Fall 2018
Report on Committee of Committees by Professor Laura Rabin
Professor Laura Rabin gave the report on behalf of the Committee on Review. She stated that the committee had reviewed the minutes of the meetings of the Faculty Council and found them to be in order.
Thank you, Laura. And now I'd like to ask Professor James Davis to give remarks from the PSC.
Remarks From Professor James Davis, PSC-CUNY Chapter Chair, Brooklyn College
Good afternoon. There are three topics I want to touch on. One is reassigned time and the teaching load reduction. Another is the contract campaign, particularly the demand for a big raise for adjunct faculty. And the third is the state budget, about which I’m sure the president will say more.
On reassigned time and the teaching load reduction, we need to thank the department chairs and program directors, who came together on this issue and advocated with a unified voice. Despite budgetary pressure, President Anderson has pledged to maintain reassigned time for sponsored research. Unsponsored reassigned time, however, is on the chopping block, including for program and department administration. The provost is convening a working group to find reassigned time efficiencies. The chapter leadership remains concerned. We urge the working group and Provost Lopes to maintain existing practices for administrative reassigned time. A sign-on letter is being circulated now on the floor. Add your name if you support the statement. It reads, "The University's refusal to fully fund the teaching load reduction should not be taken out on those members of the faculty whose work directly supports students and academic programs. Reductions in administrative reassigned time send exactly the wrong signal to those who have stepped up—and those considering stepping up—to run programs and departments." Please add your support when the clipboard reaches you.
On the contract campaign: We have been working without a contract for almost a year. Negotiations began this summer. Real progress has been made in clarifying key issues. Nevertheless, after 10 bargaining sessions the university has not made an economic offer. So what are we doing about it? In late September, 600 faculty and staff—including many of you in this room—marched in a spirited demonstration to the Wall Street bank where the chairman of the board of trustees, Bill Thompson, reports to work. We may need to do more demonstrating, more letter-writing, and more publicity about the real-dollar defunding of CUNY, particularly the senior colleges. The state persists in its refusal to provide Maintenance of Effort funding—the annual, predictable increases in the cost of doing business as a university. We have subsidized those cuts with our low wages and frozen faculty lines, and adjunct salaries in particular have allowed CUNY to run on austerity budgets. The demand in this round of bargaining for $7,000 per course for adjuncts is fundamentally a demand to break with austerity. It's an economic justice issue for adjuncts of course, but it’s really an issue for us all. We're always told it’s a zero-sum game: Here's the pie, you decide how you want to slice it up. This demand is a rejection of that phony zero-sum logic; it says another pot of money is necessary to serve CUNY students and approach pay equity for the adjunct faculty. Go online and sign the $7K petition! Your PSC department rep will send you the link. You'll be saying we won’t share the pie as usual; we actually need a whole second pie to make up for years of starvation.
Finally, alert listeners will by now have asked themselves: Won't this just arrive dead in the water in Albany? You have reason to be skeptical. Indeed, the SUNY faculty recently settled a contract that was pretty lousy, and pressure is on CUNY to adhere to a similar pattern. So last but not least, I would implore you to vote on November 6. Flipping the New York State Senate would be huge. We will have the same governor, but he will be operating under very different conditions with a progressive legislature. Vote November 6, and encourage your students to vote, too.
Thank you for all that you do.
President Anderson's Address
Today I will share with you a video and Powerpoint slideshow (pdf) to visually present the latest pertinent information regarding the state of the college.
I wish all of you a successful semester.
