From the CHE. (This is not a critique of the ACA, dispute the attention-grabbing lead.)
Recent moves by colleges to cut adjunct hours in advance of the Obamacare employer mandate offer a reminder of why contingent faculty labor is the gift that keeps on giving to the corporate university: Not only do part-time adjuncts receive a fraction of the pay expected by full-timers for the same work; they also do not encumber the institution with health-care costs. A majority of today’s teaching faculty members are thus vulnerable not only to the first round of pink slips mandated by budget cuts but also to the predations of our health-care system....
The current business model of higher education depends on leaving those least able to pay the high costs of health care in this country most likely to have to pay them. This is American exceptionalism in action: subsidized medicine for the haves, “individual responsibility” for the have-nots. Most tenured faculty members surely object to that model, but the graduate programs they run are operationally complicit in the hypocritical cult of “individual responsibility.”...
The proletarianization of university instructors is a moral crisis that graduate programs—the incubators of academia’s surplus labor force—need to confront directly and immediately.
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