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2/15/01

The Crisis at CUNY:

Privatization and Downsizing

by Gerald Meyer (Hostos Community College)

This paper is based on a talk presented at the plenary session of the CUNY-Wide Community College Conference "The Power of Community Colleges: Organizing for Change" (March 21, 1997). A somewhat expanded version was published in Community Review, Vol. XV: 34-39. 

          CUNY is in crisis!   For over a decade, the City University of New York has incurred almost annual reductions in its budget, which have more often than not been accompanied by increases in tuition. As a result, 60 percent of its classes are taught by adjunct professors and the portion of its budget furnished by government is one of the smallest among major public institutions in the entire United States. Its Board of Trustees, appointed by Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, are hostile to the policy of Open Admissions. Faculty, staff, and students naturally think that CUNY is being picked on and singled out. However, this is not really true. Everywhere in the United States, the public sector is under attack.  It is being downsized and privatized.  These are new words (they appear in few dictionaries or spell checks), because they are neologisms based on new realities. It can be very empowering if those affected remain cognizant that downsizing and privatization are very recent phenomena.

         Privatization is premised on the notion that everything that exists in the public sector is unnatural, a mistake, a perversion--something that cannot work, something that should never have been there, and something that must be eliminated as rapidly as possible.  Its supporters demand that everything in the public sector--that is, everything (including the Social Security system, public schools, even correctional institutions)--that the citizenry through the democratic process has decided advances societal goals must be assimilated into the private sector, that is, privately-owned businesses that produce profit.  In this scheme, wherever any part of the public sector cannot be privatized, it should be downsized; however, downsizing frequently precedes privatization. Remarkably, without any sustained resistance, this point of view has gained near-total hegemony at CUNY and throughout the United States.

         The basic premise of the privatization campaign is that the free market, which operates according to the principles of profit and loss and supply and demand, is the only rational model. Therefore, any intervention--to ameliorate a social problem, to redistribute wealth, to regulate the market--is doomed to failure.  Only laissez faire ("hands off" the privately owned economy) corresponds to reality. The logical outcome of this position is that as much as possible of the public sector, must be eliminated.  In the same way, unions must be restricted, weakened, and wherever possible eliminated because their primary purpose is to restrict the free market in laborCthat is, the right of employers to hire and fire at will and pay wages purely on the basis of what the market will allow. These ideological tenets of the extreme right wing have flowed from their think tanks and the pages of their journals into a broad and coherent reactionary agenda which a powerful political movement is more or less rapidly implementing.

             Here the term "reactionary" is used advisedly. The New Right's intention is not the conservation of the status quo. In essence, it is a drive to revert to a situation prior to the sixties which generated some legislation and much sentiment for the rights of women and gays/lesbians. However, its major thrust is to undo the New Deal.  They have mobilized to carry out a root and branch destruction of the social programs and pro-labor legislation enacted in that period.  They have been able to accomplish much of this part of their agenda by not directly attacking these essential and popular programs, but by demanding larger and larger tax reductions which if enacted would deprived the government of the revenue necessary for funding these programs. The Right=s program also includes instances of attempting to overturn reforms from the Progressive Era, which  brought about the progressive income tax (where the rich are taxed at a high percent than the poor and the middle class), and an assault on the regulation of industry on behalf of the consumers. The ultra-right even wants to erase some of the gains of the Reconstruction Era, for example, when they raise the demand for a Constitutional amendment to excise from the Fourteenth Amendment the phrase: AAll persons born . . . in the United States . . . are citizens of the United States . . . .@  Most recently, by proposing the use of vouchers for religious schools and the funding of religiously affiliated social programs, they are striving to erase a central part of the accomplishments of the American Revolution, that is, the separation of church and state.  The enemies of CUNY, in particular, and the public sector, in general, are not conservative; they are extreme reactionaries determined to undercut the already much-compromised social foundations of our democracy.

         The results of replacing the public sector and trade unions with the free market are beginning to accumulate.  Real wages have been steadily falling for twenty-five years. In this country, median salaries in real dollars are below their 1973 levels. The disparities in the distribution of wealth have become unprecedentedly extreme. The upper one percent of the population owns nearly 40 percent of the wealth of this country; the lower one-half of the population actually owes more than it owns! The number of Americans without any health insurance has reached 45,000,000 men, women, and children! In the City of New York, one out of four people has no health insurance whatsoever. In the United States today, children from families whose incomes are in the upper 25 percent are nine times as likely to graduate from college by age twenty-four than the children from families whose incomes are in the lower 25 percent!  Fifteen years ago, the ratio was 3.5 to 1; it is now three times more unequal.  In Congress, right wingers propose nothing less than the abolition of a key aspect of the Wagner Act of 1935CALabor's Bill of Rights@--overtime pay will be replaced with compensatory time.

          These policies benefit the upper-middle class and the rich through vast decreases in their taxes and the availability of cheap labor to provide (directly and indirectly) personal services. On the other hand, the withdrawal of the economic support of social services and unions inflicts declining incomes and increasing social insecurity on the vast majority of country's population. However, not all groups experience these changes in the same way.  No one from the working class and very few from the middle class benefit from privatization and downsizing.  Middle class families which gain a few hundred dollars from decreases in taxes, will likely spend much more than that in increases in their children's tuition due to decreases in state and federal appropriations for higher education. Added to this are the increases in their transportation costs due to the decline or total elimination of public transportation in their locality.  The catastrophic consequences of privatization for the working class and the society as a whole are unfolding in California, where the privatization of electric power has driven up the costs of electricity three and four fold, while causing blackouts and brownouts throughout the State.

           Even more dramatic are the effects of these changes for people of color.  For example, the 1990 Statistical Abstract of the United States shows that the percentage of people living below the poverty level (which in 1995 meant $15,600 for a family of four) varies enormously by racial/ethnic group: 10 percent of whites, nearly 27 percent of Latinos, and almost 32 percent of African Americans subsist in this miserable situation. A much higher percentages of African Americans than whites are union members and a much higher percentage are civil servants. Generally, the public sector is more open to public scrutiny than its private counterpart and can therefore be more effectively monitored to prevent discrimination. Everything indicates that the destruction of public sector institutions and the trade unions will disproportionately harm people of color.

         Nothing illustrates this better than the City University of New York. In 1960, five percent of CUNY's enrollment was comprised of minorities. In 1995, 77 percent of those students entering its community colleges and 74 percent of those entering its four-year colleges were non-white. CUNY represents a major resource for New York City=s working class and especially its minority communities.  For example, in 1994, Hostos Community College, CUNY's bilingual campus located in the South Bronx, ranked seventh in the entire United States in the graduation of minorities, third in the graduation of Hispanics, and second in the graduation of Hispanic women. The implications of the assault on the service-sector of this economy are racist to the core. It is intended to perpetuate and indeed intensify the subordination of non-white peoples in this country.

        City University is the concretization of social democracy, a category that includes everything in the public sector and the trade unions. The public sector and unions actually act to redistribute wealth while ameliorating the social effects of a cruel Darwinian system. They function within the capitalist system to decelerate the polarization of income and wealth, which is the natural outcome of unregulated capitalism. Furthermore, trade unions and the public sector extend social and economic rights to the working class and the poor.  For the vast majority, the legal and political rights guaranteed in the Constitution are ineffective because they are insufficient.  These rights can only have some meaning for the poor, minorities, the working class, and in fact most of the middle class, when they operate within a society which, at a minimum, promotes unions, universal health insurance, and free education through college.  Those who possess wealth only need those rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights.  They need neither a social sector nor trade unions.  Indeed, these restrict their property rights, which their ideology (conveniently for them) posits as the basis of all other rights. Those who possess little or no wealth need the group rights, the social rights that resulted from the mass movements of the Roosevelt Era and the sixties, and that are now being eliminated. 

               During the New Deal, the trade union movementCindeed the LeftCwere components of a political coalition that cohered around a political philosophy encapsulated in Roosevelt=s AFour Freedoms@: Freedom of Religion; Freedom of Speech; Freedom from Want; and Freedom from Fear.  These concepts were further elaborated by his Vice President, Henry Wallace, in his 1942 speech entitled the ACentury of the Common Man,@ which he delivered in Madison Square Garden at a rally sponsored by the U.S.-Soviet Friendship Society. Roosevelt=s 1944 State of the Union Address, where he called for a ASecond Bill of Rights,@ embodied social and economic rights, including: AThe right to a useful and remunerative job . . . .@; AThe right to earn enough to provide adequate food and clothing and recreation.@; AThe  right of every family to a decent home.@; AThe right to adequate medical care. . . .@; AThe right to adequate protection from the economic fears, old age, sickness, accident, and unemployment.@; AThe right to a good education.@  An expanding union movement, which under the leadership of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, defended the social gains of the New Deal and demanded the implementation of the remainder of its agenda.  The domestic Cold War destroyed the ideological and organizational underpinnings of this expanded version of democracy. McCarthyism-- in league with the soporifics of TV, popular culture, and drugsChave created a national amnesia about this period, which has produced a country with the least comprehensive social sector and the weakest trade union movement of all the major capitalist countries. Consequently, the United States today possess the distinction as the country with the greatest disparities of income and wealth.

         The reification of the free market and the denigration of the public sector are neither the reflection of natural law nor the natural order.  They are merely the tenets of the secular religion of capitalism, that is, the ideology of the owning class. They are social and economic Darwinism writ large. They are a conglomeration of dated and thoroughly refuted notions that have been left largely unchallenged by a demoralized and disoriented Left.

         Most importantly, history itself has been left out of Aneoliberal@ theorizing. The free market was originally restrained because it created socially and politically untenable results.  Its wild and violent gyrations led directly to the Great Depression, an unprecedented economic catastrophe, whose consequences were so unacceptable that they threatened to replace the entire system of private ownership with socialism. By insisting that history is dead, these Social Darwinists enshrine the present moment, which coincidentally corresponds to the moment in this century when capitalism is least challenged politically and ideologically.

         History as well as contemporary experience clearly show that brazen wealth flaunted amidst widespread misery destroys the requisite environment for a democratic republic. These extremes are entirely incompatible.  Still more fundamental, the unregulated market ensures that wealth produces wealth and poverty poverty ad infinitum. It simply generates unending economic polarization. 

         This process is already well underway: A vast transfer of wealth from the workers to the owners has already taken place.  The near destruction of the trade union movement--which currently counts only 14 percent of wage workers as members (37 percent of the public sector and merely 10 percent of the private sector)--has resulted in falling wages, the intensification of work, the outsourcing of work, the proliferation of part-time work, and the elimination of benefits.  The downsizing of the public sector simultaneously represents withdrawals of social benefits for those in the lower one-half of the population and decreases in taxes, which overwhelmingly benefit the rich.  The inevitable outcome of an economic system without government interventions (progressive income tax, social programs, and extensive public educational systems like City University) and no effective trade unions (to deter wages from falling) is an ever-widening gap between rich and poor. The current proposals to completely eliminate taxes on estates and decrease income taxes in the upper brackets will still further increase the abyss between the super rich and the great majority of the American people.

           Unregulated capitalism minus a public sector is not only contradictory to the goals of political democracy, it is also untenable to the sound functioning of the economy.  Missing from the brave new world of the downsizers and privatizers are consumers. Inevitably, the overproduction of goods and services results from economic polarization because it decreases the purchasing power of the working people. Everyone's attention has been attracted to decreasing inflation, while few have considered the dangers of deflation caused by the growing gap between the growing capacity to produce and the shrinking ability of the working class to consume both within countries and among rich and poor countries.  This is not a formula for recession; it is a recipe for another Great Depression. The unprecedented stock market boom, which has seen values triple since 1987, has not been based on increased production. Indeed, the overall economy has risen at the moderate rate of approximately 3 percent annually. It is a speculative boom driven by decreasing the producers' share of production and a collapse in commodity pricesCtendencies which preceded the last world-wide depression.  The 50 percent decrease in the value of the stock listed on the Nasdaq may presage a more general plunge in stock values.

         The ethical consequences of these policies are appalling.  The title of a recently published book, Everything Is for Sale, says it all. The cash nexus monopolizes the human experience. The corruption inherent in this system tears up the social contract requisite for a functioning democratic society. The political process is also obviously for sale along with the economy and everything else.  The growing sense that great wealth has rigged the political system substantially contributed to a 49 percent abstention of the eligible voters in the 2000 presidential elections.

         In brief, what is happening to the City University is happening everywhere in the United States.  It is simply the most recent target of those forces on the Right who have never wanted a City University operating under the principle of Open Admissions. Everything in the public sector and the advances of the trade union movement resulted from mass political struggle.  Without exception, the owning classes resisted the smallest advance toward social democracy, and when reform measures were enacted, they waited patiently for the opportunity to undo them. They did so not because they are greedy, but because these gains establish precedents based on a principle--people before profit--which is incompatible with the free market system, which elevates Profit as the elixir of the gods. It is of course only profit, that is, their money.

          We are living amidst the triumphant saturnalia of capitalism.  Fundamentally, these are the fruits of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the socialist bloc. Their unraveling has directly led to the jettisoning of social democracy by the mass social democratic parties in Western Europe and elsewhere. Within the United States, liberalism has become increasingly vapid and irrelevant. It appears that the Popular FrontCthat is, the coalition of the liberals and the LeftCwhich was responsible for the most substantial gains for the working class cannot function because there is no organized left. Without this component, which contributes vision and organizational acumen, liberalism seems incapable of resisting the advance of the Right.   

             Downsizing and privatization are the fruits of the United States= victory in the Cold War.  Regardless of one's political convictions prior to these events, it is becoming clear that this victory  has caused capitalism--not democracy--to spread throughout the world. Currently, there is no political or ideological challenge to capitalism either internationally or domestically.  And as a result, the capitalists have been relieved of any pressure to humanize their dog-eat-dog system. This is the moment when the owning class believes it can downsize the public sector and unions, which restrict the accumulation and use of their wealth by restricting their rights to freely remunerate their employees and to freely deploy capital.  And they have seized this moment with vengeance. Simultaneously, those who have nothing to gain and much to lose from this system have been demoralized by the elimination of a non-capitalist economic system in one-third of the world which until recently, albeit with the absence of effective political democracy, produced a well-functioning public sector and a high degree of economic equality.  At a minimum, its existenceCeven to their greatest criticsCevidenced the possibility of an alternative society; an economy which produced based on considerations other than the maximization of profit.

         These are some of the reasons why CUNY=s faculty, staff, and students have lost sight of the obviousCthey have power. Whatever anyone may feel, the facts speak loud and clear. There are 205,000 students in the City University. There is a work force of almost 25,000. There are the alumni.  And last, but perhaps most importantly, there are the communities for whose residents the City University represents their best hope for higher education.  These constituencies total a majority of the population of this City, people whose most vital interests coincide with the defense of CUNY. One positive sign for CUNY is the election of a new leadership of the Professional Staff Congress, the union of the faculty and staff, in the Spring of 2000, which ran on a platform of waging a more unified political fight on behalf of the University.

        CUNY can be restored to excellence for all those who seek a chance to earn a college degree! This goal requires the creation of a coalition that goes beyond the faculty and staff to include the students and their communities. CUNY=s students, unlike so many faculty, are not ambivalent about defending the public sector in general and CUNY in particular.  Many faculty return to relatively affluent communities where other ideologies prevail. For the students and their families and friends, the University and the communities represent a single reality which encompasses  their own dreams, as well as their children and their communities= futures. It represents their best chance.  And they are willing to fight for it. Moreover, they know why this is happening. They do not have the illusions so prevalent among faculty. These communities are absolutely approachable by a movement dedicated to save CUNY.  Unfortunately, some CUNY faculty appear more afraid of their own students (and their relatives and friends) than of their own executioners. 

           This is due in part to the unspoken and rarely acknowledged fact that while all the potential constituents in this movement share the common interest of saving CUNY their priorities are not the same.  To date, faculty have been unmoved by life and death issues for students. These include: 1) reversing the regulations of the Human Resources Administration which prevent students from enrolling in liberal arts or pursuing their education beyond two yearsCa period which effectively precludes their completing not only baccalaureate but also associate degrees; and 2) liberalizing the Tuition Assistance Program which currently caps tuition assistance at ten semesters, thereby requiring many students to transfer to other campuses and/or stop their studies.  Moreover, facultyCthrough their college senates--need to systematize mentoring of all CUNY students so that they can overcome the deficits that have been endlessly documented but rarely redressed. Faculty need to value the non-teaching professional staff, who are essential to the operation of the University and appreciate that they often have more ties to the students than do faculty. In general, as the stewards of a public institution, faculty must be prepared to accept a greater degree of accountability to their clientele and be prepared to censure acts of self-serving behavior within their own ranks.

         At this juncture, the Professional Staff Congress is the major resource for the creation of a coalition to save CUNY.  At least potentially, the faculty and professional staff control this union, because they finance it with their dues.  In fact, it may be the only institution they control.  The union represents an enormous source of power.  It is affiliated with a huge international, the American Federation of Teachers, and the New York City Central Labor Council. It has resources. Ideologically, there is no contradiction between a movement dedicated to protecting the public sector and the interests of a union representing workers in the public sector. The academic senates can also contribute to this movement by demanding that the presidents of CUNY=s colleges be accountable to the college communities and the communities these colleges serve, that they act as academic and community leaders, and not as the chief clerks of a bureaucracy whose purpose is not immediately discernable. CUNY=s faculty, staff, and students are in a position to fight back in ways that many others, who are threatened by the Right, cannot. The skills, energy, material resources, and courage at their disposal are sufficient to organize a Coalition to Defend CUNY.

         The history of Hostos Community College verifies this assertion.  On April 5, 1976, the Board of Trustees of the Board of Higher Education of the City University officially closed Hostos. In anticipation of this move, in September 1975 a mass movement--based on a coalition of students, community residents, as well as faculty and staff--organized to "Save Hostos."  Ultimately, it succeeded in forcing the Board to rescind its resolution.  One of the reasons for this victory was the experience of a prior mass movement during the academic year 1973-74 that had won another major victory, the commitment by the State and the City to purchase the campus's first building, 500 Grand Concourse. As a result of this movement, the "500" became the first building Hostos owned. In 1979, for the third time, a mass coalition, organized around the Professional Staff Congress chapter and various student organizations, obtained funding for the renovation of the "500."  These three movements secured the existence of Hostos Community College by utilizing a wide range of political tactics that included: letter writing, petitioning, leafleting, organizing assemblies and rallies, lobbying as well as stopping the traffic on the Grand Concourse and Ataking over@ buildings. All these brave efforts ensured that the students still have a school, the faculty and staff still have jobs, and the communities have hope.

         In large part, these movements succeeded because the memories of the historic Civil Rights and anti-Vietnam War movements were very much alive, and progressives who had been active in these movements were willing to apply their experience to this specific situation.  They knew that like so many other life-affirming activities political movements require measure and timing. This generation of students has not experienced the victories resulting from mass movements, and they are unaware of the struggle that brought about Open Admissions or for that matter the successful mass struggles that punctuate the history of Hostos.  Most pertinently, the history of Hostos shows that a united faculty, staff, and students--with support from the communities--can win!

         The mobilization of the union, students, communities and those who still believe in progressive democracy can defeat the right-wing forces that threaten to downsize and  ultimately privatize CUNY. However, in the long run, the only hope lies in coalescing with all those throughout this country who have everything to lose by the destruction of unions and the public sector and everything to gain by their restoration and ultimately their expansion.  We, our children, our communities, and our country have much to lose and much to gain. Let us unite to ensure that we stopCand ultimately reverseCthis campaign to destroy CUNY and the public sector which guarantees some measure of real democracy for the working people.