CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

This March 2020 statement from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) – the union representing 30,000 faculty, staff, and graduate students at the City University of New York (CUNY) – outlined the ambiguities in Chancellor Matos Rodriguez's declaration of "instructional recess" and brought to light several labor concerns that helped contextualize the pandemic. What about service staff during this period? How would hourly wages be determined? Who would be expected to be physically present on campuses? And what efforts were being made to convert CUNY into a safe place for face-to-face work? Through the points made in this email, one sees how the question of "learning" in the public university is never far removed from labor issues and how the concerns raised in the context of the pandemic must be considered within the long-ranging context of austerity shaped public education.

This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology.