TESTIMONY OF
THE PROFESSIONAL STAFF CONGRESS/CUNY:
CUNY BUDGET REQUEST: 2006-2007 

Public Hearing
CUNY Board of Trustees
November 21, 2005

Delivered by Dr. Barbara Bowen, President  

Good afternoon, Chancellor Goldstein, Members of the Board of Trustees, fellow PSC members and CUNY students.  I am president of the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents 20,000 CUNY faculty and staff.  In offering the union’s testimony today, I hope to honor the memory of Julius Edelstein, who died at age 93 last week.  A former Vice-Chancellor of CUNY, Julius worked to implement Open Admissions and for more than thirty years remained a fierce fighter for a vision of radical openness in the University.    

It is in the spirit of that radical openness that the PSC opposes the proposal for a “compact” that would transfer some of the funding responsibility for this public university away from the City and State and onto the backs of students, faculty and staff.  Although the PSC recognizes and applauds the fact that the University’s proposed budget request includes a call for substantial additional funding—a $100 million for the senior colleges and $33.8 million for the community colleges—we oppose its proposal of a “compact” to supply additional funds.  The PSC supports the budget request’s proposal that the City and State commit to funding all of the University’s mandated costs; we oppose its proposal to increase tuition through the deceptively attractive idea of indexing and to find economies through “increased productivity” by University employees.   

There is no substitute for public funding.  The “compact” proposed by the University Administration is essentially an accommodation to the culture of scarcity for public institutions and for higher education in general.  It is a proposal to find new sources of revenue and savings, tacitly accepting that State and City funding will not significantly improve.  The PSC refuses to accept that “reality”; our position is that CUNY must not compromise in its demand that the University be adequately funded by the City and State.  Any lesser commitment on the part of the government is an admission that New York is not interested in the education of its people.  At exactly the moment when all the research shows that a college degree is essential for a decent life, New York’s elected officials have underfunded the greatest hope for hundreds of thousands of people for attaining that degree.   

As Chancellor Goldstein himself pointed out in his October 7 testimony, the State’s per-student funding at the senior colleges has dropped by an astonishing $5,000 since 1990.  In 1990 the per-FTE funding at SUNY and CUNY was comparable:  $7,855 at SUNY and $7,023 at CUNY.  Although both CUNY and SUNY increased their senior college tuition by approximately 200% between 1990 and 2003, the State dramatically differed in its approach to the two systems.  While SUNY’s State funding during this period rose by 35% (still less than the rate of inflation), CUNY’s fell by 17%.  That left CUNY with funding of $5,846 per full-time-equivalent student, compared to $10,677 at SUNY.  In other words, SUNY’s per-student funding, already far from adequate, is now almost double CUNY’s.  That difference is unconscionable—and it’s hard to imagine that it doesn’t have something to do with race.  Bridging the gap—not asking students to pay more and faculty and staff to work more—should be the first priority for any budget request for CUNY.  

Instead, the proposed “compact” offers ingenious ways to identify sources of funding other than the public treasuries of the City and State.  While it may be tempting to look elsewhere for sources of revenue, the only real answer to the funding crisis for CUNY is to insist that the State and City pay their share.  As the figures show, there have been fifteen years of radical, and I would say, racialized, de-funding of the City University system.  I recognize how difficult it has been in Albany to make the case and how seriously the Chancellor’s Office has argued for restorations, but the Board’s response to this funding crisis should not be to identify alternatives to public support, it should be to demand—as a start—the restoration of that $5,000 lost per full-time student.     

• The first element of the “compact” is a call for “an unprecedented commitment to philanthropic funding in order to enhance the investment initiatives.”   Like the proposal for increased tuition, this is ultimately a move toward privatization.  The vast majority of grant funding already in place at CUNY has been secured by the faculty; it is our research and creativity that has made CUNY viable in this area.  Obviously, we will continue to seek grant funding, but a reliance on philanthropy as a source of basic support is dangerous.  Donors to the University, either funding agencies or individuals, almost always target their funds for specific uses, often restrictive ones.  Public funding for a public university makes the university accountable ultimately to the people of the city and state; private funding potentially shifts that accountability to the private realm.  If CUNY is to remain a university in service of “the children of the whole people,” it must remain accountable to the public.     
• The second element of the “compact” is a promise of “increased productivity and efficiency measures.”  The PSC is already on record in opposition to this proposal.  The scandalous decrease in public funding over the last fifteen years—coupled with a 200% tuition increase—has meant that the faculty, staff and students have, in effect, subsidized this University.  As enrollments have grown, the workloads of the faculty and staff have ballooned.  Professional staff are routinely expected to work beyond their contractual hours, and full-time faculty are stretched thin in their attempt to offer the best education to our students.  Meanwhile, thousands of underpaid part-time faculty, equally determined to provide the best service to our students, give up more and more of their own time to respond to the growing need.  We have already been cut to the bone; there is nothing more to cut.  Any “productivity increases” will end up being decreases in real productivity, if real productivity means spending time with individual students, creating an atmosphere in which the delicate and unpredictable work of intellectual growth can take place.  The PSC strongly cautions against relying on further “productivity increases”—especially in the absence of any details for their implementation.   
• Third, the “compact” calls for “targeted enrollment growth.”  While the PSC firmly supports the expansion of access to CUNY, we question this approach as a way to increase funding.  Increased enrollment must be coupled with increased support.  Otherwise, it leads inevitably to a decline in the level of service CUNY can offer its students.  Many campuses are already bursting at the seams.  BMCC, designed to hold 8,000 students, now enrolls 18,000.  Enrollment growth without adequate per-student funding is a recipe for more of the same.  The root problem—lack of operating funds—must be fixed before enrollment growth makes sense as an approach to CUNY’s budget.
• Finally, the “compact” calls for regular increases in tuition not to exceed the Higher Education Price Index (HEPI).  Let me remind the Board that the HEPI for the years 1990 to 2003 was 57.1%.  During that time, CUNY senior college tuition rose by 195%—hardly the HEPI rate.  How can you consider tuition increases now, when students have already paid so much more than their share?   In the Chancellor’s October 7 testimony, he clearly called for more public funds for CUNY, but also presented tuition indexing as a way to make college costs more manageable for students.  While the proposal has the appearance of a benign approach to student costs, it provides no guarantee of sufficient public funds and risks a dramatic escalation in students’ share of CUNY’s budget.  With tuition indexing, CUNY would move one step closer to privatization and the responsibility for funding the city’s public university—instead of being borne by all taxpayers in the state—would fall most heavily on those least able to bear the cost.

That the tuition indexing plan makes tuition increases a normal part of life is in fact its most dangerous aspect.  The PSC refuses to accept that tuition increases should be normalized.  Not when CUNY tuition is already among the highest public college tuition nationally relative to the average income of our students.  And not when CUNY students are already paying 46.5% of the cost of their public education—that’s in addition to what they already pay for CUNY in taxes.  Regular increases would put a college education further out of reach.  Yes, CUNY will find students to fill its classes, but will it be serving those whom it is uniquely chartered to serve—the city’s poor, its immigrants, its working class, its people of color?  And TAP is not, as some have argued, a safety net.  TAP is skewed toward traditional students at residential four-year colleges; it offers limited support to part-time students and or to students who are financially independent.  Many of CUNY’s non-traditional and immigrant students, who would be hardest hit by tuition indexing, come from exactly this group.  To suggest that TAP will be there to pick up the pieces is misleading. 

Most disturbing, however, is the experience of other states where tuition indexing is already in place.  The University of Alaska imposed a 10% tuition increase between 2003 and 2004, despite indexing to HEPI, which was 2.1% to 4.6%.  The University of Iowa, where tuition is directly indexed to HEPI, imposed an increase of 8% in the same period.  The same could happen in New York.  With a structure for constant tuition increases in place, it becomes too easy for the State and City to seek ever-higher increases to meet funding shortfalls.  But the real danger is that there is no guarantee in the “compact” that the City and State will keep their end of the bargain.  As costs rise, there will be no obligation for the government to match those higher costs.  Mandatory expenses, such as our salaries and benefits, are of course essential, but there will also be a need for additional funding for new initiatives if the University is to remain intellectually alive.  Where will this funding come from?  We are afraid that the answer is our students.   

On behalf of the PSC’s 20,000 members, I call on the Board to revise the budget request and eliminate the “compact” before presenting it to the Legislature.  As we work with you to try to bring negotiations on our own contract to a close, we ask you to demand full public funding for this public university.  After fifteen years of seeing CUNY battered by planned neglect, anything less than a clear demand for restoration of public funds will compromise CUNY’s mission, take us dangerously close to total privatization, and undermine the very students we are privileged to serve.