In front of the Lebanese University rectorate in Beirut, contractual professors are demanding their rights. "The issue of contract workers is a red line," reads the sign they are holding. (Credit: Photo provided by a protester)
Contract professors at the Lebanese University (LU), who are striking Wednesday and staging a sit-in in front of the public institution's president's office at Museum Square, have called on President Joseph Aoun to "end the suffering of contract faculty."
They have also appealed to Minister of Education and Higher Education Rima Karameh, as well as the LU president, Bassam Badran, to resolve the contract faculty issue by granting them full-time adjunct status, according to the state-run National News Agency (NNA).
This status is an intermediate one between their current precarious situation and that of tenured professors. The teachers are demanding this by "submitting the file to the Cabinet for approval as soon as possible."
Since 2014, the year the last file for upgrading contract faculty to full-time adjunct status was approved, LU has not had any new full-time hires. Around 1,500 professors are now candidates for full-time adjunct status. The process is stalled for reasons of sectarian balance.
Outside the administration building of the country’s only public university in Beirut, contract professor Rola Youssef made an appeal to the president. “We call on President Joseph Aoun, the chief protector of national institutions, who affirmed in his oath speech, and in his promise to contract faculty, his determination to end their suffering and to preserve the Lebanese University,” she said.
“We eagerly await your decisive and urgent intervention to recognize our dedication and lift the injustice that affects us. This step is the natural way to save the university, preserve its national and academic mission and enhance its pioneering role in nation-building,” she added, addressing the head of state.
Earlier, LU contract faculty addressed a message to the education and higher education minister and the university president. “We are writing to you today in a firm and frank tone, because our patience has limits… after 11 years of administrative humiliation and official indifference,” the statement said.
“The file on contract faculty has remained in the drawers, as if we are not part of this university,” it continued, listing their grievances: “the hourly wage of two dollars an hour during the financial crisis, indecent treatment, social and professional insecurity, discrimination compared to full-time professors and loneliness during the COVID pandemic.”
Contract faculty receive neither a monthly salary, nor transportation or end-of-service benefits, nor family allowances, and they are not affiliated with the National Social Security Fund.
While the average salary for an LU full-time professor is now between $2,000 and $2,500, not including allowances and other benefits, contract professors at the country’s only public university received, last year, just an hourly wage equivalent to $25 on average.
Before the 2019 crisis and the currency collapse, this hourly wage reached $66 for the highest tier. “Depending on seniority, the hourly wage now ranges between two million and two million four hundred thousand lira,” Professor Hicham al-Falou told L'Orient-Le Jour in October, recalling “the promise made to contract faculty by LU president Bassam Badran to raise this wage to $45 an hour.”
With no progress on the issue, contract faculty are now calling on Karameh and Badran to “take responsibility and resolve the issue independently of any political or sectarian considerations.”
“The Lebanese University can no longer tolerate procrastination, nor its professors wait any longer,” the statement insisted, affirming that contract faculty will remain vigilant until their rights are secured.
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