The PSC Strikes Out
The adjunct announced that he had been at CUNY since 1989. Long-term adjuncts are a key constituency of the current union leadership, which has demanded for them seniority rights and pushed through an increase in their salary and health care benefits that had the effect of drying up funding for the full-time faculty’s dental and life insurance. Both the speaker and the union leadership seemed blissfully unaware that basing contract demands around protecting those unable to get a tenure-track job for a decade or longer doesn’t serve the University’s overall best interests.
The faculty speaker was Hunter political science professor Rosalind Petchesky, who has made a name for herself by taking rather extreme positions—denouncing the"massacre" in Jenin after the allegations against the Israeli army had been disproved; or equating the fetal form with “American imperial might,” since “it is not the image of a baby at all but of a tiny man, a homunculus”; and criticizing the war in Afghanistan on the grounds that it showed that “global capitalist masculinism is alive and well but concealed in its Eurocentric, racist guise of ‘rescuing’ downtrodden, voiceless Afghan women from the misogynist regime it helped bring to power.”
At the mass meeting, Petchesky mostly delivered as expected, informing CUNY professors that the “War on Terror is a war on us”; attributing a “fear-mongering” campaign against PSC leadership “right up to the White House’; and positing that a faculty strike would be “very exciting,” even a “life-transforming” experience. Then, she added, she also backed a strike for personal reasons: “I am worried that I might have to move out of my apartment in Manhattan.” (Petchesky is a distinguished professor, which has a salary in the range of $120,000.) Imagine the horror: CUNY professors might have to suffer the indignity of living in the . . . dreaded Outer Boroughs.
Petchesky’s remarks (unintentionally) captured the essence of the union’s ill-conceived call for an illegal strike, which combines a discomfiting sense of entitlement with a belief that the contract should be a vehicle to pursue fundamentally political goals.
Salaries for CUNY professors, especially for assistant professors, are too low. But the PSC seems to operate on a belief that CUNY professors should have to work much less and get paid much more (all while being evaluated through a “redefined” conception of “quality” that decreases the significance of scholarship in personnel decisions). It was embarrassing to see that the loudest applause at any point in the meeting came when Bowen suggested that one possible “job action” would have CUNY professors stop grading papers and exams. And it was distressing to hear Bowen urge CUNY faculty to “reorder our priorities” by deferring writing projects and spending an hour less on grading each week—i.e., cut back on what professors are paid to do—to free up time for union matters. Moreover, she added, CUNY profs should abuse their classroom authority by distributing pro-strike material in class to students and use class time to convince undergraduates to support a faculty strike.
Complementing this vision of faculty entitlement is the leadership’s view of the contract negotiation as primarily a staging ground to roll back the political and ideological defeats suffered by the far Left since 1968. Negotiations, Bowen contended, have only a limited potential for success. To get a worthwhile contract, the PSC needs to “reclaim this university” by overturning the Bloomberg/Pataki political agenda, which she described as “exactly the agenda exposed in Hurricane Katrina.”
Such a radical goal requires radical tactics—an illegal strike. Flouting state law, Bowen mused, “can be beginning of new level of struggle” for the union; it can be a “powerful moment” in history of the city, allowing CUNY profs to “expand what it means to be an academic.” The allegedly “transforming” effects of PSC policies formed a key theme of the evening.
Let’s leave aside, for a moment, the absurdity of believing that an illegal strike by CUNY professors would have a transformative effect on anything except for the financial status of a union that would be decimated by state-mandated fines; or that a strike would make the New York public any more sympathetic to the Bowen/Petchesky political agenda than it has been in rejecting PSC-endorsed candidates in the 2001 mayoral primary, 2001 mayoral election, 2002 governor’s race, and 2005 primary for NYC public advocate. And let’s even leave aside the obvious point that an illegal strike is illegal, and there’s something unseemly about the lesson for students that professors supply in advocating breaking the law for self-seeking aims.
Quite beyond these points, the PSC’s dream of an illegal strike is improper for two reasons that directly relate to the union’s position within the university. First, the PSC under Bowen’s leadership has become far too involved in matters that more appropriately fall under the jurisdiction of college-wide faculty councils or academic departments. The union has advocated a radical redefinition of personnel policies that would border on a quota system based on race and ethnicity; on the curricular side, we’ve seen a variety of initiatives designed to infuse CUNY courses with an “anti-war” or “pro-diversity” perspective regardless of the topic matter. A faculty union’s job should be to handle matters relating to the contract—not to dictate personnel priorities or design course themes.
Second, the union seems wholly unconcerned with the lasting damage to CUNY its campaign for an illegal strike has already caused. Petchesky spoke because she is one of 300 picket captains from around the University. Described by Bowen as dealing with questions “as rich as any questions we consider in our scholarly work,” the picket captain is essentially a union commissar. By November 3, each CUNY faculty member will receive a visit from a picket captain, asking if he or she will support a strike. Those who answer no will receive the party line as to why they should change their minds.
The potential for improper pressure in this arrangement are enormous. During visits to faculty at Bronx Community College, picket captains ostentatiously wrote down the names of those who refused to support a strike. The academic administrations of two other CUNY campuses (Brooklyn and LaGuardia) are PSC puppets; any untenured faculty who publicly refused to follow the union line on either campus would be risking his or her career. The picket captains’ efforts, it could be argued, are entirely proper union activity, even if the goal is to break the law. But, in the real world of an inherently subjective personnel process and a faculty that on many CUNY campuses isn’t exactly diverse intellectually, the union’s efforts raise the specter of retaliation in the personnel process for years to come.
Unfortunately, a different path to this contract negotiation was imaginable. The union and administration could have, say, jointly agreed on one or two critically pressing needs at CUNY—such as the perilously low starting salaries for assistant and even associate professors. They could have combined their resources to lobby City Hall and Albany for a contract that would have delivered a concrete benefit to the union (in the form of a pay raise for its lowest-paid members who go through a regular faculty search) and to the administration (in the form of enhancing CUNY’s competitiveness to talented new faculty). Instead, the union embraced a negotiating plan that reeked of bad faith, and is now gearing up for an illegal strike that—if it occurs—would harm the University for years to come.