Committee on Contingent Faculty (Full-time Lecturers and Part-time
Adjuncts)
Julie Reiser, English (jreiser@towson.edu)
Sub-committee on Contingent Faculty Seeks
Adjuncts and Lecturers
Last spring, the Towson branch of the
AAUP formed a sub-committee on contingent faculty to help address concerns
about flexible labor, academic freedom, and administrative policies
toward Lecturers, adjuncts, and other non-tenure track instructors.
We currently have three Lecturers from English, and we'd like to broaden
our representation across different colleges and disciplines by including
Lecturers and adjuncts from other disciplines. If you're interested
in joining the committee, please email Julie Reiser at jreiser@towson.edu.
Lecturer Survey Results Are In!
At
the end of Spring 2006, the sub-committee on contingent faculty distributed
an email survey to all full-time Lecturers within the university. This
questionnaire was designed to help us create a profile of Lecturers
across disciplines, to ascertain their professional concerns and shared
interests, and to learn more about how they contribute to campus life
and the Towson community.
The response proved informative and significant: nearly
thirty percent of the university's 137 Lecturers submitted completed
surveys, and we received responses from Lecturers in some fourteen different
departments across all six colleges of the university: CBE, CHP, CLA,
COE, COFAC, CSM. We look forward to publishing more specifics from our
survey findings in the AAUP's Spring 2007 Newsletter. The committee
is also looking at the prospect of surveying adjuncts in Fall 2007 or
Spring 2008.
For more information about contingent faculty all
over the U.S., please see AAUP's comprehensive profile on its website:
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issuesed/contingent/
contingentfacts.htm?PF=1
Google Group Listserv for All Contingent Faculty
The sub-committee on contingent faculty has created a Google group listserv
for contingent faculty to announce events, share concerns, contact other
contingent faculty, and ask questions. If you are a lecturer, adjunct,
or non-tenure track instructor and want to join the list, please send
an email from your Towson account to
jreiser@towson.edu. In your message, please list your name, department,
and contact information. While the listserv is in its initial stages,
it will be a group-wide email list to facilitate discussion. However,
once the group gets enough members, we will create two lists--a moderated
list for announcements and an unmoderated list for chatting.
Junior Faculty Committee
Matt Durington, Anthropology (mdurington@towson.edu)
The AAUP Junior Faculty Committee needs you!
The AAUP Junior Faculty Committee formed three years ago to address
the issue of workload in relation to the expectations of junior faculty
at Towson University. Since that time, the intent of the committee has
been to increase communication between the administration and junior
faculty around issues pertaining to tenure and promotion. If a junior
faculty member has an issue he or she would like discussed, the Committee
serves as an informal forum to collect information to be addressed in
the spirit of collegial exchange. The Committee meets informally with
the Provost once a month throughout the academic year. As members of
the Committee have joined or rotated off in the last three years, they
continuously reach out to their colleagues across the various colleges
to solicit feedback on issues of concern to bring to the Provost for
discussion.
For the academic year of 2006-2007 the Committee consists
of: Judith Guerrero (College of Education); Vincent Thomas and Marguerite
Baker (College of Fine Arts and Communication); Joy Watts and Felice
Shore (Jess and Mildred Fisher College of Science and Mathematics);
Mel Brennan (College of Health Professions); and Matthew Durington,
Isabel Castro Vasquez and Christine Eith (College of Liberal Arts).
At this time, there are no representatives from the College of Business
and Economics, something we hope to change!
Members are recruited by other AAUP members in the
summer leading in to the academic year, with the hope and goal of increasing
participation from every college as time progresses. That said, we are
continuously looking for faculty in their first four years at Towson
to participate on the Committee. The AAUP Junior Faculty Committee is
an excellent way to increase your contextual knowledge of different
issues facing all faculty at Towson University. If you would like to
participate for the spring of 2007 or the academic year of 2007-2008
please contact Matthew Durington (mdurington@towson.edu)
or any of the members listed above in your respective college.
Committee W
Ayse Dayi, Women's Studies: adayi@towson.edu
Leticia Romo, Modern Languages: lromo@towson.edu
Maybe because women are better at multi-tasking
(as the research maintains), or due to our naiveté as new faculty,
Leticia Romo and I decided to chair the Women's Committee of AAUP. We
would like to work on various issues of concern to women faculty (whether
tenured or in tenure-track, lecturer or adjunct positions). These could
include discrimination in salary compensation; treatment by colleagues
(both male and female faculty) as well as students; promotion and tenure;
teaching and research opportunities; opportunities for women mentors;
promotion of women of color and international women faculty; child care
concerns; and, benefits equality for lesbian and bisexual faculty. We
would also like to think of ways to celebrate and make visible Towson
University's women faculty's accomplishments! We invite you to join
us in determining the issues significant to women on this campus and
then work on them together. Please email Leticia and me to join the
group and/or give your input for issues to address.
Interested in helping to activate or in serving on AAUP committees?
See the Towson
AAUP Bylaws for a list of all designated committees.
