BY JONATHAN REES We’ve been arguing over salaries at my university. Sometimes we get cost-of-living adjustments, but those almost never keep up with inflation (even during years when inflation is low). There’s a model developed by our Faculty Compensation Committee designed to allocate additional funds on the basis of equity, but what is equity, anyway?…
BY JANE S. GABIN Many have read the Chronicle of Higher Education’s latest survey of public university presidents’ salaries and are appropriately horrified: sixteen presidents make over $1 million a year. This underlines the overall problem with US higher education: too many people are making too much money. Higher education in the United States has…
BY JOSEPH G. RAMSEY Welcome back to school, faculty—and grad student teachers, too! Wondering how much your teaching labor is subsidizing the rest of your university (in other words: your basic rate of exploitation)? Try this fun back-to-school activity! Locate your school’s per course student tuition rate. (At my public university, in-state tuition per 3…
BY THE COLORADO AAUP CONFERENCE A rumored 25 percent pay raise sounds fantastic until people learn administrators want to phase it in over five years, that a cost-of-living increase will not accompany it, and that the average base pay is only $2,500 per class. To showcase how the “raise” would shake out for impoverished adjuncts…
BY CAPRICE LAWLESS Note: The Colorado Conference published this press release yesterday. It is another example of how activists can be their own journalists. Research your organization and the larger context for the decision-making destroying the profession. Crunch the numbers and provide memorable images of what those numbers mean. Set the record straight with facts…
BY HANNAH JOHNSTON, M. SIX SILBERMAN, AND JAMIE WOODCOCK Dana Barr put the kids to bed, opened the computer, and logged in to Amazon Mechanical Turk to look for work. After about a minute, Dana saw a task from Albaventura University Cogsci. “Ten minute survey about political beliefs, $1.00.” Six dollars an hour—not the best…
BY THE AAUP RESEARCH DEPARTMENT This is the second in a series of three blog posts on findings from the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. You can read the first post here. The steady rise of contingent faculty appointments and the growth of administration in higher education present a significant…
BY THE AAUP RESEARCH DEPARTMENT This is the first in a series of three blog posts on findings from the AAUP’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession. New data from an AAUP survey detail the profound impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on faculty salaries and fringe benefits for both tenure-line and non-tenure-track…
BY GLENN COLBY The results of the AAUP’s 2020–21 Faculty Compensation Survey, released today, show that real wages for full-time faculty decreased for the first time since the Great Recession, and average wage growth for all ranks of full-time faculty was the lowest since the AAUP began tracking annual wage growth in 1972. After adjusting…
BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND AAUP EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE Dear Colleagues, Are you troubled by the direction that the University of Maryland has headed in recent years? We are. In March 2021, we relaunched the University of Maryland Chapter of the American Association of University Professors (UMD AAUP) because we believe a different university is possible.…