CUNY Faculty Stage Illegal May Day Strike As Criticism Mounts Over Campus Protest Response

Untold numbers of City University of New York faculty and staff stayed home from work on Wednesday in solidarity with a student encampment at City College, in an illegal work stoppage just one day after authorities arrested nearly 300 students at that campus and at Columbia University.

The strike, which was not authorized or endorsed by the union representing CUNY faculty and staff, comes after law enforcement and riot police engaged in a brutal crackdown on Tuesday night to clear protest encampments at City College and Columbia, erected by students seeking to force those universities to divest from companies that provide arms and other support to the war in Gaza, which Gazan health authorities say has claimed over 34,000 lives.

On Wednesday morning, Mayor Eric Adams and top law enforcement officials announced the NYPD had arrested roughly 300 people and claimed, without evidence, that many of those arrested were “outside agitators .” Classes at City College are being held remotely beginning on May 1 , the university announced on Tuesday.

A member of the union’s Graduate Center chapter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said he was joining the work stoppage because he “cannot stomach the sight of NYPD brutalizing CUNY students, faculty, and community members.”

“Nor can I stomach the genocidal Israeli state’s actions in Gaza, where every university has been leveled and thousands of students and higher education workers have been killed in the last six months,” he added.

Spokespersons for CUNY did not respond to a request for comment about the work stoppage.

A group of union members gathered at the City College encampment held an anonymous vote Monday to authorize the May Day strike if 250 or more members pledged to call in sick on Wednesday. By Tuesday night, the group — which has since renamed itself CUNY Out Sick for Palestine — announced it had cleared that threshold and called the strike.

The faculty petition noted the gravity of such action: Public sector workers in New York, under the state’s Taylor Law of 1967, are prohibited from striking or engaging in any work stoppages and may face jail time for their actions.

“This is a decisive and a serious action,” the petition read. “But this is a decisive and serious moment — a point in history that we will look back at and see ourselves on one side or the other.”

The faculty pledge declared support of the student protesters’ demands, which include a call for CUNY to “divest from all companies complicit in the imperialist-zionist genocide” as well as a call to reinstate free tuition.

Just after 11 p.m. Wednesday evening, the organizers posted on social media that 300 “rank-and-file members of PSC-CUNY” participated in the job action.

The Professional Staff Congress, the union representing CUNY faculty and staff, distanced itself from what it called the “unauthorized” sick-out in a statement to members on Tuesday. The vote, wrote PSC president James Davis, “is not sanctioned” by the union, adding that PSC “does not condone this action and discourages PSC members from participating.”

In a separate statement, the PSC Principal Officers condemned the mass arrests at City College “escalatory and disproportionate to any threat that the encampment posed.” On Wednesday morning, details began to emerge of police body-slamming and using pepper spray on some people during arrests.

At Columbia, faculty were still reeling from a violent crackdown that reportedly sent several students to the hospital with injuries, according to student organizers .

The Columbia University chapter of the American Association of University Professors is considering issuing a symbolic vote of no confidence against university president Minouche Shafik, following a similar faculty-wide vote against Barnard College president Laura Rosenberry, said Patricia Dailey, vice president of the AAUP-Columbia.

“Columbia, as an Ivy League university at the center of this, you would think we would be the people to model better responses to things,” Dailey told THE CITY on Wednesday.

On Tuesday evening, Shafik announced that NYPD will remain on campus until after the semester ends later this month in order to prevent students from re-establishing the encampment — against a unanimous vote from the campus Faculty Senate.

(Disclosure: Irizarry Aponte is a PSC member in her role as an adjunct instructor at the Craig Newmark School of Journalism at CUNY.)

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