CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

The CUNY Adjunct Labor collection documents three decades (1970-2001) of organizing efforts by part-time faculty and graduate students at CUNY to advance their interests as contingent workers. The collection emphasizes labor and organizing issues specific to adjuncts, within the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the CUNY faculty-staff-graduate student union, and across the City University of New York system at large. Through newsletters, correspondence, legal documents, memoranda, flyers, minutes, and newspaper clippings, among other items, the collection presents a view of CUNY history that incorporates the struggles of adjuncts to win better wages, benefits, and working conditions. The documents in the collection, for the most part, are drawn from the PSC archives at NYU’s Tamiment Institute Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives.

CUNY’s increased reliance on adjunct labor began with the implementation of Open Admissions at CUNY in 1970, which had significantly increased the system’s undergraduate enrollment to more than 250,000 by 1972. The use of part-time faculty at CUNY reflected national trends toward the de-professionalization of the academic labor force, as well as the broader movement in international labor markets toward a culture of labor fragmentation, dis-organization, and precarity. Because adjunct workers are undervalued and thus vulnerable in both the labor force and the larger labor movement, the CUNY adjuncts struggled for paid office hours, health and unemployment insurance, a formal grievance process, union representation, and reductions in pay disparities between full- and part-time workers, among other adjunct-specific concerns. These struggles had been waged largely on the initiative of adjuncts themselves, who organized across campuses and pressured both CUNY and the PSC to protect their interests. The persistence of CUNY adjunct teachers in their struggle for rights and representation arguably strengthened CUNY as well as the PSC itself.

Beginning in 1969 with the efforts of the United Federation of College Teachers (UFCT), a union of instructional staff and lecturers (a title later replaced by that of "adjunct"), and continuing with attempts to organize independent unions and non-union worker associations for part-time labor, CUNY adjunct labor had a formative influence on, and a sometimes contentious relationship with, the PSC leadership and membership. The PSC formed in 1972 through a merger of the UFCT with the Legislative Conference (LC), the full-time faculty union.

In 1974, the Adjunct Faculty Association (AFA) filed a New York Public Employment Relations Board (PERB) “Improper Practice Charge” against the PSC, charging that it had intentionally undermined the position of adjunct labor in its contract agreement with CUNY. Ultimately, this conflict did not result in the splintering of PSC, but shortly thereafter the Committee for Part-Time Personnel (CP-TP) was established to represent the interests of part-time CUNY faculty within the union. The CP-TP was able to win adjunct-specific provisions in CUNY's 1977 contract agreement with the PSC which offered incremental pay increases for adjuncts based on length of service, and also in the 1983 contract, which included the relaxation of workload limits on adjunct teachers and early notification of re-appointment and non-re-appointment.

In 1986, the Doctoral Students’ Council (DSC) at the CUNY Graduate Center, along with the Graduate Students’ Union, formed the self-identified Part-Time Instructional and Research Staff Union (PTU) and also submitted a petition to the PERB for separate certification, which was denied. However, in the same year, the 1986 contract agreement included employer-funded health insurance and tuition remission for adjunct faculty. The DSC continued to press adjunct issues, and in the 1990s formed the CUNY Adjunct Project, a research and organizing group of graduate student adjuncts that agitated for improved wages and working conditions for contingent faculty.

In the early 2000s, the New Caucus ran candidates for PSC leadership positions against the City University Unity Caucus (CUUC/Unity) that had controlled the union’s top officer positions for almost 25 years. The New Caucus ran on a platform that included a call for increased part-time representation in the PSC and – in part due to the large vote by adjuncts – won control of the PSC. Union struggles led on behalf of and by adjunct labor continue (for instance, in the "7K for Adjuncts" campaign of 2019) both within the PSC and through breakaway activist groups. These continuing struggles ultimately demonstrate that in addition to improving adjuncts’ working conditions and pay, the fight for adjunct equity within the union has the ability to fulfill the promise of the PSC and CUNY– an institution that was established to further the nation’s promise of access to higher education opportunities.

The collection was curated by Chloe Smolarski and Irwin Yellowitz from documents provided by the PSC and Marcia Newfield, to whom gratitude is due.