LIU Brooklyn faculty won’t back down from bullies

On Labor Day weekend, when Americans were honoring organized labor’s role in promoting fairness and educators were busy preparing for the start of school, the administration of Long Island University’s Brooklyn campus took the unprecedented step of locking out its faculty members. Days before the start of classes, the university put the entire semester of education in doubt for its students and left faculty in the lurch, suddenly and unexpectedly, without health insurance or pay.

The university has deployed administrators and replacements to fill in for faculty, an act as ineffective as it is disrespectful to students and faculty.

This draconian move will harm students, tarnish LIU Brooklyn’s reputation and erode the ability of the faculty and administration to work together. No wonder a resounding 93 percent of the LIU faculty senate voted “no confidence” in the university’s president, Kimberly Cline, and its vice president for academic affairs, Jeffrey Kane. The administration must end the lockout immediately, allow classes to commence with the proper faculty and return to good faith contract negotiations.

In the meantime, the administration is providing tuition-paying students with substandard education. For example, a staffer was told to teach a master’s program class in which she is enrolled as a student. Another student, who’s in the master’s of education program, was informed that, instead of the professor he had chosen to oversee his thesis project during his final semester, he had been assigned someone he does not know. A class on modern dance technique and repertory was assigned to an LIU dean trained in biology.

The lockout is a clear attempt to pressure faculty, including underpaid and exploited contingent and adjunct professors, to accept the university’s contract offer or else suffer severe economic and professional harm.

At a membership meeting to consider the administration’s “last, best and final offer,” an LIU faculty member, with her 10-year-old son at her side, said: “My husband and I both teach at LIU, we are both locked out, our entire family income is gone, but we are both here to vote against this contract because we want our son to know that you don’t back down to bullies.”

University officials are also refusing to address the lack of parity at LIU’s Brooklyn and Nassau County campuses. Many faculty members at the racially diverse Brooklyn campus are paid significantly less than their counterparts in Nassau County. Yet qualification requirements for faculty and tuition for students are the same at both campuses.

Faculty, students and community members have expressed their concern at these disparities in demonstrations and online protests – the lack of respect for faculty and their students, the unfair treatment of adjuncts and the lockout itself. Their colleagues across the country have decried the situation as well, recognizing that when faculty at one institution are abused this way, faculty at all institutions are threatened. We will not be cowed by an administration that shows no respect for the work we do. We will continue to protest the administration’s disruptive actions until we achieve a resolution and can return to our students.

Students have been filling online forums with posts reflecting widespread anger and shock about the administration’s tactics. Many echo Catherine Garibaldi, a student in the university’s master’s in microbiology program, who told The Nation: “It’s extremely disruptive, especially on the graduate level where there’s so much material to cover in a 13-week semester. One of the classes I signed up for is a really tough class, but I know the professor, and I know that she’s going to teach it well.”

That’s what our members want to do – teach their students and help them realize their aspirations. It is unconscionable for the administration to stand in the way.

Dana Hash-Campbell, a former principal dancer with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater and the chair of LIU Brooklyn’s dance department, says she feels that students are being “defrauded.”

“If I were a student in this day and age, when we have Black Lives Matter and other social activism, if I were a student currently enrolled in LIU, I would bring a lawsuit against Kimberly Cline for fraud,” Hash-Campbell said. “The majority of our student population is minority. They are saying people of color do not matter. That’s how I read it.”

Hash-Campbell expressed concern that some programs may lose their accreditation if the faculty qualified to teach in their subject areas are removed.

These actions by Cline and other university officials are unnecessary and unacceptable. They show contempt for workers, students and the mission of higher education as a path to a better life. Administrators have a solemn responsibility to support the university’s educational mission. The faculty of LIU Brooklyn wants to be with their students, doing the work they love and have prepared to do.

Jessica Rosenberg is the president of the Long Island University Faculty Federation. Randi Weingarten is the president of the American Federation of Teachers.