PHEEIA: A Near Miss, But For How Long?
If you’ve been following the torturous progression of this year’s state budget through the legislature, you probably already know about PHEEIA, the Orwellian-named Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act. (You can find the Advocate’s previous coverage of PHEEIA here and here.)
In reality, the only “empowerment” PHEEIA offers is the power of CUNY and SUNY’s trustees to raise tuition annually and to charge more for some majors and some schools than for others. PHEEIA will definitely not be “empowering” CUNY’s low-income students, many of whom will be forced to leave school if it passes.
As anyone who has taught at CUNY knows, a shocking number of CUNY students are already working one or more jobs, often full-time, so they can afford to stay in school, in many cases leaving them precious little time to devote to their studies. Any tuition hike will inevitably force many of these already financially marginal students to drop out.
In 1976, when tuition was first introduced at CUNY (it was free from 1870 to 1976), enrollment dropped from 272,000 to 213,000. Tuition hikes disproportionately hurt students of color. Again using 1976 as an example, CUNY reverted from becoming a majority student-of-color institution for the first time in 1976 to once again being majority-white in 1977. (I’ll be working on analyzing more recent data on enrollment and tuition for future posts.)
While the naming of PHEEIA is cause for some black humor, it also illustrates an important political point. The current attack on public education, both K-12 and university, is being sold as progressive reform. In K-12 education, which is bearing the brunt of the attack, it’s taking the form of overt privatization through charter schools, an issue that I’ll write more about in a future post. In higher education, the privatization is subtler, at least in the United States. (It was not so subtle in Puerto Rico, where a student strike this spring defeated not only the government’s privatization scheme, but also a tuition hike and other attacks. A post about the University of Puerto Rico strike is also in the works.)
In any case, the political strategy of privatization is to sell it as reform. By the time people realize what’s really happening, so the thinking goes, it will be too late to reverse it. It’s the same strategy that Bush used to gather support for the invasion of Iraq: lie until you establish “facts on the ground” and create a new status quo, then move on before the dust clears. As cynical pundits and political operatives sometimes say, it’s easier to apologize than to ask permission.
PHEEIA is dead for now, since it was not included in the budget that was passed by the Assembly on Monday, but Democratic leaders in the Senate are already making plans to reintroduce it as early as next week. Before Monday, Governor Paterson’s insistence that PHEEIA be included in the budget bill had been a major sticking point between Paterson and Democrats in the Assembly.
The bill that the Assembly finally passed not only removed PHEEIA but also restored many of Paterson’s cuts to education and social services. With regard to CUNY, funds for the Tuition Assistance Program and community college funding were restored but not the proposed $84 million cut to CUNY’s senior colleges, according to Kate Pfordresher, Director of Research and Public Policy for the PSC.
As soon as the bill was passed, however, Paterson immediately vetoed many of the restorations, with more to come. Now another fight is likely over whether the legislature will overturn Paterson’s line-item vetoes, which could also start as early as next week. Keep an eye on the PSC’s website for further updates and actions to take. While lobbying politicians in Albany is important, we also a need to build more forceful forms of resistance to these attacks. The next major step in this effort will be the October 7th national day of action to defend public education, the follow-up to the March 4th day of action. Stay tuned to this blog for more on those plans as they develop.
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