The City University of New York (CUNY) was founded on a democratic principle—“whether the highest education can be given to the masses … and whether an institution of learning, of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will” (Board of Education 1849). During its 170-year history, CUNY’s commitment to this principle has waxed and waned. During the 1960s and 70s, students, buttressed by the new social movements of the era, pushed the institution to a democratic high tide marked by free tuition and open admissions—in other words, a commitment to universal public higher education. The long economic crisis that began in the 1970s (Brenner Reference Brenner2006) prompted an ongoing retreat from this goal, making the country’s largest urban public university a frustrating laboratory for the effects of disinvestment on the students who need our help the most. A key component of this retreat has been an attack on the wages and working conditions of the faculty, achieved by fostering a class of teachers whom the school demeaningly calls “adjuncts” despite the fact that they teach the majority of courses at the university.
In recent years, the crisis has worsened. Between 2008 and 2015, per-student state funding fell 17% at CUNY’s four-year colleges (CUNY Rising Reference CUNY2016), reflecting a trend that shook public colleges across the United States (Mitchell, Leachman, and Masterson Reference Mitchell, Leachman and Masterson2016). Administrators compensated by increasing the number of students, increasing the tuition they pay, deferring maintenance on crumbling campuses, and replacing full-time faculty with adjuncts, who are low-paid and can be jettisoned as demands shift. An adjunct starting at one of CUNY’s 25 campuses earns just over $3,200 per course, slightly more if one possesses a terminal degree. This works out to under $26,000 a year before taxes for an eight-course annual load in the most expensive city in North America, although few adjuncts can secure this much work. I once made more money moving furniture for nine days than I did for an entire semester of teaching at CUNY.
The university’s goals in establishing a tiered workforce are the same as employers everywhere—to cut costs and to safeguard those cuts by undermining workers’ solidarity. Adjunct work is a form of contracting, a maneuver designed to sever conventional bonds of responsibility between employer and employee. This disavowal of responsibility is expressed not only in low wages and vulnerability to layoff, but in the thousand subtle and not-so-subtle ways adjuncts are reminded they do not fully belong at the institution.
In their roles as department chairs and committee members, tenure-track professors risk becoming conscripted as front-line managers of the growing adjunct crisis. To the extent that they acquiesce, they become complicit not only in the erosion of their own salaries and working conditions, but of their power to check the university’s slide into the narrow logic of profit-seeking. At the City University, doing more with less means bulging class sizes, decrepit facilities, overworked faculty, and inadequate advising (Chen Reference Chen2016). It also means increased tuition, which privatizes the school, making it an instrument that hardens class and racial divisions instead of ameliorating them. The ability of the faculty to intervene in the interests of students diminishes when the bulk of the faculty are poor, alienated, vulnerable, and scared.
These forces can likely be checked only by a democratic revolution within the institution. The City University is not “controlled by the popular will” in any meaningful sense of the phrase. Ultimate decision making lies in the hands of a political establishment for whom investment in public higher education is not a priority. Many of us feel we have reached the limits of moral persuasion. Our union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), has established a $7,000 per course minimum salary for adjuncts—nearly double the current rate—as a central demand in ongoing contract negotiations. Other public sector unions in New York, however, including the one representing faculty at the State University of New York, have accepted raises that total around two percent per year. It is unlikely that CUNY management, saddled with limited budgets by the state, will wish to radically alter this pattern by doubling the salaries of its 12,000 adjuncts.
For this reason, like increasing numbers of educators across the United States, we will likely be forced to turn to direct action if we are to compel a living wage for adjuncts, check the erosion of faculty governance in one of the country’s greatest universities, and stand up for the needs of students for whom the City University is a key vehicle for achieving their dreams. There are serious obstacles. Our union, afflicted by gaps in sympathy and understanding between tenure-track and contingent faculty, is in some ways a victim of the administration’s divide-and-rule strategy. In addition, New York’s Taylor Law forbids public employee strikes and provides incentives for union leaders to eschew militancy in favor of moral appeals. And we need to mount an intensive campaign to enlist students, our most powerful allies, in a quest to remake the university into a vehicle for the satisfaction of our shared goals—a task that involves making tuition, class sizes, facilities maintenance, and adequate advising part of our bargaining agenda. The growing wave of teacher direct action across the United States, including the recent strike by educators in Los Angeles, offers models we should heed.
As a rank-and-file activist, I can report that sentiment for direct action is growing among faculty at CUNY, as evidenced by a near-unanimous strike authorization vote in 2016 and sympathy for a “$7K or Strike” campaign emanating from more militant corners of the union. The future of CUNY as a genuinely public institution depends on our willingness to organize and to stand fast in service of a democratic vision.
