NYU Administration Pressures Professors to Help Break GSOC Strike
By: El Yurman
Tags: Labor, Gsoc, On Campus News, Unions, NYU

NYU Administration Pressures Professors to Help Break GSOC Strike

According to a professor who has chosen to remain anonymous, NYU department heads sent out an email implying that professors could lose their jobs if they didn’t take over striking TA’s’ responsibilities. El Yurman Follow May 5 · 9 min read

Graphic by author.

As the graduate student strike entered its second week, undergraduate students said tests and papers weren’t being graded, urgent questions weren’t being answered, and some TA-led recitations have been cancelled altogether. Local learned that the administration has pressured professors to take over TA responsibilities. When asked about this behavior, the graduate student union (GSOC) characterized it as “scabbing (replacing striking graduate worker labor).”

NYU Spokesperson John Beckman and other university administrators and department heads have not responded to emails from Local asking for comment.

In recent bargaining sessions, NYU, via a mediator, has responded to GSOC’s demands with a series of counter proposals. However, in an email to Local, GSOC bargaining committee member Arundhati Velamur said that the university gave “non-responses’’ to several of the union’s key demands, including the demand for increased hourly wages.

Rachel Weissman, a junior studying Early Childhood Education and Special Education, said she and her classmates received an email from Catherine Milne, chair of the Teaching & Learning Department at NYU Steinhardt, informing them that she would personally be stepping in to replace their striking grad student on May 4 and 6. Weissman said she and eight of her classmates agreed that they would not break the strike by attending class.

“While we understand and appreciate your desire to mitigate the disruption in our learning, that disruption is due to the refusal of NYU administration to bargain in good faith with graduate student workers,” the students wrote to Milne. “We support [our graduate student worker] and all other graduate workers in striking, and we will not contradict that by continuing her course in her absence.”

Weissman said she was “somewhat” concerned about the decision affecting her grade in the class. Catherine Milne has not responded to emails from Local asking for comment.

A professor at NYU Steinhardt, who asked to remain anonymous due to fear of retribution, told Local that faculty in their department who have TA’s received an email from the department chair telling them that “we had no standing to not submit grades or take over TA responsibilities.”

The professor said they understood the email to be implying that professors could lose their jobs if they didn’t take over TA responsibilities, and added that multiple people to whom the email was sent were contract faculty or not yet tenured, for whom the threat of job loss “would be scary.” They also noted that “requests for clarification that [the administration] wanted to force us to break the strike were met with vagueness.”

Before this email, the professor told Local, many faculty had signed a statement of support for the strike — even the Director of Graduate Studies had circulated the statement in the full-faculty email list — which was why the directness of the new email stood out. The professor said they felt it wasn’t safe to share documents or emails at this time, for fear of being identified.

Another email, sent on April 22 and provided to Local by GSOC via screenshot, was sent internally to all NYU Tandon faculty. The email, which the screenshot says comes from Tandon Dean Jelena Kovačević, says “departments and faculty need to have plans for how to ensure that teaching and learning goes on. Failure here is not an option.”

The faculty’s responsibility is to the students’ academic progress, “strike or no strike,” the email says.

Jelena Kovačević and NYU Tandon’s Public Affairs Officer Karl Greenberg have not responded to emails from Local asking for comment.

The NYU chapter of the American Association of University Professors published a statement in support of the GSOC strike on April 25. ”We are asking for our own members and for the faculty at large to support the strike by honoring, and joining, the picket line. We strongly advocate that faculty resist any call to substitute their own labor for that of their TA’s in the matter of grading or teaching, and that they forgo any kind of reporting on students who may or may not be participating in any union action,” the statement said.

Caitlin Hsu, a junior in the Department Media, Culture and Communications, said that her TA-led class stopped meeting once the strike began, while another, larger class that was run by a professor and several TA’s has been thrown into disarray without the TA’s there to grade final papers.

“It was total chaos because the TA’s all had different expectations for the paper and then they went on strike so no one knew what rules to follow,” she said.

Hsu’s professor said in an email to the class, “I will, as noted last week, continue to do my job — teaching, assigning, collecting work, giving tests. But I will not undercut the strike by doing the TA’s work.”

Monica Williams, a first year student in Gallatin, said all but one of her classes have been impacted. “Some of my finals were canceled or restructured,” she said, “and for one class we haven’t been able to meet with our teacher at all because she is a grad student, so it’s just over.” Williams said that the strike has made her life more difficult, especially as a first-year student still trying to get the hang of college.

“The class where the teacher is a grad student is a stand-alone,” Williams said, “so all of our instruction came from her and now we can’t even communicate with her. It sucks, and in the emails she did send about the strike, she wasn’t clear about what to expect regarding finals and turning in assignments.”

Cate Hynes, a junior studying Journalism and Media Communication, told Local that one of her professors, an adjunct who is a striking grad student, has cancelled class for the rest of the year.

“We got this email basically saying that class was done for the year because of the strike,” Hynes said. “We would all get 100% on the final if there was no contract negotiation before the end of the year, but if there was contract negotiations, he would offer an optional final. The email was confusing and a little upsetting, but we haven’t had class since.”

In the email, which Hynes provided to Local, the professor apologized for the abrupt end to the semester, but pointed the finger at the university for its intransigence in negotiations. “It is a shame, in my eyes,” he said, “that the greed of an ‘institution of higher learning’ has kept you from carrying out the function you came here for.”

“For me personally,” said Hynes, “I’m glad the union is on strike, they deserve fair wages and benefits. However, I am not thrilled it has impacted my education. Undergraduates pay a lot of money for classes taught by grad students, so this strike is affecting more than just the graduate students and I don’t think the university is paying attention to this trickle down effect.”

Hannah Young, a sophomore in Gallatin studying Accessibility in Reproductive Healthcare, told Local that the professors for one of her classes had moved the class to Google Meet instead of Zoom, in order to be “off campus” to support the strike.

“We value our graduate student colleagues and support their right to collective bargaining,” the professors said in an email to Young’s class. “The union has established NYU-Zoom as the picket line.”

Gallatin’s full-time faculty emailed a statement in support of the strike to students on April 27. “The faculty of the Gallatin School believes that graduate students should be free to act on their own convictions about the union contract negotiations before them,” the statement read. “In the event of a strike, we agree to not intervene in any way that would impede any student’s academic progress, or penalize any student with regard to grades, departmental funding, or academic evaluations and recommendations. Nor will we report to anyone else about students who may or may not be participating in any union action.” A number of other professors publicly supported the striking graduate students as well.

GSOC and the NYU administration held a nine-hour mediated bargaining session on Monday, May 3.

Prior to Monday’s negotiations, the union said it had dropped some of its demands, focusing on its priorities of increased hourly compensation, tuition waivers, full dental coverage, childcare subsidies for children under six, out-of-pocket healthcare coverage, and the funds for tax and legal assistance for international and immigrant workers.

In a blog update on May 3, GSOC said NYU had responded to the narrowed list of demands with a series of counter proposals, the university’s “most significant movement in months.” According to GSOC, the university offered a $50,000 increase to the Graduate Employee Health Insurance Support Fund from their initial offer of $200,000 per year, an increase in child care funds from $100,000 to $200,000 per year, an additional three paid personal days for religious observance and/or immigration proceedings, and six weeks of paid parental leave for grad students who have worked for more than one semester. GSOC said NYU had also agreed to convene a committee to discuss matters of health and safety in the workplace, including the presence of NYPD on NYU’s campus, and to explore the addition of infertility treatment to the student health plan.

But Velamur said the union has yet to receive a response from NYU on compensation, specifically hourly wages, “on which we’ve been waiting for movement since October 2020,”

“We have also had no response to our demand for better protections from power-based harassment and to provide better accommodations to our workers. The university also continues to refuse to bargain over any of our international student demands, including our demand for better protections from ICE and other federal agents.

NYU has not responded to emails from Local seeking comment.

While a $50k increase to health insurance is substantial, amounting to $250k in the first year, increasing to $375k by Academic Year 2025–26, the number falls far short of the estimated $1 million that GSOC says would be required to cover the median out-of-pocket costs for union members. Similarly, despite being a 100 percent increase, NYU’s proposed $200k budget for child care funds is still far less than GSOC’s demand for $9,000 per child under six.

In a series of public statements published between April 10–23 (before the most recent bargaining sessions), John Beckman blamed the union for the slow pace of negotiations. He said NYU had made a strong set of proposals” that would “typically lead to swift renewal of a contract, though not with GSOC, unfortunately. NYU’s seriousness in trying to come to agreement with GSOC can be seen in the quality of the proposals we’ve made.”

The university also said that Harvard and Columbia’s graduate student unions had both just settled contracts for $17/hr, while the 20% increase NYU is proposing is on top of the current $20/hr salary. But in an email to Local, Tristan du Puy, Joanna Lee, and Lilian Coie — members of Columbia’s bargaining committee — said that they believed the demands made by GSOC to be both legitimate and reasonable. “21$/hour and 3% annual raises is nowhere sufficient for student workers to live in New York,” du Puy said. “NYU’s refusal to bring serious counter-proposals to the table is both a show of bad-faith and detrimental to NYU workers.”

Additionally, the Columbia contract NYU was referring to was voted down by GWC-UAW, Columbia’s grad student union, on April 30, despite being tentatively approved by the GWC Bargaining Committee on April 19.

NYU Spokesperson John Beckman and other university administrators and department heads have not responded to emails from Local asking for comment sent on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.

The GSOC strike is scheduled to continue through the week and beyond. The next bargaining session between the union and the university is set to take place on Wednesday, May 5, just five days before the last day of classes for the semester.

“The pressure remains high, said Velamur, “and the ball remains in NYU’s court.”

This article was updated on May 6 to provide additional clarity with regards to the Columbia graduate student union’s contract negotiations.