NYU’s Graduate Student Organizing Committee (GSOC) is going on strike starting today, 4/26/21. AAUP–Penn supports the rights of grad student employees at NYU and everywhere to organize, collectively bargain for a living wage and a fair contract, and strike when the university refuses to bargain. You can join their virtual picket line here, and materially support those on strike by contributing to the hardship fund here.

On March 16, 2021, a 21-year-old white man murdered eight people at three Atlanta-area massage parlors, six of whom were Asian immigrant women: Daoyou Feng, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Soon C. Park, Xiaojie Tan, and Yong A. Yue. AAUP-Penn condemns anti-Asian violence and all forms of racism, misogyny, and xenophobia, and it stands in solidarity with Asian and Asian American communities at Penn and everywhere. The white supremacist rhetoric and policies of the former Trump administration have incited a torrent of intimidation, bullying, assault, and murder of countless Asian American women and men. At the same time, these attacks are grounded in long histories of anti-immigration discrimination, scapegoating, and hate. To make things worse, racial violence against Asian Americans is systematically rendered invisible: mainstream society consistently refuses to acknowledge racism against Asian Americans even when it is in plain sight to see.

We mourn the tragic loss of Asian American lives in Atlanta, even as we celebrate our Asian American activists and leaders who have been at the forefront of anti-racist and revolutionary action. We demand that the Penn Administration support Asian American and ethnic studies through the programmatic hiring of many more faculty and staff in these critical areas of thought. We demand that the Penn administration increase the scarce course offerings in Asian American and ethnic studies at the University at least to match those of our peer institutions. While we appreciate the Administration’s recent statement about being “proud of the myriad contributions of our Asian community” at Penn, words are not enough. Unless the University commits material resources to an anti-racist pedagogy, and unless it offers an equitable curriculum to its underserved Asian American and BIPOC communities, long histories of white supremacy and racism cannot be fully recognized, let alone undone.

AAUP–Penn stands in solidarity with Columbia University’s graduate workers union (GWC-UAW local 2110) and its members’ decision to go on strike, beginning on March 15, 2021. Columbia’s graduate workers voted to unionize in 2016 and still do not have a contract. The American Association of University Professors has long supported the right of graduate workers to unionize—a right reconfirmed in the National Labor Relations Board’s (NLRB) 2016 decision on the Columbia graduate workers’ unionization vote. We call on the Columbia University administration to cease violating its legal obligation to bargain with the union in good faith, to retract its threats to dock past pay for those participating in the strike, and to respect the rights of graduate workers to unionize. To support our colleagues striking at Columbia, you can sign up to join a digital picket line, or contribute to their hardship fund.

As Penn faculty—members and non-members of the AAUP—we object to the proposed university-wide course schedule changes that add to the length of class meeting times. While we recognize the convenience of spacing out course blocks to allow a longer transitional period between classes, the apparent elimination of the existing ten minutes of “passing time” built into our current course blocks makes this schedule change amount to a tacit addition of ten minutes of teaching per class period. When faculty have asked whether the modified schedule indeed extends teaching time, administrators have not provided a decisive answer. This abrupt and unilaterally imposed change concerns us on three major grounds: 1) Its implementation is inconsistent with shared governance principles; 2) it represents a demand for additional instructional time without compensation; and 3) its impact will fall hardest on faculty members who do the most teaching, for instance language lecturers.

1. Shared Governance:  Changes to the manner in which faculty teach courses fall within the purview of those areas of governance in which faculty are meant to have primary responsibility. Yet in this case, as with other policy changes recently announced by the central administration, faculty were largely cut out of the decision-making process.

2. Additional Instructional Time:  The addition of 10 minutes of instructional time per class period for each session of a course is a non-trivial change in work expectations for all faculty. For an instructor teaching two courses per semester, each of which meets twice per week, this adds 40 minutes of classroom time per week, which translates into 9 1/3 hours of additional teaching over a semester (or the equivalent, in instructional time, of seven 80-minute periods added to the semester). We have not seen any indication that instructors will be compensated for this additional work time.

3. Hurting Those Who Teach the Most:  Those most affected, however, will be language lecturers and others who shoulder the highest teaching load at Penn.  A language lecturer who teaches three courses per semester, in five contact hours a week, will end up teaching an additional 35 hours per term. 

For standing faculty, increased teaching time directly detracts from the time available for other work obligations and professional activities, including research, advising, service, and indeed even preparation for the courses we teach. It thus pushes those work obligations further into our own already limited personal time on evenings and weekends. For non-standing faculty who are paid per course, and likewise for graduate instructors and TAs, the addition of instructional time without any change in compensation is, still more unambiguously, a form of wage theft.

The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), whose chapter at Penn was founded in 2020, is a national organization of faculty and academic professionals that has helped to shape U.S. higher education by developing standards and procedures that maintain quality in education, fair employment conditions, shared governance, and academic freedom. Penn’s AAUP chapter is concerned about a perceived lack of transparency in institutional decision-making at our university (of which this schedule change issue is only one example) and about working conditions for all those who teach at Penn. 

We call on the University of Pennsylvania senior administration, however belatedly, to initiate dialogue with faculty about the effects of these changes and undertake actions to mitigate their impact on faculty, including on those who may be excessively burdened by additional uncompensated teaching hours.