Inside Higher Ed
by Colleen Flaherty
May 11, 2021
Faculty unions at Point Park University and City College of San Francisco have found different means to the same end: preserving full-time faculty jobs threatened during COVID-19.
Point Park University cut 17 full-time faculty jobs earlier this year, but an independent arbitrator just said it can’t do that. City College of San Francisco’s faculty, meanwhile, has been working with its administration to find a way to avoid more than 100 faculty layoffs.
For professors, neither the arbitration at Point Park nor the faculty pay cuts on the table at CCSF are ideal. But they represent two avenues for preserving jobs that are at risk, due in part to the pandemic.
Point Park
Point Park’s faculty union, which is affiliated with the Newspaper Guild of Pittsburgh, says the recent arbitration win protects faculty jobs and workloads and demonstrates that the university can’t use COVID-19 to undermine the contract.
“This was just an opportunity for the administration to try and clean house, save some money and to replace full-time faculty with part-time faculty,” said Ben Schonberger, a lecturer in art at Point Park and a negotiator for the union. “It’s bad management. And it’s actually worse than just bad management. They chose to ignore the contract language and attack their faculty.”