Who’s Really Teaching at CUNY?
by Advocate Staff
Most of the classes at City University now taught by underpaid and overworked adjuncts
In a concerted effort to raise awareness about the situation of part time, adjunct, and contingent faculty labor at the City University of New York, adjunct lecturers and graduate students at all of the university’s 17 college campuses are taking their struggle into the classroom.
Timed to coincide with National Campus Equity Week, from October 29th to November 2nd hundreds of teachers across the university will be taking a break from their usual course plans and spending their class hour talking about their working conditions and how those working conditions directly impact the learning conditions of their students. Carl Lindskoog, the student coordinator of the CUNY Graduate Center Adjunct Project, which is leading the CUNY awareness campaign, says “once students learn about the low wages and intolerable working conditions of CUNY adjuncts they will join us in our campaign for equity. Students and adjuncts want the same thing: conditions that create the best possible environment for both learning and teaching.”
Although many people have little or no idea what an adjunct is, adjunct lecturers and contingent, non-tenured or tenure-track, faculty currently comprise more than 50% of the total faculty members at CUNY. These “invisible faculty,” are basically teaching professors and perform many of the same duties as full time tenured or tenure track professors, including researching and publishing articles, participating in civic activities, presenting public lectures, advising students, attending meetings, and writing recommendations. Despite this they are paid only for their teaching, and often earn less than $3,000 per class per semester.
With an average course load of four classes per semester (this would be an abnormally large course load for most full-time professors) an adjunct would be able to make a total yearly salary of only $24,644. This is in comparison to the average salary for a CUNY professor of $56,664-$102,235. By contrast, the starting salary for a New York City Teaching Fellow in the public school system with a bachelor’s degree is $43,362, with an increase to $48,325 in the second year. This is almost twice as much as what an adjunct lecturer teaching full time earns at CUNY, despite the fact that many of these Teaching Fellows may have been taught by CUNY adjuncts just a semester before.
Many of the adjuncts at CUNY, however, have master’s degrees and PhD’s, which makes these inequities all the more real. According to the US Census Bureau the average New York City resident with a master’s degree earned $53,700 and those with a doctoral degree earned an average of $73,300. This means that starting wages for an adjunct teaching at CUNY are only a third to a half of what other New Yorkers with similar educational backgrounds are earning.
Although salary is by far the most egregious inequity between full and part time faculty, adjuncts insists that it doesn’t stop there. In addition to low wages, adjuncts have practically zero job security.
Since they are technically considered contingent, or “non-essential” faculty, adjuncts are regularly hired on a semester-to-semester basis. This means that many adjunct lecturers, who have sometimes been teaching at their campuses for years, and even decades, face the alarming prospect every semester of simply not being rehired or sometimes, even worse, having a class cancelled without pay. In order to mitigate this loss many adjuncts will try to get courses at other colleges at the last minute, often creating a situation where they must travel from one college to another in the same day, forced to prepare for their classes or finish their grading on the subway or bus.
The majority of adjunct lecturers are dedicated and often selfless teachers in the classroom, but they argue that the heavy workload they have to take on just to survive and the insecurity of their positions make it difficult for them to give students the time and attention that they deserve.
Perhaps the least obvious but most insidious inequity is the continued de-professional-ization of college teaching in general. While tenured and tenure-track faculty enjoy secure yearly salaries with regular wage increases, self-governance, academic freedom and protection through tenure, small course loads, and paid research time and sabbaticals, adjuncts toil away in the trenches teaching large introductory level courses and often receiving little respect for the work that they do. Instead the CUNY administration sees these workers as largely interchangeable and completely dispensable
This lack of respect is exemplified by the University’s recent and incredibly expensive ad campaign, “Look Who’s Teaching at CUNY.” Designed to remind New Yorker’s of the high quality and talent of CUNY’s teaching faculty, these ads feature pictures and brief bibliographies of award winning tenured faculty members. Of course, CUNY does have a lot of talented and dedicated teachers at every level, but to place all of the emphasis on a handful of academic stars and award winners, all of whom are full time and tenure-track faculty, while ignoring the immense talent and dedication of its majority contingent faculty, is perhaps what hurts the most for many adjuncts.
Participants in Campus Equity Week actions and concerned adjuncts, faculty, and staff are encouraged to sign the open letter to Chancellor Goldstein (http://gcadvocate.org/openletter/) calling for greater equity for adjuncts.
