CUNY Chancellor Announces
New Compact for Public
Higher Education
By Joan Baum,
Ph.D.
Parents,
take note: Introduced by the president of the Center for
Educational Innovation-Public Education Association (CEI-PEA)
Semour Fliegel, who hailed him as the first CUNY graduate
to be the leader of a great public university, and someone
Fliegel’s own
father would have called a “prince of a man,” Matthew
Goldstein, the chancellor of The City University of New York,
gave an impassioned address on the need to rethink the funding
of public higher education, citing along the way The New
York Times’ Thomas
Friedman, new data on costs and student performance, and his
mother. Quoting from Friedman’s best-seller The
World Is Flat, the chancellor quoted Friedman’s observation that when he a child
he was told “to finish his dinner because people in China
and India were starving.” Today, Friedman tells his own
children “to finish their homework because people in
China and India are starving for their jobs.”
With
compelling anecdotes and hard data, the chancellor effectively
drove home his theme that there are moral, social and academic
reasons why funding must be increased for public higher education
in general and for CUNY in particular, and now. Although
the chancellor had addressed CEI-PEA in February, the November
17 speech expanded on earlier discussion about private funding
sources. This time time around, however, the emphasis was
on the “public
side” of higher education funding. Specifically, the
chancellor proposed implementing recommendations recently made
by a university task force. Called
Investing in Futures: A New Compact for Public Higher Education,
the initiative would bring together various funding constituencies:
the state, the city, the university, friends and alumni and
the students through a 3-31/2 percent tuition hike. Alone, the
students can’t do it
and the city and state won’t do it, but a “shared
partnership” could efficiently and effectively meet global
competition for skilled workers and serve the mission of the
university. To
do less than provide
access and ensure equity, the chancellor said pointedly, looking
out at the assembled guests, would be a “moral outrage.”
Though reading from prepared remarks, the chancellor paused
at numerous times to emphasize what clearly is for him a personal,
heartfelt mission. The facts are that public support for public
higher education has plunged dramatically in the last decade,
continuing a trend, thereby aggravating the disproportionate
number of blacks who do not enroll in college or complete a degree, compared
with whites. This “divide” in higher education and the work place,
he pointed out, citing Bill Gates, has serious economic and social consequences
for the country in keeping competitive, especially in the sciences. The numbers
are frightening: only 7 percent
passing the physics regents, 18 percent chemistry. CUNY would address the challenge
by way of more pipeline programs in the schools, full tuition scholarship for
those who commit to teach math and science in middle and high schools, strengthened
financial support for graduate school programs, guaranteed financial aid for
poor but promising college-bound youngsters, refurbished science facilities
at the colleges, and new collaborations with the Department of Education. But
it all costs money. So what else is new? A new way to get it.
The
chancellor believes that a “self-leveraging” multi-year, multi-pronged
investment initiative to effect CUNY’s Master Plan can
provide a responsible means of funding public higher education: “If
each [partner of the Contract] agrees to put in a share, each
gets the benefits of the whole.” The chancellor noted
the irony that CUNY is asking for more public support at a
time when reports indicate that the university is at the top
of its form in enrollment and academic performance. Indeed,
four outstanding students sitting in the audience, heard their
praises sung as winners of prestigious awards, an honors circle
that includes, of course, the nation’s number-one Intel
Science Talent Search Contest winner this year. The implications
were clear: the public can be assured that their investments
would bear fruit.
CEI-PEA, a not-for-profit organization made up of
private citizens dedicated to investing in public education,
seeks to support school leaders, encourage parental involvement
and infuse curricula with imaginative and efficient programs
that will strengthen both the image and the functioning of
urban public school systems.#
