However, because the decades-old struggle to mitigate or reverse the trend has, in spite of a variety of efforts, seen the percentage of postsecondary faculty on contingent appointments actually rise from 43 percent in 1975 to almost 75 percent in 2010, and because troubling new developments include brazen union busting by the administration at East-West University in Chicago and the proposals by two community colleges in Michigan to outsource the hiring and administration of contingent faculty to new “academic temporary agencies,” it is impossible not to return to questions of cause-and effect.
It is not our purpose here to analyze the causes of contingency in this essay we focus on the efforts of those who have worked to reform or eliminate it.
The narrative, which includes differing accounts of what, or who, is most to blame, has been well rehearsed: the increase came in slow and steady waves tied to significant political and economic events, including postwar enrollment surges, economic downturns, and the shift to a corporate management model it came with the knowing or unknowing complicity of administrators it was caused by the complacency of the tenured, the fear of the untenured, or is simply collateral damage in a war against tenure. Much has been written about higher education’s increasing reliance on contingent academic labor over the last few decades.
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