Stylus Publishing (VA) Contingent Academic Labor: Evaluating Conditions to Improve Student Outcomes (The New Faculty Majority)

The Adjunct Dilemma is a concise guide that offers higher education professionals a way to measure the degree of equality taking place in work environments across institutional settings. It frames the relevant issues and nationwide surveys that reveal the current professional landscape. The goal is to offer a standardized way to identify both unjust and equitable labour practices that impact adjunct faculty on campus.The main feature of this guide is The Non Tenure Track Faculty Report Card, a tool to help evaluate current labour practices that impact adjuncts in both positive and negative ways. This tool measures 3 areas of labour conditions:Material Equity: Pay, job security and benefitsProfessional Equity: Opportunities for advancement, academic freedom and professional developmentSocial Equity: Gender and racial parity between contingent and non-contingent faculty in proportion to populations served Review Contingent AcademicLabor by Daniel Davis isa timely, relevant, and necessary text that pushes us all to reconsider thetreatment of non-tenure track academic faculty and the implications thistreatment has for students. The book is an organized and concise work targetedat all who are (or should be) concerned with the treatment of contingentfaculty: faculty, students, administrators, researchers, labor unions, etc.This work builds off of successful tools geared toward advancing equity inhigher education like the Equity Scorecard (Bensimon, Hao, Bustillos, 2006) andoffers a useful gauge for campus stakeholders to take the temperature regardingcontingent faculty treatment and experiences in higher education. In the introduction, Davis sets the stage for the present conditionscontingent faculty face working in a higher education environment thatunderpays, undervalues, and under-employs them. Despite the growing number ofcontingent faculty members, their treatment indicates higher education hastaken for granted their import to student success. Davis divides the book intothree parts so that the reader first has a foundation of the broader contextand conditions of academic labor. He then depicts the variety of workingconditions for contingent faculty and ends with an overview of the utility ofthe Labor Conditions Score developed to aid higher education institutions inassessing the environments in which their contingent faculty work.It is clear that no one winswith the present treatment of contingent faculty members. One participantinterviewed for this work said, 'I don't understand why this situation persistswhen it's a lose-lose-lose scenario. There has to be a better way' (p. 22).When the faculty members are struggling to survive, they oftentimes cannotrecognize or address the challenges students face. The use of a tool like theContingent Labor Conditions Scorecard can help move institutions towardsmaximizing student experiences and outcomes. The tool can also help betterassess the feelings of contingent faculty members in their current roles. Thetext will certainly prompt additional discussion and direct attention to thisimportant topic of contingent faculty, and hopefully those who read it willpush for institutions to convert the knowledge shared into meaningful actionsthat will benefit all campus stakeholders.--Teachers College Record"Provides a tool that institutions and/or advocatescan use to spur and guide reform. For readers new to conversations aboutcontingent faculty, [this] is a good place to start - but it is not just forbeginners. This book's synthesis of recent work in the field is useful foranyone interested in understanding and evaluating local campus conditions. Forstarters, institutions should care about the working conditions of theircontingent faculty because of their impact on students."-- "Change: The Magazine of Higher Learning"In this book, Daniel B. Davis has proposed an important practical tool for addressing the contingent faculty crisis and ensuring that all stakeho