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NANCY ROMER is a professor of psychology at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and is the Murray Koppelman Professor of Community Service. She directs the Brooklyn College Community Partnership for Research and Learning which engages students and faculty in a wide range of projects serving and studying community-defined needs. Serving as co-coordinator of the New Caucus of the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, she has been active in campus and community organizing around issues of gender, race, and class. A developmental psychologist, her scholarly work has focused on the socialization of political activists.
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK (CUNY), founded in 1848 as the College of the "whole people" and since 1970, the leading example of open admissions in the nation, has served to educate generations of working class, poor and immigrant New Yorkers.1 Recent attacks on CUNY, the nation's largest urban public university system, with 20 campuses serving over 200,000 students, represent more than the standard cutbacks of public services. They constitute a new level of assault on the opportunity structure for the poor and working class in a city supposedly thriving under a mini-boom economy. The current moment reveals a confluence of political and economic gains by the wealthy and their defenders and the marked weakness of the traditional advocates of labor and community interests. This situation creates an environment ripe for either successful progressive political organizing or a terrible defeat of educational opportunity and political power for poor, working class and middle class people of New York City.
THE GLOBALIZATION OF CAPITAL AND THE PRE-EMINENCE of American capital interests have wrought many changes in the U.S. The rise of an increasingly emboldened right, as evidenced by the sharp decline of public assistance and the Clinton impeachment proceedings, plays out locally in varied ways. For example, in California the right successfully attacked affirmative action and bilingual education and, less successfully, targeted union participation in elections. In New York City, as in most major cities, the increasing income disparity between the wealthy and the poor is palpable and growing. The city's public schools continue to deteriorate, creating a separate and unequal state system: underfunded, inadequate public city schools for the poor and working class; private education for the wealthy and upper middle class; adequate suburban schools for the middle class. In the face of private accumulation of wealth, steady de-funding of public services except for the police creates a tale of two cities: one expanding, the other contracting. In this political climate, racism finds further expression in greater disparities of wealth, jobs and power between social and class-defined groups, and spawns a culture that blames the victim for social ills and hard times.
The New York Times reports that there is " deep recession and mass unemployment in Southeast Asia, political paralysis in Russia and Indonesia, huge bank failures in Japan, an incipient currency crisis in Brazil, but continued prosperity in Western Europe and the United States."2 Despite a budget surplus in both the city and the state, New York political elites, viewing these ominous economic clouds on the horizon seized the moment to decrease the public domain while expanding opportunities for capital: that is, downsizing and privatizing public services. Following the national trend, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani slashed welfare without providing increased childcare or a meaningful jobs initiative. Giuliani, who is planning a run for national office on his "get tough on crime" stance (code for "get tough on people of color"), helped build his reputation by setting his rifle sights on CUNY.
Conservative political forces calculated that the time to strike for major changes is now. With the national polity willing to acquiesce to a punitive analysis of poverty, and the hungry information systems industry seeking new markets, the trend in local governments has been to move toward privatizing previously public education systems (e.g., the insertion of school vouchers and such privatization schemes as the Edison Project). Right-wing intellectuals in such think tanks and organizations as the Manhattan Institute, Change NY, the Olin Foundation and the National Association of Scholars have offered numerous ideologically-driven criticisms of CUNY, paving the way for NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani to begin his attack on CUNY.
In January 1998 Giuliani remarked in his State of the City address that so many of CUNY's incoming students required additional educational support in the form of remedial courses in basic skill areas that it had become "Remedial U." In reality, this situation was created by the constant cutbacks of both the K-12 NYC Public Schools budget (spending about $7,000 per pupil per year compared to nearby suburban districts and private schools spending about $14,000)3 and by the growing immigrant/English as a Second Language population attending CUNY.4
While budget cuts to public education on every level continued unabated throughout the 1980s and early 1990s, the administrations of Giuliani and Governor George Pataki deepened these cuts significantly. The failure of the public schools to prepare students properly presented colleges with a dilemma: Should they reject high school graduates who were under-prepared or should they admit them and rectify their academic deficits? Nationally, 80% of all public colleges and 63% of private colleges currently offer remedial courses for students.5 Although many colleges give credit toward graduation for these developmental courses in math, reading and writing, CUNY does not.
Giuliani argued that CUNY should demand higher "standards" while he attacked the programs which would bring students up to the standards CUNY had set for its credit-bearing courses. He further ridiculed CUNY students for low graduation rates. In fact, CUNY students graduate at about the same rate as other public college students, but within a longer time frame. CUNY students are mostly older and employed, and many have extensive family and community responsibilities. Not receiving financial support from parents, they do not breeze through college on the 2- or 4-year express.6 Moreover, the job market for college graduates is eroding. Giuliani and Pataki responded to this situation with downsizing and privatization of public higher education, which would negatively impact the poor and people of color (who don't vote for them anyway) while playing to their better-off, white constituency. This change would end a 30-year open admissions policy permitting anyone with a high school diploma or General Equivalency Diploma (GED) to attend a CUNY college, get remedial support and work her/his way through college.
By demonizing CUNY students -- 65% people of color and over 50% of whom are immigrants -- for requiring remedial courses and for their slow progress, the mayor scored points with his potential constituency in middle America and humiliated the students of CUNY into stunned inaction. Giuliani's argument went like this: Why should "we" (read "successful middle class folks") pay for the inadequacies of CUNY students (read "poor folks and people of color")? Giuliani, with tag-team partner Governor George Pataki proposed an end to all remedial courses at CUNY. What is unprecedented is that they leaned on the CUNY Board of Trustees, a body appointed by the mayor and governor but intended to be somewhat independent, to effect this policy change. The Trustees responded to this intense pressure with a plan to end all remedial courses at the system's eleven 4-year colleges, phasing this in over a 3-year period. They decided to wait until the next round to perform their surgery on the community colleges.
Giuliani's solution was to force students in need of remediation to seek out private colleges and educational institutions which they can ill afford. At the same time, a rash of applications for accreditation came in to the state from educational coaching entities such as Sylvan Learning Centers and Stanley Kaplan. Sensing economic opportunity, they proposed remedial courses for potential college students. Meanwhile, the NY State legislature approved increased financial aid to educational institutions per student per semester which would be a form of subsidy to private colleges by financing their higher tuitions. Thus, private colleges, most of which offer remedial courses for academic credit, were seeking CUNY's sizable and profitable student body. The increased financial aid will simply be a windfall to private colleges while further saddling poorer students with the increased burden (even though partially subsidized) for private college tuition.
According to CUNY's own management, the effects of the policy to end remediation will be to downsize the total student body of the 4-year colleges by 45%, including close to 75% of the students of color. This would dramatically cut the budget through decreased tuition and monetary allocations from the state. It would also produce a concomitant decline in CUNY's 8,000 professional full-time workforce (including 5,500 full-time faculty), 7,000 part-time faculty, and 20,000 non-professional workforce.
The overriding factor explaining the inadequate defense of CUNY is the absence of a broadly supported political perspective and the failure of an alternative, combative strategy to emerge. Academics, in the main, are not prepared to risk their jobs and students don't want to risk the opportunity for a share of American prosperity. Nevertheless, a militant minority of union insurgents and student activists are aware that what the capitalists and their sycophantic politicians want is not what labor or poor folks need.
While the most vocal faculty are opposed to the new policy, many prefer to teach only students who are fully prepared for college level work before they enter the CUNY system. Some professors long for a return to a more elite system of college education which would attract undergraduates eager and able to perform at the high level, with which they identify as middle class professionals. Many faculty also assume that the appropriate place for acquiring basic skills is in the high schools, and that if CUNY refused to admit under-prepared students, that would force high school personnel to prepare their students adequately. But high schools did not better prepare students before CUNY remediation was ended and the mass influx of funds necessary to improve the high schools has not been appropriated. Why should one believe the high schools will succeed now?
THE CUNY WORKFORCE IS REPRESENTED BY A VARIETY OF UNIONS: faculty and professional staff by the Professional Staff Congress (American Federation of Teachers), clerical and maintenance workers by District Council 37 (AFSCME), and skilled trade unions such as plumbers, electricians and carpenters. PSC and DC 37 are part of the city's Municipal Labor Coalition, primarily a vehicle for collective bargaining, and all are members of the AFL-CIO's Central Labor Council. Only the faculty and professional staff and its union participated in this crisis, despite the fact that all other workers at CUNY would be affected by a potential 45% downsizing of the majority of the university's units. Having devolved into service organizations which complain while capitulating to the city and state, the unions had no plans to alter their stance and risk the involvement of the rank and file.
The Professional Staff Congress (PSC) leadership has long followed the political model of AFT leader Albert Shanker which relies on a combination of Democratic Party loyalty, back channel maneuvering, acceptance of political "realities," and an uninformed and demobilized membership, in short, business unionism.7 Moreover, the PSC, like many other college faculty and staff unions, allowed the teaching workforce to drift from 60% full-time in 1973 to 40% full-time in 1998--with some campuses having as many as 80% part-timers. Keeping a few choice privileges for the full-timers, who were continuing to age and were not being replaced by younger colleagues, the union chose not to organize part-time faculty into the union even though it legally represented them. Failing to enforce an agency shop for part-timers, the union could allow management to abuse them without much outcry. The usual panoply of anti-democratic tactics assured that no opposition to the 25-year leadership would be successful. For example, at the monthly Delegate Assembly meetings, the union leadership refused to discuss strategy to defeat the anti-remediation measures. It also disallowed discussion of politics and general strategy around contract issues. It refused to print chapter newsletters for those chapters led by New Caucus members -- insurgent rank and file unionists critical of the top leadership -- penalizing them for not following the line laid down by the union leadership. They summarily quashed all attempts by New Caucus members to introduce policy discussions.
The union leadership crafted a strategy that would leave its members out of the loop of the city's labor union movement, despite the fact that the vast majority of the city's unionized workforce either went to CUNY themselves and/or send their children there. They did nothing to invite other unions to participate as fellow workers or as students and family members of students despite the fact that the new policy would have an effect on the families of almost all union members in NYC.
The stance taken by the PSC leadership is consistent with the bureaucratic approach of much of the American labor movement during the last 50 years. Progressively eliminating debate and disagreement, the mainstream of the movement has become anti-democratic, bureaucratic and concessionary toward management. It has done little to build inter-union solidarity. Striving to keep their jobs as power brokers, the union leadership is determined to prevent a rank and file takeover.8
When the attacks on CUNY were mounted, PSC President Irwin Polishook claimed to be busy negotiating a contract that had expired two years earlier. He insisted he could not be embroiled in the struggle to save the university or unionized jobs until after the contract was settled. Many suspected that Polishook had struck a deal with CUNY management to lie low in exchange for a good contract-- though there is no hard evidence of this. But, lie low he did. Asked at a union Delegate Assembly meeting about the union's plan of action in the face of impending layoffs, Polishook blithely said: "Layoffs are management's prerogative." When pressed by New Caucus members to create a plan of defense against the attacks, Polishook steadfastly refused. Although this crisis was specifically about downsizing the student body and thus the workforce, and about privatizing or outsourcing part of the workforce, the union chose to remain silent on the most important issues facing the international labor union movement today. It did little more than issue press releases and hold a few small press conferences. Mass mobilizations of any kind were actively discouraged in favor of "back channels" and leader-to-leader phone calls.
The New Caucus managed to mobilize significant forces. With a core of about 50-100 activists, it was a more significant force than its membership total of 400 would suggest. It organized several small but successful demonstrations and news conferences in conjunction with students and community groups, held a conference attended by 200 members that discussed mobilization strategy, initiated the community-oriented organization CUNY is Our Future (see below), held teach-ins and forums on the campuses, and reached out to community groups and to labor activists.
The New Caucus played a key role in organizing large numbers of faculty, students, artists and literary figures to testify before the CUNY Board of Trustees. The three required public hearings of the Trustees became public pageants of support for CUNY, its mission and students. The official union leadership often sent one or two representatives to these events but did not actively support mobilization. New Caucus members also led a dramatic civil disobedience action during the final Trustees' meeting at which the vote was taken to end remediation on May 26. Once the policy was finally decided upon, individual New Caucus members pursued a legal strategy which won an injunction against any plan to implement the anti-remediation decision until the Trustees provided an open and public decision-making process as required by law.
The New Caucus drew a fair amount of media attention to CUNY policy despite a general news black-out of information other than that generated by the mayor. The most important role played by the New Caucus was developing a class analysis of the attacks and a strategy to mobilize collectively. A central problem it faced was the pessimism of the CUNY community that anything could beat back the forces of the powerful and aggressive right-wing.
The long-term strategy of the New Caucus is to create a coalition of rank and file unionists from many different unions with the support of community groups and public service recipients fighting for expanded public services. Such a coalition might well provide the impetus for a successful political challenge to the dominant forces of reaction.
The core of experienced, committed activists willing to give their all to the struggle was small and did not, at that time, have the political, organizational, and communication skills to overcome the lack of material resources and ambivalence among faculty, students, and community. New Caucus activists, while a bit younger than the average CUNY faculty and staff, were a relatively senior crew for a deeply committed activist group. Moreover, many of the New Caucus faculty and staff had other commitments, e.g., scholarly work, artistic endeavors, teaching and family responsibilities.
Faculty from the 2-year colleges created a Community College Caucus (CCC) within the UFS, stressing the importance of community colleges for the education f students.9 They were mainstays at the public hearings of the CUNY Board of Trustees. While UFS and CCC patiently cajoled the PSC leadership into participation, if only on limited basis, their alliance with the New Caucus was practical and productive.
The CUNY African American Network (CAAN) met to assess the damage the new remediation policy would impose on people of color. The group meeting was small in size but significant in the specific cast of activists with interlocking membership in other organizations, particularly the New Caucus, UFS and CCC. CAAN lobbied the Black and Latino Caucus of the state legislature, talked with CUNY trustees, and involved more faculty and students of color.
Relying heavily on the intellectual work offered by the UFS and the CCC, the New Caucus proceeded to build alliances outside of CUNY. The city labor movement's reluctance to work with union members other than official leaders, hampered the New Caucus outreach to the union sector. Leaders from other unions would meet secretly with the New Caucus, exploring ways to get PSC President Polishook to engage them in the CUNY struggles so their participation would be seen as legitimate by their fellow union leaders on the Metropolitan Labor Council. There was some support from other union leaders but it was always tempered by the careful rules of the fraternity which require the proper handshake and official credentials to join the party. Without the green light from Polishook, the city's union leadership was stuck in its own protocol.
Part-time faculty, organized through CUNY Adjuncts Unite! (CAU!), were key to the fightback. Their participation in all aspects of the struggle, from raising the issues of the casualization of the workforce and the lack of paid office hours, to organizing demonstrations, community coalitions, lobbying and making their presence felt at pubic hearings, made them highly valued partners. Their activism advocating for part-timers was extraordinary: they distributed 10,000 newsletters to part- and full-timers monthly, were leaders in building the International Congress of Adjunct Part-Time, Non-Tenure Track and Graduate Teaching Assistant Faculty (renamed the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor), and did a recruitment drive for part-time faculty to join the PSC (all with no assistance from the PSC leadership). Their goal was equitability between part- and full-time faculty.
As 60% of the teaching workforce, they had the most to lose with the new policy. From management's perspective, a part-time workforce with virtually no rights is perfect for impending downsizing. Less resistance is expected as full-time faculty breathe a sigh of relief knowing that part-timers are the buffer between the policy and their own jobs. Part-timers at CUNY are among the leaders of a growing movement of part-time college faculty organizing across the country since the casualization of the college teaching workforce has become a common practice.
CUNY Adjuncts Unite is led by a mix of older "career" part-timers as well as graduate students working to complete their PhDs and, hopefully, to obtain full-time academic jobs in the future. That full-time faculty throughout the nation, often through their union leaders, have failed to defend their professions and create an intellectual and economic space for the next generation of college teachers is a disturbing reality not so different from that confronting other skilled or professional unionized workers. In fact, permitting management to casualize the workforce leaves full-time faculty less powerful in the defense of their own interests in the long run. A passive, demobilized, cheaply bought-off full-time workforce finds few allies in a time of crisis.
Changes in the political and economic landscape threatened the hopes of CUNY students. A grim future seemed to hang above their heads and colored their visions for change. Giuliani and allies managed to humiliate students, publicly calling them unworthy of citizen support. Though close to half of our successful students entered needing some type of remedial course work, they were embarrassed to come forward and proudly claim their accomplishment. Nonetheless, some of these post-remedial success stories did emerge. This was particularly true at graduation exercises, many of which had valedictorians or student graduation speakers who came out as ex-remedial students. Some asked their fellow graduates who had started with remedial courses to stand up and be counted. These were dramatic moments. Some also spoke proudly and eloquently at public Board of Trustees hearings.
However, most students on the campuses hid in silence, hoping they would not be discovered. When asked, "What about your brothers and sisters? Don't they deserve a chance to go to the 4-year colleges like you did?", their responses were mixed. Some said, "Well, they are lazy" or "Let them start at a community college and then transfer." Many were unwilling to defend CUNY for future generations. This is understandable given the turn in the broader political culture that defines value through the bottom line of solitary achievement, that glorifies the lone efforts of the individual disconnected from a past or future group struggle. Success American-style is a lonely march to the next level that negates one's responsibility to others and one's reliance on others' past achievements. The loneliness of the culture and individualistic solutions popularly offered made the response to this attack ineffective. A collective effort striving for democratic rights through participatory efforts seemed too improbable for our overworked, overburdened, publicly attacked students.
Nonetheless, there was an important, articulate, even if small and dispersed, student movement that was an impassioned partner in this struggle. Groups existed on a handful of campuses, mostly though not exclusively on campuses with New Caucus-led union chapters. On campuses with both strong student groups and New Caucus chapters, the synergy was moderately effective--though never enough to kindle true mass participation. On the one campus in which the student group was strongest (Hunter College) there was no organized New Caucus chapter at the time. But there the student activist group was also, atypically, the elected student government and thus had significant human and financial resources at its disposal. These Hunter College students were central in the struggle and worked hard to revive a network of activists throughout CUNY-- the Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM).
The official student governments and their representative body, the University Student Senate (USS), were very late in realizing the importance of the struggle and tentative in their response. While small numbers of students ultimately expressed concern about the loss of significant opportunities at CUNY, the heat generated was luke-warm compared with fiery CUNY student movements a few years earlier.
The New Caucus and CUNY is Our Future mobilized community groups and religious organizations for demonstrations of support of CUNY. Upward of 30 community groups attended meetings, rallies, hearings, and over 6,000 signed petitions in support of keeping CUNY an open admissions institution with full remedial services.
As the Board of Trustees steamrolled to its final decision, a coalition of legal groups representing the city's African-American, Latino, Jewish, and Asian-American groups united to challenge the legality of eliminating remedial programs. The People of Faith Network, the Labor-Religion Coalition, the Same Boat Coalition, the Baptists Ministers' Conference and a handful of other progressive groups lent a helping hand. Some progressive politicians such as Congressperson Major Owens, State Senator Ed Sullivan, and City Council Representative Helen Marshall championed the CUNY cause and participated in press conferences, public hearings and CUNY Board of Trustees testimony. Sullivan even ended up getting arrested with faculty and students at a Trustees hearing on May 26.
The lack of community outcry for CUNY echoed the feeble protest against terminating public assistance, and to the cutbacks in school budgets, after-school programs, public housing and medical care. Internalizing self-blame exacerbated by the media, weakens self-confidence and resolve. With a few earlier noted exceptions, communities of color basically sat this one out.
A NUMBER OF LEGAL STRATEGIES WERE EMPLOYED to challenge the policy and buy time. A multi-ethnic legal coalition advanced the argument that it is discriminatory to create an educational policy which would weigh more heavily on people of color than on whites. Individual New Caucus faculty members and students successfully challenged the virtual denial of public access to Board of Trustees meetings and won a delay on the anti-remedial policy until a new vote can be taken in proper public format. Finally, the UFS lobbied the State Board of Regents, which oversees all public educational institutions, to call for a full review of the anti-remediation decision since it significantly alters the mission of the university. Completion of this review will probably not occur until April 1999, thus delaying the implementation of this decision. This gives pro-CUNY forces a chance to re-group and reverse the decision.
Author's note: I wish to thank the following people, all activists in these struggles and scholars in diverse fields, for sharing their ideas and editorial comments with me: Stanley Aronowitz, Joan Greenbaum, John Hyland, Eric Marshall, Bart Meyers, and Susan O'Malley.