Graduate students, part-time lecturers, and full-time faculty at Rutgers stand in solidarity with members of PSC-CUNY presently withholding grades as a collective action in the face of mass layoffs. We support PSC-CUNY members’ demands that adjunct and part-time faculty at CUNY, as well as part-time staff, be reappointed to their positions.

Adjunct and part-time faculty teach over half of the courses in the CUNY system. With New York City devastated by Covid-19, they supported their students and their communities during the move to online learning, even as they faced the same dangers and traumas that all New Yorkers living through the pandemic faced. Now, hundreds and potentially thousands of teachers across the different CUNY campuses may lose their jobs due to austerity measures imposed by the administration in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. At John Jay alone, 40% of teaching faculty will not have their positions renewed, and departments at other CUNY schools have been told to plan for 25% cuts to their classes for the next academic year, even though the situation for the fall remains unknown.

Adjunct and part-time CUNY faculty are being treated as disposable labor. Adjuncts have long been treated as second-class faculty, working the same amount or more than tenured and tenure-track faculty for less pay and fewer benefits. The CUNY administration’s response to the current pandemic draws further attention to these underlying inequalities. Terminating their employment now will exacerbate the existing financial precarity of vulnerable adjunct and part-time faculty. It will rob them of much-needed health insurance in the middle of a pandemic. And, both in the short and long-term, it will not only endanger the health and lives of these members of our academic community, but also damage the education of CUNY students and the educational mission of the CUNY system as a whole.

At Rutgers, where part-time lecturers (PTLs) have faced similar obstacles to receiving the just treatment they deserve, union members have endeavored to defend and protect our most vulnerable members. A coalition of unions representing 20,000 employees at Rutgers’ three New Jersey campuses has proposed to the administration a work-sharing program that would save the university $100 million, and bring to a halt to the administration’s order that departments reduce PTL lines for the fall 2020 semester by 20% (https://www.rutgersaaup.org/work-sharing-proposal-may-2020/

We believe that CUNY’s administration should be compelled to search for similar creative solutions to the current crisis. We support and commend members of PSC-CUNY currently withholding grades for pursuing a strategy designed to make CUNY contend with the harm it is inflicting.

We call upon the CUNY administration to fulfill its ethical and political obligation to these vulnerable members of the CUNY community by ensuring that adjuncts and part-time faculty, as well as part-time staff, are reappointed in fall 2020.