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Statement in Solidarity with Howard University Nontenure-Track Faculty

22 March 2022

Dear President Frederick and Provost Wutoh:

The Executive Committee of Tenure for the Common Good, a national organization of tenured allies of non-tenure-track faculty, writes to express our strong support for your non-tenure-track lecturers and adjunct instructors, who find themselves with no alternative but to threaten a strike. Their demands for compensation, stability of employment, and long-term job security are eminently reasonable, and we urge you to listen to them with compassion and in good faith.

We stand with dozens of your own tenured and tenure-track faculty who have signed a letter in support of the non-tenure-track faculty and their demands. We agree that it is unjust to ask non-tenure-track faculty to educate your students without adequate compensation and without job security.  These faculty members are some of your most experienced, hard-working, and committed instructors, and their contributions to the success of Howard are not in dispute.  Treating them as the professionals they are – and that you clearly trust them to be, given the fact that you hire them to teach two thousand course sections a year – requires paying them an adequate salary and giving them employment stability–whether by multi-year contracts, preferential hiring, the elimination of the seven-year cap on employment, or offering promotion pathways that entail longer-term positions. The union has asked for those, and as we understand, have gotten no response.

At a time when institutions of higher learning are coming increasingly under attack, Howard’s underpaid and under-appreciated faculty model the qualities of dignity and respect for learning.  We ask you to reach out to your non-tenure-track faculty and meet their demands so that they are not forced to strike.

Respectfully,

Carolyn Betensky

Rachel Buurma

Seth Kahn

Talia Schaffer