Five Campuses a Week: Anatomy of the Gig Professorate
Photo: empty university office hallway at night with fluorescent lights, via thumbs.dreamstime.com
Consider a Tuesday in the life of an American college instructor. A 7:40 a.m. highway drive to an 8:00 a.m. composition course at a community college. A midday dash across a metropolitan area to a noon section at a private university. An evening seminar that ends at 9:45 p.m. at a third campus. Multiply this by five institutions, add grading done in parking lots, and you have the working week that higher education now calls a staffing model.
This is not an anomaly. It is the design.
The Arithmetic of Contingency
The numbers have stopped shocking anyone inside the academy, which may be the most damning thing about them. Roughly three-quarters of faculty appointments in the United States are now contingent—adjuncts, lecturers, graduate students, and other non-tenure-track instructors. Tenure-line positions, once the default expectation of an academic career, have become the exception.
The transformation was not accidental. Beginning in the fiscal crises of the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, administrators discovered that they could meet enrollment demand without committing to lifetime salaries, retirement contributions, or the professional obligations that come with a tenure line. An adjunct teaching the same course load as an assistant professor might earn one-fifth the salary, without benefits, without research support, and without any promise of renewal.
The vocabulary did the rest. 'Adjunct' and 'contingent' sound like weather, not policy. 'Flexibility' — the word of choice in budget memos — implies mutual benefit, as though the instructor chose precarity the way a freelancer chooses a coworking space.
What the Commute Costs
The instructor shuttling between five campuses is not merely tired. She is structurally excluded from the work of a university.
There is no office, which means no reliable place for a struggling student to ask a question after class. There are no faculty meetings to attend, which means no voice in the curriculum she is paid to deliver. There is no research budget, no sabbatical, no time — the currency scholarship runs on. Faculty governance, the mechanism by which academics traditionally checked administrative power, quietly becomes a tenure-line club she cannot join.
Students absorb the losses even when they cannot name them. Research on contingent instruction suggests measurable effects on course availability, advising continuity, and mentorship — the intangibles that distinguish a degree from an education. A professor with an office and an institutional home can write a recommendation letter at midnight and know the student by name three semesters later. A highway commuter often cannot.
The Ideology of the Tower
Defenders of the status quo sometimes argue that the ivory tower was always a fantasy — that American higher education was built on cheap labor from the beginning, from graduate teaching assistants to underpaid junior faculty. There is truth in this. But the scale is new, and so is the candor. Where universities once hid contingent labor, they now advertise it in course schedules and accreditation self-studies.
The deeper cost is epistemic. A professoriate that cannot afford to think will, over time, stop producing thought. Scholarship requires slack — the unfunded hours spent reading, arguing, revising. Strip the slack from the system and the tower becomes a facade: institutions that confer credentials while the intellectual life inside them runs on fumes.
What Reform Would Require
The remedies are neither mysterious nor unaffordable in aggregate. Converting a fraction of contingent lines to tenure-track positions, as some flagship universities have begun piloting. Paying per-course rates that reflect preparation time, not just seat time. Extending benefits and governance rights to long-term lecturers, as several state systems have done under union pressure. Most fundamentally: treating instruction as the core mission that the balance sheet claims it is.
None of this will happen through goodwill alone. It happened where it has happened because adjuncts organized, students noticed, accreditors asked questions, and legislators connected workforce conditions to institutional budgets.
The ivory tower has always been a metaphor with a double edge — an aspiration toward detached inquiry and an indictment of detachment from consequence. A two-tier professoriate completes the indictment. An institution that will not pay for the minds it sells is not a tower at all. It is a scaffolding, dressed in ivy, waiting for the next budget cycle to decide what remains standing.
