Adjunctification is the Ultimate “Cancel Culture”
The real threat to “viewpoint diversity” on college campuses is the precarity of faculty employment
Most college profs in the United States — over 70% — don’t have tenure and aren’t even on the tenure track. We are on year-to-year or semester-to-semester adjunct contracts. We are perilously vulnerable to the prospect of punitive treatment for our viewpoints, from conservative administrators, from boards of trustees drawn from “the business world,” from “angry taxpayers” hollering over the controversies deliberately ginned up by Campus Reform or The College Fix or right wing radio shock jocks.
The biggest risk to viewpoint diversity on campus is the precarity of the professoriate: how can we dare to foster difficult, challenging conversations that ask students to respectfully consider viewpoints they might strongly disagree with if we know that the slightest controversy could cost us our jobs?
And let me say this: you know those armchair observers and commenters who assume that “liberal professors” cannot make room for diverse viewpoints in the classroom, or do not allow for any viewpoint but their own? Those people are just telling on themselves and disclosing their own lack of professional integrity. Just like doctors or lawyers or counselors…
