BUDGET CUTS: Protesters from CUNY (City University of New York) form a picket line at 34th Street and 5th Avenue on Monday, before they marched to Gov. Paterson’s offices to voice their disgust at budget cuts for CUNY. (Katy Mantyk/The Epoch Times)
Protesters marched from 34th Street at 5th Avenue to Paterson’s Madison Avenue offices holding signs with fiery slogans like: ‘Paterson Says Billions for Bankers, We Say NO!’ ‘Fund CUNY, Not Prisons,’ and ‘$$ For Schools, Not Wall St, Not War, Not Jails.’ They chanted “No Health Insurance Makes Me Sick,” “Wall Street Bailouts Make Me Sick,” and “Poverty Wages Make Me Sick.”
In addition to reversing budget cuts, they are calling on Gov. Paterson to halt plans to deregulate tuition hikes. Under the current system, the state legislature has to approve tuition increases. CUNY and State University of New York (SUNY) trustees seek to overturn the current system, allowing them to charge differential tuition rates by program and by campus.
According to the protesters, these tuition hikes would hit working and middle class students in particular, who are already being squeezed by tightening credit markets and are often not eligible for financial aid other than loans which take years to pay off.
“We need to make sure CUNY stays affordable so people have hope and aspiration,” says Jim Phillips, a retired CUNY professor who was at the protest handing out fliers.
“During times of recession and unemployment, people go back to school to get re-skilled and re-tooled. CUNY is exactly the kind of university where that happens. People don’t go to Columbia to get retrained, but they do go to CUNY. Working class, middle class people,” said James Hoff, adjunct lecturer at CUNY.
“These budget cuts are on the backs of working class, middle class people. The Wall Street bailouts are a perfect example of that. The nation has a trillion dollars to bail out these huge corporations, but they can’t give $50 million to CUNY?” said Hoff.
57 percent of classes at CUNY are taught by adjuncts. These are graduate teaching fellows, and receive as little as one fourth the wages that professors receive, no health benefits, and are hired part-time, with no job security.
Paterson’s budget cuts come from his focus on eliminating the ballooning $6.4 billion state deficit, without further taxation on citizens.
"Just like families across New York facing difficult economic times, our state government needs to scrutinize its spending carefully and acknowledge that we simply cannot afford everything we want or everything we counted on when we thought we had more money," Paterson said.
In addition, Paterson has proposed cutting hundreds of millions in health care spending, local government assistance, and new programs.
“The city and the state spend a lot of money on a lot of things that they don’t need to,” counters Hoff. “For instance, the Rockefeller drug laws, people wind up in prison for years, sometimes decades; it cost almost $35 thousand a year to keep somebody in prison. It costs, I don’t know, maybe a third of that to send somebody to school for four years. So there’s an example of where money could be taken from an unjust prison system and given to the education system, which is obviously going to lower crime. You’ll have more educated people, more people who feel they have a future; there’s going to be less crime.”
