The campus of the Lebanese University in Hadath. (Credit: Mohammad Yassine)
"We will only return to class as full-time temporary professors," announced one of the committees of contract professors at the Lebanese University (LU) on Monday.
For this reason, this committee declared "a strike from the first day of the 2024-2025 academic year, each in their faculty and department."
This strike was decided "in accordance with a census of 645 contract professors at the Lebanese University who meet the conditions for full-time temporary status, and who have overwhelmingly declared themselves in favor of this action."
"The strike will end as soon as the government approves this change in the status of contract workers," the statement said.
LU contract professors committee called on "professors to firmly adhere to the strike order regardless of the pressures." The statement noted that "any threat to terminate the contracts of contract workers, to reduce their salaries or not to pay them what they are owed is rejected," asking all political, community or educational authorities to "preserve freedom of expression and the rights of professors."
LU has 3,000 hourly contract professors, 1,760 of whom are eligible for full-time temporary status, because they have a doctorate and the required seniority (at least two years, with 200 hours of teaching per year), explained Bassam Badran, the rector of the Lebanese University, to L'Orient-Le Jour last March. The full-time temporary status is intermediate between the contract and supervised statuses. The only public university in the country has only 1,600 supervised professors, and enrollment in the supervised has been frozen since 2014.
This article originally appeared in French in L'Orient-Le Jour.