Results due from University of Chicago non-tenured faculty vote on union

[December 09, 2015]  By Mary Wisniewski
 
 CHICAGO (Reuters) - Part-time and full-time faculty who are not tenured or on the tenure track at the highly ranked University of Chicago will find out on Wednesday whether they have a union.

Mail-in ballots will be counted sometime before noon, and faculty organizers predict non-tenure-track instructors will agree to unionize.

So-called contingent faculty members have organized at Georgetown, Tufts and Boston universities in response to what supporters say is the growing use of lower-paid non-tenured or non-tenure-track instructors at colleges and universities.

If approved, 173 instructors will be in the University of Chicago contingent faculty bargaining unit with the Service Employees International Union. Organizers have said they want to be able to negotiate with the school over employment conditions, including salary, benefits and job security.

"It's not fair to the students who are paying huge amounts of money to attend college to be taught by people who are paid so little," said Dan Raeburn, 47, a lecturer in the creative writing department for 10 years.

Raeburn makes $50,000 a year, about $11,000 less than the average Illinois public school teacher, according to the National Education Association. But Raeburn said he was lucky compared with colleagues who make $25,000 a year - half the cost of the school's annual tuition - and do not get benefits.

Raeburn said many part- and full-time non-tenure faculty worked more than one job to make ends meet.

"If you're good enough to teach here, you're good enough to be employed here," said Raeburn.

Part-time humanities lecturer Andrew Yale said 41 percent of classes at the University of Chicago were taught by faculty not on the tenure track. The school is ranked fourth in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Nationally, about 76 percent of all university instructors are contingent, according to the Washington-based American Association of University Professors. That is up from 55 percent in 1975, said Yale.

"We're trying to secure some basic safeguards against the administration being able to do whatever they want, whenever they want," said Jason Grunebaum, a senior lecturer in Hindi. "Ultimately the students will benefit immensely."

University officials were not immediately available for comment.

(Reporting by Mary Wisniewski; Editing by Peter Cooney)

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