Anh’s notes from the Graduate Center’s Labor-Management Meeting – 9/25/17

In attendance from Management: Chase Robinson (GC President), Jane Herbert (President’s Chief of Staff), Lynnette Phillips (GC Labor Designee)

In attendance from Labor:  Luke Elliott-Negri (Chapter Chair), Marc Kagan (Delegate), Anh Tran (Chapter Vice Chair), Andrea Vasquez (HEO Chapter Chair), Zee Dempster (Welfare Fund Delegate)

1. Putting Graduate Assistant issues in upcoming contract negotiations on GC admin’s radar

• We want option for two extra years of Grad Assistantship renewal beyond current five
  • Requesting GC admin signal support to CUNY Central
    • Admin: need to talk to Provost & Dean, but looks reasonable at face value
  • Need to clean up vague contract language around approval process (currently 3 years + 1 + 1)
    • Admin: agreed
  • We want increase GA-B annual workload cap to 270 classroom teaching hours (up from 240)
    • Admin: concerned about balance between excess workload and increasing financial support for students
• Grad Assistants who teach have too large of classes –> onerous towards time-to-completion of degrees, equity issues among different GAs, no contract language on class caps other than protections against “excessive workload”; perhaps “cap” could be better framed
  • Admin: hard to get buy-in from the different work campuses
• We want tuition waiver for Level III students past five years (a top 3 issue from the GA survey, student government survey research shows average GC student takes 7.7 years to complete PhD)
  • Admin: is this the best use of resources?; incentivizes students to slow down time-to-completion; Jane will dig up costs of this but it will be $1-2 million, a cost that will get passed onto the GC rather than being absorbed by CUNY Central per past practice of passing strains of tuition waiver budgets to GC (no separate budget allocation from CUNY for waivers), 3 years ago when new packages were negotiated with CUNY, GC charged $540,000-570,000 for tuition wiavers

2. Update on getting PSC office space; how is office space generally allocated & who makes the decisions?

• Admin: we found a shared space available 10/15, Provost makes the decision
• Followed up w/ Provost & people whose offices we are sharing with, but latter say it is a broom closet with no space for storage or privacy necessary for grievance meetings → PSC GC is now exploring other options

3. Revising admission and yearly financial aid award letters to reflect actual financial allocations (with student fees & contractual raises) and work requirements (hours & nature of work from year to year); Provost’s office has not gotten back to DSC & PSC GC to have a meeting about this

• Admin: will follow up with Provost

4. Review Science Fellows issues

• Science Fellows met w/ Dean Brumberg about job titles, workload, paying issues, fixing inequities & regularizing of Science Fellows’ work experience
  • Admin: Science Dean Brumberg has spoken to Research Fund, Principal Investigators & Lynnette (GC Labor Designee) to address the issues he feels like he has some influence over & President’s Office will follow up with the Dean; problem is PIs are so different & will say they don’t have enough funding to guarantee X years of funding to students; President will put these issues on the agenda of the university-wide Bench Sciences Advisory Committee that has the power to address these issues, but no promises on quick progress
• Will GC admin ask Chancellor to extend new $29,000 Science Fellow packages to currently-enrolled students in their 3rd-5th years?
  • Admin: will ask Brumberg about cost, but will probably amount to $1-1.5 mill spread across the campuses
• Is it theoretically possible for the GC administratively handle the Science Fellows & be reimbursed by Research Fund?
  • Admin: Can’t redesign multi-year system from scratch but if we handled the Science Fellows then we could address some disparities

5. Faculty with salaries (180%) above base : how many exist? How many are exempt from all wage caps per 2016 CUNY-PSC Memorandum of Agreement?

• Admin: none exist on this campus; GC has slowed down hiring due to lack of budget

6. Social Welfare Doctoral Program’s denial of tuition reimbursement for students unable to take adjunct positions

• Admin: this is the case because Social Welfare is under Hunter’s domain, we don’t want to connect university service to tuition because folks might want to work full-time while going to school, which is more true of programs like business or social welfare or counseling; the Social Welfare tuition reimbursement system is vestigial of older systems

8. Putting it on the radar of GC that in regards to administrative staffing of new departments/programs, full-time positions are becoming part-time & non-union when budget cuts occur
9. We thank the GC for smoothly implementing new salary differential for HEOs (especially compared to clunky roll-out on other campuses)