A letter to President Cunningham, Provost Ritter, and Vice President Horstman Regarding Appointment and Pay Confusion for NTT Faculty, August 28, 2025.
The following is an email sent to President Cunningham, Provost Ritter, and Vice President Horstman.
August 28, 2025
Dear President Cunningham, Provost Ritter, and Vice President Horstman,
We write to bring your attention to an urgent matter that requires immediate action.
Our membership has communicated to us several questions about faculty appointments for the 2025-26 academic year; non-tenure track faculty members in particular are experiencing acute uncertainty about whether they have appointments at all, and what their pay will be.
While we are still gathering information, our understanding is that widespread confusion, anxiety, and frustration stem from the following circumstances:
As you know, these are fraught times in higher education. Contingent faculty already face precarity as a daily working condition, and are all too aware of conversations about budget cuts, layoffs, and hiring freezes across campus. Without assurance to the contrary, it would be reasonable for many of them to fear, this late in August, that they do not have a job in September.
We object strenuously to hiring practices that appear to make it the responsibility of the employee to seek information about the terms of their employment that is posted at unknown times, in unknown places, and without any opportunity to negotiate, accept, or reject it.
Many of the challenges facing our institution are outside our control, but clearer communication with University employees about the terms of their labor is squarely within your power and capacity. Non-tenure track faculty constitute over 40% of all faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota, and we ask you to take the following immediate steps out of respect for the role they play in advancing the mission of our institution:
Sincerely,
The Executive Committee of the AAUP-UMTC:
William P. Jones, President
Heather Holcombe, Vice President
Gopalan Nadathur, Secretary
Laura Kane McElfresh, Treasurer
Ruth Shaw, Member-at-large
V.V. Ganeshananthan, Member-at-large
August 28, 2025
Dear President Cunningham, Provost Ritter, and Vice President Horstman,
We write to bring your attention to an urgent matter that requires immediate action.
Our membership has communicated to us several questions about faculty appointments for the 2025-26 academic year; non-tenure track faculty members in particular are experiencing acute uncertainty about whether they have appointments at all, and what their pay will be.
While we are still gathering information, our understanding is that widespread confusion, anxiety, and frustration stem from the following circumstances:
- Lack of communication about employment status
Contingent faculty (in job titles such as Lecturer, Senior Lecturer, Associate Teaching Professor, Education Specialist) who have customarily received letters of employment confirming their appointment and stipulating their pay did not receive them. Some received an automated email about a pay change, but no accompanying Notice of Employment. Others have discovered a Notice of Employment on MyU, but just days before classes begin, many are uninformed about where and how to verify their employment status.
Tenure track faculty are also experiencing these inconsistencies, with some receiving formal employment letters and others finding pay changes at MyU, but this lack of transparency is particularly concerning for contingent faculty who face structural uncertainty about their employment from one semester to another. Without a formal notice of reappointment, they must assume they will not be employed. - Lack of clarity around pay
Those contingent faculty who, through their own initiative, have confirmed their appointment for the upcoming year are reporting uncertainty about their pay. An email from the Office of Human Resources dated June 5 stated that the specifics of merit raises would be communicated on August 6, but that appears to have happened without uniformity or not at all. At this time, it is unclear whether Notices of Appointment on MyU do or do not reflect merit and/or equity increases, when such increases take effect, or when they might be communicated.
We are additionally hearing understandable frustration that merit and equity increases may be deferred by one-month without retroactive pay; such a policy would reflect a sizable decrease in any raise for those who work on short-term contracts and is, by definition, inequitable. Again, the lack of clarity around this matter means that contingent faculty might be several weeks into the semester before their salary is transparent to them–and that their salaries may effectively be lower than the salary stated on their current Notices of Appointment.
As you know, these are fraught times in higher education. Contingent faculty already face precarity as a daily working condition, and are all too aware of conversations about budget cuts, layoffs, and hiring freezes across campus. Without assurance to the contrary, it would be reasonable for many of them to fear, this late in August, that they do not have a job in September.
We object strenuously to hiring practices that appear to make it the responsibility of the employee to seek information about the terms of their employment that is posted at unknown times, in unknown places, and without any opportunity to negotiate, accept, or reject it.
Many of the challenges facing our institution are outside our control, but clearer communication with University employees about the terms of their labor is squarely within your power and capacity. Non-tenure track faculty constitute over 40% of all faculty appointments at the University of Minnesota, and we ask you to take the following immediate steps out of respect for the role they play in advancing the mission of our institution:
- Initiate college-wide communication from deans that addresses this confusion
- Initiate department-level outreach to confirm appointments and salaries for non-tenure track faculty
- Address this institutional error and improve clarity by implementing merit raises without delay, or with retroactive pay
Sincerely,
The Executive Committee of the AAUP-UMTC:
William P. Jones, President
Heather Holcombe, Vice President
Gopalan Nadathur, Secretary
Laura Kane McElfresh, Treasurer
Ruth Shaw, Member-at-large
V.V. Ganeshananthan, Member-at-large