In this article, the authors explore the multiple roles that contingent faculty play in an evolving system of higher education. They consider the professional work of faculty in contingent positions at Colorado State University through the lens of activity theory, analyzing workplace discourse logs in an effort to understand the roles of…

Scholarly groups have long served as hubs of academic life and the embodiments of their disciplines, but they face uncertain and divergent futures. Some disciplinary associations are struggling to remain relevant and financially viable as demographic and technological changes threaten their traditional sources of revenue. The core of their…

This January, the Inter Faculty Organization, the union representing nearly 3,300 faculty members at the seven Minnesota state universities, took the unusual step of making an offer that broke dramatically with past practice and with typical union negotiating. The Minnesota faculty offered to accept a pay freeze while holding current contract…

This personal reflection, as a tribute to Joe Cytrynbaum, is a primer on the struggle in which he was involved, covering the general history of the movement and the local history at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). Part I sketches the history of graduate employee unionization in the United States. Part II discusses the union movement at Penn…

Despite trends toward greater corporatism and bureaucratization of the academy, some vestiges of shared governance remain, including some level of faculty decision-making in faculty senates or councils. Generalizations about faculty senates are difficult to make because they vary with regard to their level of power and faculty involvement.…

This report describes agencies (established by government) and organizations (established by others) that dealt exclusively with postsecondary education in British Columbia, Canada and which had at least one professional employee and/or were separate legal entities. Of the fifty groups described since 1960, about two dozen existed in 2012. The…

In this article, the author discusses the issues surrounding contingent faculty. Contingent faculty members are central to academe's future because prevailing logics of the market can confuse accountability with accession to any and all "customer" demands; faculty organizations can instead take the opportunity to hold academic managers and…

The 1999 Academic Senate for California Community Colleges paper, "The Role of Academic Senates in Enrollment Management", presented principles for effective faculty participation in developing policies and making decisions that affect course offerings. In 2007, an Academic Senate resolution called for an update to that paper, to provide…

Many observers of higher education have sharply criticized the application of corporate models of management to higher education. The best way to reverse the trend toward corporate-style management is to make issues concerning contingent faculty the center of the struggle. The California Faculty Association, an affiliate of the AAUP, has done just…

Over the last two years, the work of the CEE-GS has included the establishment of the organization, participation in the CEE leadership summit in May 2005, a panel discussion about PhD student issues at last year's NCTE conference, and the establishment of a CEE-GS executive committee. Potential future pursuits include the development of a CEE-GS…

Dr. Jane Buck, who spent almost her entire career teaching psychology at Delaware State University, the only historically Black college in Delaware, is the outgoing president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). Having grown up in a family of civil rights activists in Reading, Pennsylvania, it seems appropriate that Buck…

Offers a history of the American Association of University Professors' censure list and a reminder of the struggles over academic freedom that shaped the association and its role in the profession. (EV)

In the early 1990s, a small group of dedicated two-year college English faculty, led by Helon Raines, began the fight for the Two-Year College English Association (TYCA), a professional organization that would give two-year college English faculty across the nation a respected identity and voice within the National Council of Teachers of English…