Watch Eilsabeth Fay (FAS) and David Brooks (Gallatin) chat about Friday’s bargaining session.
There’s been a palpable change in the bargaining room at 105 East 17th Street. Yes, it’s still stuffy and airless, and yes, it’s still packed with CFU members observing bargaining — but the attitude of the administration’s negotiators has changed. We’ve met sixteen times (a total of nearly 50 hours) and passed more than 50 proposals. Through our election victory, our bargaining goals ratification, our academic freedom petition, our student leafleting at the start of the semester, and our continued observer turnout, we’ve shown that contract faculty from every school and department of the university are united in demanding a strong first contract. As a result, the dynamics at the bargaining table have shifted to allow for more give and take and more meaningful exchanges.
At Friday’s bargaining session, we asked the administration pointed questions about the inadequacy of their two page, catch-all proposal on benefits, a counter to our comprehensive package of fourteen benefits provisions. For the most part, their answers were the same: as full-time faculty, we should be grateful to receive what our tenure-track peers get, “on the same terms and conditions, as may be amended by NYU from time to time.” In other words, they’ll offer to us exactly what they offer to our tenure-track colleagues, and make changes whenever and however they like.
Their response has been very different when we ask about housing, compensation, retirement, office space, P.I. status, and professional development funds. In these crucial areas, they want us to accept decidedly less than parity with tenure-track peers. Their “retirement” proposal is a actually just one-time-only buyout plan that amounts to at most half of what our tenured peers receive as a matter of course at retirement. Where we had proposed that every contract faculty member should receive a professional development fund to support our work, they brought a proposal cribbed from the adjunct contract that would create a fund of approximately $215 per contract faculty member, to which we could apply for conference funding. In their workspace counter, they’ve suggested we share desks. They downplayed the ramifications of their proposal on PI Status, which would render us unable to hire research assistants and effectively demote us into secondary co-PI roles behind tenured colleagues. They’ve told us that housing benefits are for tenured faculty only, and they won’t even talk about it. Most glaringly, our average salary is 36% less than the average for tenure-track colleagues; the administration’s proposal would give raises to only 244 of us and provide no guaranteed raises for anyone after the first year of the contract.
When we asked why the administration insists on perfect parity with tenured professors in some cases but insist on giving us less in others, they had a lot of words but no coherent response. Perhaps it comes down to the origins of our positions in the John Sexton era, when then-Steinhardt dean Ann Marcus described the vision for the contract faculty: “We need people we can abuse, exploit and then turn loose.”
Read every proposal that’s crossed the table on our Bargaining Tracker.
We also exchanged new counterproposals, most significantly a package of three: Titles, Appointment and Reappointment, and Promotion. Taken together, these would ensure fair processes for appointment and promotion that would preserve both deliberative peer review and essential diversity across schools and departments — but would also respond to the administration’s insistence that deans make the final decisions. We also continue to insist on what our colleagues at the University of California, Rutgers, and CUNY already have: job security, though a presumption of reappointment after multiple successful reappointments.
Like job security, many of the things we’re negotiating with the administration are, fundamentally, about academic freedom. We think we’re close to an agreement on Discipline and Discharge that would protect due process, but in other areas, considerable distance remains. Our latest proposal on International Faculty Members reasserts a number of crucial protections for non-citizen colleagues that the administration has repeatedly rejected.
Read about our fight for international faculty rights in The Chief Leader.
The administration also brought us several counterproposals. They took a tiny step closer to us Grievance and Arbitration, but indicated verbally where they were open to further movement. They also came closer on a Technology Committee, now agreeing to accept advisory recommendations and to explain technology decisions in writing. But it wasn’t all progress: they continue to try to carve more people out of the union and to insist, absurdly, that the vice president of the University Senate (an elected faculty member whose only duty is to preside in the absence of both the president and the provost) is a “rank of president of the university” and thus a high-level member of the administration. And they insisted, again, that they will not bargain with us at all over Data Privacy protections, the administration’s attempt to take control of our Intellectual Property, or the basic guardrails we seek over the misuse of generative AI.
Both parties have agreed on the next two dates for bargaining (but not yet the times): Wednesday, October 10, and Friday, October 31. You can RSVP to observe here, and there’s lots you can do before our next bargaining session to show the administration we’re serious about winning the strong first contract we need and deserve. Wear your union button, hang a union poster, and talk to your students and colleagues. Be visible and vocal. We can win the university we fight for, but we’ll only win the university we fight for.
In solidarity,
CFU-UAW BARGAINING COMMITTEE
Richard Dorritie (Rory Meyers College of Nursing)
Elisabeth Fay (Expository Writing Program, Arts & Science)
Robin Harvey (Teaching and Learning, Steinhardt)
Thomas Hill (Center for Global Affairs, SPS)
Peter Li (General Engineering, Tandon)
Benedetta Piantella (Technology, Culture, and Society, Tandon)
Jacob Remes (Gallatin School of Individualized Study)
Chris Chan Roberson (Undergraduate Film & TV, Tisch)
Jamie Root (French Literature, Thought and Culture, Arts & Science)
Fanny Shum (Mathematics, Courant Institute)
Heidi White (Liberal Studies)