MARCH FOR EQUALITY
12:15PM
Tuesday, December 6
Meet at Riverside Parking Garage on North Campus
UML Adjunct Faculty deserve equal pay and benefits as Adjunct Faculty at Boston and Amherst.
Student tuition is almost equal. Why aren’t faculty treated equally?
STUDENTS and FACULTY – March with us to deliver over 3,000 signatures to Chancellor Maloney demanding equality!
WHEN PEOPLE OUTSIDE academia think about life inside it, we often imagine tweedy tenured professors who are blithely innocent of all earthly concerns. Yet more than 40 percent of the teachers at US colleges and universities are adjuncts — part-time faculty members who are paid by the course. Like TaskRabbits and Uber drivers, these instructors are in the vanguard of an unpredictable freelance economy.
Adjuncts on more and more campuses are responding in an old-fashioned way: by turning to a labor movement that, despite its flaws, is their best option for handling specific types of grievances.
Amid a national freak-out over the cost of college, marginally employed professors aren’t obvious objects of sympathy. Yet the surge in union activism among adjuncts reveals cracks in the American higher-ed model that universities would just as soon paper over.
via Adjunct professors unionize, revealing deeper malaise in higher ed – The Boston Globe.
So True!!
Posted by UMass Lowell Union of Adjunct Faculty (UAF/UAW) on Tuesday, September 15, 2015
It's worth reading the entire essay, but here is a teaser.
It used to be the case that non-tenure-track faculty were assumed to be inferior to their tenure-line colleagues. These days, however, jobs have become so scarce in many fields that one’s position in the academic hierarchy is largely an accident of birth. One could probably instantly create a new university that would rival the world’s best simply by hiring from the pool of the un- and under-employed.
Even if academe were a magically pure meritocracy, there would be no reason to treat some of its members as second-class academic citizens. But perhaps the randomness makes an especially strong case for the general rule that contingent faculty should be treated as members of the academic communities of which they are indeed a part. There are three things that need to be done — two easy, one hard: welcome contingent faculty when they arrive, support them while they are there, and thank them when they leave.
Essay on how tenure-track faculty members should treat adjuncts @insidehighered.
