Non-Tenure Track Teachers Grow Frustrated with Administration

Faculty Forward LUC formed in 2015 to represent Non-Tenure Track (NTT) faculty in their struggles to win increased benefits. After three years of negotiations with Loyola administration, in 2018 they were able to argue for their first contract, which gave part-time faculty its first raise in 10 years. In 2021, they argued for their second contract, which expired Sept. 30.

Though negotiations began in February for a third contract, the administration has requested they extend their second contract. The union hasn’t agreed to extend. In doing so, the protections outlined in the contract continue to apply to members. 

They now have the ability to strike — and move closer to that possibility each passing day the administration doesn’t meet their proposals.

Chief among the 400-member union’s concerns is a three-pronged approach. The “Big Three” are compensation, appointments and reappointments, and workload, according to union board members Matthew Williams, Paige Warren and Deborah Goodman.

“The administration and the union came to the table with fundamentally different philosophies,” Williams said.

Four negotiators make up the administration’s, or management’s, team. Each week the union and administration meet for negotiations.

The only way to avoid a strike at this point, Warren said, is to hope management will “do the right thing.”

Though previously interviewed by The Phoenix, Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs David Chinitz referred communications to Assistant Vice President of Communications Christian Anderson, who reiterated the university’s archive of Collective Bargaining Updates (CBA) provides a “good overview” of where the school stands on the negotiations in an email to The Phoenix.

Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences Peter J. Schraeder also referred The Phoenix to Anderson.

At the beginning of the 2025-2026 academic year, Lecturer in the Department of Biology and member of the Contract Action Team Dallas Krentzel said the union proposed several articles to management. Through this process, the union members take the existing CBA and draft a new proposal which would modify the existing language. This way, union members are able to ask for changes to, for example, caps on the number of classes part time faculty are allotted to teach.

Management — a team of four negotiators appointed by Loyola administration — considers the modified documents and proposes a counter. Most recently, the union argued for a pay increase and a change in workload — three classes instead of four per semester — which Krentzel said management has admitted is comparable to most peer institutions. 

Management didn’t meet their proposals — a request of a 35% pay increase across the board for both full-time and part-time faculty. The majority of Loyola instructors are part-time, according to Krentzel.

“Loyola’s counter was, ‘We’re not even going to entertain a pay increase for the majority of the membership,’” Krentzel said, though he noted they agreed to a slight pay increase of 6% for full-time faculty — a small amount compared to the increase outlined in the existing CBA.

Williams said when the union first put forward their proposals for compensation, appointments and reappointments, administration took a while to provide a counter. When they did, they took a an intense approach.

Before even addressing the Big Three, the administration proposed language for a layoffs contract. It’s not unusual for unions to have layoffs clauses as they can protect members by guaranteeing severance pay and Continuation of Health Coverage, according to Williams. Instead, the administration outlined vague reasons for laying employees off, such as “acts of government.”

Part of the layoffs included allowing for administration to layoff faculty with two-weeks notice, potentially allowing layoffs in the middle of a semester. Williams said tenured-track faculty were just as dismayed as NTT.

“The fact that they started with layoffs really feels like it was meant to be a threat,” Williams said

In their first contract win in 2018, part-time faculty received their first raise in 10 years. In the second contract, a volume of part-time positions were consolidated to form 14 full-time positions in order to provide a raise for those faculty. Co-founder of the dance department and now full-time faculty member and Faculty Forward Secretary Goodman experienced a 60% raise when she assumed one of the 14 consolidated positions after being part-time for 16 years.

Advanced Lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Full-Time Faculty Co-Chair of Faculty Forward Williams, Ph.D., explained the first issue to be adequate compensation for faculty.

“They’re not recognizing people need to be paid more to live in Chicago,” Williams said. “They keep on saying they’re aiming for slightly above market average. I don’t know why that’s their aim.”

Median household income for Rogers Park is $58,876 and $74,955 for Edgewater, according to the Chicago Health Atlas. The most recent tentative agreement listed on the Service Employees International Union Local (SEIU) Local 73 webpage defines a lecturer of less than three academic years with a terminal degree to be $61,054, and for a senior lecturer of more than six academic years — $76,549.

The union came to meetings with a “big vision statement,” which Williams said didn’t include language on cost-of-living increases in Chicago because union members thought it was obvious the subject would be something they’d want to negotiate. Many members of the union can no longer afford the cost-of-living in the city.

At the time, however, President Donald Trump had just been sworn in for his second term, and members were worried about academic freedom, DEI and immigration, which the presidential administration has hit with cuts in recent months,The Associated Press reported.

“To us, the reasons to worry about those things seemed fairly obvious,” Williams said. “The administration accused us of virtue signaling. They told us we didn’t need to worry because the administration would have our backs.”

Union representatives Williams and part-time faculty co-chair Warren expressed concerns about rising inflation and said the negotiations include these concerns. The Federal Reserve cut rates Sept. 17, shifting focus from inflation to hiring, The AP reported.

The union’s Chief Negotiator Andrew Yale told the SEIU Local 73 staffers the administration didn’t envision any pay increases for part-time faculty, according to Williams.

“We did propose what looks like a dramatic raise on paper, 35%, but this is taking into account inflation and then giving ourselves an additional raise in real terms,” Williams said.

Warren said the university often claims student tuition would suffer if faculty were given raises. She said this analogy is provably false. When Loyola was unionized, adjunct instructors hadn’t had a pay increase in 10 years, but tuition had gone up exponentially in that decade, according to Warren.

“The money is not one-to-one,” Warren said. “It’s not, ‘We take this money and we put it into instructors’ pockets.’ That’s not how it works.”

Appointments and reappointments have the largest impact on part-time faculty. Williams said the vast majority of part-time faculty make a living working as part-time faculty at multiple schools, like Warren, who teaches at three universities — Columbia College Chicago, Roosevelt University and Loyola.

When NTT faculty are hired to the university, they begin on two one-year contracts for a “probationary period.” After this period, the university is relatively free to let them go. If they’re not let go, they begin a three-year contract, followed by another three-year contract and five-year contracts from then on.

“There’s been this consistent pattern of saying ‘no’ as a whole sentence and a consistent pattern of wanting to avoid accountability,” Williams said. 

The other stipulation of the first contract was to afford union members priority for getting on-campus final stage interviews for positions. When a new non-tenure track position opens up, they get priority to interview for the job. 

Williams said the administration “completely eliminated” the union’s proposal for caps to 88-lines. Contract instructors are hired on a year-by-year basis, with no guarantee of being hired the following year. 

“So they’ve been telling us we should only bring problems that have developed since the last contract to their attention,” Williams said. “We did. They just rejected it.”

Williams said over the course of bargaining and at a meeting Sept. 23, the union members repeatedly brought up to management their tendency to avoid counter solutions. Their response was, verbatim, “We welcome your counter proposal.”

Tenure-track faculty teach a two-two load, meaning they teach two classes each semester on the expectation they’re also “research-active” — engaged in research. NTT, on the other hand, are required to teach a four-four load, or four classes each semester. Instructors can only alleviate their teaching loads by requesting a “course release,” in which they have to meet 570 credit hours to avoid teaching four classes.

570 credit hours, for most instructors, comes out to 190 students, according to Williams, who said it would then grant the instructor a course release the next year. Some full-timers hit 570 every year, like Williams. Some hit it every other year. Some instructors only teach small labs or writing intensive classes and never hit it.

“It’s not sustainable,” Williams said. “We’re on burnout loads.”

Williams and Warren expressed concern over the impact these loads have on the quality of education students receive. Williams said he tends to fall behind on grading when given a heavy work load, impacting the timeliness for students to receive feedback needed to improve their work.

“Our working conditions are students’ learning conditions,” he said.

On top of the high course loads, some professors like Warren teach at multiple universities. 

“Do I want to give extra feedback on these essays,” Warren said. “Or do I want to get another hour of sleep?”

The administration came back with a counter proposal of six-year contracts and no raises for part-time faculty at all. They rejected a request for full-time faculty to have a three-three load and instead reweighted some courses which will harm both students and tenured faculty. 

Not only have they offered the union nothing, they retracted victories gained from the last two contracts.

Warren has been teaching at Loyola since 2008. She’s currently on a two-year contract but only teaches two classes per semester. If she taught more than two classes, the university would have to pay her insurance. 

“If you’d been dating somebody for 20 years, you would think they’d put a ring on it sooner or later,” Warren said.

The university promoted her, but only for two years, at which point they dropped her back down to part-time faculty, which took away her ability to have any benefits, retirement or stability and drastically lowered her wages. It also cuts her off from professional development funding and other resources which would help her grow as a scholar and educator. 

The administration refuses to host the negotiations over Zoom in order to have more of the 400 union members attend, according to Williams.

“The more members are present, the more eyes are on them,” Williams said. “The thing this administration fears most is their hypocrisy being exposed to students. You see it time and again. They do something that violates their social justice mission. It blows up publicly. Students ask questions about how this is consistent with the social justice mission that attracted them to the school in the first place, and the administration backpedals and says they never meant it.”

Goodman expressed her concerns with the course loads faculty are expected to manage on top of the service they’re expected to provide to the university. She said the administration asks NTT faculty to devote 80% of their workload to teaching, 10% in service to the university and the remaining 10% to professional development or scholarship.

Goodman said the university acknowledges each class to be nine hours of work.

“We know faculty spend much more than nine hours a week on their classes, but they say nine hours. Let’s say you round up to 10, even if you don’t either way, if you look at four classes, you’re looking at 36 to 40 hours a week,” Goodman said. “So Loyola has full time at 37.5, so if you round up to 10 hours, then four classes is already 40 hours a week. So if they want that to be 80% of their teaching, they’re asking us for a 60 hour work week.”

She said her full-time position allows her to care more individually for students.

Krentzel acknowledged it’s still early on in the proposal process. Before the summer ended, the union had months to negotiate non-economic proposals, for instance, immigration and academic freedom — the ability for instructors to feel protected in what they teach in the classroom.

Though completely unrelated to the negotiations, there exists a Faculty Handbook which instructors must adhere to which contain clauses about Academic Freedom. Nothing the union requested in their current contract differs from the handbook. However, the contract serves to cement the language surrounding academic freedom on a legal basis. If made official, any disagreements with management regarding academic freedom could be brought to the National Labor Relations Board.

“Obviously, there’s a contentious atmosphere around academic freedom these days, and we wanted a little bit more of that security,” Krentzel said. “That would then put the pressure on the university to kind of be legally responsible for that. And you know that obviously is something they may be resistant to because anything that adds further legal responsibility, it is an ask.”

In March, a professor who chose to remain anonymous lost his permit to live and work in the U.S., The Phoenix reported.  The College of Arts and Sciences wouldn’t sponsor his visa anymore and said they had stated their policy previously. The professor, identified as A.S., said they were never made aware of this.

Because of the union’s negotiations, they were able to get the administration to include language on a Loyola website about their immigration policy, which they claimed to have publicly listed before but actually hadn’t.

University Marketing and Communication provided no further comment on immigration beyond the tentative agreement Faculty Forward and administration reached in June.

A couple of months ago, the administration’s chief negotiator John Frendreis walked out of a negotiation and never returned, according to Warren. She said the administration’s chief negotiator did inform the union before negotiations began that he would retire at some point but never clarified when. 

Throughout Frendreis’s time with management, he had Siobhan Cafferty shadow him. Cafferty became the chief negotiator upon his departure, and despite her observed experience shadowing Frendreis, Warren said she didn’t seem prepared for negotiations afterward.

Both Cafferty and Frendreis didn’t respond for comment by the time of publication.