Today is my last day as full-time non-tenure-track faculty @ Harvard.

Tomorrow I stay in this job but drop to 25%.

I know I’m lucky to have health insurance, a small paycheck, & some meaningful work. NTT & TT are being fully axed across the country.

But H could do better.
Harvard has publically announced extensions for tenure track faculty. They’ve announced limited but important accommodations for grad student workers. They’ve claimed no layoffs or furloughs.

But they made no public plans for treating NTT faculty fairly beyond limited pay raise.
Yet we’ve calculated that NTT faculty taught 46% of undergrad enrollments in 2019-2020. The vast majority of these were taught by lecturers and preceptors who are limited to short terms of employment and little year-to-year job security.
Harvard uses the vague term “curricular need” to justify this exploitative treatment of workers in literal dead-end jobs. But what curricular need is served by automatically severing mentoring relationships and teaching continuity for the undergraduate students?
Why is there no process for full renewal beyond the term limits that mean we are barred from even the possibility of retention through review, etc—basic labor practices at nearly every other job on campus.
So I’m excited to keep working with awesome students and colleagues. And to keep fighting for a better university.
I also just wanna be super clear that my issue is with the upper administration, who has been giving NTT faculty the runaround for at least 10 years.

My department and my colleagues are awesome and have been great to me since I started in 2017.
I say this cuz everything about my teaching, my research, & my mentoring is better now because of the day-to-day work environment I’ve been in. What’s maddening is that Harvard chooses to forcibly *expel* excellence, by refusing almost all paths to advancement for NTT faculty.
I hear you. But Harvard had a $40B endowment pre-covid. That’s not about merit, that’s about wealth-hoarding on the backs of a lot of workers who are less well off than I am.

I’m pointing out the myth of austerity that so many universities with huge endowments are mobilizing.
also tbqh I’m talking about my work situation because that’s what I know about. Harvard could do better by its workers but it’s not.

They’ve promised no furloughs or layoffs. But layoffs and furloughs in the form of unstable and non-renewed NTT appointments are routine.
You can follow @alexcorey04.
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