By Ryan Schwach<\/p>\n
Faculty members at Queens\u2019 largest City University of New York college are pushing back against budget cuts, which have led to a number of cancelled classes and layoffs of adjunct professors. <\/p>\n
Several departments at Queens College were told earlier this year they had to cut their overall budgets, and were recently told to slash their part-time staff budgets, which faculty say will continue to hinder their ability to provide services and educate students. <\/p>\n
Queens College faculty protested this week and are calling on CUNY to reverse the cuts, which include a recent order from the college in July to cut their adjunct faculty budget by as much as 40 percent. <\/p>\n
\u201cI don’t know what they expect us to do,\u201d Melissa Checker, chair of the Urban Studies Department at QC, told the Eagle. \u201cHow do they expect us to be able to run this college with so many ongoing cuts?\u201d <\/p>\n
The college has had to cut classes, staff and access to library services and other resources. <\/p>\n
The Chemistry Department cut laboratory sections because it didn\u2019t have enough part-time workers to maintain student safety, according to faculty members. <\/p>\n
\u201cThe effects are really very widespread and are really hindering our ability to carry forward our programming and our academic mission,\u201d Checker said. <\/p>\n
At her own department, Checker told the Eagle that the cuts have limited her ability to hire part-time adjunct professors, many of whom are actively working in the fields that they teach in. <\/p>\n
\u201cIt helps them really get prepared for what life will be like, what their jobs will be like, and to figure out what they want to do professionally, and to develop these important real-time networks,\u201d she said. \u201cWhen we have to cut adjunct instructors, we’re not able to do that.\u201d <\/p>\n
\u201cWe’ve cut as much as we can possibly cut, and we will get told from our administrators, <\/p>\n
\u2018We know that you have cut as much as you can possibly cut,\u2019 and then they ask for more cuts,\u201d she added. <\/p>\n
According to the Professional Staff Congress, the union that represents CUNY faculty and staff, nearly 4,000 fewer class sections were offered in the 2025-2026 academic year than in the 2019-2020 academic year. <\/p>\n
Faculty members hope this upcoming school year could see a reverse in poor enrollment trends at Queens College seen since the start of the pandemic, which wrecked enrollment totals CUNY wide. <\/p>\n
Checker said the latest round of cuts are doing the opposite. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"By Ryan Schwach Faculty members at Queens\u2019 largest City University of New York college are pushing back against…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":310135,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-310134","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310134","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=310134"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/310134\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/310135"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=310134"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=310134"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=310134"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}