“CUNY Union Faces Challenge’

Russell Berman’s article, “Leadership of CUNY Union Faces Election Challenge Amid Contract Battle,” [New York, March 21, 2006] fails to mention a salient dynamic in the ongoing union election campaign.

Approximately 10,000 of the City University of New York’s faculty members are adjunct faculty who are not employed as such on a full-time basis.

It is true that many of us are very nonplussed by the often extreme political activism of the incumbent New Caucus leadership who, it seems, take up the cudgels for all of the downtrodden and oppressed people of the world except the CUNY faculty (though, leftist politics notwithstanding, the New Caucus has provided adjuncts with minor gains which their predecessors would not even consider).

But neither is the CUNY Alliance slate, now challenging the New Caucus, widely perceived as a friend of the adjunct faculty.

Several CUNY Alliance candidates are reputed to have engaged in past tactics which did not make the adjunct faculty members welcome, and, more disturbingly, the CUNY Alliance leadership has wavered when asked to give solid reassurance that it does not intend to further decimate the adjuncts’ health insurance and retirement benefits in order to boost those of the full-timers.

And while individual adjuncts may have personal preferences toward the New Caucus or the CUNY Alliance, neither can be expected to zealously champion the rights of the adjunct faculty. Though CUNY’s adjunct faculty members have the most to lose in this election, it is the adjunct faculty members whose vote can tip the balance of this election. Whether and how the New Caucus and CUNY Alliance respectively cultivate the adjunct vote will play a considerable role in the outcome of this union election.

KENNETH H. RYESKY
East Northport, N.Y.
Mr. Ryesky is an adjunct assistant professor at Queens College of the City University of New York.

‘David Duke Claims Vindication’

Regarding the position paper by Dean Walt of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government:

What on earth was Dean Walt thinking when he authored a less than scholarly diatribe that was anti-Semitic in both form and content [“David Duke Claims to be Vindicated by a Harvard Dean,” Page 1, March 20, 2006]?

Faculty deans are best served, as are their constituents, by being equal part politician and fund raiser.

Dean Walt not only alienated the majority of his constituency but moreover, bit the hands that feed and in so doing has shortchanged both the student body and Harvard itself.

ROBERT C. LOBEL
President
Bellrock Development Group
Manhattan

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