We demand the following:

A 20% cost of living adjustment for all Graduate Workers and University Staff at CU Boulder.

A minimum per class rate of $14,000 for Non-Tenure Track Faculty, including Lecturers, Adjuncts, and Instructors in all departments at CU Boulder.

A raise of $10,000 for each promotion from Assistant to Associate to Full Teaching Professor.

Annual 6% cost of living adjustments added into existing contracts for all CU Boulder Graduate Workers, University Staff, and Non-Tenure Track Faculty.

After over a thousand signatures on our previous petition and public shaming at their March 2023 meeting, the Board of Regents recently sought praise for their efforts to compensate NTT faculty fairly by incrementally increasing pay and changing the titles of rostered instructional faculty without connecting the promotions to pay increases. These efforts echo CU Boulder’s attempts to tout 3% raises for graduate students as meaningful actions of care. Such publicity stunts distract from the fact that the university system has done next to nothing to improve the compensation or work conditions of instructors, lecturers, university staff, and graduate workers across the CU system. Clearly, upper administration is not interested in meaningful change unless their hand is forced.

Meanwhile, inflation has decreased the true value of all of our wages and salaries. University workers need a 20% raise to keep up with cost-of-living increases. Even with recent raises, our real wages are still lower than at any point in the last six years. This crisis of inflation is deeply felt for the most vulnerable workers in the CU System. Our university has refused to act as staff become dependent on the campus food pantry, unable to afford basic necessities necessary to live. As the Regents already know, an adjunct lecturer would need to teach 15 classes a year to afford a 2-bedroom apartment in Boulder and an instructor would need a 30% pay increase.

The professional contributions of our instructional and university staff contribute much more than the university is paying us in return. Low salaries lead to high turnover among lecturers, instructors, university staff, and graduate workers, and this shifting workforce prevents departments from providing CU students with consistent and quality course offerings. Departments across the CU system are often stuck in a cycle of hiring and training workers because of the high turnover. Salary compression and a lack of clear paths to promotion present consistent challenges for instructional and university staff. CU salaries and wages are not competitive, and many workers leave for higher paying jobs in the private sector. Many graduate students, non-tenure track faculty, and university staff cannot afford the lost earning potential of staying at CU Boulder and leave for more sustainable work. If not, many are forced to work multiple jobs or teach on multiple campuses to make ends meet. This presents numerous challenges to faculty and departments who need to recruit quality students, teachers and researchers; it also harms the university’s reputation and its status as an R1 institution.

CU works because we do. Few employees of the university work only their contracted hours. Graduate students, lecturers, instructors, and university staff alike are pushed to take on unpaid work that benefits the university under the guise of advancing their career. NTT faculty publish, present at conferences, advise students, write recommendation letters, participate on multiple committees, build departmental community and culture, and take on many other duties outside of their contract requirements to the benefit of CU Boulder with no compensation in return. Certain graduate programs at CU Boulder even require students to pay for the “learning opportunity” of performing labor from which the university makes money. University staff are forced to juggle multiple roles due to extremely high turnover as they lose members of their team, working two to three jobs for the pay of one. Women and people of color are burdened with even more unpaid labor than their colleagues as they are asked to join countless committees and projects, ultimately tokenizing their valuable perspectives.

This situation is clearly untenable and must significantly change to meet our moment.

Our demands for increased compensation would represent a significant expense for CU Boulder. We do not demand these wages out of greed but because this is what we are worth as educators and scholars who make the university run. The administration seems to have no problem spending resources on building renovations or huge compensation packages for upper administration, even with inadequate state funding. It is time for the university to spread some of this wealth to the academic underclass that keeps the university running. Our working conditions are our students’ learning conditions and we demand only what we are worth.