It’s a classic case of the progressive “choice for me but not for thee” style!

Some adjuncts are angry over decision by CUNY faculty union to exclude them from voting on resolution about controversial curricular changes. Scott Jaschik of Inside Higher Ed has the details:

The Professional Staff Congress — which represents faculty members at the City University of New York — is one of the largest faculty unions in the country, representing more than 25,000 people. The union, an affiliate of the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, has long been outspoken in discussions about the mistreatment of faculty members off the tenure track. And the union has been a leading critic of Pathways, a CUNY initiative that is designed to ease the transfer of students at the system’s community colleges to its four-year institutions, a goal that many professors applaud even as they say CUNY has ignored faculty critiques of the way the system designed the program.

The PSC is currently trying to get its members to rally against the Pathways program, in part by holding a vote of no confidence in the program. (A summary of the union’s objects to Pathways may be found here.) Last week, the union leaders in its Delegate Assembly voted that only full-time faculty members (largely the tenured and tenure-track) should be able to decide the measure. The part-timers who teach many CUNY courses, especially at community colleges, requested the right to vote on the measure, but were told that they could not do so.

An account of the union leadership’s vote, written by an adjunct activist at CUNY, has been circulating online this weekend. The account describes adjuncts leaving the room furious after the decision to exclude them from the vote, calling the outcome “surreal” “grotesque” and “a disgrace.”

Sándor John, who is an adjunct at CUNY’s Hunter College, wrote in the account that the vote was “a stinging slap in the face to CUNY’s contingent majority,” adding that “the decision is divisive, hurtful, contrary to elementary democracy, deeply damaging to union solidarity, and a big present to management-minded enemies of unionism.” John also wrote that the vote illustrated the problems of a “two-tier” union such as the PSC in which a single faculty union is charged with representing the interests of both those on and off the tenure track. John is one of the organizers of CUNY Contingents Unite, a group that has advocated for better pay and working conditions for adjuncts.