view of Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn on a cloudy winter day

A Letter to the CUNY Chancellor

POSTED BY JOAN W. SCOTT In March, Rachel Ida Buff published an Academe Blog post recounting the attacks by the Canary Mission and others on faculty at Kingsborough Community College. In response to the attack, a group of faculty, staff, and graduate students decided to greet the incoming chancellor, Felix Matos (a “veteran” administrator in…

CUNY and the Return of “Free” Tuition

BY AARON BARLOW Will New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “free” college tuition plan have much positive impact on the City University of New York (CUNY), the massive system where I teach? I doubt it; it’s really not much more than repackaging of programs already in existence. And, as David Brooks points out in The New…

Fighting for CUNY and Public Higher Education

BY MARCELLA BENCIVENNI This is a guest post by Marcella Bencivenni, associate professor of history at CUNY Hostos Community College.  The City University of New York (CUNY), the nation’s largest public urban university, has been recently the subject of several articles exposing its growing challenges: steep budget cuts, climbing enrollment and class sizes, infrastructure decay,…

CUNY Executives Under Fire

BY AARON BARLOW When the retiring Chancellor of a university system is able to negotiate for himself a new position as Chancellor Emeritus worth some $3,000.000, questions of the integrity of the institution should be raised. At the City University of New York (CUNY) this happened three-and-a-half years ago, but only now is a new…

A CUNY Student Bill of Rights

POSTED BY HANK REICHMAN CUNY Rising, a coalition of the AAUP-affiliated Professional Staff Congress (PSC) and other community and student allies working to build support for public higher education and the City University of New York (CUNY) has issued “A CUNY Student Bill of Rights,” launching a petition campaign to support investment in higher education…

PSC Schedules Strike Authorization Vote

The following message from Barbara Bowen, President of the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), a joint AAUP-AFT union representing faculty and staff at the City University of New York, was sent to all PSC members.  It is taken from the PSC website. For previous posts on the PSC’s six-year battle for a fair contract go here.…

New Alliance Defends CUNY

BY HANK REICHMAN “CUNY is for the People” read some of the signs at a highly-charged rally outside New York Governor Andrew Cuomo’s midtown office in New York City yesterday. Organized by a new and broad coalition, CUNY Rising Alliance, the rally kicked off a community-based campaign to demand increased public investment in the City…

Pathways at CUNY

 Recently, the administration of the City University of New York proposed a series of academic changes to the school, grouping these changes together under the name “Pathways.” The system would make it easier for students to transfer between CUNY schools, and it would have looser graduation requirements. This proposal and the faculty opposition to it…

Fighting Austerity Education

[This comes from Barbara Bowen of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty union of the City University of New York and Terrence Martell of the CUNY Faculty Senate.] Dear Colleague: Please click here to sign a petition calling for a moratorium on the implementation of an austerity curriculum at CUNY. And please forward this message widely to…