Tag: Students

Seeking Holiday Meal Hosts for Students

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Every Thanksgiving, faculty and staff at Temple have opened their homes to international students who are interested in celebrating the holiday as guests of a family. This year, TAUP is teaming up with Dr. Sara Goldrick-Rab to find families to host students who are food-insecure.

Surveys have shown that just over 1 in 3 students attending Temple are food-insecure, and a growing number have been utilizing the Cherry Pantry. The Cherry Pantry, in the Howard Gittis Student Center, makes grocery items and personal hygiene products available to students in need. But holidays are a special time, where students may be both away from their families and food insecure.

If you would be willing to welcome a guest at your Thanksgiving or other holiday meal, this year or next, please complete this form. You will be contacted if there is a possible guest for your table.

An Adjunct Couple Speaks for Contract Ratification

Our names are Canan and James. We’re partners and we both teach as adjunct faculty in the Department of Sociology. As adjunct faculty at Temple University, we deserve to be recognized as workers who contribute to the university’s mission to provide excellence in teaching to Temple’s diverse and engaged student population. That’s why we’re excited to be members of TAUP and ratify our first-ever union contract with an overwhelming YES  vote.

We all know too well that adjunct labor and the particular difficulties of adjunct life often remain hidden. In many cases, full-time faculty have never met the adjunct faculty in their own departments who teach a large portion of the classes and keep departments running.  Most students don’t really know if their instructor is an adjunct, and if they do, what that means for our day-to-day life. Many don’t  know what a low percentage of the tuition they pay actually goes toward paying their adjunct instructors.

Ratifying this contract will give adjuncts an immediate pay bump from $1300/credit to $1425, and another raise next year to $1500. It provides 50% and 25% health care subsidies to adjuncts.  It also lays the groundwork for adjuncts to build meaningful job security, seniority, and a promotion structure into future contracts. This contract shines light on our conditions as precarious adjunct labor, and recognizes adjuncts not simply as miscellaneous faces in the crowd, but as significant workers who put our time and energy into educating Temple’s diverse student population.

Uniting with full-time faculty in the bargaining process provides space for us to share our mutual concerns and use our strength in numbers to win. By working under a contract, adjunct faculty can begin to work towards obtaining the rights to a basic and decent livelihood that all university workers deserve. All members of TAUP will have the opportunity to ratify this contract between September 25 – 29 in an online vote. Add your name here if you plan on helping our first contract pass with an overwhelming YES vote.

In solidarity,
Canan Tanir

James Parisot

Adjunct Instructors, Sociology

Fighting for DACA and the Dreamers 

Wednesday, TAUP jointly released a letter with Temple Student Government, voicing our opposition to President Trump’s unconscionable decision to phase out Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA).  There, we urged all of us to contact our elected officials to make DACA permanent and to call on people to attend a meeting today from 3:00-4:45 at the Howard Gittis Student Center 200C to discuss how to respond most effectively to this assault on 800,000 people brought to our country—which is now their country, too—as children.  (We also urge anybody interested to attend “Creating a Welcoming Campus Community” at Paley Library on Wednesday, September 20th, at noon.)

Our national union, the American Federation of Teachers, has also released a statement.  We were heartened, too, by the letter yesterday from The Faculty Senate, which outlines some concrete steps faculty and librarians can take to support their students, both in and out of the classroom.

TAUP additionally recommends that concerned members consult the following resources assembled by The Stephen and Sandra Sheller Center for Social Justice at Temple’s Law School.  It offers trustworthy and current information about this issue as well as contact information for local agencies that provide assistance to immigrants.

Finally, we call on Temple’s Administration to express their support for DACA.  President Englert signed on to a letter defending DACA back in November, but it is imperative that Temple raise its voice again, as Penn State, Pitt, and many, many other universities have already done to speak forcefully against this recent decision and to outline steps the Temple community can take to protect Dreamers.

 

Note:  Earlier this week we promised to post photos documenting our students honoring their teachers at graduation last Spring.  Because of the urgency of this and other matters we have had to postpone that message until next week.