NM’s teachers have been chipping in for a long time

Editor,

I see in Thursday’s Albuquerque Journal story, “University Budget Choices,” that Gov. Martinez is concerned that UNM is considering helping to shield its employees from a state-mandated retirement increase.

Gov. Martinez, what do you think we have been doing our entire careers? My colleagues at UNM, at NMSU, in APS, all the state’s teachers, have been chipping in as long as we have been working as teachers. We chip in our time, our energy, our evenings and weekends. We chip in our money, too, not just in the form of lower pay and years without any salary increases.

Teachers routinely pay out of their pockets for a myriad of expenses imposed on us, expenses that in any other situation would be covered by the employer.

For example, UNM requires faculty to attend conferences. This is not a choice; it’s a requirement to maintain our jobs. If faculty don’t do this, they are judged to be not performing their duties, and they don’t receive tenure.

They’re fired.

But UNM has never provided adequate funds to cover the expenses of these mandated job duties. So, faculty chip in with their own money.
And now, in the current budget climate, UNM provides no travel money whatsoever to many, perhaps most, faculty. But we are still required to perform our duties as academics, so we pay for these expenses out of our own pockets.

My department has chipped in. When the budget crunch hit UNM, my department did the only thing it could with the very little discretionary money it had — it cut faculty phone lines. As a result, I’m chipping in again. When students need to contact me, when prospective students and their parents in other states want to ask questions about our program, I use my personal cell phone, and I pay the bill.

This state-mandated increase in my retirement contribution is not going to my retirement. It’s being poured into the state’s coffers, helping the state to bail itself out of a budget crisis our state’s legislators, not its teachers, created. There’s no doubt that we all need to do whatever we can to pull our state, and our state’s educational institutions, out of this dire situation.

But please, Gov. Martinez, don’t insult me and my brother and sister educators by telling us it’s time for us to chip in. Our contributions over the decades and across the state have built careers, businesses and made New Mexico a better, more prosperous state. We have chipped in, and we continue to chip in.

Sherman Wilcox
UNM professor