NYU’s Contract Faculty United is bracing for President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration, presenting new proposals focused on protecting international faculty during its Friday bargaining session with university administrators. The union, which represents the university’s full-time staff, is also demanding that the university increase data security and maintain its vaccine requirements.
The union has primarily focused on securing academic freedom, guaranteeing job security and improving scholarship benefits for faculty. However, it has recently concentrated efforts toward issuing protections for NYU’s most vulnerable faculty members amid Trump’s onslaught of executive orders threatening to crackdown on university communities.
In their most recent proposal, members request that NYU administrators agree to support and guide faculty through attaining or renewing visas, offer paid leave if faculty are unable to work due to immigration-related barriers and meet regularly with international faculty to discuss policy developments. In an interview with WSN, CFU representative Jacob Remes said the union ultimately aimed to pave the way for international faculty to have permanent residence in the United States.
“We came in with this renewed purpose, given the attacks of the Trump administration on academia through funding and through attacks on international students, staff and colleagues,” Remes said. “We need to negotiate a contract that not only is about improving our jobs, but is about defending the institution of academia.”
CFU also encouraged NYU to adopt stricter policies on data privacy and security, calling for the university to keep each faculty members’ personal information on NYU-owned servers and only share it with external organizations after getting the member’s consent. The union also requested that personal files be stored so faculty members can easily view their own information and records, including those referenced during university-led investigations into faculty conduct.
The call for greater data privacy comes after Trump issued an executive order calling for universities to identify all “foreign students and faculty that support Hamas.” Since CFU began its negotiations process, members have requested greater protections on academic freedom, specifically as it pertains to NYU’s non-discrimination and anti-harassment guidelines — iterating concerns they could face university sanctions continuing with their regular lessons.
“We came in with a proposal on data privacy and security, so that all of the records that the university maintains about us as employees won’t fall into the wrong hands,” Remes told WSN.
During their most recent bargaining session, CFU members also revealed a list of conditions relating to health and safety, including demands that NYU uphold its vaccination policy to support immunocompromised community members and that administrators regularly meet with union members to discuss relevant health developments.
At the end of the health and safety proposal, the union also called for removal of New York City Police Department officers from campus. The union reinforced its request in the meeting, citing two faculty members’ arrests at a pro-Palestinian protest in December. More recently, NYU President Linda Mills faced backlash for maintaining close ties to a Facebook group that has directed its members to submit protesters’ information to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement tipline.
“This repeated behavior not only threatens our workplace safety, but it threatens NYU’s international reputation,” Chris Chan Roberson, a CFU member, said at the bargaining session. “Our non-citizen colleagues are under direct attack by the federal government, and we expect our employer to live up to the commitments it has already made.”
At a Jan. 17 negotiation session, CFU issued a five-page proposal for an anti-discrimination framework with an extensive list of protected classes, detailed descriptions of what constitutes abusive conduct and requests for more pregnancy and gender-related accommodations. At the same session, administrators exchanged a one-page proposal, listing NYU’s existing policies related to discrimination.
Contract faculty began unionization efforts in 2017 and officially formed in 2020. The union’s negotiation process began eight months after winning a majority vote last year, and have since had six bargaining meetings with administrators.
“It’s in the interests of both the administration and the faculty to ensure that the atmosphere on campus is a positive one,” Thomas Hill, a CFU member, said in an interview with WSN. “We really hope that we can get much more substantively into these issues, and get away from the theatrical activity of pretending negotiations are simply an exercise in initiating current university policies.”
Contact Amanda Chen at [email protected].
