The timing of this year’s Fair Employment Week couldn’t be better, Roberta Lamb, Queen’s University Faculty Association (QUFA) political action and communication committee co-chair, said.
Arts and Science Dean Alistair MacLean sent a memo to all department heads this week asking them to plan their 2010-11 budgets and curricula without using term adjunct professors, Lamb said.
MacLean couldn’t be reached for comment.
QUFA, which is organizing the awareness week, put up posters in Kingston Hall to highlight the unfair working conditions term adjuncts face, she said.
“One of the reasons we put them up was so everybody would see them as they lined up for convocation,” Lamb said.
Lamb said term adjuncts are professors who, unlike tenured and tenure-track or continuing adjunct faculty, must be rehired each year.
“Term adjuncts are actually let go at the end of whatever they’re teaching and then rehired the next year,” she said. “So this is how the administration has been able to say that nobody has been fired because of budget cuts because, technically, no, they haven’t been fired but they haven’t been rehired, so it’s a turn of phrase.”
If departments can’t operate with term adjunct faculty, the quality of their academic programs would suffer, Lamb said.
“You know, this has had a devastating impact on the languages and the art department especially,” she said, adding that she thinks the school of music will also be affected badly if it’s asked to cut its budget for next year.
The music department has 30 adjunct professors, 23 of whom are term adjuncts.
They teach most of the applied string and woodwind courses, she said, adding that they also teach some academic courses in music theory and ethnomusicology.
The department uses a lot of term adjuncts because they’re career musicians on top of being teachers.
“Part of the reason it’s different in music is because you want professional musicians teaching those applied lessons,” Lamb said. “We’re not able to function without those people.”
Lamb said QUFA distributed buttons and put up posters to advertise the week.
“We’ve distributed Fair Employment Week buttons to all of our QUFA council representatives to distribute in their departments,” she said.
Lamb said the goal of Fair Employment Week, which occurs in the U.S. and Mexico, is to educate the public on the importance of all types of faculty and their roles at the University.
“The main message we’re trying to get out is that part-time professors, part-time teachers, are real academics,” she said. “They should be treated fairly.”
—With files from Gloria Er-Chua
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