Friday’s session was five hours long. We had suggested an extra long “working session” because we were hopeful that after we brought 20 proposals to the last session, they’d come prepared to do serious business at the bargaining table.
We were wrong.
The administration brought four counterproposals — on Benefits, Rules, Regulations, and Policies, Shared Governance, and Childcare — but in none of them did they make anything other than desultory, cosmetic movement. In contrast we made real movement toward them in Sabbaticals, Workspace and Materials, Salary Equity Reviews, and a Retirement program.
A perfect encapsulation of Friday’s bargaining session came just after we had presented a counterproposal on Individual Development Accounts — a counter in which we came closer to the administration by decreasing total cost while holding to the core principle that all faculty need individual, discretionary accounts to support our teaching, research, and creative practice. Pete Arena, a senior associate vice provost, piped up. What would “non-research faculty” like us need with professional development funds, he asked? Putting aside the fact that most of us do maintain scholarly and artistic practices — indeed, that most of us are required to do so for promotion — the question gobsmacked us. Could the Senior Associate Vice Provost for Resource Planning really not know what professional development was?
Luckily, Jennifer Gordon, a clinical professor in FAS’s Department of French Literature, Thought, and Culture, was observing. She raised her hand to describe the conference of language instructors she’d just attended in New Orleans — at a cost of $2,200. Jen’s conference is a good example of the problem we’re trying to solve, because her annual research fund is only $2,000. She had to spend her own money on it, but the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages wasn’t a vacation, and it’s not her hobby. Professional development is part of our jobs. Our ability to attend conferences, to buy books to develop new courses, to participate in scholarly and professional organizations, and, yes, to conduct research and make art is essential to our jobs as faculty and essential to our ability to deliver high quality education to our students.
It used to be shocking that our bosses don’t know things like this, but not after 15 months of negotiations. Time and again, the administration negotiators appear to know little or nothing about what a university is or how it works. They profess bewilderment at our insistence that standards for reappointment and promotion be grounded in our disciplines and be determined through academic governance in our departments and schools. They seem unable to understand the importance of faculty making decisions about who teaches, what gets taught, who gets taught, and how it’s taught — apparently preferring such decisions be made at the whim of administrators susceptible to the demands of donors and politicians. They struggle with the concepts of academic service and peer review. They won’t commit not to censor library materials.
Your elected Bargaining Committee members can’t teach them alone. We need you. We will not win a strong contract at the table without your strong backing. RSVP to observe bargaining January 30, 11-4.
If the administration shows ignorance about how the university works, it shows intransigence in economic matters. To our surprise, they did not even bring a counterproposal on Compensation. They continue to refuse to discuss Housing, Tuition Remission, Retirement Benefits, Transit Benefits, Privacy Protection Benefits, or Fair Scheduling. (Not to mention AI or Intellectual Property.) Friday’s proposal on Childcare benefits continued to offer a fund of less than $1400 per dependent child under the age of 13. (Remember, you can see every proposal that crosses the table on our Bargaining Tracker.)
Despite this, we continue to engage with the administration to try to find common ground. And in two places we succeeded: we signed a tentative agreement on Administrative Positions, winning protections for colleagues who take on extra administrative work in exchange for more money or course releases. And — only 424 days after we first proposed it — we reached agreement on a Workspace and Materials article.
The administration’s next chance is Friday, January 30. They agreed to another five-hour session, and we hope they will take it more seriously and bring us proposals that truly address the needs of the contract faculty. If they don’t, leaders from every school and nearly every department have already told them what will happen: they “will ask [their] bargaining committee to call for a strike authorization vote if the administration continues to delay.”
But more than hoping the administration shapes up, we hope that you will be there behind us to see what the administration chooses to do or not do. We know what will make them move is not good arguments — it’s their knowledge that unless they give us a fair contract that compensates us for our contributions, protects the integrity of an NYU education, and preserves academic freedom, you will authorize a strike.
Show them you’re tired of waiting for a fair contract.
RSVP to observe bargaining on January 30.
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)