Open Letter to Hunter College President Jennifer Raab
An Open Letter to President Jennifer Raab
Hunter College, CUNY
January 25, 2009
Dear President Raab,
Your email of January 15 asked our community to join you in proclaiming “hooray for Hunter,” after the college was recently ranked number eight on Princeton Review’s list of Best Value Public Colleges for 2009. But unfortunately the bargain that Hunter offers its students is produced in part by contingent faculty earning less than a living wage, so many of us cannot join you in this celebration.
More than 55% of all classes at CUNY are taught by contingent workers—adjuncts and graduate teaching fellows. For the 2007-08 academic year, the Middle States accreditation report reflected 641 tenured and tenure track faculty and 876 contingent instructors at Hunter. Although the expectation has been that graduate student life is a period of temporary impoverishment on the way to a tenure track job, this does not explain Hunter’s predicament. Of the more than 10,000 contingent faculty in the CUNY system, fewer than 2,000 are graduate students. And this is, of course, is part of the nationwide disinvestment in public higher education over the past several decades where less than 40% of university faculty are in traditional tenure track jobs.
In most public universities, graduate students serve as teaching assistants for years before being entrusted—and burdened—with their own courses. Not so at CUNY, where graduate students regularly teach overcrowded classes in their first or second year of schooling. Sure, that’s a good value, but does it reflect the quality education, for either the undergraduate or graduate student, that The Princeton Review purports it to be?
As you know, tenured and tenure track professors in the arts and sciences at Hunter teach three courses per semester, making them far better off than many of their CUNY colleagues, who are burdened with 3-4 and even 5-4 schedules. Adjuncts who teach three classes per term, as many at Hunter do, earn less than $20,000 per year. Most adjuncts cannot live on what they make teaching the equivalent of a full-time course load at Hunter and have to take another job—meaning that many of us are spending our time away from the college working to subsidize it. It is our labor, both on and off campus, that helps make the university a good value.
Adjuncts and fellows are not provided adequate office space to meet with students, or reliable access to computers and printers to prepare for classes. They do not enjoy the protections of academic freedom. They do not have the same benefits and health insurance that comes with what’s deemed a full time position. They do not have job security and can be fired without cause. And the greater the reliance on contingent faculty, the more strain is put on tenured and tenure track faculty to run their departments.
We shouldn’t be celebrating this award when it’s earned in part by paying poverty wages to half of our teaching force. College presidents at CUNY sometimes respond that labor and contract issues are beyond their control. But the head of a college has a bully pulpit from which to take a stand on an issue that is central to the health and success of the college if they choose to do so. When steps are taken to address these shameful conditions, we will proudly join you in cheering “hooray for Hunter.”
Sincerely,
Jennifer Gaboury
Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, Political Science and Women and Gender Studies
Member, CUNY Contingents Unite
cc: Jeanne Krier, The Princeton Review
Matthew Goldstein, CUNY Chancellor
Joined by:
1. Daniel Skinner, Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, Political Science
2. James Hoff, Adjunct Lecturer, Center for Worker Education
3. William Mangold, Adjunct Assistant Professor, Hunter College
4. Douglas A. Medina, Adjunct Lecturer, BMCC
5. Michael Busch, Adjunct Lecturer, City College, Political Science
6. Rosalind Petchesky, Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Hunter College and The Graduate Center
7. Shirley Frank, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor, NYCCT and York College
8. Jill M. Humphries, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor, Queens College
9. Arto Artinian, Adjunct Lecturer, Lehman College, Political Science
10. Antonia Levy, Ph.D. student, Graduate Center, Adjunct Lecturer, Queens College
11. Doug Singsen, Ph.D. candidate, Art History, Graduate Center; Writing Fellow, Kingsborough Community College, member of CUNY Contingents Unite and CUNY Student Union
12. Joan C. Tronto, Professor, Political Science, Hunter College and The Graduate Center
13. Crystal Torres, Brooklyn College
14. Emelyn Tapaoan, Adjunct Lecturer, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Member, CUNY Contingents Unite
15. Nathan Wallace, Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College, Political Science
16. Jesse Goldstein, Adjunct Lecturer, Baruch College, Sociology
17. Cristina Dragomir, Adjunct Lecturer, Political Science Department, Hunter College
18. Stephen Hager, Staff, Hunter College Music Dept.
19. Walter Dufresne, Adjunct Assistant Professor, NYC College of Technology
20. Steven Pludwin, Graduate Teaching Fellow, Brooklyn College, Political Science
21. Wendy Scribner, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor, BMCC and NYCCT
22. Sofya Petrukhin, alumna, Hunter College
23. Stanley Wine, Adjunct Lecturer, Computer Science Department, Hunter College
24. Monique Whitaker, Graduate student, CUNY Graduate Center, Adjunct, Hunter College
25. Lorna L. Mason, Ph.D., Adjunct Assistant Professor, Brooklyn College
26. Carolina Barrera-Tobón, Graduate Student, PhD Program in Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures, Graduate Teaching Fellow, Hunter College, Adjunct Lecturer, Queens College, Non-Teaching Adjunct, The Graduate Center
27. Jennifer Sloan, CUNY Graduate Center & Queens College
28. Kim Nguyen, College Assistant, English, Hunter College
29. Mark A. Torres, Member of the People Power Coalition, City College Alumni, Lehman College Graduate Student
30. Karim Dib, Student, Hunter College
31. Milena Abrahamyan, Student, Hunter College
32. Heather Cottin, Adjunct Lecturer, History, Social Science Department, LaGuardia Community College
33. Jamie Hagen, Hunter College alumna, Brooklyn College graduate student
34. Craig Willse, Interactive Technology Fellow, Baruch College
35. Michael Philip Fisher, Adjunct Lecturer, Hunter College
36. Diana Bowstead, Adjunct Assistant Professor (retired), Department of English, Hunter College
37. Stuart Ewen, Distinguished Professor, Department of Film & Media Studies, Hunter College and Departments of History and Sociology, The Graduate Center
38. Morgan Horowitz, Adjunct Lecturer, Philosophy Department
39. Soniya Munshi, The Graduate Center
40. Karen Miller, Associate Professor, LaGuardia Community College
41. Howard Pflanzer, Adjunct Associate Professor, John Jay College
42. Vanessa Lorenzo, Student, Hunter College
43. Daisy Deomampo, Graduate Teaching Fellow, Hunter College, Anthropology
44. Diana Colbert, Graduate Teaching Fellow, John Jay College of Criminal Justice
45. Binh Pok, Adjunct Lecturer, Sociology, Hunter College
Those interested in adding their name to the petititon should send an e-mail with their name and college affiliation to [email protected]
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