The IC Students for Labor Action Organization has been posting pictures on its Facebook page for days leading up to Wednesday night’s rally. Their postings did not comprise of small blurbs of information about Ithaca College’s contingent faculty members, but shared photos of those faulty members the students would be rallying for.
Each professor stood in front of a black board that ranged from how the professors feel about their students and their frustration to how they manage to make ends meet. While the organization only shared eleven photos with its Facebook fans, the truth about Ithaca’s contingent faculty members is that these professors make up about 48% of the faculty at Ithaca College.
Signs and flyers were placed all around campus and during classes students whispered who was leaving class to go to the rally instead. There were about three hundred people standing near the Campus Center building ready to hear the voices of the people they wished to help and to make the Board of Trustees, having a banquet in the Campus Center building, hear them as well.
Members of the crowd held signs reading “Fair Pay, Job Sustainability”, “Invest in Your Teachers”, and “Faculty Forward”. The crowd mumbled amongst themselves as they waited for the first speaker to stand up on what is known as Free Speech Rock.
The first speaker was a student in an orange T-shirt with the slogan “Faculty Forward”. He explained that the organization was created by students who wanted the part-time professors to form a union in order to change the status quo on campus, but when they went to President Tom Rochon’s office in the administrative building Peggy Ryan Williams, the students were “escorted out of the building by an armed guard. That was when I knew administration didn’t care.” And that was when the organization decided to band together and create plans to change the the administration’s view of part-time professors.
“Their working conditions are our learning conditions…They need job sustainability, a living wage, and, most importantly, respect.”
When the speaker stepped down from the rock, another took up a megaphone and started the chant “Tuition is high. Pay is low. Where did all the money go?” And the crowd happily chanted along.
The next person to stand on Free Speech Rock was an actual part-time professor. He explained that he taught in the art department’s “crappiest classroom in the crappiest building,” but he likes his job because the students make it all worthwhile. However, he was quick to note the hardships that many part-time professors face here at IC.
“We are here because Ithaca College has been using temporary staff members to staff its regularly offered courses; because when your living is on the line year to year, semester to semester, you become trapped in a cycle of poverty,” the professor explained.
Sadly, this statement is true: most of Ithaca’s un-tenured staff is paid very poorly. While the living wage in Tompkins County is a mere $14.34, Ithaca’s part-time staff is paid $21.54 – but this calculation was brought up by the administration only after the rally was over and based on a full-time annual salary.
“The salary is estimated from: a rate of $4,200 per three-credit courses, eight courses taught over the span of two semesters, and a forty-hour work week in a nine-month period,” read the online letter from the board. Some part-time professors do not get to teach two or more courses a year.
With a pay rate like this, most of the Ithaca College faculty are on food stamps – one professor is on Medicaid; many work a variety of other jobs at other colleges and elsewhere, meaning manual labor, retail, waitressing, etc., and juggle all of the duties of being a professor.
“The two biggest issues we face are fair pay and job sustainability,” said the art professor. According to him, there has been no action on these issues by the administration. While the administration promotes active dialogue, there has been no action about the issues that are on the table. This called for the chant “No more dialogue. We want action!”, which is a well known chant to the Ithaca campus after last year’s POC protests and rallies.
“Administration has denied all of our plans.”
According to the board’s letter, the organization wishes for Ithaca to be “at the forefront of a nationwide change (it was announced during the day on Wednesday that Pennsylvania professors at West Chester University went on strike),the first to adopt a completely new compensation model.” On September 23, both the organization and the board held a negotiation meeting over pay increases that the organization walked out on due to the fact that the administration recommended a 2% per course pay increase from the initial 1.75%, which wasn’t enough to break the poverty cycle or the status quo as the organization had asked.
“Why are part-time faculty worth-less? We demand a better Ithaca College and ask the board of trustees to do the right thing,” exclaimed the art professor as he stepped off the rock.
The next speaker did not stand on Free Speech Rock nor had a piece of paper in her hand as she spoke, “I came to Ithaca because I needed a job. I stayed here because I love my department, job and my students,” she exclaimed – but the distraught and frustration soaked her voice. She expressed her positive time spent at Ithaca (due to her students), but also some negatives ones. Then began to get angry and began to get the crowd riled up with her:
“Administration does not see you as the compassionate, bright students as I and your professors do, IC. Oh no, they only see you as two words: enrollment numbers. And you know what that means? They don’t see your professors as the talented and helpful professors as you see them. They see them as disposable. So, tell me, Ithaca, whose college is this?” This caused the crowd to yell back, “Our college!” The speaker managed to get them to chant this for a few rounds and then said, “If this is your college, then we must protect it and fight for what is right for it.”
As other speakers took a stand on the rock, some professed to the students listening to “not become a professor, but an administrative position instead. Since Tom Rochon’s annual salary could pay for twenty-seven part-time professors.” Another said, “the beating heart of Ithaca College is not in the Peggy Ryan Williams building, but in the classrooms.”
The crowd cheered and clapped at the statements it agreed with and when the speeches came to an end, most in the crowd followed the order of moving the rally inside to disrupt the banquet being held by the administration in Emerson Suites. There, the crowd chanted for the board to “do the right thing” for “our college”.
While the chants died down and the crowd dwindled to just a cluster, a student for the organization explained that the photo series exposes certain professors and their struggles and frustration, and it will be updated in six months no matter the positive or negative choices of the Board of Trustees.