What does it mean when the governor of a state can’t get along with its public universities? That’s increasingly the status quo in New York State, where Gov. Andrew Cuomo has been cutting state funding for CUNY, NYC’s university system, of which the Murphy Institute is a part, and where the relationship between the Governor and Mayor Bill di Blasio is strained at best.
As Dana Rubenstein and Conor Skelding explain in Politico New York:
Mayor Bill de Blasio, whose relationship with Cuomo is worse than Bloomberg’s ever was, said at an event in Bay Ridge last week that it was in the “dead of night” before Cuomo’s annual budget address last month that he first learned the state would reduce its contribution to the CUNY system by nearly a half billion dollars a year. The city, which does not control the university, would have to pay the difference.
Of course, this is just another chapter in a long-standing set of budgetary ordeals that have left faculty and staff at CUNY in a lurch:
The university has yet to reach a contract agreement with CUNY’s faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress, whose more than 25,000 members have been without one since 2010, or District Council 37, which represents over 10,000 non-professional workers at CUNY and hasn’t had a contract since 2009.
[Cuomo]’s denied CUNY staff a $15 minimum wage, even as he insisted upon it at the State University of New York.
The history of CUNY, its funding and the relationship between city and state are of course complex. However, many are calling this a uniquely acrimonious and harmful period in that history. The Politico article, which explains the budgetary history of the university, ends with this line from CUNY professor John Mollenkopf:
“Having taught at CUNY for 35 years, I have never been so dismayed about how the state is treating the university budget,” Mollenkopf said.
Learn more by reading the full article at Politico New York.
