As I’ve written many times, the plight of the adjunct in American colleges and universities is a true nightmare, and a profound stain on the character of those colleges and universities. You could read all about it in more detail and at greater length than I can present here, so it’s enough to say that adjuncts are terribly treated, teaching classes for low pay and without benefits in a university system that does almost nothing to protect them or their interests. It must change, and I hope the nascent efforts by adjuncts to unionize will prompt that change. The status quo is practically unsustainable and morally indefensible.

At the same time, there are many ways in which the adjunct crisis, and particularly the relationship between adjuncts and tenure-track faculty, demonstrates why labor issues can be so dysfunctional.

After all, what’s the oldest story in management’s attempts to oppose the union? Turning the non-unionized labor against the unionized, rather than against management. I’ve read countless pieces in the last few years that argue for the plight of the adjunct in a way that declares tenure-track faculty the enemy, rather than the administrations that largely determine labor conditions for contingent faculty. Please don’t misunderstand: faculty who oppose better conditions for adjuncts are simply wrong, and need to be criticized. I am frequently horrified by the thoughtlessness of many in the ranks of the tenured when it comes to conditions for adjuncts, and yes, as people have repeatedly pointed out, there’s great hypocrisy in otherwise left-wing professors failing to support adjunct or graduate unions. But dispassionate labor organizing requires an intense focus on management, and management in the university means the administrators who are gradually transforming colleges along neoliberal grounds. Again, I have no patience whatsoever for tenured faculty who fail to support or actively obstruct improving conditions for adjuncts, and I have argued with such people many times. But from the most dispassionate position imaginable, the actual power to determine adjunct labor conditions comes from administration, not from faculty.

In part, this is an example of a common human tendency to yell at the people who  you have access to yell at. Many within the faculty are willing to listen; they can be engaged with. The administration, to many academics, appears to be an entirely faceless monolith, one that they have no access to. I have no doubt that the case for the moral and practical necessity of improved conditions for adjuncts needs to be made to faculty, but I also find the relentless focus of these pieces on faculty to be misplaced. It is the neoliberal ideologues in positions of administrative power who are working relentlessly to curtail labor power within the university. They are the bosses.

My guess is that the failure to identify the adjunct-TT faculty dispute in the tradition of divides between unionized and non-unionized labor is a continuing refusal to see academic work as simply work. One thing I’ve learned, over time, is that many of the people who want to appear the most cynical about the American university system are in fact not cynical enough. In reading and talking with adjuncts or others who are critical of the political economy of the academy, there’s an emotional edge to the criticism that reflects a sense of betrayal. Anger is perfectly warranted, and yet the particular flavor of anger is indicative of an emotional commitment to the university that betrays the cynicism many attempt to project.

It is precisely an overly romantic view of our university system that prompts the really intense negative emotions: they stem from a continued belief in the traditional values that are associated with the university. But the university never really had those values. I’m someone who grew up in academic culture, surrounded by academics and administrators my entire life, so I never had a romantic view of the academy in the first place. The American university system is just a widget factory. That’s all it’s ever been. It is an American workplace, and in an American workplace, the default state is exploitation of labor. That’s not defeatism. The working conditions in widget factories can be improved, through hard work and organization. It’s just an acknowledgement that a sense of unique betrayal stems from a flawed concept of what the American university system always has been.

There is a strong chance that, in the coming decades, we will see the conditions of tenure-track faculty and adjuncts converge. It’s just that, when they do, it will be much more likely as a result of the death of tenure and all college teaching being performed by contingent labor. As a student at a school sprinting in the direction of the neoliberal education ideal, I have no doubt that administrators writ large would love to crush tenure-track faculty and their unions. That is a very distinct possibility. It would engender a kind of equality, sure, but it would only be an equality of misery. The question for us is whether that’s a kind of equality we want to pursue. If you think I’m being unfair in asking that question, I suggest you immerse yourself more in the writing of many who have recently gone through the tenure-track hiring process. Their identification of the problems with the system is commendable. But it is frequently matched with rage and resentment that are not conducive to any kind of organized improvement of the lives of adjuncts. It will be far easier to hurt the tenure-track professors than to actually make a material positive improvement in the lives of adjuncts, if we aren’t careful, if we don’t speak carefully.

We’re living in a time of broad and deep immiseration of workers. Across the country and around the world, the conditions of workers as workers seem to get worse and worse. Stagnant wages are combined with increasing costs of living in medicine and housing. Organized labor has been crushed, with worker power at low ebb. The petty degradation of workers grows and grows. What twists the knife, for me, is the lack of solidarity. The broad decline in working conditions should prompt more worker organizing and more support between workers. If anything, we’ve seen a rise in petty resentment and anger between workers. I am profoundly ambivalent about the “99% vs. 1%” frame, and yet it has the elementary advantage of reflecting the huge divide between a tiny, ludicrously privileged population of haves and an ever-growing population of have-nots. Destroying the professoriate would only eliminate one of the last remaining good jobs for those who are not rentiers and plutocrats. We have to work to make working conditions better for adjuncts rather than worse for the tenured, and that will take a focused and dispassionate message and a pragmatic strategy.