The Daily Free Press
Year xliv. Volume lxxxvi. Issue LIV
Thursday, May 1, 2014 The Independent Student Newspaper at Boston University
www.dailyfreepress.com
BU adjunct professors organizing vote to unionize Dept. of Education
helps college campuses combat sexual assault
By Taryn Ottaunick Daily Free Press Staff
As part of a national movement to end the alleged injustices of adjunct professors, members of the Boston University adjunct faculty are working to unionize. “The adjunct professors are doing this in order to improve our working conditions and our working conditions translate directly to the learning environment of the students,” said member of the organizing committee Maureen Sullivan, an adjunct professor at the College of Arts and Sciences. “That’s just really clear to everyone who is doing the organizing. It’s not just the Boston area, it’s all across the nation. That’s the bottom line.” One of the main concerns cited by members of the adjunct faculty was the lack of pay parity between adjunct professors compared to fulltime tenured professors, Sullivan said. “Boston is a very expensive place to live and adjuncts at BU are paid pennies on the dollar of what tenure-track professors are paid,” she said. “That just doesn’t translate into a living wage. It’s very difficult to actually have even a low standard of living in this area based on the pay we’re earning.” A full-time professor at BU earns an average of $157,000 a year, while the average BU adjunct professor earns $3,750 to $9,563 per course, according to the Adjunct Action BU Fact Sheet. “The idea is to get some better wages with some parity to full-time professors,” said Tinker Ready, an adjunct professor in the College of Communication. “Full-time professors have other duties. They have research they have to do, meetings they have to go to. They do have additional duties, but if you look at the numbers, there still isn’t very good parity.” Another grievance of adjunct professors is exclusion from faculty decisions and lack of provisions necessary to teach to their full potential, such as proper office spaces. “Ten adjuncts share this office [COM B40],” said Gary Duehr, an adjunct professor in the College of Communication. “I call it a mini hovel. We have a broken fluorescents light, heating pipes and a PC that’s about a thousand years old. I’m not sure if the Dean has any idea that 10 adjunct professors share this office or that it looks like this, but it’s basically slave
By Adrian Baker Daily Free Press Staff
PHOTO BY FALON MORAN/DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF
In hopes of improving their working conditions, Boston University adjunct professors are unionizing.
quarters down here.” Low wages and obligations from the other jobs many adjuncts must take on to make a living wage hinder their ability to devote ample time to student attention outside of the classroom, Ready said. “I try to find ways to squeeze the amount of time I spend on each class,” she said. “I would say, depending on these hours, I make between $10 and $20 an hour. … I try to fit it [adjunct teaching work] into 20 hours a week, but sometimes it’s hard. Some people think of it as only classroom time, but prep time and grading take up so much time. People say all we do is teach, but the reality is we all work in our fields … that’s what we bring to the schools.” The movement for a union at BU is in the beginning stages. Organizers on the BU committee are currently collecting signatures from members of the adjunct faculty in order to gain enough to establish a vote to unionize, said organizer Antonio Ochoa, a CAS adjunct professor. “Right now, we’re hoping to get the resource for organizing,” Ochoa said. “The colleagues I have talked to are concerned and they share concerns about their job situation and security. … They want to form a union and be active in something like this.” Support from the adjunct faculty at BU has been positive so far, said Stella John-
son, a member of the organizing committee and COM adjunct professor. “I have not talked to one adjunct who didn’t want to join the union once they were told they have a legal right to collective bargaining,” Johnson said. “Once everybody understood that if we all got together, we’d be protected by the union and be able to bargain for a paycheck with parity with the full-time faculty pay, they were on board. … Only one person declined to vote for the union out of hundreds.” The movement at BU is part of a larger project organized by Adjunct Action, a branch of the Service Employees International Union, to form unions for adjunct professors at universities throughout the entire Greater Boston Area, Sullivan said. “SEIU and Adjunct Action are a campaign to organize all of the Boston area universities in a metro-wide model,” Sullivan said. “… Because SEIU has shown to be successful with this metro model in D.C. and other areas, we think Boston is appropriate for this.” The Metro Organizing Strategy involves gathering the adjunct faculty at schools across a select city to ensure equal treatment at each, Ready said. “SEIU approached some people on
Adjuncts, see page 4
The Office for Civil Rights within the U.S. Department of Education issued a report Tuesday providing guidelines to assess the prevalence of sexual assault on American college campuses, which officials are hoping public and private colleges such as Boston University will implement to prevent discrimination on the basis of sex in their schools, outlawed under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972. “For far too long, the incentives to prevent and respond to sexual violence have gone in the wrong direction at schools and on college campuses,” said U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan in a Tuesday press release. “As interpreted and enforced by the department, Title IX and other federal laws are changing these incentives to put an end to rape-permissive cultures and campus cultures that tolerate sexual assault.” The report and its guidelines, prepared by the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault, are intended to help universities prepare a survey that will assess both the frequency of sexual assaults occurring on campuses and students’ attitudes regarding the incidents. The DOE will consider pursuing legislation to make such a survey mandatory by 2016, the report stated. “It’s definitely a step forward, and it’s really encouraging to see that this will be something that is governmentally enforced and not just something that will be up to students telling administration that they care,” said Tori Dutcher-Brown, the public relations coordinator for BU’s Center for Gender, Sexuality & Activism. Dutcher-Brown, a College of Arts and Sciences freshman, said it was important to realize that resources at BU for addressing sexual violence on campus have not always been available. The CGSA was established five years ago, and the BU Sexual Assault Response & Prevention Center is only three years old, she said.
Guidelines, see page 4
Memorial for deceased CAS student Binland Lee disappears, family responds By Drew Schwartz Daily Free Press Staff
On the anniversary of Boston University student Binland Lee’s death in an Allston apartment fire last April, friends and family assembled a memorial Monday where the blaze that took her life broke out. When they left to gather a few additional supplies for the remembrance and returned to place them at the scene, more than $500 worth of flowers and photographs had mysteriously been removed. “We spent about three hours that morning shopping for frames for the photographs, for flowers, for candles, candies and juices that Binland liked,” said Cait McAndrews, a former roommate of Lee’s who helped assemble her memorial. “When we got to the house, it was a very meticulous process. It probably took us a little over two hours to set the entire thing up.” McAndrews joined Lee’s mother Mei Kwong, who traveled from New York, and other friends and family members in front of 87 Linden St. where Lee, 22, was killed a month before graduating from BU. Those mourning the anniversary of Lee’s death left at around 4:30 p.m. to buy additional wreaths and flowers for the memorial, McAndrews said. “By the time we got back at [6 p.m.], we pulled into the driveway and immedi-
ately realized that something was terribly wrong,” she said. “There was nothing left. There was no sign that there had ever been a memorial there. The earth was raked over cleanly and everyone was in disbelief.” Lee’s friends and family searched trashcans along Linden Street for the materials they purchased earlier that day as well as a photograph Lee had given to her mother just before the April 2013 fire, McAndrews said. They knocked on apartment doors throughout the neighborhood to see if anyone had witnessed the removal of the memorial without success. Given the speed with which the memorial was taken apart and because it seemed as though several people had disassembled it, Binland’s friends and family suspected her former landlord may have removed it, McAndrews said. When Lee’s friend and roommate Noelle Olsen tried to call their former landlord, the property owner answered before quickly hanging up the phone, McAndrews said. When Lee’s former housemate and McAndrews then tried the landlord’s number, they received no answer, she said. “It was an interruption of our grieving process,” McAndrews said. “Everyone was really excited to be able to come back after we all went to dinner with Mei, to be able to see it that night, light the candles again. To have everything taken away so quickly,
KYRA LOUIE/DAILY FREE PRESS STAFF
Friends and family of Binland Lee, the College of Arts and Sciences senior who died last April in a three-alarm fire on Linden Street in Allston, are outraged over the sudden removal of the gifts and flowers they left to memorialize the victim.
not as many people were even able to see everything that was set up. Mei was hoping that there would be a big turnout, and that it would be a huge celebration of Binland’s life in tribute. Everything just was changed so quickly.” Binland’s family and friends installed a second memorial Monday night on Linden
St., and paid tribute to it Tuesday morning, McAndrews said. To her knowledge, the memorial is still standing. 2013 Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences graduate Sheba Ebhote met Lee in their freshman year at
Memorial, see page 2