"Solidarity Forever!"

[The report below portending a possible fall semester strike of grad student teachers at NYU could be repeated at virtually every college and university campus across North America. We are exploiting, discouraging, and thereby diverting to other fields the best of our younger scholars by the corporatizing mentality of our university boards who have appointed academic administrators all too often ready and willing to impose 'bottom line' corporate practices upon an academic world that cannot bear such exploitation of its talented younger people.

I see this phenomenon at Brooklyn College where we do our best to make life as bearable as possible for our graduate students and other 'part-time' teachers. In fact most of these are part-time only formally with us as they are obliged to teach elsewhere to make ends meet -- Yale, Rutgers, other CUNY colleges -- and are only part-time to meet the terms of our contracts which would oblige CUNY to pay full-time salaries with full benefits, should an extra course be allowed. Needless to say the pressures on our young scholars are far too great. I see the grim impact upon personal lives -- divorces, illnesses, whatever that people under terrible stresses endure.

We at CUNY and SUNY are labeled public employees so that we face the draconian punishments of the ancient Taylor Law:

http://www.goer.state.ny.us/cna/bucenter/taylor.html

enacted in 1967 principally to keep emergency workers -- police and firemen -- on the job during labor disputes. Those of us who elect to go on strike can at worst lose our jobs and at best are docked two days pay for each day's work lost. Our faculty (and thereby our students) have been exploited terribly to allow both the conditions for teaching -- more and larger classes (and higher tuitions for our students) -- combined with massively decreased faculty pay scales in the face of inflation (about 40%) which is making it ever harder for us to attract and keep first rate scholar/teachers.

What we need is what we do not have -- effective boards of trustees committed to public higher education. Instead our institutions have been burdened with politicized appointees who do little or nothing on behalf of our universities -- but pride themselves on how they have improved the quality of our educational standards. Such is pure unadulterated hog wash! Ever more burdened junior faculty and adjuncts cannot do the same level of teaching that once was done by us mainly full-timers in the late 1960s and 1970s when open enrollment at CUNY was finally achieved to permit the admission of previously excluded blue collar, new immigrant, and minority students -- many first generation in college -- to our expanded numbers of colleges. I know this history first hand, as I have have taught continuously in CUNY since 1966 in 3 of its senior colleges (Hunter, CCNY, as well as Brooklyn).

However, our gains of that period are now being sabotaged by the cuts in our budgets which used to offer education to the baby boomer generation free of tuition, but which now require their generational heirs to pay ever increasing percentages of our expenses through tuition increases -- now more than 2/3 of our budget at Brooklyn College is pried out of incomes of students hard pressed by the living expenses here in NYC. I literally have students falling asleep in classes, having worked 12 hour
night shifts! I opened up a student internet list so that I could at least pass along to such students and others whose jobs force them to miss classes the basics of our course discussions.

We, indeed, need a new deal in American higher education. The question to be answered is how to get it. Perhaps strikes will be necessary despite the hardships that they will impose on all. One is inclined to call upon all the slogans of the 1930s when the Great Depression was similarly oppressing the 'working classes ' - 'Solidarity forever!',

http://home.earthlink.net/~solidarity/

whatever.

Incidentally, both of the institutions that educated me -- Yale and Columbia where administrators receive compensation as much as 40 times annually (e.g. $650,000 annually plus free housing and perks) that of the typical adjunct -- are participating in this pattern of exploitation. Shame!

We shall see. Ed Kent]

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Sent: Friday, July 08, 2005 10:19 AM Subject: [cgeu] Villager 7/6: NYU preparing for grad student strike in fall


http://www.thevillager.com/villager_114/nyupreparing.html

The Villager
Volume 75, Number 7 | July 6 - 12, 2005

N.Y.U. preparing for grad students walkout in fall

By Johanna Petersson

After the New York University administration announced a preliminary decision on June 15 not to recognize the school's graduate teaching assistants union, it seems both sides are willing to take the fight to the fall semester.

[snip]

Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions
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