Given how negatively Adrianna Kezar portrays academe in The Gig Academy:Mapping Labor in the Neoliberal University (Johns Hopkins University Press), it is striking to hear that she remains optimistic about improvement, albeit not overnight.
"I'm pretty realistic about change and how long it takes," she says by phone from her office at the University of Southern California, where she is a professor of higher education. She and two colleagues, Tom DePaola and Daniel T. Scott, draw on a vast array of their own and others' research to detail labor practices that they believe jeopardize the goals of higher education.
"We are," they write, "rapidly closing in on the institutional dystopia long feared by those who see universities as our only bulwark against the many forces that threaten free inquiry and undermine the democratic function of higher learning."
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