Career Paths for Academic Workers

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Besides its advocacy for better wages and benefits for graduate employees at Yale, GESO also works with a variety of national academic organizations to study and improve our longterm career prospects.  In the recent past, we have formed particularly strong ties with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and graduate employee unions at Columbia University and New York University, where we have synchronized labor actions. Through the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU), GESO also maintains active relationships with labor unions throughout the national and international systems of higher education. Our alliances with other unions at private and public universities across the country are an important part of our larger vision to build a powerful academic labor movement that can reverse the trend toward casualization and secure good jobs for academics now and into the future.

"Underlying GESO’s advocacy for graduate employee rights and benefits is the issue of academic governance. The graduate student labor movement continues to grow and evolve because the erosion of tenure and the increasing reliance on part-time and non-tenured faculty in the academy demands an organized response that is national in scope. We are working with a coalition of graduate students across the country to reverse this recent trend even as it has severely reduced the ability of academics at all levels to assert and realize their visions of the university. We plan to continue working with the growing coalition of graduate students to achieve our vision of the academy."

Dan Gilbert
GESO Co-Chair
American Studies

GESO can have an impact on career path issues:

• Organizing rights for all academic workers
• Establish staffing ratios to reduce the percentage of teaching performed by non-ladder faculty
• Published tracking of alumni careers
• Hire departmental career counselors
• Union representation on committees that determine the use of graduate employees

Related GESO reports:
• The [Un]changing Face of the Ivy League [.pdf] 2/2005
• 2 Casual 2 Blue: The Status of Science Research at Yale [.pdf] 10/17/2003
• The Postdoc Crisis [.pdf] Fall 2001
• Casual in Blue: Yale and the Academic Labor Market [.pdf] Spring 1999
• Casual Nation: A report on the academic casualization crisis by the CGEU [.pdf] 2000


Related Readings

GESO's Declaration of Principles for Higher Education, ratified by the membership on December 6, 2006

For the latest information on trends in the academic job market, check out these articles and reports . . .

New! AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006
In the AAUP Contingent Faculty Index 2006, the American Association of University Professors provides data to document the increasing predominance of non-tenure-track faculty in America’s colleges and universities. This report draws on figures submitted by institutions to the US Department of Education’s IPEDS database for fall 2005, and makes data on individual campuses easily accessible for the first time.

NEW! Trends in Faculty Status, 1975-2003
by The American Association of University Professors, based on the U.S. Department of Education's most recent tabulations of academic employees' job rankings and salaries in postsecondary Institutions.

Competition and Careers in Biosciences
by FREEMAN et al.

A Union Contract Aimed at Improving the Postdoc Experience
by BERYL LIEFF BENDERLY

The Path to a Ph.D. -- and Beyond
How a group of historians has fared, 10 years after graduation
The Chronicle of Higher Education
June 6, 2003
By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

“Prospects in the Academic Labor Market for Economists,” by Ronald G. Ehrenberg, Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 18, No. 2, Spring 2004.
Ehrenberg argues that job prospects for economists seeking tenure-track positions may depend on the success of efforts to unionize full- and part-time professors who are not on the tenure track.