The faculty of the University of Illinois at Chicago went on strike this week for the first time in the school’s history, calling for pay raises with cost-of-living adjustments, promotion opportunities for high-performing faculty, and more meaningful involvement in the governance of the school.
As UIC English professors Lennard Davis and Walter Benn Michaels explain:
Tags: faculty, strike, UIC, unions“[T]he UIC faculty and the UIC administration are completely united on the fact that we don’t think that the way to solve these problems is by getting “stronger” (which is to say, richer) students. In fact, when we put together a “Strategic Thinking Report” back in 2005, we explicitly said we’re not looking to recruit “better” students; we want to do a better job of educating the students we have.
The UIC faculty is committed to that mission. And the whole point of the strike is to help us fulfill it.
Start with the retention problem. The biggest falling off is between the first and second years of college, so our administration is (rightly) concerned with the first year experience. What courses do first year students take? Who teaches those courses?
Every entering UIC student takes at least one writing course; most take two. Not surprisingly, our writing courses are overwhelmingly taught by lecturers (i.e. non-tenure track faculty), on year-to-year contracts and paid a standard salary of $30,000. Furthermore, although the administration carries on endlessly about the importance of merit, they’re unwilling to mandate a promotion track for non-tenure track faculty, the whole point of which would be to reward merit.
So what exactly does it mean to insist on the importance of the first year experience and then pay the people most responsible for that experience a wage that virtually requires them to work a second job? What does it mean to claim you want to reward the best and the hardest working when you not only won’t promote them, but you won’t even provide a position they could in theory be promoted to? You’re short-changing both the faculty and the students.”