Manhattan School of Music Faculty Moves to Organize
By DANIEL J. WAKIN
For 39 years the flutist Harold Jones — a stalwart of New York’s classical music scene — taught at the Manhattan School of Music, maintaining a steady stable of a half-dozen students at the conservatory’s youth division.
But something changed in the last two years. The administration assigned fewer and fewer students to him. His sole remaining pupil left last year, and Mr. Jones is no longer listed among the faculty on the school’s Web site, www.msmnyc.edu.
“I did my job every week I came here,” he said. “To be punished, put aside — I didn’t like it. I couldn’t protest.”
Mr. Jones is held out by a group of Manhattan School teachers as an example of why this conservatory in Morningside Heights needs a union. So the group has begun an organization effort, which has run into strong opposition by the administration.
The organizers say they are poorly paid, lack job security and have little say in how the school is run and no recourse for complaints. “We just want to be able to negotiate about certain things, instead of being treated like children for whom favors are doled out,” said Adam Kent, a pianist and veteran teacher.
School officials reject those claims, saying the teachers have contracts and ample ways to communicate with the administration. They assert that there have never been layoffs or salary cuts and say that the organizers, in a letter to the faculty, have made “egregious misstatements and mischaracterizations” about conditions at Manhattan.
The struggle has injected a dose of real-world politics into the melody-basted halls of the Manhattan School, one of the city’s top conservatories and the producer of legions of highly skilled singers, pianists, fiddlers and other performers.
The organizers have sent sign-up cards to about 150 faculty members, asking for authorization to hold a vote on whether they should be represented by the New York State United Teachers, of the American Federation of Teachers. Some 46 Manhattan instructors have signed on, the organizers said, 36 of them publicly.
In an interview this week Manhattan’s president, Robert Sirota, said he was aware of“some activity toward unionizing.” But he said he could not comment on any aspect, from general conditions at the school to the specific claims of the organizers, including Mr. Jones’s situation.
But Mr. Sirota has sent two letters to faculty members defending the school and rebutting the organizers. In a Sept. 26 letter he said the faculty should consider that unionizing “can undermine the positive, collaborative relationship that is at the heart of Manhattan School of Music.” He cast the organizers as “outsiders” who cannot understand the issues that are important to the school and students. Some faculty members, he wrote, have complained that they have felt “uncomfortable or even intimidated or harassed” by the authorization campaign, and he called the sign-up card a “legal document.”
“MSM is committed to maintaining a teaching and learning environment where a union is unnecessary,” Mr. Sirota wrote.
Daniel Esakoff, a United Teachers organizer who is helping the Manhattan teachers, said Mr. Sirota’s letter contained “standard boilerplate language” often used by law firms representing employers.
Alejandro Mendoza, a faculty organizer whose violin class has dropped to 3 from 12, said, “The administration is waging a campaign telling teachers how bad unions are.” He said the faculty recently received a form from the school that he called a “job application,” which included a clause giving the administration the right to fire an employee without cause or notice. A Manhattan spokeswoman did not respond to several telephone messages seeking comment.
The school has 152 teachers and 458 students in the precollege division; in the college there are 236 teachers and 980 students, a spokeswoman said.
Teachers at several other music schools — including Mannes College the New School for Music and the Lucy Moses School, a community arts school — have acquired union representation in recent years. The Juilliard School, the city’s leading music conservatory, does not have a faculty union, and a spokeswoman said senior staff members had not recalled an organizing effort in the last several decades.
At Manhattan teachers earn about $40 to $60 a lesson, Mr. Kent said, sometimes less than half of what they could charge for lessons privately. But he said the institutional connection was valuable and satisfying. At the same time, he added, the school depends on the teachers to bring in students whopay tuition.
How the school directs students is a sensitive issue. The organizers say they suspect that students are directed to younger, lower-paid instructors — many of them recent Manhattan graduates — to save money. They are demanding an end to the secrecy they say shrouds the applications.
The organizers raise other issues particular to music schools and not found on most shop floors. One is the availability of studio keys to the faculty. The school restricts the keys to cut down on copying, organizers said, angering some teachers. Teachers also claim that they have little recourse when aggrieved. “I know with representation you can’t just step on people easily,” said Mr. Jones, the flutist. The organizers also say many teachers are denied health benefits.
Some organizers made a point of drawing attention to Mr. Sirota’s school-supplied home, a luxury 3,000-square-foot penthouse that cost $1.3 million to furnish and complete in the school’s recently built tower. Mr. Sirota, a composer, has said the apartment is a valuable tool to court fund-raisers and is also a place for faculty and student concerts.
“They are splurging so much,” Mr. Mendoza said, “and then they say they have no money to give us our basic needs like health insurance.”
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