Re: tutors wages

[Neal Lerner <nlerner@acs.bu.edu>]

Sorry to post and run with this question of tutor wages, but two trips 
out of town made for some seriously A-synchronous communication.  Anyway, 
I wanted to try and restate my original intention in a thread that spun 
into various interesting directions, from whether tutors should be happy 
to work for their wages to whether adjuncts are underpaid to whether all 
tutors should work with LD students or non-native English speakers.

My original point had to do with casting ourselves in a professional 
image and the symbolic power of paying relatively "minimum" wages.  In 
other words, I'm not quite saying that we should immediately double the 
wages of undergraduate tutors (or graduate tutors for that matter).  
Instead, I was wondering about the efficacy of doing what Jane Nelson 
reports (and I believe several others of you do), of having professional 
staff in the writing center.

Writing centers seem to be caught in this bind of providing optimal 
"service" to the students, which means having as many tutors as possible 
to cover a maximum number of hours, and justifying this as "plum" campus 
jobs or pre-professional training.  The former justification does not 
elevate working in the writing center much beyond steaming trays in the 
commissary (in any structural sense); the latter justification makes me 
wonder why we pay at all!  After all, most of the K-12 student-teaching 
I've been involved with (both as student and as teacher) paid absolutely 
nothing!

I suppose all of this begs the question of why writing centers should 
constitute themselves as professional campus entitities (and what the 
heck "professional" means), but I'll save that for another holiday.

Happy July 4th to you all.

	Neal Lerner
	nlerner@acs.bu.edu