Dear Fellow PSC Members,

We want to thank everyone who signed our grade pledge and everyone who has supported our ongoing struggle to defend jobs at CUNY. In a little more than one week, almost 800 faculty signed onto our pledge to withhold grades and many more are signing every hour. Although this is far less than the 70 percent of CUNY faculty needed to take our pledge to withhold grades to the next level, this is nonetheless an incredible and unprecedented accomplishment for our union and our university. At this point we are not encouraging faculty to withhold their grades beyond the regular deadline (May 28 for most colleges).

Thanks to your courage and commitment we have sent a powerful message to New York State politicians, CUNY administration, and PSC leadership: We will not sit idly by while our jobs and our university are destroyed. We have shown that many of us are willing to take militant action, up to and including a strike, to win our demands, while still protecting our students. Your swift action has helped push back against preemptive adjunct layoffs and tuition hikes and has helped to build a movement toward a freer, more equitable university which values the labor of all CUNY workers. With this pledge we have demonstrated that our power is in our labor and we look forward to working with all of you to defeat austerity attacks against the CUNY community and to build a better university for our students.

As the reappointment deadline approaches, RAFA expects that many more adjuncts will be laid off and we are committed to continuing to fight to keep every CUNY worker's job. Further, we are committed to the goal of a free and open CUNY and will continue to fight against tuition hikes and increased student fees at every turn. The federal government, the state, and the city have plenty of money to support and expand CUNY during this pandemic. We ask you to continue to help us build a movement that will wrest it from their unwilling hands.

Toward that end, RAFA is calling an emergency Town Hall Meeting on Thursday, June 4 from 5 - 7pm. In that call we will discuss and collectively strategize how to proceed with our struggle and how to continue to move the union toward more militant actions. You can RSVP here. Additionally, we are asking that adjuncts who are given non-reappointment letters share them on social media using the hashtag #FightBackTogether in a show of solidarity.  

Once again, we want to thank you and ask you to join in these upcoming actions and other events throughout the summer. For those who signed the RAFA pledge, we cherish your bold gesture in support of the most vulnerable members of the PSC. We look forward to building with you.

Rank and File Action

P.S. Wondering when to submit your grades? We can't encourage you to withhold past the deadline since we don't have 70% of the faculty behind this collective action, but you can certainly wait until the final hour before the deadline to submit your grades.