The plight of adjunct professors is such that it was recently asked, “Are adjunct professors the fast-food workers of the academic world?”

However, instead of addressing the “supply vs demand” issue at the core of this development, a new book from a longtime adjunct activist Keith Hoeller claims that working conditions for many part-time faculty members has become a “civil rights issue.”

Inside Higher Ed’s Colleen Flaherty has this summary.

When it comes to the faculty, separate tracks can’t be equal. That’s the argument prominent adjunct activists make in a new anthology edited by Keith Hoeller, a longtime adjunct professor of philosophy at Green River Community College in Washington and vocal critic of the “two-tier” system of adjunct and tenure-line employment. Through historical references and rhetoric, Equality for Contingent Faculty: Overcoming the Two-Tier System (Vanderbilt University Press) presents adjuncts’ struggle for better working conditions in what they see as an inherently unfair system as civil rights issue. It also discusses examples of and other opportunities for reform.

“[The] two-track system in academe does set up two entirely separate, but unequal, tiers in which the upper tier, the tenure track, is treated in a vastly superior manner to the lower tier, the non-tenure track, which is treated as inferior,” Hoeller says in his essay, “The Academic Labor System of Faculty Apartheid.”

He adds: “Higher education is not simply another commodity produced by American factories; it is the building block of our culture and democracy.”

Hoeller uses the term “tenurism” (drawing on Robert Fuller’s discussion of “rankism” in his book, Somebodies and Nobodies) to describe what he sees as the systematic subjugation of adjuncts – under which they’re denied the same per-course pay, benefits, job security and working conditions as their tenure-track counterparts.

Lantz Simpson, a tenured professor of English at Santa Monica College who taught for nearly 20 years off the tenure track, makes a similar argument in his essay, “The New Abolition Movement.”

“My proposal is simply this: the current, two-tiered system, mired in contingency, should be replaced with the systematic regularization of faculty — that is, contingent faculty routinely moving onto the tenure track and thereby achieving full-time tenured status throughout the country,” he says.

Hoeller said in an interview that he’s been reading everything he can about adjunct labor for more than 20 years as an activist, and has written about it, as well – including in op-eds in this publication and The New York Times. But so far, the contingent faculty movement has focused on various, specific inequities, particularly low per-course pay, compared to tenure-line professors, and called for “incremental” improvements.

In other words, it hasn’t gotten to the root of the problem.