Editor’s Note: In December 2024, an earlier version of this letter was sent to the Board of Trustees asking for support surrounding fair contracts. In an effort to encourage further negotiations, the unions are publishing this piece as an open letter.
Dear members of the Tufts Board of Trustees,
We write to you as members of the Tufts University Full-time Lecturers and SMFA Professors of the Practice unions to provide critical information on the status of our contract negotiations. We are communicating with you directly, as these negotiations have significant implications for Tufts’ mission of being a “student-centered research university” delivering “transformative experiences for students and faculty.” We remain willing to bargain with the university’s designated representatives.
We thank you for your service and dedication to Tufts, a university that many of you — and your families — have personally experienced as a uniquely special place. Like you, we love Tufts. We have dedicated our careers to creating life-changing learning experiences for our students.
We represent a significant portion of full-time lecturers at the School of Arts and Sciences and School of the Museum of Fine Arts. There are 122 FTLs in A&S who represent approximately 30% of the school’s full-time teaching faculty. This fall, FTLs are teaching more than 400 courses with over 10,000 total seats. On average, each undergraduate is taking 1 ½ courses taught by an FTL. The 33 SMFA PoPs represent all of the full-time studio faculty there and are teaching 655 students in 53 courses in the fall 2024 semester.
Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions. Unfortunately, there are significant salary and workload challenges that make it increasingly difficult to deliver on Tufts’ mission of providing transformative experiences. In our bargaining sessions with the administration that started in April 2024, we have repeatedly stressed the need for livable salaries and fair, equitable workloads so that we can continue to provide an exceptional education for our students.
Our salaries are currently not livable and lag behind those of peer institutions. The entry-level salary for FTLs of $64,000 is just below the living wage for a single adult with no children in the Boston metropolitan region (for example, according to the MIT Living Wage calculator, Middlesex County, where Tufts’ Medford/Somerville campus is located, has a living wage of $64,870). The average salary for PoPs and FTLs (approximately $93,000, based on available data) is around 80% of the area's median income (depending on household size) — a level that makes us eligible for some publicly subsidized affordable housing programs in the greater Boston region. For many of us, especially those raising families, affording housing close to Tufts is impossible. Many of us are forced to live further from campus and spend more time commuting, which decreases the time we have to teach and advise students and spend with our own families. 39% of PoPs live outside of Massachusetts due to the high costs of housing and studio space. Accounting for the cost of living, salaries for full-time teaching faculty at Tufts rank No. 12 out of 13 peer institutions. This data includes all non-tenure track faculty at Tufts, including FTLs and PoPs. The peer institutions are ones that Tufts reports to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System coordinated by the U.S. Department of Education, and costs are adjusted using the MIT Living Wage Calculator. At SMFA, the loss of 10 out of 28 new faculty hires since 2017 — including nine faculty of color — has significantly disrupted programs and diminished opportunities for students to learn from diverse voices and practicing artists. This turnover reflects the particular challenges faced by PoPs, who are expected to maintain both rigorous teaching schedules and active artistic careers, all while navigating limited institutional support. Many of the faculty who have left Tufts for other universities were offered higher salaries and more institutional support.
We are overworked, and workloads continue to grow. Undergraduate enrollments in A&S (including SMFA) increased by 670 full-time students (a 14% increase) from 2019–23, yet the number of full-time faculty has not kept pace, increasing only 7.3% over that same period. At SMFA alone, undergraduate enrollment has doubled from 2019–23, while full-time SMFA faculty have only increased 24%. On its website, Tufts boasts an undergraduate “student-faculty ratio of 9:1 and an average class size of approximately 20.” In reality, there are 100 to 400 students in many entry-level classes that are disproportionately taught by FTLs. The increase in students has also led to a higher advising workload. Because FTLs teach the equivalent of six courses per year, including many introductory courses, and because these classes often have large enrollments, FTLs are also relied upon heavily by students to be formal and informal advisors. If done well, advising duties reach far beyond simply picking classes and require a high level of personalized attention to each advisee’s needs. In SMFA, PoPs already have a heavy load, conducting labor-intensive student reviews — 20 individual review boards per semester — while also teaching full course loads and maintaining active professional artistic practices. Yet, the Tufts administration is proposing that PoPs advise another 20 students each year. Our students deserve a more personalized experience, and we deserve realistic work schedules during advising periods and throughout the academic year.
Our demands for livable salaries and fair and equitable workloads have been broadly supported by the Tufts community. More than 2,000 students and their families, alumni and community partners signed a petition delivered to University President Sunil Kumar on Oct. 9, 2024. That same day, we delivered letters signed by faculty from 28 departments and programs in support of fair contracts.
In December 2024, we requested additional meetings with Kumar and Provost Caroline Genco and have invited them to negotiations. Since then, they have not responded to schedule a meeting.
We now respectfully ask you, the Board of Trustees, for your support for fair contracts. The School of Arts and Science, the School of Engineering and SMFA are currently in good financial health, despite the budget “austerity” across the university. Overall, Tufts reported a surplus of $34 million on a budget of $1.23 billion for 2023–24. The university just announced a new $6 million mortgage assistance program for faculty; however, this positive step is only available to tenure-line faculty and to tenure-equivalent faculty in the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. Prioritizing resources to support our needs could transform our lives and allow us to be even better teachers. The raises that we propose are less than $1.5 million annually and only 0.26% of the overall AS&E and SMFA expenses in 2023–24.
Tufts prides itself on offering a high-touch, transformative educational experience — one that depends crucially on the dedicated full-time lecturers in A&S and the practicing artist-professors at SMFA. The enormous cost of a Tufts education (No. 1 in Massachusetts and No. 6 in the country) is justified by the quality of the education and experience. But we need to deliver on that by supporting teaching faculty. Tufts faculty should be able to afford to live within an hour of Tufts. We faculty need manageable workloads so that we can spend more time with students, more time creating our curricula and more time engaged in professional artistic practices.
Thank you for your time and attention. We welcome the opportunity to meet and talk with any and all of you. If you have any questions or would like more information, please contact TuftsJointUnions@gmail.com.
Sincerely,
On behalf of the bargaining committees and contract action teams of the SMFA Professors of the Practice Union and the A&S Full-time Lecturers Union
