Precarious academic employment in Colombia: Lived experiences and challenges for higher education policy

Abstract

This article examines the lived experiences and meanings constructed by university professors experiencing employment precarity and their implications for academic governance and higher education policy in Colombia. The study draws on scholarship on the neoliberalization of higher education, academic capitalism, and critical organization theory, alongside recent literature on precarious academic employment. Adopting a hermeneutic phenomenological approach inspired by van Manen, it explores the ways in which contracting, evaluation, and accountability policies are experienced and interpreted within professors’ everyday academic lives. Over a three-year period, in-depth conversational interviews, embodied observation, and written lived-experience accounts were conducted with university professors from diverse professional and academic trajectories. Interpretive analysis revealed three central themes: the ambivalence between vocation and exhaustion, the fragmentation of professional identity, and the lived experience of persistent structural uncertainty. The findings show that employment precarity undermines material working conditions, emotional well-being, and the meaningfulness of academic work. The study offers critical insights that contribute to the international debate on higher education policy, faculty well-being, and institutional transformation in neoliberal contexts.