Category: AP Meetings & Info (Page 1 of 2)

Stephanie Luce on Living-Wage and Adjunct Organizing

Stephanie Luce imagePlease join us for our first event of the semester when we welcome Stephanie Luce, associate professor of labor studies at CUNY’s Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies, on Thursday, September 12th, 5 p.m., in 5409 of the CUNY Graduate Center. Luce (pictured), a sociologist by training, researches living-wage movements—she’ll be speaking on that topic as well as on her experiences in adjunct and higher-ed organizing. She’s the author of Fighting for a Living Wage (ILR Press, 2004), a critical history of various living-wage campaigns across the U.S., and the co-author of A Measure of Fairness: The Economics of Living Wages and Minimum Wages in the United States (ILR Press, 2008) and The Living Wage: Building a Fair Economy (The New Press, 1998). The talk will be followed by a Q&A/discussion and reception.

An Update From the New Coordinators

As the new co-coordinators of the CUNY Adjunct Project, we’d like to offer a few remarks on our appointments and the state of the AP.

First, we’d like to express how honored we are to serve an organization that has worked committedly on behalf of graduate employees and all contingent academic workers over the last many years.

Second, we acknowledge the regrettable circumstances of the former coordinators’ departure, and we recognize that they’ve given rise to some concern, confusion, and other feelings about the Adjunct Project and its relationship to the Doctoral Students Council, especially on the part of many who have been active in the AP. We understand that the DSC will be re-evaluating its protocols for oversight of the AP and other affiliates this year, and we hope to contribute to improving these processes with the benefit of hindsight. We also hope to build on the organizing track record of the former coordinators and their predecessors.

In light of this transition, we’d like to offer everyone—both AP veterans and those who simply wish to know what we’re about—a chance to discuss these issues, ask questions, vocalize concerns, present ideas, and generally strategize for the upcoming academic year at a pre-semester meeting this Wednesday, August 21st, from 3-4 PM at the GC, room 5409.

For anyone who is not able to make this initial meeting, please join the AP Google group and listserv, follow us on Twitter, and check us out on Facebook. We’re just getting our communications up and running, and we appreciate everyone’s patience while we’re getting up to speed, but we will soon be posting important news, updated resources, and AP office hours for the fall semester. Please stay tuned!

Lastly, the hiring process for the new Labor Relations Coordinator is ongoing, but we will update everyone as soon as we can.

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact us, either at our general email (theadjunctproject@gmail.com) or individually at the emails listed below.

Sincerely,

Jennifer Chancellor, Coordinator for Organization and Planning, jchancellor@gc.cuny.edu
Sean M. Kennedy, Coordinator for Advocacy and Education, kennedy.sean@gmail.com

UPDATE: audio & questions list from Feb 25 Pres Kelly Community Mtg, March 8 next steps

CUNY Graduate Center President Kelly held a Community Meeting on
Monday, February 25, 2013. A group of students, faculty, and staff
raised critical questions about the Fall 2013 GC Restructuring Plan,
CUNY Pathways, the Kroll Report, insurance coverage, and other issues.
These questions had been openly crowd-sourced beforehand to encourage
campus-wide input in shaping this forum.

We also announced an alternative Community Meeting for Friday, March
8, 3-5pm at GC room 5414 — a setting where students, faculty, and
staff can interact and strategize responses to the lack of general
participatory democracy and transparency at the Graduate Center, and
how specifically to counteract the worst aspects of the Fall 2013
Restructuring Plan.

Recording of the February 25 event:

https://soundcloud.com/adjunctproject/2-25-13-kelly-community-mtg

Questions list: 2.25.13 Questions for President Kelly

Flyer for the March 8 gathering: March 8 community mtg fullsheet

Please share this information openly and often across departments,
offices, centers, and club spaces, especially as our GC building
bulletin board spaces are being taken away by the day.

in mutual support,
Alyson, Zoltán, and Conor
Adjunct Project Co-coordinators

AP Strategizing: Friday Feb 22nd @ 3pm, 8th Floor Cafeteria!

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-BuildingA 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

 

Organizing in Crisis – Organization After Crisis: Experiences from New Orleans to Keratea, Greece

TONIGHT AT THE GRADUATE CENTER!

Join a conversation–co-sponsored by the CUNY Adjunct Project–with Jordan Flaherty and Themis Pellas on their experiences organizing in times of crisis and the organizational forms that emerge in those spaces as well as the challenges to organizing and building long lasting groups/assemblies/networks, in Room 5109 @ 5pm.

Jordan Flaherty is a long time journalist and organizer based in New Orleans. He is a television producer at Al Jazeera and the author of Floodlines: Community and Resistance From Katrina to the Jena Six.

Themis Pellas is an urbanist, having been active in the mobilizations and assemblies over the past years in Greece.

*This Event is co-sponsored by the Adjunct Project

Friday 12/7 @ 4 PM: planning meeting for spring 2013 student debt crisis and resistance conference!

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. 

 

NYSHIP Navigation Workshop

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.

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