OPINION: A Tale of two New York City budgets
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Evan Turiano is an adjunct instructor at Queens College, CUNY, where he has taught U.S. History since 2017. Photo courtesy of Turiano
By Evan Turiano
New York City is expecting a $7 billion budget shortfall because of the coronavirus pandemic. In response, CUNY faculty, staff and students are beginning to brace for a harsher version of an annual reality: severe budget cuts.
A decade of cuts have been devastating. The CUNY system has lost almost 1,000 full time faculty positions in the last 10 years. Classes are instead being taught by part-time adjunct professors — the gig workers of academia — many of whom are forced to work multiple jobs and rely on food stamps in order to continue teaching for poverty wages (less than $4,000 per class at CUNY). And the university system’s great mission, to be an engine of social mobility for working class New Yorkers, has become increasingly difficult as tuition rises, now up to 12 percent of the median New York income.
CUNY was already hanging on by a thread. And then the pandemic hit. In early May CUNY’s union, PSC-CUNY, was told that the university system should expect to bear over $90 million in cuts of their state funding, plus another $30 million in cuts from city spending. Per the Chronicle of Higher Education, multiple senior colleges including John Jay College, Brooklyn College and the College of Staten Island are preparing to lay off hundreds of faculty — up to 35 percent — in order to withstand these cuts.
New Yorkers have been told that this is the only way out of the crisis. That is, of course, the politics of austerity at work. CUNY’s leadership has so thoroughly accepted the inevitability of its own financial starvation that it began announcing staff cuts before anyone even saw a state budget. This is, put wisely by Ben Lerner of Brooklyn College, a university so beaten down by “the backward logic of austerity that it responds to crisis by attacking itself.”
I — and other members of the CUNY community — know that this is not the only way out. Yet, it is easy to believe that financial restrictions, especially those introduced during a crisis, are being borne equally across the city. This would at least be evidence of a real financial strain, whatever its cause. This becomes impossible to believe when we see NYPD roll out its weapons of war.
The past two weeks have seen massive street protests against racism in American policing sparked by the murder of George Floyd by a Minneapolis cop. New York demonstrators were met, since the first night of protests, with the consistent, swift, brutal force of law enforcement. A significant number of the NYPD’s 36,000 officers were out in 12-hour shifts, described as a “war-time measure.” In viral social media videos, the world has watched officers beat protesters, wave guns at them, and ram crowds with their vehicles.
Anyone who has experienced NYC austerity politics will notice a few things about the police in these videos. They appear with weapons and protective gear that resemble a military more than a municipal police force. Behind the scenes, we know that unprecedented surveillance and facial recognition technology guide NYPD decision-making. These are the fruits of a $6 billion law enforcement budget that has, between 2013 and last year, increased by a billion dollars. It is a far cry from images of nurses using trash bags as personal protective equipment, or from the experiences of anyone affiliated with CUNY.
If we didn’t already know it, the last two weeks have made clear that New York City public services do not need to starve. The fact that they do is a damning indictment of who our leaders think the city belongs to. The wealthiest New Yorkers — who do not send their children to public schools and colleges, nor ride public transit, nor avail of the social safety net — have fought since the Giuliani years to orient city services toward the preservation of “law and order” and the protection of private property.
Now the products of that unequal spending are wielded against working class New Yorkers who have been failed by public spending in almost every respect. This is an injustice that makes the present powder keg feel inevitable.
This is not a story without hope. The city can be made to work for the majority of New Yorkers, and public pressure has and can continue to force leaders to redirect funds away from policing and toward community services. A grassroots demand to slash NYPD spending by at least $1 billion has, in a matter of days, gone from obscurity to a policy pledge.
This is the beginning of a long, asymmetric fight, in which meaningful redistribution remains unlikely. But it is a reminder that resources exist and that leaders remain answerable to constituents if loud voices can drown out deep pockets.
Evan Turiano is an adjunct instructor at Queens College, CUNY, where he has taught U.S. History since 2017. He is also a PhD Candidate in History at the CUNY Graduate Center.
