Last Friday only 35 of 186 members of the Rutgers University Senate in New Jersey crossed the picket lines and signed in to attend the first meeting of the year. However, because the Senate requires that at least 62 members be present, the meeting was unable to take any official action.
Rutgers history professor Rudolph Bell was involved in the protest.
“As far as I can remember, and I’ve been here since 1968, the senate has been stopped by hurricanes and snowfall, but never before by protest,” Bell said.
Professors organized the protest because they have not had a contract with the university since last summer.
“We have been working without a contract since June 2003. We’re anxious not to disrupt class and student life by going on strike, so protesting at the senate seemed the best approach to get our message across,” Bell said.
Bell claims the support of students was critical to carrying out the protest.
“The senate is the highest legislative body in the university, composed of faculty, students and administrators. The faculty is not a majority. The students felt strongly about this because they realize that a high-quality education is in their best interests. People won’t work for nothing. I think that an increase in salary should not necessarily lead to an increase in tuition. There should be a better way,” Bell said.
Some administrators felt the protest was an ineffective method of expressing discontent, since it interfered with the senate’s role on campus.
“The principle of shared governance is embodied in the university senate, which plays a key role at Rutgers. In many ways, the faculty union’s decision to boycott that meeting undermines the faculty’s role in decision making at Rutgers,” said Sandra Lanman, associate director of communications for the New Brunswick University Relation office, one of three Rutgers campuses. Lanman also said there would be no changes in procedure following the protest.
The trend in Rutgers professors’ salaries is downward compared to other universities, according to a study done by the University of Virginia. It appears, however, that the senior faculty gets paid more and the younger faculty less.
According to studies done by Cornell University, Rutgers professors and associate professors earn significantly more than University of Wisconsin professors. However, Wisconsin pays its incoming faculty much more than Rutgers does. In addition, many universities have cut costs in salaries as medical and health benefits have increased.
In an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education, the president of Rutgers University, Richard L. McCormick, spoke of meetings that had been held at the university to raise teaching assistants’ pay by 12 percent over the next two years. McCormick went on to mention the problems the university was facing in raising salaries because of a drop in state funding.
Lanman said Rutgers has experienced few other protests.
“There have been other protests, very few in number, but none to our knowledge that interrupted university senate business,” Lanman said.
Rachel Holmes, a Rutgers student and senate member, said students did not get involved because they did not hear about it until it was too late.
“I think students had mixed reactions because they didn’t want to take sides without understanding the issues,” she said. “I know that this protest has been in the works for some time, but I don’t know if anything will happen.”
Holmes said Bell coordinated a student breakfast for later this week to present the professors’ perspective and to further educate students on the issue.
“It’s not that students aren’t behind the professors. It’s that we are not yet fully informed,” she said. “The TAs are the ones really getting shafted in all of this. I think students are in the process of sorting this out to take sides.”
