The Value of Forging Alliances.

The article discusses issues related to the formation of alliances among people involved in higher education in the U.S. Alliances between contingent faculty members and graduate students are not untroubled. Many graduate students fear too close contact with people whom they judge as the failures of academe. In addition, their perches in Ph.D.-granting institutions can give them a narrow perspective on higher education that is at odds with reality and with the perspective of most contingent faculty members, many of whom don't have doctorates. Nevertheless, they have joined with contingent colleagues in the past and can profit from such cooperation in the future. The biennial conferences of the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor were born out of collaboration between the two groups in 1995 and will continue, with a seventh conference planned for this August. Those conferences gave birth to the biennial Campus Equity Week and a large collection of papers and other resources. Librarians, counselors, manual-service workers, and dozens of other types of staff members have been buffeted by technological changes, privatization and outsourcing, reorganizations, and plain old attrition and layoffs.