To Bolster CUNY, SUNY
Faculty Unions Call For Influx of Funds

By MEREDITH KOLODNER

Higher education unions told the State Assembly last week that the city and state university systems were languishing from years of budget cuts.

BARBARA BOWEN: Need to pump up funding.

The delegations from the Professional Staff Congress and United University Professions testified in Albany at a hearing of the Assembly's Higher Education Committee which was convened to look at the impact of the 2006-2007 state budget on the City University of New York and its state counterpart.

'20 Years of Underfunding'

"Twenty years of underfunding cannot be remedied by modest increases in the operating budget," Barbara Bowen, the PSC president, told the committee.

Last year the State Legislature increased funding for CUNY from $911 million in fiscal year 2006 to $1.031 billion for the current year and blocked a tuition hike. Even with the increase, state spending on CUNY when adjusted for inflation is 26 percent lower than it was 15 years ago, according to the PSC.

Marcia Newfield, a 71-year old adjunct in the English Department at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, told the committee that she could not afford to retire because of the low wages paid to adjuncts, who teach more than half the courses at CUNY.

"We are not available to give our students the support they need," said Ms. Newfield. "I only have one office hour a week for 28 students, and I share my office and computer with 60 other adjuncts."

Job-Hunter College

Jonathan Buchsbaum, a Professor in the Media Studies Department at Queens College, told the committee that one-half of the faculty in his department is seeking positions at other colleges, which he said was a direct result of poor working conditions caused by budget cuts.

State University of New York Professors told the legislators that chronic underfunding of the system had led to the rejection of thousands of qualified students because there wasn't enough faculty to teach them. UUP President William E. Scheuerman thanked the committee for increasing funding in the current year, but said there was much more to be done.

"If the ratio of full-time faculty to full-time equivalent students in 2005-06 was equal to the ratio that existed in the mid-1990s," Mr. Scheuerman said, "the campuses would have had almost 2,000 more full-time academic faculty than was the case last year."

Governor Spitzer promised in his State of the State address a week earlier to set up a commission to make recommendations about policy changes and funding to improve New York's higher education system. The Governor will lay out his spending proposals for the coming year in his Jan. 31 budget address.