Learning, Labor, and the Demands of Developmental Appropriateness in advance

Conditions of labor in higher education for non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty are hostile. Many recognize this fact, which serves as the basis for the push for unionizing NTT faculty. This essay furthers that project. I draw attention to the fact that one’s expertise sets normative boundaries on the conditions that they may be legitimately invited to labor under. I try to capture this thought in terms of developmental appropriateness (DA), a principle that typically guides course design. I extend it to show that the conditions of labor in higher education, and professional philosophy in particular, are unjustly hostile not only due to poverty wages, a lack of resources, and precarity, but also due to the fact that the expertise of NTT faculty is decoupled from the value of their teaching. I argue that this violates their autonomy and that unionization is required to prevent that violation and reclaim the value of their expertise.