Campus Equity Week highlights adjuncts’ contributions to CUNY

There are a million part-time and adjunct faculty, graduate employees, full-time non-tenure-track faculty and continuing education teachers throughout the US. This number grew 41% in a 10-year period, according to Department of Education data for 2003. As of Spring 2005, CUNY had 9,600 part-timers teaching more than 50 percent of its courses.

Bi-Annual Event

Campus Equity Week (CEW), October 31 to November 4, is a biannual event that aims to educate universities, the public and policymakers on the inequities of contingent work in academia. Participating groups in the US, Canada and Mexico design their own events for the week, with the common theme of the need for  equitable labor policies and standards that encourage fairness and dignity for all members of the campus community.

Inaugurated in 2001, CEW grew rapidly and in 2003 over 250 campuses in North America took part. The logo for this year’s tri-part theme – fair employment, campus unity and quality education – is built around the equality symbol that has accompanied CEW since its inception.

The PSC Committee on Part-time Personnel (also known as the First Friday Group) has come up with plans to commemorate the week at CUNY. A “Seniority Scroll,” indicating the names and number of years that long-serving part-time faculty have worked at CUNY, will be unfurled.

Holly Clarke, who has taught economics and public administration at John Jay for 17 years, came up with the idea for the scroll. “The seniority scroll represents years of dedicated service given to CUNY and its students,” Clarke explains, “by adjuncts and other part-time faculty who are not given the most minimal job protections: job security, accumulated sick days, reasons for dismissal and disability insurance.”

The Future

ther plans for CEW include a forum at the Graduate Center on “The Future of Academic Labor,” a book party, and lunchtime “teachout” – lectures for the New York public, to showcase the work that adjuncts do.

Details of these and other events will be posted on the PSC website, www.psc-cuny.org, along with the resolution of support for Campus Equity Week passed at the union’s September Delegate Assembly. The website will also have information on the PSC’s legislative agenda for 2005-06, including a renewed campaign to change New York labor law to allow adjuncts to collect unemployment insurance during periods when they are not working.

Campus Equity Week (called Fair Employment Week in Canada) was conceived at the fourth Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) conference in San Jose, California in 2001. COCAL has no regular staff, and a shifting steering committee of volunteers. The bi-annual conference is coordinated by the host committee (COCAL VI is slated for Vancouver, British Columbia, in August 2006). National labor organizations – including the AFT, NEA, AAUP, National Writers’ Union and the AFL-CIO – have endorsed and contributed to COCAL and CEW, as have the PSC and other local unions.

NAFFE, the North American Alliance for Fair Employment, is coordinating the activities and website for CEW 2005 (www.campusequityweek.org). NAFFE is an alliance of organizations across a broad range of constituencies affected by problems associated with nonstandard work, such as part-time, temporary and contract employment. Its goal is to ensure the well-being of all workers and communities. (For more information on NAFFE, see www.fairjobs.org.)

Contingent Labor

Joe Berry, author of the newly published book Reclaiming the Ivory Tower: Organizing Adjuncts to Change Higher Education, the first comprehensive analysis of the contingent organizing movement, argues that winning broad public support will be key to its success. “A national strategy,” he maintains, “must understand that contingent faculty are part of a casualized workforce and must be organized as a whole workforce, on the job and in the community.” CEW 2005 aims to be one step in that direction.