Why the Gig Academy is the dominant organizational form within the higher education economy—and its troubling implications for faculty, students, and the future of college education. Over the past two decades, higher education employment has undergone a radical transformation with faculty becoming contingent, staff being outsourced, and postdocs and graduate students becoming a larger share of the workforce. For example, the faculty has shifted from one composed mostly of tenure-track, full-time employees to one made up of contingent, part-time teachers. Non-tenure-track instructors now make up 70 percent of college faculty. Their pay for teaching eight courses averages $22,400 a year—less than the annual salary of most fast-food workers. In The Gig Academy, Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott assess the impact of this disturbing workforce development. Providing an overarching framework that takes the concept of the gig economy and applies it to the university workforce, this book scrutinizes labor restructuring across both academic and nonacademic spheres. By synthesizing these employment trends, the book reveals the magnitude of the problem for individual workers across all institutional types and job categories while illustrating the damaging effects of these changes on student outcomes, campus community, and institutional effectiveness. A pointed critique of contemporary neoliberalism, the book also includes an analysis of the growing divide between employees and administrators. The authors conclude by examining the strengthening state of unionization among university workers. Advocating a collectivist, action-oriented vision for reversing the tide of exploitation, Kezar, DePaola, and Scott urge readers to use the book as a tool to interrogate the state of working relations on their own campuses and fight for a system that is run democratically for the benefit of all. Ultimately, The Gig Academy is a call to arms, one that encourages non-tenure-track faculty, staff, postdocs, graduate students, and administrative and tenure-track allies to unite in a common struggle against the neoliberal Gig Academy.

In these times of change and challenge in higher education, pleas for leadership have become frequent. However, the type of leadership required within this new context (of globalization, demographic changes, technological advancement, and questioning of social authority) may call for different skills, requiring a re-education among campus stakeholders if they want to be successful leaders. In the past twenty years, there has been a revolution in the way that leadership is conceptualized across most fields and disciplines. Leadership has moved away from being leader-centered, individualistic, hierarchical, focused on universal characteristics, and emphasizing power over followers. Instead, a new vision has emerged: leadership that is process-centered, collective, context-bound, non-hierarchical, and focused on mutual power and influence processes. This volume summarizes research and literature about new conceptualizations of leadership to inform practice. This is volume 31, number 6, of the ASHE Higher Education Report, a bi-monthly journal published by Jossey-Bass. See our entire list of ASHE Higher Education Report titles for a wide variety of critical issues facing Higher Education today.

Higher education is in an unprecedented time of change and reform. To address these challenges, university leaders tend to focus on specific interventions and programs, but ignore the change processes and the contexts that would lead to success. Joining theory and practice, How Colleges Change unmasks problematic assumptions that change agents typically possess and provides research-based principles for approaching change. Framed by decades of research, this monumental book offers fresh insights into understanding, leading, and enacting change. Recognizing that internal and external conditions shape and frame change processes, Kezar presents an overarching practical framework that can be applied to any organizational challenge and context. How Colleges Change is a crucial resource for aspiring and practicing campus leaders, higher education practitioners, scholars, faculty, and staff who want to learn how to apply change strategies in their own institutions.

Peter Eckel and Adrianna Kezar have written this book to offer insight to campus leaders who face transformational change--to help them mount a proactive, rather than a reactive, process to effect transformation. They believe that most institutional leaders have little to no experience with implementing large-scale change and lack a solid literature base upon which to rely. Although some scholarship exists on the content of change or change outcomes and conditions, very little information is available concerning the process through which leaders must go to bring about change--and particularly transformational change. Based upon empirical data, this book offers practical, specific advice for leaders faced with attempting to implement deep and pervasive change.

This book provides needed guidance and advice for how colleges and universities can reorganize to foster more collaborative work. In a time of declining resources, financial challenges, changing demographics, and staff overturn, institutions are looking for ways to maximize their resources and still be effective. This book is based on a study of campuses that have been successful in recreating their environments to support collaborative work.

Enhancing Campus Capacity for Leadership explores a mostly untapped resource on college campuses?the leadership potential of staff and faculty at all levels. This book contributes to the growing tradition of giving voice to grassroots leaders, offering a unique contribution by honing in on leadership in educational settings. In an increasingly corporatized environment, grassroots leadership can provide a balance to the prestige and revenue seeking impulses of campus leaders, act as a conscience for institutional operations with greater integrity, create changes related to the teaching and learning core, build greater equity, improve relationships among campus stakeholders, and enhance the student experience. The text documents the stories of grassroots leaders, including the motivation and background of these "bottom up" beacons, the tactics and strategies that they use, the obstacles they overcome, and the ways that they navigate power and join with formal authority. This investigation also showcases how grassroots leaders in institutional settings, particularly more marginalized groups, can face significant backlash. While we like to believe that organizations are civil and humane, the stories in this book demonstrate a dark side with which we must reckon. The book ends with a discussion of the future of leadership on college campuses, examining the possibilities for shared and collaborative forms of leadership and governance.

There is a widespread discontent with the quality of education and levels of college student achievement, particularly for undergraduates preparing for the professions. This report examines the educational challenges in preparing professionals, reviews the specific types of curriculum innovations that faculty and administrators have created or significantly revised to strengthen college graduates' abilities, and focuses on the societal changes and expectations produced by the acceleration in technology.

"This work provides a comprehensive analysis of contemporary leadership scholarship that examines how leadership is conceptualized within higher education"--

For those ready to participate in making transformative changes, Transforming Undergraduate Education provides evidence and case studies that suggest how steps can be taken and progress made. For those who are currently leading their campuses through a change in culture, this book offers support and encouragement. And for those who are pausing—looking positively but cautiously at what needs to change—at the prospects and challenges that may be encountered, Harward and the collection of authors offer an invaluable and innovative resource. Given the intensity of interest regarding the “problems in higher education,” Harward notes how the systemic sources of those problems are infrequently addressed and even rarer is the offering of solutions or suggestions for positive actions. Harward and his colleagues see the achievement of this book as doing both—understanding the problems and offering solutions. The book assembles the voices of leaders, scholars, practitioners, critics and others committed to higher education; collectively they combine theoretical considerations with analyses of fundamental issues related to learning and liberal education. The resulting arguments, theories, and evidence are sufficient to encourage significant—transformative—changes in higher education. Contributors offer examples of campus initiatives that document such changes, from directional nudges to major shifts of emphases and resources—from theoretical arguments to case studies and practices that suggest and guide constructive steps in efforts at change.

Offering a new approach to institutional practices, this book describes evidence-based strategies to create a campus culture conducive to truly supporting all students. We are at a critical crossroads in higher education, where large numbers of low-income, racially minoritized, and first-generation college students – referred to in this book as "at-promise students" – are attending college in greater numbers than ever, yet access has not translated to significantly improved retention and graduation rates. This book, therefore, proposes a realignment of existing initiatives to create campus-wide support through a new model of coordination. The ideas presented in this book are the culmination of one of the largest studies of comprehensive college support programs for at-promise students. Chapters include illustrations of the key concepts and promising practices of the Promoting At-promise Student Success (PASS) Project, as well as guiding questions that can be used to facilitate conversations on campus. In this helpful resource, the authors address how student supports are delivered in validating ways, rather than focusing solely on what supports are offered, as has typically been the way institutions address the issues that at-promise students face. This book is intended to provide guidance and support to educators who want to be a part of changing how higher education supports at-promise students toward increased equity.