New Haven Register (New Haven, CT)
‘A community that needs to be supported’
Faculty, students decry cuts to Connecticut State College and University system
NEW BRITAIN — It was a dreary Wednesday in the midst of a pandemic, but faculty and students held an outdoor rally on the Central Connecticut State University campus to decry systemwide budget cuts.
Wearing masks and red shirts, dozens of faculty, alumni and students of the system accused Board of Regents President Mark Ojakian of hoisting a white flag of surrender in applying an additional $8 million in budget cuts on the state’s four regional state universities.
The group called on Gov. Ned Lamont and the state legislature to reject the austerity narrative championed by Ojakian and instead invest more in public higher education.
Ojakian and his board voted earlier this month to make the cuts as it also dipped into reserves and turned to the state for $69 million to sop up red ink caused largely by the COVID-19 pandemic and dropping enrollment.
Since the last academic year, the Connecticut State College and University system has lost 2,081 students and now stands at an estimated 73,762 students. Included in that are 28,835 full- and part-time university students.
The deficit applies to not only Western, Southern, Central and Eastern Connecticut State Universities but the state’s 12 community colleges and online degree program which are also overseen by the regent system.
Cuts to the system include part-time faculty, graduate student assistants and other operating expenses with no classes being cut. Also tapped were dwindling reserves. The situation will be reviewed in January.
Union President Patty O’Neill, a professor at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, said students are being treated by the system like ATM machines.
“(The union) has a different vision of what public education can be,” said O’Neill, outside Davidson Hall. She was flanked on both sides by socially distanced colleagues and students.
“We believe in a better future for Connecticut’s college students where they are empowered to reach their full potential,”
O’Neill added. “This vision cannot come to fruition via budget cuts, institutional consolidation, or program elimination. It will only be achieved by investing in a public university system that we can continue to be proud of, a system where minds are opened, where doors are opened, where lives are transformed.”
Cynthia Stretch, an English professor at Southern Connecticut State University in New Haven, said she is calling on Lamont and forwardthinking legislators to recognize that state universities are essential.
“You have to keep the pipeline going so there will people to help solve problems,” Stretch said. “There has to be a way to think about the future instead of going back to the same old well of austerity measures.”
O’Neill said Ojakian and the regents should be fighting to defend and preserve the system, not cut it off at the knees.
“That is just ridiculous,” Ojakian said in response, adding that no one spends more time advocating for the system at the State Capitol than he does.
“In a perfect world the state would provide funding needed to bridge the shortfall,” Ojakian said. “We are not living in a perfect world. ... Everywhere you look (everyone) is feeling the financial impact of the virus.”
Ojakian said everyone needs to be part of the solution.
“I also think there is a place at a negotiating table, for example, where folks can come up with concessions that make sense in the short term,” Ojakian said. “We have never operated in a pandemic before.”
During the news conference, Kyley Fiondella, a Southern 2020 graduate and now a registered nurse, said she couldn’t have afforded a private college. Now she said she is on the front line of fighting the pandemic.
“At Southern I learned not just how to take care of my patients but to be a good person as well,” Fiondella said. “This is a community that needs to be supported.”
The union also issued a plan during the press conference that they called “Opening Minds, Opening Doors.”
The plan calls for an emergency re-investment in public higher education to keep the system afloat despite the pandemic but does not suggest a dollar amount.
Faculty say the point is that the state’s priorities should be on families, equity, inclusion, diversity, free inquiry and community engagement.
“We cannot allow a short-term crisis to be a pretext to downsize, gut and restructure our institutions and system,” O’Neill said.
Instead of stopping at asking the state for $69 million, Stretch said the regents should have asked for a lot more and defended its need.
David Blitz, a philosophy professor at Central and a non-voting member of the Board of Regents, said he protested the cuts when they were made. He called them harmful to students, faculty and staff, and made a proposal to mitigate the effects of the cuts, for which he is awaiting a reply.
Among his suggestions were to use system office reserves to defray the entire $8 million cut or to make cuts that are based on institutional data, do the least harm, and are appropriate given specific conditions at each institution. The union also sent a list to the system office that suggested looking to the system office, not campuses, for cuts and to suspend the ongoing efforts to merge the state’s 12 community colleges into one.