An Analysis of Academic Hiring Research and Practice and a Lens for the Future: How Labor Justice Can Make a Better Academy

Colleges and universities are formidable knowledge-producing spaces in society. At the heart of these knowledge producing spaces are academics who carry out teaching, research, and service amid other education activities. Accordingly, academic hiring, which includes hiring into any instructional and/or research position in a college or university, is a significant opportunity to shape the kinds of knowledge(s) that are generated, taught, and shared with society. Hiring- related research has recently boomed, making it an opportune time to assess what has been learned and how it has been learned. Thus, the purpose of this chapter is threefold. First, we review hiring literature published between 2000 and 2023 to describe how academic hiring unfolds across diverse appointment types. Second, we use frame theory to analyze how academic hiring has been conceptualized, studied, and practiced. Third, we introduce a novel conceptual lens, which we describe as labor justice, to illuminate how hiring research and practice might be conducted in ways that remediate historical legacies of exclusion while highlighting how the collective fates and interests of all academic workers, from postdoctoral scholars to tenure-track professors are intertwined. This chapter will be of interest to scholars who study academic hiring, academic labor, labor organizers working within higher education, and academic administrators.