Eileen Schell investigates, from a feminist perspective, the complex reasons why women are disproportionately represented in the ranks of contingent writing faculty.

"Once adjunct teaching was considered a temporary solution to faculty shortages in institutions of higher education. Now it a permanent and indispensable feature of such institutions, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. This book takes stock of this new development, concentrating primarily on the situation in the humanities. It looks at its impact on the lives of the highly-educated scholars and teachers from many parts of the world; scholars waking up to the sobering fact that higher education presents them with a two-tiered labour market in which they themselves are permanently barred from moving up to the higher tier. To them, being an adjunct teacher means experiencing frustration and humiliation. All essays in this book offer personal accounts of adjuncts' experiences together with critical reflections on institutional conditions and suggestions for their improvement. In turn defiant, poignant, analytical, exasperated, and sardonic, these essays are always incisive and revealing. Their inside view - a view from below - shows higher education as a world different from how it appears to tenured professors and university administrators, different from that presented in most college brochures. For all those who care about the current state and the future of higher education - no matter if they are teachers, scholars, students, parents, or administrators - this book will offer valuable insights into the working world of academic teaching."--BOOK JACKET.

Universities tend to be judged by the test scores of their incoming students and not on what students actually learn once they attend these institutions. While shared tests and surveys have been developed, most schools refuse to publish the results. Instead, they allow such publications as U.S. News & World Report to define educational quality. In order to raise their status in these rankings, institutions pour money into new facilities and extracurricular activities while underfunding their educational programs. In Why Public Higher Education Should Be Free, Robert Samuels argues that many institutions of higher education squander funds and mislead the public about such things as average class size, faculty-to-student ratios, number of faculty with PhDs, and other indicators of educational quality. Parents and students seem to have little knowledge of how colleges and universities have been restructured over the past thirty years. Samuels shows how research universities have begun to function as giant investment banks or hedge funds that spend money on athletics and administration while increasing tuition costs and actually lowering the quality of undergraduate education. In order to fight higher costs and lower quality, Samuels suggests, universities must reallocate these misused funds and concentrate on their core mission of instruction and related research. Throughout the book, Samuels argues that the future of our economy and democracy rests on our ability to train students to be thoughtful participants in the production and analysis of knowledge. If leading universities serve only to grant credentials and prestige, our society will suffer irrevocable harm. Presenting the problem of how universities make and spend money, Samuels provides solutions to make these important institutions less expensive and more vital. By using current resources in a more effective manner, we could even, he contends, make all public higher education free.

The professor and historian delivers a major critique of how political and financial attacks on the academy are undermining our system of higher education. Making a provocative foray into the public debates over higher education, acclaimed historian Ellen Schrecker argues that the American university is under attack from two fronts. On the one hand, outside pressure groups have staged massive challenges to academic freedom, beginning in the 1960s with attacks on faculty who opposed the Vietnam War, and resurfacing more recently with well-funded campaigns against Middle Eastern Studies scholars. Connecting these dots, Schrecker reveals a distinct pattern of efforts to undermine the legitimacy of any scholarly study that threatens the status quo. At the same time, Schrecker deftly chronicles the erosion of university budgets and the encroachment of private-sector influence into academic life. From the dwindling numbers of full-time faculty to the collapse of library budgets, The Lost Soul of Higher Education depicts a system increasingly beholden to corporate America and starved of the resources it needs to educate the new generation of citizens. A sharp riposte to the conservative critics of the academy by the leading historian of the McCarthy-era witch hunts, The Lost Soul of Higher Education, reveals a system in peril—and defends the vital role of higher education in our democracy.

More students today are financing college through debt, but the burdens of debt are not equally shared. The least privileged students are those most encumbered and the least able to repay. All of this has implications for those who work in academia, especially those who are themselves from less advantaged backgrounds. Warnock argues that it is difficult to reconcile the goals of facilitating upward mobility for students from similar backgrounds while being aware that the goals of many colleges and universities stand in contrast to the recruitment and support of these students. This, combined with the fact that campuses are increasingly reliant on adjunct labor, makes it difficult for the contemporary tenure-track or tenured working-class academic to reconcile his or her position in the academy.

How do definitions of literacy in the academy, and the pedagogies that reinforce such definitions, influence and shape our identities as teachers, scholars, and students? The contributors gathered here reflect on those moments when the dominant cultural and institutional definitions of our identities conflict with our other identities, shaped by class, race, gender, sexual orientation, location, or other cultural factors. These writers explore the struggle, identify the sources of conflict, and discuss how they respond personally to such tensions in their scholarship, teaching, and administration. They also illustrate how writing helps them and their students compose alternative identities that may allow the connection of professional identities with internal desires and senses of self. They emphasize how identity comes into play in education and literacy and how institutional and cultural power is reinforced in the pedagogies and values of the writing classroom and writing profession.

Rewriting Success in Rhetoric and Composition Careers presents alternative narratives of what constitutes success in the field of rhetoric and composition from those who occupy traditionally undervalued positions in the academy (tribal college, community colleges, postdoctoral tracks), those who have used their PhDs outside of the academy (a law firm, a textbook publisher, a community center), and those who have engaged in professionalization opportunities not typical in the field (research center, a nonprofit humanities organization).

This book shows how dominant inflections of key terms in composition reinforce composition's low institutional status and the poor working conditions of many of its instructors and tutors. Horner demonstrates ways to challenge debilitating definitions of these terms and to rework them and their relations to one another in constructive ways.

Using a three-part theoretical construct--labor, action, and work--as defined in Hannah Arendt's work of political and social theory, The Human Condition, and rich qualitative data gathered from course observations, interviews, and correspondence, Jessica Restaino looks at the experiences of four new graduate students who are first-year writing teachers at "Public U," a large state university.

Education as Civic Engagement: Toward a More Democratic Society is a collection of ten essays examining education—mostly higher education—as civic engagement. These essays are the finest works of scholarship on education published over the last decade in JAC, an award-winning journal of rhetoric, politics, and culture. Collectively, the works in this volume analyze in a substantive and rigorous manner a number of key issues in the politics of education.