From The Gig Academy, by Adrianna Kezar, Tom DePaola, and Daniel T. Scott:
Universities’ need for highly trained workers means that they must produce their own cheap workforce. For years, they have simultaneously expanded the number of doctoral degrees granted while constricting the number of stable academic jobs, creating a system in which low wages and precariousness are standard terms of employment…
Or, to put that another way:
Contingency pervades college work in ways that has [sic] universalized certain experiences of devaluation and vulnerability. This state of affairs ought not be perceived as normal, natural, or inevitable but as the product of institutional choice. (19-20)