CUNY: Gear Up for a Semester of Fightback

As the fall semester begins at the City University of New York, nearly 275,000 students are returning to the classroom. Once again, the students are the primary targets of vicious racist attacks and cutbacks, as U.S. imperialism continues its relative decline and sharpening rivalry with Russian and Chinese imperialism. As imperialist wars rage and widen across the world, CUNY students - the majority of whom are Black, Latin, Asian and are immigrant - are saddled with rising tuition costs, crumbling infrastructure, increasingly poor job prospects, and increasing military recruitment to fight and die for U.S. imperialism.
Years of bosses’ racist attacks on students have made it possible for attacks on campus workers and faculty.
Fewer places is this clearer than at Kingsborough Community College (KCC), one of the largest colleges in the CUNY system. KCC has a total of over 15,000 full time and part time students, mostly Black, Latin and immigrants from across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Central/ South Asia. Its maintenance and cafeteria staff is mostly Black, Latin, and Asian, in contrast to the faculty, which are almost completely white. With disproportionately higher numbers of immigrant, undocumented and students with DACA status, KCC students are at the cutting edge of capitalism’s system-wide racist attacks.
Members of the Progressive Labor Party have been selling CHALLENGE and making contacts outside KCC. The students, workers and faculty there paint a picture of a campus in need of building a mass, fighting PLP there to smash these racist and sexist attacks.
Students: Main Targets of Bosses’ Racism
To the capitalist bosses, students represent future wage-slaving workers, future empire-saving soldiers, or both. As the U.S. capitalist crisis worsens, increasing student tuition is the most obvious racist attack on KCC students.
Following the most recent political-economic crisis of U.S. capitalism in 2008, the bosses bailed out Wall Street banks with billions of workers’ tax dollars, deeply cut education funding, and raised the cost of tuition. Tuition has increased every year since 2011. On June 26, CUNY trustees (who come from some of the top Wall Street-tied investment banks and firms) voted to increase yearly tuition another $200 for a total of $6,530/ year for senior colleges, and $4,800/ year at the community colleges. At this same meeting, the trustees voted to cut the operating budgets that actually fund the schools by 1 per cent. The top salaries of CUNY administrators, however, were raised up to $402,700/ year. Chancellor Milliken passed this round of salary increases. Apparently, he’s satisfied with his $724,470/ year (NY Post, 6/26).
The true costs of college are far more than just rising tuition, however. At colleges like KCC, where many students are non-white and disproportionately single parents, expenses like MetroCards, textbooks and childcare can present impassable obstacles to maintaining full-time student status. Many students have family or work obligations that do not allow a full-time course load, which can complicate financial aid and scholarship packages.
For example, students hoping to qualify for the “Excelsior Scholarship,” which provides free tuition to certain students, must be enrolled full-time in consecutive semesters, and do not even qualify if they make under $50,000/ year (studybreaks.com, 4/19).
In comparison, students working full-time at the New York state minimum wage of $10.50/ hour  will only receive an annual salary of about $21,840/ year. In 2020, when the minimum wage increases to $15/ hour, that full-time salary will reach $31,200/ year.
KCC Workers: ‘Too Many Coaches, Too Few Players’
The situation of the mostly Black and high percentage women campus workers at KCC is worsening fast. While CUNY cuts the entire operations budget each year, at KCC 28 maintenance workers have left in two years, out of about 80 originally. And the college isn’t replacing them- supervisors in suits are a common sight but, as one worker explains, it’s like having a sports team “with too many coaches and not enough players.”
CUNY’s cuts mean the campus is in a state of deterioration and collapse, with heavier burdens falling on fewer maintenance workers. Bathrooms regularly flood and are shut down; toilet tissue can be scarce. Workers are burdened with maintaining more buildings and tasks they can handle. Most workers are forced to do jobs outside of their specific job title, and do so out of their commitment to providing KCC’s students with the best learning environment they can.
Many workers have worked at KCC for decades. Despite worsening conditions, many campus workers look out ‘beyond their job title’ to take care of students, workers, and faculty alike - an attitude of solidarity that all must learn from, and emulate, if a strong movement is to be built here.
Faculty: Adjunct Profs Pitted Against Full-timers
The working conditions of the mostly-white working class faculty, while relatively better, are worsening with their class sisters and brothers among the students and campus workers.
CUNY has come rely on adjunct professors for instruction, who are now 59% of all CUNY faculty, but paid about one third of what full-timers make. Teachers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions. While the professors’ union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) won certain benefits for adjuncts recently, the situation is worsening faster than the union can hope to keep up.
Issues like scheduling and teaching loads, as well as a path to full-time status, are among the issues motivating adjunct professors, whose struggles must be joined by full-timers to achieve.
KCC’s reliance on adjunct labor is no different than throughout CUNY. With the rise of ‘adjunctification’ throughout CUNY, faculty are following their students and campus workers with intensifying factory-like exploitation, where the education itself becomes more visibly a commodity, like everything else under capitalism.
An Injury to One Is An Injury to All
Decades of attacks on students have occurred with the growing needs of U.S. imperialism for obedient, low-wage workers and obedient soldiers in the widening wars between the U.S., Russian and Chinese imperialists. By keeping our struggles separate, the capitalist class has been able to segregate and control our class with racism, sexism and nationalism.
There is very little, if any, significant political contacts and joint organizing among the segregated students, workers, and faculty. But all of this can turn be turned around, and we call on all students and workers to join PLP and organize to fight back together.
We need to organize together and fight back for better conditions for all- immigrant and citizen,  Black and white. The longer campus workers and faculty to remain segregated to their narrow unions, the longer this dark night of capitalist attacks will be.
PLP is building a mass, international party for communist revolution to smash these racist borders, racist police attacks, and racist cutbacks in education to pay for the bosses’ imperialist wars.