Administrative Priorities Diverge from University Values

In our classrooms, faculty in the humanities and social sciences grapple daily with basic questions about humanitarian values. As a recently hired adjunct instructor and a lecturer with over a decade of service to Loyola, we feel proud to work at a university whose stated social justice mission aligns with our own value commitments. 

Our colleagues across departments also often feel the same, and although some of us may never have studied Latin, we endeavor to practice cura personalis — care of the whole person — and magis — the greater good — on the job and in our lives.

Loyola students also embody these values. 

We’ve both observed how our students frequently exhibit a kindness that is reflected in their thoughtfulness and help to one another, in their questions, papers and projects, in their majors and long-term plans. 

Over the past year, we’ve been both shocked and saddened at how radically the priorities of Loyola’s top administration seem to diverge from the values that constitute the core strength of this university. Foremost in our minds is how their values and priorities have been on display in their contract negotiations with non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty. 

While faculty members at four-year institutions of higher learning are often perceived to be relatively privileged people, and those who’ve risen through the ranks can earn comparatively good salaries, this obscures the full picture. The overwhelming majority of students at Loyola are taught by part-time adjuncts and NTT faculty members, who comprise roughly half of the university’s teaching labor force, but just one-quarter of its labor costs, according to university management.

NTTs face burnout workloads. Although part-time adjuncts in the College of Arts and Sciences typically generate hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in tuition revenue for the university, based on calculations regarding tuition price per credit hour and the number of students NTTs teach each year, employment precarity and lack of benefits are often daily realities . 

Both NTT full-time and part-time faculty members receive pay that’s increasingly lagged behind the cost of living in a city where housing and food costs have made double-digit spikes in recent years. Loyola faculty work second or even third jobs to make ends meet. 

For over a year, in the course of more than 30 bargaining sessions, Loyola’s administration has maintained that it will not budge from an offer on compensation that would raise base wages for only a fraction of the lowest-paid full-time faculty and make future pay increases wholly contingent on management’s discretion. 

While we’ve pleaded with them to acknowledge that our living conditions are student learning conditions, they’ve staunchly refused to engage in any discussion of the cost of living, except to state that it wasn’t taken into consideration in their compensation proposal. 

This unwillingness to negotiate on compensation is paired with an insistence on unsustainable workloads and undercompensated departmental service. In short, consistent increases in student tuition are not distributed to the faculty teaching the majority of Loyola’s courses. 

If not dignified conditions for the faculty who teach Loyola students, what are the university’s financial priorities? 

At present, this administration’s values are reflected in its frankly audacious construction plan to demolish Coffey Hall and construct a gleaming Welcome Center, which will also house a suite of new lakeside administrative offices. 

This plan is advancing over and against grave faculty concerns about how this will impact teaching, learning and research, in complete disregard of higher education’s precarious status; the inflated costs of construction; and, shamefully, the austerity measures we’ve all been warned to expect. 

Our fullest vision of sustainable and secure working conditions would cost a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of dollars this boondoggle will surely require. 

Plans for where offices and research facilities will be relocated are vague, and, while no roadmap for construction or funding has been made public, there have been indications that this project would likely require taking loans — which Loyola must indefinitely pay to service — and even dipping into Loyola’s emergency fund. 

In these days and times, one would think leaders would be wary of a top-down decision to destroy first, assemble plans and funding later. And yet, here we are. 

Practical divergence from Jesuit values was also on display in the destruction of the flatiron building at 1224 Loyola Ave., which housed the singular Roman Susan Art Gallery, a beloved cafe, and some of the few remaining lower-cost housing units left in the neighborhood. 

Neglecting their stated commitments to service to others, community and inclusivity, the administration ignored the widespread calls to weigh community values against a strategy of demolition and land-banking. As neighbor Dave White observed in a Chicago Sun-Times letter to the editor Feb. 28, this was more than the loss of an historic structure integral to the local social fabric; it marked “the displacement of longtime Rogers Park residents and the continued erosion of affordable housing in our community.” 

In publications and promotions, Loyola routinely touts its Jesuit value commitments, rightly shining a light on the good works of its students and faculty. What, though, of its leadership? In bargaining, management representatives keep insisting that on issues of compensation and workload, their hands are tied. 

Administrators aren’t listening to the objections of the campus community regarding Coffey’s destruction and have, apparently, closed their eyes to broader indications of faculty dissatisfaction reflected in the recent campus Climate Survey. 

Does Loyola’s top leadership uphold Loyola’s core values? As writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin wrote, “I can’t believe what you say, because I see what you do.” Unlike ill-considered construction, paying faculty and all Loyola workers a dignified wage isn’t an unsustainable burden: It’s an investment in student learning, community well-being and the greater good.  

We hope the campus community will join us in calling on Loyola’s administration to untie their own hands, unstop their ears and open their eyes, to reflect with honesty and humility about how this university’s stated values can guide its budget priorities.

Dawn Herrera Helphand is an instructor of Political Science. Michael Slager is an instructor of the English Language Learning Program.