faculty of the 21st Century (Rutgers University Press, 2016), How Colleges Change (Routledge, 2013), Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership (Stanford Press, 2011) and Organizing for Collaboration (Jossey-Bass, 2009).

She is the project director for the Delphi Project on the changing faculty and student success and was just awarded a grant from the Teagle Foundation for institutions that better support faculty and create new faculty models.