Lawmakers Join CUNY Faculty and Staff to Protest Layoffs, Mismanagement at Queens College

Almost 100 faculty and staff from the City University of New York picketed on Monday, July 27th outside the Wall Street investment bank where CUNY Board of Trustees Chair William Thompson works to protest departmental budget cuts and layoffs of part-time faculty and staff at Queens College (QC). They were joined by Queens Assemblymembers Claire Valdez and Catalina Cruz.

“I’m going to have your back in this fight! Part-time adjuncts and part-time staff are essential to Queens College,” said Assemblymember Claire Valdez, who is the Democratic nominee for Congressional District 7.

“This is ultimately about the students…We’re not going to let this happen at Queens College or any other campus,” said Assemblymember Catalina Cruz, who earned an undergraduate degree fromCUNY’s John Jay College of Criminal Justice and her J.D. from CUNY School of Law. 

The workers were outside 100 Wall Street demanding that Board Chair Thompson and CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez reverse the latest round of budget cuts that they argue are unnecessary and self-defeating. 

Erica Doran, PSC Chapter Chair at Queens College

“Our enrollment projections are finally looking up. Firing part-time faculty and staff and cutting classes and student support leads to loss of students. That’s a recipe for ongoing declines,” said Erica Doran, a faculty member in the psychology department and chair of the QC chapter of the Professional Staff Congress.  “CUNY Chair Thompson and CUNY Central must provide Queens College with the resources to protect students’ educations and save our colleagues’ jobs.”

President Frank Wu, who is retiring at the end of the month, ordered departments to cut part-time staff costs in June, leading to layoffs and reduced hours for College Assistants and Non-Teaching Adjuncts. As a result: 

• 40% of chemistry lab sections will disappear this fall; 
• Art students will lose access to campus studios; 
• Pre-law students have lost access to summer advisement; 
• The college will lose capacity to care for lab animals; and
•  Access to some library services will be reduced.

Now department chairs are being told to cut their teaching adjunct budgets by 25%, or more. If the latest cuts are enacted, courses that students need to graduate will be cancelled, some adjunct faculty will have no work and others will lose much of their income and become ineligible for health insurance.

“They say the Queens College deficit has continued to grow despite the fact that we have had to cut our department budgets, especially our adjunct budgets, multiple times every year, for the past few years. These repeated cuts diminish our students’ educations and undermine our work,” said Melissa Checker, chair of the Urban Studies department. “CUNY Central needs to stop demanding deeper austerity, step in and save Queens College.”

Queens College enrollment has taken longer to rebound than enrollment at other colleges in the city university system.  But a June 28 snapshot of CUNY enrollment shows that the college was almost 350 students ahead of last year’s fall enrollment on that date.

Faculty and staff point to mismanagement and a spiral of cuts that undermine enrollment growth as the main cause of their college’s delayed enrollment turnaround. 

PSC President James Davis

“Cuts and fiscal controls have pushed the academic community into a tailspin. It will take years to recover, and now is the time to invest in Queens College, not intensify these measures. These are people’s jobs – college assistants, teaching and non-teaching adjuncts – and they should be restored,” said PSC President James Davis in a letter to Chairman Thompson and Chancellor Matos Rodríguez.    

Union members also object to the college’s excessive hiring and promotion of top administrators while low-income part-time workers lose their jobs and the full-time faculty and staff lines go unfilled. 

Right now, QC has eight positions that are some form of vice president, some newly created and some that were previously deans.  This past spring, the college hired an associate vice president for student success, even as many of the faculty and staff who do much of the actual work of ensuring student success are being let go. 

While the budgets that support part-time positions have been cut, full-time faculty and staff have been lost to attrition. Positions vacated by retirements and departures have gone unfilled. QC lost 87 full-time staff positions including 61 full-time faculty members between fall 2023 and fall 2025.

“Queens College faculty has already been cut to the bone. We are hurting. Our students are suffering. There’s nothing left to give. If cuts need to be made, they need to take it from the top,” said Doran. “Let the highly paid, bloated administration feel the pain for a change and protect the jobs of the people who do the work of educating the students of Queens.”