CUNY aids response effort
Remember: just because we’re enforcing social distancing doesn’t mean we can’t have social solidarity.
That’s the motto many PSC members are living by right now, as many are eager to put their time and expertise to good use during this pandemic. On March 22, the Office of the Queens Borough President reported that faculty and staff at Queens College’s School of Mathematics and Sciences had made a “donation of various personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies including N95 masks, 30 unopened cases of disposable nitrile gloves, disposable lab coats and bottles of 70% isopropyl alcohol” and that the campus’s “professors, faculty and college lab technicians (CLTs) of ‘the college of the future’ stepped up and scoured their teaching labs for materials that could be of immediate use by the city’s medical professionals and other frontline workers.”
LEHMAN HELPS
The School of Natural and Social Sciences at Lehman College also donated N95 masks to Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
PSC President Barbara Bowen hailed the donations and told members that she was urging all of CUNY’s physical science departments to look into making whatever donations they could to nearby hospitals as they struggle with the increasing number of COVID-19 cases around the city (as of this writing, New York City has reportedly been one of the most badly hit cities in the world in the COVID-19 pandemic).
AFT SUPPORT
Bowen also said that the PSC’s national affiliate, the American Federation of Teachers, was donating health-care equipment nationally, as the union represents nurses and other health-care workers.
At the request of several officials, including U.S. Congressman Max Rose, from Staten Island (whose mother is a PSC member), the federal government approved a plan to convert the College of Staten Island into a 1,000-bed field hospital, according to the Staten Island Advance.
