TF's Gather Support For Pay Increase

The Federation of Teaching Fellows has launched a drive to amass signatures on a petition that asks Harvard to raise each TF's wage at least $400 a fifth.

The top rate for a fifth, which is a measure of teaching load, is now $1200; usually, a TF teaches two fifths. The petition calls on the University to pay all teaching fellows $1600 a fifth.

By yesterday, the petition had been signed by 300 of Harvard's more than 900 teaching fellows.

The Federation's strategy has been to contact each teaching fellow in the College individually, working through representatives in each department. According to the Federation's early figures, the 300 signatures represented personal contact with 370 TF's.

Deadline

The Federation's steering committee decided last night to set a deadline for submitting signatures in the first week after Spring vacation, the week of April 9. The Federation's three-man executive committee might present the petition to the University administration as early as that same week.

The Federation is also distributing a questionnaire to teaching fellows in an attempt to calculate how many hours a week a TF spends preparing and teaching his courses.

"We're trying to make it an objective kind of survey," said John R. Maynard, teaching fellow in English and a member of the executive committee.

The questionnaire breaks the work load down into categories such as individual tutorial and section, and also asks for information on grading and lectures.

"For the amount of teaching you do," the sheet reads, "do you feel that you are a) overpaid b) adequately paid c) underpaid d) severely underpaid."