Proposal Prompts Open Letter on Guest Faculty Labor Conditions

Tallulah Hawley ‘25

Photo via Sarah Lawrence College Archives

At Sarah Lawrence, a college so focused on multidisciplinary education, students are often unaware of the variance that exists within the labor conditions of the professors themselves. 

Guest faculty at Sarah Lawrence recently wrote an open letter to the SLC community at large to introduce themselves and the unpredictable terms of employment that guest faculty continuously find themselves in, waiting for the annual renewal of their contract. 

“Sarah Lawrence is so much about community and intellectual life and the creativity of community, the creativity of being in conversation with each other, and so we’re only asking for this to be seriously thought about and engaged with,” says Kate Zambreno, who teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in nonfiction writing at SLC. Zambreno is also one of the leaders behind the recent drive to make public the labor situation of guest faculty. “This question of why we are still called guests when we’ve been here for so long and we are so much part of the intellectual and creative life of this college.”

Jacob Slichter, a nonfiction writing guest professor at Sarah Lawrence College says, “I was recently at a rally of New York’s public school teachers and one of them said ‘our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions’ and that left a really strong impression on me.”

Public funds for education have been rapidly decreasing in the past few decades, leading colleges to move more towards a profit-oriented approach, including cutting funds or salaries where needed. 

 “Everything’s been sort of corporatized, so it’s not like this is happening only to Sarah Lawrence,” says Emmaia Gelman, a professor of public policy at Sarah Lawrence. “That’s why faculty and grad students across the country are going on strike. Grad students who teach and do grading and [are teaching assistants] and who teach courses on their own have been going on strike across the country for the last four or five years, and faculty have really drawn inspiration from that. It’s always the students who lead.”

Last Winter, adjunct faculty at the New School and Parsons went on strike for three weeks to protest differences in pay. According to the New York Times, “nearly 90% of the faculty [at the New School] is made up of untenured adjunct professors and lecturers.” The strike was resolved when the university raised the guest faculty’s pay rates, including “out-of-classroom compensation”. Similar actions have taken place at Rutgers University and Columbia University, with similar results.

Despite having been established only 7 years apart, the New School’s endowment is almost four times that of SLC’s, as of 2020.

Solutions proposed in the past at SLC to help aid guest faculty and better their circumstances have been dismissed. SLC admins’ latest proposal for guest faculty, according to the letter, includes “limiting full-time guests to three-year appointments, after which they would be terminated.” 

The reality of the proposal, and the sudden possibility of a 3 year appointment period, was a turning point for many guest faculty members.“I think that our concerns go beyond this proposal,” Slichter says. “The letter was one way to begin a larger conversation, with other guests and other faculty as well.” 

Zambreno, who has taught at colleges in the New York area for more than ten years added, “There was this idea that guests can come up with a letter to describe the conditions of their labor because there have been no surveys done of guest faculty,” 

“We love Sarah Lawrence, we want to work with regular faculty and we want to start, hopefully, a survey of who the guest faculty is so that we can get to know each other,” adds Zambreno. “All we’re saying is to acknowledge how much extra time and labor [we exert] and to be paid a salary that acknowledges our actual time, which even at part time with conferences and donning is closer to full time at other institutions.”

The letter highlights the pay discrepancy between not only guest and regular faculty, but also in contrast to the cost of living in NYC. Rather than being paid a full salary, a typical guest faculty member receives between twenty-five to thirty thousand a year to teach a 1:1 (typical SLC small seminar) course. 

SLC guest faculty are not reimbursed for out-of-classroom education time. For regular faculty, donning is considered ‘service’, a part of the tenure process that includes serving on committees and acting as an advisor for student theses. However, all donning done by guests after the students’ first year is unpaid, “but the guest faculty do it out of love for the students and out of commitment,” Zambreno says.

Health insurance is only available to guest faculty that teach a certain type of 1:1 course load every semester. The letter states, “When we are allowed to pay into the health insurance, which is not available to many of us, it is exorbitantly expensive in relation to our wages. Coverage for one person is roughly equivalent to what we are paid for a semester class”. Zambreno adds that most of the take-home pay of some of the guests they have spoken with has been almost completely diminished just by paying for the school health insurance. Additionally, guest faculty members are not given solid parental leave. 

Another item stressed in the letter is the misleading verbiage of the term ‘guest’ used to differentiate between the teaching positions. Professors rehired yearly are referred to as ‘guest faculty’, even though many of these individuals are technically working for the college full time, or have even been here for upwards of a decade. Faculty hired with a multi-year contract are ‘regular faculty’ and are either already tenured or are on the track towards achieving it. At other institutions, such as New School, the role of guest faculty aligns most similarly with that of adjunct professors. A non-definitive term in itself, adjunct roughly means non-permanent faculty. SLC also offers the position of ‘affiliate’ within the dance and theatre departments, a half-staff and half-guest position. On the Sarah Lawrence website, one is unable to find and/or identify which professors are actually hired on as guest faculty, affiliate, or regular.

At Sarah Lawrence, our education is incredibly unique and vastly different from other four-year institutions. Students have the opportunity to maintain personal relationships with their professors through the conference system and small class sizes. Sarah Lawrence prides itself on the uniqueness of their education, where students are able to develop alongside their professors, learning in tandem with each other. Despite this, guest faculty are not being properly compensated for their labor. 

According to the letter, “roughly half” of the professors are guest faculty, who receive their contracts only a few weeks before school begins in the fall. With so many dons and departments being made up of guest faculty, the guests are placed in a tedious and precarious position where they are annually unsure if they will be able to return to the community that they have dedicated themselves and their time to. 

“To have the support of students would be so incredibly uplifting to faculty who are struggling to maintain our commitment to teaching at the same time as struggling with the terms of our employment,” says Gelman. She urges students to “share the information and not make it a secret anymore.” 

Students can help by adding their name to the guest faculty letter here.