NYU Professors Vote to Strike After Bosses Stonewall for Months

An overwhelming majority of New York University contract professors voted to strike late Friday night, after more than a year of waiting for administrators to finish bargaining a first contract in good faith.

“We are rental tenured faculty, by and large held to similar standards, but we are essentially at-will employees,” said Elisabeth Fay, a clinical associate professor in the expository writing program and member of the union’s bargaining committee. “We want a contract similar to the adjunct contract and we are pushing for something that looks like an enforceable version of a status quo. And this is treated as a completely unreasonable and ridiculous request.”

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Contract Faculty United-United Auto Workers (CFU-UAW) Local 7902 members will now set a deadline for management to respond before they walk off the job. Their next bargaining session is scheduled for Friday, the 25th time they’ve come to the table in 15 months.

The strike vote comes as workers across the United States have increasingly flexed their power to win higher pay, stronger health benefits, better working conditions, and other gains.

Nearly 307,000 workers executed 30 major strikes last year, 13 percent more than the year before, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. That data represents only workplaces with at least 1,000 workers. Even more took industrial action at smaller companies, the Cornell Labor Action Tracker shows. It puts the total number of strikes last year at 298. And despite significant efforts by the Trump administration to gut the National Labor Relations Board and repeated attempts to erase tens of thousands of federal workers’ collective-bargaining agreements, the overall share of workers in unions increased slightly last year from 9.9 percent of workers to 10.0 percent, according to data released last week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Union membership went up by 463,000 in 2025.

“Affordability has been a big buzzword that we’ve been hearing in the news, from our president, from workers, and there’s really no policies enacted in the last year that have made life more affordable for workers,” said Economic Policy Institute senior policy analyst Margaret Poydock, who examined the strike data in a blog last week. “Prices and pay make things more affordable, and unions are a great tool to help secure wage gains and strikes are an even more effective tool.”

University teaching faculty around the country are reaching that conclusion. Non-tenure-track faculty at Wellesley College, for example, went on strike for 29 days last April, after management slow-walked bargaining for more than a year. They won their first contract later that year, including a first-ever child care benefit and a new guarantee that the administration may not reduce a faculty member’s salary mid-contract, even if their classes are canceled.

Adjunct faculty at the University of San Diego’s College of Arts and Sciences went on strike last spring, too, alleging administrators had committed an unfair labor practice when they cut courses just as the union was bargaining their first contract. They won their first contract in September.

Faculty union fights have been wildly successful lately; graduate student workers have voted to unionize at a nearly 90 percent clip in recent years. But winning a first contract has required more militant action, as we’re seeing with contract professors at NYU.

NYU MANAGEMENT IS STONEWALLING and slow-walking contract negotiations, unit members told the Prospect. Administrators took a year to respond completely to a request for information about salary—standard data for contract bargaining. After failing to move on proposals, administrators asked committee members to agree to mediation four months ago, a step not typically undertaken until the two sides of contract negotiations are close to an agreement, yet one management has touted in press coverage as a sign of their good faith.

Contract faculty said they hope the strike authorization vote will prompt movement on major sticking points, including compensation and job security. Unit members approved the measure 627 to 67.

“It’s been a long process and we’ve been looking for something more substantive, because we haven’t seen it yet,” said Brendan Hogan, a clinical professor in the liberal studies program who teaches the history of political and social philosophy and organizes with the union.

Unit members said that NYU’s salary offer—a 20 percent increase to salary minimums—would affect just nine people in the entire union of nearly 1,000.

The reality, Fay said, is that most contract workers at NYU struggle to afford to live in one of the most expensive cities in the nation. Those hired in 2010 earned $85,000, as she does. Those hired between 2015 and 2020 make $89,000. And unlike tenured NYU faculty, the job doesn’t come with housing.

Management’s strategy at the table includes packing bargaining sessions with middle managers from across the university’s various schools, some of whom appear shocked by contract faculty testimony about how little they make after more than a decade on the job, unit members said.

Unit members have also testified that the precarity of contract work is tied to academic freedom, especially after the Office of Equal Opportunity investigated a professor for discussing the genocide in Palestine as part of a seminar they’d taught for years on imperialism, decolonization, and feminism. The threat that the school might not renew a contract is ever-present, Hogan said: “The climate becomes very chilly for professors wondering what they can say.”

Besides slow-walking negotiations, administrators have dismissed certain contract proposals by saying that no other school has them. But bargaining committee members said that’s because there aren’t similar labor structures elsewhere. The contract is breaking new ground for faculty who are considered full-time workers and are neither tenured/tenure-track nor adjuncts.

According to NYU bylaws, those workers compose their own category. They have full-time teaching loads but are reappointed to their jobs on a rolling basis, typically annually. They also typically teach a third more classes than tenured faculty, Fay said, but earn an average of nearly 40 percent less.

As other universities are doing around the country, NYU is replacing tenured professors with contract workers; in Fay’s own department, the number of contract workers has grown from 30 to 1,000.

NYU spokesman Joe Tirella did not respond to a request for comment. In a press statement on Sunday, he said NYU’s salary counteroffer would “put NYU’s unionized contract faculty among the best paid nationally,” and accused them of disrupting “thousands of students’ education to gain leverage at the bargaining table.”

Earlier this month, NYU President Linda Mills said in an email to faculty that the school was struggling financially and running a $71 million deficit, blamed in part on “increasing labor costs.” It’s important to clarify that point, she wrote, “in light of a misunderstanding of the University’s financial position based on IRS Form 990 filings.” The most recently available Form 990 shows that NYU’s revenue was $11.6 billion in 2024 and that Mills took home $1.3 million. It also notes that the university paid for one administrator to travel first-class, paid for the spouse of a former administrator to join them on university business trips, paid for a former administrator’s housing for six months without charge, gave one school’s five highest-paid employees a car and driver, and gave former chief investment officer Kathleen Jacobs a severance payment of $3.1 million. The form does not list the NYU endowment, which stood at $7.4 billion as of the end of last August.

For Carley Moore, a clinical professor of writing and contemporary culture and creative production at NYU, unionizing has been an ongoing project for more than two decades. She was a grad student at NYU when grad employees organized with the UAW in 1998, participating but afraid of retaliation. Now, as a member of the contract faculty union organizing committee, she’s the one who calms those fears. In the weeks leading up to the strike vote, Moore was speaking with other professors, answering their questions, and countering misinformation. About 100 of her colleagues changed their minds from no to yes, including one who was so afraid that she hadn’t yet signed a union card. But after a conversation with Moore, she signed her card and voted for the strike, all within the course of a single afternoon.

“I do think it’s been a shift for some professors to recognize themselves as part of a union movement,” Moore told the Prospect. When they do, the overwhelming sense is of hope and power, she and other unit members said.

“In today’s political moment, it’s so overwhelming. There’s so much going on,” Moore said. Organizing a union is an antidote. “A lot of people are looking at that right now.”

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