HOME | POLITICAL-LEGISLATIVE |
TEACH-CUNY | LOBBYING-YOUR-LEGISLATOR

Teach CUNY Lesson for Political Science Courses

        (Taught in part or as a whole, this can be a 15 minute to a full class lesson)

1. Start with definition of politics (e.g. Lasswell's "Who gets what,  when, where and how" or David Easton's "The authoritative allocation of  values").

 2. Discuss the nature of the US Constitution and the development of a  presidential system with the separation of powers that distinguishes us  from parliamentary political systems, which have the capacity to mount  rapidly-forming majorities with broad mandates.

3. Move to an exploration of the federalist system in which education,  among other programs, is essentially state funded.

4. Discuss the Albany arena in which contending executive and  legislative budget plans compete, including the Republican governor's,  the Democratic Assembly's, the Republican Senate majority's version and  Democratic Senate's minority version.

 5. Discuss New York State politics, up-state vs. NYC. Evaluate the  notion of former Speaker Tip O'Neill that in America "all politics is  local" due to the absence of a disciplined, centralized, ideological,  issue-oriented political party system.

6. Observe the competing pressures and lobbies that are contending for  the attention of the NY State Assembly persons and Senators. Discuss  the needs of higher education in general and CUNY in particular.  Examine the importance of higher education funding, which is as basic as hospitals, highways, prisons, tax cuts, budget surpluses and so on.

7. Explain the nature of American political coalition-building and the potential for urban, community, minority, feminist and labor union interests to coalesce around funding for CUNY. Public higher education is an excellent issue that lends itself to support by culturally-diverse groups of people because it is represents an issue that supports both  working class and middle class interests, affordable education and training, human resource investment, and positive tax repercussions that redound to the state.

8. At this point one could distribute one or two key fact sheets that  illustrate PSC budget demands and CUNY data that depict our underfunding  (see PSC-CUNY website). Here one could introduce the question of CUNY  open access with remediation, and the need to roll back tuition, comparable to the much lower tuition of most other state universities nationally.

9. Finish with a depiction of several key PSC contract negotiation  demands that most affect to student interests: e.g. more full time  faculty lines, smaller FTE/faculty ratios, smaller classes, funding  arts, social science, natural science and teacher education programs,  paid adjunct office hours, adjunct pay parity, etc.

Submitted by Peter Ranis - York/GC