I want to kick off the first post of this blog by talking about an issue that every graduate student is probably concerned about, the dearth of job openings for tenure-track faculty, and how it’s connected to CUNY’s widespread use of adjuncts and the state’s budget deficit. We’ve all heard the horror stories about how there are too many students getting Ph.D.’s, that there aren’t enough academic jobs to go around, and that these degrees are worthless for anything else.

What is usually left out of such accounts or relegated to secondary status is that there are hundreds of thousands of university teaching jobs in existence that, rather than providing the comfortable middle-class lifestyle one associates with academia, are instead being compensated at a very marginal level, with no benefits, that it would be difficult to support an individual and impossible to support a family on: adjuncts. Adjuncts now make up over one half of the teaching workforce at public universities, including CUNY. For many grad students, adjuncting is a convenient way to gain some teaching experience and pick up some extra income. Yet many graduate students have difficulty surviving economically even by combining loans, adjunct jobs and/or other work. For many others, adjuncting becomes a life-long career of constant financial hardship and struggle.

The common refrain of those academics lucky enough to receive tenure is that they have earned their positions through their hard work and high-quality research. This position ignores several realities. First, the vast adjunct workforce was not created by the inferior scholarship of its members. State governments have been slashing their contributions to public universities for decades, resulting in severely underfunded institutions, such as CUNY. University administrations have responded by creating a two-tiered labor system in which half of the workforce receives low pay, poor benefits and no job security. This is not an intellectual strategy, it’s an economic one, and it’s the same strategy used by major corporations to prop up their bottom lines by attacking workers. It is part of the thirty-year-long national and indeed global “one-sided class war” of the employers against their workers in which median wages have stagnated and public services have been cut back while taxes on the rich and corporations have been slashed. Right now, education is one of the central fronts in this struggle, with K-12 schools being privatized right and left and public universities having their budgets cut, employees laid off, and tuitions raised.

Second, despite the universities’ role as producers of research, their educational role remains their core function. When tenure faculty complain that adjuncts deserve their low pay because they produce inferior research, they ignore the fact that without enough teachers, universities would cease to function, and rather than teaching their low-enrollment advanced seminars, tenured faculty would be forced to do the grunt work of teaching high-enrollment introductory lectures, which are usually relegated to adjuncts.

As the above makes clear, the “Ph.D. glut,” the adjunct-ification of the university, and the budget deficit are intimately linked. None of these problems can be solved individually, which is why it’s in the interest of all graduate students, adjuncts, and anybody interested in preserving the quality of public universities to become active in the fight to defend public education. If we lose this struggle, we can say goodbye to a secure economic future for ourselves and to higher education as a public good. To get involved, check out the Adjunct Project, the “March 4th” CUNY-wide coalition, or the PSC.

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Paterson to CUNY: “Take a Hike…A Tuition Hike!”

The money used to fatten Mathew Goldstein’s wallet isn’t going to grow on trees, people, so get ready to pony up some cash! As if David Paterson hasn’t already caused the students at CUNY and SUNY enough grief with his statewide cuts to higher education, Governor Justice is now looking to help the struggling university systems recoup some of those losses by proposing legislation that would allow the Boards of Trustees at SUNY and CUNY to increase and/or adjust tuition rates at will. Paterson’s new bill (euphemistically titled the Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act) would neither empower students nor provide for any greater innovation, but would instead give chancellors at both SUNY and CUNY the ability to significantly raise tuition without state legislative approval, as well as the option of offering differential tuition rates for different programs and campuses. This means more prestigious CUNY or SUNY campuses, such as Hunter and City College, could potentially begin charging higher tuition rates than other schools in the system, making access to those schools out of reach for increasing numbers of poor and working class New Yorkers. Not surprisingly, Matty G. is all in favor of the plan.

According to the Gotham Gazette, the new bill would allow increases in tuition up to to two and a half times the five-year average of the Higher Education Price Index, which measures inflationary increases in operating costs for colleges and universities across the nation. In other words, Mathew Goldstein and his BOT henchmen would essentially be able to increase tuition at a rate at least two and a half times that of inflation.

This kind of power would, once again, place the burden of the current budget crisis onto the backs of our city and state’s poorest and most vulnerable citizens. To make things even worse, Goldstein has made it explicit that he intends to use differential tuition rates at the graduate level, which could mean higher tuition for students in the sciences and those earning professional degrees.

Both the PSC and some state senators argue that this new bill is nothing less than an attempt to further privatize the two state university systems. In January, Barbara Bowen gave formal testimony in Albany that pretty well sums up what the future will look like should this bill actually pass: “It is not difficult to predict the next step, given New York’s sorry history of underinvestment in CUNY and SUNY. Students become the cash machine, legislative control of tuition disappears, and the State cuts back even further on its support. The governor’s proposal says not one word about State investment and offers no guarantee that ever-escalating tuition would not be used to replace existing State support.”

The City University of Phoenix

In a wildly audacious move even by the low standards of our lord and chancellor Matthew Goldstein, the School of Professional Studies (SPS) moved during the middle of January to jettison key provisions of its governance document that threaten the quality and value of CUNY doctoral education.

Initially designed to funnel all of CUNY’s continuing education programs through a centralized bureaucratic institution modeled after NYU’s School for Continuing and Professional Studies, the SPS was founded in 2003 with the twin understandings that portions of the generated revenue would be directed to doctoral support initiatives and that the new school would not offer duplicate degrees that could be obtained through other CUNY colleges.

Not surprisingly, the SPS paid out revenue funds for doctoral support only once, while it was still in its infancy in 2003. Since then, doctoral support monies have not been collected from SPS, with over a half-million dollars sitting in a rainy-day escrow account. The GC Advocate will be reporting in depth on reasons why the allocation of these resources has been refused by the Graduate Center in next month’s issue. But more immediately, and more troubling, is the fact that the SPS board of governors voted to kill any official responsibility it previously had to doctoral support as well as its promise not to issue duplicate degrees.

As the SPS increasingly offers undergraduate and graduate degrees in various subjects, the possibility of correspondence course degrees in, say, political science or biology, at the undergraduate, Master’s and doctoral levels has become increasingly real. Moreover, the fact that the SPS does not distinguish between in-state and out-of-state students for the purposes of tuition payment (everyone gets charged the same tuition regardless of residency) opens the floodgates for University of Phoenix-style online education to take root within CUNY, and suggests a naked business logic of offering for-profit educational opportunities for anyone, anywhere, that can pay.

All of which gets compounded by matters of accreditation. SPS currently enjoys pride of place under the banner of the Graduate School and University Center, a fully-accredited institution within the Middle States accreditation initiative. If oversight or rigor is lax—and current evidence suggests it is—and credits between the school and other degree programs are rendered transferable (which is theoretically possible already), than SPS could essentially free-ride on the accredited strengths of other colleges while simultaneously draining the integrity of the CUNY network’s solid academic reputation. Look for further coverage in these pages on SPS in future issues.

What Good are Rules for If You Can’t Break Them on the Regular

According to the CUNY Board of Trustees Code of Conduct, no member of the board may accept employment with the university within two years of serving as a trustee. Yet this past month, the Board of Trustees voted to “waive” this silly ethical protocol in the name of political expediency and cronyism. The recent passing of Vice Chancellor Ernesto Malave left the board scrambling to find a replacement to fill this “large and unexpected hole in the University’s administration.” But what’s this? A perfect replacement from the board of trustees itself? What are the odds? “Fortunately, the University has a trustee,” the board announced, “whose background and experience make him uniquely qualified to step into the breach under these unique circumstances.”

Unique, indeed. Shaw’s bona fides are apparently so impressive that his fellow trustees simply brushed aside all bureaucratic constraints blocking his appointment as Interim Senior Vice Chancellor for Budget, Finance, and Financial Policy. At the same time, Shaw’s record is not so impressive that he can fill Maleve’s shoes alone. The board also promoted Matthew Sapienza, a career CUNY technocrat, to the position of Associate Vice Chancellor for Budget and Finance. Given the effusive praise heaped upon him by the board in their explanation of promotion—not to mention his close association with Malave—some might question why the board did not simply appoint Sapienza to Malave’s vacant post, and save the extra salary. Others might also question why Shaw’s portfolio includes “financial policy” whereas Sapienza’s does not. Should we expect another appointment of an additional “associate vice chancellor” to help hold Shaw’s hand through the thickets of financial policy? More on this as it develops…

Raise High the Chancellor’s Salary, Trustees

Times are tough—just ask CUNY’s Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. With the recent economic and financial crises, it’s hard to live on a nearly half-million dollar annual salary with an additional $100,000 yearly housing allowance. Good thing the Board of Trustees jumped into action with all the enthusiasm of an Obama administration official bailing out a Goldman Sachs senior executive. Citing his extraordinary—nay, Herculean—efforts to situate the CUNY system in the vanguard of corporatist efforts to smother public education, the band of trustees moved to raise the Heart of Darkness’ annual salary by nearly $40,000 a year. Seemingly without any intended irony, the board noted that such a raise was “richly deserved,” and moreover was “necessary for CUNY to remain competitive and on an upward trajectory.”

Yet despite the soaring rhetoric in honor of Darth Goldstein’s irreplaceably steady hand at CUNY’s helm, a seedling of dissent, a slight rebellion off fifth if you will, could be seen sprouting in the Board of Trustee ranks…kind of: the vote was not unanimous. Apparently concerned that a vote against Matthew Goldstein’s bank account is a vote against America, student senate representative Cory Provost, an MA student in Brooklyn College’s School of Urban Policy and Administration, abstained from casting his ballot. Way to stand up, guy!

Newsflash: You’re Both Ass Clowns!

What should have been a celebratory moment of remembrance and renewal in early December was quickly turned into an episode of Jerry Springer by City Councilmember Charles “the Red” Barron and CUNY’s own loose-cannon goon, trustee Jeffrey “don’t get spontaneous with me” Wiesenfeld.

On December 1^st, city dignitaries and other mega-millionaires gathered in downtown Manhattan to mark the start of construction on a replacement facility for Fiterman Hall, a CUNY-owned campus facility badly damaged during the attacks of September 11. Barron, who had been asked to speak at the event, had not finished delivering his opening salutations before Wiesenfeld shouted “You’re a disgrace!” at the former Black Panther-turned-politico-insider.

What followed was an exchange of machismo idiocy worthy of a middle school playground as each man taunted the other with long-distance finger jabs, threats, and, rumor has it, unspeakable insults to each
other’s mother.

The incident would have been just another example of New York politics run amok had Weisenfeld and Barron let matters rest there. But weeks later, Councilwoman—and chief adjutant to Emperor Michael Bloomberg—Christine Quinn removed Barron from his chairmanship of the Higher Education Committee, an action that Barron insists was carried out on the orders of Jeffrey Weisenfeld. For his part, our lusty trustee has been otherwise engaged, reportedly locked in a political death match with fellow Republican Chris Collins, a rising star within New York State conservative circles, and could not be reached for comment.

In a bizarrely argued response to his ouster and backdoor call to revolutionary arms, Barron compared his fight with Quinn and Weisenfeld to the deadly struggles of the 1968 civil rights movement, and invoked Steve Biko to rally supporters to his defense. It was hard to know if Barron was consoling his constituents or himself when he proclaimed that while he may no longer be the speaker’s chair of the Higher Education Committee, he would always be the “people’s chair” of social struggle. Or perhaps, more fittingly, of political irrelevancy: Barron currently finds himself the only city councilman without a seat on a single committee.

More CUNY News In Brief

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Author Louis Menand

The Marketplace of Ideas by Louis Menand. W. W. Norton and Company (2010).

The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected by Jonathan R. Cole. Public Affairs (2010).

In Willa Cather’s 1925 novel The Professor’s House, Godfrey St. Peter, a professor of history at a Midwestern university, befriends Dr. Crane, a professor in the physics department at the same school (and mentor to the novel’s tragic hero Tom Outland). These two professors, one from the humanities and one from the sciences, find a common foe in what they see as the encroachment of industry and profit in the educational process, a phenomenon that threatens their goal of producing well-rounded, cultivated students. As Cather describes it: “His friendship with Crane had been a strange one. Out in the world they would almost certainly have kept clear of each other; but in the university they had fought together in a common course. Both, with all their might, had resisted the new commercialism, the aim to ‘show results’ that was undermining and vulgarizing education. The State Legislature and the board of Regents seemed determined to make a trade school of the University.” That this appears in a novel published in 1925 is some indication of how long there has been this persistent anxiety over the aims of higher education, and the fear that market forces were corrupting the values of institutions of higher learning. (In The Professor’s House these forces of profit play a major role in the story, as the scientific discovery of the deceased intellectual prodigy Tom Outland ends up being patented and used to fund the luxurious lifestyle of St. Peter’s unscrupulous son-in-law.)

One wonders what Professors St. Peter and Crane would think of today’s universities with their power rankings, outsized athletic programs, and students who resemble not so much pupils as customers (who are always right!). And that’s not to mention the rise of for-profit conglomerates like the University of Phoenix. Louis Menand’s The Marketplace of Ideas and Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University, are two recent works on higher education which attempt to make sense of where the nation’s colleges and universities are today, what makes them work or not work, and what challenges lie ahead for American higher education in the coming years.

Before taking his current position as the Bass Professor of English at Harvard, where he has been since 2003, Louis Menand taught here in the Graduate Center’s English department. His newest book, The Marketplace of Ideas: Reform and Resistance in the American University, is part of W. W. Norton’s Issues of Our Time series edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Menand mentions that he served on a committee to re-develop Harvard College’s General Education curriculum, and this had no small part in inspiring the book, which examines the history of higher education, ideas about appropriate curriculum, and the state of graduate education at the current moment. Coming from a different angle is Jonathan R. Cole’s The Great American University: Its Rise to Preeminence, Its Indispensable National Role, Why It Must Be Protected. Cole is a sociologist by training and served as the Provost and Dean of Faculties at Columbia University from 1989 to 2003. In this book, Cole examines the nation’s largest and most prestigious research universities, shows why the United States is the unequivocal world leader in academic research, and argues that this status could be threatened by limitations on research and inquiry put in place in the past eight years.

As you may have gathered from the literary reference that began this review, my own allegiances are in the humanities. I am a student in the English department here at the Graduate Center, and my dissertation project is on academic novels such as Cather’s The Professor’s House and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, examining them in the context of the history of American higher education. All of us in this profession encounter debates around higher education and policy in some form. Though it is impossible to keep up with every article, trend, and debate, we all read our share of pieces from The Chronicle of Higher Education and InsideHigherEd.com. However, my work on this dissertation has led me to dive headfirst into the voluminous field of higher education history. I soon found myself drowning in a sea of monographs full of overlapping information, murky statistical claims, and confusing, convoluted historical narratives about the origins and trajectory of America’s institutions of higher education and all of the administrative personalities that have shaped the field. Complicating matters even more is the fact that the American collegiate system is not really a “system’ at all, but a loose network of degree granting institutions. On the up side, this allows for a wonderful diversity of institutions and approaches. According to Cole, there are roughly 4,300 different institutions of higher learning granting degrees in the United States today. Ultimately, that variety is an asset that allows students of various abilities, backgrounds and interests to choose among a plethora of options. We now have small liberal arts colleges like Berea College in Kentucky, a school known for its innovative financing which does not charge its students tuition. We have massive public state colleges like Ohio State University which, while located in Columbus, functions like a whole city unto itself. And we also have unique institutions with specific historical missions such as my alma mater, Morehouse College, the nation’s only all-male historically black college. Cole’s number of 4,300 also includes the hundreds of community colleges spread out across the country. But how does one begin to document and quantify the outcomes of education given all these disparate institutions and their assorted curricula? How do you compile a history of American higher education in such a way that it gives us a language for assessing the success and failures of education and provides some grounding to make the appropriate changes to ensure that these institutions remain competitive in the 21st century? Some scholars have taken an institutional approach, examining the history of one particular institution and its administrative decisions about curriculum. Other historians have attempted sweeping historical surveys of American higher education as a whole, and the library shelves groan under the weight of these tomes, many clocking in at 500 pages or more.

In The Marketplace of Ideas, Menand narrows his emphasis to a set of particular issues, but in the process provides a useful overview of American higher education. The book is organized into three essays examining three particular issues in higher education: 1) the history of the general education curriculum, 2) the logic of academic disciplines and the allure of “interdisciplinarity” as a buzzword in academia, and 3) the politics of professors and the academic labor market. Menand’s writing style may seem deceptively simple—the book clocks in at a slim 174 pages—but in the course of presenting the background on these topics Menand also does a masterful job of taming and synthesizing over a century’s worth of scholarship on higher education. To boil all that down to an accessible narrative requires some generalizations, and there are many in The Marketplace of Ideas. But Menand has picked his reductionisms wisely and his attempt to fashion a coherent narrative out of all of this history is in itself a useful exercise that will allow scholars to reevaluate some of the central themes in the history of American higher education.

One of the most
striking concepts that jumps out of the book’s second section is his insistence on labeling the years between 1945 and 1975 as the “Golden Age of Academia,” a period during which “the number of American undergraduates increased by almost 500 percent and the number of graduate students increased by nearly 900 percent.” This is a level of growth that will likely never be surpassed. Higher education continued to grow after 1975 but at a much slower rate. The Golden Age began with the end of World War II and the introduction of the G.I. Bill, and lasted until the financial turmoil of the 1970s. The G.I. Bill is perhaps the single most important piece of legislation in the history of American higher education. It extended what was once a privilege reserved for children of the wealthy to thousands of working class veterans. These measures have radically reshaped the look, feel and size of
America’s colleges.

No doubt many of my peers approaching the job market will want to skip ahead to the third section titled “Why Do Professors All Think Alike.” Here Menand confronts the well-worn conservative gripe against a leftist bias in higher education, especially in the humanities where multiculturalism and pop culture have allegedly replaced the sober study of Western Civilization and its greatness. Menand dismantles this argument by citing surveys that show that the academy does in fact lean liberal, but it does so across disciplinary lines, including in the sciences, and that within that umbrella of “liberal” is a variety of political and religious perspectives. However, Menand acknowledges that “the politics of the professoriate is homogenous,” and goes on to argue that this homogeneity is rooted in how academia trains and hires its professors. While I don’t think Menand’s explanation is convincing his discussion of academic labor is worth a look less for its intervention into the culture wars and more for his examination of the “time to degree” which has blown wildly out of proportion. For instance, a typical graduate student in English will spend roughly ten years earning a doctoral degree. Other humanities fields have comparable numbers. This is an unnecessary and sadistic system. Menand proposes that the humanities Ph.D. should be streamlined in the way that programs in medicine, law and business are administered, with a set number of years and clearer program requirements. The length of the Ph.D. program prohibits many students from considering the process at all. Shortening the time to degree would make graduate education seem less daunting for college graduates from modest economic backgrounds who may have already sacrificed greatly just to get an undergraduate degree and who may be interested in earning a Ph.D. but unable and unwilling to endure its length and cost.

As for the labor market itself, Menand writes that “There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs.” These ABDs have increasingly served as the cheap labor force for teaching undergraduate students. In recent years we have seen a graduate student unionization movement necessary to counteract universities using graduate students to teach undergraduate courses, even the upper-level ones once reserved for tenured faculty. (I first typed in “full-time faculty,” but many adjuncts are teaching full-time, which is precisely one of the problems.) Menand does not go far enough in indicting the exploitation of the current adjunct teaching system. And one wonders if this system of contingent labor has any chance of being stopped. Now with the rise of for-profit schools and the prevalence of corporate management in higher education becoming the norm, the situation continues to look bleak. Nevertheless, Menand provides some ammunition against the usual narrative of an “overproduction of Ph.D.s.” Marc Bousquet’s book How the University Works and his blog of the same name, also contests the “overproduction” thesis, showing that the demand for teaching is actually higher with more students enrolling in college each year, and that adjuncts are being slammed with larger class sizes. The question of “overproduction” must be seen in light of the growth of adjuncting as the default teaching model for the humanities.

At first glance the hefty 660 pages of Jonathan Cole’s The Great American University appears to be exactly the kind of dense, foreboding book I described earlier that makes up the canon of higher education history. And to some degree it is. But Cole has done an exemplary job of making the narrative relatively accessible despite the voluminous statistical data and flurry of eminent names that bog the book down at times. Cole has spent most of his life at Columbia where he earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees in sociology, and later served as provost for fourteen years until 2003. His focus in the book is, well, universities like Columbia. Cole identifies about 260 institutions that now claim to be research universities and narrows his focus to the 100+ that sit at the top of the list.

The first section of the book chronicles the history of the nation’s earliest institutions of higher learning and examines how these colonial colleges evolved into major research universities over the years. Long story short, by 2001 the United States has produced a third of the world’s science and engineering articles in refereed journals, and in three of the past four years American academics have received a majority of the Nobel prizes for science and economics. The American university system, like the nation itself, has firm roots in England, but Cole also describes how American institutions borrowed from the German model of the 19th century, with its combination of research and teaching. Germany is a key part of Cole’s conclusions in the book. Cole returns to the history of Nazi Germany in the 20^th century to demonstrate how repression of free inquiry damaged Germany’s standing as the site of the world’s most competitive research institutions, driving talented academics in Germany and Austria to American universities where they helped these institutions to flourish. The second part of the book details the specific discoveries and innovations that have originated in American research universities—things such as the bar code, congestion pricing for traffic, and even the Internet itself. The third part outlines what Cole sees as a potential threat to the American research university—the squelching of academic freedom and scientific inquiry—especially that which took place under the eight long years of the Bush presidency.

Cole sounds optimistic that the Barack Obama administration will restore science to its rightful place in our research institutions and restore some of the restrictions put in place by George W. Bush’s flat-earth approach to scientific knowledge. In his most recent State of the Union address, Obama at least mentioned the importance of science education (as well as funding for community colleges). But Cole is leery of the damage done by the recent financial crises, and in this regard the Obama administration has already been a major disappointment (for anyone not on the board of Goldman Sachs that is). This, in fact, raises a looming question about Cole’s own study. He identifies a number of innovations in science and economics as well as the social sciences and humanities, and cheerleads for the goodness of America’s institutions of higher learning. But I was also left wondering as to the extent that these same elite institutions and their departments of economics and business were the breeding grounds for the very policies that have left all of us in financial turmoil and threatened the opportunities for a generation of young Americans whose families may no longer be able to afford college at all. Ultimately, it is this relentless push for profits and a continued faith in corporatization and finance capital to solve all our problems that is changing institutions of higher education, including the way they teach students, and how they train and hire faculty. Neither of these books seems interested in challenging corporatization of higher education at the ideological level (not that they need to do so as several other books and many articles have already tread over that ground). But what they have both done is map out the current terrain of the American university in ways that will help us to understand how to ensure that in the rest of the 21^st century, the nation’s colleges and universities maintain high standards of achievement, and continue to be a force for good.

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Just a week ago, the New York Times featured an article in their “Economix” blog: “Teacher Pay around the World” (Sept. 9, 2009, http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/teacher-pay-around-the-world/). The article presents a mass of statistics collected by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) about education around the world, focusing on how the United States measures up. As it turns out, “compared to other developed countries, in the United States teachers generally spend more time teaching but apparently without an equivalent advantage in pay.” The study tells us that American teachers in primary, lower secondary education and upper secondary education divisions spend, on average, 1,080 hours teaching each year. For this effort, though internationally the public primary-school teacher earns $43,633, America’s teachers receive an average of $39,007.

This shouldn’t come as much of a surprise to those of us in academia. Though we’re teaching as adjuncts or fellows at the college level, we must be especially aware of the plight of teachers at all levels. It seems unnecessary to point out that, as college degrees become more ubiquitous, the expectations and compensation of secondary education teachers and graduate students and adjunct faculty become more and more similar. If our colleagues are being expected to teach classes in schools which are over-attended and under-staffed, and to do so with lower pay and longer hours, the inequities are likely to spread to adjuncts.

As the OECD notes, comparing the compensation of teachers in much less wealthy countries to the lesser compensation of American teachers makes this all the more disconcerting. Here in the United States, a seasoned teacher—someone with fifteen years of experience—makes a salary that is 96 percent of the country’s gross domestic product per capita. Across the board, a teacher with identical experience makes 117 percent of GDP per capita (it turns out that the best place to teach, financially anyhow, is Korea: there, the average teacher makes 221 percent).

At the secondary level and below, more American teachers are women: 69.4 percent compared to 65percent across the OECD (at the post-secondary level the numbers change to 41.6 percent compared to 39 percent). This reminds us that inequity in pay is often a symptom of a larger problem of workplace gender discrimination.

In short, “The demographics of teachers in the United States look similar to those of teachers elsewhere in the developed world.” This should concern us not only as adjuncts, but as citizens.

The Tenuous Faculty

About a year ago, Inside Higher Ed (www.insidehighered.com) published an article titled “For Adjuncts, Progresses and Complexities.” The article quoted a lecturer in anthropology at San Jose University who complained that after teaching four or five courses there a semester since 1987, he was still considered part-time faculty: “Higher education, he said, must confront the ‘glaring disparities and inequities between the tenured faculty and the tenuous faculty.’”

There is potential to languish ambivalently in the adjuncting world; particularly in New York City (ironically, considering the cost of living). Many of us will rush from college to college teaching an ever-changing handful of classes as we muddle through our dissertations.  This reality is something for which we must all take responsibility; as graduate students and professionals, it is on us to usher ourselves along the stages of our degree. Still, an individual who is continually re-hired to teach courses, who participates in departmental meetings and has input on curriculum should be treated as more than part-time filler. Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of job security for contingent academic labor; so much so, we’re not even quite sure what job security would look like.

The Inside Higher Ed article describes how the University of California lecturers’ union (an American Federation of Teachers affiliate) was able to negotiate a “gold standard” contract for non-tenure track professors. The writing program at UCLA was described by one lecturer “as one in which most decisions are made by a staff composed entirely of lecturers, who evaluate one another, manage the program’s budget, and are given curricular responsibilities based on their expertise.”

Non-tenure track faculty in this category can only be let go for “narrowly specified reasons—criteria the university has yet to use successfully.” Across the board at American universities, adjunct complaints are sloppily handled; the person who made the original complaint is often the same person making the “final decision” about the hiring or firing. The UC grievance system allows for independent decision making, and crucially, “In a provision that responds to the sense that at many campuses a complaining parent or a false rumor on RateMyProfessor.com can ruin an adjunct’s career…lecturers in (the) union cannot be dismissed or punished on the sole basis of student evaluations.” As for job security, if one lectures at the University of California for six years, one has a presumed reappointment.

That’s the good news; here’s the less good news. The union in this case made these gains over twenty-five years of slow, plodding progress. The article quotes Robert Samuels, president of the University of California lecturers’ union, as saying: “A lot of union organizers or academics want all or nothing—the same job security or nothing”; but, the article continues: “….his union’s success wouldn’t have happened that way. ‘You can’t get everything right off the bat,’ he said. But you can come back, with more ambition, time after time.”

Other non-tenure-track professors who were part of progressive universities agreed with the California lecturers on a few main issues. An organizer in British Columbia warned of the importance of “striking while the iron is hot,” and being together enough to act when a union-friendly government is in power.

A president of the non-tenure-track faculty union at Southern Illinois University, Alan Shiller,

described a “process his National Education Association-affiliated union won for adjuncts to be given the status of ‘established’ after teaching thirty-six credit hours. Such faculty members get the rights, among other things, to have seniority on course assignments, and the ‘right of first refusal’ on courses they have taught in the past. He also said that the adjuncts are protected from ‘the power of the department secretary.’ He said that until the union raised the issue, course assignments were routinely being made by secretaries, who if they couldn’t reach someone after one call, just went to someone else. He said that tackling these issues created ‘real job security for members.”

It seems the message of this meeting was three-fold: be creative, be patient, and be organized.

First Things First: Getting Paid

The similarities between American teachers at all levels—what’s required of them and how they’re paid, along with problems with job security—are important to understand on a global level, literally and metaphorically. On one hand, our compensation is revealed as even more paltry when compared to that of other, less wealthy nations (not to mention the fact that shoddier education standards, and more frazzled teachers, is not going to help the United States compete in a global marketplace). On the other hand, these concerns are  systemic, structural, multi-faceted; they exist in the context of labor inequities nationally.
And what about CUNY? First things first: this week, a number of recently appointed or reappointed Grad A, B, or C Assistants failed to receive their first paycheck. It seems to have been an organizational or clerical error, but a consequential number of CUNY’s adjuncts, who had attended orientations and dutifully signed the stacks of paper required to get “in the system” are now scrambling to pay their rents. This is a problem, obviously, and if this has happened to you, the Adjunct Project advises you to take the following steps:

1.  Go to Human Resources (do not call—go) on the 8th floor of the Graduate Center, and explain to them that you were not paid.  Have your appointment letter and any other potentially relevant paperwork. When they tell you that you won’t be paid, calmly ask for a 50 percent advance on your salary.

2.  Write an email to the Associate Provost of your division (Dr. Louise Lennihan for the Social Sciences and Humanities, llenni@gc.cuny.edu and Dr. Ann Henderson for the Sciences, ahender@gc.cuny.edu.)  Explain who you spoke to in payroll, what they told you, and the date you signed your appointment letter.

3.   Let the Adjunct Project know.  We’ve already notified the PSC of this problem but would like to know the number of people this has impacted.

The main message we’d like to send from the Adjunct Project is: you must contact the Associate Provost. It’s imperative that they understand concretely how this issue is impacting adjuncts. Even if you are able to secure an advance, keep in mind this is a problem that is symptomatic of larger issues. It was only last year that our adjuncts were finally able to secure basic health care; now we are fighting to get paid on time!

It’s worth noting that it’s unclear why this problem occurred, and what part of the system failed us. CUNY staff, in Human Resources and elsewhere, are spread too thinly as it is. As adjuncts, we should keep this in mind as we discuss it with the Provost’s Office and elsewhere. We need more staff and better funding at all institutional levels, so that this kind of thing never happens again.

Upcoming Events

The Adjunct Project holds office hours both in the GC Mina Rees Library on Tuesdays from 2:00-4:00 and for the month of September, on Wednesdays from 4:00-5:30, this month (September) in the Art history lounge, 3rd floor. Come see us to discuss any issue you have relating to your adjunct position, including compensation, healthcare, and human resources issues.

Come to the Adjunct Project’s Health Insurance Party on October 15^th, room 5414 at 8 p.m. Refreshments will be provided, as will door prizes! You must present either your NYSHIP card, a union card or a filled out NYSHIP application as your invitation. We look forward to seeing you there.

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As the economic crisis continues to deepen, many New Yorkers are choosing to return to school, and are looking to do so as cheaply as possible. CUNY has enjoyed a sharp 12 percent increase in applications over the past year, which will likely lead to CUNY’s highest enrollment ever next semester.

According to CUNY overlord Matthew Goldstein, rising numbers of applications are to be expected during moments of economic turmoil. Speaking with the Daily News–Advocate staff was too busy adjuncting to take his call–Goldstein noted that “When the economy takes a dip [people] run to higher education institutions to shore up their skills.”

Goldstein also notes that the financial squeeze suffered by working class citizens makes CUNY schools particularly attractive. At $4,000, CUNY’s annual tuition for four-year colleges stacks up nicely against other American universities, where school fees can run as much as $50,000 a year.

CUNY officials expect a total enrollment boost of 25 percent by year’s end, and made sure to note that the system’s colleges have more than doubled the number of incoming freshman graduating at the top of their high school classes, while also increasing the number of graduate students by roughly 25,000 since the start of the decade.

CUNY community colleges have also enjoyed a significant bump in enrollment, where the number of incoming students has jumped 6 percent already this year. Increased enrollment makes sense, as the job skills offered at CUNY’s community college campus are in high demand right now, among employers and employees alike.

Even on the Cheap, Education Costs are Difficult to Bear

While rising numbers of first-time and returning students to CUNY campuses is news to be cheered, incoming students face the unpleasant task of figuring out how to pay for their educations–a particularly daunting challenge in the current environment.

CUNY officials reported that while the number of applications to the system have increased at a healthy clip, these numbers are dwarfed by those of students seeking federal education assistance. In the past year, federal financial aid requests have ballooned by 33 percent, a striking departure from the usual annual increase of 13 percent.

Congressman Anthony Weiner, representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens, chose Baruch College in Manhattan to highlight the importance of increased demand for federal assistance. “We now have another indicator of how difficult it is for middle class New Yorkers,” Weiner said. “The number of people asking for financial aid to make ends meet has gone up as the economy has gone down.” Despite money allotments set aside for financial aid assistance in the recent federal stimulus package, Weiner argued that the government must take further action to continue insuring that working-class Americans have the opportunity to pursue their education. “We need students being able to come here. We need Baruch to be able to sustain its programs. And the federal government needs to take an active role.”

While Students Struggle to Make Ends Meet, CUNY Fundraising Goals Exceeded…and then Some

Students struggling to find money for CUNY might want to get in touch with Matthew Goldstein. Our esteemed chancellor can’t seem to stop people from throwing their money at him.

In late March, Goldstein announced that he had reached CUNY’s fundraising goal of $1.2 billion…three years in advance. The chancellor noted that over 200 donors have agreed to hand over at least $1 million each, the largest gift coming from City College graduate Bernard Spitzer. The father of ex-governor Eliot lavished the university with a gift of $25 million which he asked be funneled in its entirety to his alma mater in Harlem.

CUNY expects that by 2015, the chancellor will have extracted over $3 billion from potential and continuing donors. Others are skeptical, noting that the economic downturn will likely tighten the amounts philanthropists would otherwise consider.

Whatever the result in three years’ time, the current flush of money is to be welcomed…we think. While CUNY promised to direct spending to student services, scholarship endowments, and new faculty hires, full details have not yet been articulated. Stay tuned. 

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Entering this new school year, it may seem like we got everything we asked for last year. After writing letters, calling the Chancellor, the President, legislators, and a large rally, the latest communications from the PSC and CUNY indicate that soon health insurance for doctoral student CUNY employees will be in our hands. Of course, the question remains: how soon? And, can we truly see this as success?

To start, it’s best to go straight to the tentative contract settlement announced by the PSC. The proposed settlement, announced in late June and passed on to the union membership by an emergency meeting of the Delegate Assembly on July 1, does nothing to lift CUNY employees out from the basement of our nation’s lowest academic salary scales. For example, the 3% increase proposed for the first year of the contract raises the pay of an adjunct on the lowest step (perhaps you, a graduate student with little to no teaching experience and without a master’s degree) by $75 per course. Hardly impressive, and hardly what we deserve.

We didn’t win significant increases in pay for contingent workers in the system, and other demands were not met as well. The contract doesn’t even broach the subject of job security for part-time workers. For graduate students, this question is often tossed to the side, as we see ourselves as just passing through on our way to bigger and better things. But are we? Are the five, six, seven, or ten years of our lives that we spend teaching in the CUNY system really just temporary? Or are we attempting to reinforce the hierarchy that already exists? Without job security, graduate students are just as likely to lose adjuncting positions as anyone else. When that happens, without cause or justification, after compliments from students, and stellar observation reports, graduate students feel just as dejected, vulnerable, and robbed as other adjuncts. For many of us, adjuncting is what pays the bills and the tuition. We cannot, and should not, view these positions as temporary.

Along these lines, members of the Adjunct Project have spent the summer forming a coalition with other contingent workers in the CUNY system. Working alongside adjuncts from a variety of campuses, we have created a vision of the contract we’d like to see in the future. Of course, pay equity is among the top demands, as is job security. Additionally, we are united in consistently questioning the adjunctification of the university, and are committed to tearing down the two-tier labor system that exists within CUNY.

What of doctoral student health insurance, then? Certainly, we can see progress. CUNY and the PSC have promised that doctoral student employees will be added to the state health insurance plan in the near future. Details have yet to be released, though, and there has been no mention of a timeline for this process. It seems unlikely that it will be instituted for the fall semester, which leaves many students with questions. Should they renew their current coverage? Or is there a chance this will come through? Unfortunately, neither organization has released any answers to alleviate the anxiety of our student body. While all of us are looking forward to low-cost, quality health coverage, we need our questions answered and we need to continue advocating for students who remain uncovered by this proposal, namely master’s students and non-adjunct student employees. During the week of September 8, the Adjunct Project will sponsor a series of events to answer whatever questions we can, and pressure CUNY to expedite our coverage and extend it to more students.

It’s been a busy summer — and the work will continue during the school year. In addition to these very important contract issues, a group of students has begun working on a CUNY Disorientation Guide, which seeks to demystify the system and make its inner workings more transparent. Rumblings of radicalism are making their way across all campuses as fledgling groups, such as the CUNY Student Movement and the CUNY Social Forum, seek to unite students, faculty, and alumni and work to create space for dialogue about what CUNY was, is, and what we want it to be.

As the academic year begins, we are looking forward to hearing from you, hearing your needs, and what you’d like to see the Adjunct Project accomplish in the coming months. Our meetings will be held on the second Friday of each month at 4pm in room 5414.

Join us, and let your own voice be heard! 

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