In August, shortly after the big news broke, then-Lieutenant Gov. Kathy Hochul told CNN, “I’m so excited to work with Eric Adams…I’ve had a chance to work with him while he’s been Brooklyn borough president, he was very supportive of me in my past two statewide elections and I appreciate that.” Further, she said, speaking to the Democratic nominee for mayor, “You have smart people, I have smart people. How about doing it together and not in competition?”
It is hard to overstate how dramatic a change this simple collegiality portends. In 2016, then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo used the City University as leverage in his juvenile battle with Mayor de Blasio. He threatened to off-load half a billion dollars in regular state funding for the system onto the city. He ultimately failed, thanks in part to the heroic efforts of the CUNY Rising Alliance and city lawmakers, but the stakes of the governor’s maneuver became clear: New York’s public colleges and universities are vital institutions worthy of real, sustained investment.
Thankfully, a new day is here. Hochul has supported public higher education and praised the education her son received at SUNY Geneseo. Eric Adams, meanwhile, is a CUNY “two-for,” boasting degrees from City Tech and John Jay, and has marched across the Brooklyn Bridge with the CUNY Rising Alliance. After more than a decade of austerity budgets, there is finally reason to expect a gubernatorial executive budget and a mayoral preliminary budget that are aligned and include substantial new investment in CUNY.
CUNY is in dire need of leaders who are ready to think big and put right the failings of the Cuomo administration, which made a policy of underfunding New York’s public universities.
Tuition at CUNY senior colleges increased by 43% during Gov. Cuomo’s tenure and state investment per-student fell by 3.6%, when adjusted for inflation. Cuomo starved CUNY of resources by refusing to fund routine increases in operating costs, even workers’ negotiated raises. He twice vetoed bills passed by the Legislature to stabilize CUNY and SUNY funding, forcing colleges to cut academic programs and student services and rely increasingly on underpaid adjunct faculty, more than 10,000 of whom CUNY now employs.
CUNY leads the nation in empowering low-income students — mostly Black and Brown New Yorkers — to ascend to the middle class and beyond. We have the capacity to transform the lives of young people and their families, but the university has been hollowed out by years of cuts. We need game-changing investments from the state and the city. And the communities and that depend on CUNY, who have endured the worst of the COVID pandemic and have been the targets of decades of racialized austerity, need a meaningful investment in their paths to opportunity.
The governor and presumptive mayor can finally set CUNY on a sustainable path by building the provisions of the New Deal for CUNY into their budgets. That bill, introduced by Sen. Andrew Gounardes and Assemblywoman Karines Reyes, would make CUNY truly tuition-free. While splashy and headline-friendly, the Excelsior Scholarship, which promises free tuition to public colleges for all New Yorkers in the middle class and below, benefits very few CUNY students.
Congress may provide the first dollars toward a New Deal level of investment in CUNY via the Build Back Better Act, the budget reconciliation bill that, among other things, would fund two years of tuition-free community college. If free community college funding survives the reconciliation process, New York can finish the job by funding free tuition at all its public colleges. If it’s cut from the bill, New York can lead the way as it has before on progressive policies.
Enacting the New Deal for CUNY will do more than make public college free; it will guarantee a quality education and provide the support that students need to succeed. It will also establish minimum staff-to-student ratios for mental health counselors, academic advisors and full-time faculty at CUNY while raising pay for underpaid and overworked adjunct faculty.
Funding the first year of the New Deal for CUNY in their first budgets would demonstrate the shared commitment of the governor and the mayor to the working people of New York City. That’s the kind of change and leadership New Yorkers need.
Davis is president of PSC-CUNY, the union of university faculty and staff.
