Behold What a Union Gets You
Adjunct professors—the worker ants of higher education—are the lowest-paid highly educated workers in America. What could unions do for them? Here is your freaking answer.
It’s typical for our nation’s most enlightened elite universities to suddenly become reactionary right-wingers when unions arise on their own campuses. Duke University is no different. After a hard fought battle against the school’s management, more than 200 non-tenured faculty members at Duke University formed a union last year. At Duke, as at every college, these teachers suffered from low pay, little job stability, and a general sense of being treated as disposable by the shiny institutions they served.