Opinion
For years, NYU’s administrators have casualized the school’s teaching force, many of them artists, by creating a second tier of full-time contract faculty.
The NYU community gathers at Schwartz Plaza in support of Contract Faculty United – UAW on October 31, 2024. (all photos courtesy CFU-UAW)
After 15 months of negotiations with the New York University (NYU) administration, which has been accused of multiple labor law violations, over 900 professors from the Contract Faculty United – United Auto Workers (CFU-UAW) have overwhelmingly voted, by a 90% supermajority, to authorize a strike.
What led to this situation?
For a long time, NYU’s well-paid administrators have tightened their grip on university governance while making the teaching workforce more precarious. This has been achieved by employing part-time adjuncts and establishing a secondary tier of full-time contract faculty like myself. These contingent faculty members often share similar responsibilities with their tenured peers but do not receive equal pay, benefits, or protections. Despite some having taught at NYU for many years, the renewable nature of their appointments requires them to reapply for their positions every three to five years. While other universities have similarly casualized their full-time faculties, the scale at NYU is unmatched, with contract faculty numbers increasing tenfold over two decades, now constituting half of the full-time faculty.
CFU-UAW was formed in response to the need for improved job security and compensation, as well as a broader demand for academic freedom, which has been severely impacted under the leadership of NYU President Linda Mills. The union is also advocating for safeguards concerning AI and intellectual property, topics that university administrators have consistently refused to discuss.
Arts faculty members are prominently represented in CFU-UAW. The Steinhardt School, offering programs in music and studio art, the Tisch School of the Arts, and the Expository Writing Program, where a third of the faculty hold MFAs, form significant components of the union.
Artists have been instrumental in building NYU’s reputation. Before becoming a global brand, the university was recognized as a commuter school with robust arts programs. In 2004, when former NYU President John Sexton introduced his vision for the university during a period of so-called “hyperchange,” he emphasized the institution’s heritage of having some of the “leading schools of the arts.”
However, he also initiated a process of precaritization, justified partly by claiming “harmony” between “different modalities of faculty” at Tisch. Like many other art schools, Tisch has a history of employing non-tenure-track professors who have careers outside academia.
Since then, “hyperchange” (interpreted as yielding to market forces) in New York and beyond has resulted in a significant affordability crisis, even for well-compensated individuals. Solidarity movements have arisen, along with a rise in workplace organizing, particularly among cultural and intellectual workers. For the artists within CFU-UAW, much is at stake in the pursuit of an initial contract.
Among them is NYU Gallatin School professor and interdisciplinary artist Nina Katchadourian, who recognizes that creative pursuits “always involve financial precarity.” Teaching, she says, “feeds my practice.” However, the stability offered by a union contract would also enhance her artistic endeavors.
“A fair job with benefits and security (financial, political, intellectual) allows me to create the best work possible,” Katchadourian remarked.
Similar views are shared by documentary editor and Tisch professor Jason Pollard. As a member of the Editors Guild, the Directors Guild of America, and CFU-UAW, Pollard sees the challenges faced by filmmakers and professors as “interconnected.” He believes that securing the “basic rights” and dignity fought for in both industrial and educational settings enables everyone to perform their roles more effectively.
Many artist professors emphasize the importance of academic freedom. NYU Liberal Studies Professor Sarah Ema Friedland works in film and media on topics like reproductive justice, undocumented migration, and Palestinian human rights, which are often censored and increasingly difficult to finance.
She noted that at NYU, “students and faculty who criticize the state of Israel have faced intense scrutiny and worse.” After her film Lyd (2023), co-directed with Rami Youmis, was censored in Israel, she feared the attention might affect her teaching career. “We need academic freedom protections in our contract,” she stated. “We owe it to our students to ensure they can express themselves freely as artists.”
Safeguards against the misuse of artificial intelligence are another critical goal for NYU’s artist professors, as highlighted by novelist and Creative Writing professor Hari Kunzru. Kunzru believes that “untested and unreliable AI” poses a threat to “the ethos of the university and the authority of scholars.”
The general sentiment among artists within CFU-UAW is that their push for a first contract is a battle for the collective welfare of the NYU community.
Solidarity appears to be a key lesson. Following the strike authorization vote, author and Tisch professor Kathy Engel crafted a poem for CFU-UAW organizers, reflecting on past labor struggles and expressing her willingness to withhold her labor if necessary. Referring to Gwendolyn Brooks, the poem concludes: “We are each other’s glory/we are each other’s last chance/we are each other’s other.”
NYU administrators have delayed and resisted for months. They have until March 23 to finalize a fair agreement with CFU-UAW and prevent a strike.
