Painful departmental cuts at Queens College have faculty and staff organizing in resistance. College assistants and non-teaching adjuncts were laid off in June after a deep cut to departments’ temporary services budgets, putting workers represented by DC37 and the PSC out of work and shifting more work on to the remaining PSC members. Department chairs have been suddenly directed to drastically cut their adjunct budgets, a move that would undermine class schedules for the student body.
Queens College (credit: Desiree Rios).
Cuts are not uniform across all departments, but chairs have reported a dire situation to the PSC. Erica Doran, the PSC chapter chair at Queens College, said that department chairs received directives that “showed a drastic reduction in their adjunct budgets.” The union has met with state lawmakers and demanded that the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees provide the funding to avert these massive cuts to students’ services and education.
Melissa Checker, chair of the Urban Studies department, said that she was instructed by the administration to cut her department’s teaching adjunct budget by about 40% and that her temp services were sliced by about half.
“Department chairs had their non-teaching adjunct hours cut this summer. We are now expected to advise students and coordinate summer courses with no compensation,” she said, adding that “To make up for some of these cuts, department chairs are being asked to use funding from the Queens College Foundation, or research overhead, or any other funds we might have.”
This has had a huge impact, she said. “As full-time faculty members, we are continually asked to prop up the failing college in myriad ways, all of which involve our free labor.
Of course, this significantly diminishes our ability to pursue our research, which in turn hamstrings our careers as academics. Regardless of the specificities we cannot possibly close the deficit on our own. We need CUNY Central to invest in our college and frankly, to save it.”
“Why is this happening now? We are told that our deficit has continued to grow despite the fact that we have had to cut our budgets, especially our adjunct budgets, multiple times every year, for the past few years,” Checker said.
The usual administrative claims that enrollment numbers have been in decline and attempts to blame contractual salary increases don’t cut it for the PSC, however.
“I don’t think that the Queens College budget entered some unbelievable foul territory this summer,” said David Gerwin, professor of education. “That is for CUNY Central. CUNY knew what the contract was, they knew what costs were going to be. The basic costs of the college are the people and some repairs and some operating expenses that I don’t think that dramatically changed all of a sudden. If anything, enrollment is a little better.”
A June 28th snapshot of CUNY enrollment shows that Queens College was almost 350 students ahead of last year’s fall enrollment on that date. Morever, the full cost of negotiated raises for Queens College PSC members was covered by this year’s state budget, as it is for all senior colleges at CUNY.
The impact on the college is massive, Checker said.
“Morale is incredibly low,” she said. “All of us, across the board, from custodial staff, to some associate provosts, are being forced to take on increased workloads to make up for the reductions in hours and the layoffs of part-timers and the non-replacement of retirees,” she said. “I receive emails from staff at all hours of the night and on weekends. Faculty are having to teach classes that are not in their expertise, as we fire adjuncts. We have fewer classes; students have a hard time finding the classes they need to graduate; we are being asked to change our curricula so they have fewer requirements, but we are also told to cut electives.”
Annie Tummino, head of special collections and archives, said libraries have been hard hit. A search for a permanent chief librarian was canceled and new books can only be purchased with grants or donations, she said.
“The budget crisis is affecting the library in a myriad of ways,” she said. “Many non-teaching adjuncts have lost their jobs, including the social sciences librarian, visual and performing arts librarian, and sciences librarian. These NTAs were hired to fill positions previously occupied by full-time faculty. So, we’ve gone from the adjunctification of library positions, which was bad enough, to eliminating these lines altogether. Hours for college assistants are also being eliminated or severely reduced to the point of these staffers losing their health insurance.”
Cuts to college assistants, represented by District Council 37, have had a tremendous negative impact on the library. “College assistants staff the information desk, keep the doors of the makerspace open, re-shelve books, process archival collections, and carry out many other core tasks,” Tummino said. “Many of our CAs are students in the School of Information Studies, and these jobs provide resume-building experience that complements their education. Now, the administration is trying to shift these tasks to full-time faculty and staff, who are already burned out and overwhelmed. Unfortunately, information and reference desk coverage will either be severely reduced, or librarians will need to be pulled away from other duties to keep these services going.”
She vowed PSC resistance. “The administration wants us to fight over crumbs, but we refuse to be divided,” she said. “Together, we are standing up for our most vulnerable colleagues, including CAs, NTAs, and adjuncts. Investment, not austerity, is what’s needed for Queens College to turn its situation around. After all, students will go elsewhere if they can’t get the services or classes they need at Queens.”
Jorge Velez is the assistant director of the college’s First Year Experience. He said, “In my own department, we are a team of one full-time staff member with four part-time college assistants. For years, I have been advocating for another full-time line in my department, and at every turn, was offered college assistants as a bandage to the austerity labeled like a budget crisis. Now I have had to lay off half my staff, and my department is in a worse situation than it was five years ago, with the same amount of full-timers and half the part-timers.”
He said he’s not alone: other higher education officers are suffering.
“My situation is one of several happening across administrative and academic departments across our campus–ultimately negatively impacting student retention and pushing work onto already overworked and overburdened HEOs,” Velez said. “People are incredibly frustrated. We are told we need to focus on enrollment, when the services we offer that impact retention are being gutted. Many feel the work we do is for no gain, as we can’t keep the students we hope to attract to the institution.”
Anestoria Shalkowski, an adjunct teaching earth and environmental science, said she doesn’t know if she will be offered a class for the fall. This has her looking for other work, but she also feels that this robs students of the chance to take classes they want or need. As a result, Shalkowski said students either stay in school longer (and thus take on more debt) or they simply take classes they aren’t interested in so they can graduate sooner. “Neither of which is favorable,” she said.
Natalie Bump Vena, an assistant professor of urban studies, said, “I want CUNY and Queens College administrators to stop neglecting the Borough of Queens. There’s been a campaign of disinvestment at our four-year colleges–Queens and York–and it’s doing irreparable harm to the immigrants, to the people of color who continue to power this city and are often exploited while doing so.”
In June, Adjunct budgets for departments at York College were cut by 10 percent and academic hiring was frozen. In their campaign to oppose the cuts, the York PSC chapter objected to the “continued expansion of administrative roles at the highest salary levels, including the addition of multiple Vice Presidents, Deans, and other senior positions such as Associate Provost and Director of Academic Affairs.”
Queens College has room to chop from the top as well. The chapter’s petition says, “The Queens College administration seems to have insulated itself from much of the pain the rest of us have suffered. High-paid administrative positions are filled quickly, with new roles being added (or existing ones elevated). Right now, QC has eight positions that are some form of vice president, some newly created and some that were previously deans.
The faculty and staff are fighting back with a petition and a rally in lower Manhattan outside the office of William Thompson, chairman of the CUNY Board of Trustees.
Click here to RSVP for the July 27th Rally to Save Queens College Jobs.
