In our book, Power Despite Precarity (Pluto 2021) Joe Berry and I provide a summary history of the four major transitions that have taken place in higher education since its evolution into a national project after the Civil War. The fourth transition is the spread of contingency from about 1975 up to the present, when it includes over 75% of all higher ed faculty. We explain how this last transition happened by saying that it solved four management problems. I will list those problems; then I will look at what has become of these problems today and what that means for what happens next: a fifth transition.

The four problems solved by contingency

First, cutbacks in state funding to higher education led managers to cut faculty labor costs and hire low-wage adjuncts.  Second, increasing need for flexibility in scheduling with students trending older, more likely to be working, and enrolling part-time required a flexible just-in-time faculty.  Third, a real threat of rising faculty unionism as public sector workforces won collective bargaining rights in many states and proceeded to organize was answered by letting a two tier workforce serve as a deterrent to solidarity between tenured and precarious faculty. Fourth and last, the changing character of the faculty applicant pool, now more female and minority as products of the movement-era graduate schools entered the academic workforce created a dismal opportunity: the perceived lower social status of these new graduates  — to say nothing of their students – provided an excuse for managers to lower the standards of the job to match the status of the job applicants: keep wages down, hold back benefits, and eliminate the traditional “perks” of academic work like private offices, research funding, conferences, participation in shared governance, and so on.

Once that single solution, in this case contingency, solved four problems at once, they interlocked. It became like a knot that does not loosen easily when attacked one thread at a time; what gives in one place tightens up in another. Furthermore, by the time contingency had become how over 75% of faculty in higher education were employed, it had become the norm, leaving tenure exposed as a singular, privileged status — no longer essential to the healthy functioning of the higher education sector. Academic freedom was now a perk, not something to be exercised by contingents.

Then contingency became normal

But between 2000 and 2023 contingency itself became mainstream. We became used to talking about the US “gig economy” and “just-in-time” hiring.  Everyone – Uber drivers, Amazon workers, Walmart workers – was flexible or precarious. “Precision scheduling,” a key issue in the threatened railroad strike, were seen as a health and safety hazards. So it was not a surprise to the general public when faculty started to argue that there is something fundamentally wrong, something bad for workers including faculty workers about contingency.

Then the problems outgrew their solution

Not surprisingly, the four problems that contingency was supposed to solve for higher education have escaped their institutions and ballooned up and become national issues. Where once these problems were local matters, just part of the internal challenges of individual institutions, now they each have a life of their own in mainstream news.

Funding was a key part of the 2020 Sanders/Jayapal bill, Free College, which tried to make public higher ed free.  It began with protests against student debt burdens. Under pressure from young activists (such as those in Scholars for a New Deal), the bill was expanded to say college would not be free “on the back of workers,” making workers’ labor conditions part of the bill.  The bill became part of Biden’s Build Back Better – and then failed to pass in Congress. But this was far from the only mainstream outrage about higher ed funding. There were many articles about “administrative bloat” and the difference between administrator pay and faculty pay, about expenditures on student athletics, the Edifice Complex behavior of institutions built like resorts. The central outrage about funding for higher education has to do with the fight over what constituencies tax-payer funded higher ed should serve: the public good, or profit-seeking corporations?

The threat of faculty unionization has been realized, as waves of organizing among graduate student employees have spread from campus to campus. Even students are forming unions. As we described in our book, Power Despite Precarity, the credible strike threats mounted by the vast California State University system faculty union, CFA, resulted in probably the best (at least at that time) contract for contingent faculty in the country. Since COVID, strike and credible strike threats have taken place at Howard, Columbia, New College, Harvard and the UC system. In just the last week (mid-April, 2023) there have been strikes at Rutgers, Goddard, University of Michigan, and Governors State in Illinois. The Rutgers strike is wall-to-wall; the Goddard strike is a strike of staff, not faculty but has faculty support. The prospect of entering academia as faculty has become tarnished and many young grad employee activists are now choosing to work in the labor movement instead. Immediately after COVID, many activists including those from the Sanders campaign formed a group called Higher Education Labor United, or HELU, which put forward a vision statement for the future of higher education that is currently endorsed by over 140 local unions and organizations. HELU is not itself a union; it is a coalition committed to a national strategy that the traditional teacher unions, AFT/AAUP and NEA, could not pull off because their dominant majority membership is K-12 teachers.

The problem of flexibility, oddly enough, has been transformed less by faculty activism than by technological change. During COVID, students, faculty and all workers in higher ed learned to teach and learn remotely, many not even staying in the US to teach.  Where remote teaching is headed is anybody’s guess right now. Google is reportedly designing universal educational platforms that may be animated by AI. Some bad news is that the pressure on the need for flexibility has been somewhat solved by the layoffs under COVID.  Reports of thousands of contingents losing their jobs have come in from CUNY, for example.  The faculty at City College of San Francisco is now half of what it was before COVID.  Any time a full-timer was laid off, all the contingents who worked in that department or program could assume that they would be laid off.

The fourth problem, the problem of diversity – the threat of a fundamental change in the culture and role of higher ed, from being a gatekeeper to serving all of society – has exploded into the white supremacist attacks on higher ed in red states like Florida and Texas (but there are at last count 132 examples of similar bills in other states).  Florida and Texas stand out because their legislatures have proposed (and in some parts actually passed) statues that interfere directly with the practice of academic freedom. Racism has always been the most effective way to start a fight about something in our country, and here it’s being used to light the fuse that may blow up public higher ed. The most eye-catching examples are prohibitions against awarding tenure, against authorizing programs like Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) trainings, forbidding any teaching about race and gender or “divisive concepts” – whatever those are, including anything labeled Critical Race Theory. Students in Florida are allowed to video classes and use the videos to report teacher raising “divisive concepts.” What was thirty years ago a veiled way to keep higher education a safe terrain for white men (and some women) has become a campaign promise. It’s called taking ideology out of higher ed, but in fact it’s imposing ideology through the political process, and it’s using racist triggers to do so.

Now what?

The challenge for us is to see where all this is leading. That’s actually badly put: it’s not just leading in one direction. The reason why there is so much going on right now is because the forces at work are pushing in many directions.  It’s a lesson from the past that no one who was alive and working during the previous major transitions in higher ed was able to visualize clearly what was going to happen next. They may have been able to visualize what they wanted – but what would actually happen?

Consider the period of the 19960s and 1970s – the period we call the Movement, when higher ed was expanding rapidly, starting ethnic students and women’s studies programs, setting up “experimental” colleges, accepting a wave of students who were the first generation in their families to attend college? Who could have seen what would happen next?

Good news in this regard is the number of people who are at work trying to figure it out. Many of these people are either in HELU or participating in associated projects or campaigns, so it’s exciting to be part of that.