Taking on the crisis at CUNY

May 11, 2011

Tami Gold is a documentary filmmaker, activist and professor of Film and Media Studies at Hunter College in the City University of New York (CUNY.) Her films include Out at Work, Every Mother's Son and RFK in the Land of Apartheid. Her most recent film is Passionate Politics: The Life and Work of Charlotte Bunch. She is also the chapter chair of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), the faculty union at Hunter College.

She spoke to Danny Katch about CUNY and the state of public higher education.

HOW HAS the current environment of budget cuts and austerity impacted CUNY, which has long been the site of debate over what type of education working-class people have a right to?

THE BUDGET cuts have been present since I started at Hunter College 23 years ago. I've never known the City University not to have the mentality of scarcity.

Just a funny side story: While I was in my early years as a professor, I went to Cuba a few times and Nicaragua a few times in the late 1980s and 1990s. And I always used to say that Hunter was a great laboratory for me because it always positioned me to be in a developing country in a great crisis. I was always very prepared for what I would have to live with--elevators not working, no lights in the halls, no plumbing.

There's no question that my time at Hunter College has always seen the active gutting of the City University. I think it's a mistake for us to think there's a crisis only now. There's a long-term crisis--it's really a crisis of commitment and a crisis of capitalism. The crisis of commitment is the fact that there isn't the belief that everyone has a right to an education.

CUNY students protest budget cuts
CUNY students protest budget cuts

Women were invited in droves in heavy industry when men were fighting a war. But they didn't keep the invitation open after the war, and so the women had to leave. What that speaks of is how the system works. It uses people for industry when there's work and industrial employment. When it doesn't serve them, there isn't.

At this particular crossroad, I think there's an understanding that a highly educated working class isn't needed. And so if it's not needed, we can change the discourse about whether we need public education.

THE RHETORIC behind most education reforms is actually the opposite: Americans are falling behind other countries, and we need our education system to prepare us to compete in the global environment.

WELL, I don't know who says we're falling behind--if you're talking about Obama or the Bushes. The way we should read things is not in the words people say or write, but in the practice.

If in the world of education, the common language is that we have a problem--that we're falling behind and other countries are advancing--I don't see anything in practice that speaks to that. I certainly don't see money. We have no money. This country has reached its limit in terms of debt. So where did the money come from to enter Libya?

IF CUNY has been in crisis since you've been here, what changes have you seen over that time?

FUNDAMENTALLY, THE change at Hunter College and all through CUNY has been relying on a cheap labor force--namely adjuncts. I said at a meeting yesterday that you can see the crisis profoundly within higher education before anything else in the public sector. Someone said, "What about K-12?" K-12 doesn't hire adjuncts. They still hire full-timers. The full-timers still get vacations. The full-timers still have health insurance. The full-timers know they have a job tomorrow.

CUNY is 70 percent adjuncts--a contingent workforce. That has grown enormously. When I started here, in my department, we had a bigger faculty than we do now. We've shrunk, and our majors have grown. So there's a real shift in terms of money--the money for full-time faculty.

The other thing that has gone down radically is the support staff. We have one plumber. We used to have plumbers in every building. We have one electrician; we have one locksmith. People don't have their places painted. We're talking about the erosion of an infrastructure of a city called CUNY. That city used to have a workforce. Now it has a skeleton crew. That's erosion, and that's been going on since I started in 1987.

There have been times where there's been no working toilet on this entire floor. It's kind of like, "How do assess a society? You look at the old and you look at the young." How do you assess a city? You look at the plumbing. The plumbing in the city of CUNY sucks.

And Hunter isn't the worst. Go to Bronx Community College. I went there to speak, and I felt like I was in prison with some of the spaces there. They were dungeons. They were cinderblock buildings.

You would go down deep into these buildings, and in the bathrooms, the mirrors were made out of steel instead of glass. What do they think--people are going to break them and use the glass as a weapon? And the doors on the stalls in the bathrooms didn't close--they were half off. These are the conditions at some of the community colleges.

BUT HAVEN'T there been investments in certain types of infrastructure--such as the renovation of Eleanor Roosevelt's house?

THERE'S BEEN a greater emphasis on private fundraising. I haven't researched this, but the president of Hunter College claims to have been very successful at this. And maybe that's where the money came for the beautiful renovations at the Roosevelt House.

I think that was wonderful, and I applaud that renovation. But I think it should come out of public money. Eleanor Roosevelt's home should be renovated and remembered. We should go there and celebrate that history. That's our history. I'm glad the money was raised--it was raised primarily by the private sector.

There are two big construction projects underway on 119th Street--the Social Work school, Public Urban Heath, Health Sciences, etc., are moving up there, as is the Center for Puerto Rican Studies and the archives. I don't exactly know where the money comes from. I'm sure it's a private-public relationship. So there is money.

But we can say that to rely more on private fundraising is a statement that the public is no longer responsible for educating those who want to be educated beyond 12th grade in the United States. That's my objection. I believe public education is critical on the higher level--college.

Education is the best form of family planning. People who are educated have the best control of their health and their bodies. So as a society, we should want people to be educated, even if they work in factories.

Education is not about a career. It's about being a full person. That's where we're clashing.

HOW DO you feel about CUNY's planned partnership with IBM to create a new school focusing on technical skills and job preparation?

THE UNITED States is one of the few countries that has a community college system, and I think it's a very important system.

A lot of community colleges might be trade schools in some sense of the word. I don't think training schools to get skills is a bad thing. My father was a skilled worker, and he taught. He was an adjunct in the CUNY system. He didn't have a high school education, and he taught his skill--he taught me his skill. He was a dye maker.

I think skills are good, whether the skills are working with wood, with dresses, with Photoshop or whatever. But if IBM is doing that, it's very important that critical thinking is brought into it.

CURRENTLY, CUNY's Board of Trustees has put forward a controversial proposal to alter curricula and requirements at different schools in order to simplify the transfer process from community colleges to four-year colleges in the CUNY system. Can you explain why many professors are opposed to the proposal?

THE CURRENT controversy is very simple. There is a mechanical logistical problem: To transfer from the CUNY two-year colleges to the four-year colleges, you lose some credit. And you shouldn't lose credit. It's cumbersome and bureaucratic, and it's very archaic. It needs improvement.

The Board of Trustees is trying to solve it, but they're trying to solve it by going into areas that have to do with scholarship, curricula, etc. We feel, as professors and as people who have scholarship in certain areas, that we are the best at determining the curricula of what we teach. A lot of those different areas that are in constant change intellectually are ones where we're in the best position to factor all of this in to create the curricula. It is not up to the Board of Trustees to synthesize it.

The criticism is that a CUNY degree will become less substantial in a competitive world. We don't want that--and it's not a solution to the problem. There is a solution. The problem is how do we manage, streamline and serve students needs, while on the other hand, how do we allow the autonomy of professors and departments to create their own work?

Why are is this happening? One explanation is that we have people on the Board of Trustees who don't fully understand what public higher education is. But I think another reason is that the people who are in City University are primarily people of color--working class, many new immigrants, many women. And there's less of a sense that they have the same rights to have their brain opened up to all that expansive knowledge that is the university experience.

MANY OF the officials who advocate this new plan are the same people who previously supported the elimination of remedial programs from the four-year schools. Isn't this a contradiction?

THE WORD "remedial" needs to be thrown away because it's so negative. We all learn differently. I had a student back in 1991--I was told he couldn't take a production class with me because he had learning disabilities and couldn't read well. So I got him classified as learning disabled, and they had to let him in my class. Not only did he flourish working with technology and become a leader and graduate, but he left and started his own business, and eventually we hired him back to run a whole program here.

A lot of people learn differently--they need a more hands-on approach, more studying. But when you put it in terms of "remedial," it feels like you're doing what the high schools didn't do, and then it's like a question of "Who's responsible for this?"

CUNY is responsible for this! Because when someone says, "I want an education," we should be responsible to meet them all the way. That might mean that we need to have classes that are designed differently.

When they cut remedial education--which meant that we couldn't have people get help with their reading skills, their writing skills, how to communicate, understanding how to get to class on time, all that stuff--what ended up happening was that everyone had to flood to the community colleges. The community colleges had an enormous increase in students, and they had to do all of that work which should have been done throughout the whole CUNY system and the State University of New York system and all of public higher education.

The same people who did that are now saying we have to streamline the transfer process so that community college students don't lose credit. There's something about that that I feel is disingenuous.

LOOKING AHEAD to CUNY's future, what gives you concern and what gives you hope?

I'M NOT sure the answer is within the City University system. Wisconsin gives me hope. Not the recall, but what gives me hope is that a cross-section of people from working-class and middle-class backgrounds were able to have a common vision and really speak to each other. If that can happen there, it can happen anywhere--even in New York, which I think is a very hard city to organize in.

I have hope when I think of some of the struggles internationally--and I don't mean Egypt, because that's too simplistic, and there's a lot of fundamentalism taking leadership there. It's simplistic to just say "Wisconsin, Egypt."

I think that small people's movements are very hopeful around the world. We had a little taste of that with Wisconsin. I guess when people start to realize that there is no longer a guarantee that their children will have a middle-class lifestyle, then people might start to really look around and try to analyze how this happened, and that capitalism does not, in fact, work for the majority of people.

My daughter is in college, and for her sociology class, she had to interview me. The question was something about how all societies--socialist, capitalist, etc.--claim that their interests are always to protect the majority of the people. I don't think capitalism has ever made that guarantee. It doesn't make the premise that its interests are with the majority of people. Somehow people think that. And maybe now, it's not that there is a new economic crisis--it's that the charade might be coming down. That capitalism cannot serve the majority of people.

Can socialism do it? I never saw it. I've certainly been to socialist countries; I come from a progressive left background. I don't know what the solution is. I certainly don't think what we've known of socialism is an example. But I know positively that capitalism can only destroy itself, and unfortunately the planet with it. That's why the time is really now.

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