Perhaps because my career is drawing to a close, and I've persisted in an industry while many of my compatriots have long since abandoned their studies or left for the private sector, I am re-examining what has inadvertently become a career. I never intended to be a permanent contract professor, any more than a child expects mortgages or dental work, but the joy of teaching, the students' interests and needs, as well as a life-long academic curiosity kept me in a field which has not always welcomed me or my kind.

In some ways this is a familiar conversation about precarious labour in a university system which led many of my colleagues to niche instructional work with international students, adult learners, or non-governmental organizations. Upon pondering academic privilege, the privation of contract labour, and the myriad ways that venerable institutions work to install, sanction, and capitalize on long-standing class boundaries, however, it occurs to me that I have my own story to tell.

While many academics immediately slam the door on the new arrivals once they have found a seat at the table-unless the supplicant is appropriately deferential or useful-I have always thought of myself as someone who crept in when the door was left ajar. Therefore, I have spent my career prying that door open so that others might follow me. The profound benefits of the university experience are difficult to define, but I am certainly not the same person who first attended the University of New Brunswick in 1984.

This book intends to examine those benefits even while it describes the pitfalls of working inside the two-tiered professorial system. Contract work is increasingly how instruction happens in the North American university, and for a cog in that vast machine, this is how the gears grind against a person's self-esteem, how often grease is applied and to whom, and ultimately what maintenance looks like when wear draws attention to the mechanism.