The crowd
was well-behaved. No one was arrested. It was a peaceful gathering
of students and faculty in front of City University of New York
headquarters to show support for the Professional Staff Congress,
the faculty/staff union, in its struggle for a fair and equitable
contract and its efforts to revitalize CUNY.
And
that’s probably the reason it was hardly reported as news. But
the PSC rally held on Monday, April 23, was not about making a
spectacle of the faculty and staff of the City University of New
York. It was about higher education and the real standards CUNY
should uphold.
The union
is seeking a contract from CUNY that will provide competitive
salaries, a smaller workload, compensation for adjunct professors
for the extra time and effort they put in as well as a
health-benefits plan comparable to that of full-time faculty, and
more funding for up-to-date computer, library and laboratory
resources. These are the principal demands of the PSC. They are
not extraordinary or extreme.
I’m
always amazed by how Mayor Giuliani can say that CUNY has no
standards and offers little in the way of an education, yet in the
next breath he can propose cuts to the university budget. The
logic—or lack thereof—leaves me astounded. It is as though the
mayor believes knowledge is imparted to students by the walls and
ceilings, not by the faculty who teach within the classrooms. CUNY
needs higher academic standards, says the mayor, but it’s not
getting money to hire more full-time faculty members or get more
up-to-date equipment.
And
what’s worse is that the mayor is not alone in his thinking.
CUNY’s Board of Trustees, a body of political appointees, has
bought into this notion as well. Standards aren’t determined by
the quality of the education provided. Standards are determined by
the scores students receive on standardized tests. Budgets can be
cut, faculty members can be overworked and underpaid, but as long
as the tests are in place, everything is great and “standards”
have finally been returned to CUNY.
"Standards
Never Left CUNY"
The mayor
and CUNY’s Board of Trustees do not seem to realize, however,
that standards never left CUNY. What did go are many faculty
members who have been wooed away by other colleges and
universities that provide higher pay, fewer classes, more time to
do academic research and better benefits. Starvation budgets have
also constrained CUNY’s ability to recruit new faculty.
Complicating
matters is the media’s complicity in all this. The major
metropolitan newspapers are particularly guilty of jumping on the
Giuliani-led bash-CUNY bandwagon. They report the outrageous
claims of our mayor and print editorials and opinion pieces about
CUNY’s lack of standards. They provide the public with only one
point of view—the mayor’s—without delving deeper into the
fundamental issues behind higher public education. This is the
media’s way of saying that the faculty and staff at CUNY do not
matter, let alone the students. As long as there’s someone like
the mayor to make headlines with controversial comments and
defamatory statements, they’re content with the status quo.
If the
mayor truly cared about raising standards at CUNY, he would
provide more funding. If the Board of Trustees really cared about
standards, they would offer, without need of a protracted
struggle, a decent contract that gives the faculty and staff at
the university what they sorely deserve: respect.
But in the
end, it is the CUNY students who lose out. We need faculty members
who come to work every day looking forward to something other than
management’s disregard, overcrowded classes and a laughably
small pay check compared with other colleges and universities.
Students
Shortchanged
Students
in the City University system are shortchanged each semester by
budget cuts that rob our colleges of classes and course sections,
in many cases causing delays in graduation. Students often deal
with faculty who are harried by their workload and have to bend
over backward to schedule office hours. Students are left to the
good graces of adjunct faculty who hold office hours and provide
other out-of-class services even though they aren’t compensated
for doing so.
When much
of the media neglected to report to the public about the PSC
rally, they weren’t just saying that the faculty and staff’s
issues don’t matter. They were saying that the city’s students
do not matter, either.
CUNY
deserves better. Our professors deserve better. Our students
deserve better.
[This
article was originally published on May 9 in Newsday.]
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