Students, teachers, union members and elected officials march over the Brooklyn Bridge during a rally demanding the state fund the City University of New York in the upcoming budget, on Sunday, March 19, 2023.We are just a few weeks away from the city budget deadline, and if Mayor Adams has his way, the City University of New York will remain grossly underfunded.
CUNY’s return on its investment has been proven time and time again. Yet Mayor Adams has cut CUNY repeatedly, leaving the community colleges with 400 vacant positions. The LaGuardia Community College library only had three of its 11 units fully staffed at the time of the report, and the collections shrunk so much that access to databases needed for student and faculty research was lost. The Borough of Manhattan Community College library had its non-personnel budget cut by half.
CUNY isn’t the only victim. Mayor Adams has cut the city budget seven times since taking office. His cuts hit hardest on services that poor and working families in New York rely on, like childcare, libraries, and education. The NYPD’s overtime budget and the vendors who received hundreds of millions of dollars in no-bid contracts have fared much better.
Speaker Adams has defended CUNY and the working people of our city again and again, and she is the driving force behind CUNY Reconnect, a program that has re-enrolled more than 33,000 stopped-out students in CUNY colleges since its 2022 launch. But it is increasingly difficult for our members to service more students with smaller budgets.