The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University (Reforming Higher Education: Innovation and the Public Good)

Why the Gig Academy is the dominant organizational form within the higher education economy―and its troubling implications for faculty, students, and the future of college education.

Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year―less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers.

In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators.

The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.

Adrianna Kezar (SANTA YNEZ, CA) is a professor of higher education at the University of Southern California and the director of the Pullias Center for Higher Education. She is the author of numerous books, including How Colleges Change: Understanding, Leading, and Enacting Change and The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University.

Tom DePaola is a provost's fellow in urban education policy at the University of Southern California, a researcher with the Pullias Center for Higher Education, and a member of USC's Graduate Student Organizing Committee.

Daniel T. Scott is a PhD student at the University of Southern California and a researcher with the Pullias Center's Delphi Project.