Here at ProfHacker we like to talk about things in academia that “everyone just knows.” It turns out that many people don’t know these things because they go unspoken for one reason or another. And among those things is the role that non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty play in higher education. It’s not the readers of ProfHacker that don’t know about adjunct labor, however, so much as the general public. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an event that is looking to change that.

I was at the first national summit—Reclaiming Academic Democracy—called by the New Faculty Majority (NFM). NFM is a three-year old group that seeks to (1) highlight the extent of NTT faculty (hint: they teach the majority of classes and students across the country) and (2) the conditions under which many of these NTT faculty labor (hint: it ain’t pretty). The goals of the summit were to bring…

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