Non-Tenure Track Faculty Vote to Allow Strike if Demands Not Met

The non-tenure track (NTT) faculty in the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS) have authorized the bargaining committee to issue a strike in the case the university doesn’t make moves toward meeting their demands at the bargaining meeting April 20.

Of the 244 faculty who voted, about 90% voted to allow a strike. The decision to authorize a strike was made after a total of 35 bargaining sessions over the course of 13 months, in which the university and the union had been unable to come to a contract agreement. 

“The message to Loyola University Chicago administration is evident,” a press release on the vote reads. “After more than a year of negotiations, the time for stalling is over.”

The university regularly posts collective bargaining updates about the situation to their website. In a post from April 7, they expressed their desire to move forward with negotiations without the occurrence of a strike. 

“We do not want a strike,” the update from the university reads. “We believe this agreement can and should be resolved at the bargaining table, and we remain fully committed to continuing negotiations in good faith. Through more than 30 bargaining sessions over 13 months, the University and the Union have reached ten non‑economic tentative agreements, with several additional areas no longer in dispute.”

Union members are demanding pay increases, improvements in parental leave policies for part-time faculty and more manageable workloads. 

In the April 7 update, the university denied the “rumors” they’ve been refusing to bargain with the union, haven’t made progress on meeting demands and haven’t offered substantial pay raises since the previous contract. Additionally, they denied allegations they’re spending more money on campus buildings than they are on paying faculty, haven’t taken the time to address unsustainable work loads and haven’t accounted for the cost of living in their pay raises. 

A part-time instructor, who asked to remain anonymous, said as the cost of living continues to go up, their pay doesn’t reflect the same trend. 

“When we are in the room talking about these core issues — these issues that are the most important issues to our members — they have repeatedly and unapologetically refused to take cost of living into account,” the part-time instructor said. “They’ve said over and over again that that is not part of their calculus in determining our pay, and they also have not taken seriously the real repercussions of burnout workloads for teaching and learning.”

Dallas Krentzel, a lecturer in the Department of Biology and a member of the bargaining committee said he doesn’t feel the university has made enough headway in meeting the unions demands. 

“The university has continued to refuse to budge on their initial economic proposal, which was a very low number that they were offering with no guarantees for increased salary for increases in cost of living, and nothing in their version of bargaining that would allow all faculty to receive a raise,” Krentzel said in a press release on the vote to authorize a strike. 

The NTT faculty union, represented by SEIU Local 73, was formed in January 2016, The Phoenix previously reported in a 2018 article. 

On April 4, 2018, NTT faculty went on strike for the first and only time since their 2016 unionization. As a result of that one-day strike, the NTT faculty and the university reached a contract agreement, which was ratified April 20, 2018, The Phoenix previously reported. 

That 2018 contract agreement included an increase in pay for NTT faculty, annual raises, created a professional development fund and added the part-time teaching classification of “adjunct instructor.” This was the first contract the union and the university agreed upon. 

NTT faculty account for about 70% of university instructors nationally — 49% part-time and 19% full-time, according to data from the American Association of University Professors, an organization designed to define professional values and standards in American higher education. 

At Loyola, NTT faculty account for about 48% of all faculty, with a total of 895 instructors who qualify as part-time within the university, according to the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis. 

Part-time faculty accounted for an estimated $147.4 million in revenue in the 2024-25 school year, while full-time faculty accounted for an estimated $110.7 million in revenue the same year, according to data collected and presented in the Loyola Faculty Forward / SEIU 73 NTT Faculty Union Contract Survey from Spring 2025.

The NTT faculty union’s second contract was agreed upon in 2021, but expired in September of last year, The Phoenix previously reported. The union agreed to multiple smaller extensions to the second contract before they decided not to agree to continue to extend the terms and instead opted to begin negotiations for a third contract. The bargaining sessions currently being hosted are for their third contract. 

“Teaching thousands of students, bringing in millions of dollars in revenue a year, our NTT faculty are essential to the mission of Loyola and to the fiscal health of the institution… and we deserve better,” a statement from the Loyola Faculty Forward / SEIU 73 NTT Faculty Union Contract Survey from Spring 2025 reads. 

Lara Driscoll, an adjunct instructor of piano in CAS who’s worked at the university since 2015, said the union doesn’t want to have to strike but is willing to do so if it means their demands will be met. 

“Nobody wants to strike,” Driscoll said. “We all want to be there for our students and the ones graduating and all of the things at this time of year. But we’ve been pushed into a corner.”

According to the part-time instructor who asked to remain anonymous, the university is required under their contract with the union to provide members a space to hold an authorization vote. 

The part-time instructor said there’s been some confusion about the location for their meetings in recent weeks. When instructors arrived at the “meeting dining room” in Simpson dining hall where the university had told them they could conduct voting, they found the doors were locked and there was a sign on the door which read “reserved for private dining.” 

Additionally, neither dining hall staff nor residence life workers had been informed of the event, so there seemed to be a general lack of communication, according to the anonymous part-time instructor. Ultimately, the group had to move to the multipurpose room in Simpson.

Not only were doors locked and signals mixed, Driscoll said some of the entrances to the spaces were also not ADA compliant, which made it more difficult for instructors with disabilities to participate in the voting process. 

Overall, the part-time instructor said they felt disrespected by the school in the bargaining process thus far. 

“Just feeling really insulted and dismissed by Loyola’s administration over the course of this,” they said. “It’s really hard as someone who takes their job very seriously, is very committed to doing the best job that they can for their students, to go into bargaining week after week and be told outright that our work doesn’t matter to our managers, to our administrators, whether we can afford to live in this city or not. It’s been very demoralizing.”

Additionally, the anonymous instructor said the university told them they wouldn’t be able to provide the union with a downtown location for meetings, which the part-time instructor said causes issues for professors who work exclusively at the Water Tower Campus. 

“The indicator of a problematic mindset is the fact that they are refusing flat out, outright to provide us with any space on the Water Tower Campus to hold a vote,” the anonymous part-time instructor said. “We have a significant membership who only teaches on that campus. That’s a significant impediment to them because you have to vote in person.”

The part-time instructor said members of the union also attempted to table in Damen Student Center to spread awareness among the student body about their efforts to come to an agreement with the university, but were told by administration they couldn’t do so. 

The university has a policy on demonstrations and fixed exhibits which allows free speech by students in “designated free speech zones,” which include the West Quad between the hours of 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. and Damen Student Center with permission or in the case of inclement weather. The policy doesn’t provide specific details for free speech for full-time or part-time faculty. 

The university didn’t provide comment when asked about their response to these specific incidents. When asked to point to the policy disallowing faculty speech in Damen, they instead referred The Phoenix to their collective bargaining updates page, where they put up-to-date information on the results of bargaining sessions between the university and the union. 

Driscoll said she began teaching at Loyola in the fall semester of 2015, right as the union was forming. She became active in the fight for an improved contract and was involved in the decision to strike in 2018. 

Since the NTT faculty unionized initially and subsequently went on strike in 2018, she said she’s seen significant improvements in the lives of part-time faculty.

“There’s more transparency than there was for many, many years,” Driscoll said. “…A lot of things have improved since we formed a union.”

The bargaining session will take place from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. April 20, after which NTT faculty union members will make the final decision on whether or not to strike.