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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Jen Gaboury, First Vice President of Professional Staff Congress, CUNY
4:06:01
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170 sec
Jen Gaboury, First Vice President of PSC CUNY, testified on the need for restored funding and support for CUNY, particularly in light of recent budget cuts and new programs. She emphasized the importance of rebuilding faculty lines, addressing the challenges of the Opportunity Scholarship Program, and improving student support services.
- Highlighted the loss of nearly 500 full-time faculty lines during the pandemic and the need to restore them
- Expressed concerns about the Opportunity Scholarship Program creating an "unfunded mandate" for community colleges
- Advocated for additional support for Citizenship Now, including expertise on visas for graduate student workers
- Stressed the importance of work-study programs for library operations and the need for more dormitory spaces, especially for emergency housing
Jen Gaboury
4:06:01
Good afternoon, I'm Jen Givori, first vice president of the PSC CUNY.
4:06:05
Like Professor James, I would like to thank you, Chair Jenowitz and you, Chair Brennan, as long as Speaker Adams because we know that your leadership is what helped get that pig money restored.
4:06:17
We heard a less than fully detailed answer today from, in our view, the CUNY administration on how they might, as you pressed, build back what was lost in the PEG cuts.
4:06:29
We know that just under 500 full time faculty lines were lost in the pandemic, and that was after years of kind of like city council funded stability in the de Blasso years at the community colleges when that was not the case at the state.
4:06:43
And so that is what we need restored.
4:06:45
We need those full time faculty lines back and that's a problem.
4:06:49
That's especially a problem in the context of the Opportunity Scholarship Program.
4:06:53
We are tremendously excited by the governor's like opportunity to bring folks back to the community colleges in these high need areas in nursing and computer science and in teaching.
4:07:05
Yet what we have is a kind of unfunded mandate that will cover student costs but will not build the kinds of like faculty infrastructure, like advising, like the university provost said, but also the faculty to teach in those areas as well as the program money to do so.
4:07:21
And that's unfortunate.
4:07:22
We now have a kind of like unfunded mandate through the Opportunity Scholarship Program that's going to hit the community colleges first.
4:07:29
So we are excited about what this does but we don't want to see a hole blown into the city council.
4:07:34
And we need nurses and we need teachers and we need computer scientists.
4:07:38
That's gonna be an important then component of like how we do it, and the peg restorations going to full time faculty lines would be one of the ways to kind of like stop that hole.
4:07:47
We really thank your your focus on Citizenship Now.
4:07:50
One of the things that Citizenship Now doesn't have that some of our graduate student workers need is support and expertise on visas.
4:07:59
That expertise did not There wasn't a need for that in previous time.
4:08:03
That's one of the kinds of things that we are struggling to figure out how to fill.
4:08:07
We appreciate your attention to work study and the questions about like what will happen to the libraries when suddenly there are not hundreds of workers all across CUNY who are doing the kind of daily work that keeps libraries open.
4:08:20
And we are really grateful for Councilmember Brewer's attention to dorms.
4:08:24
I work in a gender studies program where students come to me to talk about domestic violence in their homes, and there are not currently enough dorms in an emergency setting that I can send them to to get them out of their home, and sometimes they drop out and they leave the city to escape.
4:08:40
And there should be dorms available for many reasons, but that is also one of the other kinds of reasons, like for emergency housing.
4:08:49
They just don't exist.
4:08:50
You so much.