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Allow me to put on my professor hat for a moment here. More specifically, let me put on my hat as the chair of a very large English department of around 130 faculty at the City University of New York.
It& #39;s the College of Staten Island. And before you make jokes, you should know that my department includes a recent Pulitzer winner, a recent Pulitzer runner-up, and nationally- and internationally-acclaimed scholars and writers.
The reason I saw "around 130 faculty" is because every semester about 90-110 of those faculty are adjuncts, many of whom work on a year-to-year contract. The best those adjuncts can get is a 3-year contract, which, if you know anything about adjuncting, is a sad miracle.
Adjuncts keep virtually every college and university in business. They are low-wage professors who primarily teach the huge number of first-year classes in an area. At CUNY, they are limited in the number of hours they can teach. At CSI, that generally means 2 classes/semester.
By the way, some would argue about whether or not to call adjuncts "professors." Yeah, sorry, but they deserve the respect the word "professor" comes with.
Our union, the Professional Staff Congress of CUNY (PSC-CUNY), which is a local of the American Federation of Teachers, secured health insurance for adjuncts who teach two classes each semester. It& #39;s the same insurance the full-time professors get.
This is huge in the world of adjuncts, who are often teaching at two or more colleges to make a living. We who schedule classes take it into account when assigning classes, making sure that adjuncts get their insurance.
So in the last couple of months, because of the shutdown and the drop in revenue for the state of New York and the failure of anyone to address that, we were asked to make cuts to our adjunct pool.
We (meaning the department chairs and others in our division at CSI) fought back as much as we could, but, inevitably, if we didn& #39;t make cuts, cuts would be made for us.
Now, I don& #39;t want to get into my criticism of the state or CUNY in how this was all handled. First, that would be a boring thread for most of you. And, second, I& #39;m not writing this to complain about that.
What I want to tell you is that I sat in Zoom calls with others in my department to figure out who to cut. And one of the things we kept coming back to was health insurance: who needed it and who didn& #39;t because we didn& #39;t want to be more cruel than we had to.
That wasn& #39;t the only thing we took into account, but it weighed on us because, in a time of pandemic or at any time, we could be making a decision between life and death. So what I want to say about this (and forgive the all-caps):
I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO WORRY ABOUT WHETHER OR NOT MY DECISIONS TAKE HEALTH CARE AWAY FROM SOMEONE. WHAT KIND OF BULLSHIT COUNTRY DOES THAT? AND I& #39;M FUCKING FURIOUS TO HAVE BEEN PUT IN THAT POSITION.
Today, we learned that 5.4 million people lost their health insurance in the last few months. They will shortly be joined by CUNY adjuncts who were not reappointed and whose insurance runs out at the end of this month. https://www.politico.com/newsletters/politico-pulse/2020/07/14/analysis-54m-have-lost-health-insurance-during-pandemic-789153">https://www.politico.com/newslette...
My anger here isn& #39;t at CUNY or even the state or city of New York. It& #39;s at our goddamned stupidity as a country in not having national health care, that health care is a factor that hangs over everything.
People who talk about "freedom" who don& #39;t talk about the way our idiotic health care system chains people or destroys people don& #39;t have a clue about what "freedom" is.
One last thing: So far, through negotiation, cajoling, and luck (in that I had some adjuncts leave on their own, generally for good reasons), I have been able to avoid cutting anyone. But if things get worse...
