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NY Times Op-Ed, May 26, 2020, 5:00 a.m. E
The Backward Logic of Austerity Threatens America’s Most Vibrant Campus
CUNY must be saved from needless cuts.
By Ben Lerner
Mr. Lerner is a writer and a professor of English at Brooklyn College.
Last month the administration at Brooklyn College, part of the City
University of New York, announced that — in anticipation of a coming
budget crisis — departments must reduce their course offerings by 25
percent. This will mean firing large numbers of adjunct professors, some
of whom will lose their health insurance, in the middle of a pandemic.
(Mass firings have already started at other CUNY campuses, 450 to date
at John Jay alone; they could happen at Brooklyn any day.) Remaining
classes will then swell, which is bad for in-person education, but worse
if classes remain online, as anybody who has tried to teach on Zoom can
attest. The administration has said the projected savings from
terminating adjuncts and ballooning classes at Brooklyn College would be
$1.4 million. On the scale of New York State’s budget, the system’s main
funding source, that’s a rounding error; for our adjuncts and our
students, it’s a disaster. After years of being brutalized by Albany,
CUNY has apparently so thoroughly internalized the backward logic of
austerity that it responds to crisis by attacking itself.
Can I skip the part where I drive home the importance of public
education by highlighting a brilliant student and what she’s achieved
despite economic hardship? I know and admire scores of such students,
but this isn’t only about the stars. It’s about the commons, the fact
that an outstanding public education should be available to everyone, in
New York and beyond. CUNY is the nation’s largest urban education
system; its 275,000 students are spread across 25 campuses. Brooklyn
College, like the rest of CUNY, crackles with energy and intelligence;
its diversity represents a wealth that transcends any fiscal metric;
that’s why it is, despite decades of disinvestment from the state, the
most vibrant campus I know, here or abroad.
It also largely runs on underpaid adjuncts (who are often graduate
students). In recent weeks, these adjuncts and their students have
struggled valiantly to move the university online, as Zoom classes
become sites not only for learning but also for mutual aid. (The
correlation of Covid-19 deaths with race and class is well documented;
the CUNY student body is around 30 percent Latinx; 25 percent black; 21
percent Asian; and 23 percent white, many of whom are white immigrants.
Nearly a third of our students at Brooklyn have sick family members;
many are in mourning.) CUNY adjunct faculty members and their students
are often the city’s essential workers, stocking the grocery stores or
driving Ubers or ambulances (is an Uber ambulance next for the
privatized city — or is that already here?) while caring for older and
younger family members. And then they show up to take or teach the
chemistry or composition class, to reassert with every virtual meeting
the actual stakes of living and learning together.
Austerity is powerful people saying “we’ll have to endure painful cuts”
when “we” means “everybody but us.” In the coming months, CUNY might
well be told by Albany to slash its payrolls and compromise its classes.
At that point, the CUNY leadership, along with our strong union and
student activists, along with anybody who cares about the city, should
fight back. It should demand that Gov. Andrew Cuomo increase taxes on
the wealthy, issue bonds the Federal Reserve will buy, or otherwise find
ways to make our city university system a priority. In early February, a
poll conducted for the American Federation of Teachers found that some
90 percent of New Yorkers support taxing the wealthy to raise public
revenue. Democrats control both houses of the State Legislature and the
executive. The rhetoric of austerity is as empty as the luxury towers we
pass by on our socially distanced walks.
The adjuncts I work with typically have — or at least they had — several
jobs in addition to their own teaching; how else to survive in a city
from which all but the very rich are increasingly priced out? And still
these adjuncts are spending unpaid extra hours with their students,
standing with them in this disastrous time, trying to remind them of
other times and human possibilities through the study of a poem or work
of political theory or a strand of DNA. The CUNY administration should
be asking how it can best support these important teachers now. Let’s
start by not firing them.
This pandemic has made painfully clear both our shared vulnerability and
its uneven distribution. So far, our underrecognized and underpaid front
line workers — a great number of them CUNY students and graduates — have
been receiving nightly applause. Applaud their adjunct teachers, too.
But we owe the adjuncts more than applause: We must stop — in the realm
of education and beyond, in this city and beyond — the broken record of
austerity, in which crises caused or compounded by underfunding public
institutions are used to justify another round of cuts.
Ben Lerner is a professor of English at Brooklyn College and the author,
most recently, of “The Topeka School,” a novel.
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