The Adjunct Project seeks to empower Graduate Center student-workers and contingent faculty at CUNY by serving as a resource to:

➝ Raise consciousness about academic labor issues inside and outside CUNY

➝ Provide political education to GC adjuncts about ways to address these issues

➝ Activate GC student-workers to improve their collective position as workers at CUNY

➝ Work in solidarity with labor struggles outside of CUNY

The Adjunct Project’s Current Initiatives

Please stay tuned for the AP’s 2023-24 initiatives!

In the meantime, here are the coordinators’ goals for the academic year:

  • Keeping the GC’s union membership informed of bargaining updates.
  • Educating GC PSC members about the language of contract negotiation, and the relevance of individual contract demands to their own conditions.
  • Providing resources to help graduate workers navigate CUNY’s Daedalean labor landscape.
  • Event planning and solidarity building to provide programming and opportunities for graduate student workers to gather and build community.

Some Past Initiatives

Collaborating on #InsureCUNY: A third of CUNY Graduate Center PhD students receive tuition assistance only &, unlike their fully-funded counterparts, are not guaranteed health insurance. This is unacceptable. Particularly so in the midst of a global pandemic.

Collaborating on #CUNYStrikeReady: Post the final resolution, “PSC Must Prepare for Strike- Readiness As Part of the Fight to Save Lives, Save Jobs, Save CUNY”, presented by PSC leadership, passed at the PSC Special DA 11.23.2020, with amendments from the Cross Campus Strike Authorization Vote Coalition (CCSAVC), the Adjunct Project’s #CUNYStrikeReady Teach- In Listening series launched in December 2020 as a continued commitment to the effort to support #CUNYStrikeReady.

Collaborating on The People’s Budget: Adjunct Project aims to serve existing organizing at CUNY campuses and constituency groups with research into the CUNY budget with the purpose of building strike-readiness across CUNY and collection of campus- and constituency-specific demands around anti-austerity, abolition, and student/worker need through targeted, specific inquiries about existing budget allocations and priorities.

Collaborating on External Labor Relations. The Adjunct Project believes in organizing in solidarity with all workers of the world. We work to uplift the external labor and struggles at CUNY as a part of our political education to graduate workers and adjuncts, while also working to uplift CUNY labor and student struggles externally.

Collaborating for Full and Fair Funding for all doctoral students: Approximately 30% of incoming doctoral students do not receive full five-year funding packages. Students who only receive tuition waivers face out-sized obstacles to the completion of their programs.

Collaborating on Labor Conditions: The pay and labor conditions for adjuncts, part- timers, graduate workers are deplorable. The Adjunct Project is working with the Committee of Adjunct and Part- Timers (CAP) on their current platform to improve pay and labor conditions for CUNY adjuncts, part- timers, graduate workers.

Developing and implementing the “Toward a Just Contract” campaign. In connection with the expiring contract between the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and CUNY in November 2017, our multifaceted campaign highlights the issues and communities that are integral to achieving a just contract, broadly considered, in the next round of bargaining. (See the first volume of our related zine!)

Collaborating with the DSC to address tuition payments/permanent tuition remission for GC doctoral students. Currently tuition remission expires for GC doctoral students after their first five years/10 semesters as registered students, proving a significant financial burden for the many students who need more time to complete their degrees, especially given how much teaching and other instructional labor we provide CUNY overall.

Continuing our outreach to GC programs and CUNY campuses begun in spring 2016 vis-à-vis the PSC strike-authorization vote but with an eye to the next contract: specifically, holding conversations with and activating more GC student-workers and CUNY adjuncts to participate in academic-labor organizing.

Connecting with graduate-employee unions at private universities in the aftermath of the National Labor Relations Board decision of August 2016 that such unions must be recognized by employers.