When Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona signed SB1070 (“Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhood Act”) into law on Friday, April 23rd, I felt like many of us had the morning after Obama won the presidential election: I went to sleep in one United States and woke up in a different one. Of course, with Obama’s election—for many of us—this was a feeling of elation, waking up the next morning and suddenly remembering that we, as a nation, had elected a (relatively) progressive, (definitely) Black president. Waking up the Saturday morning following Brewer’s signing of SB1070—a law that requires law enforcement officials in Arizona to stop and detain anyone they “reasonably suspect” might be an “illegal immigrant” until they produce papers proving they are in the country legally—I was devastated and living in a country where it is now legal to stop people on the street and detain them for looking Mexican.

Undocumented workers form a large part of the workforce in this country. They are a class of workers not offered any protections in their daily lives and are completely at the mercy of their employers; they are reliant on the kindness of those who hire them to do any number of their very necessary jobs. I have seen justices brought about by employers who do right by their undocumented employees. I have seen horrors brought about by those employers who do not.

Undocumented workers cannot continue to rely on the kindness of strangers as they continue to live and work in the United States. Labor unions, including the Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), have already begun to come forward to speak for immigrant workers. As we saw at the recent May Day march in New York City, and other actions around the country, May Day is increasingly and quickly becoming a day of action for workers in solidarity with immigrant workers. Labor unions need to remain aggressively at the forefront of this fight, demanding comprehensive federal immigration reform that gives amnesty to those already living here and allows for freer movement between arbitrary borders. Many national unions, such as the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), already have demonstrated commitment to, and forward momentum in, organizing these communities.

Every other national and local union—both the leadership and the rank and file—needs to continue large and vocal shows of solidarity with all workers and point out the obvious: this does not begin or end with the oppression of “illegal immigrants.” Illegal immigrants form an unpopular class of workers in our nation. We must also recognize that all of us who work for a living are an unpopular class of workers. We are all human, and we are all workers. We must fight together to end the injustice perpetrated against Mexicans in Arizona, and immigrant workers everywhere in this country, if we want to remain at all credible as a movement.

At CUNY this translates to rallying with cafeteria workers at Hunter and child care workers at other campuses. Right now, we must stand in solidarity with contingent instructors, as we are beginning to find out just how disposable we really are. We are faced with an epidemic of layoffs. Contingent employees—people who work with no job security—cannot be laid off, though. Rather, those of us who are not being asked back to our current schools, schools that we have been at for one semester or ten, are simply “non-reappointed.” This is an administrative whitewash of reality. The fact is that we are being let go in large numbers.

The worst report those of us organizing at the Adjunct Project and CUNY Contingents Unite (CCU) have heard is at John Jay College, where fifty-two adjuncts in the sociology department alone were laid off. Mass layoffs are also rumored for the fall semester in the computer science and psychology departments at John Jay. As we heard at a joint emergency meeting of the CCU and the Adjunct Project on Friday, April 30, adjuncts are being let go at every single campus. With updates from almost every CUNY campus, adjuncts and graduate fellows expressed concern over both their job status and their class size should these layoffs go through. This joint emergency meeting passed a motion demanding that the administration stop layoffs, that the PSC immediately begin organizing a protest, and organizing our own protest at John Jay, where we have seen the most egregious offense.

There is one huge stumbling block in showing solidarity with laid off workers: CUNY is not required to tell anyone of these “non-reappointments” except the victim. The PSC-CUNY need not be informed, so there is no way to compile data about just how many contingent workers are being let go. Therefore, we must do what we do best as academics and compile the data ourselves. For that reason, please send any information you have about layoffs to cunycontingentsunite@gmail.com.

As we approach contract negotiations in the Fall, the CCU and the Adjunct Project have included job security as one of our four keys demands, asking that contingent instructors be offered a three-year contract. These layoffs indicate that we are completely devalued as a class of workers (and graduate students are not immune, though many department chair choose to treat us a “protected class”) and job security will never be offered unless we demand it.

Our petition regarding these four key contract demands is being circulated on campuses (and can be found online at http://www.petitiononline.com/demands/petition.html). In addition to job security, we are asking for significant pay increases for adjuncts and graduate fellows that move toward pay equity, equal health insurance plans for employees across the board, and a promotional series and due process for higher education officers. Meeting these demands, we believe, will move the PSC one step closer to striking at the heart of the two-tier system, as contingent employees were promised in our last round of contract negotiations.

Graduate students have a unique struggle in this, as we fight simply to be recognized as workers at all. In the year 2000, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) ruled that teaching assistants at private universities had the right to unionize. Many schools began this process, New York University perhaps being one of the most prominent cases. In 2004, the NLRB reversed this landmark ruling, stating that the main role of teaching assistants at universities is as students. It is integral that we stand in solidarity with students at NYU, as the school administration fails to recognize their union. The administration has not offered them much hope, and the students will then have to again take this to the NLRB, now dominated by Obama appointees, to reverse the 2004 ruling.

What ramification does this conflict between our roles as students and workers have on our careers? Primarily, the teaching experience we accrue as graduate students is completely discounted. Certainly, it is used to in the hiring process, but when determining pay for new instructors, tenure-track and contingent alike, the three, or four, or five, or six years you spent in the classroom while taking classes and writing your dissertation do not count. This is an affront to the work that we have done over our graduate career and completely ignores the fact that universities rely on us for this labor. We must fight to see that this is corrected. More and more graduate students at universities across the country are asked to teach their own classes, but we are treated as children in the paternalistic system.

Even amid all these struggles, I have decided to resign as Adjunct Project co-coordinator. Having served in this position for two years, my reasons are manifold. First and foremost, I feel that the fight for a contract that truly destroys the two-tier system is too great to be restricted by a formal position that is largely kept in line by the DSC. In this position I never truly felt responsible to anything but a set of baffling, unclear, and sometime arbitrary rules.

Additionally, the DSC Plenary recently approved a new bylaw that added a third co-coordinator position. Though many may view this as a further investment in the Adjunct Project, I voiced concerns that it was, in fact, a misguided one. Dividing the Adjunct Project into three discrete positions, with limited overlap, creates further bureaucracy in an already overly bureaucratized system. It becomes difficult to listen to the needs of students, and adjuncts, when there are so many “professional” voices speaking up. I encourage you to continue to speak to the Adjunct Project about whatever problems and concerns you have, and I encourage the new co-coordinators of the Adjunct Project to work under the unified vision of allowing graduate student needs to guide their work. Anything less than that would serve as proof that the DSC’s investment in the Adjunct Project did not, in any way, serve a student body clearly in need of representation.

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On March 4 at 4 p.m., the Adjunct Project and a large group of students will march on Governor David Paterson’s Manhattan office. This will be a part of our effort to participate in the National Day of Action to Defend Education. We want you to join us in both the protest outside of the Graduate Center and the action at the governor’s office.

Why are our protests aimed at Governor Paterson? In an effort to end what the governor calls an “era of irresponsibility,” Paterson has called for $400 million in budget cuts to New York City public schools, $95 million in cuts to SUNY schools, and $48 million in cuts to CUNY. This attack on public education is the largest part of his attempt to close a $7.4 billion budget deficit.

These proposals come alongside a less frequently discussed initiative called the Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act. According to Paterson’s office, this would “take the politics out of tuition setting,” ostensibly by allowing each school to set its own tuition. The governor’s office heralds the proposal as a way to create more jobs (2,200 faculty positions on SUNY campuses alone—but it is not mentioned whether these would be tenure-track or contingent hires) and end overregulation of the schools by the state and create more accountability. Both the SUNY and CUNY chancellors are in favor of this proposal.

The formula as presented by proponents of the plan is simple: tuition goes up, and quality of education follows.

But what will the real effects be? Coupled with vast cuts to the school system’s budgets, this plan allows colleges to raise tuition themselves. Without the state’s supposed “overregulation” there will be no caps on tuition—meaning that colleges and universities can institute steep tuition hikes, essentially pricing out lower-income students.

The real formula is equally as simple: tuition goes up, and public education becomes unaffordable.

I grew up in Illinois and am very familiar with each university in the state setting its own tuition. Chancellors praise this model because of the autonomy it affords each campus. But here’s a reality check: base rate undergraduate tuition varies among Illinois state institutions from $7,017 to $14,500 for the 2009-2010 academic year. The tuition rate has no apparent connection with the academic standing of the school—with the most prestigious university center charging a middling tuition rate. Additionally, a complicated system of grandfathering students under old tuition rates and prepaying tuition has been instituted. It’s no surprise, then, that one institution is raising its base tuition from $8,448 in 2009-2010 to $11,020 in 2010-2011.

As tuition becomes less affordable with this plan, the Professional Staff Congress has pointed out that the state’s funding for full-time students has decreased from $14,000 in 1990 to $9,000. Enrollment has gone up, funding has gone down, and the Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) is being cut by $93 million. All student aid will be reduced because of this.

This constitutes nothing short of privatizing public education. Though it sounds almost idyllic for state schools not to funnel money through the state government, the governor’s plan is nothing more than a fantasy. There is no legislative oversight and no accountability to the public. Each school functions free of any strings attached. Is that what public education is?

Both chancellors argue that the most common use of this system will be in graduate programs. In other words, we will be the most likely to fall
victim to it.

To break down the funding problems at the Graduate Center is easy: there’s just not enough money, and there’s going to be even less of it starting
in 2011-2012.

There will be more money for more incoming students, that’s for certain, but that’s only because the schools will be taking money away from advanced students. Even if you receive an Enhanced Chancellor’s Fellowship (which, remember, only covers in-state tuition) you are only funded through year five—with an incredibly heavy workload. Second-chance funding in the form of Writing Fellowships and Instructional Technology Fellowships will be folded into the ECFs.

Sadly, there are few students who go from a bachelor’s degree to a PhD in five years. The time-to-degree is even longer at the Graduate Center, where students are often required to work far more than students in other institutions. After year five, though, CUNY tells us we’re on our own. There’s no tuition remission for teaching at CUNY after ten semesters. Level III tuition might seem like nothing, but when it’s half your salary for teaching one course at a CUNY college, it’s a lot.

Arbitrary and unregulated tuition hikes will impact you, even if it seems unlikely.

We’re asking you to join us on March 4 at Governor Paterson’s office—to leave or miss class to take a stand—not only because of the direct impact that these cuts will have on you, or even your students, but because of the impact they have on the city and the country as a whole.

The New York City Department of Education (DOE) announced in January its plan to close twenty public schools, one of which is located just blocks from the Graduate Center (Norman Thomas High School, located on 33rd Street and Park Avenue.)

In its decision about closings, the DOE cites high drop-out and low graduate rates at these schools, poor performance on standardized tests, and a failure to hit a number of other, rather arbitrary, academic markers. The DOE does not recognize—as NYCORE, Class Size Matters and other advocacy groups correctly point out—that it is neither the students nor these schools are failing. The system is failing them.

New York City public high school students go on to become CUNY students—and the system continues to fail them. It begins in elementary and high school with overcrowded classes. In more extreme cases (becoming less extreme these days) schools close, which according to Class Size Matters leads to higher drop-out rates, more push-out rates, and higher discharge rates. These are much more common with at-risk students.

Additionally, there is little evidence that the DOE has done anything to try to improve performance in these schools. Rather the schools attempt to do so autonomously and are often punished for setting higher academic and safety standards. The DOE is also largely responsible for a school’s success through admissions rates, a policy they set. Not surprisingly, the more higher-risk students that are admitted, the less “success” a school has. Higher-risk students are less likely to be accommodated at small schools, and therefore the success rate of these schools will skyrocket.

Beyond all this troubling evidence, it is worth pointing out that, in a time of budget cuts, the DOE’s moves are fiscally stupid. Teachers cannot (thankfully) be laid off from their positions due to school closures, and therefore they will be added to what is called the Absent Teacher Reserve. Teachers in this reserve earn a full salary while essentially functioning as substitute teachers. The financial impact is obvious, but what is perhaps more insidious is the disrespect for teaching as a profession. Teachers are not pegs that can be used to fill in holes wherever they are needed; they are trained professionals and should be treated as such.

On March 4 at 4 p.m. the Adjunct Project and a large group of students will walk up to Governor Paterson’s office to demand that students and teachers be treated with respect throughout New York State. We will demand that the cuts to all public schools in the state be restored. We will demand that the governor end his attacks on education. We hope you will join us.

If you would like to help organize or join protests, contact the Adjunct Project Co-Chairs Renee McGarry and Alison Powell at theadjunctproject@gmail.com. Updates can be accessed at:

http://opencuny.org/adjunctproject. 

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Governor Paterson set to slash CUNY budget yet again

Forgive me if you’ve heard this one before. On September 11, 2009 I passed my second exam and advanced to candidacy. On September 10, 2009, I was told I wasn’t going to receive my first paycheck until October 8, 2009. I also discovered that about 150 graduate assistants—through no fault of their own—were in the same situation.

Rather than spending the morning of my second exam vacillating between pulling my own hair out and wanting to vomit, I spent it first on the phone with payroll trying to resolve the issue. Frankly, even now, I am more concerned with the impact that missing paycheck had on my professionalism than it did on my finances. It wasn’t just disappointing not to get paid—it was also disheartening. How could CUNY have so little respect for me as an academic that my paperwork couldn’t even get processed?

This problem certainly has everyone’s attention now—largely because it has impacted a large number of graduate students. It’s pretty impossible to recruit top-tier graduate students when word gets out that they might not (or probably won’t) get paid.

But this problem isn’t new. Any one of us who has taught as an adjunct on any college campus knows that this problem is familiar—and it’s systemic. Again this semester it impacted adjuncts and new faculty members on every campus (except one.) Setting conspiracy theories aside, this might not be on purpose, but it certainly isn’t an accident.

When questioned about this, the school administration often blames the employee: did you turn in your human resources paperwork on time? What forms are you missing? What did you do wrong?

Oftentimes nothing. Particularly at the Graduate Center this semester, those 150 of us who missed one or two paychecks did everything right. Our paperwork was in on time, but, according to university officials, there was a backlog that made it impossible for them to pay us on time.

And apparently they didn’t realize it until September 9. When I haven’t been paid at other campuses, it’s been a similar situation—either I was hired too late to be paid during the first pay period, or I was missing a form I was never given, or my chair held all of the adjunct paperwork until it was “finished” to hand it over to human resources.

As Jesse Goldstein pointed out at the October 5 community meeting with President Bill Kelly, this points to the precarious position of adjuncts throughout the CUNY system. We don’t make enough money, and if we aren’t paid on time we suffer.

This isn’t our fault, but what is our responsibility?

When the Adjunct Project suggested that graduate students talk to their classes about not getting paid, I was personally surprised at the response. A lot of graduate students are embarrassed to do so—perhaps because it highlights the fact that we are students and we are often in similar situations to the ones we teach. Other students were angered by the suggestion, equating it to an adolescent temper tantrum in the classroom.

Maybe if we threw temper tantrums more often we’d have more money in our bank accounts.

Maybe if we followed the lead of the University of California students, faculty, and staff, we’d have an impact on CUNY. We all know our problem is bigger than two missed paychecks—our problem is a system that treats us like disposable employees rather than respected academics. It is our responsibility to demand that respect not just for ourselves but also for our students, our colleagues, and staff throughout
the system.

This is our struggle.

On October 6, Governor David Paterson announced an additional $53 million dollars in cuts to the CUNY system. This isn’t a surprise—the state already balanced the budgets on our back last year, with $68 million in cuts in 2008, $44 million in cuts already in 2009, and a 15 percent increase in tuition for students on every campus.

And, the question remains, why aren’t we angry about it? Is it because the Graduate Center is thoroughly removed from college life at CUNY? Maybe if we did talk to our students about our missing paychecks, we’d begin to understand how a 15 percent increase in tuition impacts them, or how they’re doing with higher enrollment and fewer services. Maybe if we talked to our students, we’d learn from them. Maybe if we talked to our students—or staff members—as equals, we’d stop performing authority and start actually having solidarity.

And if we are angry, why aren’t we doing anything?

The University of California system is faced with steep budget cuts this year, as California attempts to—yet again—balance its budget by slashing education across the board. Schools are faced with a 20 percent budget cut this year and are planning to increase student fees by 32 percent. On July 16, the Board of Regents approved an emergency plan that would force 80 percent of the system’s employees to take unpaid furloughs of between eleven and twenty-six days over the next year.

At individual campuses, this doesn’t just mean that people aren’t getting paid; it means that there will be fewer student jobs, fewer teaching assistants, a virtual elimination of lecturers (who often teach up to 30 percent of undergraduate classes in some departments) and the risk that top faculty will leave for more lucrative positions.

Before we sit back and think about how lucky we are that this isn’t happening to us (or that it’s happening more slowly and more quietly), let’s ask the question: are we next?

On September 24, University of California students took action to make sure that their voices were heard. Thousands of students across the ten-campus system participated in a Day of Action to protest the de-funding of the system. While they were out there protesting for themselves, they were speaking for all of us. Public education is being systematically de-funded nationwide—and two missed paychecks are just one of the small consequences.

This is a wake up call to all of us, and it’s time to take action.

But how do we build solidarity across a twenty-three-campus system? I say this all of the time: we can start by talking to each other. I think it’s obvious that we need to talk to our students, but what about talking to other faculty members? When tenured and tenure-track employees started hearing the story of how I didn’t get paid, I got to hear their stories too—and they were surprisingly similar. They missed paychecks, taught classes with over 100 students in them, and felt overworked and exhausted. When I talked to higher education officers—more popularly known as HEOs—and college assistants about what their offices looked like, they had four times as much work and the same number of employees.

And what about the cafeteria workers at Hunter? The cafeterias were sold to a company, AVI, which refuses to honor the worker’s old contract. AVI is threatening to slash health benefits (by following the national pattern of making employees pay more each year for their insurance) and do away with their pension plans (many employees have been paying into this for decades!)

The workers are already underpaid—and their raises are at risk, despite an existing contract. A boycott is scheduled for October 29 if AVI refuses to respect the standing contract.

While it seems unrelated to budget cuts, this struggle is part of the ongoing corporatization of CUNY. Money is more important than people, and the struggles of those working in the Hunter cafeteria, or at the CUNY Research Foundation, all prove this.

Just like missing a paycheck, the corporatization of CUNY isn’t our fault, but it is our responsibility. We can choose to follow the lead of those in the Hunter cafeterias with protests and boycotts. We can choose to follow the lead of Research Foundation employees who walked out on September 14 to demand a contract settlement. We can choose to follow the lead of those at the University of California. Whatever we do, though, we cannot be quiet, and we cannot hide. Whatever we do, we must do something.

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Sometimes data and statistics fail us. I work in the humanities so I’m not entirely surprised to say this, but I was shocked when I saw the data released in a recent report by the American Association of University Professors on the Economic Status of the Profession. Swimming in charts and graphs, it looked as if academics were faring fairly well: salaries were up and it initially appeared that tenured, tenure-track, and contingent faculty were doing all right.

I don’t interpret data, and taking the graphs and charts at face value made it difficult for me to reconcile our current subjective situation and the numbers. Fortunately, the AAUP did interpret their statistics, and the situation is as grim as it appears in our own minds and lived experiences.

The economy is hardly stable, which is a large part of the reason that we cannot rely on overall averages to tell us the whole story. Energy costs at the beginning of the 2007-2008 academic year were at an all-time high. These costs then rapidly fell for any number of reasons. This explains why transit costs are the only cost of living expenses that show a decline during the past academic year. (This may seem particularly ironic to New Yorkers, who are faced with balancing the MTA budget on their own backs–with a 20 percent increase in the cost of a monthly Metrocard.)

Even with energy costs decreasing, the cost of everything else was, and continues to be, on the rise. There may have been, as the AAUP states, a "one-time bump in average salaries" from the 2006-2007 academic year, but when adjusted for inflation, full-time faculty salaries in 2007-2008 are only 1.2 percent higher than they were in 2001-2002. The actual inflation-adjusted increase is lower for employees of public school systems such as CUNY. The cost of housing, over the past year alone, was up 2.4 percent, food was up 5.8 percent, and health care was up 3 percent. It’s no wonder, then, that even those in the highest echelons of academia are finding it more and more difficult to maintain their lifestyles.

Clearly the nation is facing an economic crisis, and it is carrying over into our education system. According to the AAUP, "in some states, public college and university faculty members are subject to the same salary and hiring freezes, benefit cuts, dismissals, and furloughs that are being applied to other state employees as governors and legislatures struggle to balance budgets in the face of revenue shortfalls. The problem with this shortsighted approach is that it treats faculty members and other higher education workers only as a "cost" to the state, rather than as the engine for growth they really represent."

This statement is interesting for many reasons, not least of which is that the public and academics themselves often view academia as an island, one that has very little impact on the real world. Think what you will of your own and your colleagues’ research (and what a dim view of it that is), we are also in the business of educating people. Time and time again during economic downturns, we see the public returning to school, either because they were laid off or they see further education as a means to advance their career. The public isn’t wrong: "data reported by the U.S. Census Bureau show that, on average, a person who had completed a bachelor’s degree earned almost twice the income of a person with only a high school diploma in 2007. Going on to earn a master’s degree raises income again by more than 20 percent, and obtaining a professional degree doubles the salary of a four-year college graduate." As applications increase and faculty members are asked to teach more and larger classes, they are actually aiding in our nation’s economic growth.

But budgets need to be balanced, and colleges and universities have been asked to take the hit. It’s ironic that as enrollment increases in both two- and four-year colleges, budgets are being scaled back and tuition raised. It’s not accidental–here at CUNY only 20 percent of the tuition hike is being turned back over to the university system. The remaining 80 percent will be used to balance the state budget. It’s also important to note that CUNY officials are pleased that we are getting such a large amount back; that’s a much larger number than has been seen in past tuition increases.

Obviously, increased enrollment has an impact on tenured and tenure-track faculty. They are asked to teach more and larger classes and are often asked to sacrifice some of their specialty courses to teach the basics. Sometimes it’s hard for contingent employees to feel sympathy for full-time faculty, but these are real issues. It impacts our own future as potential tenured professors, and it also means that contingent workers are being let go at higher rates.

There seem to be two paradoxical strategies to dealing with rising enrollment in universities when it comes to contingent workers. The first is to hire more of them. In 1975, only 30 percent of university faculty nationwide was part-time. In 2007, the number reached just over 50 percent. This number doesn’t come as a surprise. At CUNY, over 60 percent of the teaching faculty are contingent. The second strategy is to, as the AAUP so neatly puts it, rely heavily on the "contingent aspect of contingent appointments" and let contingent employees go without cause or recourse. This provides university systems with a "highly flexible" workforce, which is really just a euphemism for paying less money for people with equal education and skills.

Contingent workers in universities aren’t all the same. When I was out doing class visits for Campus Equity last month I repeatedly asked classes "What is an adjunct?" Inevitably, the first (and often only) answer that came up was that an adjunct is a graduate student, someone still working on getting her PhD, often overworked from that particular set of responsibilities. I think that graduate students are the most visible of the contingent teaching faculty at CUNY. We often talk about our experiences in school and classes, and, as one student said, "tend to act all crazy and tired all the time." I gently explained to all of these classes that adjuncts can be graduate students, but they also can be people with the same education and professional accomplishments as full-time faculty. Additionally, they can also be people out working in their own fields and professions and bringing that experience back to the classroom.

Following a corporate model, it’s nice to have all those options. But education isn’t a corporation and it becomes impossible to sustain any level of academic freedom within this model. While we often discuss the economic consequences of being so heavily reliant on contingent workers, we gloss over this crucial idea: it damages the university community and the ideal of the university when over 50 percent of teaching faculty do not have academic freedom. Academic freedom has been sacred to the academy, and the use of contingent faculty is a seamless and almost invisible way to erode this fundamental principle.

The AAUP’s 2008 release "Looking the Other Way? Accreditation Standards and Part-Time Faculty," argues that there are no sustained and systemic ways of protecting the academic freedom of contingent workers. Four of the seven large accrediting commissions make no mention of protecting part-time faculty in standards, and the remaining three, Middle States included, vary greatly. Most of these statements are broad; Middle States has the most specific: "Academic freedom, intellectual freedom, and freedom of expression are central to the academic enterprise [and] should be extended to all members of the institution’s community (i.e., full-time faculty, adjunct, visiting, or part-time faculty)." Without specific definition of any of the three protected categories, this statement becomes useless. Allowing for such broad interpretation affords universities the opportunity to use statements made by contingent faculty within and outside of the classroom as reasons for dismissal (when they don’t even need a reason to dismiss!)

Academic freedom can be profoundly misunderstood. It is often touted in the conservative media as something awful, nearly always citing some single controversial statement made by a politically unpopular professor somewhere. While professors in these instances deserve the fullest protection afforded them, academic freedom goes beyond this. It allows full-time faculty, graduate students, and (hopefully) contingent workers the ability to pursue their own research and political interests without retribution. Without it, academics might not have the opportunity to change from someone who studies Renaissance Italy to someone who studies Colonial Mexico. That might seem trite, but without the ability to make these changes scholars become stagnant and the academy begins to lack fresh ideas and new insight. If scholars cannot pursue their own academic and teaching interests (and cannot speak their minds) an atmosphere of fear develops within institutions and the ability of professors to add to the body of knowledge becomes severely limited.

Given the state of higher education both locally and nationwide, we often focus on questions of the economy. But what becomes of our own economy of ideas and idea exchange when colleges and universities rely too heavily on unprotected classes of workers? In order to maintain a truly flexible workforce, if that is how academics will be considered in our current world, universities must recognize that protecting academic freedom affords individuals opportunities for growth and flexibility, and protects them when someone better, or cheaper, comes along. 

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Adjuncting

RENEE McGARRY

They say when it hits the New York Times Sunday Style section you know the trend is over, and probably has been for at least a year. I have a distinct memory of such an event, the moment when the Style section did a photo essay on Doc Martens. I think it was 1995, and if I know the paper of record, it wasn’t ironic.

I wish this axiom could be applied to everything in the paper, because it would only mean good things for higher education. From a February 18 article on grade inflation in colleges to a March 6 article outlining the difficulties facing those of us searching for jobs, to Stanley Fish’s blog detailing what he called Neoliberalism 101, it’s not hard to see that Stanley Aronowitz was right when he stopped by the Adjunct Project table in the lobby to tell me that "this is a horrible time in higher education" and that it’s time for "adjuncts to take to the streets."

I wish it was as easy as Professor Aronowitz made it sound.

If Fish’s blog made anything clear to me, it was the real reasons tenure-track faculty, adjuncts, graduate students, and undergraduates aren’t taking to the streets: many of us in the academy are in denial. I don’t think it’s a denial about how bad the problem is. Most of us will admit that we are overworked and underpaid, and those of us at the Graduate Center may see that as a stepping stone to getting a coveted tenure-track position. (In fact, many of us are fed that exact line by our programs. If I had a dime for every time someone told me that the most valuable piece of my CV isn’t my research or publications, but the lengthy section on undergraduate teaching, I wouldn’t need to scramble for fellowships to write my dissertation.) Most of our undergraduates know that their classrooms are overcrowded and they aren’t getting the attention they deserve. Most tenure-track faculty understand that hiring an army of adjuncts means fewer colleagues, a smaller academic community, less intense and engaging conversation about their scholarly work, fewer and fewer opportunities for collaboration, and an erosion of academic freedom.

It’s not that we can’t see the problem, or that we can’t see how bad the problem actually is. Many of us refuse to name it, and without a name we can just pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.

Fish’s opening to his blog anecdotally reports exactly this: "I’ve been asking colleagues in several departments and disciplines whether they’ve ever come across the term "neoliberalism" and whether they know what it means. A small number acknowledged having heard the word; a very much smaller number ventured a tentative definition." Luckily in the first half of his post, Fish put together a brief, user-friendly, and relatively unbiased definition of neo-liberalism. He also cites many excellent sources that can teach us more.

When the Adjunct Project first started planning CUNY Equity Week (CEW), we had no idea that the national conversation might turn in a direction that would highlight the neoliberalization of the university, even if articles in the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education don’t apply this label. But any time we read of the difficulties of new PhDs finding full-time and tenure-track positions or lowered expectations of undergraduate students or harried and over-worked instructors, the conversation is essentially about neoliberalism. Call it what you want: neoliberalization, adjunctification, Walmartization. Our goals in CUNY Equity Week are to educate our students and each other enough so that we can, and do, call it something.

We are educators after all, and we can find power in using our skills. CUNY Equity Week does not aim simply to help us learn facts and figures and regurgitate them to our students. While it is meaningful that 57 percent of the faculty at CUNY are contingent employees, facts and figures themselves do not empower. Nor is Equity Week an outlet for our laundry list of complaints: I hate grading papers on the train, I work three jobs, it’s taking me nine years to complete my degree because I have to teach so much, I don’t have an office, they took away my mailbox. Complaint does not empower. Recognizing ourselves and our students as victims of a systemic attack that seeks to further oppress those already oppressed, racial, gender, ethnic, sexual, and economic minorities, by disenfranchising those who might help them the most will create a class of active social participants with real power to make changes. CEW serves to inspire faculty, tenure-track and contingent, and students, graduate and undergraduate, to act on a looming social issue that continues to devalue our education system from kindergarten through post-graduate education.

The Adjunct Project invites you to join us in naming the problem of neoliberalization and educating our students and colleagues about how it impacts us here at CUNY. During the week of March 30 through April 3 we ask that you participate in a collective effort to use these unspeakable words, neoliberalization, adjunctification, Walmartization, as much as possible. Use them in your classrooms. Use them with your colleagues. Use them with support staff. Use them with your supervisors.

We also ask that you spend at least fifteen to twenty minutes of one class during CUNY Equity Week engaging your students in a conversation about the CUNY edu-factory and ask them (and maybe yourself) to question our current paradigm of education. Does the university need to be a credential factory? And how can we change the university to meet our needs and demands?

Stop by our table in the Graduate Center lobby during the week of March 23 to sign up to teach this in your classes or have a team of students come in and talk to your class about it. Join the Adjunct Project for two workshops that will discuss the specifics of how to teach this topic on Thursday, March 19 and Monday, March 23, both at 7pm in room 5409 of the Graduate Center. There you can sign up to teach this yourself, join a team of presenters at the campus of your choice, and join an ongoing conversation about classroom strategies for equity week. At both the table and these workshops we’ll have teaching tools and materials available, including a large color poster (like the one seen opposite) that we hope will serve as a conversation starter and an illustration of the current state of our CUNY edu-factory. For more information or to download these materials now, visit our website (adjunctproject.org.)

Our fear of naming the neo-liberalization of CUNY and universities throughout the country allows the process to continue by sustaining its invisibility and furthering the myth of its inevitability. Stanley Fish might think CUNY Equity goes too far, removing us from our isolated cocoon of esoteric pursuits and bringing politics into the classroom. Stanley Aronowitz might think it doesn’t go far enough, that we should march down the streets and demand equity. These are important conversations to have and we have important decisions to make as a community. How do we demand we be treated fairly and that we are offered the same opportunities as those who grew up in Fish’s and Aroniwitz’s generation? And how do we demand that our students are treated fairly and that they have the same opportunities we do? 

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In a news conference on Friday, January 30, Mayor Bloomberg announced what many are referring to as his doomsday budget. This included one billion dollars in budget cuts, the core of which calls for laying off over 23,000 city workers. According to Bloomberg, the majority of these workers will be New York City public school teachers—as many as 15,000 of them may lose their jobs as the city faces an ongoing budget crunch with little to no help from the state. In addition to these lay-offs, Bloomberg expects to dramatically increase sales tax in the city and also to ask property owners to return their $400 tax rebates.

Not surprisingly, the city (and state) is again looking to balance their budget on the back of workers, explicitly stating that they need givebacks from municipal unions in order to prevent these layoffs. If municipal unions agree, workers will at the very least be expected to pay more for their health care, and it isn’t difficult to imagine what else they will be asked to do. Not only are we faced with the possibility of these givebacks, and an increase in sales tax, but we will also suffer a dramatic increase in MTA fares, and whatever else the city and its agencies throws in our direction.

In times like these anti-union rhetoric looms large. In its article about the proposed budget cuts and layoffs on January 30, the New York Daily News mildly referred to a lack of cooperation from “stubborn unions” throughout the city. The New York Post wasn’t far behind. But union-bashing doesn’t just exist in these conservative venues. In fact, we can see it in the comments sections of the New York Times website, on Gothamist, and in practically every other news source. Public employees are regularly referred to as “freeloaders,” “overpaid,” and “lazy”: these are among the tamest of insults.

Unfortunately, these feelings about unions, unionization, and union members are not limited to the local stage, nor are they limited to some abstract internet personalities hurling insults in our direction. The Employee Free Choice Act, supported by President Obama while he was in the Senate but notably absent from his economic stimulus package, is at the center of many of these anti-union arguments. Supporters of the bill herald it as one of the greatest changes to labor legislation since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act in 1935 and argue that it would make it much easier for workers to unionize, ostensibly eliminating a multi-tiered and possibly years-long certifications process by eliminating the need for secret ballots.

Critics of the act argue that by eliminating secret ballots, unions will be more likely to bully workers into signing on. (It is important to note that the act does not eliminate the possibility of complicated secret ballot voting but allows for the additional option of certifying a union after a majority of employees sign union authorization cards.) The rhetoric surrounding this act has escalated beyond that of stubbornness and free-loading. On a conference call with other CEOS, the CEO of the notoriously anti-labor Home Depot referred to the act as “the end of civilization as we know it.” In an interview on the Fox News Network on Saturday, January 31, a top editor at Forbes magazine called the bill “pro-slavery.” The scope and outlandishness of these claims can seem shocking but it’s not at all surprising.

Of course this bill makes CEOs nervous. Studies show that union members have 14% higher pay than those who aren’t unionized and are 28% more likely to have employer-paid health care. The Employee Free Choice Act will cost companies a great deal of money if it passes. But what’s troubling is when we hear similar arguments in our day-to-day lives.

As adjuncts and fellows, we have the opportunity to do something about this. We can sign union cards and become vocal and active members in a large municipal union. If you haven’t yet signed a union card, now is the time to do it.

Living in times of economic insecurity, with our fates in the hands of union leadership, we need to let them know what we are and aren’t willing to do. Are we willing to pay more for the same health care, especially having just won access to it in January? Are we willing to teach fewer classes of more students? Are we willing to see our friends get laid off and their students added to our sections?

Signing a union card and voting in union elections is not the only way to be active in this fight; we also have the opportunity to be vocal and pro-union in our everyday lives. From March 30 – April 3, the Adjunct Project is sponsoring CUNY Equity Week, a university-wide event that offers the opportunity for all faculty members to discuss the plight of contingent workers in the CUNY system. During this week we are asking faculty to make a coordinated effort to incorporate information on adjunct teaching conditions and the impact these have on our students.

There are a lot of ways you can incorporate this information into your classroom. You may have a class discussion, a persuasive letter-writing exercise, a statistical analysis of adjunct and full-time wages for the same workload, or an extra-credit assignment to find a link between course materials and adjunct labor. Adjuncts teach nearly 60% of all classes at CUNY, and oftentimes students are unaware of this, or that the position of an adjunct is radically different than that of full-time faculty members.

Talk to you students about what it means: how does it impact your relationships with them? Your ability to teach your courses to the best of your ability? Your working conditions? If you can’t have office hours because they are unpaid or there is no location for you to do so, let your students know. Alerting students to these situations makes them more aware of how the ways in which adjuncts are treated unequally impacts their education.

Set aside a class session or two, or less time if you like, to talk about these inequalities in your classroom. Attend one of our training sessions and learn what you can say and how to say it. Allow someone else to come into your classroom to discuss the role of contingent workers in the CUNY system. Just starting a conversation can make a world of difference and can call attention to just how different a university we would have with more full-time faculty members and greater opportunities.

Most importantly, CUNY Equity Week is your week. Do what you want to do in your classrooms and beyond. Be creative, and let us know your ideas so we can share them.

If adding just one more thing to your schedule is making your mind spin, we also invite you to join us for a special session on yoga for students and adjuncts on Friday, February 20 at 6pm (suggested donation $5). A certified yoga teacher will help us create a toolbox of coping mechanisms for when our back hurts from writing our dissertation all day, our head hurts from teaching, and whatever else hurts from whatever else we do. We look forward to seeing you there! 

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Where other cultures have an earth mother, the Aztecs have an earth monster. Their creation myth takes all our ideas about this familiar paradigm and goes topsy-turvy. The female creature from which the earth grew doesn’t nurture her people but terrifies them and demands ritual sacrifice. Quite frankly, this image is what made me fall in love with the Aztecs. Sometimes, when I look at the bottom of an Aztec sculpture, the most common place to carve this creature, I see a lot of myself.

I’ve always been jealous of instructors who can be all earth mother with their students: caring, nurturing, and meeting their needs with warmth and kindness. Yet, while I admire it, it’s never something to which I’ve aspired. Last year, though, I realized that while I could not, and didn’t want to be, an earth mother, I was actually quite happy to be an earth monster.

We’re all faced with challenges as instructors, but I think women are faced with an extra-special obstacle. Students often want us to baby them, and get frustrated when we make demands of them in the classroom. I always wondered: how can I be warm and caring and still maintain a cool distance that communicates that I have expectations? It’s a question of balance, and I’ve always found myself on the colder end of the spectrum. My students could never tell if I was laughing at them or with them. Even I didn’t know. My responses to comments or questions were almost universally sarcastic. And more than once I heard one student say to another, “No, YOU ask her!”

While I can’t entirely change my personality (especially without some major behavior modification therapy), I realized last year that I could adapt pedagogically to melt the ice a little. I was lucky enough not to have to transform on my own, and I don’t think I ever could have. A small interdisciplinary group of students worked with me to find the land of the warm-fuzzy, and I am sure they will agree that we always challenged each other. We’re talking about dealing with me, a girl who recognized the free-write as a pedagogically valid and useful tool, but dismissed it simply because it was too “hippyish.” Between the constant cracks about having a bonfire and singing Kumbaya, I’m surprised we ever made any progress. It wasn’t their job to make me softer, but it was all of our jobs to make each other better teachers.

Part of my reticence was disciplinary. Art history is largely taught in the dark, literally. The most familiar and most used format is the good old-fashioned slide lecture, which creates what Robert Nelson calls “the performative triangle consisting of speaker, audience and image.” It’s a strange relationship, and more frequently than not, this threesome becomes a very intimate coupling of the speaker and the image. And the student is ostensibly just there to watch.

I desperately wanted to get out of this habit. Of course, when we start in the classroom we teach the way we were taught, and the pattern was very easy to slip into. I was lucky to have colleagues who wanted to help me. Because we came out of different disciplines, we couldn’t always apply each other’s ideas but just discussing a different mindset became quickly transformative. Sometimes I backslid and found myself “triangulating” for an hour at a time. I was learning quickly that it’s easy to lecture; it’s harder to give up control.

In order to clarify my own values, I wrote a teaching statement. I saw myself changing even as I wrote it, saying something about aiming to create a classroom atmosphere where students were unafraid to be vulnerable, not scared to take risks. I steered clear of that clichéd safe space thing, but it was what I meant. I knew that meant a lot of things about my teaching style had to change. I was going to have to embrace things I may have previously scorned. I was going to have to let my students talk more than me. I was going to have to take the images off the screen and put them in front of these kids and trust what they had to say.

I was terrified, since I knew I was going to have to check my sarcasm at the door as well. Suddenly, though, I realized that the classroom wasn’t all about me. This sounds obvious when someone says it aloud, but how many of us honestly see our classrooms as collaborative spaces that are created with our students, not intricate performances choreographed for them? I was boggled by the question of creating a classroom community that wasn’t about me, where I wasn’t going to consistently win the most valuable player award. How does an instructor let her students direct warmth toward other students and make them love the class not her? Can anyone’s ego handle that?

I knew I had to try. I began introducing critical pedagogy into my classroom, and slowly witnessed change. Some of it was student resistance. You know how it was easy for me to lecture? Well, it was also easier for them to listen to me than it was to actively participate in a classroom community.

But before I knew it, the classroom looked completely different. I turned on the lights. My students were getting out of their chairs to point to the images on the screen. My students were getting out of their chairs without me asking them to do so. They were drawing in their notebooks and showing each other the results. Their chairs moved more easily with each group work assignment. Students wanted to write on the whiteboard. They spoke with confidence, as if their opinions mattered. Their opinions did matter. I was eventually hearing their voices more frequently than I heard my own.

Last semester was tough for me as a teacher. I fought hard to make fundamental changes that went against the grain of the discipline and sought to embed them into my classroom, taking into account the both my own needs, as well as those of my students. I can’t say I was surprised when on the last day of class I instinctively said, with no small heaping of snark, “All right, guys, it’s our last chance to hug it out.” Students stood up to file out of the room and approached me as I quickly added “Oh, with each other, not me.” After all, don’t touch the earth monster.

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