Casualization of Academic Labor: Blackboard Blues Summary

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"Undergraduate education in the United States is at a crossroads. As major research universities become increasingly oriented towards business and profit concerns, they are re-evaluating the future of undergraduate education."

Blackboard Blues examines "how Yale's heavy reliance on 'transient' teachers bears upon undergraduate education as well as how it affects the career prospects of the teachers themselves."

Some Facts

70% of undergraduate teaching contact hours at Yale are performed by transient teachers: graduate teachers, adjunct instructors, and other teachers not on the tenure track.

In 2002, 47% of the faculty listed as primary instructors for Yale College classes were transient teachers.

In the last 30 years, the numbers of graduate student teachers and adjunct instructors have both more than doubled, without an increase in tenured faculty.

Implications for Undergraduates

Undergraduates receive far less one-on-one contact with senior faculty than they ought to at an institution as prestigious as Yale. The reliance on transient teachers inevitably distances undergraduates from great thinkers and instructors in every department.

Our instructors' teaching environment is our learning environment. When transient teachers struggle with job security, low compensation, meager benefits, and the demands of graduate research, our education, it affects our education as undergraduates.

Without access to full-time tenured faculty, undergrads frequently rely on transient teachers for research support and advising duties. In addition, undergrads look to transient teachers for letters of recommendation, though they will carry far less weight.

Transient teachers are often forced to teach outside their fields in order to fill the academic needs of departments relying more and more on casual labor.

Recommendations:

1. Hire more tenured faculty. To actually achieve the 7:1 student/faculty ratio that the University adverstises, it would need to hire almost 200 more full-time faculty in tenure positions.

2. Improve Transient Teacher Working Conditions. Includes a year-round living wage, comprehensive health care for teachers and their families, limited class size, office space, English Language Training, and teacher training.

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