by Christopher Sanchez
Daily Lobo
Christine Rack, a part-time faculty member at UNM, qualified for food stamps last year.
Rack, who has a doctorate in sociology and is in the process of publishing a book, taught four courses last year and made about $12,000. She never applied for food stamps because she had integrity, she said.
Rack is not the only part-time faculty member at UNM who is underpaid, she said. Depending on the department, she said part-time faculty members are paid $1,900 to $4,000 per course. She said it is absurd educated people get paid so little.
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"It's embarrassing because it makes you feel like a real worm to talk about it," she said. "We don't want to admit how marginal we are. We don't want our students to think of us as marginal."
Rack said part-time faculty members at UNM have few benefits, if any, and they can easily be replaced. She said her contract did not guarantee her a job after the semester.
"We can be dropped two weeks into the semester if not enough students signed up for the course," Rack said.
Part-time faculty are recruited locally and are used as needed for courses, said Richard Holder, deputy provost of Academic Affairs. He said the University is working toward rolling contracts that would assure part-time faculty a position in the future.
Rack said she would like to see part-time faculty members receive full-time benefits, which include health care, disability compensation and free access to recreational services.
Rinita Mazumdar, a part-time faculty member at UNM and TVI, said she uses her apartment swimming pool because she does not want to pay to use UNM's gym.
Mazumdar is teaching six courses this semester and has published two books. She would like to publish more books, but teaching occupies much of her time, she said.
"We have to teach a lot of courses to survive," she said.
About a year ago, the Commission of Higher Education established a task force to address the issues of part-time faculty in New Mexico, said Holder, who is a member of the task force.
The task force was established to determine whether full-time faculty and staff at New Mexico's universities and colleges are being replaced with an inordinate number of part-time employees, said John Ingram, field representative for American Federation of Teachers New Mexico.
Ingram said universities around the country have been replacing full-time faculty with part-time faculty.
"They've been filling full-time faculty and staff positions with part-timers, because they believe it is less expensive in that you don't have to pay part-time employees as much or provide level of benefits full-time employees have," he said.
Another duty of the task force is to determine whether part-time faculty are underpaid, Ingram said. He said the task force will prepare a written report and present it to the New Mexico Legislature on Nov. 16.
A survey given to part-time faculty around the state concluded they do not want benefits, Holder said. Many part-time faculty members have another job and hold teaching positions on the side, he said.
"There is another group that wants to cobble together by doing an entire career," Holder said. "It turns out to be a much smaller group."
Holder agrees part-time faculty should be paid more, he said, but he doesn't know where the money would come from.
Holder said the University has done other things to help part-time faculty. Part-time faculty members now receive five paychecks, instead of four, over the course of the semester, and are able to keep their e-mail address, as opposed to registering every semester.
University Provost Reed Dasenbrock said the University would like to hire more full-time staff when there is more money.
"Our commitment is to try and regularize the employment of the part-time faculty," he said. "It doesn't happen all the time, of course."
Rack said she hopes the issues will be addressed and fixed because the part-time faculty members deserve it.
"It makes you feel like a fool for doing your job well," she said.
