MESA is an excellent venue for a presentation on the movement for adjunct and contingent equity because of 1) the salience of the marker "Middle East" and 2) MESA's disciplinary diversity. In regard to the first, MESA's members should be natural antagonists of a duplicitous political and managerial rhetoric that promotes the value of higher education as a general public good--and never more so than in regard to "critical" topics--and at the same time minimizes or flatly denies evidence of a forty year trend toward the disempowerment of higher faculty, largely through the technique of "adjunctification." In this presentation I will explore the dimensions and power of this trend, and hope--this in line with the second point--that awareness of it is carried back into departments and programs in which MESA members can be crucial actors in a growing movement, on multiple fronts, to reverse the damage--to faculty and students as well--that has been done by inequitable labor practices in our profession