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Assemblywoman Barbara Lifton (D/WFP – 125th) has written a letter to Thomas Rochon, President of Ithaca College, urging the Ithaca College administration and Board of Trustees to respect the right of Ithaca College part-time faculty to organize and to vote to form a union.

"The freedom to form a union is a core principle of our state, as well as a fundamental human right," said Lifton. "All workers should be free to organize, join a union, and bargain collectively for better wages and/or working conditions if they so wish. I am confident that President Rochon and the Ithaca College administration will show the utmost respect for part-time faculty members at Ithaca College as they continue their efforts to determine if a critical mass of support is there to form a union. I am hopeful that they will demonstrate to the entire community, throughout this process, that they hold dear these core human rights."

In recent years, Assemblywoman Lifton has expressed alarm over the increasing numbers of adjunct and part-time faculty in U.S. colleges and universities, particularly within the SUNY system. It's a trend that needs to be reversed, she said.

"As a long-time member of the Assembly Committee on Higher Education, I have been deeply concerned for many years about the increasing number of adjunct faculty within SUNY," Lifton said. "I have fought for more state funding for SUNY to improve those ratios and have urged the Chancellor to make a priority of creating more full-time tenured faculty lines, for all the usual reasons, including a quality student experience with available faculty advisors. I am also aware that this is a very significant issue at many private colleges, including Ithaca College, and I similarly urge that action be taken to begin to reverse this tide that I see as destructive to higher education in general."

This is a deeply personal issue, said Lifton.

"My father, Gerald Smith, was a Ph.D. in English who taught for thirty years at SUNY Geneseo. In the late 1950s, he helped to form the United University Professors (now Professionals) and was Chapter President of the SUNY Geneseo campus for many years. I learned initially from him the importance and value of these labor rights, and so I have long understood that if people who had studied and worked for many long years to receive a Ph.D. – a daunting task by any measure – felt a need to form or join a union in order to make a decent living and have good working conditions, then, surely, any and all workers need to have that unencumbered right."

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