Public Education (higher, lower and in-between) is becoming less and less of a priority in this country. Over the past fifteen years the State University of New York (SUNY) has gone from being a public university receiving 88% of its funding from tax dollars, down to being a “publicly assisted” university receiving 38% of its funding from public money. The result has been higher tuition, less programs, facilities held together with spit and bubble gum, less access (many lower income or working students can no longer afford to get a college education), and a continual sense of an institution under siege. Every year in the recent past, the governor proposes huge cuts and people connected with education fight back. One year, the students at SUNY Purchase, the premiere school for the arts within the SUNY system, took the lead from students at the CUNY campuses and took over the administration building. After a week or so, I helped mediate the students peaceably leaving the building. I then organized a week of actions that would bring the entire campus community together in protest to the proposed cuts. The week culminated in a human chain made up of 800 students, faculty, staff, parents and administrators (the president of the campus is somewhere at the top of the O). On the ground I had the Purchase jazz ensemble playing Fanfare for the Common Man, while a parent flew his piper-cub airplane overhead shooting video and taking photographs. The resulting image ended up being used as a logo for the struggle against the cuts.
