Earlier this week, Deputy Editor Lillian Rountree and Deputy News Editor Paulina Rodriguez sat down with members of the bargaining committee for the Barnard Contingent Faculty Union (BCF-UAW) to talk about their union, its impact on campus, and labor on campus more broadly.

The Barnard Contingent Faculty Union (BCF), a chapter of the UAW–Local 2110, was organized in 2015. They ratified their first contract in April 2017, after a year of negotiations; the five-year contract is set to expire on June 30, 2022, meaning a new round of bargaining is imminent for the union and Barnard. For the upcoming negotiations, the BCF bargaining committee includes Gina Jae, term faculty in Anthropology; Sharon Fogarty, adjunct in Theatre; and Skye Cleary, adjunct faculty in the Athena Center; and union representatives Siobhan Burke, adjunct faculty in Dance, and Todd Rouhe, adjunct faculty in Architecture.

The transcript below comes from a conversation held between members of Bwog staff and the BCF bargaining committee. It has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Bwog: How a university works is confusing, especially for undergraduate students, who often don’t really know the differences between the titles denoting a tenure track or non-tenure track professor. To that end, who is included in the Barnard Contingent Faculty Union? How would you define your unit beyond the technical definition outlined in the contract?

Siobhan Burke:

Contingent faculty means non-tenured and non-tenure track. There are many, many different titles [included in the unit] at this point, but our unit is comprised mainly of adjunct faculty and term faculty. Adjunct faculty are part-time instructors who are teaching maybe one course a year or a semester, [often] more. They are considered part-time instructors. They’re paid per course, and they don’t automatically get health and other benefits. And term faculty, well, Gina, do you want to talk a little bit more about what a term faculty member is?

Gina Jae:  

We are considered full-time employees. In a lot of respects, that makes us seem very similar or blend in with a lot of the other tenure track faculty as far as students are concerned. But as far as our job requirements, and certainly the degree of job security, you have a completely different set of issues. What tends to happen is if you’re on tenure track, you are afforded certain protected time to do independent research, developing the scholarship, publishing. They can also reduce their course load and teach fewer classes than the four per year that is generally required. Most term faculty that are in our unit are generally teaching five classes a year, making a salary that’s about 30% lower than [an assistant] professor, even though we have a significant number of our unit members who are also doing things like major advising for students. This is a duty that’s expected of tenure track faculty that is not part of the job description of term faculty. They are really doing it out of the goodness of their heart because the consistent thing from our membership is the one great part of teaching at Barnard is the Barnard students. They are a wonderful student body and a rewarding part of being part of the instructional faculty. 

Siobhan Burke:

There is this rule that term faculty can only teach for up to five years. Their contracts can’t be renewed once they’ve taught for five years.

Gina Jae:

In addition to not having job security, you also can’t really advance.

A follow-up: There are some shared departments (such as Statistics, Architecture, etc.) where Barnard and Columbia students are all kind of mixed together, taking the exact same classes. Do the contingent faculty in these departments fall within your unit?

Siobhan Burke:

Our unit includes only faculty who teach at Barnard. Some people, if they’re adjuncts, might teach at Barnard and Columbia. Skye is an adjunct at Barnard and Columbia, but at Columbia, she’s not in a union. And at Barnard, she is in a union.

Skye Cleary:

The union doesn’t cover anything I do at Columbia.

Todd Rouhe:

If you declare a statistics major at Columbia, you’re going to be in the classes with the same students who declared the statistics major at Barnard [though the department is housed at Columbia]. The architecture department where I teach follows the same pattern. We’re a shared department, so all of the Columbia students that are in the architecture department are being taught by Barnard instructors. We’re not hired by Columbia. They’re not part of our review process at all. It is an interesting overlap. 

It really underscores how the Barnard–Columbia relationship is very complex, confusing, and sometimes nonsensical. 

Now that we’ve laid the grounds of who the workers in the union are: Why do they need a union?

Siobhan Burke:

Back in 2015, the early organizing started. None of those people are actually here on this call. Todd and I were involved in the early stages, but we weren’t there at the very beginning. My understanding is that people were looking around and seeing that adjunct wages had been stagnant for a long time. Before we unionized, many adjuncts were making five or $6,000, a course, which compared to the cost of living in New York City is just really inadequate. When the recession happened in 2008, the former president, Debora Spar, had frozen these annual cost of living increases that adjuncts were getting and never reinstated them, even after the economy started to recover. Adjuncts were working semester to semester with no guaranteed job security, no guaranteed minimum pay, no access to health benefits. We needed to band together collectively to advocate for those things. We do a huge amount of the teaching at the college. It was just not fair that we should be so peripheral. The same went for other contingent faculty positions like term faculty. 

Todd Rouhe:

We were looking for recognition. Recognizing who we were as a group and what we are contributing.

Sharon Fogarty:

When the union started to reach out and organize, I was actually quite nervous, because as an adjunct, I had zero security. I was concerned that if I backed this, would I lose this job? Because I very much enjoy teaching at Barnard. The students are fantastic. So I needed to keep my relationship [with the school]. But once the union was established, I saw the benefit. I wasn’t always starting again every semester and at the will of whoever decides that I should or shouldn’t be there. My time and my investment in the school were accruing benefits over time. This was a huge transition for all of us who are adjuncts, and it meant so much. I didn’t realize how hard it was until we established this union. We want to keep it going and continue to advocate for the things that we need as union members, as teachers, as people who are investing in the college.

Skye Cleary:

My experience echoes Sharon’s. I joined in 2015. Now that we have some benefits, I realize how it was problematic before. [Pre-unionization], I wouldn’t know until much closer to when the semester started whether I was going to be teaching. There was the occasional time when I accepted other work because I didn’t know, then Barnard came to me and said, “Can you teach next semester?” And I said no because I’m working elsewhere. [The contract] provided me with more consistency and financial benefits. I taught elsewhere close by and was paid about double what I was getting paid at Barnard, even though I really enjoyed teaching at Barnard. [The contract] had a huge impact on me, not only financially. It was psychological as well. It sent the message that someone was paying attention, someone cares, someone appreciates the work I’m doing that’s so often underappreciated for many adjuncts. I felt so much more supported. That’s one of the reasons why I joined this committee because I want to contribute and give back and share the love.

Todd Rouhe:

We discovered as the union came into being and the contract was signed how much we needed the union. Now we have some guidelines for how we’re hired and how we proceed with our jobs and what the benefits will be. Before that, there was just nothing. It was a black hole. Everybody who has become a member realizes how important it is because without it, it would be hard to know what our position at the college is. It’s also hard to know what other instructors are going through until you get in contact with them.

Siobhan Burke:

To give some examples of the types of gains that we made with the first contract that gave a bit more security—there are now these tiers in the contract, where if you’ve taught as an adjunct a certain number of semesters, then you get an appointment for a certain number of years. If you’ve taught, for example, 14 semesters at the college, you get an appointment for two years, which means you’re guaranteed to be offered classes for the next two years. If you taught 28 semesters, you get a guaranteed appointment of three years, and 42 semesters is a guaranteed appointment of four years. People who get more seniority get longer appointments. We created the Adjunct Professional Development Fund, which allows adjuncts to apply for reimbursement for things that enhance their teaching and research and their professional development. For example, Skye has used it for editing a book manuscript. Adjuncts also now have access to health benefits. That’s definitely somewhere we want to make improvements, but previously, adjuncts had no access to health benefits. Now, if they teach six or more credits, they have access to benefits with a 50% contribution from the college. There’s a grievance and arbitration process that’s formalized now. We’ve been able to advocate for members through that process. Our previous union representative Sonam Singh filed a lot of successful grievances on behalf of our members. For term faculty, wages increased from $60,000 to $70,000 over the course of the contract. For adjuncts teaching three to four credit courses, they increased from seven to $10,000 per course, over the course of the contract. Those are just some examples of the improvements we were able to make.

You’re all anticipating my questions because the next question was going to be about the experience of Barnard pre- and post-unionization for those of you who have been there before and after, but most of you have touched on that. Instead, I want to ask Gina [who joined in 2020] if Barnard having a union impacted your decision to come and how joining a faculty that already had a union felt different to you.

Gina Jae:

I was fresh out of my graduate program, and I was offered the position just as everything was about to shut down. I was in a position of like, I’m so happy to have a job. They did mention the union and just said, “This is your salary, this was your course load. It’s all because of the union, there’s nothing else you could do.” I was not super savvy. I certainly didn’t read the contract or anything before I signed. It wasn’t until I started attending some [union] meetings that I learned that the constraints that were posed to me at the time I was offered the position were actually ones that union members who are term faculty were also told in different departments. Then I was surprised to learn that actually wasn’t true. I wouldn’t have known that that did not reflect what the union had bargained for had I not become more involved in their activities. That’s definitely part of what we would like to clarify, going forward, as far as the responsibilities for term faculty. Somehow, the way that these positions have been disseminated since then has put a ceiling on salaries for a number of term faculty. 

Siobhan Burke:

The contract sets guaranteed minimums for these different positions. The guaranteed minimum for term faculty is $70,000 in the year that Gina was hired. It’s a common management tactic to misconstrue the union’s role at an institution and say, “This is the rate that was negotiated through the union, so this is what you get.” That’s what they were saying to her. There’s a line in the compensation section of our contract that says nothing in this contract precludes the college from paying a unit number more. It leaves the door open for union members to negotiate. Unfortunately, we’ve heard from a number of term faculty who received a similar message when they were hired, which is that $70,000 is it. So we need to figure out how to better communicate to incoming faculty or to the chairs that are doing the hiring that nothing is stopping you from offering more. 

To talk about what’s about to happen for you all this upcoming contract negotiation, can you talk about what your priorities are and other changes you’d like to make from the existing contract? What do you anticipate the bargaining process will be like with Barnard?

Siobhan Burke:

We can’t talk in too much detail right now, because we’re still working together as a group to finalize and draft the proposals. We’re still very much in conversation, but some things are clear. We’ve surveyed our membership, and the things that are most important to them aren’t surprising. It’s wage increases, stronger job security, and improvements to health benefits. From my own memories of negotiating the first contract, we felt like we made significant improvements on wages, but even back in 2017, when we ratified the first contract, we knew that there was a lot of room to grow on health benefits. At the moment, adjuncts have to teach six or more credits to receive benefits, and even then it’s still pretty expensive. We’d like to create a way to make that more accessible for people. At the same time, we have heard from some members that what matters the most is just a wage increase, and they can use the wage increase to purchase health insurance through the marketplace. So people have different views about that.

Todd Rouhe:

We’re trying to improve the language in most articles. It was a very steep learning curve the first time, living with and reading the contract over the last five years, explaining it to our members. Now, when we go back, there are some gaps and things that we want to fill. We want to make it a little more ironclad in some places, expand the language to catch definitions of members and how their salaries are treated and how they’re part of the college. Those are things that we can focus on if the college is willing to focus on those things with us. We have a better overall picture of what the contract can do, and we want it to be as strong as possible because it’s going to be for people who aren’t even here yet. This contract will be part of their working environment. We want it to be something that makes life better for them.

Siobhan Burke:

Even though we did make really big strides in wages, particularly for adjunct faculty, we’re dealing with this really steep inflation rate at the moment. We’re just living in a different world than we were five years ago. The cost of living in New York just continues to just rise. It’s really hard to make ends meet here, even on a Barnard adjunct salary, which is better than some other institutions but also on par with others. 

Sharon Fogarty:

We’re really positive about this process. We have ideas of things that we would like to ask for. But the establishment of the union and the contract has been a wonderful thing, not just for us, but for Barnard. They get some experienced faculty who know the systems there and know the students and enjoy working there. So it’s helped the college too. We’re approaching this as a win-win situation.

Gina Jae:

It’s a benefit to the college to have this particular group of faculty here for their students and for the benefit of the college. One of the things that the college highlights is what they speak of as a concerted effort to diversify their faculty. Barnard’s full-time faculty, particularly their tenure track faculty, statistically and demographically resembles that of the rest of the United States [as per the Barnard self-study for Middle States Accreditation]. Over 75% of their tenure track faculty are white. [Barnard] had pointed to what sounds on paper like significant increases in recruitment of personnel for faculty of color, and they specify these as full-time faculty of color, as well as a smaller percentage of underrepresented minorities. They included term faculty as part of that growth. This is certainly a change even over our unit membership over the past five years. This past year, we have about 39 term faculty, 16 of whom are minorities, and persons of color. This is exactly what’s been mirrored across the United States. Colleges are diversifying their faculty, but it is through the recruitment of contingent faculty, of adjuncts, of non-tenure track lines. We filled that university need. We filled that advising need that was not being met. We were a person of color minority filling a need for the college, providing mentorship in ways that the existing faculty could not provide.

Let’s move to BCF’s relationship with the broader campus. The SWC strike was many students’ introduction to unions on campus, so understanding what’s different between the SWC and other unions, like the BCF, can be a helpful touchstone. How would you all contrast the BCF with the SWC, both in structure and history? Does anything strike you about the SWC’s experience with Columbia compared to the experience that you’ve had with Barnard and the campus community?

Siobhan Burke: 

First of all, SWC is a much larger union—they have over 3,000 members. BCF, in comparison, is much smaller. This year, we have about 175 unit members. Not to make any generalizations, but I would say the majority of Barnard’s contingent faculty are at a different stage of our careers. This is not to say that graduate workers aren’t juggling many different responsibilities, but sometimes they’re more focused on the work that they’re doing on campus, whereas for adjunct faculty, often we’re teaching at multiple institutions, and we also have careers outside of that. For example, Todd has his own architecture firm. I’m a freelance writer. Skye just wrote a book. Sharon has a theatre company. In terms of organizing, it’s challenging, because for the majority of our membership, this isn’t a full-time job, and we’re splitting our work time between a number of different places and a number of different institutions. Also, SWC was negotiating with the Columbia administration, and we’re at the table with Barnard administrators. When we first unionized, Barnard, unfortunately, hired a typical anti-union lawyer, from this notorious union-busting law firm called Jackson Lewis. That’s who we were at the negotiating table with. It was a pretty adversarial year of negotiations. We had a strike authorization vote, we prepared for a strike, we got very close to striking, and then in the end, they finally came through with a contract that we could recommend to the membership. I don’t know what the relationship is going to be like this time around. I think the tenor of negotiations could be a little bit different. It won’t necessarily be exactly the same as it was at Columbia.

Todd Rouhe:

The UAW has other unions on campus, too. We have support workers at Barnard, and then UAW represents the support staff at Columbia—the same union organization, but with different units. For instance, today [April 13], there was a rally on Columbia campus for the support staff. If there were any BCF members there, we were only there to support them. Our [Local 2110] president, Maida [Rosenstein], and the people who work with 2110 and the UAW are all over campus, encouraging us to support each other across the different unions. That’s helpful across the board. We’re definitely not all in the same line of work, so to speak, but we’re all workers.

Beyond what we’ve discussed, what do you believe undergraduates need to know about contingent faculty? 

Todd Rouhe:   

We care. Everybody that I’ve met, we’re teaching because we like this. We care about the students, and that’s our first priority. Sharon mentioned that the college is a better place for having the union, and I think the students should know that their education is better for having a union. College is a better environment for us having a union. Whether we get an improved contract or one where the college is taking things back, we’re still going to be there for the students.

Siobhan Burke:   

A college administration is always going to see a union as a thorn in their side because we make demands, but I think that it absolutely is a better place to work because of what we have negotiated for. 

Gina Jae:  

I know that for a lot of students, the graduate student strike was a rude awakening. College is considered a protective, more egalitarian, equalizing space. Then you actually have to confront the fact that there are existing hierarchies, including at your undergraduate institution. Students now are a lot more politically savvy in certain ways as far as dealing with issues of inclusion and hierarchy and inequality, and if this is a meaningful way to make that real for them—that the faculty are experiencing these kinds of inequities just by virtue of coming to work every day—I hope that will be a valuable learning experience, our being able to negotiate an advocate for ourselves collaboratively, as a collective. That gives me hope.

Todd Rouhe: 

I got more questions about unionization, what a union is, and what our union is during the graduate student strike than I did when we were unionizing. The students were very aware of it. There was more dialogue around everybody’s situation.

Siobhan Burke: 

Student support has been instrumental to our union over the years. During our first contract campaign, students were phenomenal in speaking up on our behalf or organizing events on our behalf, and that kind of support from students has been really invaluable. I just want students to know their support has been and continues to be really meaningful to us.

Update made April 18 at 9:15 am: This article had been edited to clarify that all term faculty are full-time positions.

Update made on April 17 at 9:34 pm: This article has been edited to clarify that term faculty members make 30% less than an assistant professor, not a full professor, and that adjunct faculty members often teach more than one course per semester. It previously stated that adjunct faculty sometimes teach more than one course per semester.

Image via Shane Maughn and Wikimedia Commons