Members of the PSC-CUNY Bargaining Team:

As we move into contract negotiations, we, the undersigned, implore the Bargaining Team to include negotiation for promotional titles and correspondent salary schedules for Lecturers and Doctoral Lecturers in the pending Collective Bargaining Agreement. Advancement would be based on criteria established by each campus’s Faculty Personnel Board and include excellence in teaching, service, institutional program building, and/or professional achievement.

Denying Lecturers and Doctoral Lecturers who currently constitute over 15% of full-time faculty university-wide the same opportunities provided to all other faculty limits the economic and professional mobility of Lecturers and creates inequality among faculty. This oversight is out of step with the values of both our union and our university. The time to redress this issue of equity and fairness is now:

• Lecturers are the only CUNY faculty members without opportunities for promotion past the Certificate of Continuous Employment (CCE). Both tenure-track and adjunct faculty members have opportunities for promotion on a salary schedule that aligns with their rank (Assistant, Associate, Full). 
• Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Wendy Hensel recently promised to formalize Lecturer promotional titles. Lecturer faculty want PSC representation to assist in this valuable effort.
• CUNY Lecturer numbers are growing. This year, the State of New York committed $53 million dollars to faculty hiring, including 255 new Lecturers. We now have approximately 1,125 Lecturers working at CUNY with an additional hiring of 220 anticipated next year. 
• CUNY Lecturers work with large numbers of first and second-year students. During their first year at CUNY, this year’s 255 new Lecturers will teach approximately 60,000 CUNY students across the university (estimated based on each Lecturer teaching 8 courses per academic year, with 30 students per course, though some courses may be larger).​​ These numbers indicate that, by next year, CUNY Lecturers will serve approximately 300,000 first and second year students per year of service. Many of these courses are general education, gateway, and high DWIF courses that primarily enroll students in their first or second year of their college journey and often have an outsize impact on student degree completion.
• Lecturers’ opportunities for professional growth benefit students, colleagues, the college, and the university at large, especially considering many Lecturers’ roles as academic program administrators, as well as the types and numbers of courses they teach. It’s in everyone’s best interest to ensure that lecturers don’t view their line as a dead-end position. 

We sign to request the PSC’s support and expertise to ensure that CUNY does not define promotional titles for Lecturers without input. We ask you to assist in negotiating favorable terms for current and future Lecturer faculty.