After being at AU for four semesters, I have finally been able to establish meaningful relationships with many of my professors.
This student-teacher relationship has not only been stressed by family, advisors and peers, but it has also been promised by AU in their boasting of the professor’s “open doors” and low faculty-to-student ratios.
Yet last week, I was talking to my most influential professor, and she told me that AU was not going to renew her employment contract for next semester.
I was in shock.
The University claims the reason were purely financial. In financially tight times for everyone, this might make sense, but when I stepped back and connected all the dots, the results were unsettling.
AU is comprised of three main categories of professors: tenured, full-time term faculty and adjuncts. My professor falls into the category of term faculty, which means she works under a yearly renewable contract.
In the University’s financial crunch, her classes may be dropped completely or taken over by one or multiple adjunct professors.
Adjuncts are part-time employees of the University who receive below-the-poverty-line wages, receive no health benefits and teach many classes at AU.
This means that even if they wanted to provide their students a quality education, filled with office hours and extra advising, they would be doing so under limited resources.
The situation that my professor is facing is not an isolated incident. It is part of a national trend toward the increase of exploited labor that universities call adjuncts.
While one may think that this only affects my professor in her struggles to maintain a salary, the trend has greater effects on the student body at large. As much as I would love to rant about how amazing my professor is and what a mistake AU has made, it will be more beneficial to talk about the further repercussions of the trend in which my professor is just one part.
AU has a 12:1 student to faculty ratio. That sounds fine and dandy, but how is this intimate environment at all valuable if students begin to build relationships with professors whom might not even be teaching in the years to come?
We are being deprived of having faculty members we can connect with and rely on throughout our college experience. Scrolling through professors for next semester that have never taught here before was another frustration that brought me closer to the reality that the professors here are treated as if they are easily expendable.
I am sure that students from all majors have faced similar frustrations, and I would like to let them know they are not alone in feeling gypped by AU. We pay about $50,000 for this “quality education,” and if that money isn’t being used to maintain a reliable team of faculty members, it puts into question where our tuition is really going.
A few days after I talked to my teacher, a good friend of mine told me that their favorite professor had his contract terminated as well. I had heard a lot about the professor in the past, and even though he presents controversial viewpoints, students praise him for making them think critically.
I felt my heart drop as I heard this news. And then the anger grew as my friend told me how important this professor has been to them, and that their self-designed major almost relies on this professor being at AU.
Although the knowledge of these two cases raises critical questions about how the University chooses professors to cut, I can still find fundamental flaws in their logic of using finances as an excuse. There should be no excuse for educational institutions to sacrifice intellectual communities and academic freedom for good business practices.
In the past I have been annoyed, confused and even amused by the decisions of our University.
But today, I am angry.
Sophia Miyoshi is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.
edpage@theeagleonline.com
