Pope Francis has described pay too low to allow workers to better themselves as “wage slavery.”
This has been a special concern on THE Ave.US because the branch campuses in Tacoma and Bothell were created not as full fledged centers of academic excellence but as low priced alternatives to the UW, offering the logo, the Husky teams, and UW logos without the cost of building a faculty like the one at any major research university.
This topic has come up on THE Ave before. Taken to its extreme, Washington State now has “Western Governors University” .. a university with no faculty. at the UW AAUP listserv, ELIZABETH ‘LIBI’ SUNDERMANN an nontenure lecturer at the UW’s Tacoma Campus posts:
I just read about this eforum on the Committee of Education and the Workforce today in The Chronicle of Higher Education <https://chroniclevitae.com/news/207-q-a-the-congressman- who-wants-to-make-adjunct- labor-an-issue?cid=at&utm_ source=at&utm_medium=en>and followed the link to the eforum where Senator Miller of California (D) is collecting stories about contingent faculty as a way to gather information about the issue he has only recently come to really understand. Link here http://democrats.edworkforce.house.gov/eforum for this:
“Even while college tuition has soared, reports point to the growing use of low-paid contingent faculty and instructors in higher education. The House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats are interested in learning more about the working conditions of the over one million contingent faculty and instructors at U.S. institutions of higher education, including part-time adjunct professors and graduate teaching assistants, and how those working conditions may impact students’ education.
We are seeking comments from contingent faculty and instructors and their representatives”
ELIZABETH ‘LIBI’ SUNDERMANN, PhD Lecturer | History & Global Studies Interdisciplinary Arts & Sciences