January 16, 2014
Dr. Barbara Bowen, Professional Staff Congress President
New York, NY — The PSC welcomes the new chancellor and will work to build a productive relationship with the incoming chancellor in order to address the urgent needs of CUNY faculty, staff and students. This is a moment of national crisis in public higher education, brought on by massive cuts in state funding, and the crisis has hit CUNY particularly hard.
We hope that the new chancellor will be an aggressive advocate for the entire University, and will rededicate CUNY to its bold mission of providing top-quality college education to all New Yorkers.
We hope that one of the first things the new chancellor will do is take action to support the faculty’s 92% vote of No Confidence in CUNY’s new austerity-driven curriculum Pathways. By failing to respond to the faculty’s broad denunciation of Pathways the CUNY Board of Trustees has put the quality of a CUNY education at risk. We call on the new chancellor to listen to the faculty and respect our knowledge and our experience in the classroom.
The PSC looks forward to working with the new chancellor to negotiate a contract that provides fair compensation for CUNY’s extraordinary faculty and staff, and helps to create the working conditions we need to teach and serve our students.
Finally, we hope the new chancellor will advocate aggressively for increased public funding for CUNY from the City and State and will not be satisfied with a funding structure for the University that relies heavily on tuition hikes.
The PSC has been grateful for the opportunity to work with Interim Chancellor Dr. William P. Kelly this year. Working collaboratively, the PSC and Dr. Kelly have been able to make some real gains in a short time. We look forward to building a similarly productive relationship with the incoming chancellor.
We invite the new chancellor to work with the union and call on the new administration to join us in working for a CUNY that fulfills its promise for the people of New York.
