The City University of New York (CUNY) is at the cultural and intellectual center of working class life in New York City; a common resource taken for granted, but severely forsaken, where students and faculty alike are systematically mistreated and defrauded. Before 1976, CUNY was free for all students. The foundation of the university has historically been free and quality education for New Yorkers, but, of course, this is no longer the reality. Austerity politics and class warfare have made a historically robust working class institution, which New Yorkers could look upon with pride, feel neglected and derelict, both materially and administratively. CUNY has been treated as something increasingly irrelevant, as full-time faculty are supplanted by low-wage, precarious adjunct labor, and student life and well-being are ignored, despite becoming an increasingly crucial resource for education and mobility for more than 275,000 students — and thousands more alumni — to the point of severe and dangerous overcrowding. Putting aside overpaid administrators, crumbling, dilapidated infrastructure, and rampant food insecurity amongst both students and faculty (a recent study showed nearly half of CUNY student are facing food and housing insecurity), it’s a common sight on CUNY campuses to find students crying in the bursar’s office, begging at the financial aid desk, asking for MetroCard swipes in subway stations, looking for non-existent campus health centers, coming in late to class because of broken elevators, and sitting on floors because of lack of adequate student space.
CUNY was founded as the Free Academy in 1847 as a tuition-free university for working class New Yorkers, and provided exceptionally high-quality education for free to all students until 1976. For decades, City College was known as the “proletarian Harvard,” and in 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus and reclaimed it as the University of Harlem, opening it up to serve the needs of the community. The abandonment of CUNY’s tuition-free policy was engendered by the adoption of open admissions in the Fall of 1970, when Black and brown students were welcomed in much broader numbers onto CUNY campuses. In response, CUNY was no longer treated by the City as a sacred, common good for New Yorkers, but as a space to be policed and where students felt less and less valued. Though student space at Hunter College is already limited, the administration has been negotiating behind closed doors to rent out a section of the West Building to Starbucks and Grishko, an international dancewear company. Though Hunter College has rented out space to private companies before, there is a wider trend within the CUNY system toward a complete and utter lack of transparency into how space is being used. Instead of looking to policy solutions to the lack of public funding for CUNY, administrators are forced to cut deals with private corporations to bring in money behind closed doors from students and student government. Meanwhile, in 2018, the President of Hunter College, Jennifer Raab —a notable ally of former Mayor Rudy Giuliani, through which she got the position despite no background in higher education — pulled in $486,133, being the third highest paid CUNY employee after former Chancellor James Milliken, with a total pay of $519,110, and the Dean of the School of Public Health, Ayman El Mohandes, with a total pay of $544,685. Raab’s annual income from CUNY precedes that of the President of Baruch College, Mitchel Wallerstein, with a total pay $467,874, and that of the President of Queens College, Félix Matos Rodríguez (now Chancellor), with a total pay of $440,062. Meanwhile, student activity fee money has gone to expensive dinners that aren’t promoted or accessible to students, but to high-dollar donors and the CUNY Board of Trustees, while students and workers go hungry and unhoused.
To make CUNY free again, students, faculty, and community members must coalesce to build a militant movement fighting not just to make CUNY tuition-free once again, but for freedom and dignity for everyone who has a stake in public higher education in the City. Doing so means collectively recognizing that what’s been happening to CUNY over recent decades is class warfare, and the only way to win is to organize and fight back. New York City has some of the most concentrated wealth in the world, and much of it goes untaxed and could go to improving CUNY, making it tuition and fee-free, and making public transit free. There are administrators at CUNY making hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, in addition to their bonuses and presidential funds with millions to spend at their discretion, while adjunct faculty are living in poverty and students are going hungry, and reassessing how these highly-paid administrators are compensated can bring much-needed money back to students and workers, and we can begin to ask ourselves if space would be better used for student art, food pantries, or study space instead of Starbucks. To demand such change from CUNY means building that coalition, it means PSC-CUNY breaking the Taylor Law and going on strike for fair pay for their members, it means students going on strike and organizing, it means workers across the industry — beyond the professionals in the PSC, such as janitors, cafeteria workers, IT staff, and student-workers — organizing and demanding a free and fair university for all. Students and workers withholding their tuition and labor from CUNY is the pressure point the City and State are most fearful of having pressed, not the least in vain of the history of student occupations, notably in the 1970s and 1990s, and working class organizing at CUNY.
Recent publicity stunts by the State include the extraordinarily restrictive Excelsior Scholarship, which benefits a tiny fraction of CUNY students by covering the infamous TAP Gap. There are annual tuition hikes, such as the upcoming 2020 hike of $320 ($200 in tution and $120 for health services), which stretch available aid that isn’t TAP or Pell, and hurt students further with little improvement to life on campus for students or for faculty. Students are required to take between 15 and 18 credits each semester and graduate within four years to remain eligible and to prevent Excelsior grants becoming Excelsior debts, in addition to being required to live in-state for at least the same amount of time they’ve received the Excelsior Scholarship for after graduating. Working class CUNY students are unable to meet the demands of the state-sponsored scholarship, having to juggle a commuter life of work, family, school, and other material obligations that make it impossible for most students to benefit at all from Governor Cuomo’s false promise of free tuition in public higher education. This is in addition to the family income requirements, which narrow it even further to only being available to middle class families. Only between 3,000 to 5,000 students benefit from the Excelsior Scholarship, of the quarter of a million students enrolled at CUNY. The solution is simple: a truly free and fully-funded CUNY, one that supports all of its students, pays a dignified wage and provides decent working conditions to all of its workers, and maintains the material quality of its campuses for students by making them accessible and available to all New Yorkers.
CUNY needs to be transformed, not reformed. CUNY needs to be entirely tuition-free once again, and needs democratic governance by its students and workers. A student and worker-led movement needs to emerge out of the struggle for dignified pay for adjuncts — a minimum of $7k per course — out of the struggle for unions across CUNY cafeterias, out of the struggle for student space on campus, out of the struggle for accessibility across CUNY, out of the struggle for ethnic studies at CUNY, out of the struggle for universal free transit in the City, and out of the struggle for an end to student and faculty food insecurity. Students and faculty, especially adjunct faculty, need to recognize the intersection in their struggles at CUNY: working conditions on campus are students’ learning conditions, and the struggle for worker power and student freedom are one and the same. At this time when the interests of CUNY students and workers are being neglected by administrators, their unions, and City and State governments, the only people who can fight for free, dignified, and high-quality public education at CUNY are the students and workers at CUNY themselves. Seeing tuition imposed on CUNY for what it is, which is violence — through starving, suffering, working class students and impoverished faculty — and fighting it as the class war that it is, waged on these students and workers by the City and the ruling class that it protects, is a necessary orientation to making CUNY free once again. It will take organization and action, it will take those very students and workers going on strike and supporting each other in their unique but connected struggles, facing the same adversaries. The solution to building a free and just CUNY is the same it will take to build a free and just world: solidarity.
Photo: CUNY students at a protest on November 22, 2019, against 500 new police officers being placed in the MTA. Credit: Decolonize This Place
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