U of A lecturers paid far below national average petition for raises

Danny Clifford has a master’s degree and over 10 years of teaching experience at multiple institutions. He has worked as a social worker and is a veteran. And yet the University of Arizona is paying him so little, he said, he has to rent out his spare bedroom on Airbnb just to make ends meet.

Clifford is not alone. There are about 65 lecturers in the writing program alone who teach a combined 6,500 students per year in foundational writing courses. They teach almost every first-year student at the UA and almost all have advanced graduate degrees. They make $44,000 per year.

“We teach so many students, I’m not sure how they would teach those students without us,” said Jamey Rogers, a senior lecturer in the program who also serves as a faculty senator.

Lecturers in the writing program at the UA have gone eight years without a significant raise, they say, and with the cost of living rising, many are now pushing for increased salaries.

Compared to the national average, writing lecturers at the UA are underpaid, according to data released by the American Association of University Professors. The average pay for lecturers is between $63,000 and $70,000 at public universities.

“The money that the university offers us is not equitable, and it’s not satisfactory,” said Clifford. “It needs to be improved, especially when you have so many other higher administration members getting paid these obscene amounts of money.”

In addition to the lower pay, these lecturers also have little to no job security. Most of their contracts are up for renewal every year and they are not eligible for tenure.

The vulnerability of these employees, said Nataly Reed, a writing lecturer at the university, “makes it very easy for institutions to exploit this type of faculty.”

Reed has been working with the United Campus Workers of Arizona union to fight for an increase in baseline salary to $25 per hour. Currently, lecturers make just over $21 an hour. The union presented a petition with more than 1,000 signatures to the Arizona Board of Regents last spring but hasn’t seen any major changes.

“When you look at the salary database, there are 50 people at the University of Arizona who are paid $450,000 or more,” Reed said. “And a lecturer earning $44,000 would have to work nine years to hypothetically earn $450,000 (total over that time). To me, that represents misplaced values and misplaced priorities on the part of the university.”

In a statement to the Arizona Daily Star, Pam Scott, a spokeswoman for the UA, said the university “has made consistent efforts to increase employee pay where possible over the last several years, including salary increase programs, minimum wage increases and pay equity studies. In addition, colleges and departments regularly review market data by discipline to inform pay structure decisions.”

Writing lecturers say they are crucial to the university.

“We play a really strong role in the first semester, first year experiences of (thousands of) students. We’re kind of the welcoming committee,” Reed said. “This is valuable work in terms of student retention, but also in terms of student wellbeing and student success.”

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The lecturers teach foundational writing courses, mainly to first-year students, that help teach them how to write at the university level, said Clifford.

“We lecturers not only teach them how to write, we teach them how to research, we teach them how to argue, we teach them how to write in many different formats that could be and probably aren’t used in their academic journey,” he said. “And when they leave our classroom, they have an even better understanding of how to navigate this university system. They have a better understanding of their own voices and have a better understanding of how to convey their own thoughts and ideas to any kind of audience. And that’s the value of what we really bring to the table.”

In 2015, lecturers at the UA participated in a national walkout for adjunct professors to protest low wages and poor working conditions. That walkout succeeded and led to better pay and treatment.

Those positive changes, said Kristen Little, another writing lecturer, have started to “erode away.”

“I don’t have much hope for a raise,” said Little, who has two master’s degrees and is a UA alum. “But I also think if we get that information, (and a) proposal out there, at least, we got the ball rolling, and hopefully, in a year or two, this financial crisis clears up.”

Some lecturers like Little had been working on a proposal to send to senior administrators at the university to push for raises. They were finalizing the report, she said, when University President Robert C. Robbins announced in November that the UA was in a financial crisis.

In his plan to the regents released earlier this month, Robbins said there will be a hiring and compensation freeze for at least 18 months at the university.

That doesn’t bode well for these writing lecturers in their compensation fight.

“Our arguments are that if teachers can’t (afford) basic needs then it’s difficult to provide sort of the full support to students that we need to,” said Rogers, the Faculty Senate representative for these lecturers.

Even though these lecturers get paid less than the national average, each one could answer immediately when asked why they chose to be at the UA.

“It is a great job, it’s a really exciting place to be helping students navigate this threshold,” Reed said. “The typical student that we imagine is someone coming straight from high school, but we have lots of nontraditional students. There’s always this shift from what they had experienced before, as students and writers, and making the shift to an academic and professional context. And for me, that’s a really great part of my job.”

Clifford echoed his colleague’s sentiments.

“I see many students who are scared, who are new to this whole system of academia, coming from different high school institutions where they have different levels of education, different skills, that they that they gain, and they’re looking to find some sort of shore foundation footing,” he said. “That’s why we call this a foundations writing course. Because they get that foundation from us.”