Good afternoon, Chairman Johnson and Chairman Farrell, distinguished members of the Legislature, students and colleagues. I am President of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, the increasingly mobilized union that represents 20,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York. On behalf of my members and the two hundred thousand students we teach, I want to thank you for giving me this opportunity to address you about an Executive Budget that would be catastrophic for CUNY and that singles out education for its deepest cuts. I speak in solidarity with my colleagues from SUNY and NYSUT, and in strong support for their requests.

In a year in which almost all state agencies face budget cuts, it may be easy to lose sight of the dimension of the cuts to education in the Governor’s budget proposal. But the figures tell a story that cannot be interpreted as other than an attack, however sincerely the Executive Office may intend to support education. It’s not too late to give that story a different ending, but the Legislature must act definitively if our state government is to avoid being responsible for dealing education a death-blow. The people of New York consistently rate education as the first or second most important issue for public investment, yet education as a whole sustains the most severe cut in the entire Executive Budget. Something is out of joint.

No other broad category takes such a large hit as schools and colleges. While the Governor announced that overall spending would be decreased by 2.9 percent, the Executive Budget has proposed cutting K-12 education by 5.5 percent and higher education by a staggering 11.1 percent, according to a report by the Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities. In other words, higher education is asked to take a cut that is proportionately almost four times greater than the overall spending decline. The proposal for the City University of New York is even more damaging: CUNY’s senior colleges face a 12% cut from last year’s bare-bones budget, and our community colleges are facing a drop of 17.7% The CUNY community college cut, then, is proportionately more than five times higher than the overall spending decline. New York is in danger of becoming the anti-education state.

Hearing those figures, you might think that the disproportionate cut for CUNY this year is an aberration or a creature of the revenue shortfall. Unfortunately, that’s not true. This year’s proposal for CUNY, though more extreme than other years’, continues a pattern of systematically starving the University of funds, in good times or bad. Once the thirteen-year history of disproportionate cuts to CUNY becomes clear, you will see why the Professional Staff Congress takes the tough position that state funding for CUNY—even in this constrained budget year—must be not just restored but increased. I want to use my time today to give you ammunition for making the case for CUNY—this year, in this fiscal climate. The PSC also has proposals for revenue enhancement to support this and other public investment, and I’ll return to them, but I want to start with the hard question. Why should the Legislature restore and increase CUNY funding in a year when everyone is facing cuts?

First is the huge disproportion of the cuts proposed for higher education in this year’s Executive Budget. Second, the magnitude of the proposed cuts to CUNY specifically for fiscal 2003-04—12% at the senior colleges and 17.7% at the community colleges. But third, and perhaps most important, is the particular history of CUNY’s public funding. During the 1990s, when New York State experienced a decade of economic growth, CUNY saw its public funding cut by over a third, when adjusted for inflation. That’s one-third of our public funding that has already been lost even though the decade was marked by a steady increase in the personal income tax base, peaking in 1999. What was happening to CUNY during these years? State funding was falling.

In the last 10 years (1993 to 2003), the Governor and Legislature have reduced appropriations for all higher education by 5.2 percent in constant dollars. At the same time, other states took advantage of the period of economic growth to invest in higher education. In constant dollars, appropriations for higher education between 1993 and 2003 grew: 3.7% in New Jersey, 10.8% in Rhode Island, 25.1% in Connecticut, 32.4% in Texas, 38.8% in California, and 42.1% in Florida. Next year, under the Executive Budget proposal, the decline in CUNY funding in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1990 would be 41%.

It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that New York is actively hostile to public higher education and the to City University in particular. But having talked to many of you and learned of your real support for higher education, I can’t believe that’s the position you want to take. The PSC is aware of the Legislature’s strong history of restoring cuts to TAP and fighting for restoration of CUNY funds. But each year CUNY starts out so far behind in base funding that even significant restorations leave us with a net loss. Many of you have rightly struggled to restore TAP, as we must do again this year, only to find that those restorations are the limit of what is possible to gain for CUNY. If there was ever a moment to turn that history around, the moment is now.

Dollar for dollar, the best investment the state can make is in higher education. To starve higher education now is to guarantee a lower income base for the state in the future; CUNY graduates add millions of dollars every year in tax revenues to the economy. Cutting the community colleges is especially shortsighted at a moment of acute economic downturn: students are flocking to CUNY’s community colleges this year to gain the new skills and knowledge they need. Robbing us of the means to educate them is dangerous to the health of the State and a deep betrayal of trust for New York’s people.

This is the right moment to take the bold step of reversing the pattern of underfunding CUNY. Chancellor Goldstein has already outlined some of the University’s significant gains in recent years. I will highlight the advances made in the last three, especially as the result of cooperation between the union and the University on the project of strengthening the University. The Professional Staff Congress took the unusual step of approaching contract negotiations as an opportunity to renew and rebuild the institution. Instead of claiming all of our financial settlement for salary increases, for instance, we carved out significant portions to create new features to support high-quality education for our students. The contract we negotiated provides, for the first time, guaranteed research time for new faculty; it makes a start on supporting part-time faculty, who now teach a majority of our courses, in offering office-hour consultation with students; it recognizes the professional development needs of non-teaching staff and of the Educational Opportunity Centers’ faculty and staff. All of these changes have had a demonstrable effect on improving the quality of education at CUNY and helping the University to recruit and retain nationally-competitive faculty and staff. That CUNY’s resurgence has begun is without question. This is the moment to build on the firm foundation we have managed to put in place despite chronic underfunding and change the course of CUNY budgets.

Our specific funding priorities are outlined in the brochure you have received, and you’ll be hearing more about them as our members fan out and visit your offices this year. We join the University in prioritizing funding for new full-time faculty, the area that has been most visibly devastated by years of underfunding. The PSC request is for a modest 20 or so faculty per campus, or 450 new positions at a cost of 39 million dollars. Second, and especially urgent in light of the Executive Budget, is increased base aid to the community colleges. The proposed cut in the Executive Budget stands out among the budget proposals almost weirdly—it’s so out of scale with everything else; the community colleges cannot continue to function if their funding is carved out from under them. Our other priorities for new money include the relatively small sum of 4 million dollars for graduate tuition remission. CUNY is still one of the only doctoral institutions in the country that does not support the tuition costs of its Ph.D. students who teach. If you want to lift the academic horizon of CUNY’s doctoral programs and infuse the University with energy in a single stroke, add this 4 million dollars to the budget. Another relatively modest sum, 5 million dollars, would complete what was begun and allow all part-time faculty to provide students with the office hours they need. This need, like our request for improved technology for our classrooms and labs, is not a call for anything but what would be considered standard in other universities. We are not asking for luxuries, unless education has now become a luxury in New York; we are asking for what is essential to serve our students. All we want is to do the fundamental and beautiful work of a university: teaching our students and expanding collective knowledge.

Before closing, I want to explain why the solution to the budget shortfall proposed by the Executive Budget—increasing student tuition—is not an acceptable way to support the University. On its face, it may seem logical: CUNY faces drastic budget cuts; students can pay more tuition to fill the gap. But a closer look reveals two things: our students can’t pay, and increasing tuition is not fiscally sound. Tuition increases are an unstable base on which to fund a public university. CUNY’s recent history makes that clear. In the 1990s, tuition was raised twice, and the net result was a decline—159 million dollars less in total CUNY funds. Where is the logic in that? Students are forced to drop out when tuition is raised—CUNY lost 8,000 students in 1995—and thus overall tuition income can decrease. Tuition increases give the message that supporting higher education is no longer a public responsibility, and state and local appropriations decline. There is no substitute for public funding. Under the Executive Budget, the share of CUNY’s overall expenses covered by tuition would be 43%—twice the share students paid in 1990. Is that the future we want? Silent transfer of the cost of public services away from the public and onto individuals? It’s hard to see a tuition increase as anything but a tax increase in disguise.

To apply a tuition increase to CUNY students is especially unbearable. The Professional Staff Congress understands the pressure to increase the share of CUNY’s expenses paid by tuition, but we ask you to look more closely at the unique profile of our urban, immigrant, racially diverse student body. Our students are among the poorest college attendees in the nation: 16% come from families with a total income under $10,000; and nearly 60% are from families whose total annual income under $30,000. In the community colleges, nearly a third are from families earning under $20,000. That’s in New York City, with some of the highest costs of living in the nation. Even a modest tuition increase or tuition indexing for these students would be devastating. To think that with a little belt-tightening they can bear the increase is fantasy. The real effect of the proposed tuition increase has to be faced: it will mean elimination from CUNY, and probably from any college education, of thousands of our poorest students. The group forced to drop out will inevitably be more female than male, more brown and black than white, more urban than suburban. A tuition increase at CUNY is a direct withdrawal of the chance for higher education from this group. If you can support that premise, you can support a tuition increase at CUNY.

Many of us would like to think that financial aid, especially if TAP is restored, would cover the difference between the old tuition and the new. Unfortunately, that’s not how TAP works. Because TAP is based on eligibility factors and not only on the level of tuition, many students would not receive TAP increases equal to the increased tuition, and thousands would continue to receive no TAP at all. For instance, a single student with no dependents earning $20,000 a year—quite a plausible income for a working person without a college degree—receives absolutely no TAP support. This student would have to pay the full increase herself. Or a part-time student, working to support his college education at CUNY, would also receive no TAP, because Supplemental TAP has been eliminated. In fact, the income profiles of CUNY students mean that far fewer students at CUNY receive TAP than at either SUNY or the private colleges. In 2000-01, there were 70,230 CUNY students receiving TAP, while there were 104,003 on TAP at the private colleges and 126,670 at SUNY. There is a sharp case to be made that CUNY students—urban, multiracial, largely working-class and first generation—would not receive sufficient TAP grants or other financial aid to cover a tuition increase.

If increased revenue for CUNY is not to come from student tuition, then from where? The Professional Staff Congress joins NYSUT, the New York State AFL-CIO and many others in the Fair Budget Coalition, proposing a restoration and reconfiguration of several revenue sources eliminated by the Governor and the Legislature. We support modest progessivization of the state income tax so higher-income taxpayers pay their fair share; we support a 1% surtax on payroll incomes of $100,000 or more; we propose reinstating the stock transfer tax in an amended form; and we support reinstating the commuter tax that is so vital to the economic health of the City. These proposals would raise $5.4 billion this year. The PSC is also studying other sound and creative approaches to revenue enhancement that would close the remaining $4 billion deficit. The solution to the current revenue shortfall is not to grind another thousand dollars out of some of New York’s poorest people and drive them out of college, nor is it to continue to cut CUNY so severely that it’s impossible to sustain a university. The answer is to restore lost revenue and chart a different course for the future, one closer to the expressed priorities of New Yorkers.

Let me leave you with one index of how CUNY has suffered under the regime of ever-decreasing budgets. At the Borough of Manhattan Community College, which now houses 17,000 students in a space built for 8,000, where students and faculty are still struggling with the death of several of their student colleagues on September 11^th and the loss of one of the college’s main classroom buildings in that terrorist attack, there are now only 11 full-time Counselors for 17,000 students. That’s more than one thousand five hundred students per Counselor. You may as well tell students outright, "We despise you, we want you to fail," because that’s the message being sent by a budget that leaves them so underprovided with support.

I don’t underestimate the political courage it will take to demand so dramatic a reversal of the funding priorities expressed in the Executive Budget. But I urge you to remember that the proposed budget cuts education way out of proportion to the overall cut, and that CUNY’s history has been one of carefully planned starvation—death by inches—over the past ten or more years. If you want to change that record and stop the incremental death before it is too late, you will demand full state support for CUNY. That means not depending on the short-range solution of a tuition increase, not thinking it’s enough if TAP is restored, not even accepting restoration of the Executive Budget cuts. It means stopping at nothing less than increased state funding for CUNY. A Legislature with imagination and courage can accept no less; if you rise to the challenge of this moment and make funding for CUNY a priority, the people of New York will support you.