The East Side Freedom Library invites you to a conversation with Joe Berry and Helena Worthen about their new book, Power Despite Precarity: Strategies for the Contingent Faculty Movement in Higher Education.

Register here to join this event on Zoom.

Higher education is the site of an ongoing conflict. At the heart of this struggle are the precariously employed faculty ‘contingents’ who work without basic job security, living wages or benefits. Yet they have the incentive and, if organized, the power to shape the future of higher education.

Power Despite Precarity is part history, part handbook and a wholly indispensable resource in this fight. Joe Berry and Helena Worthen ask: what is the role of universities in society? Whose interests should they serve? What are the necessary conditions for the exercise of academic freedom? The book discusses the history of the “casualization,” or “adjunctification” of non-tenure-track faculty in relation to an increasingly corporatized and diminished higher education system, provides a deeper explanation of academic faculty unions, their processes and challenges, and explains how contingent faculty can organize and work to build power through their unions.

Berry and Worthen are contingent faculty activists whose direct experience with contingent faculty working conditions and labor organizing dates to the early 1980s. They draw upon their long arc of experience and deep knowledge of the subject, particularly the experiences of California State University lecturers who created solidarity and collective power culminating in threats of strikes in 2007, 2011, and 2016, leading to what Berry and Worthen argue “is generally thought of as the best contract for contingent higher ed faculty in the United States.”

Berry and Worthen advocate for what they refer to as an “inside-outside strategy”, meaning that while contingent faculty must work within the union power and leadership structure, they must also organize their fellow contingent workers outside that structure to listen to and acknowledge contingent concerns, build solidarity, and in turn either shape or take charge of leadership to get their demands met at the bargaining table.

Joe and Helena will be joined in conversation by three local contingent faculty members—Mary Pogatshnik (Spanish and Portuguese, University of Minnesota), Jacob Jurss (History, University of St. Thomas), and Rebecca Church (History, Metro State). We are also hoping to attract faculty activists from these and other Twin Cities academic institutions and involve them in the conversation.

Free and open to all

Invite your friends on Facebook!