Opting Off the Tenure-Track: Why Some Faculty Choose a Different Path

by Kristen Kennedy Recent figures put the number of contingent faculty working in colleges and universities at 65 percent of the 1.3 million faculty currently teaching in the United States. We generally read this number as an indicator of where we are in that part of the dance called the corporate turn in higher education. And every major education organization in the U.S.—the NEA, AFT, and AAUP—has gone on record to protest the increasing use of term faculty, citing the loss of academic freedom, job security, and the things that make academic culture different from, say, working at Microsoft, among the significant consequences of embracing a consumer […]