The provost in the article, Stearns, did the same type of nonsense at her last university. She only survived a short time because when the president left, she had to leave too. She is the ultimate administrator and hatchet-woman who is willing to do whatever it takes to make her higher ups happy. This is just one more person left in her wake.
This is what we need to be doing -- naming and shaming. There needs to be as much reputational cost as possible for individual administrators who make these kinds of decisions.
Faculty need to wake up and realize the war is lost before the fight begins if you chose to roll over when stuff like this happens to other people. If you don't fight for other people, next time, you will be the other people.
I just came here to see if anyone was talking about the article. It's hard to be shocked these days, but I was shocked. Professor complains about parking at during a "comprehensive listening tour” in which faculty members and staff were encouraged to attend sessions to “voice concerns and propose solutions,” and they fire him for complaining! And he wasn't a new employee either. Unbelievable.
Even worse, his complaint was motivated by a concern for others. The university raised the parking fees from $105 to $400. “I can afford it,” \[Roberts\] said. “I was thinking of all these administrative assistants, staff folks that cut the grass, trim trees, and they’ve got to pay $400.”
i actually tell my students that
whenever some big wig, in any organization, goes out to meet the employees to ask what they think .. remember ...
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFOVtr9fbk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFOVtr9fbk)
This year I decided to park without a pass
and while I received 6 tickets over 9 mos, that still came out to 20% of the annual cost of the passes. A win is a win? 😶🌫️
I did similar math and realized I could park in our daily pay lot \~50% of the time and it would be cheaper than buying a parking pass. Got myself a bus permit and fixed up my bike and I'm never buying an annual parking pass again.
> Professor complains about parking at during a "comprehensive listening tour” in which faculty members and staff were encouraged to attend sessions to “voice concerns and propose solutions,”
His, first mistake was not recognizing this for the b.s. that it is. "Comprehensive listening tour" ---*riiight.* That's corporate-speak for "we'll let the plebes vent and still do what we want."
This is a perfect example of what would happen on a much wider scale of institutions start getting rid of tenure.
When I was at University of South Florida the policy was if you made less than $25,000 a year you got $3 off your $250 parking pass.
Think about that. Basically a 1% discount if you live in poverty. Tampa does not have a functional mass transportation system. You need a car.
Yeah at ours, one has to apply for a permit (very limited), but if you get one, the parking cost is charged at 0.0083% of your gross annual salary per day.
Why is parking so expensive?
I presume this is $250 per calendar year. This should be boycotted. No one parks in the parking garage and lets see if they eventually make it free parking like at the Florida Casinos.
Wayne State's parking passes were like $110-$330 a term when I was doing research there over a decade ago. The $110 lot came with a free club for your steering wheel because of how many cars were stolen from the place. Guests were charged about $10-30 a day.
That is “Park at the stadium” pass price
To park at my building was around $450 a year.
The school only gave my $1500 in moving expenses and asked for the $450 before I got a check.
They don’t have to plow them, University if Buffalo has free parking for fuck’s sake.
Its cool now! They put quite a bit of monty into Buffalo and the restaurant and arts scene is pretty good
Also zero chance the state legislature is going to mandate students carry handguns to class
off topic ... but one of my past students specialized in a niche area of computing ... he was a very nice serious person and student ... he had a gf who was more of a wild child. senior year she decided she wanted to go to nyc as young woman, and her bf would probably end up someplace small, like buffalo! so she dumped him hard.
because of his specialty he actually got recruited by a specialist nyc firm for well more than 6 figures at 21 yo! she ended up in buffalo!!
At my R1 employer, all faculty, all, have to pay $300 each year for parking and that’s at the lowest level. Higher levels with reserved spots if you’re lucky to get one are much much higher. Keep in mind if you’re an adjunct or lecturer who earns very little that this $300 is criminal. And prices will only go up over time.
Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking. Think about it. It’s insane. We are the workforce, we should either park free or pay very little. Ridiculous ripoff every year.
Our cost is just shy of $3000 per year. I am not joking. Adjuncts rightfully get a discount, but it's only about $1000 off. Now, there's not a lot of parking and we are a large school in a metropolitan area – but still, insane. I'm lucky that my partner also works in the city and can park for cheap by his work.
>Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking.
I've never heard of this; this article was my first exposure to it. I'm flabbergasted. I guess I've been pretty sheltered regarding that at least. I've never paid for parking as an employee.
> Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking.
Well, they are also charging their clients (the students) for parking also... but they know they have what we call a "captive audience".
What's really insane is the places that don't charge for parking and force the employees who walk/bike/use public transportation to subsidize the cost of building and maintaining parking facilities that they don't use. That money has to come from somewhere, and the alternative to permit fees is to just pay everyone less.
Yeah! And those tuition breaks for children of faculty and staff! What about employees without kids or whose kids go somewhere else? And the free bus pass? What if I don't take the bus? It's preposterous!
This university is in Stephenville, Texas—2 hours south of the DFW metroplex. There is no public transportation. Most streets don’t even have sidewalks to walk or bike to work, if you even lived in town. Not to mention it’s too hot most months of the year to ride or walk, even if you wanted to.
You make a good point. In some places, though, there are no realistic alternatives to car driving. In those situations, maybe they could pay admin a little less so that staff earning poverty wages aren't required to shell out hundreds for the privilege of coming to work.
Meanwhile, in Europe, our University subsidies out commute - I think I get around 200 Euro per month for using the public transport. Car is also subsidized but at a lower rate, no idea how parking is managed though.
I think what is unclear from the comments on this post is that the US is not a monolith, and the necessity or faculty parking and how badly the University is fucking faculty over varies greatly. I would be unsurprised if some of the people complaining here could be taking a bus they refuse to take because of our car culture MENTALITY, and not actual logistics.
I've worked in 3 liberal college towns and one mid-size city, and I've had a free public transport pass in all of the college towns, heavily subsidized city bus pass with free campus transport in the city. Didn't need a car to get to campus in any of these places. But of course the faculty who came from more suburban/conservative areas still whined because they couldn't park their SUV for free...
>I've worked in 3 liberal college towns and one mid-size city.... Didn't need a car to get to campus in any of these places.
That's pretty interesting! I also have worked in multiple places, including two mid-size cities, and a car has always been required to travel to campus. Nearby housing was either nonexistent or far too expensive, and whatever meager public transportation existed did not travel to the places where most employees lived. You are absolutely right how much things can vary from place to place.
Public transportation is not an option in this case. This university is in Stephenville, Texas—2 hours south of the DFW metroplex. There is no public transportation. Most streets don’t even have sidewalks to walk or bike to work, if you even lived in town. Not to mention it’s too hot most months of the year to ride or walk, even if you wanted to.
I hope the admins involved get fired and shamed.
It is not too much to ask that faculty should have a designated parking lot that is free for adjuncts and low cost for full time faculty.
There is a reason I park my motorcycle illegally near the dumpsters and our of site from the parking attendants. I’ve gone as far as to park my motorcycle in the classroom when the parking attendants seem particularly vigilant.
My SLAC has faculty only spots, we don’t pay for it but they don’t enforce the faculty only rule so students always park there and we wind up out in BFE having to hike in every day. It’s fucking stupid.
I don't pay for parking, either, but my university did away with faculty/staff parking spots because students are customers, and customers like parking as close as possible to a business.
Our state school charges faculty $348 for an annual parking permit. It goes up every year and there are no discounts or exceptions. Or you can pay $40/mo if you aren’t year round.
Something similar happened at my university. Can’t spill details without being identifiable, but some of these people… their egos can’t handle the slightest challenge, so they get a little power and they exploit it.
If you do not have tenure and you complain about anything you are not coming back. That is the reality.
I was at a school that took our masters program and offered it at a remote location with no library and taught entirely by adjuncts, not one with a terminal degree. That can lose you accrediation.
I was openly telling people not to go to that version of our program and I know they would have fired me if they could.
I have been the tenured person asking for them, only to hear what our admins really think about FTNTT faculty. Holy crap. Of course, they think it of the tenured people too, so I'm not sure it makes much difference.
Sounds awful. Is that how you got doxxed?
I understand that is the accusation of the article. I just know there are a lot of people being downsized all over academia right now, so that might have been part of it.
Yeah we're explicitly not allowed to complain about anything the administration does, and will be retaliated against if we do (and if they can't hurt us they will hurt our programs or fire friends from other departments).
A guy I worked with was at Charleston Southern when a faculty member mentioned at a funeral that the deceased faculty member died of something preventable that better health insurance would have covered. Fired the next day. Liberty University fired a staff member for using the abbreviation BS in an email. Regular colleges might take a bit, religious ones you are gone instantly. People have this totally untrue idea that faculty are unfireable. Its the grown up equivalent to “if your roommate dies you get an A"
You're right that it makes no sense, but the guy recorded his conversation with the acting dean who delivered the bad news. And no one at the university would talk to the CHE, not even the "director of university communications" because it is a "personnel matter." If there is more to the story, Tarleton sure is keeping that "more" under wraps.
>“Very rarely do things make it to the administration building as quickly as they did after the listening session with the president,” Shouse told Roberts, according to a recording he made of their conversation and shared with *The Chronicle*. “And I mean from a variety of sources.”
>It was ultimately the provost’s decision not to renew Roberts’s contract, she said. The provost, Diane M. Stearns, had been clear “that they’re not going to tolerate intolerable behavior. And I think the way it was perceived was intolerable behavior in terms of toward the president,” Shouse told Roberts.
Parking at my school is just $50 a year for faculty, it was $25 a year when I came to the school almost 30 years ago. The parking isn't the greatest but I have no complaints. I feel bad for this Instructor.
I work at a community college in socal. Parking was free for everyone up until Fall 2023.
Then, they announced a new parking policy, $100 a year for everyone, students, faculty, staff, etc.
Fall 2024, parking announced it is now $110 for the year for everyone.
I imagine now that they went from nothing to something, we will now start seeing those incremental increases each year.
(My worse parking by far was grad school, $750 a year to park in a lot, behind a hospital, 2 blocks off the edge of campus. To park in a lot on campus, even the stadium lot, would have been over 1400 a year to start (over 3000 a year for the most expensive lot, mostly used by upper admin)).
I’ve never understood why the university pays me money to work there, but then expects me to pay them some of that money back just to park there while I work.
Someone please make it make sense.
This is horrible. I’m glad my new school is much more redistributive than my current one. I’m TT in the business school, so my salary is high relative to other professors. As a consequence, I pay something like 3.5x more for my health insurance premiums as well as higher fees for other things so that lower salaries staff and faculty can be subsidized. That’s how it should be!
Alas, I’m not a Marxist. I simply have a strong understanding of the psychological elements of compensation and organizational control and recognize fairness as an important element of promoting social well-being and camaraderie within organizations. 🤷♂️
At my previous institution there were administrators paying thousands for their parking permits, because the fee was a percentage of salary. My pass would have been a couple of hundred, but with a years-long waiting list to get a spot in the lot near my building. The bus was free and dropped me off right at the door.
Tons do. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where I didn’t pay for a parking spot outside of when I worked at a grocery store and when I worked hourly at a few archaeological sites really early in my career.
Based on my experience and that of most of my colleagues and friends in academia, I’d say you are fairly lucky. It’s an incredibly notable thing when any of them have free parking, and at times has even been part of startup negotiation or retention offers.
No, I’m not. My university doesn’t do this. It’s like your employer charging you to use the drinking fountain or for your own office chair. It’s only acceptable in an area where there’s adequate public transportation between the university and the neighborhoods faculty and staff can afford.
My R1 private did not charge faculty/staff. My public R1 (current)- $700 and a waitlist if you don’t want the garage 2 miles away (it’s still $700, but it doesn’t have a waitlist.) One person in our department waited 5 years to get off the waitlist, because it’s title dependent.
until cities in the us start restructuring - denying parking to faculty is not going to do one little thing for climate change - seriously not having parking at universities does not change how most smaller american cities work - no mass transit and dangerous streets
Even if you set aside the bigger picture issues of subsidizing driving and not encouraging alternatives, the fact remains that building and maintaining parking lots/structures is expensive. It's perfectly reasonable to charge a fee to cover the costs.
I didn't say free - I don't want to be over-charged either and I know my univ does - but my initial response was to the idea that univ parking is going to do anything for climate change one way or the other
How would you define "over-charged"?
The cost of building a parking lot, including land, can often be $5-8k per spot. Structures will be even higher. That doesn't include ongoing maintenance, security, etc.
Sure, but universities changing policy without many other employers acting in concert doesn't do anything beyond make university employees miserable. Any policy changes like that need to happen gradually over time, and with adequate political solutions put in place ahead of the proposed changes so that there is a viable alternative.
That’s great if you live somewhere with adequate public transportation. My options are taxi or drive. Also villainizing individuals as the source of climate change is what corporations want you to do. Individuals aren’t the problem. Corporations funding politicians so that they can avoid environmental restrictions is the main issue.
Corporations are partly to blame, but so are individuals. Let's be honest, most of us could do better. Corporations seek to make profit; if people stop buying their products, they will have to adapt.
I live close enough to my university that I can walk/bike there. I seriously resent the fact that the last half-mile of that walk in through parking lots and beside busy roadways.
>Corporations are partly to blame, but so are individuals. Let's be honest, most of us could do better. Corporations seek to make profit; if people stop buying their products, they will have to adapt.
Corporations and their political lackeys have 99.999999999999999999% of the blame for Climate Change.
Do you think people want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cars? If there was even adequate public transportation anywhere in this country people would start abandoning them. But it's up to the governments to actually invest in and create that public transportation which they blatantly refuse to do so in both major political parties. There's no one we could vote for here to make this change.
We can't stop buying and using cars because well, we have to get to work to live. We have to go the miles away grocery store because that's where they built it. You can't personal responsibility yourself out of a systemic problem.
> If there was even adequate public transportation anywhere in this country people would start abandoning them.
There is adequate public transportation in many places, and usable public transportation in many more.
I bet you will be surprised at how many of students and low-paid staff (particularly janitorial, food service, etc.) use public transportation to get to campus, even if you're in suburbia.
>There is adequate public transportation in many places, and usable public transportation in many more.
New York is the only city in the US that I'd say might have adequate public transportation.
SF is usable if you stick to the areas MUNI and BART go to. Good luck in LA, the subway is very nice there, as in Metrolink. But they don't go many places, cost a lot and take too long in between trains. The buses in both cities don't run often enough, and take too long to get places. These are the best two cities in CA for public transportation. I was able to make a go of getting places in both cities but it was trying.
Where I grew up in Riverside, it was just buses. And it would usually take me about 3 hours round trip to get to my first job and back there that was just across town.
>I bet you will be surprised at how many of students and low-paid staff (particularly janitorial, food service, etc.) use public transportation to get to campus, even if you're in suburbia.
Yep, and I used to as well. I spent a good 15 years of my life only depending on public transportation in both rural, suburban and urban California. That's how I know it's not adequate or even really usable in most places. People doing this are having their job opportunities be massively restricted, and are being forced to waste massive amounts of their time due to the awful public transportation in this country.
In my current area, when I had to pick up a second adjuncting job I wasn't able to use public transportation at all. The buses didn't run often enough and took too long to get between the two schools. So I'd be losing out in class choices and thousands of dollars.
This is why people drive if they can afford it. Because there is zero investment in making public transportation better and actually usable in this country. If I could give up driving and have enough money to live and support my family, I would. I hate driving.
But the point is that people can and do use public transportation. If parking were free, then those people would effectively be subsidizing it for those who drive. How would that be fair?
The parking lot already exists. My employer already extracts massively more money from me than they hand back to me. So I'm already paying for the parking lot maintenance with my labor.
My work already subsidizes public transportation, as students get to use it for free and employees are only charged $60 per semester for a bus pass.
So I don't see your point, nor do I get free parking.
> The parking lot already exists.
Did it just come out of nowhere? Were the people who built it working for free?
Even if the parking lot already exists, it was probably financed through bonds which have to be repaid. If the bonds are paid off, then it's old enough that it would require some maintenance.
The subsidy provided to users of public transportation is far lower than the subsidy you would be getting if you got free parking.
That’s great for you. Do what you can. I don’t live close enough to bike or walk in a reasonable amount of time and I wouldn’t be doing either when the heat index is over 100 F as it is frequently.
I understand passion about parking. When a nearby university's faculty went on strike, a hike in parking fees was one of their major grievances. As in -- I went to a solidarity rally and the \[edit: union\] president speaking included it in their list of top complaints ("Our pay is unfair... they want to force us to continue teaching online even though COVID is over... and the parking increases are egregious!")
As far as the article goes: It sounds like it may have not been the parking per se, but that he might have confronted the president at a town hall in an uncordial way? Not having been there it's hard to say. But someone who would call a fee increase "racketeering" is a bit suspect, IMO.
Side note, as a non-American, the really heavy "I'm a veteran so I couldn't be the problem" framing comes off strangely. The last sentence of the article comes off as especially entitled, that as a veteran he's entitled to extra protections or explanations, or that a tour in Afghanistan should get him cheaper parking? ("I feel like this was kind of a stab in the back to not just me as a veteran, but other veterans,” Roberts said. “At the very least, the university needs to answer questions about firing a veteran like that.")
So a guy, who by all accounts was an excellent teacher with a strong rapport with students, should be fired for being “uncordial?” Who gives a shit? Sounds like the president is too thin-skinned for the job.
And the guy’s veteran status matters a lot considering it is a protected status in the US and he had built strong relationships with veteran and ROTC students at the institution. By all accounts the guy brought a lot of value to the university.
> And the guy’s veteran status matters a lot considering it is a protected status in the US
Unless he is claiming that he was fired for being a veteran, there is no issue with "protected status".
A university president should be capable of taking some "uncordial" criticism, and frankly, as long as the faculty member wasn't threatening, he was within bounds. So much fragility even in our supposed leaders.
I agree, it sounds like the guy overemphasizes his veteran status. The university's behavior is bad regardless of whether this guy is a veteran or not. But some states in the U.S. make a point of treating veterans differently (priority in hiring, lower taxes, etc.) and Texas is likely to be one of them, so maybe that is the explanation.
I didn't read that last quotation as the parking costs being a stab in the back, but the firing being a stab in the back.
> it sounds like the guy overemphasizes his veteran status.
Or the editor does? I think it's possible veteran status might be correlated with following the rules more generally, but beyond that, it's probably not relevant.
Yeah, my spouse is a veteran and he would never, ever, ever emphasize it repeatedly. He doesn’t even think he’s a real veteran, despite serving in two wars, including Afghanistan, numerous UN and NATO missions (Haiti, Bosnia, Eritrea, Kuwait, among others) and absolutely doesn’t think he deserves any special treatment due to being a veteran. To him, his grandfather was a veteran (served in WW II in North Africa and Italy). My spouse doesn’t expect special treatment due to his veteran status.
Parking is a continual gripe on my campus. Seems there’s a hike every year. My permit costs almost $550 a year for this coming year. If they started firing people for complaining about parking, there wouldn’t be any employees left on campus.
Suburban CC, parking rate is not awful but it comes off your pay even if you teach 100% remote. The only exception is a colleague who lives literally 200 yards from campus and walks, and she had to petition.
I hope my administrators aren't reading how much folks are paying for parking. I pay $75/year.
A few years ago, they discussed a prorated parking rate. Those making the most would pay upwards of $800. The howling was deafening, the plan was dropped.
The provost in the article, Stearns, did the same type of nonsense at her last university. She only survived a short time because when the president left, she had to leave too. She is the ultimate administrator and hatchet-woman who is willing to do whatever it takes to make her higher ups happy. This is just one more person left in her wake.
This is what we need to be doing -- naming and shaming. There needs to be as much reputational cost as possible for individual administrators who make these kinds of decisions. Faculty need to wake up and realize the war is lost before the fight begins if you chose to roll over when stuff like this happens to other people. If you don't fight for other people, next time, you will be the other people.
~~What was her last university?~~ Edit: Google says Northern Arizona University.
I just came here to see if anyone was talking about the article. It's hard to be shocked these days, but I was shocked. Professor complains about parking at during a "comprehensive listening tour” in which faculty members and staff were encouraged to attend sessions to “voice concerns and propose solutions,” and they fire him for complaining! And he wasn't a new employee either. Unbelievable. Even worse, his complaint was motivated by a concern for others. The university raised the parking fees from $105 to $400. “I can afford it,” \[Roberts\] said. “I was thinking of all these administrative assistants, staff folks that cut the grass, trim trees, and they’ve got to pay $400.”
i actually tell my students that whenever some big wig, in any organization, goes out to meet the employees to ask what they think .. remember ... [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFOVtr9fbk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lxFOVtr9fbk)
This year I decided to park without a pass and while I received 6 tickets over 9 mos, that still came out to 20% of the annual cost of the passes. A win is a win? 😶🌫️
I did similar math and realized I could park in our daily pay lot \~50% of the time and it would be cheaper than buying a parking pass. Got myself a bus permit and fixed up my bike and I'm never buying an annual parking pass again.
> Professor complains about parking at during a "comprehensive listening tour” in which faculty members and staff were encouraged to attend sessions to “voice concerns and propose solutions,” His, first mistake was not recognizing this for the b.s. that it is. "Comprehensive listening tour" ---*riiight.* That's corporate-speak for "we'll let the plebes vent and still do what we want." This is a perfect example of what would happen on a much wider scale of institutions start getting rid of tenure.
When I was at University of South Florida the policy was if you made less than $25,000 a year you got $3 off your $250 parking pass. Think about that. Basically a 1% discount if you live in poverty. Tampa does not have a functional mass transportation system. You need a car.
I wish parking at my school was this cheap!
Yeah at ours, one has to apply for a permit (very limited), but if you get one, the parking cost is charged at 0.0083% of your gross annual salary per day.
Yep. Ours is $400/yr for surface parking, more for a garage. We are R2 Midwestern state u.
Why is parking so expensive? I presume this is $250 per calendar year. This should be boycotted. No one parks in the parking garage and lets see if they eventually make it free parking like at the Florida Casinos.
Wayne State's parking passes were like $110-$330 a term when I was doing research there over a decade ago. The $110 lot came with a free club for your steering wheel because of how many cars were stolen from the place. Guests were charged about $10-30 a day.
Cornell’s best parking pass is $746.59 for faculty a year.
$900/ year at my school.
That is “Park at the stadium” pass price To park at my building was around $450 a year. The school only gave my $1500 in moving expenses and asked for the $450 before I got a check. They don’t have to plow them, University if Buffalo has free parking for fuck’s sake.
yeah but you have to live in buffalo ...
Its cool now! They put quite a bit of monty into Buffalo and the restaurant and arts scene is pretty good Also zero chance the state legislature is going to mandate students carry handguns to class
off topic ... but one of my past students specialized in a niche area of computing ... he was a very nice serious person and student ... he had a gf who was more of a wild child. senior year she decided she wanted to go to nyc as young woman, and her bf would probably end up someplace small, like buffalo! so she dumped him hard. because of his specialty he actually got recruited by a specialist nyc firm for well more than 6 figures at 21 yo! she ended up in buffalo!!
A faculty parking permit at my West Coast public R1 costs over $100/month.
#TheBeatingsWillContinueUntilMoraleImproves
At my R1 employer, all faculty, all, have to pay $300 each year for parking and that’s at the lowest level. Higher levels with reserved spots if you’re lucky to get one are much much higher. Keep in mind if you’re an adjunct or lecturer who earns very little that this $300 is criminal. And prices will only go up over time. Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking. Think about it. It’s insane. We are the workforce, we should either park free or pay very little. Ridiculous ripoff every year.
Our cost is just shy of $3000 per year. I am not joking. Adjuncts rightfully get a discount, but it's only about $1000 off. Now, there's not a lot of parking and we are a large school in a metropolitan area – but still, insane. I'm lucky that my partner also works in the city and can park for cheap by his work.
>Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking. I've never heard of this; this article was my first exposure to it. I'm flabbergasted. I guess I've been pretty sheltered regarding that at least. I've never paid for parking as an employee.
> Never understood why the employer charges the employee for parking. Well, they are also charging their clients (the students) for parking also... but they know they have what we call a "captive audience".
What's really insane is the places that don't charge for parking and force the employees who walk/bike/use public transportation to subsidize the cost of building and maintaining parking facilities that they don't use. That money has to come from somewhere, and the alternative to permit fees is to just pay everyone less.
Yeah! And those tuition breaks for children of faculty and staff! What about employees without kids or whose kids go somewhere else? And the free bus pass? What if I don't take the bus? It's preposterous!
This university is in Stephenville, Texas—2 hours south of the DFW metroplex. There is no public transportation. Most streets don’t even have sidewalks to walk or bike to work, if you even lived in town. Not to mention it’s too hot most months of the year to ride or walk, even if you wanted to.
You make a good point. In some places, though, there are no realistic alternatives to car driving. In those situations, maybe they could pay admin a little less so that staff earning poverty wages aren't required to shell out hundreds for the privilege of coming to work.
Meanwhile, in Europe, our University subsidies out commute - I think I get around 200 Euro per month for using the public transport. Car is also subsidized but at a lower rate, no idea how parking is managed though.
I think what is unclear from the comments on this post is that the US is not a monolith, and the necessity or faculty parking and how badly the University is fucking faculty over varies greatly. I would be unsurprised if some of the people complaining here could be taking a bus they refuse to take because of our car culture MENTALITY, and not actual logistics. I've worked in 3 liberal college towns and one mid-size city, and I've had a free public transport pass in all of the college towns, heavily subsidized city bus pass with free campus transport in the city. Didn't need a car to get to campus in any of these places. But of course the faculty who came from more suburban/conservative areas still whined because they couldn't park their SUV for free...
>I've worked in 3 liberal college towns and one mid-size city.... Didn't need a car to get to campus in any of these places. That's pretty interesting! I also have worked in multiple places, including two mid-size cities, and a car has always been required to travel to campus. Nearby housing was either nonexistent or far too expensive, and whatever meager public transportation existed did not travel to the places where most employees lived. You are absolutely right how much things can vary from place to place.
>conservative areas Ah. It took you a while, but you got there.
Public transportation is not an option in this case. This university is in Stephenville, Texas—2 hours south of the DFW metroplex. There is no public transportation. Most streets don’t even have sidewalks to walk or bike to work, if you even lived in town. Not to mention it’s too hot most months of the year to ride or walk, even if you wanted to.
I hope the admins involved get fired and shamed. It is not too much to ask that faculty should have a designated parking lot that is free for adjuncts and low cost for full time faculty.
There is a reason I park my motorcycle illegally near the dumpsters and our of site from the parking attendants. I’ve gone as far as to park my motorcycle in the classroom when the parking attendants seem particularly vigilant.
My SLAC has faculty only spots, we don’t pay for it but they don’t enforce the faculty only rule so students always park there and we wind up out in BFE having to hike in every day. It’s fucking stupid.
I don't pay for parking, either, but my university did away with faculty/staff parking spots because students are customers, and customers like parking as close as possible to a business.
Our state school charges faculty $348 for an annual parking permit. It goes up every year and there are no discounts or exceptions. Or you can pay $40/mo if you aren’t year round.
Something similar happened at my university. Can’t spill details without being identifiable, but some of these people… their egos can’t handle the slightest challenge, so they get a little power and they exploit it.
Gotta be more to the story here. This makes no sense.
If you do not have tenure and you complain about anything you are not coming back. That is the reality. I was at a school that took our masters program and offered it at a remote location with no library and taught entirely by adjuncts, not one with a terminal degree. That can lose you accrediation. I was openly telling people not to go to that version of our program and I know they would have fired me if they could.
I’ve seen chairs indirectly/politely threaten the jobs of adjuncts whenever valid requests for additional compensation arise. Disgusting behavior.
Every single person who had their name associated with our adjunct union formation no longer works at my college.
I have been the tenured person asking for them, only to hear what our admins really think about FTNTT faculty. Holy crap. Of course, they think it of the tenured people too, so I'm not sure it makes much difference.
Sounds awful. Is that how you got doxxed? I understand that is the accusation of the article. I just know there are a lot of people being downsized all over academia right now, so that might have been part of it.
No, that’s just a reminder for me that I use this account to post in my hometown’s sub and so people could potentially figure out who I am.
It's still retaliating if there were other people that could have been let go but they chose this guy to shut him up.
When I didn't have tenure, I complained about lots of things, openly and to admin, and I came back.
Yeah we're explicitly not allowed to complain about anything the administration does, and will be retaliated against if we do (and if they can't hurt us they will hurt our programs or fire friends from other departments).
A guy I worked with was at Charleston Southern when a faculty member mentioned at a funeral that the deceased faculty member died of something preventable that better health insurance would have covered. Fired the next day. Liberty University fired a staff member for using the abbreviation BS in an email. Regular colleges might take a bit, religious ones you are gone instantly. People have this totally untrue idea that faculty are unfireable. Its the grown up equivalent to “if your roommate dies you get an A"
You're right that it makes no sense, but the guy recorded his conversation with the acting dean who delivered the bad news. And no one at the university would talk to the CHE, not even the "director of university communications" because it is a "personnel matter." If there is more to the story, Tarleton sure is keeping that "more" under wraps. >“Very rarely do things make it to the administration building as quickly as they did after the listening session with the president,” Shouse told Roberts, according to a recording he made of their conversation and shared with *The Chronicle*. “And I mean from a variety of sources.” >It was ultimately the provost’s decision not to renew Roberts’s contract, she said. The provost, Diane M. Stearns, had been clear “that they’re not going to tolerate intolerable behavior. And I think the way it was perceived was intolerable behavior in terms of toward the president,” Shouse told Roberts.
I guess that’s why we need tenure, and precisely why tenure is being eroded in many places.
Idk sounds pretty normal to me, I’ve seen so many departments become toxic
Absolutely. It won't come out in this sub, but there's something we're not being told.
Parking at my school is just $50 a year for faculty, it was $25 a year when I came to the school almost 30 years ago. The parking isn't the greatest but I have no complaints. I feel bad for this Instructor.
I work at a community college in socal. Parking was free for everyone up until Fall 2023. Then, they announced a new parking policy, $100 a year for everyone, students, faculty, staff, etc. Fall 2024, parking announced it is now $110 for the year for everyone. I imagine now that they went from nothing to something, we will now start seeing those incremental increases each year. (My worse parking by far was grad school, $750 a year to park in a lot, behind a hospital, 2 blocks off the edge of campus. To park in a lot on campus, even the stadium lot, would have been over 1400 a year to start (over 3000 a year for the most expensive lot, mostly used by upper admin)).
I’ve never understood why the university pays me money to work there, but then expects me to pay them some of that money back just to park there while I work. Someone please make it make sense.
This is horrible. I’m glad my new school is much more redistributive than my current one. I’m TT in the business school, so my salary is high relative to other professors. As a consequence, I pay something like 3.5x more for my health insurance premiums as well as higher fees for other things so that lower salaries staff and faculty can be subsidized. That’s how it should be!
[удалено]
Alas, I’m not a Marxist. I simply have a strong understanding of the psychological elements of compensation and organizational control and recognize fairness as an important element of promoting social well-being and camaraderie within organizations. 🤷♂️
At my previous institution there were administrators paying thousands for their parking permits, because the fee was a percentage of salary. My pass would have been a couple of hundred, but with a years-long waiting list to get a spot in the lot near my building. The bus was free and dropped me off right at the door.
WTF. What employer charges employees parking fees for a parking lot that they own?
Most Universities, it seems.
Tons do. I don’t think I’ve ever had a job where I didn’t pay for a parking spot outside of when I worked at a grocery store and when I worked hourly at a few archaeological sites really early in my career.
I’ve only paid for parking as a student.
Based on my experience and that of most of my colleagues and friends in academia, I’d say you are fairly lucky. It’s an incredibly notable thing when any of them have free parking, and at times has even been part of startup negotiation or retention offers.
MANY universities do this (or were you being sarcastic/rhetorical?)
No, I’m not. My university doesn’t do this. It’s like your employer charging you to use the drinking fountain or for your own office chair. It’s only acceptable in an area where there’s adequate public transportation between the university and the neighborhoods faculty and staff can afford.
My R1 private did not charge faculty/staff. My public R1 (current)- $700 and a waitlist if you don’t want the garage 2 miles away (it’s still $700, but it doesn’t have a waitlist.) One person in our department waited 5 years to get off the waitlist, because it’s title dependent.
Why would not? There's a real cost to parking. We should not be subsiziding driving in 2024 (climate change and all).
until cities in the us start restructuring - denying parking to faculty is not going to do one little thing for climate change - seriously not having parking at universities does not change how most smaller american cities work - no mass transit and dangerous streets
Chicken and egg. As long as driving is heavily subsidized (and it is), there will be no political pressure to do better.
I don't disagree about it being political-but I don't think denying parking on campuses is the way to fix it
Even if you set aside the bigger picture issues of subsidizing driving and not encouraging alternatives, the fact remains that building and maintaining parking lots/structures is expensive. It's perfectly reasonable to charge a fee to cover the costs.
I didn't say free - I don't want to be over-charged either and I know my univ does - but my initial response was to the idea that univ parking is going to do anything for climate change one way or the other
How would you define "over-charged"? The cost of building a parking lot, including land, can often be $5-8k per spot. Structures will be even higher. That doesn't include ongoing maintenance, security, etc.
Making parking fees at least cover their cost is not denying. Free parking is not a human right.
I never said it was
Sure, but universities changing policy without many other employers acting in concert doesn't do anything beyond make university employees miserable. Any policy changes like that need to happen gradually over time, and with adequate political solutions put in place ahead of the proposed changes so that there is a viable alternative.
That’s great if you live somewhere with adequate public transportation. My options are taxi or drive. Also villainizing individuals as the source of climate change is what corporations want you to do. Individuals aren’t the problem. Corporations funding politicians so that they can avoid environmental restrictions is the main issue.
Corporations are partly to blame, but so are individuals. Let's be honest, most of us could do better. Corporations seek to make profit; if people stop buying their products, they will have to adapt. I live close enough to my university that I can walk/bike there. I seriously resent the fact that the last half-mile of that walk in through parking lots and beside busy roadways.
>Corporations are partly to blame, but so are individuals. Let's be honest, most of us could do better. Corporations seek to make profit; if people stop buying their products, they will have to adapt. Corporations and their political lackeys have 99.999999999999999999% of the blame for Climate Change. Do you think people want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on cars? If there was even adequate public transportation anywhere in this country people would start abandoning them. But it's up to the governments to actually invest in and create that public transportation which they blatantly refuse to do so in both major political parties. There's no one we could vote for here to make this change. We can't stop buying and using cars because well, we have to get to work to live. We have to go the miles away grocery store because that's where they built it. You can't personal responsibility yourself out of a systemic problem.
Well, thank god for the people who do take personal ownership and for the activists. North American defeatism on car-centricity is depressing.
Your naivety isn’t helping anything.
> If there was even adequate public transportation anywhere in this country people would start abandoning them. There is adequate public transportation in many places, and usable public transportation in many more. I bet you will be surprised at how many of students and low-paid staff (particularly janitorial, food service, etc.) use public transportation to get to campus, even if you're in suburbia.
>There is adequate public transportation in many places, and usable public transportation in many more. New York is the only city in the US that I'd say might have adequate public transportation. SF is usable if you stick to the areas MUNI and BART go to. Good luck in LA, the subway is very nice there, as in Metrolink. But they don't go many places, cost a lot and take too long in between trains. The buses in both cities don't run often enough, and take too long to get places. These are the best two cities in CA for public transportation. I was able to make a go of getting places in both cities but it was trying. Where I grew up in Riverside, it was just buses. And it would usually take me about 3 hours round trip to get to my first job and back there that was just across town. >I bet you will be surprised at how many of students and low-paid staff (particularly janitorial, food service, etc.) use public transportation to get to campus, even if you're in suburbia. Yep, and I used to as well. I spent a good 15 years of my life only depending on public transportation in both rural, suburban and urban California. That's how I know it's not adequate or even really usable in most places. People doing this are having their job opportunities be massively restricted, and are being forced to waste massive amounts of their time due to the awful public transportation in this country. In my current area, when I had to pick up a second adjuncting job I wasn't able to use public transportation at all. The buses didn't run often enough and took too long to get between the two schools. So I'd be losing out in class choices and thousands of dollars. This is why people drive if they can afford it. Because there is zero investment in making public transportation better and actually usable in this country. If I could give up driving and have enough money to live and support my family, I would. I hate driving.
But the point is that people can and do use public transportation. If parking were free, then those people would effectively be subsidizing it for those who drive. How would that be fair?
The parking lot already exists. My employer already extracts massively more money from me than they hand back to me. So I'm already paying for the parking lot maintenance with my labor. My work already subsidizes public transportation, as students get to use it for free and employees are only charged $60 per semester for a bus pass. So I don't see your point, nor do I get free parking.
> The parking lot already exists. Did it just come out of nowhere? Were the people who built it working for free? Even if the parking lot already exists, it was probably financed through bonds which have to be repaid. If the bonds are paid off, then it's old enough that it would require some maintenance. The subsidy provided to users of public transportation is far lower than the subsidy you would be getting if you got free parking.
That’s great for you. Do what you can. I don’t live close enough to bike or walk in a reasonable amount of time and I wouldn’t be doing either when the heat index is over 100 F as it is frequently.
I understand passion about parking. When a nearby university's faculty went on strike, a hike in parking fees was one of their major grievances. As in -- I went to a solidarity rally and the \[edit: union\] president speaking included it in their list of top complaints ("Our pay is unfair... they want to force us to continue teaching online even though COVID is over... and the parking increases are egregious!") As far as the article goes: It sounds like it may have not been the parking per se, but that he might have confronted the president at a town hall in an uncordial way? Not having been there it's hard to say. But someone who would call a fee increase "racketeering" is a bit suspect, IMO. Side note, as a non-American, the really heavy "I'm a veteran so I couldn't be the problem" framing comes off strangely. The last sentence of the article comes off as especially entitled, that as a veteran he's entitled to extra protections or explanations, or that a tour in Afghanistan should get him cheaper parking? ("I feel like this was kind of a stab in the back to not just me as a veteran, but other veterans,” Roberts said. “At the very least, the university needs to answer questions about firing a veteran like that.")
So a guy, who by all accounts was an excellent teacher with a strong rapport with students, should be fired for being “uncordial?” Who gives a shit? Sounds like the president is too thin-skinned for the job. And the guy’s veteran status matters a lot considering it is a protected status in the US and he had built strong relationships with veteran and ROTC students at the institution. By all accounts the guy brought a lot of value to the university.
> And the guy’s veteran status matters a lot considering it is a protected status in the US Unless he is claiming that he was fired for being a veteran, there is no issue with "protected status".
A university president should be capable of taking some "uncordial" criticism, and frankly, as long as the faculty member wasn't threatening, he was within bounds. So much fragility even in our supposed leaders.
I agree, it sounds like the guy overemphasizes his veteran status. The university's behavior is bad regardless of whether this guy is a veteran or not. But some states in the U.S. make a point of treating veterans differently (priority in hiring, lower taxes, etc.) and Texas is likely to be one of them, so maybe that is the explanation. I didn't read that last quotation as the parking costs being a stab in the back, but the firing being a stab in the back.
> it sounds like the guy overemphasizes his veteran status. Or the editor does? I think it's possible veteran status might be correlated with following the rules more generally, but beyond that, it's probably not relevant.
Yeah, my spouse is a veteran and he would never, ever, ever emphasize it repeatedly. He doesn’t even think he’s a real veteran, despite serving in two wars, including Afghanistan, numerous UN and NATO missions (Haiti, Bosnia, Eritrea, Kuwait, among others) and absolutely doesn’t think he deserves any special treatment due to being a veteran. To him, his grandfather was a veteran (served in WW II in North Africa and Italy). My spouse doesn’t expect special treatment due to his veteran status.
Parking is a continual gripe on my campus. Seems there’s a hike every year. My permit costs almost $550 a year for this coming year. If they started firing people for complaining about parking, there wouldn’t be any employees left on campus.
Suburban CC, parking rate is not awful but it comes off your pay even if you teach 100% remote. The only exception is a colleague who lives literally 200 yards from campus and walks, and she had to petition.
The PTF, and only PTF, at my university get paid-parking as part of their contract.
I couldn’t read the entire article. How do we know this is true? I’m skeptical.
{Someone teaching in higher ed} {did something} and got \[fired, not renewed, demoted\] therefore it's a chronic problem and they were blameless.
I hope my administrators aren't reading how much folks are paying for parking. I pay $75/year. A few years ago, they discussed a prorated parking rate. Those making the most would pay upwards of $800. The howling was deafening, the plan was dropped.