CUNY Adjuncts Refusing to Teach Spring 2020

[mahagonny]

Why is it so hard to say a school is having labor relations problems and bad press because they're asking for it?

[marshwiggle]

Why is it so hard to say a school is having labor relations problems and bad press because they're asking for it?

Do the administration and union negotiators get any credit for reaching an agreement? Do they only get it after 50% +1 vote in favour? Or do they have "labor relations problems" that "they're asking for" as long as anyone isn't happy?

[mahagonny]

Why is it so hard to say a school is having labor relations problems and bad press because they're asking for it?

Do the administration and union negotiators get any credit for reaching an agreement? Do they only get it after 50% +1 vote in favour? Or do they have "labor relations problems" that "they're asking for" as long as anyone isn't happy?

No. They made a bad deal for the part time faculty, who should be reconsidering their union membership. There are good unions, unions that are trying to be good, unions that are finally-waking-up-and-smelling-the-coffee, and just plain lame unions.

Marshdoggle, since you're so high on the concept of highly educated people who have  many options committing to four months of accredited college teaching, why don't you get your above average butt down there and do some teaching at CUNY for $2800 or whatever it is? And bring cash. When you go out to a deli for your pastrami sandwich and coffee, you'll find the downtown prices take a little getting used to.

Wahoo -- sorry, I fed the troll again.

[polly_mer]

Getting back to Tux's case regarding quality and paying for that quality, CUNY City College tuition is $6,530 per year for in-state residents.

There's a more than $100 million gap between what it costs to run CUNY and revenue (state funds combined with current tuition).

The mathematically simple solution is to write the optimization equations and solve them in terms of how many full-time faculty at a given pay rate can serve how many students with additional constraints related to other costs of serving students.

My bet is that we'd be looking at about half the current number of students with a huge reduction in part-time faculty who are covering general education classes instead of being the one-course, professional fellows who are already paid acceptably well.

That's a trade-off that should be made if the goal is high-quality education for college-ready folks instead of attempting to fix poor K-12 education combined with other social ills on the cheap by insisting that any old college education is valuable to the enrolled students. 

CUNY used to have a stellar reputation in terms of serving poor people with an excellent education.  Maybe that's still true of those who get through CUNY, but a 33% six-year graduation rate for a 2-year degree is nothing to brag about, even though that's an improvement over recent years  Perhaps investing more money in each student by having fewer students, many more full-time professors, and more support for a demographic that will need it would be a better use of the money than propping up the failed adjunct system. 

Instead of asking for $7k each for their 3/3 load, the adjuncts ought to be making the case for why a 3/3 load is already a full-time load (even though many CCs assert that 5/5 or higher is a full-time CC load) and thus should be consolidated into full-time jobs where faculty would have the energy to support the students in other ways in addition to teaching classes.

[marshwiggle]

Marshdoggle, since you're so high on the concept of highly educated people who have  many options committing to four months of accredited college teaching, why don't you get your above average butt down there and do some teaching at CUNY for $2800 or whatever it is?

If I were there, I'd make the same calculation I do here: Is it worth it to me? If so, I'll do it. If not, I won't.  What I will not do is agree to something that's basically unacceptable and then grumble and complain and tell everyone how awful it is and beg others to fix it.

And I think you'll find others on here have pointed out how low the unemployment rate is for people with PhDs, and how decent their salaries are, so they can be more specific about all of the options available.

[mahagonny]

Marshdoggle, since you're so high on the concept of highly educated people who have  many options committing to four months of accredited college teaching, why don't you get your above average butt down there and do some teaching at CUNY for $2800 or whatever it is?

If I were there, I'd make the same calculation I do here: Is it worth it to me? If so, I'll do it. If not, I won't.  What I will not do is agree to something that's basically unacceptable and then grumble and complain and tell everyone how awful it is and beg others to fix it.

So what's the purpose of your constant grumbling about your union on this forum? You could find a place to work that doesn't have a union. But then, maybe the money wouldn't be enough to satisfy you.

[Wahoo Redux]

Wahoo -- sorry, I fed the troll again.

It's cool.

He's lonely.

And you make him look silly.

[polly_mer]

https://www.leftvoice.org/why-im-voting-no-psc-cunys-contract-is-bad-for-adjuncts-and-students

[polly_mer]

I ended up on a page titled "How the Increases in Adjunct Pay Would Work" where the claim is made that a 3-credit course at $5500 (starts fall 2022) comes to a rate of $91.67/hour.  When I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

Anyone teaching classes in which the total workload is only 60 hours per term?  That's only 4 hours per week for a 15-week semester, which seems pretty low if the 3-credit class meets for 3 hours and the faculty member has a required office hour as the new contract would mandate.

[marshwiggle]

I ended up on a page titled "How the Increases in Adjunct Pay Would Work" where the claim is made that a 3-credit course at $5500 (starts fall 2022) comes to a rate of $91.67/hour.  When I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

Anyone teaching classes in which the total workload is only 60 hours per term?  That's only 4 hours per week for a 15-week semester, which seems pretty low if the 3-credit class meets for 3 hours and the faculty member has a required office hour as the new contract would mandate.

The big problem that can't be avoided is that parts of the time commitment are fixed; i.e class time is the same regardless of how many students, parts scale linearly with the number of students, such as grading, and other parts have a strong network effect, e.g. prep time which drops with experience and multiple sections. So in the absence of a ridiculously complex (and probably still only moderately accurate) formula, having a high wage based on the fixed time commitment alone is the easiest compromise.

[Wahoo Redux]

I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

I've begun to wonder if Polly really is who she says she is.

You've only calculated class time and 1 office hour per week...

...but if you have ever taught you know that a great deal of the work of academia goes on outside of the class----grading, prepping, answering emails, looking things up, reading the text ahead of time, doing the syllabus, designing and updating Blackboard, etc.

Never mind that we have a more livable wage for the people actually delivering the prime mission of the institution.

Let me post that again: Never mind that you want to short change the people who actually perform the work which is the primary reason for the existence of the institution in question (who have probably not received a rate increase in 20 years).

For whatever weird reason, Polly just has it in for these people.

[scamp]

I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

I've begun to wonder if Polly really is who she says she is.

You've only calculated class time and 1 office hour per week...

...but if you have ever taught you know that a great deal of the work of academia goes on outside of the class----grading, prepping, answering emails, looking things up, reading the text ahead of time, doing the syllabus, designing and updating Blackboard, etc.

Never mind that we have a more livable wage for the people actually delivering the prime mission of the institution.

Let me post that again: Never mind that you want to short change the people who actually perform the work which is the primary reason for the existence of the institution in question (who have probably not received a rate increase in 20 years).

For whatever weird reason, Polly just has it in for these people.

To be fair, I think you misread Polly's post here - she is saying that the link implies 60 hours of work for that pay, which is not at all realistic. So in this case you two are in agreement.

[Wahoo Redux]

I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

I've begun to wonder if Polly really is who she says she is.

You've only calculated class time and 1 office hour per week...

...but if you have ever taught you know that a great deal of the work of academia goes on outside of the class----grading, prepping, answering emails, looking things up, reading the text ahead of time, doing the syllabus, designing and updating Blackboard, etc.

Never mind that we have a more livable wage for the people actually delivering the prime mission of the institution.

Let me post that again: Never mind that you want to short change the people who actually perform the work which is the primary reason for the existence of the institution in question (who have probably not received a rate increase in 20 years).

For whatever weird reason, Polly just has it in for these people.

To be fair, I think you misread Polly's post here - she is saying that the link implies 60 hours of work for that pay, which is not at all realistic. So in this case you two are in agreement.

Well, I'll be...

Apologies Polly.  I don't know what to say.  This is certainly a heartening development.

[marshwiggle]

I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

I've begun to wonder if Polly really is who she says she is.

You've only calculated class time and 1 office hour per week...

...but if you have ever taught you know that a great deal of the work of academia goes on outside of the class----grading, prepping, answering emails, looking things up, reading the text ahead of time, doing the syllabus, designing and updating Blackboard, etc.

Never mind that we have a more livable wage for the people actually delivering the prime mission of the institution.

Let me post that again: Never mind that you want to short change the people who actually perform the work which is the primary reason for the existence of the institution in question (who have probably not received a rate increase in 20 years).

For whatever weird reason, Polly just has it in for these people.

To be fair, I think you misread Polly's post here - she is saying that the link implies 60 hours of work for that pay, which is not at all realistic. So in this case you two are in agreement.

Well, I'll be...

Apologies Polly.  I don't know what to say.  This is certainly a heartening development.

All of those skills like careful reading that are developed in graduate school are only valuable to the extent that people choose to use them....

[Caracal]

I ended up on a page titled "How the Increases in Adjunct Pay Would Work" where the claim is made that a 3-credit course at $5500 (starts fall 2022) comes to a rate of $91.67/hour.  When I do the math, that means 60 hours of work is expected for a whole term.

Anyone teaching classes in which the total workload is only 60 hours per term?  That's only 4 hours per week for a 15-week semester, which seems pretty low if the 3-credit class meets for 3 hours and the faculty member has a required office hour as the new contract would mandate.

The whole idea of trying to count hours is, and always has been, pointless. Teaching, as well as scholarship, just aren't jobs where there's any way to do this in some consistent, reasonable way. The basic distinction between hourly work and salaried work is supposed to be that hourly jobs are ones in which work takes place under certain conditions and can be strictly separated from non work time. When I worked at Blockbuster a long time ago, I was paid hourly because if I wasn't in the store I wasn't working. The store manager was on salary because if they were short staffed she had to figure out, if the fire alarm went off in the middle of the night she had to come down, when the new titles came in, she needed to go set them up etc etc. My job was just to be there when I was scheduled to be and do what people told me to. Her job was to make sure the store was functioning, which isn't an hourly job.

Managing a store is a lot harder than teaching a class, but neither of them are hourly jobs. I have a lot of flexibility about my schedule, but my job is not to just show up to class and an office hour and do some set amount of grading. I'm in charge of making the class work. I'm not trying to claim I work really long hours. I don't. But, it isn't an hourly job.