Angelina Dohre/Photo Editor
ANGELINA DOHRE
Photo Editor
This past Thursday and Monday, Fredonia’s Chapter of United University Professions (UUP) held its biennial event for Campus Equity Week. This year’s campaign was mask-making events, titled “mAsk4CampusEquity.”
Since 2015, Fredonia has been involved with Campus Equity Week.
According to an email from UUP’s Fredonia Chapter Vice President for Academics Bruce Simon, Campus Equity Week “seeks to promote awareness of the harmful consequences of the precarious situation of faculty in higher education, to organize for action and to build solidarity among stakeholders.”
Simon said these mask-making events were mostly made to promote awareness.
“It’s promoting the basic idea that our teaching conditions are your learning conditions, which is the core of all the Campus Equity Week events,” he said.
“We want students to know that some of their teachers may not be getting health insurance, and this is more of a national problem, but some may not have offices, telephones or computers.”
UUP Fredonia Chapter’s officer for contingents, Anne Fearman, said adjuncts have a part-time contract that is renewed each semester but a lot of them take on a full-time load and still aren’t paid enough.
“I make $2,000 above poverty and I teach full-time so it’s hard to get another job,” she said. “There are only 40 professors on this campus that are tenure.”
According to their website, the UUP is a union which represents the faculty and professional staff at the state-operated campuses of the State University of New York. They are the largest higher education union in the United States with over 30,000 members.
UUP is affiliated with the New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), the National Education Association (NEA) and the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO).
According to Fearman, the Fredonia chapter received a grant from AFT which ended up funding their “mAsk4CampusEquity” events.
Fearman has been an adjunct lecturer at Fredonia since she was a graduate student in 2002. She said she feels like she has been treated unfairly before.
“I’ve been here for 14 years but I could easily not have a job next semester,” she said. “There is no protection whatsoever and really the union offers the only bit of protection.”
According to Fearman, at the end of the day this issue ultimately hurts the students and their families.
“If I were taking my daughter to a college and I saw that the majority of the classes were taught by people who didn’t have any real title I would think ‘Why am I paying so much?,’” she said. ‘“Why do I have to wait until I get to my junior year before I’m taught in my department by somebody who actually has tenure?”’
A new resource added to UUP’s Campus Equity Week Toolkit displays basic information about the extent of contingent employment in SUNY. It states more than 40 percent of UUP members are contingent employees, meaning they have no path to permanency.
Other statistics include that more than half of part-time, temporary professionals earn less than $17,000 a year and one in three part-time academics earns less than $200 per week.
When asked why things haven’t really progressed with this issue, Simon said he has no idea.
“I don’t understand it,” he said. “I started being aware of this issue back in the ‘90s, back when I was in graduate school and was involved in the general workplace and so many universities, even ones with multi-billion dollar endowments are still cheating their students, essentially, and cheating their faculty.”