CUNY News in Brief (March, 2010)
On March 4, 2010, hundreds of thousands of teachers, students, and their supporters gathered across the country in protest as part of a national day of action against cuts in education. From New York to California, demonstrations in some forty states highlighted the current crisis in American public education made worse by recent waves of governmental budget cuts. In New York State, as the GC Advocate has been reporting consistently for the past several years, the cuts to education spending are staggering. The past two years alone have witnessed Governor David Paterson leading the charge in a slash and burn campaign against the State and City Universities of New York, which has robbed SUNY’s budget of roughly $400 million and the CUNY system of over $172 million, and the Wonder governor is looking to relieve its coffers of an additional $104 million in the next year in the name of fiscal responsibility.
But that’s not all! Our state’s number one Yankee fan has shifted the burden of education even more lopsidedly since taking off by raising tuition costs by 14 percent, and has expressed his wish that future tuition hikes be decided by the CUNY Board of Trustees on an annual basis without check or balance. This is the same board that recently reaffirmed its commitment to fiscal austerity in the face of economic crisis by voting to raise the salary of its lord and savior Matthew Goldstein by a modest $40,000, bringing the annual income of CUNY’s answer to Mephistopheles to well over half a million dollars. And that’s before you factor in his yearly living allowance which, needless to say, is more than you’re ever likely to earn in a year, well, with your Graduate Center degree, and all.
As the March 4th NY group pointed out in its call to action, “The K-12 public school system is also under attack. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has announced the closing of nineteen schools, given public schools’ space to charter schools operating in the same buildings, and attacked teachers’ salaries and tenure, while the board of the Metropolitan Transit Authority recently threatened to cancel student Metrocards. Meanwhile, in California, the state has issued more than 23,000 pink slips to k-12 teachers across the state, informing them they will not have a job next year, and in Rhode Island, all 93 of the teachers and staff at Central Falls High School were fired for poor performance. A move that President Obama himself praised as a necessary step in school reform. These attacks on K-12 education are also often racist since most schools to close are in communities of color. Furthermore, the charter school invasion, supported by Obama is a strategy of privatization not a strategy to better public education. According to a recent NYC Department of Education accountability report, although charter school students scored higher on standardized tests, traditional public schools actually did a better job at raising test scores. The truth is that charter schools raise their scores by picking the best public school students and rejecting English language learners and special needs students.”
Protests were organized across the city, beginning with walkouts at New York University and the New School just before noon, continuing on with a healthy showing of resistance at City College just after lunch, and followed by major protests at Hunter College immediately thereafter… where things reportedly got a little ugly. Unsubstantiated accusations have been hurled by a number of different sides in a bout of intramural bickering between organized groups purportedly fighting on the same side against the budget cuts. Regardless of what actually went on, the real story is clear: the Hunter College administration, CUNY security, and the New York Police Department once again met acts of resistance to egregious state policy with a show of overwhelming force. Before the protest even began, the NYPD raided the Hunter campus, refused entry to all non-Hunter ID holders, shut down the cafeteria, and denied protest organizers access to sound amplification devices. In the end, three protesters were arrested by police. Security is one thing, but the question needs asking: what were so many cops doing at a small-scale peaceful student protest?
Despite some disturbances at Hunter, students gathered at the Grad Center at 4PM, and marched together on Paterson’s office at 4:30. Out in front of the governor’s Manhattan address, amidst hundreds of protestors, PSC president Barbara Bowen outlined in no uncertain terms for Democracy Now! the motivation driving the nationwide protests and just how high the stakes are for students and teachers in New York State. “We want to teach the students. We want to teach students in great conditions, not substandard conditions. We want funding to make our university a great university, and that takes money. So don’t believe anybody from the Governor’s office, which is right up here, when they say that budget cuts are inevitable, that CUNY and SUNY will have to tighten their belts this year. We have already tightened too hard. We wait in lines for classes. We sit on windowsills to be in a class. We stand in line to get to a lab. We wait all day to register. That is not acceptable. And if we have more cuts, we’ll only get more of that. CUNY and SUNY have been cut proportionately more than any other state agency in New York. Think about that for a minute. CUNY and SUNY, the public higher education system, has been cut, proportionately to its size, more than any other state agency in New York. What does that tell us? That someone has an agenda of your not getting an education, not getting a first-rate education. We have to change that political agenda. That’s what we’re here for today.”
White Noise
Look who’s teaching at CUNY? White people! At a recent City Council hearing on diversity at CUNY, municipal legislators took issue with the imbalance of diversity between City University’s students and teachers. Matthew Goldstein’s henchwoman Gloriana Waters—vice-chancellor of the CUNY system—recently boasted CUNY’s rainbow of diversity in the student ranks, noting that “White, black and Hispanic undergraduates each comprise more than a quarter of the student body, and Asians account for more than 15 percent.” That’s great! And yet at the same time, white professors make up over two thirds of the city-wide CUNY faculty. This discrepancy led the City Council to demand that CUNY do more to diversify its faculty.
But according to our own president, William Kelly, shaking things up may be easier said than done. According to the New York Daily News, Wild Bill “said there’s a national shortage of minority applicants with a Ph.D. that makes recruiting difficult. It takes an average of 8-1/2 years to get a doctoral degree, and starting salaries for professors pale in comparison to that of lawyers, medical residents and financial service occupations.”
But these are only excuses, says City Councilman, and recently fired head of the council’s Higher Education Committee, Charles Barron. “If we’re the new majority, then we should be a majority of the faculty,” Barron argued. Barron followed up these comments by officially challenging CUNY trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld to a duel.
Suck on this Wiesenfeld!
Speaking of Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, the world’s sexiest trustee was recently busted down a notch by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC). The federal board of inquiry determined at the start of March that the New York Department of Education (DOE) discriminated against Debbie Almontaser—founding principal of the Khalil Gibran Academy, an Arabic language public school in Brooklyn—by forcing her to resign her position following a tsunami of controversy provoked in no small part by Wiesenfeld. Handsome Jeff argued back in 2007 that schools like the Gibran Academy would likely become breeding grounds for Islamic fundamentalism. “We have to be concerned with this type of school on a different level,” Wiesenfeld argued, “for the simple reason that…while today most Muslims are not terrorists, virtually all terrorists are Muslims.” Impeachable logic, clearly. Wiesenfeld went on to label the school a “national security concern.”
Not so, finds the EEOC. The federal commission basically ruled that arguments for Almontaser’s ouster, including Wiesenfeld’s, were, at their core, rascist, noting that the school administrator had been discriminated against “on account of her race, religion and national origin.” While the commission’s findings are nonbinding, federal investigators recommended that the DOE reinstate Almontaser to her position, that she receive back pay, and that she be compensated for damages and legal fees.
This wouldn’t be the first time, of course, that Wiesenfeld has been slapped by a public authority for his, er, intolerance. In the late 1990s, then State Senator Daniel Hevesi (himself not without some questionable character issues, it should be noted, as if you couldn’t infer that from his being a state senator!), questioned Wiesenfeld’s integrity after accusations that he referred to blacks as savages and Hassidic Jews as “thieves” were leveled by community advocate Isaac Abraham. (Jeffrey! Baby! Did you think we wouldn’t resurrect this particular skeleton in the closet? Feel free to respond!) Unlike Wiesenfeld’s previous run-ins, however, this latest controversy came directly under the rigorous examination of an independent, expert body, and was rightfully dismissed as the product of politically charged bigotry. More on this will be reported in these pages as the situation develops and demands.
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