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"the reports really show that the shift to a contingent academic work force was motivated by economic (and, I would argue, political) concerns -- disempowering the faculty by making them economically precarious of course reduces their influence and weakens shared governance, giving administrators more power."

"My situation is not unique. 76% of instructional staff appointments in US higher education are now not even full-time jobs"

" With a degree in creative writing, she's been working short-term teaching jobs since her 30s, often skirting poverty, never achieving the job security traditionally associated with academia. Now in her 60s, approaching retirement age modestly in a compact mobile home, she's helping build one of Vermont's few adjunct unions to help colleagues gain the respect on the job she has long been denied."

"The New York Times, Slate and Al Jazeera have recently drawn attention to the adjunctification of the professoriate in the US. Only 24 per cent of the academic workforce are now tenured or tenure-track.  Much of the coverage has focused on the sub-poverty wages of adjunct faculty, their lack of job security and the growing legions of unemployed and under-employed PhDs. Elsewhere, the focus has been on web-based learning and the massive open online courses (MOOCs), with some commentators celebrating and others lamenting their arrival. "

This is a dialogue between Teach, an adjunct philosophy instructor at a public university in New York, and Cheat, who has authored over 100 papers for pay.

"if you aren't the best lecturer in the world, why shouldn't your boss replace you with whoever is? And if you aren't the one providing the content, why did you spend all those years in graduate school anyway? Teaching, you say? Well, administrators can pay graduate students or adjuncts a lot less to do your job. Pretty soon, there might even be a computer program that can do it."

"Universities quietly maintain the fiction that student work is mostly evaluated by people in a structural position to assess it both independently and generously. Independently, because they are tenured: when they call good work good and bad work bad, they do so because their dispassionate judgments have no bearing on their continued employment.  Generously, because they themselves enjoy consolations of time, resources, and respect that redound to their evaluative practice: they sit in quiet private offices, attentively marking a reasonable volume of student work, and have no fundamental reasons to resent the students they teach nor the institutions which employ them."

"My time is worth more than said bombardment. Everyone's is. The other day, a friend of mine who teaches at a tony private university in the South messaged me in a huff: "I posted my grades at 10:00, and by 10:04 I had two hysterical complainers. OMG. I hate grades."

""You have to make the argument that this is going to cost us money up front, but it will create distinctiveness at the university that ultimately will aid us in the longer term," Jones said. "It guarantees our ability to be a player in this era of change.""

"The well-being of public college instructors is far more important to national life than anything that happens at Harvard."

"If you are thinking of getting out, my advice to you, for what it's worth, is: get out. Even if you get that tenure track job, it's not the thing you thought it was going to be. When you are getting paid this little, you might be able to wiggle the freedom to walk away"