Coverage of Today's Press Conference

By Conor Skelding
3:21 p.m. | Oct. 15, 2015
 
The Brooklyn College chapter of CUNY's faculty and staff union, the Professional Staff Congress, rallied outside the college gates on Thursday afternoon for a new contract without tuition increases.
"We're hoping that they move the message in Albany closer to the governor's office so that the chancellor, the governor, and the mayor will find the political will to sit down at the bargaining table," said James Davis, an English professor at Brooklyn College for 12 years.
The PSC has been working without a contract for five years. Agreement on a new contract requires the buy-in of not just the union and university, but city and state as well.
CUNY has also raised tuition $300 per year for the past five years under a plan approved by the state Legislature in 2011. Tuition is now $6,330 per year at CUNY's senior colleges.
"The PSC is strongly against additional tuition increases because we see it, fundamentally, as a tax on working-class people," Davis said. "Raising tuition on them, while asking nothing from the taxpayers — nothing more from the taxpayers — is in effect a tax increase."
Chancellor James Milliken told the City Council in July that he expected to have to use revenue from the most-recent increase to fund a collective bargaining agreement. He also said then that he expects the university to request further tuition increases.

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