Union Members Demand Reinstatement of Blacklisted CUNY Faculty Member

(New York, NY) One hundred members of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC/CUNY) rallied outside an arbitration hearing in Lower Manhattan Friday morning in support of a Brooklyn College adjunct faculty member who was fired and added to a do-not-hire list for engaging in First Amendment protected speech. They were joined by Assembly Member Diana Moreno, sponsor of state legislation to protect academic freedom for all college workers. 

Assemblymember Diana Moreno photo by Mike Nitsky

“We’re here today to stand in solidarity with the Fired Fourth and demand their immediate reinstatement. The PSC contract is clear that all members have strong academic freedom protections. CUNY management has a duty to make good on that contract in today’s arbitration hearing,” said Moreno.

In summer 2025, four Brooklyn College adjuncts lost their jobs due to their advocacy for Palestinian rights. Three of the four were reinstated as of January 2026 after a vigorous campaign calling out CUNY management’s “New McCarthyism” – their attempts to stifle speech opposed by the Trump regime. The “Fired Fourth” is still blacklisted – ostensibly for distributing an anticapitalist pamphlet on campus, a pretext for discipline that directly echoes the McCarthy era.

“Make no mistake, this is a fight about the First Amendment and academic freedom. CUNY management cannot be allowed to twist its own policies by alleging a minor offense to justify terminating and blacklisting a valued, experienced educator. The final member of the Fired Four must be reinstated. This is cruelty and cowardice, and we won’t back down,” said PSC President James Davis, a professor of English at Brooklyn College.

Corinna Mullin photo by PSC staff

The Fired Forth chooses to remain anonymous, but Corinna Mullin, one of the three reinstated Fired Four, was at the rally.

“Three back. One to go. Our comrade remains blacklisted across CUNY, stripped of her livelihood, her health insurance, her ability to teach, after nine years of dedicated service. She is the best of us and we cannot rest until she is back with us,” Mullin said.

Assembly Member Diana Moreno also called for passage of the Academic Freedom Protection Act. The legislation, sponsored by Moreno in the Assembly and by Senator Julia Salazar in the state Senate, would make violations of academic freedom a grievable offense and a defense assertable in union arbitrations.

“New York must set a positive example for the country, not contribute to democratic backsliding. I invite all of you to reach out to your elected representatives. Ask them to join us in calling for an end to this New McCarthyism and defend your right to free speech by co-sponsoring the Academic Freedom Protection Act,” said Moreno.

Senator Salazar spoke up for the Fired Fourth this summer, telling PSC members the bill makes “abundantly clear, it should be against the law for universities and colleges to retaliate against their staff simply because they disagree with their speech, their research or class decisions or intramural activities.”

The PSC’s contract includes protections for academic freedom, but many academic workers have no such safeguards.  The bill would also give academic workers the ability to sue their employers for violations of their academic freedom.

CUNY colleges have a long history of political repression. More than 50 City College faculty and staff were named as communists at a state committee hearing in 1941. Most were fired in what the American Association of University Professors called “the largest political purge of faculty on one campus in the history of the United States.”

The CUNY Trustees apologized to blacklisted professors in 1980 passing a resolution that said, “They were dismissed during and in the spirit of the shameful era of McCarthyism, during which the freedoms traditionally associated with academic institutions were quashed.” This apology, published in the student newspaper, is featured on a bulletin board outside Brooklyn College President Anderson’s office.

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