The Decline and Fall of the “Adjunct Model”

by Christopher Cumo AS MANY AS 46 percent of postsecondary faculty are part-time, remarked Jane Buck, AAUP president at its annual meeting last June. Richard Moser, AAUP associate secretary, decries the corporate university for defining education as a commodity it buys at lowest cost by subcontracting adjuncts to do the dirty work. Robert Weisbuch, president of the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation, writes of “thirty years of unemployment and underemployment” enveloping the humanities in “a culture of defeatism.” Elizabeth Radcliffe, executive director of the American Philosophical Society, laments the desperation of a generation of philosophers in search of full-time work. Adjuncts circulate stories of their colleagues holding office hours in […]