Fury at CUNY income divide
Profs at $179K+, adjuncts at $28K
It’s a tale of two cities — in one university.
CUNY administrators and full-time professors are raking in taxpayer dough, with 48 employees pulling down more than a quarter-million dollars in salary in 2018. And 411 staffers make more than Gov. Cuomo’s $179,000 annual paycheck.
But the system’s 12,500 adjunct instructors, who teach the bulk of its classes, are paid barely more than minimum wage, making an average of $28,000 a year — a yawning salary gulf at a school that has devoted an entire institute to the study of income inequality.
At the aptly named Stone Center on SocioEconomic Inequality, star Professor Paul Krugman was paid $245,339 last year, while Miles Corak pocketed $237,063, according to data compiled by the Empire Center.
“It’s a striking irony,” said Sheehan Moore of the CUNY Adjunct Project, a student-worker group. “The division is very stark here.”
Topping the CUNY fatcat list was the dean of the Graduate School of Public Health, Ayman El-Mohandes, who took down $544,685 last year.
Former Chancellor James Milliken, who took home $519,110, was just be- hind — even though he worked for only five months before departing for a new job heading the University of Texas.
And Karol Virginia Mason, the president of scandal-scarred John Jay College — where a group of professors has been accused of selling and using drugs and pimping out students — made $389,094.
All three also basked in pricey perks like housing allowances. For Milliken, that meant up to $19,500 a month to cover rent.
CUNY’s top 10 earners in 2018 were all administrators. Queens College President Felix Matos Rodriguez, fifth on the list with a $440,062 salary, was named the system’s new chancellor Wednesday, a promotion that comes with a $670,000 annual paycheck and a $7,500 monthly housing allowance.
Physics star Andrea Alu, 40, was the university’s highest-paid academic, pulling down $349,906 in his first year as a professor at CUNY’s Graduate Center and the director of the university’s Photonics Initiative.
The average full professor at CUNY makes about a third of that, according to the Professional Staff Congress, the university’s faculty union. But CUNY’s adjunct faculty members are paid a flat fee for each course they teach, starting at $3,200 for a three-credit class.
Other colleges in the region, both public and private, pay adjuncts far more — from $10,000 at pricey Barnard to $6,100 at Penn State.
CUNY blames low adjunct pay on a lack of state funding. Total enrollment in the 23-school system has spiked in the last decade, but the number of full-time faculty has not grown to keep pace. The number of adjuncts has grown 13 percent since 2012 to fill the instructional gap.
Faculty advocates say they may call a strike to force the issue. “No one can adequately justify those salaries while also calling for budget cuts and austerity,” Moore said.
“Other major public university systems and private colleges and universities compensate their presidents, faculty and staff far more lucratively,” said CUNY spokesman Frank Sobrino.