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Chronicle of Higher Education, JUNE 02, 2020 PREMIUM
2,000 Instructors Tell Cuomo CUNY Must Be Protected From Budget Cuts
By Emma Pettit
More than 2,000 City University of New York faculty members are calling
on Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo to swear off budget cuts and fund existing
faculty jobs this year at the nation’s largest urban university system.
Such cuts would be “educationally damaging, economically misguided, and
cruel,” reads a joint letter, sent on Monday. It’s the latest action
taken by concerned instructors who see sharp reductions on the horizon.
In a plan released in April, the state’s budget office projected a
$13.3-billion shortfall due to Covid-19. Without mitigating federal aid,
a host of services, including higher education, would face steep cuts,
the plan says. Some of CUNY’s 25 constituent institutions responded by
making plans to cut faculty jobs and course sections. But the faculty
and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress, has been fighting
back, loudly.
From the union’s perspective, administrators are caving in too quickly
and threatening a powerful public good. CUNY’s colleges are some of the
most potent engines of social mobility for their hundreds of thousands
of students. Armed with a degree, low-income black and brown students
find footholds in the middle class. And it's those populations, the
union notes, that have been disproportionately harmed by Covid-19 and
that will continue to struggle in a post-pandemic economy.
If CUNY is substantially weakened, said Barbara Bowen, the union’s
president, then it won’t be able to help the city and its residents recover.
'Harvard of the Proletariat'
First, a brief history lesson. In the mid-19th century, higher education
in New York City was available only to the wealthy. That is, until
Townsend Harris, president of the city’s Board of Education, declared a
new path. The city should “open the doors to all,” he wrote in a letter
published in two local newspapers, and “let the children of the rich and
the poor take their seats together.”
The Free Academy was founded in 1847. It later became known as the
“Harvard of the proletariat,” and eventually grew into a university
system with 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges, an honors
college, and six graduate and professional schools that educate 275,000
degree-seeking students.
Today, most of those students come from black, Latinx, or Asian
families, many with low household incomes. CUNY students frequently work
low-wage jobs, raise their own children, and support their parents. They
often struggle with food and housing insecurity while managing their
course loads, according to a 2019 Hope Center report.
Many of those students enter college poor but graduate, research has
shown, on a route to the middle class, often the upper middle class. A
2017 study that tracked students from nearly every college in the
country found that the CUNY system “propelled almost six times as many
low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all eight Ivy
League campuses, plus Duke, MIT, Stanford, and Chicago, combined,” wrote
a New York Times columnist.
But since long before the pandemic, CUNY has struggled from chronic
underfunding, which in turn has hampered some student success, according
to the union and New York City’s public advocate, who published a
December 2019 report on the subject. Bowen told state lawmakers in
February that the senior colleges faced a shortage of supplies and
equipment, reduced course offerings, and cuts in library hours, and that
faculty and staff positions were being left unfilled.
There’s also what’s known as the TAP Gap. State law requires public
colleges to provide discounted tuition to students receiving what are
called TAP grants. Students with the maximum award get a grant of up to
$5,000 and a tuition waiver for charges above that. But the state
provides CUNY with only $5,000 for that student, leaving a gap for the
rest of the tuition that the CUNY college covers, according to the
public advocate's report. As tuition increases, the gap that must be
filled grows.
According to the union’s analysis, state funding per student at CUNY's
senior colleges, when adjusted for inflation and enrollment, has
declined by 20 percent since the 2008 recession and by nearly 5 percent
during Cuomo’s tenure as governor.
The state budget office rejects that math. In an email a spokesman said
the Cuomo administration places “a high value on CUNY and the education
opportunities it provides New Yorkers, which is why it increased funding
for CUNY 29% -- nearly $750 million -- prior to the pandemic.” That
money, said the spokesman, Freeman Klopott, has supported a variety of
areas, including operations, employee benefits, debt service, and
need-based tuition support.
Still, those numbers were crunched before Covid-19 hit. Amid the
pandemic, and in the absence of federal funding to offset the state's
revenue loss, “we will have no choice,” Klopott said, “but to cut state
spending by over $10 billion.”
Despite the budget office's April plan, the exact cuts facing the CUNY
system are still unknown. Currently, state aid finances a little more
than half of the system’s $3.7-billion budget, and 14 percent comes from
New York City. The city has told CUNY that it is making “significant
cuts” in the current fiscal year and is looking at a $31.6-million
reduction target for the next one, a CUNY spokesman said in a written
statement.
Colleges Plan for Belt-Tightening
In recent weeks, some CUNY colleges have begun doing what other colleges
across the country have also done: looking for ways to slash spending.
In a May 8 memo the provost of the John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
in Manhattan, wrote that it was preparing for "a worst-case scenario"
and would be issuing non-reappointment letters to all adjuncts on
one-semester contracts. The union has said that would eliminate more
than 400 jobs. (The college did not provide a comment to The Chronicle
before publication.) Meanwhile, news spread at the College of Staten
Island about a potential 35-percent reduction in adjunct faculty
members. (In an email, a spokeswoman said the college had discussed "a
range of possibilities," including the 35-percent figure.)
And at Brooklyn College, the provost told department chairs in an email
that the number of class sections must be reduced by 25 percent,
compared with last fall. (While department chairs are turning in course
schedules with such a reduction, it’s being used to “assess budgetary
and equity perspectives,” and no final decisions have been made, a
college spokesman said in an email.)
CUNY faculty members have pushed back against each measure, questioning
why such seemingly drastic action is being taken before any budgets have
been made final. Ben Lerner, a writer and professor of English at
Brooklyn College, criticized CUNY in The New York Times for so
thoroughly internalizing “the backward logic of austerity that it
responds to crisis by attacking itself.”
Budget cuts have been normalized as a reaction to harsh economic
realities, as if that’s what has to happen, said Jeanne Theoharis, a
professor of political science at Brooklyn College. But those are
choices being made, she said.
And at other times, Theoharis pointed out, CUNY has made different
choices. For example, in 1935, in the midst of the Great Depression, New
York’s mayor wielded a silver-plated shovel and broke ground on
construction for the new Brooklyn College.
Department chairs signed an earlier letter opposing contingent-faculty
layoffs via contract nonrenewals and course reductions. Those options
display “a failure of imagination,” the letter says, “as well as of
moral courage.”
The union, which has 30,000 members, made a television commercial
asserting that hurting CUNY means “hurting our recovery.” Faculty
members staged a motorcade protest last month, driving their cars and
bicycles past Cuomo’s Manhattan office and onto Billionaires' Row.
Coronavirus Hits Campus
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to
respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The
Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is
affecting campuses.\
They’ve also demanded a public accounting of some $237 million in
federal Cares Act money that CUNY institutions have received. (At least
half of that money is to be used for emergency financial aid for
students.) Guidance from the U.S. Department of Education says that
colleges that accept such money are required to “continue to pay
employees and contractors to the greatest extent practicable based on
the unique financial circumstances of each institution.”
And the union has joined others across New York in urging Cuomo to tax
the ultra-wealthy to offset the state's revenue losses.
“We’re making a principled argument,” said Vincent DiGirolamo, president
of the union's Baruch College chapter, that a recovery from the
Covid-19-spawned economic crisis is entwined with CUNY’s health. As the
strength of the collective faculty is felt, he said, its message
reverberates upward.
Lawmakers have lent support. One prominent New York congresswoman,
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said in a written statement that in “a time of
economic crisis, we need to be investing in New York City’s
working-class institutions,” not eliminating hundreds of union jobs.
“Austerity is not the answer, solidarity is.”
Toby Ann Stavisky, a Democrat who leads the New York Senate’s
higher-education committee, co-sponsored a bill that would temporarily
tax those who earn more than $5 million a year to fund New York's
schools, including the CUNY and SUNY systems, The Nation reported. “CUNY
hasn’t been properly funded for probably two decades, if not longer,
because more and more of the burden has fallen on students, and not the
state,” Stavisky told the news outlet. “We just can’t take a meat
cleaver and slash.”
On Friday the union reached an agreement with CUNY to extend to June 30
the deadline for notifying adjuncts about their fall-semester
appointments. “We created the need for the university to hold off on
devastating layoffs,” Bowen told union members in an email.
“But the fight is far from over,” she cautioned. An additional month
means more time to build the pressure.
Emma Pettit is a staff reporter at The Chronicle. Follow her on Twitter
@EmmaJanePettit, or email her at emma.pet...@chronicle.com.
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