Brooklyn College PSC-CUNY

At the urging of PSC, United University Professions (UUP), and SUNY community college union leaders, our statewide affiliate, New York State United Teachers (NYSUT), has launched a sustained campaign demanding an end to chronic underfunding of CUNY and SUNY, and a proactive plan for reinvigorating the state's public colleges and universities. The legislative campaign, "Keep New York A State of Mind," calls for increased state funding for both senior and community colleges of CUNY and SUNY, along with additional state investment to strengthen and expand student financial aid and opportunity programs. It also includes an innovative demand for the creation of an endowment to fund new full-time faculty and professional staff lines at CUNY and SUNY. The legislative platform is called the “Public Higher Education Quality Initiative.” The platform and campaign were developed by higher education union leaders over the past several months. A communications effort t...

The Union of University Professionals (UUP) our sister union at SUNY is confronting its own version of Pathways known as Seamless Transfer . This shares many of the same elements as Pathways and threatens to undermine innovation and overall quality in the SUNY curriculum. The UUP has put out an informative broadside critiquing the system that may seem eerily familiar to those of us at CUNY: http://uupinfo.org/reports/guides/SeamlessTransfer913.pdf .

http://chronicle.com/article/OveruseAbuse-of-Adjuncts/143951/ Overuse and Abuse of Adjunct Faculty Members Threaten Core Academic Values by Richard Moser The increasing exploitation of contingent faculty members is one dimension of an employment strategy sometimes called the “two-tiered” or “multitiered” labor system. This new labor system is firmly established in higher education and constitutes a threat to the teaching profession. If left unchecked, it will undermine the university’s status as an institution of higher learning because the overuse of adjuncts and their lowly status and compensation institutionalize disincentives to quality education, threaten academic freedom and shared governance, and disqualify the campus as an exemplar of democratic values. These developments in academic labor are the most troubling expressions of the so-called corporatization of higher education. “Corporatization” is the name sometimes given to what has happened to higher education over...