This site was founded by parents of Wellesley Students
We are concerned about the present and future of Wellesley.
Letter to President Johnson
Mailed May 13, 2025 to President Johnson and the entire Wellesley administration
WPBC Letter (pdf)
DownloadAbout Wellesley Parents for a Better College
Our Mission
We want your help to convince the College to settle on a fair contract for faculty that improves, rather than cheapens, our children’s education.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Please reach us at support@WPBC.cloud if you cannot find an answer to your question.
Mediation during bargaining isn’t like mediation in a divorce, for example. First, mediation isn’t binding. The mediator is meant to help both sides clarify their positions. Through this clarification, the mediator helps both sides think about how they can compromise. What explanations would the College give to a third party that it can’t already give to the Union? For example, the College has yet to explain why Wellesley should adopt a five course load. The Union understands the College’s arguments about peer institutions and market value. But these aren’t reasons why Wellesley should change the status quo, which has enabled Wellesley to offer a world-class education. The College’s arguments don’t indicate a problem at Wellesley that a five course load would solve. Bringing in a mediator isn’t necessary. It’s necessary for the College to offer reasons that justify changing the very fabric of a Wellesley education. And if it can’t do that face-to-face with the Union, why should one expect it could do so through a third-party?
Conversely, the Union has offered reasons for keeping a four course workload. Consider the most basic argument in favor of the status quo: Fewer overall students means a NTT can dedicate more time to each student. Individualized attention produces better learning outcomes. Four courses gives NTTs fewer overall students than five courses. Thus, four courses gives students a better education. How could a mediator clarify this argument? Both sides understand each other. A mediator isn’t necessary.
Another reason the College wants mediation is based on the claim that a mediator will speed up negotiations. Thus far, the College has shown no sense of urgency in coming to the bargaining table. Typically, both sides engage in non-stop bargaining before a strike (to avert it) and during a strike (to end it). During the 29 day strike the College met the Union for 14 hours of bargaining. If the College wanted to end the strike quickly, it would have come to the bargaining table more often. There’s no reason to believe that the College will come to mediation any more frequently than it has already come to the table. A mediator can’t force the College to the table. A mediator is unnecessary.
Finally, mediation isn’t binding. Imagine the mediator tells the College that the Union should have a four course workload. The College could continue to push for five anyway.
The Union agreed to mediation over the summer as a possible path forward given the College’s demonstrated reticence to make use of the normal bargaining process to settle a contract quickly. During the strike, the College continued to draw out the bargaining process by refusing to meet for more than 6 hours a week while also canceling one of the scheduled sessions. Given the College’s slow-walk strategy, the Union agreed to mediation over the summer because it is dedicated to settling a fair contract as soon as possible. The Union is willing to work with the College through an equitable mediation process in case “mediation” is the process that’s able to get the College to make serious movement on key proposals.
The Union is open to mediation now given what the community learned about the College as a bargaining partner. The strike made clear that the College is willing to disengage and let the community suffer until it gets to do things its own way. In an effort to bring the College back to negotiations, the Union agreed to mediation. While the Union retains all of its reservations about mediation listed above, it is important to try mediation since the College has slowed other paths forward through its minimal engagement at the bargaining table. The Union is engaging mediation on the chance that it motivates the College to negotiate with the appropriate urgency. The Union entered mediation over the summer to make sure it pursued every possibility for reaching a fair contract before the start of the Fall semester.
The major sticking points are Workload, Compensation, and Reappointment procedure. These go hand-in-hand. The status quo four course workload allows NTTs to offer individualized attention, advising, and mentorship to students. The College is pushing for a five course load on the basis of peer institutions and market metrics. Workload is covered more thoroughly in the next question.
In terms of compensation, the College’s current offer raises NTT work by 25% without a 25% raise in salary. The most recent offer of five courses for an additional $12,000 dollars is misleading. Currently, if a NTT teaches a fifth course (an “overload”), they receive an additional $10,000 for that course. Thus the College’s offer of $12,000 dollars for an additional course is, effectively, only a $2,000 raise in exchange for a lifetime of overtime. Alternatively, the College has offered current NTTs the option of teaching a four course load with no raise beyond annual increases.
Finally, Reappointment ties together both Workload and Compensation. Currently, when a NTT’s contract ends, they must prepare a dossier of everything they accomplished during that appointment. They present this information to the College as justification for reappointment; as evidence that the College should offer them another multi-year contract. The NTT must reapply for the job they have successfully completed. They must “reapply” because there is no expectation or presumption of another contract being offered (i.e. of being reappointed). At the end of every contract, a NTT effectively applies for the job they have successfully completed as if they are a new candidate for a new position. “Successfully completed” calls attention to the fact that NTTs are evaluated every semester by students and at the end of every academic year by their department. At the end of a multi-year contract, there is ample evidence already on file to support the NTT’s effectiveness.
WOAW is asking for a reappointment standard that’s consistent with the constant evaluation of NTT faculty. The Union is asking for a presumption of reappointment after the first contract. A presumption of reappointment is basically the standard for most jobs. While your continued employment depends on you doing your job well, you expect to be employed at your job so long as you do it well (baring massive issues like downsizing or restructuring). Your job evaluations are an opportunity to assess your growth and determine where you can improve. The expectation between you and your boss is that you’ll remain employed to continue your growth and show improvement. If, over time, your performance decreases or you don’t improve, then you expect to be let go. WOAW is merely asking for the same assumption–a NTT should be able to expect constant reappointment so long as they do their job well; they should not have to convince the College to rehire them, and not someone else, every 3-5 years.
Wellesley NTT faculty currently do a great deal of work outside the classroom – advising and mentoring (including thesis advising), supporting student research, academic program support (and in some cases chairing programs), conducting their own research, participating on college service committees, etc. Were Wellesley to make all NTTs teach five courses, they would not have time for those activities (much of which would likely be offloaded onto tenure-line faculty who, with many more students competing for their attention, would also be able to give less to each). Increasing NTT faculty workload decreases the amount of time and attention all faculty can give to each student and fundamentally changes the nature of the education (and the relationships with professors) that Wellesley is offering students. Many NTT faculty simply cannot do the type of work they do now with a greater workload. In institutions where a larger course load is common practice, faculty are not able to give as much personalized attention to students (and are not able to contribute to the academic program in the many ways that Wellesley NTT currently do).
This issue, in addition to being about the quality of a Wellesley education, is also a job security issue for NTT faculty. If Wellesley increases NTT workload by 25%, the College will likely fire (or rather, not renew contracts for) a corresponding percentage of NTT faculty because it needs fewer people to cover those courses. This change in workload signals an attempt to shrink the faculty.
WOAW also has this question for the College. In an email dated 4/23 the Provost asserts: A five- or six-course teaching load is the standard for NTT faculty across nearly all of our peer institutions, including Wesleyan, Smith, Mount Holyoke, Barnard, MIT, Tufts, and Boston College.
The College offers no selection criteria for determining these schools as Wellesley’s peer group except that their NTTs cover the same course load the College wants for Wellesley NTTs. If “has a five course load in the North East” is the only criteria for selecting these schools as Wellesley’s peer group, then the College has committed the logical fallacy of circular reasoning: Wellesley NTTs should have a five course load because our peer schools do; our peer schools are determined by having their NTTs teach a five course load; so, Wellesley NTTs should have a five course load because our peer schools do…and so on and so on.
The College has not shown if or how it considered the impact of other criteria for determining our peers such as: the size of the NTT faculty relative to the tenure stream; the presence or absence of graduate students, who do the bulk of teaching; the way “course” is defined (a course could be a class of 20 students, 3 independent studies, or a single honors thesis, for example); the student/endowment ratio; the faculty/student ratio; the school’s national rank; or even College vs University. The Union continues to wait for the College to provide answers.
Point blank: It is extremely difficult for someone to live on $83,000 a year in Wellesley without assistance (such as the College owned, subsidized housing for NTT faculty). The increase in pay is necessary to make living in the greater Boston area possible since the current starting salary for lecturers is around $64,500.
The new base salary proposed reflects what NTT salaries would be if the College had not frozen them at $55,000 since 2008. WOAW arrived at $83,000 as the base salary by calculating the salary growth that would have occurred over time. $83,000 is the market value of NTT labor if the College had not prohibited market growth for so many years.
Mediation is more thoroughly addressed in question one. The College chose a law firm and a lead lawyer known for union busting. The established relationship between the College’s lead lawyer and the federal mediator proposed before the strike could raise questions concerning neutrality and fairness.
There are two things to note here.
First, the Union initially rejected meditation for the reasons listed in question one. The effect of the relationship between the originally proposed federal mediator and the College lawyer was and remains mere speculation. At the time, there were many good reasons to reject mediation regardless of the possible effects of the mediator's relationship with the College lawyer.
Second, federal mediation services have been suspended due to the current administration. More interesting is the fact that the College should have known federal mediation had been suspended before sending an email to the campus community castigating the Union for rejecting meditation as mentioned in the March 26th bargaining update.
The Union is run by its members. WOAW members discuss among themselves how they proceed. The Bargaining Committee, made up of faculty from different departments who are in the Union, takes the lead in these discussions. The Bargaining Committee is elected by Union membership.
More than 40% of NTT faculty have been at Wellesley for more than 10 years. And 20% have been at the college for more than 20 years. Many of WOAW’s demands have been part of discussions with the President and Provost since at least the late 2000s. During this time, an advisory group was formed to help NTTs bring concerns like compensation and reappointment to senior leadership. As an advisory group, NTTs had no guarantee the Provost or President would take their concerns into account or act on them. Indeed, history shows the College made little to no movement on these issues until it recently increased NTT starting salaries to $64,500.
While WOAW is new, the faculty who make it up are dedicated members of the Wellesley community. They are invested in Wellesley's success because they are educators who choose to make their careers here.
The strike is over. But the Union and the College have not signed a contract. The end of the strike means NTTs return to work and bargaining continues.
Over the course of the strike, the College took advantage of the current political climate and put workers at risk by drawing attention to workers on visas and also by announcing that after 30 days they would discontinue paying members' health insurance premiums. Academic workers across the country have gone on strike many times. According to the best available knowledge, there is not a single instance in which their college or university cut off their healthcare. Multinational companies such as John Deere and GM have threatened to cut off striking employees’ healthcare coverage only to back down in the face of tremendous public pressure.
As the strike went on, WOAW’s bargaining committee continually re-assessed members’ risk, given the political climate and communications made by the College. On the evening of the 28th day of the strike response, the bargaining committee quickly and unanimously voted to end the strike to protect the Union’s most vulnerable members.
If you are concerned about how the College will provide redress to those impacted by the strike, WOAW encourages all parents to email or call the President, Provost, and Board of Trustees. Here is a link to a template you can use. It also includes the contact information in case you’d like to send your own message.