Wait-Listed at CUNY, Part II: The Road to Privatization
In my last post, I discussed the creation of a waiting list for entrance to CUNY schools, a development that promises to decrease access to the university for poor students and students of color. But not everyone is unhappy with this development. As quoted in CUNY Matters, the administration’s official publication, CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein practically crowed that CUNY now “joins the mainstream of highly regarded universities that routinely employ waiting lists in order to manage the available space.” However, the same article also gives a second explanation for the waiting list, claiming that “To maintain academic quality, the University has created a waiting list and installed new evaluation programs.” In a particularly Orwellian twist, the article is entitled “Streamlining the Path for New Applicants,” although it doesn’t explain how a waiting list will help “streamline” the application process.
These competing explanations illustrate one facet of the PR strategy for privatizing CUNY. In reality, the waiting list is being caused by insufficient budget and space. CUNY schools are bursting at the seams, with record high enrollments: according to the New York Times City Room blog, “Since 1999, enrollment at the senior colleges has risen 28 percent, while community college enrollment had climbed 45 percent.” Schools have added more early morning, late night and weekend classes (most of which are being taught by adjuncts) to accommodate the influx, but it’s not enough to absorb all the students who are entering school now as a result of the recession, both in order to improve their job prospects and because they can’t find any work. At the same time, the university’s budget is steadily declining thanks to the repeated cuts of the past two years, making it even harder to accommodate the surge in enrollment.
But rather than presenting the lack of capacity as a blow to CUNY’s mission of educating all New Yorkers, CUNY Matters describes it as a positive development that will improve the quality of a CUNY education. “Quality” is almost always invoked by the administration and others when what’s really happening is that poor students and students of color are being tossed out of CUNY. As I’ve discussed before, a major part of the strategy for selling the privatization of CUNY is to frame it as reform. For Goldstein and others, the more CUNY looks like an elite private university, the better CUNY is doing. The idea of CUNY as a public service that is meant to serve the most in need is totally foreign to them, which is why only a movement from below, a movement of students and workers, can reverse the privatization of CUNY.
The CUNY Matters article trumpets the supposed increase in academic quality at CUNY, writing that “The increasing enrollments go hand in hand with the University’s successful efforts to raise the academic bar at all of the colleges.” The phrasing here is very slippery, probably on purpose. First, it suggests that the increasing enrollment is a result of the academic improvements at CUNY rather than the recession, although it doesn’t actually say this. Instead, it says that these two developments go “hand in hand,” which is true insofar as they are both happening at the same time, but which also suggests a causal connection that mostly doesn’t exist. (The alleged improved academic quality may have convinced some students to apply to CUNY, but the vast majority of the enrollment surge is undoubtedly due to the recession. Furthermore, most students whose decision to attend CUNY was affected by its improved academics were also influenced by the difficulty of affording private tuition at the moment.) Second, the article doesn’t mention that the main way that CUNY has “raise[d] the academic bar” of its student body is by excluding low-performing students—which, not incidentally, is the same technique used by charter schools to boost their academic performance over public schools—rather than by devoting additional resources to improving the skills and performance of those students.
The privatization of CUNY is proceeding mostly unnoticed along three parallel tracks: 1) creating a more elite university and student body, as discussed above; 2) creating a more vulnerable, cheaper, more flexible labor force; and 3) gradually freeing CUNY from public control, as attempted in the recently defeated PHEEIA legislation, which would have allowed the Board of Trustees to raise tuition without legislative approval. (Already, barely half of CUNY’s funding comes from public sources, with most of the rest of CUNY’s operating expenses coming from tuition.) CUNY can’t be privatized all at once because it would be political suicide for anyone who tried it, so instead it’s being done one small piece at a time.
In the news coverage of the waiting list, I only came across one critic of the waiting list: Ydanis Rodriguez, a recently elected City Councilman and chair of the Council’s Higher Education Committee. Not coincidentally, Rodriguez is also a CCNY graduate and was a leader in the 1989 student strike there, which goes to show the long-term impact that activist movements can have. Not only can they win demands in the short term, but they train a layer of activists who can supply future generations with valuable skills, values and experience.
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