Politics and Precarity in Academia

Abstract

1 To say that the invitation to reflect upon precarity in academia at this moment could not be better timed is, ironically, to note how bad things are currently and have been in the recent past. In anthropology departments in the U.S., permanent tenure-track jobs have dried to a trickle while at the same time more than half of all faculty positions in U.S. universities are now held by adjuncts with temporary and insecure appointments. How is this state of affairs to be understood? What can be done about this situation, and what should be our politics, depends very much on our understanding of why things have come to this sorry state. A recent study of hiring trends in anthropology in the U.S. finds that in the twenty year period between 1995 and 2014, only 21% of those with doctorates in anthropology have found tenure-track (permanent) positions in U.S. universities (Speakman et. al. 2018: 12). After the recession in 2008, the number of people finding tenure-track employment plummeted, reaching less than 3% by 2014 (Speakman et. al. 2018: 13). Universities were reluctant to increase tenure-track jobs after the recession, and instead opted to hire people through insecure, short-term contracts. It is not enough to say that the turn to precarious labor is connected to the rise of the neoliberal university-the mechanisms that connect these trends need to be specified. In U.S. universities, there are at least three trends that intersect to produce a crisis of precarious labor in academia. First, there is the trend that predates neoliberalism as an economic phenomenon, which is the rising bureaucratization of the university. Non-academic bureaucrats are being hired at rates exceeding four times that of tenure-track faculty hires. In 25 years after 1987, the number of bureaucrats at U.S. universities doubled, while the number of part-time faculty went from one-third to fully half of instructional staffs.