Testimony from the CUNY Board of Trustees Hearing – October 19, 2026

Lynne Turner, Adjunct Lecturer, LaGuardia Community College and PSC CUNY Vice-President for Part Time Personnel: “This year, Senior Vice Chancellor Kenneth Godiner (Budget, Finance & Labor Relations and Chief Financial Officer at CUNY) in his reply shirked placing responsibility on CUNY administration by shifting blame to department chairs. We reject this divide-and-conquer approach and call on CUNY to accept responsibility, as our employer, for the impact of its systemic process of keeping classes insecure until the last minute and just-in-time employment, in which we are hired anew each semester, regardless of years and decades of teaching.”

David Gerwin, Professor, Queens College: “Senior Vice Chancellor Godiner has said that we have turned in late EPAFs and that we are responsible for the adjunct pay problem… I would like to explain to you where the late payments come from… What we need are actual stable investments in full-time faculty, but Queens College has lost 60 full-time faculty members over the last number of years without replacing them…”

Pamela Stemberg, Adjunct Assistant Professor, City College and Hostos Community College: “This year, a group of student workers, more than 20 of them, went unpaid for more than 6 weeks… but even worse, once confronted, Kenneth Godiner blamed the worker. No, it’s not CUNY administration’s problem that part-time faculty and staff don’t get paid; it’s the department chair…You have a system that rehires 12,000 people every single semester; you’re giving classes on how to deny stable and multi-year appointments and then at every turn you withhold funds and tell colleges to cut adjunct budgets, but no, paying people isn’t your problem — it’s someone else’s.”

Kate Peters, Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, BMCC, NYC Tech: “The semester started on January 26th [2026], and I was not paid until March 13th [2026], the third pay period of the semester…The college did not offer an advance; the college did not notify me of the availability of an emergency check…This was a source of added daily stress that lasted for almost half of the semester. I want to be able to be the best teacher I can be; I can’t be that for my students when I’m stressed about how I’m going to pay my rent.”

Jonathan Halabi, Adjunct, Queens College: “We are your employees and your community — when adjuncts, your employees, don’t get paid, where is the urgency? Why is it adversarial? Where is the urgency for you to make sure that your employees are taken care of?… I’m wondering what kind of leadership it takes to treat the university and the city and the employees and the students as your community that you serve – that you lead by serving. And I think there is something wrong here… Leadership is not fighting against everybody who is coming in, but leadership is actually leading. And I don’t think that we are seeing enough of it here.”

Elizabeth Hovey, Adjunct Assistant Professor, John Jay College: “The state doesn’t realize it is a temporary employment agency when it comes to adjuncts, and you are not making them fix their problems, and you are not fixing our problems so that people get paid. The only thing worse than not knowing if you are going to be employed, which is the contingency CUNY takes advantage of all the time, is having done the work and not getting paid on-time.”

Steven Harris, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Queens College: “I was notified …that I would not be receiving any appointments to teach next semester despite having multiyear appointment and many extremely positive evaluations since I began teaching at QC in 2015…I’m deeply concerned that any move to eliminate or cancel courses in the arts & humanities will have a profoundly negative impact on enrollment and retention at QC in the Arts especially for the morale of the student body themselves…QC is unique among CUNY institutions in offering a Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) degree in photography and imaging instead of reducing the classes offered for this degree program the college should be using these dark room classes as a magnet to increase enrollment by drawing students from across the city and beyond who are seeking an affordable specialized photography degree.”

Kevin Adams, PSC HEO Chapter Co-Chair and Director of Community Standards, Medgar Evers College: “When a position is vacated or frozen, that work doesn’t vanish. It falls onto the shoulders of the staff that remains. “Other related duties as assigned” has become the newest euphemism to compel a shrinking workforce already operating at capacity to find new ways to reach a new ceiling… the daily quagmire of professional staff who are continuously expected and relentlessly squeezed to do more with less just to keep the university afloat…We are the backbone of CUNY. Even the strongest backbone will snap under unsustainable weight.”