Permanently Precarious? Contingent Academic Faculty Members, Professional Identity and Institutional Change in Quebec Universities
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Universities across Canada are increasingly using contingent, or temporary instructors to teach undergraduate courses (Rajagopal 2002, Muzzin 2008, Lin 2006). Scholars have examined the marginalization of contingent academic faculty members in Canadian universities (Rajagopal 2002, Muzzin 2008). They have also critiqued the ways in which universities use contingent faculty to create surplus value and surplus labour (Rajagopal 2002, Bauder 2006), and support a “primary segment” (Bauder 2006) of the tenured and tenure-track professoriate. In this thesis, I examine the key issues faced by contingent academic faculty members, and how these issues impact on their professional identity. I also investigate into how the use of contingent faculty impacts on teaching practices in higher education. Through the analysis of Labour Force Survey data, I ascertain to what extent contingent academic labour has increased from 1998 to 2008, suggesting that full-time temporary labour is on the rise. I then analyze data gathered from twelve interviews with contingent academic faculty members at Quebec universities to explore how their working conditions and experiences have impacted on their professional identity and perceived quality of instruction. I suggest that professional identity among contingent faculty members is not as static as suggested by Rajagopal (2002) or Gappa and Leslie (1993) Using David Harvey’s (2005) concept of neoliberalism and Ulrich Beck’s (1992) concept of the flexibilization of labour under risk society, I situate the flexibilization of academic labour within the neoliberalization of the university, and also point to linkages between contingent academic labour and the commodification of higher education.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".