The Uberification of Academia: Why Adjunct Professors are Living in their Cars

We’ve done a couple (here and here) of shows recently about the war on cars. But we never discussed the connections, both literal and metaphorical, between the damage of “Big Car” and “Big University” . According to the tenured Emory law professor Deepa Das Acevedo, what she calls in her new book, The War on Tenure, is really an attempt to transform the modern university into an academic version of Uber. By getting rid of tenure, Acevedo argues, academia is creating a new precariat of adjunct professors who are living in their cars. What she calls the “uberification” of academia is, so to speak, driving an assault not just on tenure, but on free thought and intellectual innovation. The war on tenure, then, is part of the broader neo-liberal project to replace full-time jobs with precarious labor. Academics - you have nothing to lose but your cars!1. The Charlie Kirk Fallout is a Watershed MomentIn just one month, an estimated 40-60 professors have been fired over social media posts about the assassination - with perhaps 10-15 being tenured faculty. This represents potentially half the number of academic freedom-related terminations that occurred over the entire previous 20-year period (2000-2020).2. Rich Universities Are Leading the Race to the BottomContrary to expectations, it’s not cash-strapped colleges but wealthy universities with substantial endowments that are most aggressively replacing tenure-track positions with contingent adjunct labor - choosing to spend their resources elsewhere while casualizing their core academic workforce.3. Academic Job Markets Are Essentially MonopolisticThe entire state of Georgia has only 5-6 positions for a labor law professor. This extreme scarcity means academics can’t simply “get another job” like workers in other industries - making job security through tenure essential for attracting people to spend 8-10 years training for these positions.4. The “Lazy Professor” Myth is Unsupported by DataResearch shows tenure doesn’t reduce productivity - highly productive scholars remain productive after tenure, while those who did minimum work continue at that level. People become academics for reasons beyond job security, contradicting the stereotype of post-tenure retirement.5. Academic Precarity Has Reached Crisis LevelsAdjunct professors are literally living in cars while teaching classes. When academics lose stable employment, they typically exit the profession entirely rather than finding another academic position, creating a brain drain that threatens the future of higher education and research.Keen On America is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit keenon.substack.com/subscribe