Shortly after EMUFT was established, there were approximately 130 Full-Time Lecturers (FTL) at EMU. Today there are just 67. Some departments have lost every single FTL; others are down to just one or two. At the same time, many of these departments have lost several tenure-line Faculty due to two recent rounds of retirement incentives as well as a slow-down in Faculty hiring due to declining enrollment. As a result, Full-time lecturers are picking up more responsibilities in their departments, but without the same support or compensation Faculty receive for the exact same work. During this time, the Administration has actively worked to keep Part-Time Lecturers at a lower price point - less pay, no health insurance, and no pathway to achieving those things.

Dwindling numbers of Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty (TT Faculty) and Full-Time Lecturers has also resulted in increased reliance on those Part-Time Lecturers (PTL). The label part-time suggests that this employee group consists only of individuals working part-time in academia. Little could be further from the truth! Sure, there are Part-Time Lecturers employed by EMU who fit the more classical definition: they either have a full-time (industry) job and teach a class in an area of expertise EMU needs, or they might be retired from a previous job elsewhere (or even at EMU), but for a variety of reasons teach anywhere from one to three classes per semester at EMU. The majority of Part-Time Lecturers at EMU, however, cobble together the semblance of full-time work in academia by either working as close to full-time employment as EMU will allow, or by working as part-time lecturers at 2, 3, 4, or more other institutions across Michigan and Ohio.

In addition to the decrease in full-time hiring, Lecturers at EMU know that most departments will not hire their own for coveted tenure-track lines. It is irrelevant that Part-Time Lecturers who are teaching for EMU have the same qualifications as their Full-Time Lecturer and Tenure-Track Faculty colleagues. It is also irrelevant that many PTLs have served EMU in that capacity for 10, 15, 20, or more years. In fact, more than 40% of the PTLs employed by EMU in the 2021/2022 academic year have achieved the rank of PTL3, which means that they have taught as a Part-Time Lecturer at EMU at least since Fall 2016. Many have been here much longer!

Of those who have earned the rank of PTL3, 42 lecturers have earned the PTL3H rank - the highest Part-Time Lecturer rank. In this case, these lecturers have not only been with EMU since at least 2016, they have also routinely, continuously taught course loads equivalent to full-time work. Many of them are used to teaching between 12 - 15 credits a semester, a load that at most other institutions is considered full-time. Yet, despite work being available, EMU actively enforces the rule that no Part-Time Lecturer should teach the equivalent of 15 credits in back-to-back semesters, as that would automatically obligate the university to promote that part-time lecturer to full-time. In this EMU is actively avoiding hiring Full-Time Instructors, even when there is a reasonable expectation that Full-Time work is available

This continued lack of any prospects for promotion or career growth means that EMU keeps losing highly qualified, experienced and dedicated Lecturers who simply cannot afford to continue down their chosen career path. The ones carrying the burden of this institutional loss are the students. It is, therefore, of the utmost urgency that EMU prioritize more full-time employment, both for the employees and the students!

Full-time Lecturers at EMU have some of the highest workloads in the state of Michigan compared to similar positions at similar institutions without receiving credit for service duties or the many other jobs that grow naturally out of working as a full-time professor at a university. Full-Time Lecturer compensation at EMU is also significantly below compensation at comparable institutions, as well as that of tenured and tenure-track faculty at EMU. In the 2021/2022 academic year, the total compensation for Full-Time Lecturers amounted to barely 5% of the instructional budget. When presented with these facts and the data to back them up, EMU administration always points to benefits at EMU, but these are in-line with what Full-Time instructors receive at other places. It’s time for EMU to open its eyes to the reality of this situation and commit to doing something about it.

Full-Time Lecturers, much like tenure-track and tenured Faculty, do more than just teach the courses in their loads – they run programs, mentor students, sit on committees, do research, etc. They do all of this while maintaining a higher teaching load than our peers at other institutions and for some of the lowest salaries in the state. Many Full-Time Lecturers are required to jump at the opportunity to teach an overload of 18, or sometimes even 21, credit hours in a single semester, or, worse yet, take on a second job, as a result of the poor and stagnant pay received for their efforts.

The need for FTLs and TT Faculty to teach an overload is clear indication that there is enough work to hire more full-time instructional staff. Usually, however, the gap is closed by Part-Time Lecturers, who provide cheap, high-quality instructional work. PTLs are the lowest paid instructional staff at EMU, but what makes them particularly cheap from a business point of view is that they do not receive any benefits: no retirement contributions, no health insurance, no release for any additional work besides teaching - and many PTLs engage in the same type of service work as TT Faculty and FTLs.

Currently, the base minimum rate per credit hour is $1288. In the 2021/2022 academic year, EMU employed approximately 550 Part-Time Lecturers across the Fall and Winter semester for a total compensation of less than $7 million, or the equivalent of approximately 6.5% of the instructional budget. During that time, PTLs taught somewhere between 15 - 20% of classes.

An economic survey of EMU Lecturers indicates that in that same timeframe nearly 40% of EMU Part-Time Lecturers either considered EMU their primary employer or work at multiple institutions to make ends meet. And nearly 24% of lectures have an individual annual income of less than $25,000. Consequently, some PTLs routinely struggle with food and housing insecurity.

Pay raises, when they do happen, don’t even come close to keeping pace with inflation. After agreeing to forego a pay increase during the Covid-impacted year of 2020, Part-Time Lecturers received a 1% raise for the 2021/2022 academic year - a $39 pre-tax increase per 3-credit-hour class at the base pay, not even enough to fill up a tank of gas. The current rate of inflation is well over 7%. Some Part-Time Lecturers at EMU have never seen a pay raise because they were hired at a rate slightly above the base minimum and pay raises are only applied to the base.

Full-Time Lecturers also agreed to forgo a pay increase due to the impact Covid had on the finances and enrolment of EMU. Yet, when asking for a modest one-time signing bonus, the compensation bargaining team was told that such a bonus was cost prohibitive and completely impossible for EMU to afford. Two weeks later, AAUP agreed to a contract extension for TT Faculty with a 0% pay increase for the 2021 year, but each TT Faculty member received a signing bonus of $1840, for a total approximate cost of close to $1 million. That same signing bonus for all of the 67 Full-Time Lecturers employed at EMU would have set back the university by less than $125,000, or about .1% of the instructional budget! It also is just under 50% of what a PTL at base pay makes for a whole class over the course of a full semester.

All told, Lecturers at EMU - Part-Time and Full-Time together - account for more than 50% of instructional staff but only for a little more than 10% of the instructional budget.

Taking cost-of-living increases into account, if you’ve been working at EMU as a Lecturer for even just a few years, you are actually making less now than you were when you were hired. Since many Part-Time Lecturers are already living right on the edge of poverty, these stagnant salaries are even more consequential.

It’s time for EMU to look at this situation with honesty and integrity and make a commitment to doing something about it. These working conditions have a major impact on a group of people who are directly engaged in the very mission of the university to provide a high-quality education. Depriving instructors of the resources they need to do their jobs and paying salaries that are not only not in-line with the rest of the instructional team at EMU, but also with other instructors in the state of Michigan only serves to undermine the value that these instructors provide to EMU. The university always says that they value the work lecturers do. Really? Well, actions speak louder than words.

During the June 2021, Board of Regents Meeting a Faculty Senate Committee presented the first video in the “Culture of Belonging” Series. The video showed TT Faculty members and students discussing what it means to ‘belong’. The series itself focuses on strategies EMU instructors and administration can take to increase the sense of belonging EMU students feel. Glaringly absent from the entire series? Lecturers.

In fact, Part-Time Lecturers never even received the email survey that formed part of the basis of what would become the “Culture of Belonging” series that went out in the summer of 2020. Why? Because no matter how many decades a PTL has worked at EMU, they are purged from the employee email list at the end of the semester. This means that during the pandemic summer of 2020 PTLs did not receive any information about COVID protocols and safety measures. Their return to the employee email list both in the Fall of 2020 and the Fall of 2021 only occurred halfway through the first week and only after Lectures reached out to their department heads with questions about classroom safety protocols. Since then, a stop gap solution has been found thanks to the dedication of an Administrative Assistant in the Academic Human Resources office. The problem itself has not been resolved.

While it is easy to dismiss these incidents as accidental or oversights, at EMU they are symptomatic of the treatment Lecturers are subjected to every single day. The following are a few examples:

• Early in the pandemic, EMU Administration created the Covid Steering Committee - a committee that brings together people from all over campus to discuss Covid safety protocols. Various unions have representatives on the committee as the protocols impact their members. EMUFT, representing over 50% of EMU’s instructional staff and the instructors who were most likely to return to in-person teaching in the Fall of 2020, was told repeatedly by various administrators that there was no need for us to have a seat at that committee. It required the engagement of several Regents as well as the President of AFT Michigan for lectures to finally have representation on this critical committee. This inclusion did not occur until October 2021, about 18 months after the inception of the committee and after EMUFT had been forced TWICE to bargain over the Health and Safety Protocols with EMU Administration. These bargaining sessions could have been avoided by actively including Lecturers and their representatives in decision-making processes.

• As is to be expected, Lecturers often do not have a choice about what and how they teach. Over the course of the pandemic, for instance, where Faculty had the freedom to elect to teach fully online, even lecturers with risk factors were told that they had to teach their classes in person. In some cases, even classes that had always been online or hybrid, were abruptly changed to in person in order to accommodate 1) a desire for more in person classes and 2) the increasing desire from Faculty to teach online. In many instances, the online classes faculty suddenly coveted had always been taught by a PTL or FTL. Lecturers have always taken a back-seat to the Faculty but the pandemic highlighted just how inequitable this situation is.

• Lecturers are routinely excluded from any number of committees on campus. Ostensibly, one of the reasons most often given for the lack of inclusion is that the PTL and FTL contracts do not have provisions on compensation for service work. This is, however, not for lack of trying: since the inception of EMUFT, bargaining teams have presented and fought for any number of service compensation scales and ideas, including but not limited to service release time for FTLs and direct compensation for PTLs. Every single one of them has been summarily dismissed by the administration’s teams. In part, because input is directly linked to the AAUP Faculty contract which outlines shared governance through various input channels, including the Faculty Senate and Department Input Documents (DID). Lecturers do not have seats in the Faculty Senate because, contrary to the Higher Learning Commission's definition, at EMU, Faculty only refers to tenured and tenure track instructional staff. Most DIDs do not even mention lecturers and if they do it is to afford lectures ‘ex officio’ status in some very select department committee, meaning they do not get a vote.

Several problems arise from this systematic exclusion of lecturers:

1. Many lecturers are experts in their field and have crucial insights that EMU could benefit from. By excluding them, EMU puts itself and its students at a disadvantage.

2. Lecturers are placed at a disadvantage as service is a critical criterion when applying for tenure-track academic jobs. Excluding lecturers from these service opportunities creates a vicious cycle: We need the service to be able to stay competitive for tenure-track jobs, but we are excluded from the service opportunities because we do not have a tenure-track job.

3. Many lecturers feel called to still give back to EMU and our students by participating in those committees we can get access to without compensation. At the same time, any number of us simply cannot afford to do this. Our choice is to volunteer for a committee and not pay the bills, or to pick up another employment opportunity elsewhere and potentially pay that same bill.

4. There are also disadvantages to TT Faculty: as mentioned elsewhere, departments have lost a number of TT faculty, which has dramatically increased their service burden. If FTLs and PTLs were able to participate in these regular university responsibilities more fully, that burden could be lessened.