Why we write

We write to welcome you, President Felix Matos, as Chancellor of the CUNY system.  You are an academic leader and intellectual who knows intimately the workings of the four-year and community colleges.  Given your record, we count on you to protect what these colleges represent for those who teach and learn in them and, beyond that, for the health and well-being of democracy in our city, state, and nation.  We write because we are faculty who witness and, for some, face the threat of censorship as well as the slow erosion of support for critical studies, whether focused on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, class, or race.

We write to call on our new Chancellor to lead in ways that protect the soul of CUNY from threats, internal and external.  In the current climate, we experience cumulative waves of challenges to our academic health and democracy: when the NYPD infiltrates Muslim American student groups, when gender/women’s studies experience cuts and shrinking resources, when African American and Latinx programs are being merged, when standing with Palestine is considered anti-Semitic, when most of our faculty are underpaid, insecure adjuncts, when some student-faculty-staff opinions are being silenced and the core elements of their teaching and relations with students and research are being eroded.  We write to ask our Chancellor to heed and protect not only our fiscal well-being but the integrity of all that is CUNY – a space for democratic exchange of ideas and imagination.

The democratic mission

The CUNY system is unique in the United States: a publicly-funded municipal network of two- and four-year colleges and a graduate center designed to serve a remarkably diverse population that now includes veterans, undocumented students, those formerly incarcerated, those coming from foster care and those with disabilities, the food insecure, and workers from informal and formal labor markets, as well as the more “traditional” students from working-class, poor, and immigrant families.  As an assemblage of ideas, conversations, movements, aesthetics and deep civic engagements, over the years, CUNY has educated scores of NYC politicians and civic leaders, as well as nationally and internationally-acclaimed artists, poets, scholars, scientists and activists. It has also educated ordinary citizens about how to participate in and protect democracy.  Indeed, it is no overstatement to say that CUNY is an idea that provokes the imagination for a vibrant public life.

CUNY’s academic project has always aimed to provide analysis of social structures, including structures of discrimination.  Its goal is to open new possibilities of understanding for students who experience them, to teach them to read the world in order to change the world.  This is not a mission of radicalization, but a training for participation in democracy. The curriculum has explored civil rights, workers’ movements, welfare policy, and immigrant justice and, more recently, gender and sexuality, racial justice and incarceration, and anti-Muslim racism in the US and transnationally—all from diverse points of view–as well as critically examining the US and its allies changing political and economic roles in the world.

From its gorgeous palette of “diversities,” CUNY has been a site in which historically “dangerous ideas” have been allowed to breathe, be debated, experimented with, revised, and sometimes kneaded into struggles for the collective good.  These once “dangerous ideas” have birthed significant academic transformations of national and international prominence – including the once dangerous ideas of open admissions and free tuition (an idea that is returning to the popular imagination and landing in the very center of the Democratic presidential platform); the urban university system as a site of deep (if uneven) desegregation, across lines of class, race, ethnicity, language, nationality, gender, sexualities, immigration, incarceration status, and (dis)abilities.  Our history of academic imagination, political courage and resistance and our relentless desire for educational justice remains inspiring today.

The mission under siege

Today the CUNY mission, historic and contemporary, teeters on a precarious ledge. CUNY, like most institutions of higher education, is rent by broken promises: a retreat from open admissions and free tuition; an overreliance on highly exploited adjuncts; racial/class/linguistic stratification within and across our institutions.  The University for “all of the children of the city” is racially/economically/linguistically stratified, with more elite institutions (the four-year colleges and the Graduate Center) far whiter and wealthier than the community colleges and remaining four-year institutions.  The CUNY faculty has been deeply adjunctified.  There are 7600 full-time faculty members and 12,000 part-time faculty members, with part time faculty teaching 61% of the courses in the four-year colleges and 47% in the community colleges.  There are 275,000 full time students. Executive administrative positions have swelled while administrative staff positions are being cut back.

There is a new emphasis as well on the vocational aspect of higher education, often framed as the antithesis of the liberal arts commitment to teaching “critical thinking.” Administrators herald partnerships with industry that offer “careers” for community college graduates at call centers while questioning the value of courses that teach students how to read critically the world in which they live (and in which such jobs are all they can hope to find).  There ought to be no need to choose between vocational training and training for democracy; indeed, critical thinkers, those exposed to humanities, social and natural sciences, languages and the arts, history, literature, political theory and sociology, are the ones most prepared to tackle challenges in creative and novel ways at their workplaces, at home, and in social and civic life. They are also most often innovators in politics, science, and the arts; it is they who provide the leadership and inspiration for thinking about making the world a better place.

In this context, there has emerged a new set of threats to our intellectual life; one that echoes the Red Scares of the 1940s at City College.  Today the attacks are draped in the language of anti-Semitism, ironically targeting a number of Jewish as well as other faculty who support Palestinian justice. This is not only happening here at CUNY, but nationally.  As neoliberalism saturates higher education with its eye only on the bottom line, it is crucial that we attend to the censorship that creeps through the academy, one donor/trustee/faculty member/student/department/club at a time.  Perhaps we are more vulnerable as state funding for higher education shrinks. But we must remember the history of CCNY in the 1930s and 1940s, a hotbed for censorship, surveillance and faculty dismissals, motivated by anti-communist, anti-progressive, anti-labor interests. CUNY cannot be vulnerable again to those who would obstruct academic freedom on these grounds.

The lessons of history

It is precisely the role CUNY has played as a center for critical thinking across racial/class/linguistic lines that has made the system a target for conservative attack.  Predictably, with each flourish of educational democracy, critique, and possibility, has come an assault – sometimes bold, sometimes subtle; sometimes in the Daily News and sometimes in the form of an internal grievance, a FOIA request, an ethics charge, or a denial of tenure.  The choreography of radical possibility and threats to it is painfully predictable. 

And yet, through it all, as economic well-being and stability for our sprawling institution remain chronically precarious, the ethos of academic possibility, a rough and bold academic vision, echoes today as it has historically, across the CUNY campuses. With too many fiscal parents, caught in fights between state and city, corporate demands and community needs, CUNY seeks to be open to all of the children of the city of New York. And in this classic struggle, CUNY is of course never quite what it yearns to be; filled with contradiction and tension.  But CUNY is a struggle, and we know you believe it is worth the fight.

What is to be done?

We are not asking you as the new Chancellor to fix all of CUNY’s problems at the start of your tenure.  We are asking instead, that you might pursue the following four tasks as you assume office:

1.    Publicly affirm the protections of free speech and academic freedom for all faculty, staff, and students, including protection of the right to protest—a right that has been traditionally protected at CUNY.
2.    Ask the Board of Trustees to affirm those rights.
3.    Meet with those who feel under siege to talk about what kinds of protection they need in the current circumstances.
4.    Convene a committee to draft a policy on free speech and academic freedom that applies to all members of the community and that recommends forms of secure and stable employment as the way to guarantee protection of those rights.

We thank you for your time and attention to these matters, Chancellor Matos.

Concerned Members of the CUNY Community