Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education
by Joe Berry
Monthly Review Press, 2005
160 pages. Paperback.

In the last twenty years, higher education in the United States has been eroded by massive reliance on temporary academic labor—professors without tenure or the prospect of tenure, paid a fraction of the salaries of their tenured colleagues, working without benefits, offices, or research assistance, and often commuting between several campuses to make ends meet. Contingent instructors now constitute the majority of faculty at U.S. colleges and universities.

Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is the first organizing handbook for contingent faculty—the thousands of non-tenure track college teachers who love their work but hate their jobs. It examines the situation of adjunct professors in U.S. higher education today and puts forward an agenda around which they can mobilize to transform their jobs—and their institutions. In this context, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower also provides a guidepost for all those concerned about higher education: tenure track faculty, students, graduate employees, parents, other campus workers, and anyone interested in why a new labor movement has grown up on campuses across the United States and Canada.

Full of concrete suggestions for action—from starting a campus committee to finding allies in the community—and based on extensive interviews with organizers, Reclaiming the Ivory Tower is the most comprehensive and engaged account to date of the possibilities for a movement that has important lessons for labor organizing in general, as well as for the future of higher education in the United States.