The NYU Adjuncts Paid Family Leave Organizing Committee represents part of the NYU Adjuncts Union.

When a child is born or a parent is diagnosed with a life-threatening illness, the moral calculus is simple: You show up. You care for your family. You give them your time.

For over 3,000 adjunct faculty members at NYU, that is not so simple.

Under New York state law, most workers are guaranteed Paid Family Leave: up to 12 weeks of paid time to bond with a new child, care for a seriously ill family member or support loved ones during military deployment. The law ensures job protection, continued health insurance and protection from retaliation, reflecting a basic principle — no one should have to choose between their livelihood and their family.

Yet because of a carveout in the statute for those “engaged in a professional or teaching capacity for a not-for-profit,” NYU’s adjunct faculty are excluded from automatic coverage. The exemption does not prevent the university from offering the benefits, but simply allows NYU to opt out. And that’s exactly what the administration has done.

More than 650 adjunct faculty have signed an open letter to President Linda Mills and Vice President Michelle Piekutowski calling for a meeting — modeled after the one requested by union leaders in September — to establish a PFL policy for our colleagues.

In November, adjunct faculty met with NYU representatives and shared what the absence of PFL means in real life. They described returning to work days after an emergency C-section to teach dance classes; taking weekly cross-country flights to care for sick parents, because cobbling together costly visits while balancing teaching obligations was their only option; relying on PFL from a second job to care for a spouse with a life-threatening illness, while the university where they teach offered nothing.

These are not abstractions. They are the lived consequences of policy.

At the end of the November meeting, the union made a straightforward request: meet again to implement a PFL policy for adjunct faculty. Now, over three months have gone by, and senior leadership has remained silent — no timeline, no substantive response and no commitment in principle.

This work can begin with one sentence: a clear agreement in principle that NYU will extend PFL to adjunct faculty. What must follow is equally straightforward — a meeting with union representatives and a timeline for implementation. If the university needs time to work through administrative details, we are prepared to grant it. But every month of inaction forces adjunct faculty into the very dilemma PFL was designed to eliminate.

Importantly, the state’s PFL program is funded through employee payroll deductions into an insurance pool. Implementation would not require NYU to shoulder the full cost of paid leave. As such, this is not a radical demand, nor an exorbitant one — it is a commonsense labor standard that peer institutions such as the City University of New York, The New School, Pratt Institute and the State University of New York already treat as normal practice.

NYU frequently invokes “equity” and “well-being” as institutional values, envisioning a community where healthy work-life integration is embedded across the university. Those words are not merely aspirational branding. They are promises about what kind of institution NYU intends to be and extending PFL to adjunct faculty would make those promises real.

Adjunct faculty teach, mentor, advise and sustain the academic mission of this university. We show up for our students every day, and contribute scholarship, creativity and care to classrooms across schools and departments.

Now, we are asking NYU to show up for us. Providing PFL to adjunct faculty is not just sound policy — it is a test of whether the university’s stated values are commitments, or merely slogans.

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