Hey folks! If you have questions about how to use your NYSHIP health insurance, please come to this informal, student-run workshop. And if you’re interested in sharing anecdotes about your own experience dealing with NYSHIP, please email alysonspurgas@gmail.com or just come to the workshop.
Author: Alyson S. (Page 1 of 3)
Hi All,
Thanks to everyone who came to the Adjunct Project meeting on Friday, February 15th. The meeting was really inspiring, highly effective, and there are some exciting things in the works. We look forward to seeing everyone at the next planning meeting this Friday, February 22nd@ 3pm! Here’s a brief recap of some of the exciting projects that were discussed at the last meeting:
1. Alternative Budget Project: A working group formed to begin researching and writing an alternative budget for free public education in New York City. This WG will work with the Free University NYC (http://www.freeuniversitynyc.org/) in the coming weeks and months to collaboratively write this important document.
2. Counter-Kroll Report: A working group formed to research and write a report which would critically respond to the highly problematic and dangerous “Kroll Report” (The Kroll Report is the official CUNY-commissioned report on the student protests of November 2011; this report criminalizes the student protests and argues for more securitization on CUNY campuses!). To join this working group, please contact: conortomasreed@gmail.com
3. Combating Graduate Center Admissions/Funding Restructuring: A working group was formed to plan the next steps of a campaign around the Graduate Center administration’s plans for restructuring across the university. Students are upset about the inequities that will inevitably result from the restructuring plans. We invite students from across the GC to join this initiative! To join this working group, please contact: alysonspurgas@gmail.com
4. Platform/Campaign/Analysis-Building: A working group was formed to address how to educate and build solidarity across departments at the GC, through departmental student associations (PSAs), by producing and then disseminating a practical and clear critique of the neoliberal restructuring of our public university. This will be applied to discussions regarding finance, diversity, labor, governance, and many other issues that we face.
COCAL 2014: Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor (COCAL) hosts a biennial international conference on tactics and strategies for resisting the precaritization of academic labor. The Adjunct Project spent the Fall 2012 semester working with the PSC to bring the 2014 conference to the Graduate Center. We are currently in the visioning stages of designing a campaign around adjunct issues in NYC to coincide with this international conference. To join this working group, please contact: zoltan.gluck@gmail.com
To join up with any of these working groups please contact theadjunctproject@gmail.com or come to our next meeting on Friday, February 22nd @ 3pm in the 8th Floor cafeteria. We will be discussing GC President Bill Kelly’s upcoming community meeting (scheduled for 3pm on Monday February 25th in the GC Skylight Room, 9th floor) and how to present our concerns about restructuring and other issues in this public forum.
Hope to see you on Friday and Monday!
In Solidarity,
Zoltán, Alyson, & Conor
Hi all! This is happening on Friday 12/7, at 4pm at the GC Room 5414. Come if you can!!!
The International Committee of the PSC/CUNY, would like to invite you to join us this Friday, December 7th at 4 PM in Rm 5414 of the Graduate Center. We look forward to collaborating with interested CUNY graduate students and faculty to plan for a March 2013 one-day conference on the crisis of student debt, resistance to the debt and the impact of student debt on future student employment decision-making and the potential of lurking unemployment and deepening debt challenges.
This is a preliminary organizational meeting to plan for the conference’s direction, themes, and participants and we are looking to the critical input from interested CUNY graduate students and faculty. The tentative conference title would be “Student Resistance to Debt and Unemployment.”
We want it to have both a CUNY and a US focus as well as an invitation to one or another foreign student leader to bring in a comparative international context regarding privatization and austerity in higher education elsewhere. However, we are also keen on assessing the increasing challenges of rising college tuition and the mounting debt crisis among US undergraduate and graduate students that impacts on their future lives and working goals.
Like mortgages and credit card debt, students are tied to educational debt that always accompanies them in the marketplace. Students are ineligible for bankruptcy protection and future salaries can be garnished and income tax refunds seized. Additionally most student loan paybacks are in arrears so they are accumulating compounded interest plus penalty fees. These factors can have a severe impact on students finding employment of choice.
As student debt repayments are financialized and repackaged we see connections between the neo-liberal economic project and the role of financially dependent students in American society. We see student debt as having a deleterious impact on university curriculum development and the subsequent reverberations on society, social structure, and the kind of educated students we need to confront injustice and inequity through critical thinking.
Hey guys. So I know we’ve been super occupied (haha, pun intended) with other things recently, but there’s going to be this workshop on how to successfully navigate NYSHIP (your health insurance if you’re a doctoral student at the GC) next Thursday 12/8 @ 2pm. I know this sounds boring, but we’re trying to make it useful and exciting–kind of like a “skill share”! It will be a place for people to share the names of providers who have been good for them and who take our insurance, things to ask/say when you make/go to an appointment, situations that you have been able to actually get taken care of with NYSHIP (like, financial things that have been resolved), but also the particular areas that still need improvement. No administrators will be there giving boring presentations; instead students who have a lot of experience with using the insurance will share their expertise and field questions!
Please send me any and all ideas you have for how to make this workshop most useful, and also let me know if you’d be willing to participate and share an anecdote or a particular piece of knowledge that you have acquired about navigating NYSIHP. We can also of course talk about how NYSHIP should be changed, and we can strategize about ways to do that if folks are into that.
The workshop will be on Thursday December 8th @ 2pm in Room 5414.
#occupyCUNY/Graduate Center General Assembly invites you to…
Faculty Speak-out: Supporting the N17 Student Strike!!!
Wednesday, November 16th
6:30 PM @ Proshansky Auditorium, The Graduate Center
Scheduled speakers:
Anne McClintock (UW-Madison Professor of English and Gender Studies)
Neil Smith (Distinguished Professor of Anthropology and Geography, Graduate Center)
Stanley Aronowitz (Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Urban Education, Graduate Center)
Susan Buck-Morss (Distinguished Professor of Political Science, Graduate Center)
Ira Shor (Professor of English, College of Staten Island and Graduate Center)
Katie Cumiskey (Associate Professor of Psychology, College of Staten Island)
Ashley Dawson (Associate Professor of English, Graduate Center, College of Staten Island)
Ammiel Alcalay (Professor of English, Graduate Center and Queens College)
Anthony Alessandrini (Associate Professor of English, Kingsborough Community College)
Jackie DiSalvo (Associate Professor of English, Baruch and the Graduate Center)
Patricia Clough (Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies, Queens College and the Graduate Center)
Check this out for the list of faculty who have signed the support letter: http://studentweekofaction.wordpress.com/cuny-faculty-statement-of-support/
And sign it here: http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/D77B3KG!
This event will be immediately followed at 8:30PM by:
Emergency organizing meeting of GC GA in Proshansky to prepare for N17 strike and OWS support!!!
****************************************************************** PLUS
N17 City-Wide Student Strike in emergency solidarity with Occupy Wall Street!!!
Thursday, November 17th
1pm: speak-out/rally outside Graduate Center
2pm: march to Union Square city-wide education meet-up
3pm: OWS Education convergence
5pm: mass community/labor/student rally to defend Occupy Wall Street
There will also be tablings in the GC lobby all day today and tomorrow for more info…
We hope to see you there!
In solidarity,
The Graduate Center General Assembly/#occupyCUNY