On Tuesday, colleagues from around the university met in Bobst Library to deliver a letter to the NYU administration. “We are tired of waiting,” wrote around 90 contract faculty leaders from nearly every department in every school across the university. They promised that unless the administration agrees to a strong contract that guarantees our academic freedom and job security, compensates us commensurate to our contributions to NYU, protects our scholarly and creative practices, and supports our careers and families, they would “ask our bargaining committee to call for a strike authorization vote.”
Read coverage in New York’s labor newspaper The Chief Leader of the letter delivery.
Your elected bargaining committee heard you. We’re tired of waiting too. So on Thursday, between grading our students’ papers and exams, we met for our 21st bargaining session. We brought 20 proposals and took major steps towards the administration where we could while standing firm on our core issues. We hoped they would do the same. To our dismay, they made only a few small moves toward us in the eleven proposals that they brought.
We started with powerful testimony by members who were arrested by the NYPD at the request of the NYU administration on April 22, 2024, at Gould Plaza. Our colleagues spoke eloquently about how the administration had broken trust with the community. When they finished speaking, we offered the administration a deal: we would withdraw our demand that they agree not to “request the New York Police Department or any other law enforcement agency to arrest or detain Members of the Contract Faculty during demonstrations, protests, or other political activity” in exchange for three agreements: first, that they include in our contract what they’ve agreed to already with two other unions prohibiting the university’s voluntary cooperation with immigration enforcement; second, that they agree that the Health and Safety Committee meet to talk about concerns over police on campus; and third, that they agree to a provision modeled on a new contract between Weill Cornell and its postdoc union that “Contract Faculty Members shall have the right to assemble or protest peacefully, free from censorship or retaliation by the Employer.”
We also offered them a trade on peer review committees. The administration has long drawn a firm line against the continuation of faculty peer review committees as part of the process for grievances related to reappointments and promotions. In order to move toward an agreement, we reluctantly withdrew our proposal for grievance committees, conditioned on the administration’s agreeing to terms that should be uncontroversial at a university. First, in lieu of grievance committees, we are proposing binding arbitration, so that if a neutral arbitrator finds that our rights have been violated, they can order reinstatement or promotion. Second, we are insisting on real presumption of reappointment. This would mean that once we are reviewed and renewed twice, further reappointments would be automatic in the absence of just cause, financial exigency, or a small handful of other exceptions. Third, we are demanding peer review committees for promotion and reappointment, to ensure that faculty — rather than administrators, donors, or politicians — make academic decisions. Fourth, we are continuing to insist on the common sense provision that the criteria for promotion and reappointment be set by academics in schools and departments to account for disciplinary differences.
Read the petition signed by more than 250 tenure-track colleagues supporting our demands.
Later, we offered them another trade. Several months ago, the administration proposed an expansive “Management and Academic Rights” article that would give administrators broad powers to run the university according to their whims. Thus far, our counterproposals have emphasized that universities are unlike other workplaces, in that they must be run through systems of shared governance. On Thursday, we offered the administration a more traditional management rights article while demanding the continuation of shared governance. Again, our demands are common sense and traditional: we’re asking the NYU administration to agree to the standards set by the American Council of Education and other national organizations back in 1966.
In other places, too, we came substantially closer to the administration, while holding to core principles. We agreed to a system of annual evaluations based solely on FARs, so long as no evaluations are conducted in secret and we have the right to appeal them. We continued to come closer to the administration’s language guaranteeing a respectful work environment, while refusing to give up on protections against discrimination on the basis of caste and gender identity; we’re also insisting that the administration agree not to take away anyone’s rights even if the Trump administration or conservative courts erode civil rights law. We agreed to the administration’s proposal for a $200,000 annual fund to pay for immigration expenses, but we continue to insist that the administration sponsor our non-citizen colleagues for legally appropriate visas and green cards. And we took a step toward the administration on family care benefits by decreasing the dollar amount we are requesting to pay for child- and eldercare.
In compensation, the administration moved in one key way: they agreed that the minimum pay for faculty on 12-month contracts would be a third more than minimum 9-month salaries for faculty in the same departments. In Steinhardt especially, this has been a major concern and — because 12-month colleagues are disproportionately women — one cause of the salary gap. However, in other places the administration has refused to move closer to us. We continue to demand that any salary package do four things: fix salary compression, eliminate the gendered and raced salary gap, raise our average salary to parity with the average salary of our tenure-track peers, and raise all our salaries.
That last point is particularly important. We work in an expensive city. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development’s 2025 Report on Annual Median Income, the administration’s current proposed assistant base salary — $84,000 — would be, for an individual, classified as “Low Income,” with their proposed base salaries for other ranks only barely slipping into “Moderate Income.” But a third of us have child dependents, and some of us are our families’ sole bread winners. The administration’s proposed base salary of $84,000 keeps us “Very Low Income” for a family of 3 or more. We are asking for base salaries that are appropriate both for the area where we live, as well as our experience and expertise. Indeed, in the majority of cases, our salary proposal seeks simply to bring our members’ salaries into the realm of “Moderate Income,” or, heaven forbid, “Middle Income.”
Like you, we are tired of waiting for a fair contract. We hope that the administration will listen to the growing voices of faculty all around campus so we don’t need to strike.
Will they? Our next bargaining session will be January 16th, 2026 at 11am, the Friday before spring semester starts. Will you be there? The more people who are there, the stronger the message to the administration: we are tired of waiting.
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)