Here is a short but great list of sources from the Longreads web site each of which takes a deep look at the adjunct crisis faced by higher education. Adjunctification, the normalization of the practice of hiring college professors part-time to teach courses, has been with us decades now, but has worsened every year since sometime in the late 1970’s or so to become the defining but still largely marginalized issue in higher education today.

As it turns out, we potentially (hopefully!) will have an adjunct (although not one whose experience as such, as far as I can tell but certainly not since she has been married to Joe Biden, resembles that of the typical adjunct), Dr. Jill Biden, as first lady of the United States. We have written her a letter. In a recent AFT roundtable, the “Good Adjunct” himself, president of the AFT-ACC, the indefatigable Geoff Johnson posed a question to her about the adjunct crisis. She responded that she would “have to look into it.” Not a response that indicates she is in the trenches, financially speaking, that most adjuncts are in, nor that she is aware of the crisis of adjunctification and how it is at the core of devaluation of higher education.

But, once she “looks into it….”