Howard University faculty halted their strike hours after their union reached an early-morning tentative labor deal with school officials and narrowly avoided a planned three-day strike.
“This has been a long time coming,” said Cyrus Hampton, a master instructor in the English department.
“The willingness of my colleagues and I to step forward and really push this from just a bargaining-room conversation to the real effort needed to push it through, that comes from watching students and watching students stand up for themselves,” Hampton said.
“Our contingent faculty are a respected part of our institution,” a statement says. “We share the collective goal of educating our students and today, because of this agreement and efforts to bargain in good faith on both sides, we will achieve that goal uninterrupted.”
According to the union, nontenure-track faculty earn an average annual salary of $51,000, and leaders had expected to raise their starting pay to $60,000 over the course of the three-year contract. The union said on Wednesday that it also pushed to bring adjunct pay on par with what full-time faculty are paid for each course they teach, arguing that students pay the same tuition irrespective of who is teaching in their classes.
