Watch observer Ahmed Ansari (Tandon) and Bargaining Committee member Elisabeth Fay (FAS) describe Friday’s session here!
On Friday, your elected Bargaining Committee held our sixth bargaining session with the NYU administration. Since our last bargaining session, the Trump administration has embarked on a war against academia via pausing, disrupting, and cancelling research funding, by attacking diversity and academic freedom, and by threatening our valued international colleagues and students. The proposals we presented at Friday’s session were designed to provide the NYU administration an opportunity to reassure our whole university community that they are prepared to defend our faculty and academic freedom against these onslaughts.
The Bargaining Committee came to Friday’s session with a renewed sense of purpose: to ensure that we win a strong contract that will defend ourselves and our community from Trump’s attacks. We hope that the NYU administration will get there too, but they haven’t yet. Instead, they presented proposals to us that are designed to undermine the strength of our union to protect our jobs and our community: one that asks us to give up, for nothing in return, our right to withdraw our labor while our contract is in effect. The second proposal on union security would discourage union membership once our contract is ratified, and ultimately reduce our resources and ability to enforce our future contract.
Breaking: Join an emergency rally to demand that NYU Langone reverse its decision to preemptively capitulate to the Trump administration by canceling trans youth care. Monday at 6:30, St. Vartan Park.
In contrast, we started by reminding the administration’s representatives of NYU’s mission “to be a top quality international center of scholarship, teaching and research. This involves retaining and attracting outstanding faculty who are leaders in their fields, encouraging them to create programs that draw outstanding students, and providing an intellectually rich environment. NYU seeks to take academic and cultural advantage of its location and to embrace diversity among faculty, staff and students to ensure a wide range of perspectives, including international perspectives, in the educational experience.”
Specifically, we presented three proposals to the administration designed to uphold NYU’s mission and enhance our status as a global university:
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International Faculty Rights, which guarantees international scholars greater support, a fair and transparent process with a clear path to permanent residency for those who choose it, and the same job security as their citizen colleagues. We cannot defend academic freedom at NYU and write a contract that truly protects all of our jobs without protecting the rights of international faculty.
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Data Privacy & Security: This proposal protects our academic freedom and privacy at a time when they are under threat from corporations seeking to profit from selling our private information and from the government trying to curtail what we can study and say. Our proposal calls for the creation of comprehensive policies that clearly define the types of faculty data collected, the purposes of collection, and the methods of storage and access, where data is stored, and when data is deleted.
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A Counterproposal on Health and Safety, in which we made some progress toward agreement with the administration. We emphasized that we want in our contract language already in the graduate worker contract that commits the university to not voluntarily aid in the attack on non-citizen faculty or other community members. The threat of arrest or deportation — the forced removal of cherished members of our community — is a substantial source of stress for all of us that is created and experienced as part of our employment, and is a health and safety issue for us all.
We also asked (again) for status updates on the Request for Information that we made in June 2024. Although the administration is obligated to answer our questions, we are still waiting for many answers, 236 days later. We shared a Zoom screen demonstrating that information about most recent promotions — information that they have insisted is not readily available, thus time-consuming to obtain — is available in Workday! (Check for yourself: open Peoplesync, go to your profile, and scroll down to Time in Position and Time in Job Profile.)
We inquired about their progress on the many outstanding articles, including the interim grievance procedure, Recognition, Shared Governance, Respectful Work Environment, PI Status, Artificial Intelligence, Union Rights & Access, and more. We will continue to push for timely responses. You can follow along on our progress on these and other contract articles on our bargaining tracker.
Sign up here to tell us you want to get involved in fighting for one or more of our 13 bargaining goals. The more of us participate, the more power we have to change the parts of our jobs we want to improve and protect the parts we like.
As always, you can follow our progress towards a strong first contract by email, on the bargaining blog on our CFU-UAW website, and on the bargaining tracker. And you can observe bargaining directly in person or by zoom (next sessions: Thursday, February 20, 10 a.m. – 1 p.m. and Friday, March 7, 1 – 4 p.m.) – RSVP here to join our next session!
In Solidarity,
Contract Faculty United – 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