Imagine you’re a university undergraduate attending your first class of the semester. You’ve been curious about this class, a requirement for your major. The professor welcomes you and the rest of the students and launches into her overview of the topic. She is engaging, the lecture is clear, the discussion lively. You see why your friends recommended that you take the class from her. Invigorated, you walk out into the afternoon sunshine and look forward to the rest of the course.

What you don’t know are three things. One, the professor is now hurrying off campus into her car and across town to a community college, where she will arrive just in time to teach another class that night. Two, she is an adjunct, making less than half of what tenured professors make for teaching the same class. And three, unless you are an unusually attentive and politicized student, you also don’t know that she is representative of a growing majority — the casual labor force on which rests the otherwise unsustainable edifice of higher education.

It’s not news that public higher education, once a robust engine for working-class advancement, has fallen on difficult times. Thanks to its de facto capture by market-oriented forces transforming a common good into something resembling a profit-making corporation, students pay more in tuition and fees for smaller menus of educational options; administrators without subject area expertise exert greater control over academic discourse; and faculty are bifurcated into a shrinking tenure-line professoriate with job security alongside a steadily growing contingent workforce unable to cobble together a decent living, often without the resources to teach students properly despite professional qualifications equal to (and often greater than) their tenured colleagues’.