Adjunct faculty awareness event held by integrated (both tenure track and adjunct faculty) local at Raritan Valley Community College in North Branch, NJ.
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Rutgers Union Protest at Old Queens Calls for Fair Contracts
Administration Refuses to Budge as Pressure from the Community Mounts in Support of Faculty and Staff
By David Bedford
NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—On February 24, close to 100 members of the Rutgers community protested at Old Queens, the university’s oldest building and home to its administration, for fair faculty and staff contracts from the administration.
The crowd consisted of professors, part-time lecturers, graduate students, undergraduate students, teaching assistants (TA’s), adjunct professors, and alumni.
Formed a large circle around the entrance to Old Queens, they blocked traffic around the building as they spoke in favor of better contracts.
The protest was organized by the Reclaiming Rutgers campaign, a collective effort of several unions on campus, particularly the AFT-AAUP and the URA, to address their grievances with the negotiations over faculty and staff contracts.
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AAUP-AFT faculty union rallies for fairer work contracts at Old Queens
By Natasha Tripathi
Faculty, staff and students protested yesterday afternoon at Old Queens to demonstrate resistance against the University administrative board sticking to the “subject to” clause, not considering salary raises for some time and proved solidarity in the University community.
People congregated at the corner of College Avenue and Hamilton Street before marching up and into the doors of Old Queens to protest while bargaining over faculty contracts goes on behind building doors.
“The bargaining is going on, and we’re going to head in in a minute,” Sherry Wolf, lead organizer for the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers, said. “Dick Edwards will be on one side, and our bargaining team is on the other.”
Joe Richard, an organizer for the American Association of University Professors, American Federation of Teachers, a faculty union, said the AAUP-AFT was staging a protest outside of Old Queens in support of the union’s bargaining team trying to eradicate the “subject to” clause in union contracts.
The “subject to” clause enables management to impose salary freezes based on contingencies or special conditions, Richard said.
“We want to disrupt business as usual, and make it as difficult as possible for the administration to continue running Rutgers in the way that they do,” Richard said.
Lucye Millerand, president of the Union of Rutgers Administration, American Federation of Teachers, a staff union, said faculty and staff have gathered because Rutgers has a lot of money for fair contracts for its employees who work hard, serve students and conduct research.
“Rutgers has the money for fair contracts with fair wages … Barchi’s contract is not subject to anything, like the state budget,” she said.
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Adjuncts Advocate for Better Pay and Recognition
By Laura French
A group seeking to bring awareness to the issues faced by adjunct professors demonstrated in the Student Center yesterday during common hour, holding up signs in protest and handing out flyers to passersby. The group, which included full-time professors, adjunct professors and members of the Ramapo Federation of State College Teachers, a local branch of the American Federation of Teachers, honored National Adjunct Awareness Day by drawing attention to what they see as unacceptably low pay, a lack of benefits, job security and a lack of recognition and respect in the academic community.
“All across the country, adjunct faculty increasingly teach a larger and larger percentage of courses and in general they are significantly underpaid when compared to full-time faculty,” said Martha Ecker, one of the demonstrators, a full-time sociology professor and the president of the local AFT. “We want to make people aware of this, the fact that they get no benefits, the fact that in order to really create a salary that, I mean, any individual can live on, oftentimes adjunct faculty have to cobble together a number of different jobs.”
National Adjunct Awareness Day is an alternative name for National Adjunct Walkout Day, which is not an annual, government-recognized event, but rather an independently organized movement. The movement, which was first proposed in October by an adjunct at San Jose State University, gained massive support from academics across the United States after being picked up by different teacher’s organizations and unions, including several branches of the American Association of University Professors and the AFT.
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Most Rutgers faculty earn less than $50G
By Sergio Bichao
The highest paid employee at Rutgers University is not the institution’s president or even the head football coach.
That distinction belongs to Robert Heary, a surgeon at the university’s teaching hospital in Newark, who earned $3.14 million — a majority of which comes from practicing medicine, not tuition or state money.
In fact, all but seven of the 69 employees who earned more than $500,000 last year are faculty members or administrators at the university’s medical schools. Three of the 17 Rutgers employees who got million-dollar paychecks are athletic coaches. University President Robert Barchi got $650,000.
The July 2013 state higher education restructuring, which led to the breakup of University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and the merger of Rutgers with Robert Wood Johnson Medical School in Piscataway and New Brunswick and the New Jersey Medical School in Newark, created a bigger, more expensive bureaucracy with a payroll last year of $1.58 billion. The payroll was $876 million in 2012.
But the real story of Rutgers’ massive payroll may not be at the top, but at the bottom. Half of the 24,829 workers collecting paychecks from Rutgers earned less than $50,000 last year, according to a review of salary data by MyCentralJersey.com.
Many of the lowest-paid workers at Rutgers are the faculty members teaching the state university’s 65,500 students. The median gross salary last year of the more than 2,400 part-time lecturers at Rutgers was $8,727, according to the data review.
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The faculty union, the Rutgers Council of the American Association of University Professors and American Federation of Teachers (AUUP-AFT), and the university are set to negotiate terms for a new adjunct contract.
“Most students and families have no idea that the immense majority of classes are taught by academic instructors off the tenure track,” said Joe Richard, a project organizer for Rutgers AAUP-AFT. Some of these PTLs teach four classes a semester and have no chance at tenure and don’t have the resources for research and professional development. Imagine every three months having to apply for your job. It’s outrageous.”
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Districts Get Official Word: State Aid Payments Frozen for Most Schools Next Year
Some are glad that funds won’t be cut despite fiscal woes; others note than once again Christie isn’t complying with full-funding law
By John Mooney
New Jersey public schools were told officially yesterday what they had already learned Tuesday during Gov. Chris Christie’s budget address: state aid next year will basically amount to nothing more than they received this year.
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Others decried Christie’s continued underfunding of the state’s School Funding Reform Act, which has been fully funded just once since its passage in 2008.
On the day of Christie’s speech, the Education Law Center released an analysis showing that funding gap between what wealthy and poor districts were entitled to under the funding formula had doubled in size during Christie’s tenure.
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N.J. schools split $5.2M in new school aid under proposed budget
By Samantha Marcus, NJ Advance Media for NJ.com
TRENTON — New Jersey’s roughly 600 school districts would share just $5.2 million in new school aid dollars next year under Gov. Chris Christie’s proposed state budget, with the vast majority getting no increase at all, according to state aid figures released today. No school districts are slated to lose funding.
That means many schools will be squeezed for cash because costs are going up and they are banned by state law from raising their budgets more than 2 percent, said Frank Belluscio, spokesman for the New Jersey School Boards Association.
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The proposed budget revives Christie’s plan for a school voucher system, allocating $2 million to finance a pilot program. Democrats have blocked Christie on this front in prior years.
“Hopefully the Legislature will see that this $2 million will provide children in struggling districts some real educational opportunities they don’t have now,” Hespe said.
The Education Law Center panned the proposal.
“Diverting scarce public funds to private and religious schools has been consistently rejected by the Legislature as wrong for our state and children,” David Sciarra, the executive director said. “We’re confident the governor’s latest gambit is dead on arrival.”
Christie proposed cutting charter school aid by $2 million, nonpublic school aid by $3.6 million and school building aid by $4.2 million. Fewer nonpublic schools are converting to charter schools, Hespe said.
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Kean University Adjunct Faculty Federation adjunct awareness activities
“We had sea of red worn all over the campus during our work in today, even students wearing red wore it with pride,” said KUAFF Local President Dr. Kate Henderson. “Even a few of our full time faculty also wore red to show support for the adjuncts.” The local distributed coupons for coffee and lottery tickets to those wearing red. “Our presence was definitely noticed by the entire campus, especially the administration.”
Montclair State University Adjunct Union: It was a great day for organizing adjuncts
Montclair State University Adjunct Union: It was a great day for organizing among adjuncts
Rutgers AAUP-AFT on campus for PTL (Adjunct) awareness
Rutgers Prof. David Hughes
Rutgers faculty on adjunct (Part Time Lecturer) awareness day
Rutgers AAUP-AFT members on campus
