U of A contingent faculty blast 'exploitative' conditions, pay

Hundreds of contingent faculty at the University of Arizona are experiencing the same core issue:

The university is admitting more students but not hiring more faculty, according to the Faculty Senate, though the university is disputing the claims.

Career-track professors who aren’t tenured or tenure-track, and are usually on one-year renewable contracts, say they are forced to take on more work for the same meager pay.

Among them is Nataliya Apanovich, a lecturer in sustainable built environments. Her college, the School of Architecture, Planning, and Landscape Architecture, has grown over the last three years. The growth has been slow and steady, unlike other programs at the university that have sprouted up quickly.

But that’s what appealed to Apanovich. She wanted to come to the program because it was building up and recruiting researchers at a comfortable pace.

That’s what she was told, at least. Now she’s three years in, and while the school is growing, the opportunities are not. Her classes are getting bigger, she’s teaching more and yet she says she hasn’t had any time for research, class development, or, really, much of anything.

“My boss told me I’m free to look for another job,” Apanovich told the Arizona Daily Star after she unsuccessfully asked for a raise to account for inflation and the increasing number of students she teaches. “At the same time, she told me ‘I cannot afford to lose you,’ because we each teach like a bazillion students. So, if one person quits, the whole program is screwed.”

Apanovich is conflicted, she says, because “everyone is already overloaded; you cannot redistribute the load and put it on other people.”

This semester, the researcher and lecturer is teaching over 100 students and more credit hours than she taught last year, but for the same pay. Apanovich, who has multiple advanced graduate degrees, makes just over $60,000. While she was granted a teaching assistant, the university didn’t give her a grading assistant, which she did have last year.

Administrators told her it was because of the UA’s overall $177 million deficit, revealed last November, which has been reduced to a projected $63 million by the end of this year.

“I have more credit hours to teach more students and less help,” Apanovich said. “It’s complete exploitation. I’m losing my mind.”

According to a Faculty Senate presentation by Katie Zeiders, a professor in the College of Agriculture, Life and Environmental Sciences and the secretary of the senate, the percentage of students at the university has increased while the percentage of faculty has decreased in the last two years.

She says there were 110 fewer faculty in fiscal year 2024 (last year) compared to the year before. That’s a 3.2% decrease.

At the same time, according to her presentation, the student body grew by 1,780 students, or a 3.4% increase.

In a statement to the Star, UA spokesperson Mitch Zak rejected the claims made in the Faculty Senate meeting.

“The Faculty Senate presentation includes information that is inconsistent with university data,” he wrote. “It suggests a decrease in the number of faculty however the 2023-24 university report indicates an increase of 3.55%.”

Zeiders, in her own statement to the Star, stood by her data, stating it was obtained from “official UA sources” she declined to name to protect her relationships.

“I submitted a request for faculty numbers and enrollment and received data from UA administrators,” she wrote.

Since 2020, there’s been a 5% increase in faculty, but a 17% increase in the student body population, Zeiders said.

Compared to the UA’s “peer schools,” as determined by the Arizona Board of Regents, the university has a much higher student-to-faculty ratio than most, according to information publicly provided by the university in its own common data set.

The average for the UA’s peer institutions, such as the University of Maryland and Ohio State University, is 13 students to one faculty member. At the UA, it’s nearly 19, according to the publicly available data.

That doesn’t just impact faculty workload. It also impacts the student experience, professors told the Star.

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“I would never send my kid here, because they’re not getting what they’re paying for,” Apanovich asserted.

Zak disputed that claim. “The 2023 U of A graduating senior survey shows that 90% rate their overall experience as good or excellent,” he wrote.

Other contingent faculty echoed Apanovich’s points.

“The workload is so strenuous the more students we are given or the more classes we are asked to teach,” said Danny Clifford, a senior lecturer and assistant director in the writing program. “That’s less quality of engagement that you have with the students.”

Usually, Clifford teaches about 75 students per semester. Now, he says, he’s teaching upwards of 100. While that doesn’t seem like a big jump, it typically takes him between 30 minutes and an hour to grade one essay, since he is expected to give feedback to all students. He assigns multiple essays to his students per semester, so the amount of time he spends grading adds up.

And that doesn’t account for the number of hours he spends teaching and meeting with students or grading other, smaller assignments and quizzes.

“The more students that you have, the less one-on-one time you can give them,” he said. “You can’t meet with them as often one-on-one to help them in their writing. And writing is a definitely a hands-on educational experience.”

Clifford, a UA alum himself, has been working at the university since 2018. He noted that he was nervous about speaking out about the issues, since the university can fire lecturers at any time.

“We have such low morale in this department,” he said. The writing program, which Clifford is a faculty member in, is a larger part of the English department.

Clifford noted that, despite teaching more, many of his colleagues haven’t received raises for the rising cost of living. Occasionally, he said, “random” people seem to be selected for small raises, though there’s nothing uniform.

The typical starting salary for lecturers at the UA is $46,600, Clifford said. At Arizona State University and Northern Arizona University, for similar positions, according to Clifford, lecturers usually make a starting salary of $60,000.

UA spokesperson Zak declined to answer questions relating to the pay of UA lecturers.

Clifford said, “People have to take second jobs and take and find different ways to bring in second incomes in order to meet the cost of living in Tucson.” He rents out an extra room in his house on Airbnb to help make ends meet. Clifford, who has multiple graduate degrees, makes just over $50,000.

“I think it’s important that families know that their students’ learning is being directly impacted because of low morale from the teachers, from overwork and from underpaying these teachers,” he said. “You cannot have a teacher that’s coming in giving their best, even though we want to, if we’re worried about how we’re going to pay our bills, if we’re worried that we are undervalued by this institution.”

Joel Smith, a lecturer at the UA for over 10 years, says the issue of contingent faculty workload has been like a “frog slowly boiling in the pot for the last five or 10 years.”

Smith, who started as a lecturer in the writing program and now works on the first-year seminar program, said he teaches about 8% more students than he used to.

“It’s a diluted experience in terms of student interaction with peers and their instructors,” he said. “It’s really been a death by 1,000 cuts kind of thing.”

Contingent faculty often teach discussion-based classes and get to know their students on a more personal level. That has led to an increase in retention, Smith says.

“When we disinvest in these small classes, at what point does the university just become a degree mill?” he questioned. “There are these huge capital investments and buildings, but we’re just not investing in our human capital.”

Smith, who has now seen the university through multiple new presidents and has taught thousands of students, often seemed to struggle expressing his level of disappointment.

“People are just withering,” he said, shaking his head.