Watch Tom Hill (SPS) and Kathleen McDermott (Tandon) describe Thursday’s bargaining session.
Contract faculty are half the full-time faculty at NYU — yet by our estimate we earn, on average, only 64 cents on the tenure-track dollar. At our last bargaining session, we introduced seventeen contract proposals to address long-standing problems with the structure of our pay.
These new proposals would ensure that our compensation reflects our contributions to NYU. Highlights include:
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Higher minimum salaries, increases structured to solve and prevent salary compression, a minimum 20% raise for everyone, predictable 6% raises moving forward each year of the contract, and a fair and transparent salary equity review process to correct and prevent gender and racial pay discrimination:
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Creating a phased retirement plan to match tenured colleagues and restoring the NYU Retiree Medical Plan (currently available only to faculty who were older than 50 in September 2011);
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Restoring and improving tuition remission benefits: 100% for ourselves, our partners, and our children, plus a 50% portable tuition benefit;
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Expanding subsidies for child and elder care;
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Granting access to faculty housing on par with tenure-track colleagues, plus benefits for renters and homebuyers not in faculty housing;
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Sabbatical leaves like our tenured colleagues to devote time to our pedagogical, scholarly, artistic, and professional practices.
As always, the full text of everything that crosses the table can be found on the bargaining tracker on our website, and you can review a summary of our compensation and benefits proposals here.
The administration’s team emphasized their commitment to making progress and brought several new proposals as well as some long-awaited counters. We’re eager to make progress too, so we were disappointed to see that their compensation proposal fails to address most of the salary problems we’ve identified. Furthermore, their proposed new salary floor for full professors — $101,640 — is $210 less than the median regular pay for all contract faculty in our union for Academic Year 2023-24, $101,850. We can’t accept a contract that fails to meaningfully improve salaries for three quarters of our members.
The administration’s counter on Appointments and Reappointments raised widespread concern among the members who observed our contract negotiations. It ignores differences among our schools and programs and imposes a one-size-fits-all process that would give all of us substantially less job security. There’s no reason NYU’s central administration needs to do this. The collective bargaining agreement between United University Professions and SUNY covers 29 campuses while accounting for differences among small regional liberal arts colleges, large university centers, and hospitals. And not just SUNY: NYU’s central administration has also agreed to contracts, like the adjunct faculty’s, that acknowledge and preserve differences among schools. Our union contract can — and must — account for the meaningful differences in how we work and how we’re evaluated and compensated.
Despite the differences in our jobs, we are all doing the work of faculty. Participation in shared governance is necessarily part of that work, because it is a fundamental part of our collective right to academic freedom: the freedom, as anti-apartheid University of Cape Town chancellor Albert Centlivres wrote in 1957, “to decide what to teach, whom to teach, how to teach, and who should teach.” In a free university, these questions must be decided by the faculty on the basis of their academic expertise, not by administrators on the basis of what’s popular among donors and politicians.
Last Thursday, the administration’s team made the stakes of our contract fight clear with three proposals — Management Rights, Shared Governance, and P.I. Status — that would radically curtail our role within the university, arrogating to administrators decisions properly made by the faculty. Their vision for the university is coming into focus, and it looks an awful lot like an educational services corporation: they want to continue to underpay us while refusing to protect our academic freedom and limiting our participation in shared governance.
We have a different vision for NYU, and our contract demands aren’t just about improving our own pay, benefits, and job security. Our demands are about doing right by our students and the university community.
The contract faculty are load-bearing walls of the university. We teach classes with over 130,000 students each year. Without us — our teaching, our service, our expertise — NYU would collapse, unable to deliver on its mission “to be a top quality international center of scholarship, teaching and research.”
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By seeking to enshrine strong protections for academic freedom and shared governance, we aim to ensure that it is subject-matter experts, not donors or politicians, who determine how and by whom students are taught.
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By striving to establish better healthcare and family care benefits, to name just two, we hope to assure that we have the health, time, and attention to devote to our students that they deserve.
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And by insisting on parity with our tenured colleagues (the other half of the full-time faculty) with regard to compensation, retirement, sabbaticals, and housing, we set out to make certain that our students can continue to learn from “outstanding faculty who are leaders in their fields.”
We can win the strong first contract we fight for, but we’ll only win what we fight for. Will you join that fight to win the contract we need and deserve — to protect the integrity of an NYU education?
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RSVP to help pack the room (or the Zoom) at our next bargaining session, Tuesday, August 26 from 10 a.m. – 1 p.m.
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Commit to getting more involved in winning a strong contract.
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)