CUNY Grapples With Devastating Budget Cuts: “People Are Freaking Out Or Getting Fired”

Six months after Governor Andrew Cuomo and state lawmakers approved a budget for the City University of New York, the country’s largest urban public university system is reeling from ongoing, indefinite cuts.

Nearly 3,000 adjuncts have been laid off. Course offerings have been slashed, ballooning class sizes. Contingent staff that remain are having their hours cut mid-semester.

For those on the inside, it’s the kind of uncertainty and fiscal pain unseen since the crisis of the 1970s, when the city nearly went bankrupt and devastating budget cuts set the university system back a generation. Cuomo has withheld approximately 20 percent of state funding to CUNY’s $2 billion budget as part of the fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has taken a catastrophic toll on the city and state’s finances.

“It’s a dramatic, devastating cut—a huge cut,” said Barbara Bowen, the president of the Professional Staff Congress [PSC], the union representing 25,000 faculty members and staff at CUNY. “It’s becoming increasingly damaging to CUNY.”

According to faculty and staff, the impact of the budget cuts varies college to college. At City College, mathematics classes on average have increased in size, ballooning from less than 50 to more than 70 students, according to private data shared with Gothamist. With students learning remotely and adjuncts laid off, this has made managing classes, for students and professors, particularly challenging.

Individual colleges are now operating on month-to-month budgets, unheard of in a system that always has a fiscal year budget to work from. Adjuncts appointed for the semester are relatively safe if they’ve already started teaching a class—class sections, once underway, aren’t suddenly cut—but non-teaching adjuncts are not so lucky.

Many have seen their working hours reduced, while some at the Queens College library are working on contracts that terminate at the end of October, with no guarantee of being re-hired for the rest of the semester, according to those who work there.

"The senior colleges this month were allocated budgets to cover the remainder of the fall semester, as well as the winter session, which concludes in January 2021," a CUNY spokesperson said.

In the meantime, searches for full-time faculty have been canceled. If a senior college or community college wants to add personnel, the request must now pass through a vacancy review control board. The board, according to those with knowledge of its workings, is highly unlikely to recommend adding staff.

Joanna Thompson, a librarian at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, is a non-teaching adjunct fearful that her hours could be slashed soon. She knows colleagues who received reappointment letters to work this semester but haven’t been called back to their colleges because funding hasn’t materialized.

For adjuncts, the layoffs or loss of hours are not just crushing because of lost pay—they can mean the loss of union-provided health insurance.

“Okay great, I have a job this semester—but now it’s month to month and you don’t know,” Thompson said. “It’s a huge problem.”

CUNY’s story, in one sense, is not unique. Public schools and social services are enduring cuts across the state as Robert Mujica, Cuomo’s powerful budget director, unilaterally decides to withhold funding allocated in the state budget passed in April. Cuomo has insisted the state, facing escalating deficits from shutdowns and reduced economic activity tied to coronavirus, cannot afford to fulfill its budget obligations without a massive federal bailout as large as $60 billion.

With President Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, the Republican Senate majority leader, unwilling to approve another round of stimulus spending, Cuomo has been left to play a waiting game. Democrats in the State Legislature have called on Cuomo to raise taxes on the wealthy to plug budget shortfalls, a move the centrist governor has repeatedly resisted.

Without new taxes or borrowing, Cuomo has been content to wait on Washington to produce a bailout at some point. Even if Joe Biden defeats Donald Trump and Democrats retake control of the Senate, the earliest New York could receive federal funds under a new administration is the end of January, after Biden and the new Senate would take office.

In the meantime, Cuomo’s decision to keep waiting for federal aid from a Republican government has meant dwindling resources for CUNY. Both the state government and CUNY administrators have offered relatively little public detail on how exactly the 20 percent cut has been applied across the senior and community colleges, which educates around 271,000 students, many of them low-income: forty-two percent of all first-time freshmen come from households with incomes of $20,000 or less, and more than 70 percent of students enrolled at senior and community colleges identify as nonwhite.

Though CUNY is a city university system, the state government provides 60 percent of the funding to senior colleges, while New York City primarily funds community colleges. Cuomo and state legislators largely determine the finances of the senior colleges, including how much they can charge for tuition.

It is not known exactly how many adjuncts laid off in the spring have been reappointed or just how specifically, line-by-line, individual colleges have been impacted by budget cuts. In May, CUNY signed an agreement to provide the union, PSC, with “detailed college budget information, information about proposed cuts, information about State and City fiscal situations and enrollment projections.”

But such information hasn’t been forthcoming, in particular how CUNY has spent $132 million in Federal CARES Act funding allocated by Congress for “institutional support.”

“The state will work with CUNY to monitor cash flow and make sure they have sufficient funding for operations,” said Freeman Klopott, a spokesman for the New York State Division on the Budget. “New York State funds education, police and fire departments, and services for the most vulnerable, and if the federal government ultimately fails to deliver funding, these temporary withholds will become permanent spending reductions.”

Mujica, Cuomo’s budget director and a former staffer for State Senate Republicans, wields singular influence over CUNY since he sits on the Board of Trustees. Part of the challenge is that Mujica has decided to withhold, rather than technically cut, funding. Thanks to new powers granted by the state legislature when New York state’s budget was passed in April, Cuomo has the power to impose rolling cuts on local services throughout the year.

As part of that new mechanism, Cuomo was supposed to detail exact budget cuts to the state legislature, which would have to decide whether to accept them or counter with their own. This unprecedented law change has yet to be implemented.

Instead, avoiding legislative oversight, funds are simply not being allocated. Technically CUNY has merely received 80 percent of its state funding—which translates to a 20 percent reduction that state lawmakers, out of session until the new year, haven’t addressed.

“It’s a consciously murky policy,” said Steve London, the chair of Urban Studies at the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies, as well as a high-ranking member of PSC. “What is clear is that this is causing a lot of panic and havoc on campuses for understandable reasons.”

At Brooklyn College, faculty chairs have been told to create schedules for future semesters with only full-time faculty slotted for classes. In typical years, adjuncts would receive reappointments and be assigned classes for the upcoming semester. (Mara McGinnis, a spokesperson for Brooklyn College, disputed this, insisting that faculty chairs were not directed to create schedules for future semesters with only full-time faculty slotted for classes.)

The implication, at this point, is that only full-time faculty will be available to teach courses—resulting in a mass reduction of class offerings, since adjuncts typically teach many of them.

“The administration is just trying to make payroll and as we go deeper into the school year, it will be harder to make payroll. At some point, they are going to have to go deep into adjunct cuts,” said James Davis, an English professor and deputy chair for graduate studies at Brooklyn College. “People are freaking out or getting fired.”

With Cuomo unwilling to act until Congress does, CUNY’s only immediate hope may rest with Democrats in the state legislature, who can reconvene at any moment and pass a variety of bills to increase taxes and provide fresh revenue to the colleges, daring Cuomo to veto them. Toby Stavisky, the chair of the Senate’s Higher Education Committee, has proposed a bill to temporarily raise taxes on New Yorkers earning more than $5 million and redirect the revenue into K-12 schools and higher education.

Stavisky, however, isn’t optimistic any tax increases can happen unless Cuomo embraces them first.

“It’s not gonna happen,” Stavisky said. “I support it. The governor does not.”