“It’s been a long year this week,” Amy Higer, president of the Rutgers Adjunct Faculty Union, told members Thursday evening.
Make your contribution now and help Gothamist thrive in 2023.Unions representing Rutgers University’s striking faculty members say they’ve made “incredible gains” as they negotiate raises for part-time faculty workers.
The unions’ core demands include more pay and job security for adjunct faculty members, who get paid considerably less than their full-time peers for each class taught, and who must reapply for their jobs each semester. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the average professor at Rutgers made about $161,000 in 2021. The average assistant professor made about $84,000 and the average associate professor made $106,000. Faculty members classified as lecturers made an average of $65,000 and instructors made $61,000.
Multiple members of the unions’ bargaining committee said they regretted a “straw-poll” vote to accept a proposal for increasing graduate student pay, currently at $30,000 per year. Several said they misunderstood some of the terms proposed and agreed an immediate increase to $33,000 wasn’t enough. The unions have previously stated a goal of increasing graduate student pay to $37,000.
And Carla A. Katz, vice president for non-tenure-track faculty in the AAUP-AFT, also said negotiators had “extraordinary success” securing more job security for those educators. A non-tenure-track faculty member’s fifth appointment to teach would be through a “presumptively renewable” five-year contract — a standard Katz described as “extremely close to tenure.
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