If the workers took a notion they could stop all speeding trains;
Every ship upon the ocean they can tie with mighty chains.
Every wheel in the creation, every mine and every mill;
Fleets and armies of the nation, will at their command stand still.

On November 17, I marched with hundreds of other CUNY Graduate Center students from Thirty-Fourth Street to Union Square as part of a day-long series of student walkouts and demonstrations across the nation. Armed with a large “Student Strike” banner and about a dozen “book shields”—depicting the covers of such radical classics as Emma Goldman’s My Life, Ursula K Leguin’s The Dispossessed, and Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, we filled the sidewalk and the streets with our bodies and our voices. Marchers chanted “Education is a Right/ Fight Fight Fight,” and “All Day all Week/ Occupy Wall Street.” Around Eighteenth Street, as we approached Union Square, the crowd passed a group of several workers dismantling one of those ubiquitous sets of scaffolding that dot the city landscape. As we passed the workers stopped their lifting, smiled and waved, and as we waved back the chant went up through the crowd, “Students and Workers/ Shut the City Down.” The workers seemed pleased with this chant as did the students. Indeed, this particular rallying cry has become surprisingly common among student protests at CUNY and within the OWS movement. I remember feeling a little embarrassed the first time I heard it shouted at a PSC rally years ago, as if such a statement were simply wishful thinking; but the more I’ve heard it repeated and the more I’ve seen young students and faculty members embracing the chant, vigorously shaking their fists in the air, the more it has come to seem like a real possibility.

Just about two weeks earlier, on November 2, protesters at Occupy Oakland had put that very idea into practice, calling a general strike among students and workers for the entire city of Oakland. This was a bold and controversial move and many in the Oakland OWS movement and the general assembly were resistant to issue a call for a city-wide strike that they knew had little chance of actually materializing. Although the vast majority of Oaklanders went to work that day, those who came out to rally and demonstrate managed to shut down a freeway and a port for the entire day, clashing violently with police throughout the night as they first occupied and then defended more spaces throughout the city. Now Oakland is calling for another (this one likely to be much more successful) massive day-long strike of all the west coast ports on December 12. This is not an unprecedented move. The west coast ports have been shut down by longshoremen strikes several times over economic and political issues that directly affect the working class. But the longshoremen are some of the most militant union workers in the country. It will be a lot harder to convince the average worker to take such action. Overall, the idea of a serious city-wide strike, where ordinary workers such as  teachers, postal carriers, secretaries, professors, students, and bus and train drivers, all refuse to work, has not yet even begun to take shape. While workers in cities, states, and even entire nations across the globe often use the general strike as a means of achieving political ends, there has not been a city-wide general strike in the United States since a spontaneous strike erupted in Oakland in 1946 as part of an effort to unionize department store workers.  So why are Americans now so afraid of the general strike?

The reasons for this hesitancy are legion. In New York and other states, laws like the Taylor Law offer stiff penalties to public sector unions that dare to take any kind of job action. But most working class people have never even heard of such laws. The plain fact is that working class people today lead extraordinarily insecure lives, where a day’s work could be the difference between buying medicine and paying the rent or having to choose between the two. And even those workers who can afford a day off have reason to be hesitant. Calling in sick on the day of a planned strike might be seen by some private employers as sufficient grounds for termination, and few workers are in a position to take that chance with their families’ futures. So what has to change? What has to happen that would protect the economically vulnerable while still radically disrupting the normalcy of day to day alienation and exploitation that define our age?

To begin with, if we are going to talk the talk we need to start walking the walk. If students and workers are going to shut any city down, they must first come together to seriously talk about combining their power in a united front. In some places this is already happening, but not nearly at the pace needed to make sufficient gains among the rank and file of such unions as the TWU, DC37, PSC, and AFT. As I’ve argued in these pages before, it is essential that the rank and file of such unions begin to create spaces for organizing outside of the union leadership structures that have, just by virtue of their reliance upon the state for their existence, compromised the real power of their members—that is, their power to withhold their labor. Further, once these channels of communication are in place, it will probably require more than a strike call from an OWS general Assembly to get people out of their seats and into the streets. More than likely it will take a crisis of one kind or another.

In 1946, in Oakland, that crisis took the form of a police crackdown on protesting department store workers. In 2011 the options are seemingly wide-open, since crisis seems to have become the permanent state of affairs in occupied America. Some possible scenarios to watch out for include a further (potentially fatal) escalation of police brutality against students or Occupy protesters; massive austerity measures that further cut essential safety net programs like Medicare, Social Security, or veteran’s health (all already in the works); or a protracted union contract battle capable of generating sentiments of working class solidarity like those expressed in Wisconsin last year. A particularly sympathetic union, if there is still such a thing, threatened by state cuts or, better, a private union being exploited for corporate profit, might also offer a potential battleground in which to again test the mettle of the general strike. The Sotheby’s lock-out is one example that actually seems to be gaining some steam. But the PSC is also on the verge of a potentially protracted and ugly contract battle.  As the PSC moves forward there will be many opportunities to frame that battle as yet another example of the one percent’s attack on the 99 percent of New Yorkers who attend or work at public schools and universities across the nation. As the negotiations over course load, class size, adjunct parity, healthcare, and job security come to a head, it is important that we seek out allies outside our own ranks by connecting these issues to the larger problems of our current economic system which favors the already grotesquely wealthy at the expense of nearly everyone else.

Without a doubt the Occupy Wall street movement has reinvigorated the left, helping to make possible previously unimaginable acts of intelligent and creative resistance. But it has also managed to create important and vital public spaces in cities and towns across the country where electrical workers and professors, janitors and art handlers, the unionized and non-unionized, can come together across different industries and recognize their common struggle. Such solidarity across sectors will continue to make radical actions more possible and the idea of an eventual general strike a lot more plausible.

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St. Mark’s Bookshop Saved!

The beginning of November witnessed a major victory for independent, small businesses in New York City.  St. Mark’s Bookshop, a Lower East Side institution for over thirty years, was threatened with eviction by its landlord, Cooper Union, as it struggled to scrape together monies to meet its monthly rent.  The possibility of the store’s ouster by Cooper Union sparked a massive backlash from community activists, booklovers across the nation, and even celebrity personalities like Salman Rushdie.

On November 3, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, who had arbitrated the dispute, announced that a deal between the bookstore and Cooper Union had been brokered which would allow the business to remain open for at least another year, and at a reduced rent. “I congratulate both sides for agreeing to new terms,” Stringer said, “and I also want to salute the small businesses, independent bookstores, artists, and activists that have traditionally made the East Village so special.”

Under the agreed upon terms, Cooper Union will slash the monthly rent charged to St. Mark’s Bookshop by $2,500, from $20,000 per month to $17, 500, and has forgiven the entirety of a $7,500 loan made to the store.  The Huffington Post reports that the shop, in return, has agreed to work with Cooper Union students to devise a business plan that will allow for sustainable growth in the short, medium, and long terms, and has a year to begin turning larger profits or they’re out.

Cooper Union, who is facing a budgetary crisis of its own, was forced to back down on its threats to evict St. Mark’s Bookshop after a massive media campaign was launched to defend the local business.  A petition that was sent to the school demanding the bookstore not be thrown out on the street, was signed by nearly 45,000 people. But ultimately, the store will need more than signatures to survive.  St. Mark’s Bookshop has been experiencing sagging sales for years with increased competition from mega-sellers such as Barnes and Noble’s and the move by many book buyers to purchase items from online distributors like Amazon.com.

In the meantime, the store is hosting a party to celebrate both its recent victory as well as its thirty-fourth year anniversary in the neighborhood. Those interested in swinging through to grab a glass of wine (and buy a book!) can do so on Thursday, December 1 from 5:30-7:30. The bookstore is located at 31 Third Avenue (one block north of St. Mark’s Place).

DSC Issues Important Resolutions in Response to Recent Events

On October 28, the Doctoral Students’ Council released three important resolutions in response to recent events and revelations that impact CUNY students directly.  The first resolution condemns New York Police Department spying on CUNY campuses and the targeting of Muslim student organizations. It expresses, in no uncertain terms, solidarity with the Brooklyn College faculty and the CUNY School of Law faculty in opposing these surveillance activities that were clearly demonstrated to be independent of any criminal investigation. Furthermore, the DSC resolved that it calls “upon CUNY’s central administration to condemn the violation of the NYPD-CUNY Memorandum of Understanding Regarding Response to Incidents and Events Occurring at the City University of New York,” which prohibits the police from spying on CUNY campuses.  Of course, it has never been made fully clear if the spying was going on with or without the approval or awareness of CUNY brass. Thus, the DSC also demanded that if the memorandum was not violated, that CUNY administrators “account publicly for it role in this surveillance.”  The resolution also calls upon the CUNY administration to “demand publicly that the NYPD inform these groups and individuals that they have been the subject of this surveillance and the nature of the evidence gathered,” that police commissioner Ray Kelly account publicly for these actions, and that Mayor Michael Bloomberg and the City Council immediately end all spying operations targeting members of the CUNY community.

The second resolution passed that day was issued in response to proposed changes in the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws that would significantly reduce the power of student governance to regulate student organizations and extra-curricular activity. The proposed changes are in direct violation of Article Fifteen of those same bylaws which express commitment to “student participation, responsibility, academic freedom and due process,” and were only presented to the student representatives ten days in advance before the BoT Committee on Student Affairs and Special Programs was scheduled to meet. The resolution demands that these proposals be rejected outright, and failing that, that the vote on changes be delayed “in order to allow for adequate university-wide discussion of these changes.” Finally, in an act of defiance against the Board’s power grab, the resolution reaffirms its sovereignty over student activity funds and its authority of student activities and organizations.

Finally, the DSC issued a resolution proclaiming solidarity with the Occupy Wall Street movement. Sighting its ability to bring national attention to income inequality, social injustice and corporate influence in politics—the very issues affecting the welfare of CUNY students and the communities of New York City more broadly—the DSC registered its support for the OWS movement and reasserted the rights of students, and all citizens, “to peaceably assemble, demonstrate, and petition businesses, the government, and CUNY for a redress of grievances.” For more on recent DSC action, and the full text of resolutions discussed above, please visit http://www.cunydsc.org/resolutions

Occupy CUNY Graduate Center

On the afternoon of November 17, as New York City was in the midst of a day-long series of actions protesting the unacceptable conditions of our nation’s—and indeed the world’s—organization of power, over one hundred CUNY students gathered in the lobby of the Graduate Center in midtown to join in solidarity, share their stories, and march as a group to a gathering in Union Square. According to eyewitness accounts, the assembly was the most inspired and meaningful moment of collective action at the Graduate Center in recent memory.  Students delivered impassioned, elegant statements of hope, outrage, and solidarity as their colleagues, GC faculty and staff, and NYPD and private security officers looked on in support and approval.

“Masses of Arab youth have turned to face that ugly stereotype of the backward Arab street, and they have spit poetry in its face,” said Rayya El Zein, an Arab-American student at the Graduate Center and a faculty member at the City College of New York. “In the exact same way, in this country, you all, we all have turned and faced that sticking, that stinking accusation of apathy and we have spit in its fucking face. When we say today that ‘we are the 99%’ and that we are occupying our public spaces and our public schools, we are saying that we are individuals who think, who feel, and who know better about our societies. And that we are not too weak, that we are not too afraid, to say: This shit is wrong and it will not continue in our names. When I look at us now, at all of us—here, there, everywhere, I see an international community of engaged, aware, and conscious young people. And that is an incredible thing.”

“I have a different story,” said one woman, who described herself as having been “a member of the one percent. “I used to work for Goldman Sachs. I moved to India for them, and I relocated a lot of jobs there and I saw how racist the organization was, by making the assumption that we could re-colonize India, with our ideology, with our jobs, making [Indians] work hours we would never work….Seeing you all here gives me hope.” Faculty and staff also spoke. “You know the faculty is supporting you in large numbers here at the GC,” said one GC staff member. But I also want you to know that staff are supporting you, too.”
At 2:30, the group left the Graduate Center and marched down Fifth Avenue from 34^th Street to Union Square. As the nearly two hundred students entered the square from the north, it was met hundreds more students from New York University, the New School, and Hunter College marching from the south, joining together in the square center for a student general assembly at 3:00. Soon after, the human microphone resounded with the proclamation that “Now, as students, we march!” And march they did down to Foley Square for an extraordinary evening of music, speeches, and the seizure of the Brooklyn Bridge by some 20,000 protesters demonstrating their dissent from the status quo.

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On Friday November 18 several dozen police officers in full riot gear were called by UC Davis Chancellor or “Chief Executive Officer” Linda Katehi to disperse a crowd of occupying students at her campus. These students were all that was left of a small occupation of the campus quad that had been set up the previous day in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street protesters. When the police arrived these students refused to disperse and chose instead to lock arms in defiance of the orders to leave. In response the police repeatedly doused the protesters with streams of pepper spray even as they continued to sit peacefully on the ground.

As video footage of the event plainly shows, police not only sprayed them in the face from close range, but literally sprayed the chemical irritant in their mouths. One student reportedly was sprayed so badly that he was still coughing up blood forty minutes later. Such treatment of peaceful demonstrators would be cause for alarm anywhere. That these demonstrators were an organized group of college students enrolled in the very university they were occupying, is especially disturbing. Student demonstrators exercising their democratic right to free assembly and free speech are not criminals and should not be treated like criminals.

Chancellor Katehi’s decision to set police in riot gear upon her own students, and her mealy-mouthed and unapologetic response to the police violence, show a lack of awareness, compassion, and leadership that is inexcusable. Katehi claimed that the police were there to protect the students of UC Davis and to ensure that the university would be able to continue to use its resources to achieve its core academic mission. Her decision, however, not only led to the injury of several students, but actively destroyed a learning environment more powerful than any classroom. Indeed, the students protesting at UC Davis are receiving perhaps the best education possible. They are learning how to think critically, how to work together in small groups, how to organize events, analyze complex information, celebrate cultural diversity, and act as independent thinkers capable of questioning the dogma of entrenched authority. They have been sorely wronged by the police and by their own Chancellor. There is no easy way to solve this problem and there is no way forward except for Chancellor Katehi to immediately resign, and for the university to call for a direct criminal investigation into the police brutality perpetrated against its students.

The Advocate urges all readers to write to the UC Board of Regents and demand that Chancellor Katehi resign or be removed from her position as chancellor.

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“Underlying recent attacks on the university is an attempt not merely to counter dissent but to destroy it and, in doing so, to eliminate all of those remaining public spaces , spheres, and institutions that nourish and sustain a democratic civil society”

—Henry Giroux The University in Chains

The recent controversy over an honorary degree for acclaimed playwright Tony Kushner has once again revealed the highly undemocratic and ideologically-charged nature of the CUNY Board of Trustees. And once again, the members of the board, especially Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, have demonstrated that they cannot be trusted to defend or uphold even the most basic principles of academic freedom and the exchange of ideas upon which all academic practice is founded.

The board’s refusal on May 4 to grant an honorary degree from John Jay College to Mr. Kushner was, to put it bluntly, a stupid decision. This decision was made worse, however, by the fact that none of the members of the board seemed to understand the importance or the potential repercussions of their failure to properly discuss and debate the issue before rushing to a vote. Instead, the board members, including Chairman Benno Schmidt, seemed merely eager to be finished with the business at hand so that they could adjourn and, as they must have imagined at the time, put the matter behind them. Their blatant disregard for due process, their utter lack of intellectual curiosity, and their seeming inability to muster even the most perfunctory defense of Kushner against Wiesenfeld’s ridiculous and politically biased accusations, were not just stupid, but represented a real dereliction of their duties as trustees.

Although the board later reversed its decision in an emergency Executive Committee meeting on May 9, the damage to the reputation of CUNY and the climate of intellectual inquiry at the university was already an accomplished fact. The message has been sent that any current or future member of the CUNY community should be careful about what they say and publish about Israel. As long as Wiesenfeld is on the Board of Trustees, you can bet that he will do everything in his power to remove or silence the opinions of those who fail to conform to his narrow political views. Because of this, and the many other abuses of his position to date—including his extraordinarily inappropriate meddling in the hiring decisions of Brooklyn College last January—it is clear that Wiesenfeld should immediately resign. Any failure to do so must be met with a vigorous and sustained campaign to force his resignation. But the issue, unfortunately, is much bigger than Jeffrey Wiesenfeld; and although it would be nice to see him go, his Zionist rants and racist characterizations of Arabs are unfortunately just the public face of a much deeper problem inherent in the structure and functioning of the board itself, a problem that can only be fixed by either abolishing or radically reimagining its structure.

To begin with it should be clear to everyone at CUNY by now that the BOT is an inherently anti-democratic institution. Composed almost exclusively of political hacks and corporate raiders—the great majority of whom received their appointments as awards for political loyalty from Republican Governor George Pataki and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg—the board does not represent the interests of the electorate or of any of the university’s core stakeholders. Instead, it represents only the needs and ideological interests of the right-wing politicians who have made most of the appointments. Indeed, a quick survey of the board’s website reveals that of the fifteen current appointed members, nine were appointed by Pataki, and four were appointed by Bloomberg. Together, that means that thirteen of the sixteen voting members of the board were appointed by just those two.   Allowing two ideologically right-wing white men to essentially choose the entire governing board of a university as economically and racially diverse as CUNY is an insult to any theory of democracy and cannot possibly be good for the institution or the many hundreds of thousands of people whom the university serves.

Perhaps worse than this lack of democratic representation, however, is the fact that the board’s members simply do not seem to care about the vitality or heath of CUNY and do not take their charge seriously. Indeed, most of the board members have little or no experience teaching or working within academia, and none of them seem to have any real understanding or appreciation of the value of the intellectual work that is done at the university. Their clear and continued negligence and their utter lack of vision, intellectual curiosity, and foresight is an insult to all of us who work, study, and teach at CUNY and who do our best to improve the university on a daily basis. From the several merely ignorant, to the many passively and actively apathetic, to the few downright malicious and venal, these board members have displayed an inordinate lack of leadership, and as the Kushner affair has made plain, are incapable of even holding a debate within their own ranks, much less capable of considering, debating, and acting upon the many pressing issues that impact the future of the university.

The CUNY Board of Trustees is not unique in this regard, however. It turns out—no surprise!—that boards across the country are packed—just like CUNY’s—with politically appointed corporate managers, who see the university as just another kind of corporation. Indeed, over the last three decades, university governing boards have played a vital and enabling role in the slow destruction of the American system of higher education. Rather than using their political influence and connections to fight for the institutions which they have been charged to defend, they have instead done what comes naturally to business elites and have used their skills to remake their respective universities into models of corporate efficiency.

By simultaneously increasing student tuition and drastically reducing the costs of instruction through the use and exploitation of low-paid, part-time instructors, these boards have helped their right-wing counterparts in government shift the costs of higher education from the public back to the individual students and employees of the universities they govern, effectively undermining, through this process of privatization, the very principles, and often the very charters, of the institutions they were tasked to uphold and honor. In part because of these boards, the once great promise of the American university system, which made it possible for so many underprivileged and economically disadvantaged Americans to better themselves through the pursuit of higher education, has been reduced to a mere shadow of its original self. From California to New York more and more students are being priced out of the chance to get a decent education, even as those who can are forced to take larger classes taught by increasingly underpaid and overworked adjuncts.

Clearly it is time that the students, faculty, and staff at CUNY, and indeed, at all the nation’s universities recognize that any struggle to improve their schools has to include a strategy to change the institutions that govern them. The students, faculty, and employees of CUNY should naturally have a voice in the decisions that directly affect their well-being and the future of the university. Towards this end the CUNY community, including the Professional Staff Congress and the student and faculty senates, must come together and begin to demand serious and extensive reform of the Board of Trustees. Such reform should, no doubt, involve a significant amount of discussion and debate, but should include at the very least a radical increase in the number of student, faculty, and staff representatives on the board. As I proposed back in February of 2010, in addition to the current seventeen members of the board, there should be at least one elected faculty member, one elected staff member, and one elected student representative from each of the University’s current seventeen campuses. This would significantly shift the balance of interests from the politicians to the stakeholders, while still allowing for a significant amount of public representation on the board in the form of some kind of reformed public appointment system—perhaps one in which trustees are chosen by the state legislature instead of the governor and the mayor. Such an expanded, democratic, and diverse board, representing all of the major stakeholders of the university, as well as the interests of the state taxpayers, would be much better prepared to find intelligent and creative solutions to the problems that face the university while still respecting and nurturing the true pursuit of intellectual excellence that defines any great university.

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“The owners of this country know the truth: it’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

—George Carlin

The nation is in crisis! The economy is stuck in neutral! Unemployment still hovers close to 10 percent! And states across the country are facing massive billion-dollar budget shortfalls!

Thus has the second decade of the twenty-first century taken shape in America; and while the vast majority of Americans agree that something must be done about this situation, almost all of them, including the entire political establishment, have completely misunderstood the nature of the problem and the serious dangers of the proposed solutions.

Manufactured by moneyed elites who continue to look upon the nation as one big Monopoly board—complete with mortgaged properties, and empty, overpriced houses—the economic crisis that resulted from the unchecked, arrogant, and short-sighted speculations of American capital, has now become an excuse for even further acquisition and privatization. In classic disaster-capitalist fashion, the corporate-owned state and federal political machines of the ruling classes have inevitably and swiftly, but not surprisingly, begun to dismantle the few remaining barriers that stand between them and the complete exploitation of every inch of American flesh. From opposition to financial regulation and tax breaks for the rich, to budget slashing and union busting, the powers that be have declared war on the American worker and the public sector. Though he may have suffered a temporary setback in 2008, the little man with the top hat and the jewel-encrusted walking stick is still calling the shots, and though the layout of the board has changed, it’s still the same rigged game that leaves the vast majority of its players bankrupt.

Nowhere is this process of returning America to a state of unadulterated capitalism more sinisterly evident than in Wisconsin, where just last week, Republican Governor Scott Walker announced plans to completely gut the power of the state’s public sector unions, ending all expired contracts with state employee unions as of March 13 and removing the future legal right of those unions to bargain collectively for anything except wages. In addition, Governor Walker is proposing new draconian laws that would make it easier to get rid of striking workers and recently put the National Guard on alert in case of what he describes as any “labor unrest.” According to Walker, Wisconsin is “broke, and it’s time to pay up.” This kind of folksy assertion, although it lacks all imagination, has nonetheless become the new mantra of governor’s across the country, all of whom have been eager to find a scapegoat for the public’s overblown fears about budget gaps and misplaced anger about the slow recovery of the economy. It is no accident then that Walker, like so many other governors, has chosen to attack the public sector unions first instead of, say, increasing taxation on the rich. In a deeply ironic turn of events, the nation’s collective anger seems to have shifted since the economic meltdown of 2008 from Wall Street to the public unions. Accused of busting state budgets to pay for their supposedly luxurious wages, health benefits, and pension packages, the once heroic union worker is now viewed more like an over-indulged child who needs to be set straight.

Indeed, the image of the public-union worker as a fat cat charlatan, living large while the rest of America’s workers scramble to find work and struggle to pay their mortgages, is really nothing more than the product of a massive misrepresentation of the facts that has been perpetuated by Governors and pundits alike. Listening to Governor Walker speaking on Friday you would have thought that the economic crisis was generated by greedy union members rather than greedy speculators. But for those of us smart enough to step back from the rhetoric and swagger of the corporate owned government and its lapdog media, it is clear that the budget shortfalls faced by states like Wisconsin, California, and New York are growing exponentially not because the states are spending more, but because they are bringing in less revenue. As the PSC leadership has repeatedly and accurately argued, this is not a crisis of spending; it is a crisis of revenue. And there is actually a very easy way to create more revenue: raise taxes on the wealthy who stand to benefit the most from the very mess they helped to create. By creating a more progressive system of taxation, including withholding portions of the enormous Stock Transfer Tax that is refunded to Wall Street each year, New York could cover an enormous amount of its current budget shortfall and be adequately prepared to cover future increases to education and Medicaid.

Sadly, tax hikes on the rich, or on any one at all for that matter, is not on the table for Governor Cuomo, who has vowed to “balance” the New York State Budget without further borrowing or tax increases. Worse, Cuomo has stated he will let the 2009 income-tax surcharge on New Yorkers who earn over $200,000 a year expire, costing the state as much as one billion dollars in lost revenue, a stupid and indefensible proposal calculated no doubt to force even greater cuts to the public service sector. While Governor Cuomo has not yet threatened to end collective bargaining or to call out the National Guard, his position on public employee unions, many of whom tragically helped to get him elected, has been made very clear. Cuomo’s proposed $95 million in cuts to CUNY, along with his promises not to increase tuition, seem almost designed break the union. For Cuomo, like Walker, it seems that fair and decent compensation for workers in his state is simply too much of an economic and political burden to bear. But New York State needs a fair and truly progressive tax system to help maintain and provide for the indispensable institutions that fuel the state’s economy and if Cuomo won’t give it to us, we’ll have to take it.

Achieving this goal, however, is far beyond the power of one union alone. While the PSC and the AFT have talked a good talk they only have so much power, and in a state that views any job action and any form of militancy more aggressive than a letter writing campaign as criminal, forcing the hand of the government, especially against the will of an ignorant and ill-informed public, will be nearly impossible. Public sector unions, and indeed unions of all kinds, must band together on a national level, with nationally organized actions and strikes, not only in order to fight the clear threats to collective bargaining and the very fabric of unionization happening in places like Wisconsin, but also to protest aggressively cuts to public services by pushing for greater and more progressive taxation at both the state and federal level. Sadly, whenever these demands are attempted at the state level alone, local leaders and their corporate masters inevitably preempt any real possibility of raising taxes by recourse to right-wing arguments about capital flight and competition between states that limit the public’s sense of what is actually possible. In order to get a better tax system for New York, labor unions must begin to build movements across state lines, to help fight for better and more progressive tax systems in every state across the country.

Now is the time for public sector workers, and indeed workers of all unions, to come together and send a clear signal that they stand united in complete solidarity with the workers of Wisconsin and that they vow to do all in their power to protect them from these heinous attacks and to wage an aggressive campaign to force the state and federal governments to immediately enact a national stock transfer tax as well as significant progressive increases to the federal and state income taxes.

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I am writing this editorial on the anniversary of the Montgomery Bus Boycotts, on the first day of December when exactly fifty-five years ago Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on the bus, effectively setting off a protest movement that would end twenty days later in a Supreme Court ruling affirming that the segregation of the Montgomery bus system was unconstitutional. Though the successful Montgomery boycott was a pivotal moment in the history of the Civil Rights movement, Parks was not the first or the last to resist the inequalities and injustices of segregation. We sometimes forget, but the Montgomery boycott was part of a larger, and growing civil rights movement that had started three years earlier when black high school students in Virginia began protesting the despicable physical conditions and underfunding of their schools and their teachers. Though they were encouraged by local NAACP leaders to tone down the nature of their resistance to Jim Crow, these students insisted upon vocal protests and strikes, and in their refusal set off an historic chain of events, showing that the direct action of the people, taken in their own defense, spontaneously and without official leaders, was as powerful a weapon as any amount of political maneuvering.

Today we celebrate Parks’ spirit and courage, but we should also remember the courage and resistance of the hundreds of black high school students of Prince Edward County, Virginia who courageously challenged racial segregation in their public schools. Just like Parks’ original act of resistance in 1955, this anniversary of the bus boycott has also been preceded by a series of vocal student protests.

Since October of this year, students in Italy, France, Greece, Ireland, and the United Kingdom have been rising up “like lions” after decades of slumber, occupying libraries, universities, and colleges across Europe; clashing with police in the streets and on their campuses; valiantly storming and taking over the Tory party Headquarters in London; and dropping banners from the Coliseum and the leaning Tower of Pisa in Italy, effectively forestalling for a second time, the Italian government’s attempt to cut education funding. These protests, almost all of which were in response to education cuts and tuition increases, are not isolated instances. Instead they constitute the advance guard of what is quickly becoming a much broader, much deeper, more serious, and necessarily more violent battle against corporate and governmental austerity measures explicitly designed to shore up the fortunes of the world’s wealthiest, while placing the burden of their manufactured economic crises onto the poorest and most vulnerable members of society. Like the student protests of Virginia in 1951, which directly addressed the shoddy and unequal physical conditions of their learning environments but ended up overturning centuries of legal and de facto segregation, these more recent protests, largely spontaneous and unorganized, are beginning to take on the shape of a movement that has the potential to achieve much more than just the restoration of education funding or the elimination of tuition hikes. The oligarchs and plutocrats of Europe have a problem on their hands, and it’s not going away any time soon.

In the United States, too, students have been rising up, though in admittedly smaller and generally more docile crowds, to defend their educations and their jobs. At the University of California, for instance, students across the state have been staging demonstrations, disrupting administrative meetings, and occupying university buildings on and off for the last two years in an attempt to force the university to open its books, and the state to restore funding and turn back the draconian 40 percent increase in tuition since 2008. Just last month, students continued their protests against the latest 8 percent tuition increase proposed by the university only to be met with billy clubs, pepper spray, and drawn pistols at the UC Berkeley campus, where university police continue to tear down protest signs and harass and arrest students for writing in chalk on the campus sidewalks. In response students have started a campaign to remove guns from UC police.

Meanwhile things at the City University of New York—the largest public urban university in the United States—have been comparatively timid. But there are signs that students at CUNY are getting fed up, too. Just last month, on November 22, the unelected and undemocratic CUNY Board of Trustees raised tuition by another 7 percent. In an effort to forestall that vote several faculty and students protested both November meetings of the CUNY Board of Trustees, heckling board members at CUNY’s central offices and attempting to shut down the vote on the new tuition schedule at Baruch College, where as many as fifty students and faculty interrupted the meeting, chanting “when education is under attack, what do we do? Stand up fight back!” Protesters refused to leave and had to be forcibly removed from the meeting by Baruch security and police.  But protestors still refused to leave the campus, and for the next hour occupied the main 25th Street entrance of the Vertical Campus, enlisting other Baruch students to join them in their protest as they pushed back against police lines to remain inside the building.

These actions, the likes of which have not been seen at CUNY for more than a decade, are a promising sample of the sorts of protest we can expect to see at CUNY in the future. But they are not enough. It is time that CUNY students and faculty took a hard look at the demonstrations currently going on in Europe as well as the enormously successful but hard-won protests and university occupations in Puerto Rico last year, as potential models for more militant forms of active civil disobedience and resistance. Unlike the University of California, which increased tuition 32 percent with one vote, creating a massive backlash,  the CUNY administration has been careful (some would say guileful) not to increase tuition too much at any one time, making it much more difficult to organize any kind of meaningful resistance. This lack of resistance has made it possible for the BoT and the state to continue to slowly increase the rate at which they have already been steadily shifting the burden of college costs from the government to the students and their families, effectively undermining the core mission of the entire university.

If the tuition increases approved by the BoT in November are passed by the state legislature (and there is every expectation that they will be) CUNY’s tuition will have increased by no less than 51 percent since just 2003. This is an outrage. Clearly, the time for more aggressive and unified action has come, and if the ineffectiveness of previous actions is any indication, it will have to be something big if it is going to succeed. Massive occupations, shut downs, and strikes, especially those coordinated with city labor organizations and rank and file workers (many of whose children and family attend CUNY) are the only way that the city and the state will ever take action to vote against future cuts, much less to roll back the ones they’ve already enacted. The future of CUNY is at stake here and it is no longer possible to continue to teach and study and learn and pretend that everything is all right when the university that makes all of that possible is being slowly and methodically dismantled beneath our feet. A university closed and occupied for a year is far better than one beaten and crippled over the course of ten. Clearly the education movement and the people of the United States more broadly are sorely in need of another Rosa Parks. But she can only come forward if there is already a dedicated, militant, and vocal movement there to support her. Once again, it may be up to the students to make this happen.

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Anyone who reads the GC Advocate is likely familiar with the plight of CUNY adjuncts. Like other universities and colleges across the country, CUNY adjuncts are paid a small fraction of the wages that their tenured and tenure-track colleagues receive for much of the same work; are frequently fired, rehired, and then fired again from semester to semester; receive few or none of the vital benefits that their full-time colleagues receive; are often forced to share crowded offices with no room to meet with students and little or no access to computers or printers; and, even though they teach a great majority of CUNY classes, adjuncts are regarded by some full-time faculty as second class citizens, fly by night workers who don’t really care about their institutions, or worse, ignorant scabs who undermine the integrity of academia. Despite these demoralizing circumstances and the utter lack of respect accorded most of these workers by the faculty and administration, adjuncts at CUNY and elsewhere across the country have been courageously rising up, forming or joining unions, staging protests, drafting and proposing legislation, and in the words of the March 4 Coalition to Defend Public Education, demanding the impossible.

At CUNY this struggle has taken the shape of a powerful grassroots rank-and-file movement within the Professional Staff Congress: the union which represents both adjunct and tenured and tenure-track (TATT) faculty, as well as higher education officers and other workers at CUNY. Undaunted by the economic climate of austerity in New York State, these rank and file members have been pushing for a series of core demands that would fundamentally address and begin to dismantle the two tier-labor system at CUNY. These demands include: minimum three-year contracts of employment for adjuncts and other contingents, wage increases of $30 per credit hour, step raises every year (currently adjuncts only receive steps every three years), and comprehensive employer-paid health insurance for all contingent employees. These demands, which have the endorsement of over 1,200 faculty and staff members at CUNY, are ambitious, but if realized would fundamentally transform the university, making it a more equitable and collegiate institution, while dramatically improving the quality of teaching and learning that takes place at its more than eighteen campuses across the city.

Despite this powerful movement and the potential that it represents, the leadership of the PSC has failed to adequately embrace these demands and has shown little willingness to take the steps necessary to make them a reality. Instead, PSC leadership has proven, once again, that they don’t care about actually transforming the university, but are more concerned with maintaining power through continuing to prioritize TATT faculty demands, while offering piecemeal improvements to the rest of the constituencies they represent. This ultimately self-defeating strategy was succinctly, if inadvertently, articulated in a recent editorial by the PSC President Barbara Bowen, published in the November edition of the PSC Clarion newspaper. There Bowen asserts that the PSC:

“Has already named four overarching goals for this round of bargaining, all of which would provide a richer education for our students: 1) continuing improvement in salaries to allow CUNY to attract and keep top quality personnel; 2) more time for faculty to spend with individual students and for mid-career and senior faculty to produce meaningful research; 3) a path to advancement for those in the professional staff who have had no promotional ladder; and 4) real change in the unconscionable system of adjunct labor.”

I am delighted to hear that President Bowen thinks the CUNY system of adjunct labor is unconscionable—indeed it is, and saying so is at least a step in the right direction—but what exactly does “real change” mean here, and haven’t we heard this phrase somewhere before? If Bowen’s rhetoric sounds a lot like Barack Obama’s, it’s no accident. The PSC leadership, like the Democratic Party, frequently invokes the language of “real change” to inspire the rank-and-file, but inevitably offers little more than temporary solutions to recurring problems intrinsic to the system. These “goals” that Bowen articulates may sound nice; indeed, the PSC leadership is well versed in the “spoonful of sugar” method of delivering bad news to its members. But we are never going to be able to “provide a richer education for our students” without addressing the fundamentally unequal structure of the CUNY labor system. It is clear from Bowen’s editorial and all the union’s proposed demands that the leadership’s real priority here is not to transform the university, to create greater faculty equality, or better learning conditions for our students, but to continue to devote the greater part of their efforts (through wage increases and reduced course loads) to the needs of the TATT faculty, while appeasing the rest with small wage increases and minor improvements in working conditions.

The moral failing of this kind of piecemeal approach was made evident in the last bargaining agreement, where the leadership not only failed to address the huge gap in pay and benefits that still exists between TATT faculty, but instead helped negotiate a contract that actually increased that disparity. By creating a new paid-parental-leave benefit exclusively for full-timers, while simultaneously insisting upon across the board percentage wage increases, the last contract actually increased the disparity between the compensation an adjunct receives to teach a class and what a full-time or tenure-track faculty member receives. This is an unacceptable strategy for the future. How, as educators, can we call for equality for our students while treating our own colleagues unequally? And how can we talk about the injustices affecting our society when our own institutions are rife with unaddressed injustices?

Adjuncts have waited long enough. As demands for a new contract are being drafted, it is now more important than ever that TATT faculty put aside their differences and come together in unison with adjuncts and contingent faculty to prioritize dismantling the two-tier labor system that is destroying our university. As Distinguished Professor of Political Science Ros Petchesky noted in an open letter published in the Hunter Union Voice

“We teach and work in conditions that hyper-exploit over one-half of our colleagues, asking them to make the same commitment of intellectual energy, devotion to students, and professional rigor that we do, at a tiny fraction of the pay and without commensurate benefits, job security or respect. This is a form of peonage. It corrupts our work environment and compromises the very principles of morality and justice that public higher education is supposed to stand for; and it makes every one of us complicit in a foul, unjust system. It has to stop; we

As we prepare for the next contract struggle we must heed Professor Petchesky’s words and stand together unified against the CUNY administration and the Democratic and Republican politicians in Albany who shamelessly cut our budgets and raise our students’ tuition. It is also important, however, that we demonstrate to them and to ourselves, as well as other educators across the nation—whose eyes are always closely focused on events at CUNY—that we believe, as the PSC slogan goes, that “another kind of university is possible.” As Professor Petchesky says “Unity between full-timers and part-timers in fighting for a fair contract will give our union unprecedented strength—of both numbers and moral and political clarity.”

Achieving this unity, however, will not be easy and will require a real shift in the way each of us thinks about our relationship to our fellow union members and the institutions where we work and teach. The entire PSC must realize and accept the hard fact that any economic advances made at the bargaining table on behalf of full-timers must—in order to avoid any greater increase in inequality—be counterbalanced by significantly greater economic gains for adjuncts. In a climate of economic austerity this means that TATT faculty who support adjunct equality may very well feel as if they will have to settle for less in this next contract. If union members find this fact inconvenient and troubling, as no doubt many of them will, then it will be important in this instance that they see adjuncts as an ally and not an enemy. Instead of giving into the politics of austerity, and settling for a piecemeal contract, they will then be able to confidently come together with their part-time colleagues in a spirit of solidarity and renewed vigor to fight for a better university for all. 

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“It always seems impossible until it’s done.”
–Nelson Mandela

Israel’s unwarranted and outrageous attack upon the flotilla of ships carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip is another sad reminder that the leaders of Israel are determined to indefinitely continue and defend the punishing and illegal blockade of the Gaza Strip and the continued isolation of the West Bank, which has caused and continues to cause immense suffering and loss of life for the Palestinian people. Deaf to the cries and condemnations of the international community, Israel has pursued a calculated policy of punishment and humiliation against the Palestinians, explicitly designed to create a permanent crisis in the region, thus further justifying Israel’s continued policy of separation and apartheid. From the terrible 2008 Gaza Massacre to Monday’s premeditated assault upon the Mavi Marmara, Israel has sent a clear signal to the international community that it has no intentions of either abiding by international or humanitarian law, or of negotiating in good faith with the Palestinian people. Faced, like South Africa in the 1980’s, with a clear demographical disadvantage, Israel has chosen to isolate its minority population in a last ditch effort to maintain its implicitly racist policy of Zionist rule.

Because of this, it is now more important than ever, that the institutions responsible for supporting and abetting Israel’s continued aggressions against the Palestinians, including the City University of New York, be forced, at the very least, to end their investment in any company that aids in any way the blockade, isolation, and occupation of the Palestinian territories. Since Hampshire College’s successful and groundbreaking disinvestment in companies that support the occupation of Palestine in 2009, there has been a growing student disinvestment campaign, which has spread to universities across the nation from UC Berkeley and UC San Diego, to Columbia and NYU. This movement is dedicated to convincing their college and university budget and finance committees to rearrange their investment portfolios so as to disinvest from companies such as: United Tech­nolo­gies, which man­u­fac­tures Black­hawk heli­copters used by the Israeli mil­i­tary, Gen­eral Elec­tric, which sup­plies the propul­sions sys­tems for Apache heli­copter gun­ships, also used by the Israeli Defense Forces, ITT Cor­po­ra­tion, which pro­vides night vision gog­gles to the Israeli mil­i­tary, Motorola, which is engaged in a $400 mil­lion project to pro­vide radar sys­tems for enhanc­ing secu­rity at ille­gal West Bank set­tle­ments, Terex, which pro­vides trucks for logis­ti­cal sup­port to the Israeli mil­i­tary, and Cater­pil­lar, which pro­vides many of the bull­doz­ers and con­struc­tion equip­ment used to build new set­tle­ments and to destroy Pales­tin­ian homes in the West Bank and Gaza. While this kind of disinvestment is a good start, the current intransigence of the Israeli government calls for more aggressive forms of disinvestment. Universities and other institutions should be encouraged not only to disinvest in companies that support the Israeli occupation and isolation of Palestine, but any companies that engage in direct business with or provide investment to Israel in any capacity.

Last March, The UC Berkeley Student Senate passed a resolution, supported in large part by the UC Berkeley Students for Justice in Palestine, (the resolution is reprinted below), urging the university to end all investments related to General Electric and United Technologies. The resolution passed the Student Senate but was callously vetoed by the Student Senate President Noah Stern. Currently UC Berkeley students are campaigning to overturn that veto, but UC President Mark Yudof, the same individual who recently raised UC tuition by 32%, has issued statements this month making it clear that the university policy supports disinvestment only in the case of genocide—a ridiculous and incredibly irresponsible high bar to set for taking action. While this may sound like a defeat, the resolution has gained steam and is being proposed at several other campuses in the UC system including UC San Diego and UC Riverside. It is time that the student government at CUNY including the Doctoral Students’ Council, The University Student Senate and the University Faculty Senate, took up the resolution as their own.

In the meantime, it will be imperative these next few weeks that those of us who care about the suffering and humiliation taking place in Gaza remain vocal and outspoken critics of Israel’s policy, and that we call on the US Government to unreservedly and critically condemn the attacks on the Mavi Marmara and the continued blockade of Gaza.

 Click here to see the full version of the “Bill in Support of UC Disinvestment from War Crimes”

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“Taxes, after all, are dues that we pay for the privileges of membership in an organized society.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt

Increasing taxes, even upon the extremely wealthy, is not (and has never been) a very popular position in postwar America. According to a 2009 Harris poll conducted for the Tax Foundation, 56 percent of Americans believe they are paying too much in taxes; about half are opposed to taxes on soft drinks and junk food, and almost two thirds of those polled said they favored a complete elimination of the Federal Estate Tax. Although conducted by the Tax Foundation—which hides an arguably anti-tax bias in claims of bipartisanship and coded language about transparency and simplicity—these figures are nonetheless pretty consistent with the overall public sentiment since the end of the Second World War. In Gallup polls conducted from 1947 to 2009 a small majority of Americans regularly said their income taxes were too high; a slightly smaller group agreed that their taxes were just about right; while an extremely small minority, between 1 and 3 percent each year (communists no doubt!) said they thought their taxes were too low.

While this overall hostility toward higher taxes might be obvious to anyone who has studied the ideological underpinnings of American capitalism, or, for that matter, anyone who has been paying any attention to the recent “Tea Party” movement, these figures actually reveal a counterintuitive truth. Yes, almost all Americans have historically been opposed to increasing taxes, but they have also been near universally ambivalent about the taxes they already pay, regardless of how much or how little. Indeed, the poll numbers show that even during the periods of highest taxation (1950-1963) the average percentage of Americans who said their taxes were too high remained pretty consistent: about 56 percent. Compare this to the period of least taxation (1970-1990) when the top marginal tax rate plummeted from 70 to 30 percent, and the findings are startling. Even during this second period, which saw one of the greatest decreases in federal taxes ever (and consequently some of the most devastating cuts to state and federal spending, including the near complete devastation of New York City), the average percentage of Americans who said their tax rate was too high actually increased, from 56 to 61 percent. In other words, a small majority of Americans inevitably tend to complain about their taxes no matter how high or low those taxes actually are.

It is tempting to see this behavior as a kind of virtue; after all, an independent and inherently suspicious and critical populace is vital for any democracy; but the sad fact is that, no matter what the tea-baggers say, this knee jerk impulse against higher taxation is not driven by any grassroots distrust of the government as much as it is by corporate lobbying and simple, uninformed, and misguided greed. People generally want to keep as much of their money as possible, and they falsely believe that they know best how to spend it. Yet in the rush to hold onto what’s theirs, they often fail to see the bigger picture.

This resistance to taxation is a serious problem, however, for the Right has been extremely successful in manipulating America’s ingrained resistance to higher taxes and has managed, over the course of the last forty years, with the help of several Democrats, of course, to completely overturn what was once a relatively progressive tax system. Between 1951 and 1963, arguably some of the most prosperous and productive years in American History, the tax rate for those making more than $400,000 hovered around 91 percent. Today the top marginal tax rate, regardless of whether one makes $500,000 or $500 million, is only 35 percent. Considering that greater and greater amounts of wealth are being consolidated at higher and higher income levels, the result is a system where more and more money held by fewer and fewer people is being taxed at historically low levels. And yet, if one believes the polls, the people are as unwilling as ever to accept the fact that low taxes on the rich not only lead to poor services and crumbling infrastructures, but are responsible for much of our current ill-health, inequality, and general unhappiness.

As Tony Judt points out in his new book Ill Fares the Land, there is a direct negative correlation between income inequality and such shared social goods as health, happiness, and upward mobility. Measured against several other developed nations, including the United Kingdom, Germany, and Canada, the United States has the absolute greatest income inequality of any of these nations, with the exception of Great Britain, whose income inequality is only slightly lower. Consequently, the United States has an almost exactly opposite rate of social mobility, by far the lowest of all of the countries compared. Indeed, according to Judt, the percentage of a son’s income that can be explained by his father’s income has grown dramatically in the United States, from a historic low of 10 percent in 1980, to a whopping 32 percent in 2000. And yet, amazingly, the populists still clamor to abolish the estate tax! When it comes to health, the United States, sadly, fares even worse. Among the twenty developed countries Judt compares, the Unites States has the greatest income inequality as well as the worst health (as measured on the index of health and social problems), despite the fact that the United States spends, per capita, far more than any of the other countries Judt compares.

Although these findings clearly reveal that there is something fundamentally wrong with America, what really matters here is the obvious correlation between the virtues of health, happiness, and mobility, and income equality. The fact is that the greater the equality of any society, the higher the rates of happiness and general welfare. Until we learn to embrace this fact, until we learn to give up our ignorant resistance to higher taxes, and begin the long process of creating a fair and equitable tax system, we will remain little more than slaves to a flawed and corrupt ideology.

All of these conclusions then, for anyone interested in a fairer, more equitable and humane society, provide both a sense of hope and despair, for they reveal simultaneously that increasing taxes will be difficult, but also that higher taxes, once passed, would likely not be met with any greater hostility than our current tax rate, especially if those passing them can make the necessary connections between happiness and income equality. The political implications of these facts, however, are enormous, for they suggest that any president or congressperson willing to do the right thing and increase taxes significantly would face a lot of potential opposition in the next election. If Barack Obama is serious about his legacy, he will take that risk and take it soon. The longer we postpone real tax reform, the less time there will be for the American public to get used to it.

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“Knowing is not enough; we must apply. Willing is not enough; we must do.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Last November, as many of you will no doubt remember, students and faculty at the University of California staged a series of protests and building takeovers in response to the UC Regents’ decision on November 19 to increase undergraduate tuition by a whopping 32 percent. After the announcement that the increase had been approved, students and faculty took several actions: some refused to attend or teach classes, others took over campus buildings, while still others rallied outside administrators’ homes and on campuses across the state for several days, demanding that the hikes be repealed and state funding restored. Despite these rallies and the incredible amount of public outcry they helped generate, nothing was done to roll back or even ameliorate the situation. Instead, the administration explained away any responsibility for their actions, claiming simply that their hands were tied. Afterwards, the presidents of the several colleges, rather than rally with their students to take on Sacramento, chose instead to call in the police. In the wake of that decision several hundred students were arrested or suspended and scores more were beaten, detained, maced, or otherwise harassed by local police.

For many ordinary observers, the tuition increases at the University of California were seen as the inevitable result of state cuts to higher education, which were themselves the result of the recent economic crisis that has left both California and New York reeling from lost tax revenues. Although this is certainly part of the equation, there is another, arguably more important and certainly more insidious reason why the UC Regents found it so easy to pass such unprecedented tuition increases at a university that, like CUNY, used to be free. The answer is simple: the tuition increases will not affect them, their future, or their children’s future. The sad truth is that nearly all of the regents at the University of California, like the members of the Board of Trustees at CUNY, have no real stake in what happens to the students or faculty they supposedly represent. Instead, their loyalties are to the ideological whims of the politicians and bureaucrats who appointed or hired them, and upon whom their future employment and professional success is dependent.

Although the regents may have indeed imagined they were responding to an unavoidable crisis, the erosion of funding for state universities, from California to New York, is not merely the result of any one economic disaster, but represents instead an oligarchic, systematic, and ideologically driven attempt to privatize the nation’s several dozen state university systems by starving them of government funding and forcing them to charge more tuition while simultaneously seeking out further forms of corporate sponsorship to stay afloat. This process of corporate transformation is not merely a threat from politicians and ideologues outside the university, however, but is, more often than not, being carried out by those on the very inside, those like UC President Mark Yudof and CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt who seem dedicated to the idea of drowning their respective universities in the proverbial bathtub.

This structure of de facto corporate and political governance, so indicative of the new university, is nowhere more cynically self-evident than at CUNY, where the Chancellor recently welcomed the idea of radically increasing tuition, and the Chair of the BOT is also the Vice Chairman of an organization (Edison Learning) whose sole mission is the privatization of public education. This disconnect between the needs of the students and the ideological interests of its leaders exists in part because the City University of New York is currently governed by an incredibly hierarchical and dysfunctional structure of organizations and representatives ranging from an extremely powerful Board of Trustees, a moderately influential chancellor, several university presidents who are mostly beholden to the board and the chancellor, and a very loose coalition of faculty and student senates and organizations whose decisions, concerns, and protests are frequently ignored or overlooked. While the Chancellor ostensibly has control over the future direction of the university, his appointment is always contingent upon the approval of the Board of Trustees. Likewise, all of the college presidents, including our own Bill Kelly, are appointed only on the approval of the Board of Trustees. The students and faculty, meanwhile, have practically no formal representation when it comes to the future direction of the university where they work and study.

It is time that all of the stakeholders involved, including the students, staff, and faculty of CUNY, as well as the unions and organizations that represent them, begin to agitate for democratic reforms of the University’s governance structure in an effort to shake the monkey of corporate control off their backs once and for all. It is not enough to merely have the freedom to oversee the academic aspects of our work and to pursue our research and teaching unimpeded; we must also insist that we be directly involved in the larger economic and structural aspects of the university, paying attention to and taking control over the processes and decisions that so profoundly affect our day to day experiences.

The first place to begin this effort would be with a complete restructuring of the Board of Trustees. Currently the board consists of seventeen members, ten of which are appointed by the governor and five by the mayor. The remain­ing two non-appointed mem­bers of the board include the head of the Uni­ver­sity Stu­dent Sen­ate and the chair of the Uni­ver­sity Fac­ulty Sen­ate, the last of whom, because of supposed col­lec­tive bar­gain­ing con­flicts, sits with­out a vote. This means that of the seventeen members only two are actually stakeholders who have any real interest in the well being of the university, and of those two only one is allowed to vote. The fifteen members who make up the rest of the board, as the GC Advocate has reported several times in the past, are almost exclusively composed of persons whose primary experience and interests are in the business sector. The students and faculty of the university, meanwhile have absolutely no say in who is appointed to the board.

It should be obvious to anyone who believes in the idea of democratic self rule that the university belongs as much to the students, staff, and faculty as it does to the residents of the State of New York; and instead of allowing the governor and mayor to stack the deck with friends and political appointees, many of whom are sorely unqualified, we should insist that the size of the board be dramatically increased so that there is at the very least an equal balance between the interests of the state and the several groups of stakeholders of which the university is composed. Although the specifics of such a plan would no doubt involve a significant amount of nuanced legislation, the principle of equal representation is a good place to begin.

Instead of one student and one token, largely powerless faculty member, the board should be expanded to include one elected student representative, one elected faculty member, and one elected staff member from each of the eleven senior colleges, the six community colleges, and the Graduate Center for a total of seventeen students, seventeen faculty members, and seventeen staff members. Each of these members would have a full and equal vote in all decisions made by the Board of Trustees, except for the faculty and staff members, who would be able to vote on all decisions except those directly related to contract negotiations. Add to this an additional two gubernatorial or mayoral appointments, or perhaps two City Council appointments chosen by the City Council Higher Education Committee, and the BOT would be fairly balanced between the interests of the city and state, the staff, the students, and the faculty. Under such a structure, there would no doubt be much more debate, much less rubber stamping, and much more innovation. Most importantly, though, there would be a much greater concern for the interests of those whom the university was originally meant to serve. 

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