Tell Your Senator to Support Higher Education

Subject:

Dear [ Decision Maker ],

Today, it is widely recognized that a college education is more important than ever. President Obama has called for the United States to restore its leadership in higher education. The work of the previous Congress and the legislation being considered now in this year's Congress reflect a desire to achieve that goal. However, investments in student access and completion may very well founder unless they are coupled with investments in the people most responsible for our students' education: the teaching force.

Over the last generation, we have witnessed a frightening disinvestment in academic staffing. As a result of that disinvestment, barely more than one-quarter of the instructors in U.S. colleges and universities today are full-time, permanent faculty members. The vast majority of college instructors teach on a contingent basis, either as part-time faculty members, full-time contract faculty members or graduate teaching assistants. Contingent faculty members teach more than half the nation's undergraduate courses and most are paid unjustifiably low wages for the work they do. Contingent instructors perform professionally and successfully, but continuing the erosion of full-time faculty and the exploitation of part-time faculty is not good for America's students.

Congress is now working on a critical piece of legislation for higher education. The bill recently passed by the U.S. House of Representatives (H.R. 3221, the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act) seeks to address many challenges facing higher education--access, affordability, persistence, completion and student success. As a higher education professional, I strongly support these goals, but I believe we must also address the issue of academic staffing.

Toward this end, I urge you to support the inclusion of language in the final legislation that would permit program money to be used to create additional full-time faculty positions or to provide more stability and equitable compensation for contingent faculty. For the national investment in our students to pay off, we must invest in the educators who will help those students succeed.

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