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The Defense Department surely wins the contest for having the most acronyms, but a close second must be awarded to higher education. Even I--after 40 years in the business--am still encountering mysterious letter combinations. Today's set comes from a collection of essays entitled Voices From CUNY: Why We’re Voting No on the PSC’s Proposed Contract. The teaser paragraph reads
Workers from eight CUNY colleges speak out against their union’s proposed contract, which includes: inadequate raises for many job titles, workload increases and givebacks on job security for adjunct faculty, and no remote work protections for staff.
CUNY, as most of you likely know, stands for The City University of New York, a collection of 25 campuses from community colleges to graduate schools that purport to serve the citizens of that city. It is New York State's second largest system of public higher education, behind only SUNY (State University of New York), which includes 64 campuses outside the City, with similar scope. I worked for SUNY for most of my career.
Most readers are likely less familiar with PSC, denoting the Professional Staff Congress, which is the teachers' union representing professors and staff. These days that includes everybody from graduate assistants to full professors, along with many staff members. The union tries to capture dues from as many people as possible, even though their benefit in belonging to a union is negligible.
Among those staff members is an acronym I'd never encountered before: HEO. I asked Google AI for assistance.
At CUNY, an "HEO" stands for "Higher Education Officer," referring to a series of non-teaching administrative staff positions within the university, encompassing various administrative roles across different CUNY campuses; essentially, it signifies a professional working in a mid-level administrative role at the university.
I'm still not clear what this means--perhaps it's analogous to the classified services employees at SUNY, eg, secretaries and lower-level administrators. At SUNY those folks have a separate union.
None of the contributors to Voices from CUNY are HEOs, so it's left to Professor James Dennis Hoff to make their case.
The proposed contract also does nothing to secure remote work options for our HEO colleagues. This was the biggest demand for HEOs this contract round, and no progress was made on this question at all. This means that CUNY can end or limit remote work for HEOs anytime it feels like it.
Which is weird. The reason for a physical campus is ostensibly to provide students with one-on-one, in-person instruction. So allowing the HEOs to work from home seems counterproductive. I do know that the secretaries at SUNY are often the front face of the department, welcoming students and answering questions. Or perhaps Professor Hoff thinks that CUNY should move entirely on-line and dispense with in-person classes altogether? In which case everybody could work from home.
Meanwhile, the adjunct faculty are whining to high heaven. A contributor named Kamran writes,
I’m an adjunct at Lehman, and I’m poor, and I hate it. And if this contract goes through, in 2027, I will still be poor, and I will still hate it. $7K was the minimum I think we deserved — 10 years ago. In 2027, it won’t be enough. I will be enthusiastically voting no.
The $7K is payment for a three-credit-hour class, and admittedly it's slim pickings.
Though at SUNY most adjuncts teach two classes per semester for two semesters per year (and maybe also in the summer)--which then comes to $28,000 per year. Still not much. As Tatiana Cozzarelli, an "adjunct lecturer," writes
Over the summer, I had a dream that we had gotten a contract at CUNY. ... But when I woke up, the reality was so different: I had 30 dollars in my bank account and was borrowing money from friends in order to make ends meet. I needed emergency dental surgery and I had to make a gofundme to pay for it. I’m not the only one. I know adjuncts who are on food stamps, especially over the summer. While CUNY President Felix Matos Rodriguez makes nearly $800,000 a year, adjunct professors just cannot make ends meet.
I have no idea if Mr. Rodriguez is over- or under-paid. But if you take his salary and share it among CUNY's 40,000 full- and part-time employees, the annual raise per employee is about $20. Not enough to get anybody off food stamps. Mr. Rodriguez's salary is--in budget terms--irrelevant.
Ms. Cozzarelli, who identifies as "...a former middle school teacher and current Urban Education PhD student at CUNY," needs to go find another job. Her salary reflects the value of her PhD, which is probably closer to zero. Almost anything she could do, eg, drive an Uber, would pay more and be a greater contribution to society than what she is doing now.
Professor Hoff, who is a member of the union's Delegate Assembly (an elected leadership body), contributes this:
[T]his memorandum of agreement is a pay cut, plain and simple. The proposed across the board wage increases for the life of the contract will equal only 2.82 percent per year. This comes after historic levels of inflation close to twenty percent since 2021. The proposed retroactive wages will do little to make up for that loss and probably will not even keep pace with inflation going forward. Even in the best-case scenario, this contract will actually bake in a nine percent pay cut across the board for all PSC-CUNY members. This comes on top of the lost value that our salaries have suffered since the New Caucus took power in 1999.
In other words, the union got peanuts--despite collecting union dues from Ms. Cozzarelli and her ilk. She's wasting what little money she has. But one has to wonder at the perfidy of the "New Caucus," which agreed to this contract. Why did they do that when it's obviously so bad?
I can think of a number of reasons:
- Declining enrollments
- Declining revenues from state and city governments
- The necessity to keep all the adjuncts and HEOs employed, despite fewer students
- An inability to continue deferring maintenance.
I think the contributors to Voices from CUNY are all members of what I call the Shutdown Caucus, of which Dr. Hoff is a leading spokesman. These people--who have never seen a strike they didn't like--think every workplace in America should be shut down until the bourgeoisie cough up their horde of gold coins. In particular, they think CUNY should be shut down with all 40,000 employees going unpaid while on strike. The analogy they present are the strikes at Starbucks, Amazon, the auto workers and at Boeing.
What they don't mention is that workers at Starbucks and Amazon, etc., actually do something useful--and for their labor they get paid by their customers. CUNY employees--ie, the professors, HEOs and adjuncts like Ms. Cozzarelli--don't do anything useful. They're effectively on the public dole--and if they went on strike nobody would even care.
They have no customers. Nobody voluntarily pays money to CUNY. Their entire budget is extorted through taxes on pain of imprisonment.
So please--go on strike. Save us all a dime.
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