Scores of adjunct professors at the City University of New York aren’t getting paid on time, CUNY officials acknowledged, in an ongoing problem that has frustrated the university’s part-time teaching workforce for several years.
Some CUNY adjuncts are owed sums north of $10,000.
“First paychecks don’t come through for a lot of people, and they’ve made that standard,” Rose Shelor Moulton, an adjunct at Hunter College, told The City Reporter. “But our first month of rent is still due.”
This semester, CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress said it has received 110 complaints of delayed pay. That’s actually an improvement: Using payroll data from the state teachers union, the PSC counted just over a thousand late paychecks in Spring 2025.
The delays are due to late additions to the payroll at individual colleges, CUNY said.
“CUNY values the dedication of its adjunct professors and has worked to improve the payroll process to reduce delays, including sending reminders to the campuses before payroll deadlines for the start of each semester, making it easier to provide advance pay to faculty who are hired at the last minute or paying them outside the normal payroll period,” spokesperson Noah Gardy said in a statement.
Adjuncts and union reps said the delays are baked into the university’s hiring practices.
Lynne Turner, a union vice president and an adjunct lecturer at LaGuardia Community College, said pay delays are one of the many consequences of what she called the university’s “employment model of extreme contingency.” Adjuncts are hired on a semester-to-semester basis, according to their union contract and CUNY standards.
“We are employed, re-employed, and then re-employed again,” Turner said. “Of course that comes with problems. Late paychecks are the tip of the iceberg.”
GET THE CUNY SCOOP: Subscribe to our new weekly newsletter covering the City University of New York
According to CUNY’s most recent human resources report, the university employs 11,000 part-time faculty, compared with just under 7,000 full-time faculty. CUNY reported that part-time labor makes up 52% of its instructional staff, higher than the national average of 40%, as reported in February by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
Most CUNY part-time faculty must be rehired each semester. Adjunct pay can range from approximately $7,000 to $11,000 per course.
The PSC’s data analysis shows the vast majority of late paychecks go to employees at senior colleges: in Spring 2025 there were 984 late paychecks to senior colleges, and 25 to community colleges. Senior colleges receive the bulk of their funding from the state legislature, including for payroll.
Because of CUNY’s split funding model, the payments of senior college employees are processed through the state comptroller’s payroll system. This means paperwork has to go through an extra step, possibly one of the reasons for the systematic delays.
In a letter to PSC president James Davis, a senior CUNY administrator said the principal cause for the delays is late submission of paperwork by department chairs, and said the university is working on an improved communications plan to “remind chairpersons.”
Turner said “shifting the blame” to individual department leads ignored what he called the root cause of the issue: CUNY’s reliance on temporary contract labor.
Late paychecks are standard for adjuncts, Moulton said. She is also one of over 50 adjuncts who has joined a union grievance seeking outstanding pay for teaching so-called jumbo courses, which have more than 90 students.
When the union renegotiated its contract with the university in 2023, it increased wages for those teaching courses of 90 or more. Moulton says she is owed $13,000. Her colleague Jasmine Bayron, who teaches in the geography department, says she is owed nearly double that for three semesters of jumbo courses.
Moulton is on a costly payment plan to cover her child’s daycare, which she needed over the summer in order to stay on top of bills. Bayron has taken to grading high school advanced placement exams and tutoring students for the state Regents exam, on top of her regular course load.
Katelyn Peters, an adjunct who teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College and Hunter, said unstable pay affects her ability to teach.
“There’s all these different programs to increase retention and graduation rates,” Peters said. “But I would think that if you take care of your teachers, the people who are delivering instruction, that’s going to help improve students’ academic experience a whole lot.”
Our nonprofit newsroom relies on donations from readers to sustain our local reporting and keep it free for all New Yorkers. Donate to THE CITY today.
The post Past Due: Why CUNY Adjuncts Can’t Get Paid On Time appeared first on The City Reporter.
