The NYU Faculty Strike and the Politics of Workers’ Rights

Just days ago, NYU faced an imminent faculty strike of nearly 1,000 non-tenure track faculty as questions about labor conditions and university governance come into focus. In this exclusive interview for CounterPunch, Professor Rebecca Karl, a historian specializing in Modern Chinese History, provides insight into the political factors fueling the dispute. The university’s shift toward contract and adjunct faculty is raising concerns over job security and academic freedom. Now that the strike has come to fruition, Karl breaks down trends in higher education and highlights the barriers faced by NYU workers throughout the city, country and world.

Daniel Falcone: According to an article by Natalie Deoragh in Washington Square News, NYU’s contract faculty union planned to strike if no agreement was reached by March 23. What were the main issues driving the possibility of strike, and how do you think it shows how higher‑ed labor relations and political power are playing out in universities?

Rebecca Karl: One of the main driving issues is how NYU in the last few decades has restructured its faculty in fundamental ways; this transformation is not unique to NYU, but NYU has done this at greater speed and with more intention than most. The previous reliance on tenured/tenure-track faculty lines has been completely eviscerated in large parts of the university and unevenly across the whole university, in favor of the lower-paid and less secure alternative of contract and adjunct faculty labor. Most of these faculty — aside from the professionals who come in as practitioners — have the same degrees, the same training, the same commitments to research and teaching as those of us on tenured lines, which are job-secured and carry benefits.

Because of overall restructuring of universities and defunding nationally, the only jobs available are contingent ones. Contract and adjunct faculty are hired as second-class citizens. Contingency works to keep labor in perpetual fear of losing jobs, especially when individual contract negotiations upon renewal are left to the vagaries of vindictive deans and/or administrations looking to yet again cut costs on the backs of faculty and teaching (while jacking up and maintaining their own sky-high salaries and benefits).

What the union is organized around and negotiating for are thus: more predictable renewals based in peer review not administrative logic; salaries that are commensurate to the work rendered and the importance of contract faculty in the institution (now over 50% of the teaching faculty at the university); guarantees about academic freedom and protection from political targeting; defense against being rendered redundant by AI modules; among others. These are issues indicative of more general assaults on higher education by political, tech, and financial authorities, to which NYU’s administration, led by President Linda Mills and Provost Gigi Dopico, has capitulated and usually pre-emptively prostrated itself in shameful fashion.

Daniel Falcone: Amita Chatterjee in The Chronicle of Higher Education described how contingent and adjunct faculty were facing uncertainty, limited job security, and challenging work conditions. Do you see structural issues playing into the NYU contract faculty’s fight for a first contract?

Rebecca Karl: Yes, restructuring higher education, and at NYU, is hugely responsible for this situation. NYU decided some decades ago (under John Sexton) to pivot towards contract faculty away from tenure lines as part of its imperial growth around the world and in Greenwich Village/ Brooklyn; it is reaping what it sowed (See: “NYU Eats World”). Contract faculty at the New York campus are hugely united behind the union and behind the necessity to strike, if forced by NYU’s intransigence.

The adjunct union and the non-unionized tenured faculty are strongly in solidarity with contract faculty, and many of us have pledged to refuse to do struck work, even though the university is encouraging scab labor from all its units and resources – including, reportedly, from Abu Dhabi, Tel Aviv, Shanghai, and other places. The lengths to which this administration will go to break the union are astonishing, although of course not surprising. The university has always been hugely anti-union and has expended phenomenal amounts of money on law firms aiming to break unions, not successfully but at great cost.

Daniel Falcone: In an article by The American Prospect on the months of bargaining with management, Whitney Curry Wimbish contextualizes it with national classroom labor struggles. Is the NYU matter a local dispute, or part of a bigger capitalistic struggle?

Rebecca Karl: This is a much bigger struggle that is playing out in microcosm at the university level. Casualization of labor is universally practiced now, less in the breach, more as a norm across the board. Unionization of academic labor across public and private universities is one of the bright spots in the labor movement today in the U.S.

Daniel Falcone: According to Sara Wexler of Jacobin, in talking with Brendan Hogan, Elisabeth Fay, and Fanny Shum, NYU’s contract faculty union planned to strike if no agreement was reached. Since their conversation in February, described as pulling “the emergency brake on the process of casualization” and centering on “job security” and fair pay — can you provide an update on how negotiations have progressed of late and comment on your expectations for post March 23 life at NYU?

Rebecca Karl: I know the pace of negotiation is quickening, but I’m not in the room, as are Elisabeth Fay and the others. I expect, if the strike is forced by NYU intransigence, that the administration will be doing its utmost to pretend that things are going on as usual and that serving our students is the primary goal in their increasingly disturbed rhetoric.

If serving our students were in fact what they cared about, they’d care about the conditions of student learning, which requires paying the professors who teach them a living wage and protecting them from the worst of contingency — the threat of the sudden loss of a job and of livelihood. I imagine that certain programs will be affected far more than others, since contract faculty are not evenly spread through the university. I imagine that the university will attempt to find scabs off the street if necessary to cover classes (I heard one story that they suggested going to immigrant communities to find native speakers of a language to come into the classroom to replace professional language teachers!).

I imagine that undergraduate students — many of whom have been mobilized in support — will be vocally out on the picket lines; I imagine that the graduate students, who are unionized, will be picketing too. And I imagine the administration will hype up their divisive rhetoric and I imagine that we — one faculty united in solidarity — will fight back relentlessly.

Daniel Falcone: Now that the strike has commenced, would you like to add any additional commentary related to the dispute?

Rebecca Karl: From what I’ve seen in pictures and descriptions, it is huge and comprised not only of CFU members on strike, but adjuncts, undergraduate students and grad students, as well as sympathetic local unions. We’re hoping the numbers remain strong and the university is crippled. The central administration has predictably offered ridiculous bromide messaging that “strikes are disruptive” and “we’re negotiating in good faith.”

Obviously strikes are intentionally disruptive; that’s their purpose as a last-resort tool of labor against employers. They have not been negotiating in good faith, and meanwhile they’ve been strong-arming staff, administrators, and wavering faculty of all ranks into doing struck work.

Finally, though, I find it unconscionable that our administration would add to everyone’s anxieties and sense of foreboding — due to ICE at our airports and on our streets, disrupted travel and student distress over visas and classes, war across the world, an erratic insane president who destroys countries and murders untold numbers of people he dislikes.

In such a situation of intense unease among all of us, that NYU’s “leadership” would add to all this by refusing to pay a living wage to its faculty, by denying folks who work hard for a living some sense of security for their livelihoods, by insulting our intelligence and treating students like disposable consumers…is just appalling to me. It demonstrates how craven NYU has become and how little the institution values education and educators.

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