By Victoria Merlino

A number of Queens College faculty and students demonstrated for higher professor salaries during the college’s commencement ceremony on Thursday, with members and supporters wearing red stickers over their graduation regalia demanding “wage justice.”

The Professional Staff Congress, CUNY’s staff union, organized the action at commencement. Since November 2017, PSC has operated without a contract with CUNY as union officials try to negotiate higher wages for both underpaid full-time faculty and adjuncts. Professors at other public universities in the area, such as Rutgers-Newark, University of Connecticut and SUNY-Stony Brook, earn more on average than CUNY professors, according to the PSC.

Adjunct pay — which starts at $3,200 per course and averages at around $3,500 per course — has been an especially contentious topic in the last few months as some adjuncts work various jobs and struggle to pay their rent. Several adjuncts formed their own strike movement, an issue previously reported by the Eagle.

Many faculty members wore union stickers as they marched into the official commencement on Queens College’s quad. Some faculty and students handed out stickers that said, “United for Wage Justice at CUNY,” before the ceremony. A banner hung from a building facing the graduation read, “PSC Contract Now,” “CUNY Needs A Raise” and “$7k For Adjunct” — a reference to the popular demand for adjuncts to earn $7,000 per course.

“‘Teachers need a living wage,’ basically what we are saying. And we deserve a living wage, and we can do a better job for Queens College students and beyond,” Karen Sullivan, associate professor of French language and literature, told the Eagle.

Sullivan said that professors’ salaries affect more than just the professors.

“We train a lot of teachers. I know most of the teachers of French in Queens and Long Island and some in the Bronx and Manhattan because they are my former students. So it’s not just Queens College, it’s sort of like a ripple effect,” she said.

Jonathan Buchsbaum, a professor of media studies at Queens College since the late 1970s, lamented the rise in tuition at CUNY and what he called the school system’s “defunding” by the government.

“The PSC wants everyone to recognize how popular the institution of CUNY is among everybody in the city — that they support proper funding for CUNY,” he said, calling CUNY a “great public resource.”