4/30 op ed in the New York Times

To the Editor:

By focusing on elite institutions, you describe only the tip of a far-reaching iceberg.

The University of Chicago, which has announced salary freezes and other “austerity” measures, operates on a yearly budget of $4.3 billion, serves 17,000 students and is undergirded by an endowment that reached $8.5 billion in 2019.

In contrast, in fiscal year 2019, New York State recommended a $4.6 billion budget for the City University of New York’s 25 campuses serving some 275,000 students.

The shock wave of Covid-19 will hit hardest at institutions like CUNY, already operating on very frayed shoestrings.

CUNY has historically been an engine of socioeconomic mobility. The burning question, more so than the volatile stock market’s dents to sturdy endowments, must be how the state and the city will reverse the course of underfunding essential public institutions.

Nothing less than the future of a generation of low- and middle-income New Yorkers may be at stake.

Cynthia Chris

Jersey City, N.J.

The writer is a professor of media culture at the College of Staten Island, CUNY.