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Cadence: What do we want? Audience: Justice! Cadence: What do we want? Audience: Contracts!
Cadence: What do we want? Audience: Contracts! I'm Ann Gordon. I retired from Rutgers as
a non-tenure track faculty member last year, and we are... I'm chairing a negotiating team
with the faculty union to try to improve the working conditions for non-tenure track faculty
members. Now, that's a really vague category, "non-tenure track faculty." We... It made
up about half of people who work in research -- they work in labs. In all the fields in
which Rutgers is noted for research, there are going to be non-tenture track faculty
members working. That's what I was doing. I was research. And then, about the other
half are in the classrooms, in every subject. They're teaching Intro to Psych, they're teaching
freshman English, the whole gamut of undergraduate courses. And the working conditions at Rutgers...
Rutgers is slow to realize they have to figure out new and specialized procedures for this
group of faculty. We're never elegible for tenure. So, all of the rules that are developed
-- that sort of protect the faculty members who are on the tenure track -- don't apply
to us. So, how long are our contracts? When, if we are eligible for promotion, when might
that be? We have people who have been on the bottom-most rank for 18 years at Rutgers.
We also figured out while we... Yeah, 18 years in the bottom rank, and some of them are very,
very good teachers... and we figured out, also, while we were getting ready for the
negotiations, that the pay is also... We knew the pay wasn't good. What we didn't know was
that the bottom pay for the non-tenure track faculty is lower than anybody else in higher
education is paid in the State of New Jersey.
I'm Dr. Joy-Lynne Barrett Carnes. I'm one of the fellows for geriatric, under family medicine.
I did my residency at Robert Wood Johnson, and now I'm doing my fellowship.
And she's also a delegate -- an elected delegate -- for the Committee of Interns and Residents.
My name is Djar Horn. I'm the New Jersey Area Director for the Committee of Interns and
Residents. So, we're here in support of the non-tentured
teachers. They're having problems negotiating their contracts. We just started our negotiations
with Rutgers, so we just wanted to show support for our sisters in the negotiations against
Rutgers. My name is Carla Katz, and I'm on the bargaining
team. We have been very frustrated with the lack of progress and non-tenure track faculty
are sort of second-class citizens here at the University. We have starting salaries
of $35,000 a year -- no job security. We have members of our bargaining team and many of
our members that have 18-20 years of service to the University, yet still making in the
neighborhood of $50,000. So, there's a distinct unfairness, and this picket is just to call
attention to, you know, the situation that NTT faculty are facing. And it's not just
here at Rutgers, actually, this is a phenomenon around the country, and teaching faculty are
just tired of it. My name is David Bedford. I'm a junior here
at Rutgers studying political science and women & gender studies, and I'm out here to
support the AFT and the non-tenure track professors because, ultimately, they are the people here
at Rutgers who interact with the student most, and are most important to our education. You
can have a large administration without any teachers, and you're not going to get anywhere.
And yet, the administration is continually ignoring these teachers who are getting paid,
you know, lower than most high school teachers in the State of New Jersey. And their demands
are rather simple for, you know, base around $50,000 salary -- because a lot of them are
getting paid like $35,000 -- and my great concern is the overall growing economic disparity
at Rutgers, where you have, you know, dozens of administrators getting paid very fat, six-figure
salaries, and then you have the teachers who are interacting with students on a daily basis
getting paid, you know, $35,000. It's just completely unjust and, you know, that issue
needs to be addressed, and the administration just doesn't seem to care.