Debates about academic freedom rage in the academy--but they are marred profoundly by the broad assumption that this is even a category that applies to faculty across the board. But as more and more college teachers are not tenure-track faculty members and are at-will, temporary employees who typically see small pay and few if any benefits, the terms of debate have finally begun to shift. There is a building discussion about the impossible terms upon which academe's contingent labor force lives--and some interesting ideas are coming out of it.

Robert Zemsky of the University of Pennsylvania has proposed a truly interesting idea:

Rather than trying to turn back the clock, which is an unwinnable proposition, he suggested, "the slogan in the world we're talking about ought not to be a call to organize--it ought to be a call to incorporate."

Incorporate? Adjuncts? You could almost read those words in the quizzical looks on the faces of the audience members.

The contingent academic work force "has real skills and fulfills real needs," Zemsky explained, particularly in high-demand fields such as foreign languages, math, and science for non-scientists. Instead of organizing one employer at a time, he said, what would happen if groups of adjunct instructors formed a cooperative in which they marketed and sold their services to all institutions in a city or area (instructors of Chinese and Russian in Chicago, say, or math instructors in the Bay Area). "I'm amazed that there hasn't been this sort of market impulse to take advantage of the phenomenon that actually benefits those who provide the services," he argued.

Zemsky acknowledged that he didn't know exactly how such an arrangement would work, mechanically, or even if it would work; "I'm just a guy who makes the speeches," he said self-deprecatingly. But given that we now have the "worst of all worlds," where the number of adjuncts is growing and they feel "unloved" and "disposable," doesn’t it make sense to be "thinking of alternate ways of making this system work?" he asked the assembled.