Three dozen faculty members rallied outside the Bronx Community College (BCC) campus last Tuesday, protesting compensation practices they feel have long shortchanged adjuncts throughout the City University of New York (CUNY) system.

Last week’s demonstration was the second in a chain of protests staged between May 21 and May 31 on five CUNY campuses. At these campuses – Baruch College, College of Staten Island, Queensborough Community College, Kingsborough Community College and BCC – CUNY part-time faculty, or adjuncts, protested a pay reduction during the 15th and final week of the semester.

Unhappy with CUNY’s compensation of teaching adjuncts for two hours per class during finals week instead of the three hours’ pay rate they receive throughout the semester, faculty at BCC led a spirited demonstration to raise awareness of the issue.

Organized by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the labor union representing 20,000 CUNY professionals and faculty staff, last week’s protest highlighted what Ruben Rangel, a BCC adjunct lecturer, said was the main point of the protest. “BCC administration is [either] clueless about what their faculty does in the last week of the semester, or they are pretending that they do not know,” Rangel said.

In addition to proctoring exams, adjunct faculty spend the last week advising students, grading finals, and managing administrative duties such as filing attendance records, explained Rangel, who teaches in the English departments of BCC and City College.

While he does the same amount of work at each institution, Rangel said he is paid fairly at City College, but not at BCC.

“Shortchanging adjuncts during finals week is incredibly cheap, blatantly unfair and an insult to PSC members’ professionalism as teachers,” said Dorothee Benz, the PSC press secretary and a former instructor at Baruch College.

“These five colleges have done it this way for a long time. They’re allowed to keep doing it, legally and contractually, but that does not mean they have to,” said Benz, referring to a May 2006 arbitrator ruling that frees those five colleges to pay the lower rate.

Michael Arena, a CUNY spokesman said the issue would be addressed during negotiations with the union.

“The matter was presented to an arbitrator who essentially indicated that the appropriate venue for resolving this issue was through the collective bargaining process,” he said. “We are waiting for PSC to present this issue as part of negotiations between the union and the university.”

In response, PSC president Barbara Bowen said, “We should not have to wait for the very long process of collective bargaining to solve what we see as a straightforward issue.”

Bowen is confident that the protests and the 2,000 petition signatures they will present to the president’s office on each campus, will lead CUNY to change its end-of-semester pay policy at the five colleges.