On Nov. 29, 2012, shortly after my two-year stint as an adjunct faculty instructor at City College, 14 of 17 scheduled employees at a Madison Avenue McDonald’s went on strike, joining 200 other fast-food workers across New York City. It was the first in an escalating series of nationwide actions demanding a $15 minimum wage and the right to join a union. Exactly four years later, at 6 a.m. on another November morning, I joined workers, organizers and elected officials in civil disobedience outside the McDonald’s located just steps from Wall Street, making the same demands.
In early 2013, Barack Obama came out in support of a $9 minimum wage. Here in New York, Mayor de Blasio echoed this demand in his bid for mayor, outflanking then-Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver’s proposal to raise the wage floor to $8.50.
To many, the striking fast-food workers were making a radical demand, one that might change the conversation but that was fundamentally out of step with what politicians would be willing to do.
Yet in June of 2014, less than two years after the first fast-food strike, the Seattle City Council passed the nation’s first $15 minimum wage law and by 2016, New York had passed one as well. The radical became real.
This is often the way with dramatic policy demands: They sound unbelievable until suddenly they become reality. Right now, the New York Legislature has an opportunity to transform the national conversation about free college from the radical to reality.
I co-sponsor legislation with 35 others called the New Deal for CUNY. The City University of New York is the world’s largest public urban university, serving some half-million students each year. The legislation would make CUNY tuition-free, mandate ratios of mental health counselors, academic advisers and full-time faculty to students, and create pay parity between adjunct faculty and full-time faculty. It is long past time we made good on our rhetoric about lifting up the underprivileged by making this bill a law.
When I worked as an adjunct lecturer in 2011, I was paid just $2,900 to teach a single course, which translates to an annual full-time salary of just $20,000, with few of the benefits afforded to full-time faculty. Persistent organizing by their union has raised CUNY adjuncts’ pay to closer to $5,000 a course, but it is still far below what New York should be paying college faculty.
CUNY was founded as the Free Academy in 1847 with the mission to educate “the children of the whole people.” From 1847 to 1975, all New Yorkers, including many first-generation immigrants to the city, could obtain a tuition-free bachelor’s degree. Several generations of the children of Jewish immigrants to the city, for example, were able to attend the city’s four municipal colleges tuition-free at a time when other universities, including Columbia, discriminated against them.
But as CUNY University Student Senate Chairperson Juvanie Piquant recently described, in 1975 something changed: “as the New York population continued to expand and diversify, elected officials were reluctant to raise taxes to fund the increased need for services. A free and well-funded CUNY had worked for white New Yorkers for more than a century, but suddenly the cost of providing the very same education to Black and Brown students was too great.”
The decision to end the century-long tradition of free public higher education in New York was steeped in racism. So too is the pattern of austerity and disinvestment that has left CUNY with 4,000 fewer full-time faculty than it had in 1975, despite serving tens of thousands of more students. If CUNY were funded at the per-student rate of just the 1990s, its budget would be about $1 billion larger than it is today.
This year, the Legislature rejected the governor’s proposed cuts and made modest though meaningful new investment in CUNY. But it isn’t enough.
After all the talk about correcting entrenched injustices, we have the chance to right the wrongs of the past and to step onto the national stage — much as the city of Seattle did in 2014.
While President Biden, Sens. Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and Chuck Schumer, and mayoral hopefuls like Scott Stringer and Dianne Morales talk about the dream of free public higher education, we know that the dream is possible because it was our reality in New York history. Our return to this reality can start with this legislation.
It took the best kind of political will to create the City University, and it took the worst kind to upend the fundamental nature of the institution in 1975. Let’s lead the country, let’s fund our university and let’s make CUNY free. Again.
González-Rojas represents Corona, East Elmhurst, Jackson Heights and other neighborhoods in the state Assembly.
