Faculty, staff to protest lack of new contract

SUNY New Paltz faculty and professional staff will hold a demonstration Tuesday about being without a new contract for 21 months and being paid wages that they say are 20 percent below the nationwide average for fouryear public universities.

The demonstration is scheduled for 1:30 to 2:15 p.m. outside the Haggerty Administration Building on the New Paltz campus.

“It’s been most demoralizing for our newer faculty,” demonstration organizer Brian Obach said Monday. “People who have been here less than 10 years have actually seen their real wages decline in value, which is not what we want in our career trajectory.”

Obach he was not sure how many of the 351 fulltime staff and 273 part-time employees will participate in the Tuesday event.

He said the demonstration is being held independent of the New Paltz chapter of the United University Professions union.

Obach said state budget constraints have caused roles to change for people hired to provide instruction.

“We see it first-hand [through] faculty workload, things like class sizes,” he said. “We have seen an increasing number of people hired under the designation of ‘lecturer,’ which basically means they teach five classes a semester.

“In my department (Sociology), we used to not have large lecture-style classes,” Obach said. “Our classes were capped at 35 students, which, in itself, is larger than what you want for certain kinds of discussionbased learning. Now we offer lecture-based classes that have 80 to 100 students.”

SUNY New Paltz officials were not immediately available for comment Monday.

A press release about Tuesday’s demonstration says New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo has “created a budget crisis for SUNY despite good economic times” and should be pressured to end a cycle of program cuts.

“SUNY has suffered years of disinvestment by Cuomo,” the release states. “State support for the public higher education system has declined for years under his watch, while more and more of the burden has been placed on students through tuition hikes.”