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| Shirley Temple, The Little Princess* |
Dear Mr. Brooks,
You may have noticed a new phrase emerging in academic circles sweeping higher education journals, newspapers, websites, twitter and blogs. Precarious, contingent, or adjunct faculty are living in poverty like low wage service employees. Adjuncts are forced into this new economic climate to accept jobs offering semester only contracts (if that) and low salaries as well as few opportunities for health insurance and retirement benefits.
Recently our classes have been cut even further by universities insisting they can’t afford the cost of insuring us with the new health care law. And now we have the cuts in food stamps which is eroding our ability to sustain our families that helped us survive our low wage higher education teaching jobs. We happen to be teaching all over the United States in every academic discipline you could imagine. As 79% of the professors employed, you can imagine this is causing some of us adjuncts to stand up and organize for better working conditions and a more viable future for our colleagues as well as a better learning environment for our students.
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| David Brooks Phones It In |
In sociology and economics, the precariat is a social class formed by people suffering from precarity, a condition of existence without predictability or security, affecting material or psychological welfare, and also means a member of a proletariat class of industrial workers who lack their own means of production and must sell their labor to live
All of us who work under these definitive conditions have one thing in common. We, like you so cleverly noted, are forced to “rely on friends and family” and “we lack faith in American possibilities.” Not now, we don’t.
