Rotting rungs on the ladder of opportunity

The New York State budget passed in Albany last month has been justly praised for lifting the minimum wage and introducing paid family leave. The unions, advocates and lawmakers who helped to turn workers’ dreams into law should be proud.

But the budget leaves a major piece of the economic justice agenda unfinished. It fails to fund a new contract for professors and staff at the City University of New York, endangering an educational institution that serves exactly the people affected by a higher minimum wage. CUNY professors have not had a raise in more than half a decade. The resulting crisis of faculty recruitment and retention has put the academic mission of the school’s 11 senior colleges, seven community colleges and five graduate and professional schools at risk.

CUNY’s 25,000 faculty and academic staff, most of whom are on the state payroll, have not had a raise since 2009. The value of our salaries has fallen as the cost of living in New York City has soared — by 23%, according to The Economist.

Even before the current crisis, CUNY faculty salaries were thousands of dollars lower than those at comparable institutions, such as Rutgers or the University of Connecticut. Now they are completely uncompetitive. One professor took a $30,000 salary cut from her job as a high school teacher to come to CUNY after earning her Ph.D. And that was before she went years without a raise.

CUNY’s secret has always been that professors and other academic staff who could work anywhere choose to work for the nation’s largest urban public university because we have a vision of a world in which college education is accessible to all, not restricted by race and class. Working here is a labor of love; we do it because there is nothing like teaching the university’s brave, committed, resilient students.

After nearly seven years without a raise, however, the thread that holds many of us to CUNY is starting to fray. Salaries are so uncompetitive that departments are struggling to keep the profes- sors they have and to fill open positions.

In the economics department at City College, seven of the 11 professors hired in the last few years have already left for other jobs — driven out by low pay, poor research support and overcrowded classrooms. In another CUNY department, not one candidate would accept a faculty position after hearing the salary offer.

The lack of a contract has begun to hurt CUNY’s core mission — teaching and learning.

CUNY has been on a forced austerity diet for decades; it already balances its budget by relying, for more than half of its teaching, on instructors who are paid by the course, at a fraction of the rate of full-time professors. These faculty are hit hardest by the lack of a raise; some have been forced to rely on food stamps.

There is enough money in this rich state to support high-quality public college education. The problem is policy, not resources. Albany’s failure to fund our contract reflects a political decision not to invest in the students we teach — who are overwhelmingly people of color from poor communities. Three-quarters of CUNY undergraduates are Latino, black or Asian; nearly half are immigrants; the majority are working class or poor.

In an economy that systematically denies opportunity to the poor and racial minorities, CUNY offers a half-million New Yorkers a chance for a good life. If New York lawmakers want to take serious aim at inequality, they must allow us to do our jobs well and fund the contracts of CUNY employees.

CUNY has champions in Albany, and there are promising signs that a resolution may emerge. But this demands urgency; the legislative session ends in June. What is needed now is the moral imagination to value CUNY students — and the political will to support those who have the privilege of working with them.

Albany abandons CUNY