Why we fight for funding
“Fight for funding” rolls nicely off the tongue, but what does it really mean? In a series of first-person stories, AFT Voices shows what underfunding higher ed feels like to AFT faculty and staff, and to their students. Here, members of the Professional Staff Congress, the AFT local at the City University of New York, describe how important it is to keep course loads manageable so they can give their students the time they deserve (instead of teaching an overload because it’s cheaper to hire fewer faculty), and what it’s like to teach in crumbling classrooms with scant resources. Originally printed in PSC’s Clarion.
Expectations and demands continue to grow
Community college presidents are insisting on more scholarly activity and productivity today than ever before. On Oct. 15, 2016, I was commissioned to write two art songs for Dr. Louise Toppin, chair of the music department oat the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The song was to be performed Feb. 9, 2017 at a music conference at the University of California at Irvine. When I accepted the challenge of the commission, Dr. Toppin asked me how many classes I teach a semester. When I told her five, she was shocked. At the University of North Carolina, the course load is only two. CUNY community college professors are now being required to produce scholarship equivalent to that of senior college professors. Across CUNY we need a course load reduction to meet increased research demands and to spend more time with our students. — Joyce Solomon Moorman, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Overtallies and jumbo courses stretch us too thin
The most common yet most easily overlooked way in which faculty rise to the occasion to support students, thus absorbing the impact of defunding, is by taking more and more students into their classes. The financial imperative to offer fewer sections and the robust increases in student enrollment meet at the doorway to our classrooms.
Requests for “overtallies” (admission of students above the enrollment limit), requests from deans to offer “jumbo” courses or otherwise pack students into a class, trips down a hallway to borrow chairs from a neighboring room — these are regular occurrences at Brooklyn College.
Faculty care deeply about their students’ educational progress and classroom experience. If they have many more students than usual, the temptation is for instructors to assign less work: fewer or shorter papers and fewer exams or assessments, which are standardized for quick turnaround. But that’s not in the students’ interest. Instead, instructors absorb the brunt of the impact of defunding by staying up later at night to read the extra papers or to write the necessary comments. They remain longer on email and in their office hours to make sure their students’ needs are met. — James Davis, PSC Chapter Chair, Brooklyn College
More time needed
For several semesters I have had the intention to develop a new course on Latin American visual studies. It would be so rewarding being able to develop and teach a course focused on my area of expertise, especially now that we have a major. Unfortunately, I have not been able to do so, because developing a new course requires extra time. Having more time would also allow me to apply for collaborative research grants to work more closely with students during the summer. At present, I devote most of the summer to working on my own research. A restructured workload committed to teaching, service and research would certainly be beneficial in this regard. — Àngeles Donoso Macaya, Borough of Manhattan Community College
Faculty go beyond teaching and learning
I want to draw attention to the invisible workload for faculty that affects student learning in ways we often do not consider. With so many students each semester, we live with their often unimaginable problems because our eviscerated welfare state, loss of a sense of common good and shift of social policies from funding schools to punitive mechanisms like prisons.
For example, in the last four months I have had one student explain to me that she’s been missing class because she is homeless, another confide that she struggles to study because of domestic violence in her household, and still another describe how he has been existentially terrorized because of his immigration status in light of the intensified war on immigrants since Trump took office. An honors student who is confronting debilitating depression came to me to discuss quitting school. Faculty are really the face of the college for students, and our work goes well beyond the teaching and learning in the classrooms. — Paul Narkunas, John Jay College
Fewer students per professor means deeper learning
With 90 students, I’d have to give primarily written feedback, hand scrawled in a rush on their paper and handed back to them at the end of class. With 60 students, I’d be able to give them substantial verbal feedback, in actual one-to-one, give-and-take conversations. Instead of waiting days or even a week to get answers to their questions, they’d be able to hear answers within seconds. And of course, that individualized conversation leads them to deeper questions. That individual attention also makes me better able to cajole students who need counseling into walking to the counseling center, or better able to intervene on the behalf of students who are having trouble navigating the bureaucracy.
A three-hour reduction would also enable me to spend more time and more consistent, sustained consecutive hours on scholarship. I’d be more excited about my field and more up to date, and better able to articulate that excitement to my students, treating them as potential scholars themselves rather than simply as customers. — Sigmund Shen, LaGuardia Community College
Students deserve our investment of time
My courses routinely fill to 40 students each, which is as much as most Baruch classrooms will hold. Since we have no teaching assistants at Baruch, I do all my own grading. This grading isn’t easy. I don’t believe in using multiple-choice exams, which only teach students to memorize and regurgitate answers without context or argument. My bluebook exams and papers require students to make clear arguments, show change over time, marshal evidence to back up their points and demonstrate a deep knowledge of a particular period. They also require students to learn to read critically and write well.
These are skills our students desperately need to develop both for their careers and to be good citizens. Most do not have to the chance to develop these skills in their high schools, which are often overcrowded and underfunded. Furthermore, English is frequently not our students’ first language. That means our students require intensive investments of time from professors to help them build the skills I’ve described. And they deserve that investment of time. They deserve a real, thorough and competitive college education. — Charlotte Brooks, Baruch College
It’s as basic as paper towels and rent money
You don’t have to look far to see the everyday effects of underfunding at Baruch College. I know a professor who supplies the department with paper towels from Costco at his own expense. Other faculty members have advanced their graders and teaching assistants rent money. Those with children in other colleges use their children’s resources to gain access to databases available at other university libraries but not at CUNY. — Vince DiGirolamo, PSC Chapter Chair, Baruch College
Taking care of our students takes time
Written feedback on student essays often is not enough. My students need to meet face to face with me to review drafts, clarify ideas and understand what they need to do to improve their writing if they are to successfully complete the course.
Writing is an intensely personal act, and students often reveal intimate details of their lives to their writing instructors. It is through student essays that I have learned that one student has relapsed after a 10-year struggle with sobriety and had been kicked out of his home, or that another student is experiencing paralyzing anxiety over her parents’ undocumented immigration status. These are the needs that must be attended to swiftly, thoughtfully and individually. Investigating appropriate campus-based referrals and following up to make sure students have access to the help they need is a time-consuming task, but one that faculty must take on if we want our students to succeed, both personally and academically. — Emily Schnee, Kingsborough Community College
Broken chairs are everywhere
PSC members in our chapter have taken note of varying levels of disrepair on our campus. It’s common at BMCC to have three to five faculty members in an office, which makes confidential conversations with students impossible. It’s not like classroom conditions are any better. There are a few broken student desks in many classrooms, and even when they’re not broken, the classroom desks are uncomfortable and have too little desk space for a book and notebook. The “professor chair” in many classrooms is broken, and no high stools or lecterns are available. Even though we have a stringent restriction on how much printing we can do, we still run out of copier paper before the end of the spring semester. Many of us have dealt with wires hanging from open ceiling panels. The physical layout of the library is very disjointed; it’s a patchwork of spaces and badly needs an overall renovation. — Geoff Kurtz, PSC Chapter Chair, Borough of Manhattan Community College
We fight for repair funds
Facilities and buildings and grounds teams at Lehman College do their best to keep the campus in as good shape as possible. But the absence of a dedicated minor repair fund and understaffing has led to inevitable states of disrepair. A planned fix of a crumbling, high-traffic pedestrian bridge on campus had to be scrapped due to lack of funds. Americans with Disabilities Act compliancy work has remained incomplete for years in our main academic event space. Filthy ceiling tiles in many parts of the campus are slated to be replaced, but there’s no completion date due to inadequate funding. Classrooms and office spaces are locked and unused while the college awaits money to renovate the outmoded spaces. And despite afront-page investigative article in the New York Times in May of last year, serious leaks in the college’s library have yet to be repaired.
But we have fought back. Lehman received more than half of a recent (and wholly inadequate) $20 million capital allocation to CUNY to complete the long-stalled construction of a new nursing building, housed for decades in a more-than-30-year-old “temporary” structure. This was no doubt in large part the result of our chapter’s outspokenness on the topic at Board of Trustees and City Council meetings over the past year and our successful #ReclaimOurSchools. — Robert Farrell, PSC Chapter Chair, Lehman College
