Delighted to pass along the announcement of the availability of Vol. 112(1) of Academe, the magazine of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP). This from their Press Release:
The winter issue of Academe—edited by Alissa Karl, associate professor of English at SUNY Brockport and vice president for academics of United University Professions—considers the structure and conditions of academic labor today. Who performs the type of knowledge work we call academic labor, of what does it consist, and what might its appropriate aims be? Contributors to the issue examine the realities of teaching, research, and service within a highly tiered and increasingly contingent academic workforce; graduate students and the reproduction of academic labor; the stakes of AI for faculty work; and the demographic changes that are transforming the academic labor movement.
The featured articles, with links, follows below, along with Alissa Karl's essay: From the Guest Editor: What Is Academic Labor Now?. The essays provide a very useful starting point for considering the sociology and politics of labor and value in a society where both are being transformed. The difficultly, and a common one, is that sometimes one tends to engage in analysis holding for time; or more often of attempting an analytics in which one element in a dialectal ecology is dynamic and the rest are assumed to stay in ace (and time), The surprise always comes when these premises do not reflect the realist on the ground. It is at that point that one may be inclined to invoke normative principles, and more specifically, a specific set of objectives derived from an application of those normative premises, as the basis of critique or in the service of a normative politics of j'accuse. Both are perfectly reasonable, and indeed ought to be expected. These then frame the larger issues within worthy discourse, like that in this volume, may be better situated and on that basis produce an even more profound contribution to knowledge.
Reports of the decline of academic labor are rife and, depending upon the report and one’s inclinations, not necessarily exaggerated.
For too many who perform academic labor, jobs are insecure and unsustainable. The college and university administrators who hold so much sway over the status of academic work are wont to disregard academic disciplines in favor of the chase for hot enrollments and trends. In 2025, we experienced the collapse, followed by what could be a slow, continuing decline, of grant-funded research infrastructure and the primacy and prestige of the work conducted therein. We are in the thick of the current federal administration’s wholesale assault upon, and attempted hostile takeover of, the higher education institutions that house the various facets of academic labor.
Each of these—again, not necessarily exaggerated—signs of decline rests upon a set of assumptions about what academic labor ought to rightly do, in itself or within our broader social order. This issue’s collection of essays inquires, “What is academic labor now?”: Who performs it, of what does it consist, what are its internal and external conditions, and what might its appropriate aims be? Contributors to the issue hold a range of academic positions and approach these questions from differing perspectives, but all do the kinds of work that we might classify as “academic.”
Before we proceed any further, a note on the terms academic labor and academic work is in order. The operations of higher education institutions require all kinds of labor. They require teaching labor and research work and work in the adjacent domains of librarianship; the work of skilled technicians and tradespeople; specialized administrative and clerical functions; service and facilities work, from groundskeeping to food services; and specialized services including health care, advising, counseling, and tutoring. Our institutions require the work of state and federal public servants who administer the programs and infrastructures upon which our campuses rely. This list could be extended, and all these types of work are essential to the operation of higher education. This issue, however, asks about the status of labor that not only takes place within the context of higher education but is specifically academic in nature—typically, this academic labor is the work of teaching and related instruction and of conducting and disseminating scholarship and research.
In my experience as a professor of English, as an organizer in higher education labor, as an elected leader in a large higher education labor union, and in service to national bodies that deliberate on strategy and policies for all of the above, I have found that we tend to believe that we share a set of assumptions about what academic labor entails or ought to entail, and this sense of a shared assumption animates our strategies for defending and bolstering the work that we do. In the broadest of terms, most academic workers would probably say that the purposes of academic labor (though not necessarily its daily functions) include the creation and advancement of human knowledge—in large part through the instruction of students in that knowledge—as well as the stewardship of the institutions where this knowledge work is conducted. I’m not here to contest the validity of such assumed shared purposes, but I believe that when we place them in the context of the sense of crisis and decline that I outlined above, we can identify a bottom line in such enduring goals: the reproduction of the very conditions of and need for academic labor itself.
To acknowledge that academic labor’s assumed purpose is self-referential is not to diminish that purpose but rather to recognize an anxiety about the status of that work in the future. I will venture that such a preoccupation motivates what contributor David A. Banks names as the academic’s familiar comparison of “a luxurious past . . . with an austere present”—that is, our frequent talk of the way we used to hire or how much more abundant resources were back then or what it was like when students didn’t complete their work with AI. In other words, the esteem that we attach to academic work is inseparable from an anxiety over its future reproducibility and thus an ironic fixation on how it was supposedly done in the past. In the simplest terms, academic work is really important, and if we keep diverting from the past, how will we ever maintain it into the future?
The essays in this issue demonstrate some of the reasons why we might see that reproductive endeavor as imperiled. Jesús Fernández unfolds the contradictions in the systems by which the newest cohorts of academic workers, graduate students, are recruited and trained. Fernández argues that the situation of the graduate student reveals a collapse of the categories of trainee and professional that is rooted in the anxieties of position characteristic of the meritocratic middle class more broadly. Banks elaborates how such an uneasy structural hierarchy is replicated after the terminal degree is awarded; what he calls the “arbitrary” nature of that hierarchy undermines any confidence (if one ever held it) that the structures of academic labor are rational or sustainable. Fernández and Banks variously interrogate the meritocratic pretensions of the academic labor system in ways that suggest its alignment with more arbitrary and conflicted classed and economic interests. Ulises A. Mejias argues that the introduction of artificial intelligence into academic work has inaugurated a realignment of academic labor with economic interests in certain domains of contemporary capital.
But where these essays point to the conundrums upon which academic labor is predicated, Gary Rhoades and Eric Rader gesture toward the adaptive possibilities that academic workers present when they are organized formally or informally. Rhoades and Rader respectively detail how substantial shifts in the social and political climate in which the reproduction of academic labor can take place have remade aca demic workers’ expectations and demands. Rhoades elaborates that “who” is performing academic labor has fundamentally changed “what” practitioners are coming to expect of it. Rader offers a case study of how his decades-old faculty labor union has adapted to new cohorts of members with renewed expectations of their jobs and their union.
My experience has also convinced me, and the essays in this issue demonstrate, that what academic labor in fact “is”—the job functions we perform, the outcomes to which they are supposedly directed, and the structural contexts in which both of those reside—have either never been clearly defined or are fraught at their core. As the essays here reveal, what academic labor “is” is historically and generationally changeable; it is predicated upon often-indeterminate values that are nonetheless under threat; it is caught within professional and institutional contradictions; it is vulnerable to institutional capture by political and economic actors who seek to instrumentalize it. Little wonder we worry that academic labor’s conditions are not reproducible. This is not to suggest that academic workers should be resigned to the inequities and indignities of our workplaces, or that we should react passively to the imperilment of instruction and research. Rather, in our commitment to carrying our work forward, it behooves us to think not about how our work should replicate that of a supposed past but about what it could be in the future.
Alissa Karl is associate professor of English at SUNY Brockport and vice president for academics of United University Professions, the labor union for over forty-one thousand faculty members and professional staff at the State University of New York.
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