Dear Colleagues: Please sign the petition
To: Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez and President Vincent Boudreau
Faculty, staff, and students of City College, like all New Yorkers, have had our lives upended by the COVID-19 pandemic. We have seen the inequities of our society laid bare, as the rates of illness and death have risen disproportionately in the low-income communities of color and immigrant communities served by our university. We have witnessed an unbearable loss of life in our City, among our colleagues, students, and within our families.
To cause further trauma for the City College community by cutting a quarter of its core teachers, increasing class sizes, and reducing the quality of our student’s education, while also eliminating the jobs of many of CUNY’s most precarious workers is outrageous. Furthermore, these hasty cuts undermine City College’s core mission to educate «the children of the people, the children of the whole people “ who make up our student body.
Now is the moment to answer the challenge from our first president, Dr. Horace Webster, when he asked if our institution “can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.» We must not allow our institution, so much a part of the rich heritage of Harlem and of New York City, to be destroyed by the short-sighted and panicked response of those unwilling to fight for our right to exist and properly educate our students.
Announcing massive, preemptive cuts to our already underfunded college before every dollar of federal stimulus, every college reserve fund, and every cost-savings measure from our campus shutdown has been publicly accounted for sends the message that City College can withstand such cuts. It cannot. Cuts that will cause hundreds, if not thousands, of faculty across the CUNY system to lose their jobs and health insurance in the midst of a public health crisis are morally repugnant, especially when there has been no announcement about reductions in pay for employees on the Executive Compensation Plan.
The PSC’s Delegate Assembly has resolved that our union “stands by the principle during the pandemic of keeping everyone working, getting paid and maintaining health insurance and rejects any attempt to anticipate or resolve budget difficulties by dismissing or not reappointing employees, including contingent and part-time employees and student employees.” We support the union’s fight to ensure that the economic and moral realities of this pandemic are realized before the CUNY system cuts faculty recklessly.
The fiscal challenges we all face from this pandemic are real, but CUNY must address these challenges with maximum transparency, urgency, and as such, we, the City College community, demand another virtual town hall so that members of the campus community (including our greater community) can pose questions, seek clarity, and propose ideas before dramatic and rash actions are taken. As part-time faculty, staff, and students are disproportionately impacted by these proposed cuts, their voices should be given priority.
Even more, New York cannot overcome the deepening recession with a hollowed-out public university. Your job is to uplift and protect CUNY, not to manage its destruction. Do not accommodate deeper austerity for our students, faculty, and staff. Do not help Governor Cuomo place the burden of this economic crisis on the most vulnerable and marginalized populations. This is a bad policy for our state and our country. Join us in demanding new taxes on billionaires and the ultra-rich and new investments in CUNY, instead of cuts to CUNY. Progressive taxation has been a successive response to economic crises from the Great Depression to the 2008 Recession.
Embrace your place in history, not as the overseers of the end of the “Greatest Urban University,” but as the leaders brave enough to stand against the elite who would use this moment to reduce our university to little more than trade schools. Realize the dream of Dr. Webster, to give voice and agency to those most in need whether they be students, faculty, or staff who are the “whole people” of our university.
New York will be forever changed by COVID-19. The choices you make will help determine if City College can be part of a just economic recovery. The time has come to stand up for public education. Otherwise, there won’t be much of a CUNY left. Do the right thing. Help keep a quality education within the grasp of all.
Adapted from Brooklyn College’s original petition
Café CUNY 