Defend CUNY!

On July 9, the City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Matos will be testifying before the House Education and Workforce Committee along with administrators from Georgetown and UC Berkeley. It is essential that we lift up the benefits of CUNY as part of a campaign to defend public universities as the pathway to the middle class for students and as economic engines for local economies. Past hearings before this committee have attacked higher education.

• Attacks on CUNY are attacks on NYC’s economy and communities. 
  • CUNY employs 40,000 people: from security guards to counselors to administrators to faculty. 
  • Approximately 300,000 students attend CUNY studying to be nurses, teachers, doctors, IT specialists, cyber security and everything in between. Dozens of current elected officials got their start at CUNY.
  • CUNY graduates have an ROI of $4 billion to New York State’s economy
  • The Brookings Institution ranked six of CUNY’s senior colleges and six community colleges among the top 10 four-year and two-year colleges nationwide with the greatest success in lifting low-income students into the middle class.
  • CUNY produces half of the city’s nurses and a quarter of its teachers.
• This hearing will not help combat antisemitism. Instead, it will further Trump’s plans to ambush CUNY services, hurting our diverse student and employee body (including many Jewish students and PSC members) and strengthening the administration’s attack on DEI. 
• Beyond CUNY, these hearings send a message that now is the time to attack and defund public higher education in the US. If no one comes to the defense of public higher education, it will be even easier to cut the state and city colleges on which working and middle class Americans depend. There are forces that want to gut public education and delegitimize academia. An attack on CUNY is an attack on all public educational institutions in the United States.