An Open Letter to Attorney General Eliot Spitzer
by Advocate Staff
From the Undersigned Students and Faculty of The City University of New York
Dear Mr. Spitzer,
It is becoming increasingly likely that you will be the next governor of the state of New York. As such, you will be in a position to significantly influence the future direction of the City University of New York (CUNY) – the largest urban university in the nation. As you know, the governor of New York is permitted to nominate up to 10 members of the CUNY Board of Trustees and it is through this nomination process that you will have the opportunity during your tenure to create a new, fairer, more democratic, and more representative board of trustees.
Although the press likes to talk about the great improvements at CUNY over the last few years, the university still faces a number of significant challenges. Like President Bush’s plan to leave no child behind, the CUNY Board of Trustees has focused on increasing standards at CUNY through proficiency exams and higher entrance scores without offering any subsequent decreases in class size or course loads, or significant increases in student resources, faculty wages, or the faculty to student ratio at the university. All of this comes despite the fact that the Board of Trustees has increased tuition at CUNY schools across all levels, including the community colleges and the graduate school, whose students were hit with an 18% increase in their tuition last year.
During this same period, however, the CUNY Board of Trustees approved huge pay increases for the Chancellor and the college presidents, equaling as much as $2 million each year – or the equivalent of 7,000 scholarships to cover the new tuition increases. CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein alone received a 40% increase to his annual salary. In addition to this the board has continually conducted itself in the most undemocratic fashion, often holding meetings and passing unpopular resolutions during the summer and winter months when students are away from their schools and thus unlikely to find out about any vote until it is too late, and refusing to bargain with the faculty and staff union until the last possible minute, causing employees to wait for as long as three years to receive their own relatively tiny retroactive wage increases.
A close look at the composition of the board of trustees will reveal to even the most naïve observer that the board sadly does not and cannot possibly reflect the interests of the students, faculty, or staff of the university, but that they instead reflect the interests of the Republican politicians who appointed them and the investment firms, development corporations, and the for-profit education firms they work for. How, for instance, can Benno Schmidt, the Chairman of the Board of Edison Schools, a corporation whose sole interest is to privatize public education, simultaneously sit on the board of a public university system like CUNY? In addition, none of the appointed members of the board have PhDs, only one has any experience teaching at CUNY, and although many have graduated from CUNY schools, many also have spent long years at elite corporate and private education institutions and have clearly long since forgotten their years at CUNY.
A university is not a corporation and should not be run like one. We urge you to take this opportunity seriously and to consult the university community before making future Board of Trustees nominations. We also ask that you nominate future board members who promise to make the board more accountable to the the students, faculty and staff of the university, and who promise to fight for the university’s interests in Albany, set a fixed and fair tuition scale, significantly increasing the number of new tenure track faculty positions, offer some kind of parity to the adjunct lecturers who make up more than half of the teaching faculty at the university, deal fairly with the university unions, including the Professional Staff Congress, and make the university truly accessible to all of the people of the city that it serves.
We wish you all the best in your new position and are ready to help you make the university truly the best that it can be.
The Advocate Newspaper of the Graduate Center CUNY
The Doctoral Students Council of the Graduate Center CUNY
James D Hoff, English CUNY GC
Alan Feigenberg, City College School of Architecture, Urban Design and Landscape Architecture
Mark Schiebe, English
Matt Lau, English
Abigail Schoneboom, Sociology
Patrick Reilly, Comparative Literature
Dan Skinner, Politics
Carolina Barrera-Tobon, Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Languages and Literatures
Nicky Leifer, Physics
