Thomas Cleary, left, with Ian McDermott (credit: Ari Paul).
Enrollment at LaGuardia Community College is recovering from the pandemic-era decline. But at the college’s library, staff said that cuts to the workforce in this vital arena are degrading the quality of education.
At the end of February, two library faculty members are scheduled to retire. Several other lines have been lost and have yet to be refilled, members said, meaning that staff roles “disappear in the shuffle,” according to Thomas Cleary, an assistant professor in the library and a PSC delegate. There have been three vacancies left open since 2017, he said.
“Everyone’s stretched,” Cleary said, noting that when a library faculty member, a HEO, or college assistant leaves and the job is left vacant, the remaining staff must take on new tasks in addition to the ones they already have. “As students go up, our workload goes up,” he said, referencing recent enrollment gains.
This has undermined the quality of education at the Queens two-year college. “Sometimes there aren’t enough workers on any given day to staff the circulation desk,” Cleary said. The library has been forced to reduce its hours of operation, Cleary noted, “because we don’t have enough warm bodies.”
Money has been made available for adjuncts to take on some of the library instructional work, according to Ian McDermott, an associate professor in the library, but that has fed into a general anxiety PSC members have had about the work once done by full-time labor being replaced with part-time labor. “This increasing reliance on adjuncts is something I worry about,” he said.
With library faculty and staff taking on more roles, certain new projects simply haven’t started, McDermott noted, adding that sometimes workers are put into duties that aren’t their specialty. “People are spread too thin,” McDermott said. “There’s a lack of understanding of what library faculty roles are.”
Cleary agreed that when library faculty and staff are taking on more work it becomes impossible to stop and work on bigger, long-term projects for the library because “there’s no way to come up for air.”
Library faculty at LaGuardia are calling on the administration to focus on adding more staff to the library to make up for what has been lost.
Laura Tanenbaum, the PSC chapter chair at LaGuardia, said, “As LaGuardia’s enrollment has been increasing, it’s crucial that we have the resources for all students to thrive with a wide range of educational supports, and none of these is more important than a well funded, well staffed library.”
Alycia Sellie, chair of the union’s library faculty committee, said that the situation at LGCC is also happening throughout the libraries at CUNY.
“These shortages have increased over the last five-six years or so,” she said. “When someone leaves they are often not replaced, and workloads have been redistributed to those that are left, especially affecting junior faculty who are assigned heavy workloads while still working toward scholarly requirements for tenure.”
Sellie added, “It can be fixed by replacing lost lines as well as reassessing increased workloads with more duties assigned to all of us.”
The PSC’s Committee on Legislation is leading City and State budget campaigns this spring to win the funding needed to replace lost faculty and staff lines at the libraries and throughout CUNY. Contact Legislative Organizing Coordinator Sam Lewis ([email protected]) or your PSC chapter chair to get involved.
Published: March 2, 2026
