Pullias Center Director to Participate in June 9 Webinar on COVID and Non-Tenure-Track Faculty

Adrianna Kezar, Director of the Pullias Center, is participating in a special webinar titled “The Gig Academy and COVID-19: Implications for the Future” on June 9, 2020 at 9am PT (noon ET).  

In the recently published book The Gig Academy: Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University, Adrianna Kezar and her co-authors describe and critique the restructuring of all academic labor relations in higher education over the past few decades.The book documents the increasingly precarious employment of staff, contingent faculty, post-doctoral appointments, and the use graduate assistants for teaching and research.   Today, non-tenure track faculty (NTTF) make up 70% of college instructors nationwide.

Dr. Kezar will join a panel to discuss the book’s insights and recommendations in general as well as their relevance for post-pandemic colleges and universities.  The panel will also include Daniel Greenstein, Chancellor, Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, and a member of the National Center’s Board of Advisors, Henry Reichman, Chair, Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure, AAUP, and Maria Maisto from  New Faculty Majority.

“The major upheavals sweeping across higher education threaten to once again reshape academic labor and increase contingency among faculty and staff as well as the move toward outsourcing labor,” notes Kezar, Endowed Professor and Dean’s Professor of Leadership, University of Southern California.  “The panel will focus, in particular, on the impact of the pandemic on faculty , and if concerted thought and effort are not brought to bear by and on behalf of part-time and full-time non-tenure-track faculty, they may end up with even less support and compensation for bearing more of America’s higher education teaching load.  Inequities may get worse, and these faculty’s lives are already so precarious.”

The event will be moderated by William A. Herbert, Distinguished Lecturer and Executive Director of the National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions at Hunter College, which is one of the organizations presenting the event with the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute.  This webinar is part of a series on the impact of COVID-19 on labor and higher education issues.

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