Around the CUNY system, adjuncts are raising awareness among students about their economic precarity and lack of institutional support. It’s a solidarity-building exercise with the message: Our working conditions are your learning conditions.
Dozens of adjuncts and other PSC members sprawled onto the lawn of Brooklyn College’s east quad for a “grade-in” on May 8.
Claire Greising, an adjunct lecturer in English, had her laptop open on the sunny, spring afternoon. She and others advertised that adjuncts were engaging in uncompensated work including writing student letters of recommendation. While the recently-ratified collective bargaining agreement includes substantial wage increases, many adjuncts believe they are lagging behind financially, she said.
“I don’t feel like the wage compensation is enough,” Greising said. “This is the most expensive city in the country and our salaries should reflect that.”
Adjuncts demonstrate on the quad at Brooklyn College. (Credit: Paul Frangipane)
BIG WIN
The 2019 PSC-CUNY contract included a big win for adjuncts: a paid office hour, which put more money into part-time instructors’ pockets for doing work that was previously uncompensated. But, as adjuncts explained at the Brooklyn College action, adjuncts don’t have offices and must use cramped, shared spaces in which it is nearly impossible to have confidential conversations with students. That problem, they said, was a result of the general disinvestment in CUNY.
Despite successful efforts by the union to convert adjunct lines into full-time lines, many part-timers remain in limbo, with full-time jobs out of reach. Adjuncts wanted students to know that many of their instructors don’t have real job security. “I’ve never felt like there was an opportunity for full-time employment at Brooklyn,” said Ann Marie Dorr, another adjunct instructor in the English department.
On May 15, adjuncts participated in a hybrid grade-in and speak-out both on Zoom and in person at City College and John Jay College. At Hunter College, on April 28, adjuncts held a flash mob on the bridge over Lexington Avenue, so that students could speak to adjuncts about their working conditions.
“The inspiration for the action came about when I realized that most of my students don’t understand that I’m not a full-time employee. They are always shocked when they learn how little my colleagues and I are being paid to teach our classes, or that we have no job security,” said Tim Cusack, an adjunct lecturer in theater at Hunter. “I’ve also noticed that the instructional staff whom they tend to feel most connected with are usually the non-tenured, non-tenure-track folks. It’s frustrating when the University refuses to acknowledge the very real contributions we make, not only to the intellectual life here in academia, but also in reinforcing the social cohesion that is crucial to student success.”
According to Cusack, “Several Hunter students stopped to talk to the activists taking part, who were more than eager to engage them in conversations about our working conditions. Social media posts about the action garnered lots of engagement, while also providing one of our adjunct colleagues a conduit to alert us to an issue regarding multiyear appointments for academic programs.”
SOLIDARITY
PSC adjuncts want to build solidarity with students and want them to know that a better education starts with more investment in CUNY and raising living and working standards of part-time instructors.
Cusack said, “Let’s keep raising awareness among our students and colleagues about the inequitable two-tier system under which we labor.”
In addition, adjuncts called on the University to adhere to contract language protecting multiyear appointments, known as Appendix E, for part-timers.
“The Appendix E pilot adopted for the 2023-2027 contract provides for a review for eligibility of courses in academic programs and for these reviews to be conducted in a timely fashion for appointments beginning in Fall 2025,” said Lynne Turner, the PSC’s vice president for part-timers, in testimony to the CUNY Board of Trustees. “I have received numerous emails from adjunct faculty that teach in academic programs – some for close to two decades, teaching consecutively at least six contact hours per semester, thereby meeting the criterion for eligibility many times over – who wish to be considered for eligibility and instead are running into unnecessary barriers due to the stonewalling of CUNY administration. The time is now to stop stalling and stonewalling and to honor the multiyear-appointment agreement that we bargained.”
