CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

This issue of The Refuse (December 1983-January  1984), a Doctoral Students’ Council newletter, addressed the issue of retrenchment at CUNY, pointing to several articles that had mischaracterized CUNY’s relationship to labor precarity and injustices. In the article “Merry Christmas Mr. Polishook [PSC's president],” Zaccardo and Bunnell unpack the distinction between Graduate Assistant A-lines and adjunct positions, which they claimed in effect amounted to a loss of 3,800 dollars annually per graduate student. Also discussed was the national trend of replacing full-time lines with adjuncts and how that resulted in the further de-professionalizing of the teaching field. The newsletter closed with a call to all graduate students to join the Graduate Student Union (GSU) and provided an agenda for the next meeting, which included discussing a decertification campaign.