Before the Strike

How I Came to New York University and Why I've Stayed

Photo by Jeremy Huang on Unsplash

I wrote this a few weeks ago, when I was feeling maximum frustration with my employer and teaching and learning home, New York University. As some of you know, I’ve been a very active member of my contract faculty union, CFU-UAW, for the last few years.

When I wrote this, we’d been in bargaining for the last 15 months, and after a series of escalations, were preparing to strike. I’ve never been in a union before, or gone on strike, and though I have come to love organizing, I was sick of the administration’s stalling and breaking the law. I was also tired, grouchy, and surprised by how hard it had been to bring together 932 academics to one common cause.

How many professors does it take to change a light bulb?

CHANGE?!!?

Like many New York City transplants, I came here by way of graduate school. At the naive (stupid?) age of twenty-two, I was accepted* into NYU’s Creative Writing Program. Though I knew it was a big deal to study with Sharon Olds, Galway Kinnell, and Marilyn Nelson, to name a few of my professors, these were not my favorite poets, though Sharon would come to be. I loved Muriel Rukeyser, Elizabeth Bishop, Ruth Stone, and Milton Kessler. The last two had been my poetry professors at SUNY Binghamton.

Accepted doesn’t fully get at the complexity of the situation. On the same day I received an acceptance letter, I also received a rejection letter. I can’t remember which letter I opened first. Picture the tragedy and comedy masks. Confused, I called the Creative Writing Program and spoke to someone on the phone, maybe eventually the director, who assured me there had been a mistake. I was accepted, not rejected.

Talk about giving someone imposter syndrome. Later, I asked Sharon Olds, who became my thesis advisor about this, and she too assured me that I’d been accepted. Obviously, I felt weird/bad about how it had gone down, but I told it to new friends as a funny story, and I forgot about it until writing this post.

To be honest, I hesitated to include that part because Little Carley piped up with her leg braces and fear of falling and quavered like a cartoon hobo mouse, “What if people think you’re a fraud?”

But then Big Carley said, “People can think whatever they want.”

From that clerical snafu, I learned that if you get into something, even by mistake, you’re in! I have used this ethos to weasel my way into bathrooms, restaurants, parties, and the minds of resistant union colleagues.

When I think about those of us in my cohort who have gone onto publish books, I feel like I was meant to be accepted, and also nobody knows who is going to publish books in the future, because publishing is a crap shoot and an endurance test. Also, who cares? Also also, don’t ever let anyone tell you to leave a field because what do they know about future you? Also, also, also, let’s believe Sharon Olds.

In my young poet’s mind, New York was the only place to be an artist and a writer. I fantasized about bumping into Blondie on the Lower East Side, going to Saint Marks Books whenever I wanted, finding cheap Fluevog knock-offs on 8th Street, and reading the Village Voice the hour it came out. I suppose I fell for the same NYC fantasies that have brought thousands of my students to NYU. I mean, I was once them, just a few years older.

NYU didn’t offer me any fellowships, so I took out loans and got a work study job. I got hired in the campus Writing Center office, working under an avant-garde literary theorist from Poland, who loved Derrida and her shaky-legged Italian Greyhound. How I adored this woman, with her burgundy hennaed hair, and laugh that carried across a sea of cubicles.

By accident, I wound up hanging out with Ph.D. students who were learning how to teach while getting their degrees. I made copies, brought undergrads to their appointments, and found myself at the center of an intellectual hive of teaching and learning. Our office then was on top of The Bottom Line, and at night, the music filtered up through the ceiling.

In the final semester of my M.A. program, I was offered one section of Intro to Creative Writing. I’d never taught before, but I put together a syllabus and hoped for the best. I remember standing around the corner from my classroom on the first day and willing myself not to throw up. I was only a few years older than most of my students, and terrified they wouldn’t listen to me.

To my surprise they did, and I learned that I loved teaching more than anything I’d ever done in my life. I loved it as much as I loved writing poetry, which was my first artistic and intellectual romance. Something clicked for me after those first few jittery days in the classroom. I knew what I wanted to do with my life.

After one rootless year in the Ph.D. English Literature program at NYU, I realized I wanted to study the way people learned more than literary theory, so I applied to the Ph.D program in English Education, also at NYU, where I finished my doctoral degree.

I’d also landed one of the teaching fellowships, that were part of the Writing Center where I’d been a work study. Now I was a graduate instructor, teaching a three/three load (I need a fact checker on this, it might have been two/two). The fellowships were competitive, so to be hired was a relief and a reward. It meant if you were unfunded you could still get a doctorate without taking out any more loans.

It was 1997, and I was elated to be making thirteen thousand dollars a year.

The graduate students at NYU were beginning to organize, and I wish I could say that I was one of those early radicals. In a lesson that’s not lost to me now as I call on my contract faculty colleagues to prepare for a strike, I was the one who needed reassurance.

I had no idea what collective action meant, and had so much financial trauma in my life, I was terrified the university would stop paying us. I remember one of my fellow graduate students, Ben Stewart, talking me down in the decrepit teaching lounge where we re-heated our leftovers and shared one communal phone.

Photo by Shannon VanDenHeuvel on Unsplash

I applied for my current job, on a whim, mostly as practice for the job market. I was ABD, but I got the job, and I’ve had this job for twenty-five years. Like all contract faculty positions, it was the standard grueling process of a preliminary interview, a job talk, and a campus visit. I was hired by a committee of expert faculty in the fields of composition and creative writing–aka my future colleagues. Shared governance (faculty make the academic decisions, not administrators), something the union is fighting to hold onto, was central to my hiring, and it has been on every single hiring committee I’ve served on since then.

My title then was Master Teacher, which confused students and friends outside of NYU to no end. “Do you work in a Dojo?” was a common quip. When I left to teach literally across the street, I’d been making twenty-one thousand a year. The rise from thirteen thousand to twenty-one thousand was because of the graduate student union.

When the then Dean called me to tell me I got the job, I cried with gratitude. No one had taught me how to negotiate for my salary or other possible benefits. I might have stammered, “What is the salary?” as my then-husband, jumped up and down in the background.

“42,000 with benefits.”

It was double what I was making at the time. There was no such thing as Glassdoor then, and I’d been trained like many women my age that it was shameful to talk about money. I was mad at myself for years for not negotiating, though now that I’m in a union, and we talk openly about salary and compensation, I know that the women who tried to negotiate for a higher salary were not successful. We all started at somewhere around forty two thousand, and now most of us, even after twenty-five years of service to the university, make between 75-105k.

I’d heard that some Master Teachers had faculty housing, so I pushed the Dean on that. He said I wasn’t eligible. but added, “I’ll get you into housing, if you teach in Florence for a year.”

I did that, and it was amazing and difficult. I lived on campus with my then-husband, in an apartment which overlooked an olive grove. My students came to my apartment to drop off papers, ask me questions, and say hello. It was lovely at times, and intrusive at others, but above all else it was a job that was presented to me as a perk.

I was also too anxious to really enjoy myself there. I missed my friends and Florence turned out to be kind of lonely for a newly-wed couple with no friends and no ability to communicate. We also ate some of the best food of my life, and saw art that changed me forever.

When I returned my dean did not give me faculty housing. He left, we got another dean who was much more difficult, and then another, who was beloved by our faculty, but left last year with two years to go on her contract. I’ve taught a three/three load for the last twenty-five years, and usually a course or two in the summer so that I can support my daughter and myself. Because of the good work of our Faculty Assembly, I’ve had two semesters off to write and research.

There are other promises the university made and broke. After ten years of teaching I was supposed to get a 10% raise, which never happened. When I was promoted to Full Clinical Professor, I was also supposed to get a 10% raise, which also never happened. The excuses were always the same. NYU doesn’t have the money, there is this crisis or another one, and/or I already make more than most of my colleagues.

In these same twenty five years, I gave birth to and raised my daughter who is now seventeen, and headed to college in the fall. I’ve published five books–two novels, an essay collection, a poetry collection, and a young adult novel. I’ve published peer-reviewed articles, essays, and poems, and I’ve attended conferences in my field, and conducted research in libraries and archives. I’ve chaired my concentration and served on committees almost every year.

I’ve lost count of how many students I’ve taught. Thousands! I love my students. They are smart, creative, engaged, and determined humans who are just beginning to learn how the administration exploits their professors. They don’t like it.

Mostly I’ve taught essay writing in our first-year two-semester writing sequence, but I’ve also taught upper level courses called City as Text, Experiential Learning, and Youth in Revolt. I’ve revised my curriculum and pedagogy more times than I can remember, and my evaluations are consistently high even though evaluations tell us little about how or what students learn and are biased. In these last twenty-five years, I’ve re-applied for my own job seven times, putting together a portfolio package that resembles a tenure application in both its requirements and scale.

I catalogue all of my achievements here, not because I’m special, but because so many people I talk to when I’m organizing, especially women and women of color, share this experience with me. We have done years of tenure-track level work, much more teaching than our TT colleauges, and almost never at a living wage.

This is how universities and colleges across America have come to function, and parents and students, through no fault of their own, don’t know it. My union and all of the faculty unions across the country are fighting back, and I believe that we will win.

When my daughter was four, I applied for a Faculty Fellow in Residence position and got it. I’d applied three times before, and the process consisted of three interviews, an elaborate cover letter, and extensive curriculum and programming planning. I felt like I was on the job market. My then husband and I accepted because our financial precarity was eroding our marriage, and we wanted our daughter to go to a good public school.

I lived rent free for eight years in a nice faculty apartment in a residence hall. It was not opulent or even particularly big, but I had a dishwasher and I lived on campus. My then husband and I separated after just a few months after we moved in. Still it was a rare time during my employment at NYU that I had enough money to live a somewhat comfortable life. I saved nothing because I still had bills, loans, and expenses, and I had become a single mom. But I sometimes went out to dinner, I took my daughter to Maine on a vacation for a few years in a row, and I paid off my credit cards.

It was another job that was presented to me as a perk and an honor, on top of my already existing full-time one. The administration made it clear to me I should be grateful to have been selected.

My residence hall was part of what’s called the Residential College, a special intensive experience for students who wanted direct engagement with their professors. During those eight years, I planned and led four to six events every month, hosting anywhere from ten to one hundred students in my apartment and around the city for each event.

My apartment opened out onto a dorm room floor, I said hello to every student I saw in the hallways, laundry room, and elevators. Students came to me when they were stressed out, needed someone to talk to, and at least once or twice every year when they wanted to commit suicide.

The residential life staff I worked with became some of my favorite people in the university. The RA(s) who have just unionized and won their first contract, were the funniest, hardest working, smartest young people I’ve ever met. They ran those dorms.

The security guards we knew treated us with kindness and respect, but sometimes a new guard would make my daughter cry by insisting she didn’t live in her own apartment. Security kept track of my movements in and out the residence hall and asked inappropriate questions about my dating life. When I was dating a trans woman, the guards harassed her about her I.D. so much, she stopped wanting to visit me.

I spent eight years living in that residence hall, welcoming a new class of first-year students and their parents every year. It was a lot of turn-over, and sometimes I felt so anxious I didn’t want to come home. I also loved the community of excited 18-year- olds, and the places we went together.

My favorite event I created was “Get to Know Your Indie Bookstore.” We went to an indie bookstore, I gave everyone a twenty dollar bill (really their own tuition money funneling through the cogs of NYU right back at them), and we talked about and bought books.

Photo by John Michael Thomson on Unsplash

I still worry that writing about these “perks” makes me sound ungrateful and privileged. I’ve had opportunities many people haven’t, and of course I have quite a bit of privilege as a white cis woman, teaching at a wealthy university. It’s also important to write about the ways in which second, third, and forth jobs are presented to contract faculty as rewards for good behavior, and that I might not have taken these extra jobs if I wasn’t always so underpaid.

Now I live in Flatbush, Brooklyn, and I run out of money by the 15th of every month, after paying my mortgage, maintenance, and other bills. I’m in tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt. But it’s my apartment and I don’t have to talk to anyone in the halls or elevator. Though I do! My building is full of interesting people! But I love that it’s not my job.

I’m part of the Organizing Committee for our union. I support the Bargaining Committee, and I phone bank and talk to people from all over the unit. The administration claims that our data about salary is incorrect, but my conversations across the union confirm what we all know to be true.

NYU has been underpaying us for decades. Women and especially women of color make ten percent less than men for doing the same job. Compression for women in our unit is so bad that we joke that I’d make more money if I were hired ten years ago as a man.

We make up more than half of the faculty at NYU, and we have been poorly treated for years. The difference is, and having a union gave us this, we have each other now. We have solidarity and community, and finally we have power.

As I sit in bargaining session after bargaining session and watch my colleagues and friends on the bargaining committee put forth reasonable proposal after reasonable proposal, only to have them ignored or countered with university proposals that are disrespectful to us as human beings, I think, I’ve Given My Whole Adult Life to NYU, It’s Time for NYU to Give Back.

In my next post, I’ll tell you about what happened when we went on strike.

Enjoy the typos and if you made it to the bottom of this long post, say hello and tell me about what’s pissing you off or delighting you about America today.

Carley