Read the full piece at The New Republic
By Jasmine Liu
In early May, students, librarians, mental health counselors, adjuncts, and tenured professors gathered in the LaGuardia Performing Arts Center to speak to the City University of New York’s board of trustees. Fresh from a picket line at LaGuardia Community College, those assembled spoke their minds with tones that ranged from temperate to unrestrainedly angry as they testified to the devastating toll that decades of disinvestment has taken on the largest urban university system in the United States. The consequences of this chronic neglect: overstuffed classrooms, meager provision of support and services, poverty wages for faculty and staff, peeling paint and falling debris. Members of PSC-CUNY, the Professional Staff Congress union representing 30,000-some faculty and staff, placed silhouetted signs in empty seats that read “Missing Adjunct,” “Missing Adviser,” and “Missing Student,” a visual symbol of all those who have had to leave the system as a result of unrelenting austerity.
Naomi Schiller, a professor of
anthropology at Brooklyn College, spoke about a student named Angela
whom she had advised just that day and who was the first in her family
to attend college. “What came up again and again were the many ways that
the leadership of this university is failing her,” Schiller said.
“Our
financial aid office is so understaffed that it can’t figure out if she
has the funding to take summer classes. The advising office has
struggled to reach students, so she’s not aware of expensive new
software she’s supposed to use to monitor her academic progress. Angela
takes classes in rooms that are much too hot. Three of her five classes
are taught by adjuncts. Only one paid office hour a week is not nearly
enough to meet her and her classmates’ needs. A strange black goo is
leaking from the ceilings of some of our lab spaces.” When she and her
student charge finally got down to discussing topics related to class,
they discovered that the journal articles Schiller recommended Angela
read were no longer available to her through CUNY’s subscriptions.
When Schiller told Angela that the board of trustees had announced $100 million in cuts to CUNY in 2024, Angela responded, “I guess they just don’t care about us—but honestly, it doesn’t surprise me.” And there are few surprises in store for the beleaguered faculty, staff, and student body of the CUNY system, for they have seen the future laid out by New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The course that has been charted for what was once a higher education gem is one of demoralizing neglect.
As
one might expect, many of the speeches delivered at the hearing came
from those who’d divined this grim future and were on hand to deliver a
rebuke to the February directives for CUNY campuses to slash their expenses by 5 to 6 percent, alongside the cuts to CUNY outlined in Adams’s proposed Fiscal Year 2024 budget.
These cuts, as they currently stand, will amount to $41 million each
year for the next three years, further straining the budgets of the 11
senior colleges, seven professional institutions, and seven community
colleges that comprise the system—the last of which depend heavily on
city funding. The budget is set to be finalized in June.
The
cuts come on the heels of $155 million in reductions to CUNY’s funding
over the past year; since June 2021, successive cuts have resulted
in the elimination of 363 part-time and full-time-equivalent staff. The
city’s rationale for deepening cuts to CUNY is that enrollments have
declined in past years, but such are precisely the dire conditions under
which funding should be reinforced, not scaled back. Since the
beginning of the pandemic, full-time enrollment across CUNY has fallen
by over 16 percent, a likely reflection of wayward institutional
support and intensifying economic precarity that has hit CUNY students
particularly hard.
“The mayor has been pretty
brutal in his brief tenure towards CUNY, which has disproportionately
harmed community colleges,” PSC-CUNY president James Davis said.
Maia
Rosenberg, a member of Jews for Racial and Economic Justice who
graduated from Brooklyn College last year, says that she chose to go to
CUNY because it was the cheapest option. She studied linguistics and
loves that CUNY is “a home to everyone regardless of their backgrounds.”
“I’d be in a classroom, and there was no majority demographic. There were people from immigrant families, people who are new immigrants themselves. There was a range of ages, a range of economic backgrounds.” Currently, around 60 percent of students who graduate from New York City’s public high schools matriculate at a CUNY campus. Seventy-five percent of undergraduates are students of color, and half come from families that earn less than $30,000 a year. The students at CUNY, Rosenberg said, are “a mini-version of the city itself.”