The number of part-time faculty...has increased sevenfold ... Why did this happen? Mr. Childress has trouble answering that overarching question because he loves the field of higher education and tries hard not to sound like a right-winger fulminating against it. He does not challenge the modern universities’ creation of faux-academic disciplines—hospitality management, marketing, women’s studies—or the 20th-century delusion that everybody should go to college. Mr. Childress writes as a wounded lover, not as an adversary ... Mr. Childress’s reluctance to raise larger questions about the higher-education industry occasionally leads him to credulity, as when he accepts without qualm the notion that state universities underpay faculty and rely on contract work in part because their public funding has diminished ... Even so, and despite its author’s wavering sympathy for academia, The Adjunct Underclass is a heartbreaking indictment of American higher education.
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