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The Harvard Undergraduate Association will lobby Harvard administrators against time limits on employment for non-tenure-track faculty, the organization announced at its weekly general meeting on Sunday.

Academic Team Officer Matthew R. Tobin ’27 announced plans to meet with the Faculty Arts and Sciences Office for Faculty Affairs on Wednesday to share student perspectives on the time caps — which restrict lecturers and preceptors to two, three, or eight-year contracts.

“We think that it has negative pedagogical effects to essentially force teachers out after a certain amount of time," Tobin said.

The announcement comes after more than 1,400 University affiliates including nearly 600 undergraduate and graduate students signed a petition opposing time caps for faculty. Their union, Harvard Academic Workers-United Auto Workers, is currently bargaining a first contract with the University and has been pushing to eliminate the caps in bargaining.

While University representatives have offered to eliminate time caps for preceptors, conditional on the union accepting contract language around discipline, it has resisted calls to uncap lecturer positions.

Organizers from HAW-UAW delivered the petition to Harvard President Alan M. Garber ’76 and Faculty of Arts and Sciences Dean Hopi E. Hoekstra late last month before a well-attended student walkout and protest against the practice.

“Even if the students really like a lecturer — even if the lecturer wants to stay, and theoretically, even if the administration wanted a lecturer to stay and to renew their contract — they literally cannot,” Tobin said. “It’s counterintuitive and counterproductive.”

“What the Academic Team is hoping to tell the administration is that time caps are not just hurtful for the people in these jobs, they’re also hurtful for the students pedagogically,” Tobin said.

A University spokesperson did not respond immediately to a request for comment Sunday night.

At the Sunday weekly meeting, HUA Co-Treasurer Tobias Elbs ’27 also presented statistics on club funding decisions that were announced last week. According to Elbs, 252 clubs requested a total of $1,048,596 in funding, $531,554 of which was requested for projects the association deemed eligible for funding. $238,258 was ultimately allocated across all applicants.

Elbs said that his team “needed a little bit longer” to process requests this semester because they spent extra time on applications they had “difficulties reviewing” in order to accept all requests.

On average, applicants received 47 percent of their funding-eligible request.

Elbs said the HUA reviewed the requests without the help of an algorithm to make decisions, adding that they attempted to decide “what clubs have really meaningful events.”

“We decided to do it more based on our intuitions,” Elbs said.

Elbs also said that clubs collectively received a total of 85.9 percent of the HUA’s semesterly budget, a record high proportion despite a decline in the amount of funding available through the Student Activities Fee. The fund, which sustains the HUA in addition to other student life organizations, has recently been subsidized by the Dean of Students Office after hundreds of students opted-out of the $200 annual fee.

Elbs added that the HUA continues to struggle with funding clubs.

“We have a ton of clubs, and we cannot really accommodate anybody’s needs in full,” he said.

At the meeting, the HUA also voted to allocate $700 from the Well-Being Team to support a Financial Aid fair and $500 and $1000 from the Academic Team to fund textbook subsidies and end-of-semester care packages, respectively.

According to HUA Co-President Ashley C. Adirika ’26, the Financial Aid fair is designed to create “a space where students can come fill out their financial aid forms and be informed by financial aid officers who are actually determining their aid decisions.”

—Staff writer Nina A. Ejindu can be reached at nina.ejindu@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @nina_ejindu.

—Staff writer Claire L. Simon can be reached at claire.simon@thecrimson.com. Follow her on X @ClaireSimon.