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The faculty members in our universities are often worried about the amount of time required to learn new computer-based technologies as they face an increasing academic workload in the current financial milieu. Gender becomes a prominent issue in the various discussions related to computer usage. Is there a gender-divide in the wilingness of faculty members to embrace the new instructional technologies (IT) and to integrate them into the pedagogy of teaching? Are there gender differences in the proficiency of faculty members in and their level of knowledge of IT? Do academics confront gender-differentiated barriers to using IT in their work? This study is based on a survey of academics which explores whether gender is a critical variable in understanding their attitudes and actions towards learning and adopting instructional technology.

More than one-third of all Canadian faculty are part-timers who contribute significantly to academic work while consuming only marginally universities' economic resources. Mythical images of their temporariness in the workforce obfuscate the differences of career aspiration and motivation within the group. Two factors render them invisible or hidden academics: one rooted in the economics of the university system and the second in the ideological structures of academic practices and traditions. In the political economy of universities the relentless drive to manage enrolment, finances, and teaching costs has resulted in a bureaucratic rationalization of the academic workload and a bifurcated academic labour force hierarchically split into full- and part-time faculties with radically different work processes and treatment within universities. Part-timers are now a permanent and low-cost academic workforce, producing a surplus value transferable within the university to compensate for what would otherwise be fiscal shortfall. Degradation of certain workprocesses by rationalizing and de-professionalizing certain academic functions legitimized the academic workforce split in relative pay and job characteristics, which reinforces the evident feminization of the part-time faculty.

The financial crisis in the Canadian higher education system has led to marked growth in the use of part-time faculty, whose interests and powers are strongly differentiated from those of the full-time faculty. The reasons for the differential power and divergent interest between the two are to be understood in the context of corporatist responses to the “state in crisis”. Under continuing financial strigency, the university administration negotiates concessions with the collegium of full-time faculty to satisfy their corporate interests and maintain the stability of the system. Part-timers, excluded from the collegium, remain peripheral to these corporatist arrangements, their marginalization being strongly related to ideological structures that originate from and entrench the dominant power and status of the full-time faculty.