Faculty leaders are asking the University of Arizona to reverse the decision not to renew the contracts of 10 writing program faculty members.
UA announced May 19 the contracts would not be renewed, citing lower student enrollment numbers for the coming fall semester.
In response, UA Faculty Senate leaders sent an email to UA President Suresh Garimella, new Provost Patricia Prelock and Dean Lori Poloni-Staudinger of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, citing “distress” and asking them to reverse the decisions.
“This distress is first and foremost for the plight of our colleagues, who are treated as dispensable, even after we made good progress this year in achieving consensus on their underappreciated value to the entire institution,” wrote Faculty Senate Leaders Leila Hudson, Katie Zeiders and Mona Hymel in an email Wednesday.
“But it is also distress for the foregone opportunity to restructure our Gen Ed writing classes, budgetary priorities, and — ultimately — the student experience to directly improve student success, retention, and graduation rates,” said the email.
Writing program faculty members Logan Phillips and Jonathan LaGuardia, who were both told May 19 that their year-to-year UA contracts will not be renewed, said the reason they were given was that the program had 2,000 fewer students enrolled this fall semester.
The writing program now has about 40 full-time faculty.
UA spokesperson Mitch Zak said the instructional staffing levels in the writing program are adjusted each year based on “projected student enrollment and course demand” and that some contracts haven’t been renewed as part of that process this year.
“We recognize the impact this has on the individuals affected and remain committed to supporting our faculty and advancing student success,” he said.
The view from the Social Sciences Building on the University of Arizona campus.
The decision to not renew the contracts of the 10 faculty members — all of whom are full-time, career-track or contingent faculty — comes weeks after the UA administration announced its university budget for fiscal year 2026. The overall FY26 budget shows a 3% cut from all units, out of which the colleges will be taking a cut of 2.2%.
Hudson, Zeiders and Hymel called the decision to let the contracts expire a result of “budgetary rigidity, inexperience, and time pressure along with uncoordinated and decentralized decision-making, more than the long-predicted decline in enrollment.” “An action like this, coming on the first business day after commencement and as a new provost disembarks in Tucson, really hurts people and trust, but provides an opportunity to build back better if addressed urgently,” they said.
The United Campus Workers Arizona, the state’s campus labor union, also put out a public statement Wednesday calling for the contracts to be renewed. The statement said the 2024-2025 academic year proved “profitable” for the UA with a record number of 9,300 first-year students, the largest starting class so far.
Zeiders, secretary of the faculty, said the combined salaries of 10 professors equals that of one UA vice president, in a written statement to the Arizona Daily Star. Zeiders also said UA’s shared governance leaders recently addressed what she called the writing faculty’s “exploitative working conditions” and that their salaries were increased this year as a consequence of that.
Phillips, who has been with the writing program since 2018, said career-track writing lecturers usually teach a 4/4 course load — four courses each in the spring and fall semesters — and they demonstrated to administrators at the beginning of this year that they should be paid more. He said administrators instead changed their course load from 4/4 to 4/5 and raised the base salary. More work and more money was “not a raise,” Phillips said.
“This creates a culture of silence in which we are scared to advocate for ourselves, lest we face this exact outcome,” Phillips said.
LaGuardia, who has been with the writing program since 2008, said enrollment estimates are always low at this time of the year as students are still in the process of choosing colleges and registering for classes and that enrollment numbers come up again around July.
He said the UA program had a practice of laying off career-track lecturers each year, cancelling their health insurance for the summer, and asking them to return in the fall as adjuncts with a lower wage and no health benefits.
Jamey Rogers, a writing program principal lecturer, said writing lecturers have been promised a $12,000 raise starting in the fall, but that their teaching load has been increased to a 4/5, which means they will have 125 students one semester (five classes), and 100 (four classes) the other semester. He said they hadn’t had a meaningful raise since 2018 and the base pay remains at $46,000.
After his contract expired, Phillips said he found out the health insurance for himself and his child would be cut off within six days.
LaGuardia, whose health insurance was also expiring on Sunday, said he was panicking. “I take medications that would be disastrous to stop,” he said.
“It’s a strange temptation to be both in shock and deeply unsurprised. Because this is the continuation of trends that we’ve seen in the writing program at the University of Arizona, in which lecturers are continually asked to do more for less,” Phillips said. “And more than anything, I’m just angry for peers for whom this was their primary career.”
Zeiders said the solution involves retaining writing lecturers and reducing class sizes. Students would gain stronger foundational writing skills through smaller classes and more individualized instruction, she said.
