Youngmin Seo was barely making ends meet on his adjunct faculty salary at the City University of New York. He and his then wife both worked full- time as they raised two children, and he took an extra job at The Korea Times to fill the gaps. For 20 years he commuted to Queens from Edison, N.J., because he couldn’t afford to live closer to work. “Every paycheck we struggled to pay our rent,” he says. “Life was so fragile.”
Seo’s experience is just one of so many like it. That is why the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty-staff union at City University of New York, fights so hard for its adjuncts – some 10,000 of them – who teach approximately half the classes at the University’s 25 campuses. And the PSC has made great strides: Minimum adjunct pay went from $3,222 per class to $5,500 in the last union contract, and adjuncts with more experience and/or advanced degrees can get up to $6,000 per course, considered one of the best rates in the nation.
STUDY
Another tremendously important win was job security. A recent AFT survey, “An Army of Temps,” shows that 74% of adjunct faculty nationally have contracts that cover just one semester at a time. That means many have to wait until the last minute, sometimes just days before the semester begins, before learning whether they’ll have classes to teach – and income to live on. It’s all part of a movement among colleges and universities to hire more and more contingent faculty, who can be hired and fired as enrollments and budgets dip and rise. So when the PSC won three-year appointments in its last two contracts, it was groundbreaking.
CUNY adjuncts who have been teaching six hours a semester for five years are eligible for the three-year appointments. That makes a huge difference for faculty who will now have more job stability and more time and attention to devote to their students. “PSC/CUNY has been among the leaders in containing the radical adjunctification of the academic workforce,” PSC President James Davis told the Queens Ledger in March.
ON THE LINE
Now that’s all on the line. CUNY has threatened to drop the three-year appointments, which were part of a pilot program that ends in June. As the PSC negotiates its next contract, CUNY wants to cut the adjunct appointments to two years and increase the number of years required to qualify from 5 to 12 – more than twice the initial requirement. If the changes go through, PSC analyses show that the number of adjuncts eligible for multiyear appointments would drop 87%, from 2,450 to 318, across all campuses.
This not only harms individual adjuncts, it also threatens the quality of education for students: Professors who are stretched thin, trying to teach too many courses on too many campuses and taking on extra jobs and worrying over financial stability, cannot be as present and engaged with their students, and students won’t get the benefits of continuity among faculty, either.
Members rally at CUNY headquarters for job security.
(Credit: Erik McGregor)
The change would be harmful “not just to the folks who are in these titles,” Davis told the Queens Ledger, “it would also be harmful to students because they don’t benefit when there’s so much churn and turnover in the instructional staff.”
In such a scenario, Seo says, “Students come back if there is a grade dispute or if they need a recommendation, only to find out the professor is gone.” Since he has been at CUNY for so long – 27 years – he knows how important that can be. “They come back 15 years later and say, ‘Do you remember me? You were tough on me, you gave me an F. Thank you. That was the turning point,’” Seo says.
Through the years, Seo has tried to roll with the punches. His dual degree is in English literature and sociology, but his doctoral study was anthropology. When he started, he taught a night class in beginning anthropology, since that was what was available to teach. He has moved among four different CUNY campuses over the years. Currently, he teaches two anthropology classes and one intro to sociology at LaGuardia Community College in the Long Island City section of Queens. He also teaches a sociology class at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, near the river in Lower Manhattan – nearly an hour through New York City traffic, or 12 stops and two 10-minute walks via the E train.
“Adjuncts are very resourceful,” he says wryly – he is among many who cobble together a full teaching load on different campuses. CUNY policy limits them to nine credit hours on one CUNY campus and one additional class at a second CUNY campus, but Seo has one colleague who teaches 15 courses a year by adding Suffolk County Community College, on Long Island, to his roster so that he can make enough to earn a living.
Seo is working through his third three-year appointment, which has made a huge difference in his sense of job security – especially since he was laid off from The Korea Times during the pandemic.
But not everyone is so lucky. “There are so many good faculty members who are totally dedicated to their students but have no choice but to leave,” says Seo, citing the lack of job security, low pay, hours spent commuting and other factors. “This is no way to teach.” He admits that he has considered leaving the profession himself.
It would be a tough move. He is so animated in class, it is clear he cares about the material and his students. Weaving stories with facts, he keeps the content relevant and engaging. His aim is to reach each of his students, who are a mix typical of community college classrooms – an ethnically and racially diverse group including many who are the first in their families to attend college. One day in cultural anthropology, the class included a nun from Kenya and an aspiring journalist who wants to write about her Mexican American grandmother, who moved to the United States as a 16-year-old bride.
If Seo were to leave them, they would lose not only a good teacher but also the kind of continuity that helps students once they leave the college. “That kind of continuing connection is important,” Seo says.
And so he and the rest of the PSC keep fighting.
TAKING ACTION
In addition to speaking at board meetings and attending bargaining sessions, PSC members and leaders held a press conference and action on May 2 to advocate for job security among adjuncts, full-time lecturers and higher education officers, whose job titles are programmatic and administrative in nature. Contract negotiations continue, and people like Seo, who is on the bargaining committee with Davis and 18 other union leaders, will continue to insist that adjunct faculty get the support they need – that the community needs – to provide the kind of education that changes lives.
A version of this article first appeared at AFT Voices.
Published: August 5, 2024
