We did it! Forward to the dignity of our adjunct professors and the wrong so-called ‘contractual professors’

With three months to go, it is an honor to announce the results of the Government University Project, which is committed to achieving dignified and fair living conditions for UPN professors, i.e., the historic agreement signed with the Association of University Professors (ASPU-UPN). This will come into force in the second academic semester of 2024 and will help to guarantee the rights of contractual and adjunct professors, who make up 82% of the institution’s total staff.

This is the result of the technical and budgetary studies aimed at achieving our political will as a university government, which tends to increase the length of employment of contractual and adjunct professors, to 22 weeks and 3 days and 20 weeks, respectively. In the same way, it is the representation of the recognition and proportional payment of vacation and leave bonus, which are highly beneficial to their income increase and intrinsic contributions to the payroll, which increase up to about $ 5.5 billion for 2024 and about $ 12 billion for 2025.

It is important to highlight that this agreement has been made between two strategies included in the Rector’s approach, Garantizar el por-venir de nuestros maestra(os) (Guarantee the Future of our Teachers), which refer to 1) To ensure the development of a regularization of work through the expansion of the employment of contractual and adjunct professors; the recognition and payment of social benefits, respecting labor rights subject to the laws, the decisions of the Constitutional Court, and the 2023 Collective Agreement signed between the National Government and the Public Workers Unions in the Education Sector Roundtable; and 2) The implementation of Rectoral Resolution no. 0677 of July 2023 and other current ones that formalize the ASPU-UPN Collective Agreements.

Therefore, together with the team of the UPN Directorate, we strongly believe that the right to freedom, the declaration of democracy, the collective relevance of the university ethos, the strengthening of social justice, the equality in working social relations and, above all, the recognition of all the professors are the basic principles to protect dignity.
Thus, we speak of human dignity as a multidisciplinary and multidimensional category related to philosophy, anthropology, politics, law and, above all, ethics. This concept is found in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948, which states that every human being, regardless of his social, cultural or economic condition, has inalienable rights and dignity that must always be guaranteed and everywhere, because human dignity itself justifies the recognition of rights.

However, dignity is also full of paradoxes, dilemmas and drifts, such as the impact of neoliberalism on our subjectivities, which is reflected in the loss of collective solidarity, in the motto “Each one for himself”, i.e., professors with different types of work contracts; in the record of a continuous devaluation among colleagues for degrees and academic production; in the realization of some inequality regimes that exclude and expel; in the existence of hidden and open indifference; in the lack of community projects. Situations like these do not only exist in the UPN, but also in the university environment, where unfortunately they are part of the daily drama.

Even in these events and in a construction of training processes in which we find ourselves, the realization of a project around the dignity of the teacher’s work means and requires us to recover three paths that account for their own place in the ecology of educational policies, located within the philosophical framework that includes education and pedagogy. A first line that justifies teachers as intellectuals of pedagogical and political action; secondly, the recognition of them as cultural workers; and thirdly, a concept of territory for them as creators of pedagogical knowledge. Each of these paths has a repertoire of memories and conflicts, political struggles, and cultural battles. There is, of course, epistemic knowledge in these forms and, above all, there is a kaleidoscope of ways of being a teacher in these times and spaces where university life itself takes place.

Therefore, we in UPN are working hard to seize the opportunity and have a dignified, fair, and beautiful life for all of us. That is why we are ensuring the strength of new knowledge and pedagogical practices; strengthening the ways of academic management, social and administrative outreach; placing the University supported by teacher training programs and processes; and building collaborative connections with territories, communities, and government scenarios. These are undertakings that make us responsible for the management of the UPN in relation to real issues, making decisions of educational public policies according to the expectations, challenges and concerns required by the university community, since teacher training is part of our main project about all that we think, feel and do.

In this way, the realities we face are assessing our relationships and our perspectives. We are working on it, and no one should be excluded from this opportunity to build in the midst of the extreme conditions we are facing, so that we will have the opportunity to live in friendly sceneries, and the University will stand before universal thinking with determined and supportive actions.