S2 Episode 4: Living the Contradictions of Precarious Labor

Collegeland

Students know who their favorite professors are on campus but they rarely know that up to 70% of college faculty are contract workers, often paid by the course, with very low pay and no job security.

To put a personal face on the issues facing contingent faculty, we talk to Jennifer Hyland Wang, a long-time non-tenure-track faculty member at the University of Wisconsin. Jennifer balances parenting, teaching, research, and organizing work as co-chair of the Precarious Labor Organization within the Society for Cinema and Media Studies.

Jennifer explains what it is like to “live the contradictions” of a university system designed for the outdated model of white male tenured professors. Contingent faculty are usually paid per course and rarely have job security or benefits. They face the lack of institutional support for parenting common to tenure-track faculty as well as policies that deny them research funding, participation in governance, and even library access. How would higher education be different if we acknowledged that contingency is structural, not shameful, and that the people who have landed tenure-track positions just happened to “fit the suit” to be filled at a particular moment? Jennifer calls for new kinds of thinking, organizing, and community building that support and enfranchise contingent faculty and make non-tenure-track jobs liveable.