Wel­come to the Aca­d­e­mic Free­dom at CUNY blog. We’ve been cov­er­ing the recent sit­u­a­tion of polit­i­cal purg­ing at Brook­lyn Col­lege and any related news since Fri­day, Jan­u­ary 28. Most recent updates will appear at the top with a EST stamp.

Day 5

10:45pm The let­ters con­tinue to flood the admin­is­tra­tive inboxes at Brook­lyn Col­lege, and the GC Advo­cate in sup­port of aca­d­e­mic free­dom at CUNY. The qual­ity and focus of all the let­ters, from stu­dents, alumni, aca­d­e­mics and con­cerned cit­i­zens has been truly stun­ning, inspi­ra­tional, pow­er­ful, and as evi­denced by Brook­lyn College’s deci­sion to reverse its ear­lier actions, effective.

A num­ber of promi­nent aca­d­e­mics and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als from around the world have sent let­ters to Brook­lyn Col­lege Pres­i­dent Karen Lee Gould and Provost William Tra­mon­tano express­ing their dis­plea­sure with the events that pre­ceded tonight’s vic­tory. We’ll be run­ning all of the ones we have received that have not yet been made avail­able as a pub­lic record and tes­ta­ment to the orga­nized efforts on the part of those who stand up in the face of polit­i­cal bul­ly­ing to defend the bedrock of aca­d­e­mic free­dom upon which higher edu­ca­tion in the United States is built.

From Dr. Philippa Strum, Senior Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars:

Philippa Strum

10:00pm The let­ters con­tinue to flood the admin­is­tra­tive inboxes at Brook­lyn Col­lege, and the GC Advo­cate in sup­port of aca­d­e­mic free­dom at CUNY. The qual­ity and focus of all the let­ters, from stu­dents, alumni, aca­d­e­mics and con­cerned cit­i­zens has been truly stun­ning, inspi­ra­tional, pow­er­ful, and as evi­denced by Brook­lyn College’s deci­sion to reverse its ear­lier actions, effective.

A num­ber of promi­nent aca­d­e­mics and pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als from around the world have sent let­ters to Brook­lyn Col­lege Pres­i­dent Karen Lee Gould and Provost William Tra­mon­tano express­ing their dis­plea­sure with the events that pre­ceded tonight’s vic­tory. We’ll be run­ning all of the ones we have received that have not yet been made avail­able as a pub­lic record and tes­ta­ment to the orga­nized efforts on the part of those who stand up in the face of polit­i­cal bul­ly­ing to defend the bedrock of aca­d­e­mic free­dom upon which higher edu­ca­tion in the United States is built.

From the Committee for the Open Discussion of Zionism:

Dear President Gould:

The Committee for the Open Discussion of Zionism (CODZ) applauds Brooklyn College’s decision to reverse its removal of Kristofer Petersen-Overton from his assignment due to pressure from a single individual, Assemblyman Dov Hikind, a former supporter of Meir Kahane’s JDL. We note that unfortunately Hikind is not the first elected official to act to suppress freedom of speech and academic integrity in U.S. colleges on behalf of the State of Israel.

We are a group of lawyers, professors, physicians, writers and others who came together in 2007 to counter our society’s pervasive suppression of criticism of Israel, often in a manner that reminds us of McCarthyism.

It is clear from Petersen-Overton’s syllabus that he had no intention of singling out Israel for attack, while Hikind clearly has an agenda that is driven by Zionist ideology rather than academic integrity.

The Provost’s actions betrayed the standards of free thought and expression upon which a flourishing academy must be grounded. Increasingly, the American people, including a growing number of Jews, are rejecting the injustice of such actions. We are grateful that you have acted in the best interest of academic integrity and against bullying by a fear-minded ideologue by reversing the Provost’s decision and reinstating Petersen-Overton. Thank you!

Sincerely,

Abdeen Jabara
Attorney and Board Member, Center for Constitutional Rights*

Carl Schieren
M.I.A., formerly with the American University in Cairo

Michael Smith, Esq.
Attorney

Mitchel Cohen
Brooklyn Greens / Green Party, and
Chair, WBAI (99.5 FM) Local Station Board*

Len Weinglass
Attorney

Alice Shields
former faculty, New York University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of Psychology

Barbara Harvey
Attorney

Nina Felshin
former faculty and curator, Wesleyan University

Howard Brandstein
Executive Director, Sixth Street Community Center, NYC*

Jonathan House, M.D.
Faculty, Columbia University, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Department of Psychiatry
Former Secretary, American Psychoanalytic Association

Dennis James
Attorney

Barbara Grossman
Attorney

Joel Kovel, MD

Brian Drolet
Director, Deep Dish TV

John Moran
emeritus [retired] Dept. of Philosophy, Manhattan College and
former adjunct at Hunter College

Thomas Hillgardner
Attorney

Bertell Ollman
Prof. of Politics, New York University

Dave Lippman
Musical journalist

9:30pm We were once again experience major technical difficulties this evening, as the blog was temporarily taken offline by our server for reasons that are still unclear.  But no matter: we are back!

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Embattled CUNY students, already laboring under the stresses of a broken economy, are being forced to absorb another blow to their pocketbooks. On November 22, the CUNY Board of Trustees voted to raise tuition by 5 percent for the coming spring semester, and then another 2 percent for the fall of 2011.  Not only that, but the BoT also empowered CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein to raise tuition another 3 percent during the coming year if he deemed it necessary. Such a move would have to be based on an assessment of New York City and State’s budgetary health.  Which basically means that it will happen, given the fact that there is currently no end in sight for the continuing problems each is expected to suffer over the next five years or so.

“These tuition increases are unfortunate but necessary for the University to continue to provide the high quality educational opportunity our students deserve,” Goldstein said shortly after the decision.  According to the CUNY News Wire, Lord Vader sees tuition increases as “necessary to stabilize college operations, protect new faculty hired over the last several years and maintain the University’s widely regarded progress in enhancing academic quality and the value of its degrees.” 

The tuition increases hit all students hard.  Full-time college undergraduates will notice a $115 increase on their tuition bills in the coming semester, while community college students will pay an additional $75 in the spring. Meanwhile Master’s students will get hammered with a $185 increase per semester, slightly more than the $165 fulltime doctoral students can expect. CUNY Law students will see a $255 tuition hike, while Hunter College School of Social Work students will be hit the hardest, with a whopping $500 per semester increase.

CUNY Students and Faculty Take to the Streets

As the Board of Trustees was voting on tuition raises, several dozen CUNY students and faculty attempted to shut down the meeting before the vote took place. As the Advocate’s own Doug Singsen reported in the Indypendent, “As the Board was preparing to vote on the proposed tuition hikes, students in the audience began chanting slogans against the tuition hike, forcing the meeting to come to a temporary halt. Within a few minutes, the Board’s security forces began ejecting the students and teachers leading the chants, forcibly when necessary, to the exit. Outside in the hallway, the ejected protesters took up their chanting again.

“Once all the protesters had been removed, the security guards instructed the protesters to vacate the hallway. The protesters refused to move, so the guards began pushing the crowd of students down the hallway and into the elevators, which were sent to the lobby. Once there, the protesters continued to be shoved toward the building’s main entrance, but the guards could not force them out. As Baruch students watched and cheered from a balcony and other parts of the lobby, the protesters began chanting again and speaking to the students in the lobby. After twenty minutes, the protesters were finally pushed out into the street, where they continued to chant and speak out for another half hour.”

Despite taking to the streets to voice their displeasure, the protest did not alter the course of BoT voting, which was near unanimous in approving the tuition hike.  The only dissenting vote was cast by the Student Senate representative on the board, Cory Provost. 

Not Only Do Students Get to Pay More, They Get Less in Return!

As tuition rates begin to rise, CUNY obviously has to offer something extra in return.  And boy has it ever!  According to Advocate sources, at least one senior college, Baruch, plans on offering “super jumbo classes” in the coming semester.  No, these won’t be super in the sense of better, but bigger.  Baruch is planning to combine several sections of their tier-two courses (electives and second year requirements like Great Works, Modern American History, American Government, Art History Surveys, and Principles of Biology) into expanded gigantic courses of 150-500 students each. These moves are intended to make up for the huge cuts to departments across Baruch, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Savings will be realized through the elimination of what will likely be hundreds of adjuncts who would otherwise be teaching these courses. One source within the English department notes that the college requested that the department slash its budget by $250,000. That would come to about twenty adjuncts let go at a course-load of 2/2!

Thankfully, these moves are not being accepted without challenge. The Advocate has obtained access to a letter from Glen Peterson, chair of the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch which we hope provides an example others will follow.  In the letter, worth quoting at length, Peterson notes that

“On November 22, I sent a message to Baruch College’s top administrators, forwarding it to our personnel and budget committee as well as our Faculty Senate’s executive committee. I described a conversation I had with Chancellor Goldstein and Vice Chancellor Logue earlier that day, in which I explained the impact of the cuts at Baruch, where the administration wants introductory level courses that are taught at normal class sizes to be tripled across the board, thereby devastating years of work developing writing- and communication- intensive classes and pedagogy based on close interaction with students.

“Chancellor Goldstein stated that any changes in class size could have to do only with enrollment increases and constraints on space, and nothing to do with the budget cuts. I explained that the changes were being imposed solely as cost-cutting measures, that very large numbers of adjuncts were being laid off, and that we had been shown the savings that would be thereby achieved.

“In my November 22 message, I asked: ‘What is going on here? The Chancellor insists that budget cuts will not affect the quality of education at CUNY while Baruch’s administration quite forthrightly admits that the shift to an all-jumbo model for Tier-two courses will have significantly adverse impacts on the quality of teaching we provide our students. Clearly there is a major disconnect between the university’s leadership and Baruch’s.’

“In a meeting on November 30 with adjuncts and full-time faculty from several departments, I reiterated that our department opposes, and will not cooperate with, measures that can only damage the quality of education while eliminating the jobs of our adjunct colleagues. We need to join together to stop such measures, before they become “the new normal” and cause irreparable damage.

“At a [recent] Baruch Faculty Senate meeting [on December 2] Baruch’s administration responded to my query by providing financial data demonstrating the marked degree to which the college is underfunded in comparison with every other CUNY campus. The “disconnect” between CUNY’s leadership and Baruch’s leadership exists, the administration explained, because “The average situation facing CUNY senior colleges is dramatically different from the situation facing Baruch.”

“This response, unfortunately, merely restates the problem mathematically; it does not explain why CUNY’s leadership denies that its policies are doing what they are in fact doing, that is, forcing Baruch to dramatically diminish the quality of the education it provides to its students.”

Peterson’s letter underscores the need for broad-based organization against jumbo-sized classes, both within Baruch and beyond. Indeed, if what we understand is true—that the Provost’s actions in this matter are largely taken in a willy-nilly fashion—then this offers an imminently winnable fight for the Professional Staff Congress, the Adjunct Project, the CUNY Contingents Unite, and any other allies interested in joining forces.  Indeed, it’s critical that action is taken immediately in order to stave off similar actions at other campuses. And winning might just prove to be a desperately needed shot in the arm to a CUNY labor movement that has seen better days. 

The Graduate Center Tightens its Belt

A dispiriting memo circulated the Graduate Center community during November detailing the painful belt-tightening measures to be adopted by the GC in the face of major cuts to the CUNY budget.  In the letter, GC President William Kelly outlined the challenges facing our institution:

“The Graduate Center…has experienced diminished tax-levy support over the last few years.  From 2008 to 2010 we absorbed permanent budget allocation reductions totaling $2, 477,600…The 2010-11 budget allocation imposed a further reduction of $2.4 million.  The Chancellery’s mandate that we sequester an additional 1.25 percent of our base budget as a reserve against mid-year cuts added an additional $1.1 million to the total.  Collectively, that’s a $6 million base budget reduction.”

Holy shit!  Kelly also notes that “the prospect of even greater cuts in 2011-12 looms large.”  Great.  As a result, the Graduate Center leadership has taken steps to fill holes punched into being by Albany’s budget pillaging. So pay attention, GC students: this is going to play out in big ways in your life over the years to come.

First, President Kelly has ordered that except in “very rare circumstances,” faculty vacancies will not be filled.  One wonders what might constitute the circumstances under which this rule is not followed, but thus far there is no word on that score.  Second, the GC will institute major cutbacks in its spending on supplies and equipment, and authorize no new expenditures, whether they be requests for conference funding, lecture series or the creation of new research centers.  Third, and most directly important for students will be efforts to expand enrollment. While the president insists that across the board expansion will not be the objective, he expects that the number of Master’s and special certificate program students (those who, surprise, pay the most tuition and receive the least financial aid) will be increased in coming years. 

So, get ready for swelling class sizes everyone! Who knows?  Maybe soon we’ll be treated to our own super-duper mega-courses!

Adjuncts (Actually) Unite!

On November 4, the Professional Staff Congress met to vote on a bargaining agenda for the next round of contract negotiations with the state.  The PSC’s executive council proposal was adopted after a lopsided vote in favor.  But what was most important in many respects was the effectively organized turnout of adjuncts to protest the possibility of a repeat of what took place in the previous round where, despite gains for the PSC, adjuncts were largely left behind.

In addition to the 115 delegates present for the vote, another hundred or so Adjunct Project and CUNY Contingents Unite members showed up to make their voices heard.  Wearing bright orange t-shirts with “We Are the Teaching Majority” and “Pay Parity Now!” emblazoned across the fronts and backs, protestors vocally applauded delegate statements in support of adjunct parity and heckled those that did not.

The AP and CCU position comprises four key demands:  a minimum three-year contract for adjuncts that begins building a system of seniority; $30 wage increase per credit hour for all contingent categories and the promise of step raises ever year; comprehensive employer-paid health insurance for all contingent positions in the CUNY system; and promotional series for Higher Education Officers who receive similar pay rates, benefits and job security as other contingent classifications. 

As the Socialist Worker notes, the superhuman efforts of the AP and CCU organizers have already begun to pay off.  “Even before the DA met, however, the adjuncts’ campaign for the four demands was already bearing results.  The PSC’s bargaining committee adopted the health care and HEO demands nearly verbatim, but significantly weakened the job security and wage demands. The bargaining committee replaced the $30 per credit hour raise, which represents an approximately 50 percent raise for adjuncts, with the vague demand for ‘measurable progress toward pay parity.’ The committee also replaced the demand for three-year contracts, which would protect adjuncts from being laid off without cause, with job protections that only kick in after an adjunct has taught two courses per semester for five years, a condition that department chairs could easily evade by simply laying off adjuncts before they reach the necessary five years.”

Obviously, there is still significant work to be done.  If real change is to occur, the commitment level of adjuncts and contingent labor will need to be both deepened and broadened.  Progress is possible, as the November 4 PSC vote testifies.  But it demands perseverance, creativity, an aptitude to point the way to a more equitable future, and the refusal to sit back and take yet another for the team.

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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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A student at City College asked me the other day what I thought about Af-Pak and all I could think of was this.  Maybe President Obama just needs some better marketing for his war in Central Asia.

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This doesn’t seem to have gotten much publicity, but the Coalition of Graduate Employee Unions (CGEU) is sponsoring a three-day conference at SUNY Stony Brook this weekend. CGEU is a national coalition of around 25 grad student unions. Stony Brook is an hour and forty-five minutes from NYC by train (schedules here) but the program for the conference looks pretty great so it’s worth making the trip if you can.

The increasing turn to an insecure, underpaid labor force is not just happening at CUNY; this is a national phenomenon, and it affects the future job prospects of all grad students. Our whole futures are tied up in this economic enterprise of public schools. If public universities’ funding continues to plummet, we can expect more and more adjunct positions and fewer and fewer tenured ones. That spells economic death for us. The CGEU is in the forefront of fighting for the labor rights of higher education instructors. Definitely worth checking out and supporting. The conference program is below. Visitor information for the conference is online here.

Thursday, August 5

5:00 p.m.- 8:00 p.m., Registration

U. Cafe

Friday, August 6

8:00 – 8:45 a.m., Breakfast and Registration
9:00 – 10:30 a.m., Opening Plenary
10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m., Workshops I

Leadership Recruitment and Development; Maintaining Institutional Memory

Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto), Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902), Rob Henn (TAA/Wisconsin), Susan Valentine (GESO/Yale)

Running Contract or Advocacy Campaigns

Scott Bruton (Rutgers AAUP-AFT)

Privatization and the Globalization of Higher Education in Canada and the U.S.

Zach Schwartz-Weinstein (GSOC/NYU), Scott Drake (TSSU/Simon Fraser), Aman Gill (GSEU/Stony Brook)

12:30 – 1:30 p.m., Lunch

Speaker on RA Union rally, Kasia Sawicka (RA Union/Stony Brook)

1:45 – 3:45 p.m., RA Union rally
4 – 5:30 p.m., Workshops II

Recent Strikes in the U.S. and Canada

Peter Brogan (CUPE 3903/York), Natalie Havlin (GEO/UIUC), Kerry Pimblott (GEO/UIUC), Anna Kurhajec (GEO/UIUC)

Restructuring of Graduate Education and Academic Labor

Patrick Gallagher (GSOC/UAW), Michal Rozworski (AGSEM/McGill), Arianna Paulson (GESO/Yale), Matt Williams (New Faculty Majority)

Stewarding and Grievances

Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto), David Rowland (GEO/Michigan)

7:00 p.m., Dinner

Marc Bosquet Q&A via Skype

9:00 p.m., Party

The Bench

Saturday, August 7

9:00 – 9:30 a.m., Breakfast
9:30 – 10:30 a.m., Workshops III

Organizing Research Assistants and Post-Docs in the U.S. and Canada

Elric Kline (Rutgers AAUP-AFT, NJIT RA campaign), Jim McAsey (RA Union/Stony Brook), Jing Su (GEO/UMass), Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

U.S. Private University Organizing, including GSOC/NYU Fight for Recognition and NLRB Filing

Rana Jaleel (GSOC/UAW), Michael Cramer (GESO/Yale), David Assouline (GESO/Yale), Marie McDonough (GSU/Chicago)

Incorporating the Needs of Minority Sections of the Bargaining Unit

Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902/Toronto), Lena Palacois (AGSEM/McGill), Michal Rozworski (AGSEM/McGill), Kai Wu (RA Union/Stony Brook), Michigan?, York?,

10:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m., Workshops IV

Creative Communications—web 2.0, facebook, tumblr, youtube, twitter, etc.

David Rowland (GEO/Michigan), Jorge Cabrera (UAW 2865/UCal)

The Canadian Bargaining Context in 2010

Geraldina Polanco (CUPE 2278/British Columbia), Juan Acevedo (TAUMUN/Newfoundland), Arvindh Raman (TAUMUN/Newfoundland), Mikael Swayze (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

Coalition Building on and off Campus

Tamara Kneese (GSOC/NYU), Cristina Cruz-Uribe (GESO/Yale), Ajamu Nangwaya (CUPE 3902/Toronto)

12:30 – 1:30 p.m., Lunch

March 4th and Beyond

Jorge Cabrera (UAW 2865/UCal)

1:45 – 3:30 p.m., Workshops V

Making and Using Film Strategically for Your Campaign

Jim McAsey (RA Union/Stony Brook)

Strategic Campaign Research (including Public Sector Budget Research)

Dave Rowland (GEO/Michigan), Nathaniel Johnson (AFT)

3:45 – 5:15 p.m., Caucuses

U.S. Public Universities

U.S. Private Universities

Eastern Canada Universities

Western Canada Universities

7:00 p.m., Dinner

The Curry Club

9:00 p.m., Party

The Curry Club

Sunday, August 8

9:00 – 9:45 a.m., Breakfast
10:00 – 11:30 a.m., Closing Plenary

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Protesting education cuts in New York on March 4, 2010

The committee that organized the March 4th protests against budget cuts and tuition hikes has put together a planning and strategy meeting on Sunday, August 1 to kick off the fall organizing against cuts and hikes. March 4th was a success in New York and nationally, but we are still far from where we need to be in order to actually stop and reverse these cuts. We need to expand the movement and bring in new activists. Throughout the 1970′s, 1980′s and 1990′s, CUNY students had a thriving movement that was capable of turning out tens of thousands of students at protests, closing campuses through occupations, and winning real victories, including stopping or reducing tuition hikes, budget cuts, school closings and more. That’s what we need to aim for. The meeting on August 1st will hopefully be a small step in that direction.

These issues affect Graduate Center students both in the short term, through tightened budgets, reduced resources and higher tuition, and in the long term, through the gradual  adjunct-ification of public universities and the resulting lack of secure, well-paying tenure-track jobs. We need to organize the Graduate Center politically and make graduate students a force in the student movement. One example of what graduate students are capable of can be seen in the recent graduate assistants’ strike at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where the strikers won all their immediate demands and won concessions from the university.

Defending Public Education: Organizing for the Fall and Beyond

Sunday, August 1
2:00pm – 6:30pm
CUNY Grad Center, Room 5414
(365 5th Ave, btw 34th and 35th, photo ID required)

On March 4th, all across the country, we saw the first nationally coordinated day of action to defend public education.  It was neither the beginning nor the end, but an expression of the developing struggle to defend public education both in k-12 and higher ed. Now a call for another national day of action this fall on Oct 7 has been issued, the text of which can be found below.   This is another opportunity to bring together students, teachers, parents, and ordinary working people as part of an on-going effort to stop the cuts and other attacks on education.

We are calling on all activists, students, teachers and whoever wants to get together and fight for public education to attend an organizing meeting on Aug 1st to discuss Oct 7 and how to build the struggle this fall.  Atached is a leaflet for the Aug 1st meeting.

Discussions will include:
• the nature of the attacks on education
• the experience organizing so far and the current level of struggle
• Oct 7 as the next national day of action
• how to continue to build a movement this fall and beyond

-organized by the March 4th Committee

The national call for action for October 7th is reprinted below.

National Actions to Defend Public Education, October 7^th 2010

Last fall, California sparked a movement that has grown drastically over the past year. Much energy went toward building March 4th 2010, National Day of Action to Defend Education, which as a resounding success in the struggle to defend public education. Thousands organized and participated in the events of that day which took place in 32 states.  Major actions took place throughout California, but also in Milwaukee, New York City, Illinois, and Baltimore with hundreds of actions planned nationwide. University of Puerto Rico students capped off a two-month strike with a victory receiving many concessions from administration.

What is clear is that this fight is not over. The lines are drawn. As working families struggle to recover from the crisis, access to education is diminishing as cuts continue to come. California activists have proposed October 7^th as the next Day of Action. Internationally, activists are focusing on October and November as crucial moments in the struggle to fight back against neoliberalism and defend education rights. We, the below signed organizations and individuals, call on students, teachers, faculty, staff, workers, and parents to unite together and Defend Public Education this fall.

In Texas, the Board of Education has drastically changed the content of Texas textbooks, to include praise of Joseph McCarthy, and many other clauses. In Arizona, The state has passed the racist SB1070 that mandates police detain anyone looks like an undocumented worker. Following this, Arizona is also shutting down ethnic studies programs. In New York City, Chicago, and Detroit, districts are facing massive school closings. Public universities throughout the country are raising tuition costs and looking for more private investors. Budget cuts, tuition hikes, school closings, and right-wing reforms are hitting working families the hardest, especially in communities of color.

As these cuts continue to come, we see the costs of neoliberalism hit home harder than they have before. Public education has been losing funding for years, much of which disappeared because of neoliberal changes to the economy. The current budget crisis in many states will result in further drastic cuts to public education, including further cuts to underfunded schools, increases in unpaid days off for staff, a incentive program promoting “reforms” that are outright attacks on teachers, a restructuring of the public university around the needs of private business – largely supported by massive private grants, and tuition hikes that threaten accessibility to higher education for working families and people of color.

As the education disparities between poor and affluent grow ever wider, public schools serving communities of color are swiftly being re-segregated, provided fewer resources, and less-experienced teachers. These students are being tracked into non-academic, dead-end programs while ethnic and multi-cultural classes and opportunities are being cut.

This crisis and this solution are a direct result of neoliberal-era ideology, reducing or dissolving taxes on the rich and corporations while working people struggle to provide for their families out of their ever-shrinking pockets. As private interests gain more power, as the private dollar begins to strengthen its influence in education, our democratic rights are being stripped away.

The time to act is now, students teachers and staff are preparing for the next wave of actions. We need your support and participation to make this day a historic moment in American history. To get involved please Email: fall_actions@defendeducation.org or call us at 860-916-2761.

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Bust of Dr. Horace Webster, Greco-Roman style. City College, Shepard Hall, Room 250.

In discussions of CUNY, the school’s mission is often cited as being to serve “the children of the whole people.” These words were spoken by Horace Webster (1794-1871), the first director of the Free Academy, CUNY’s predecessor, at the academy’s opening ceremony in 1849. This phrase is used to demonstrate that CUNY’s mission since its founding has been to serve the entire community of New York City, rich and poor alike.

These words are claimed by almost everyone with an interest in the past, present and future of CUNY, including the university’s administration, its faculty union, and student activists. You can find them in the Graduate Center’s website, CCNY’s mission statement, the official history of Baruch College, CUNY’s 1999-2000 budget request, PSC President Barbara Bowen’s 2007 statement against the budget cuts, a 2006 statement by the CUNY activist group SLAM! (Student Liberation Action Movement), a Facebook page for a CCNY speak-out against budget cuts, and many more.

While this phrase pops up all over the place, the rest of the passage it belongs to is rarely cited. It reads, “The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.” This passage reveals several layers of meaning that are typically omitted from accounts of CUNY’s origins.

First, Webster considered it an “experiment” to educated the sons of the working class. He wasn’t sure if it would work. Perhaps, he seems to say, the lower classes would turn out not to be educable. (And, needless to say given that this was an era before the Civil War and the women’s suffrage, civil rights and women’s liberation movements, he wasn’t even going to bother trying to educate the female or non-European children of the whole people.)  The second, related experiment was whether an institution of higher education could be controlled by the people rather than the elite. It’s not clear whether this was because Webster was unsure of the lower classes’ intellectual or political capacities or, perhaps more likely, some combination of the two.

So while Webster was in all likelihood a sincere advocate of reform, the working class did not necessarily have his full confidence. What is to account for this half-hearted enthusiasm? One clue is the identity of Webster’s own alma mater, West Point. He was trained in the authoritarian, top-down style of the military, and was therefore  steeped in the military’s conservative political culture, which places a premium on obedience and deference and whose job is to defend the interests of society’s elite with physical force. While Webster clearly diverged from the military’s elitism far enough to devote his life to the experiment of a higher education open to the lower strata of society, it seems likely that he never fully divorced himself from his military background, a supposition supported by his hesitancy about the mission of his own academy.

Webster’s words show that public higher education has always been in doubt. When it was first tried in New York, its own founding leader was unsure of its chances of success, and ever since then it has constantly been besieged, assaulted and questioned, but also defended, ratified and reaffirmed, from the battle for academic freedom and free speech of the 1930′s to the fight for racial inclusion of the 1960′s and 1970′s, to the current fight to protect it from downsizing and privatization.

Finally, I want to point out the striking revolutionary symbolism that surrounds the major dates of Webster’s biography. Webster was born in 1794, one year after the execution of Louis XIV in the French Revolution, became director of the Free Academy one year after the Revolution of 1848, and died in 1871, the year of the Paris Commune. Webster lived in revolutionary times, and although all these events took place in the Old World rather than the New, their symbolism reminds us, as do Webster’s own words, that democratic gains have always had to be fought for. As Frederick Douglass famously said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.”

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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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Chancellor Goldstein,

Although it comes as no surprise to those of us who are familiar with the machinations of the CUNY hierarchy, your recent and very public support for Governor David Paterson’s proposed and cynically titled Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act, does not serve the needs or ease the burdens of the students and faculty who work and teach at the City University of New York. On the contrary, your support for Governor Paterson’s bill actively threatens the welfare of these stakeholders, who, should the bill pass, would be subject to unprecedented cuts, layoffs, tuition hikes, and differential tuition changes that would effectively price out many of the underprivileged poor and working class students whom CUNY has historically sworn to help, while threatening the job security of the professors and lecturers who serve those students.

When Paterson was originally considering his first round of budget cuts to CUNY way back in 2008 you did nothing to oppose that move, telling the Governor that CUNY could bear the cuts; and now in a classic and frankly quite expected quid pro quo, the governor is fighting tooth and nail against the entire legislature to pass a bill that would effectively give you and the CUNY Board of Trustees complete control over the CUNY budget, including the ability to raise tuition more than 9% per year indefinitely. This is a rate unprecedented in the history of the City University of New York, and would be a devastating blow to the students of CUNY, who have already been hit with significant tuition increases even as the university’s budget has been slashed year after year.

We realize that as Chancellor you have big visions for the future of the university. These visions are made quite explicit in the myriad advertising campaigns that the university is waging across the city in an effort to portray CUNY as a cutting edge research institution with award winning students and celebrity faculty. We, too support the best CUNY possible, but not at the expense of the current students, whose children, should this bill pass, would likely not be able to afford to attend the CUNY you envision.

By cynically and unilaterally supporting Governor Paterson’s proposed higher education bill, Chancellor Goldstein, without prior public discussion or debate within the university, without seeking the opinions and ideas of those you represent, you have overstepped the bounds of your power; and in your effort to increase that power, in your attempt to manufacture a university based on your own narrow vision rather than that of the faculty and students and citizens of NYC who make the university possible, you are in great dereliction of your duties as Chancellor.  

We the undersigned urge you and the CUNY Board of Trustees to withhold any further official support of the Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act until such time that there has been ample debate on the subject and all interested parties have been able to register their opinions and possible objections to the bill.

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The Professional Staff Congress of the City University of New York is vigorously campaigning against Governor Paterson’s proposed Higher Education Innovation and Empowerment Act, which the Governor has threatened to include as a rider in his upcoming budget proposal.

The proposed legislation would allow the SUNY and CUNY university systems to annually raise tuition as much as two and a half times the five-year aver­age of the Higher Edu­ca­tion Price Index (which mea­sures infla­tion­ary increases in oper­at­ing costs for col­leges and uni­ver­si­ties across the nation) and to create differential tuition rates for different programs and degrees. This means that the CUNY Chancellor and Board of Trustees would be allowed to raise tuition by more than two and a half times the rate of inflation without any approval from the state legislature.  

Proponents of the bill such as John Simpson, the president of SUNY Buffalo and CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, say the bill would provide the universities greater flexibility and autonomy. “In these difficult fiscal times, budget flexibility will enable the University to strengthen its responsiveness to the changing needs of students and to the changing economy,” said Chancellor Goldstein.

But the PSC, which represents more than 20,000 staff and faculty members at CUNY, disagrees, and they are calling on members to write letters to their state legislators in opposition to the bill. In a forceful statement issued on July 25, PSC President Barbara Bowen said

“The proposal strips CUNY and SUNY of public investment while limiting access for students.  Under the governor’s proposal, tuition could go up by more than 9 percent per year, every year, and could rise even higher for certain colleges and academic majors. “This cynical proposal would accelerate the under-funding of CUNY while purporting to enhance the University.  It is accompanied by devastating budget cuts to both CUNY and SUNY.  If the proposal is enacted, the governor’s legacy will be public universities that are weakened and increasingly stratified by income and race.”

State legislators are expected to decide on the proposed budget by Monday, June 28.

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