Class ends. Students pack up and head back to their dorms. The professor, meanwhile, goes to her car . . . to catch a little sleep, and then eat a cheeseburger in her lap before driving across the city to a different university to teach another, wholly different class. All for a paycheck that, once prep and grading are factored in, barely reaches minimum wage.   Welcome to the life of the mind in the gig economy. Over the past few decades, the job of college professor has been utterly transformed—for the worse. America’s colleges and universities were designed to serve students and create knowledge through the teaching, research, and stability that come with the longevity of tenured faculty, but higher education today is dominated by adjuncts. In 1975, only thirty percent of faculty held temporary or part-time positions. By 2011, as universities faced both a decrease in public support and ballooning administrative costs, that number topped fifty percent. Now, some surveys suggest that as many as seventy percent of American professors are working course-to-course, with few benefits, little to no security, and extremely low pay.   In The Adjunct Underclass, Herb Childress draws on his own firsthand experience and that of other adjuncts to tell the story of how higher education reached this sorry state. Pinpointing numerous forces within and beyond higher ed that have driven this shift, he shows us the damage wrought by contingency, not only on the adjunct faculty themselves, but also on students, the permanent faculty and administration, and the nation. How can we say that we value higher education when we treat educators like desperate day laborers?   Measured but passionate, rooted in facts but sure to shock, The Adjunct Underclass reveals the conflicting values, strangled resources, and competing goals that have fundamentally changed our idea of what college should be. This book is a call to arms for anyone who believes that strong colleges are vital to society.   “ The Adjunct Underclass belongs to what has, at this point, become a recognizable genre, popularly known as ‘quit lit.’ (That name doesn’t capture the degree to which people feel that they are actually forced out of the profession.) Childress has a way of reinvigorating familiar tropes. He likens the adjunct professoriate to local auto mechanics crushed by national franchises, cab drivers forced to hustle against apps, journalists turned ‘content providers’ trying to stay afloat in hyper-partisan times. He describes adjuncts as ‘shock absorbers’ and compares their situation to the ‘invisibility of garment workers in Bangladesh.’ . . . In the last few pages of Childress’s book, the manifesto melts away, and we’re afforded a momentary glimpse of a deeply moving memoir. . . . Academics often traffic in a tone of clear-eyed detachment, rising above the emotional fray. But there is nothing more universal than the moment when Childress realizes that his was never a problem of drive or focus; the horizon was illusory by design, moving according to someone else’s whims, continually drifting out of reach.” ― New Yorker " The Adjunct Underclass  is a heartbreaking indictment of American higher education. In the book's epilogue, 'Life in Exile,' Mr. Childress reflects on his inability to find a permanent faculty position. . . . [He] keenly regrets his failure, but he shouldn't. Failure has freed him to write truthfully about an injustice few others even see." ― Wall Street Journal "With this book, Childress has written a generous note of condolence to the profession that killed his dream of a tenure-track position. It has killed the same dream for a generation of academics who have left the profession or hang on today in what he calls 'the vast purgatory of contingent life.' He claims that higher education’s ecosystem is being destroyed by a million bad decisions. While many will disagree with him on the genesis of the disaster, by reading his book we engage in the dot-connecting and relationship-repairing that Childress urges us to do so that we may work to restore higher education’s ecosystem and eliminate the adjunct underclass." ― American Association of University Professors “The Adjunct Underclass is a powerful read, an emotional read as Childress peppers his analysis with his own experiences, and concludes the book with a chapter on the ‘aftermath’ in which he makes the personal cost of his desire to engage in work he believed to be meaningful, only to be one of those bulldozed into rotting piles of bodies on the shore.”   ― Inside Higher Ed “This lyric lament for the traditional faculty career that its author, Herb Childress, spent decades trying but failing to attain conveys a raw longing and naked grief that left me stunned.” -- Beryl Lieff Benderly ― Science “Childress describes why colleges and universities turned to a contingent workforce, and the consequences this shift has had. A former adjunct himself, Childres