Join the candidates for a conversation about the future of our Union. Bring your questions and ideas!

Monday April 18 @ 7:30pm: Zoom link

Monday April 11 @ 7:30pm on Zoom

Registration link

All community members are welcome!

This is the time for change.

We deserve a Union that respects members and values action, democracy, transparency, inclusion, and justice.

We are running a slate of candidates in the spring AFT 1796 election:

Wendy Christensen: President
Murli Natrajan and Liz Victor: Co-Vice Presidents for Negotiations
Keumjae Park and Joseph Spagna: Co-Vice Presidents for Grievances
Ellen Pozzi: Recording Secretary
Deborah Sheffield: Professional Staff Officer
Richard Kearney: Librarian Faculty Officer
Atola Gerri Budd and Donnalynn Scillieri: Adjunct Faculty Co-Officers

Spread the word to help support the slate!

Our meetings are open to all Union members. Please contact us for the Zoom information.

Friday 1/28 at 12:30pm: Discussion topic: What does democracy look like in a Union?

Readings: AUD’s Union Democracy Benchmarks and Chapter 1, Democracy is Power

Friday 2/11 at 12:30pm: Discussion topic: Austerity in higher education

Reading: Shared Governance Unionism and the Fight against Austerity in the Age of COVID-19

Friday 3/4 at 2pm: Topic: Slate, Platform, and Campaign brainstorming

Friday 3/11 at 12:30pm: TBA

William Paterson University says it’s saving the institution by cutting nearly 100 full-time professors over three years. Faculty members wonder what will be left to save.

By Colleen Flaherty December 20, 2021, Inside Higher Ed

Thirteen tenure-track or tenured professors are finishing up their last semester at William Paterson University in New Jersey, having been laid off this year due to budget problems exacerbated by COVID-19.

Now professors who thought their jobs were safe—and who agreed to a number of concessions in order to save as many colleagues’ jobs as possible in the first round of cuts—are facing another, bigger round of layoffs: citing ongoing declining enrollment and a $30 million structural deficit, William Paterson proposed cutting 150 more professors over three years, or about 40 percent of the full-time faculty.

That number has since been reduced to 100 over three years, with the faculty union agreeing to even more concessions. It’s also possible that a few more professors will opt for special retirement packages by a January deadline. But the prospect of losing anything close to 100 professors, out of about 340 total, has the faculty at William Paterson worried about not just their jobs but the future of the institution as a whole.

Read more here.

On November 19, 2021, hundreds of faculty, students, staff, and others rallied against layoffs at William Paterson University. Faculty members also met with members of the Board of Trustees and the following statements were among those read to the Board.

Statement by Dr. David Fuentes, Dr. Carrie Hong and Dr. Ellen Pozzi:

To our William Paterson University Board of Trustees, faculty colleagues, campus partners and peers, I thank you for your commitment to our institution and to the academic mission we all carry out together for our students. It is my honor to address you today, as it has been in the past, in support of our university and its community. 

Today, we find ourselves as an institution at a crossroads.  Many of us have faced the impending possibility that we, or our colleagues, may not be here next year.  While that concern is of great significance to us, personally, there are even greater stakes at play in this crossroad. 

While, for my peers and I, being in potential peril represents a catastrophe of the highest personal magnitude, the prospect of our university not getting ‘this right’ and further underserving those who rely upon us the most, represents an even bigger threat to our nation, our commonwealth, and the region of Northern New Jersey, –and, most importantly to our students. 

As an education researcher and a representative from a college tasked with knowing, understanding, and implementing research-based best practices in education, I regret to say that there are none that support that what is happening here and now at WP will be beneficial for students, for their lives, their families, and their communities, nor their social mobility.  The problem that looms here at WP has the potential to be far more detrimental to our students than we all may anticipate.  Put simply, we are experimenting with the lives of children that have been among the most marginalized. 

The children we hope to welcome into our WP community are the same children the NJDOE and the federal government have allocated millions of dollars to address learning gaps created by Covid-19.  So, how will we support them next year?  It is my fear that a new generation of children could be left behind just as our commonwealth left their parents and grandparents behind.  In 2021, we have an obligation to do better than the failures of our past generations.  We can’t afford reducing the imperative of education for those who need it most.

Folks, we have the greatest of all responsibilities, working with underserved and historically marginalized students. For their sake more than ours, we have an obligation to be as just and equitable as we can be and that includes keeping ourselves capable of delivering on our mission and vision to transform lives, locally, regionally, and nationally by delivering the highest quality of education.

Stop Layoffs, Protect our students, Save WP!

“We envision a U.S. higher education system that works for and is led by workers, students, and the communities it serves. We envision a system that secures our nation’s democratic future and serves as a vehicle for addressing inequities.“

We are hosting an Open Discussion Forum on Friday, April 9, 2021 at 12:00pm via zoom. All members of AFT Local 1796 are welcome to join us. The purpose of the forum is to clarify the role of the Solidarity Caucus, and to answer questions about our goals and plans going forward. We believe it is important to open a space where people can freely discuss ideas, and we are fully cognizant of the fact that this discussion is in no way directly related to ongoing negotiations between elected Union leadership and the Administration of WPU.

Topic: Open Discussion Hosted by the Solidarity Caucus

Time: Apr 9, 2021 12:00 PM Eastern Time (US and Canada)

Join Zoom Meeting: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84561659064?pwd=bm9IbWJORUxqbEZuNWQ2eS9nV0tKdz09

Meeting ID: 845 6165 9064

Passcode: 770208

By Maggie Williams

The much-discussed national crisis in American higher education hit me particularly hard this year. At William Paterson University, where I have taught for 13 years and am now a tenured Full Professor, I am in danger of being laid off, along with dozens of colleagues. My local union has managed to negotiate the number of job losses down by about ⅔ of what Administrators originally threatened, but it’s very likely that similar negotiations will occur next year. And the year after that. Meanwhile, AFT and AAUP National Leadership are calling for a New Deal for Higher Ed and fellow academic workers are organizing at both public and private institutions that face the same kind of “academic disaster capitalist” decisions–cutting programs and firing tenured faculty and full-time staff rather than chopping from the top.

At the same time, GWC-UAW Local 2110: the Union for Research and Teaching Assistants at Columbia University is about to enter the third week of a contract strike.

This post is about how the two fights are linked–both for me personally, and for the broader future of American universities.

Click here to read the full post at the Material Collective.