The Chronicle of Higher Education has a summary of a new research piece on contingent faculty working conditions by Adrianna Kezar and Cecile Sam from University of Southern California.  It is, of course, behind the CHE wall, but here are the basics:

It concluded that adjuncts had made the most progress at colleges where they tried to transform the campus climate to be more inclusive of them, rather than simply fighting to change one employer practice at a time.

"Contingent faculty leaders tend to focus on a narrow set of rights such as salary and benefits and tend not to focus on deeper issues such as climate and inclusion," says a paper summarizing the study's results.

But where the overall campus climate has been changed so that adjunct faculty members are valued and included in decision making, the paper says, colleges are "naturally drawn" to tend to adjuncts' concerns. Much of the resistance to improving their working conditions, especially from tenure-track faculty members, dissipates. Adjuncts at such colleges not only get better pay, benefits, and job security, but also often find their institutions taking other steps, such as paying them for office hours, adopting policies intended to protect their academic freedom and intellectual-property rights, and providing mechanisms for them to get on the tenure track.

The paper is being presented this week at the Association for the Study of Higher Education.  Professor Kezar was gracious enough to agree to answer a few questions about the study.  We will run that interview and have the paper for you next week after the AHSE conference concludes, so stand by.

Update:  the authors of the paper sent some clarification about CHE's representation of the study.  There are two major issues they felt were misstated.

One - our study does not say there were not differences in working conditions between unionized and non-unionized campuses.  Research clearly demonstrates unionized campuses have better working conditions.  Our study found that non-unionized and unionized campuses did not differ dramatically in terms of processes to institutionalize change.  Both campuses used similar approaches to improve working conditions.

Second, we found it difficult for contingent faculty to mobilize for an assortment of reasons - hectic schedules, heterogeneity of the group, lack of shared interests, and among the many reasons we found, one was an internalized poor self image, typically a result of tenure track faculty treating them as second class citizens.  Though there are many active contingent faculty members trying to enact change, this factor made mobilization on some campuses difficult.  While the article states that our study found this as a major roadblock to mobilization, it misstates it as a major one rather than one among many.