The age of precarity and the new challenges to the academic profession

Neoliberalism has had destructive effects on the academic profession. While fulltime academic employment has always been a privilege for a few, the academic precariat has risen as a reserve army of workers with ever shorter, lower paid, hyper-flexible contracts and ever more temporally fragmented and geographically displaced hyper-mobile lives. Under the pressure to ‘publish or perish’ a growing stratification between research and teaching has emerged. It has made academic work more susceptible to market pressures, and less – to public accountability. Focusing on a recent call for ‘casual researchers’ issued by Oxford University the paper indicates how the growing competition for scarcer resources has made academics finally aware of the inequalities engendered by neoliberal capitalism, but still incapable to mobilize.