Fifty years later, in 2025, New York City and the CUNY community are still feeling the ramifications of the 1975 fiscal crisis and the city’s response to it. As Kim Phillip-Fein posits, the fiscal crisis “marked a change in what it meant to be a New Yorker and a citizen.”1 And for CUNY’s students, faculty, and staff, the fiscal crisis changed what it meant to be part of the CUNY. The lean towards austerity politics on the city, state, and federal level crippled the utopic promises that CUNY represented. The cutbacks, the layoffs, and the imposition of tuition deferred and undermined the dream of Open Admissions and its potential to drive social and economic mobility.
CUNY students recognized the threat to their education and did not take the coming end-of-an-era laying down. Students organized – opposing the closings of CUNY colleges, the end of academic programs, and, of course, the introduction of tuition. Out of these student rallies, came one of the most successful mass movements in New York City’s history – The Save Hostos Community College Movement. Baruch students, also, dissented against the city and the Board of Higher Education in their student papers, The Ticker and The Reporter.
For more information, see in the Student Activism page, the Save Hostos Community College Movement page, and the Dissent in the News page.
- Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and The Rise of Austerity Politics, 4. ↩︎