Our Mission
We seek to improve the lives and working conditions of contingent faculty at Ithaca College by fighting for job stability, benefits, equal pay, and equal treatment. We believe that by doing so, we will also improve the educational and scholarly standards of the institution for ourselves, our students, and our colleagues, and that this work can inspire positive change at institutions across the nation. We are accomplished professionals in our own fields; from Grammy Award nominated performers, to publishing poets, to physician assistants recognized for their work in the community; united by a strong dedication to our students. We support all workers at IC, including students, staff, faculty, and maintenance workers, in their attempts to find representation, fight for their rights, and win fair wages and treatment.
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We seek to contribute to worker power within Tompkins County, to ally ourselves with other unions and worker groups, and to lift up the most marginalized around us. We especially laud and support the Tompkins County Workers Center for their outstanding work in this area, and encourage everyone to become a member of the center and support their ongoing efforts.
We seek to demonstrate, especially to our students, that change for the better is always possible.
We seek to create a better college, a better Ithaca, and a better world.
Our History
In January 2014, four Ithaca College contingent professors and a union organizer sat down to commiserate about the crisis that is sweeping American Higher Ed. Like so many workers in precarious jobs across the country, we felt isolated, disrespected, depressed, frustrated, fearful, hopeless, powerless.
As precarious workers on semester-by-semester contracts, we knew that any of us could be fired at any moment, regardless of how much effort and dedication we put into our teaching. Our paltry salaries had not been raised in years, but what could we do about it? As individuals, we were entirely dependent on the munificence of the IC administration. What the Boss Giveth, the Boss Taketh Away – at the snap of a finger.
The plight of contingent faculty at IC and other universities across the country is a microcosm of what is going in the U.S. economy as a whole. American universities, which used to provide stable and well-paying jobs for its professors, have turned into intellectual sweatshops over the course of the last 40 years. University administrations have increasingly balanced their budgets on the backs of underpaid, overworked, and demoralized contingent faculty on part-time or short-term contracts.
In May, an overwhelming majority of contingent professors at IC voted in favor of creating the union. We began contract negotiations with the administration in October 2015, a process that continued until the spring of 2017, when after a long, hard struggle that brought us to the brink of strike, we finally won a new contract for contingent faculty at IC that significantly improves our salaries, working conditions, and access to institutional opportunities.
In the process of organizing our union, we have formed lasting bonds of friendship and solidarity, not only among our bargaining committee but also with student activists from groups such as Students for Labor Action (SLA), our tenured and community allies, and with other local union movements like the Tompkins County Workers Center, CGSU and the CMC Nurses. We are no longer isolated, fearful, or powerless – we are now part of a network of allies who are struggling together in solidarity to reclaim the common good that was lost in the ideological pandemic of neoliberalism and the ensuing corporate assault on the democratic and economic foundations of the United States.
Since universities have turned away from tenure toward a corporate model of exploiting precarious labor, the foundations of the American Academy have been hollowed out. The unionization movement of adjuncts that has caught fire all over the country in the last few years is an attempt to shore up the crumbling foundations of the American professorate.
On that bleak midwinter evening in 2014, we decided that we, too, had had enough of being taken advantage of. We decided to fight back by forming a union that would stand up for the interests of the most vulnerable segment of the professorate at IC. After spending months talking to our colleagues and collecting signatures, we filed for an election with the National Labor Relations Boards (NRLB) in April of 2015.
