After Learning Her TA Would Be Paid More Than She Was, This Lecturer Quit

Last spring the University of California at Santa Cruz hired Amanda Reiterman to teach two 120-student lecture classes on classical texts and Greek history. Soon after, an administrator from the history department asked Reiterman if she had any suggestions for teaching assistants.

As the instructor for both classes, Reiterman would be responsible for designing the course content, lecturing, and creating lesson plans for discussion sections, while her TAs would provide support by helping with grading or leading discussion sections, for example.

Reiterman, who holds a Ph.D. and has taught as a part-time lecturer at the university since 2020, recommended a former student of hers who had just graduated with a bachelor’s degree and would be pursuing a master’s in education. But when administrators started the hiring process and copied Reiterman on the emails, she was shocked to learn that the teaching assistant would earn $3,236 per month — about $300 over Reiterman’s own monthly pay.

“I wrote back to my administrator and said there’s some kind of mistake,” Reiterman said.

There was no mistake, though. That’s because after 48,000 graduate students, postdocs, and researchers in the University of California system went on strike in 2022 and won pay increases and expanded benefits, some TAs are now earning more than the instructors in their own classes. The minimum academic-year salary for first-year teaching assistants, for example, will increase from the $25,000 they got in the spring of 2023 to $36,000 this fall.

For Reiterman, learning she would earn less than the one of the TAs she would be supervising — who was her undergraduate student just months before — was a gut punch. “It made me sick to my stomach,” she said.

Unionization and strikes have upended colleges’ compensation schedules, resulting in some professors getting lower pay than people with far less experience.

The University Council-American Federation of Teachers, the union that represents UC-system librarians and non-tenure-track lecturers, including Reiterman, recently kicked off an effort, including an online letter-writing campaign and a couple of town halls, to persuade the system to confront what they’re calling a pay inversion. The union’s existing contract ends June 30, 2026, but union leaders are urging administrators to pay lecturers more immediately.

The union doesn’t know how many lecturers are earning less than their teaching assistants, said Katie Rodger, president of the union and a lecturer at UC-Davis. While such scenarios occurred occasionally prior to the TAs’ pay increase, she said, they appear to be more common now. According to the union, lecturers teach 30 to 40 percent of credit hours across the UC system.

Rodger said UC administrators have an obligation to rectify the situation. “The fact that they would allow any faculty, of any rank, to be paid less than a graduate student is something that I think that people who attend this university should be aware of as a practice and I think that all of us, as instructional faculty, should be fighting and pushing back on,” she said.

Asked about the pay disparity, Heather Hansen, a system spokesperson, said in an emailed statement: “The University of California recognizes lecturers’ valuable contributions to fulfilling our teaching mission across the university system. We strive to provide competitive compensation for these integral employees: The current contract, ratified in 2022, provided wage increases totaling more than 20 percent through 2025. Additionally, lecturers are eligible for robust merit and promotion increases every one to three years, ranging from 3 percent to 9 percent or more.”

“The university strives to provide fair, equitable, and consistent compensation across its employee groups and will consider these important issues as it enters negotiations with bargaining units in the coming months,” the statement continued.

Reiterman was so upset at the thought of being paid less than her teaching assistant — and what that implied about her value to the university — that she resigned from teaching one of her two classes and accepted an offer from the history department to teach the other class with fewer students and no TA.

“For the university to suggest that my work is less valuable, or I bring less to the table than a teaching assistant who just got a bachelor’s degree a couple of months ago and has no expertise in my field, is really insulting,” Reiterman said.

Wage Stagnation, High Inflation

University of California lecturers are not alone in struggling with poor compensation. Faculty wages nationwide have stagnated in recent years, with average salaries for full-time faculty members still falling below pre-pandemic levels after adjusting for inflation, according to preliminary data from the American Association of University Professors’ most recent faculty-compensation survey. Part-time faculty members earned an average of roughly $3,900 per course in 2017-18 and 2022-2023, during which inflation eroded the purchasing power of their income.

Dissatisfaction with compensation has contributed to an unusual wave of unionization and strikes in academe in recent years. Employees have sought better wages, benefits, and working conditions as the industry has hired a decreasing share of tenured and tenure-track professors compared with contingent faculty members, who have lower status, pay, and power in campuses’ hierarchy. According to AAUP, 68 percent of faculty members nationwide had contingent appointments in 2021, up from 47 percent in 1987.

While contingent faculty and graduate-student workers saw an increase in unionization over the past decade, unionization among undergraduate and graduate-student workers has surged drastically in the last couple of years, according to National Center for the Study of Collective Bargaining in Higher Education and the Professions, at City University of New York’s Hunter College. Also on the rise, says the National Center, are strikes among faculty members, students, postdocs, and researchers.

Compensation in higher education has long been inconsistent. Professors teaching different subjects on the same campus can make wildly different salaries, and adjunct lecturers can earn far less than tenure-track professors teaching identical courses, for example.

Kevin R. McClure, an associate professor of higher education at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, who has studied compensation in higher education, said universities tend to be “slow moving and generally not super concerned with compensation practices.”

Unusual salary structures can also result when universities have multiple unions representing different types of employees during contract negotiations, as is the case within the University of California system, said William A. Herbert, executive director of CUNY’s National Center. In the UC lecturers’ next round of contract negotiations, they will very likely point to the teaching assistants’ pay increase as a reason to increase the lecturers’ wages, much as they might point to the salaries at a neighboring institution, a common tactic in contract negotiations.

So-called wall-to-wall unions, which include all employees at an institution, allow for greater uniformity in terms of conditions of employment, Herbert said. But it may also be more difficult within those unions to represent the perspectives of different types of employees, which may be one reason such unions are rare.

The pay raise for UC teaching assistants has led to other unusual scenarios. For example, Tara Thomas, a lecturer at UC-Santa Cruz, is earning about the same as they did working as a teaching assistant before graduating with a Ph.D. in 2021. Ironically, Thomas said, if they had continued as a teaching assistant and never received a Ph.D., they would be earning $300 more per month now.

Having worked as both a teaching assistant and lecturer, Thomas said the roles are very different. “As a professor, you develop the entire course from scratch, and that means reading all of the materials in advance, making sure that you have in-depth knowledge and an understanding of the research behind each and every book that you’re putting on the syllabus,” Thomas said. It also means preparing course readers, designing tests, and developing lectures and slideshows. Teaching assistants, on the other hand, typically handle administrative tasks like taking attendance, attending lectures, and running small-group discussion sections, they said.

Wesley Viebahn, a TA at UC-Santa Cruz and third-year Ph.D. student in literature, was active in the 2022 strike. She said that while the teaching assistants worked hard for and earned their raises, she believes the lecturers also deserve to be paid more. “They have Ph.D.s, which is a huge accomplishment, and I think they should be paid accordingly.”

A recent opinion essay in The Sacramento Bee highlighted yet another unintended consequence in the California system following the 2022 strike.

According to the essay, documents received by the union representing postdoctoral scholars showed that about a third of postdocs whose titles are changed to “project scientist” — which would appear to be a promotion — end up taking a pay cut. The author of the piece, Amanda Goodrich, an assistant project scientist at the University of California at Davis, wrote about signing an offer letter for her new title and anticipating a raise, only to later receive an updated version of the letter invalidating the raise. “This was insulting, demoralizing and disruptive,” Goodrich wrote. “But writ large across UC-Davis’s research community, this creates a compounding pattern of missed financial opportunities: homes never purchased, loans never paid off, and families never started.”

An administrator for the UC system responded that the overlap in pay between postdocs and project scientists was understood during contract negotiations, which included more than 60 bargaining sessions.

The 2022 UC strike was the largest in U.S. higher-education history, disrupting life across the system’s 10 campuses for six weeks as employees sought better compensation. The unions won base-pay increases ranging from 55 to 80 percent for academic employees and 25 to 80 percent for graduate-student researchers.

The UAW president at the time, Ray Curry, said in a statement: “Our members stood up to show the university that academic workers are vital to UC’s success. They deserve nothing less than a contract that reflects the important role they play and the reality of working in cities with extremely high costs of living.”

(Some employees from the same group are on strike now over the university’s response to student protests of the Israel-Hamas war.)

Replacement Hired

Until her recent experience, Reiterman was a true believer in the mission and promise of higher education. She recalled how her maternal grandmother, who grew up in a small town in the foothills of the Central Valley of California, bravely went off to Berkeley in the 1930s, paying $25 a semester. The experience was so transformative that in her 90s, she was still quoting her English professors. “Going to a university is the chance to broaden so many students’ horizons, to expose them to things that will enrich their lives in ways they don’t even know,” Reiterman said.

Reiterman studied archaeology at Yale for her undergraduate degree, earned a master’s degree at Oxford, and then a Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, where she won graduate-student awards for both teaching and research.

She worked long and hard to complete her Ph.D., which she recalled as a lonely process. She was proud to earn her doctorate and eager to get her students excited about the ancient world. But learning that her teaching assistant would earn more than her cheapened all her hard work, she said.

Within two weeks of Reiterman’s resignation from teaching one of her two courses, another lecturer had signed on in her place. That lecturer was Thomas, who went from being so excited to get the offer to teach to being “devastated” after learning that their teaching assistant was earning more than them for a class that Thomas had spent hundreds of hours developing from scratch.

“I was heartbroken,” Thomas said.

Despite the experience, Thomas remains committed to working in higher education, saying that they love being in the classroom and teaching students. They said they do, however, plan to advocate for lecturers and graduate students to ensure equitable compensation.

But for Reiterman, learning she would be paid less than her teaching assistant was “like a bell that could not be unrung.”

It’s not about the money, Reiterman said, but the principle. “I felt like I could not teach a class under those circumstances.”