The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive network of public universities in the United States. SUNY proudly claims this superlative, noting that its campuses—sixty-four schools and thirty community colleges—are embedded in nearly every community across the state. Impressively, this means that “93 percent of New Yorkers live within 15 miles of a SUNY campus, and nearly 100 percent live within 30 miles.”[i] Add to this the fact that SUNY is a postwar institution—established only in 1948 compared to, for instance, the University of California in 1868. One may be led to believe that New York State has made remarkable progress in cultivating and providing public higher education.
Recent developments in education across the United States, however, beg a reassessment of New York’s feat, and of US public higher education in general. When I first drafted this text in the summer of 2023, the ongoing crises in the US education system included conservative politicians’ frightening regulation and rescripting of curricula, investment in and pursuit of the humanities declining at an alarming rate, and insurmountable student debt for which recent forgiveness programs were ruled unconstitutional. The severity and exacerbation of these threats hang in the balance as I revisit and revise this text three days before the 2024 presidential election.
In this short time, another, more immediate and terrifying development emerged: the violent suppression of political speech on campuses, public and private alike. In the last weeks of the spring semester in April and into May 2024, university administrators across the United States—including at Stony Brook—called on the police to forcibly dismantle student encampments, erected in solidarity with Palestinians, and in protest of the US and Israel’s relentless, devastating war on Gaza and their universities’ complicity in it.[ii] While these protests were not unprecedented, they were momentous in extending the long and consequential history of student activism. The swiftness and violence with which universities sought to quash the protests testify to the dramatic transformation of the values and ethics of institutions of higher education in the US. Indeed, universities’ responses to student protests vividly illustrate the culmination of decades of restrictive neoliberal policies that threaten the university as a central site of democratic inquiry and expression, raising urgent questions about how to continue doing political work in the academy.
What is a public university?
These recent developments prompt a seemingly simple but extremely fraught question. What, exactly, makes a university in the United States public? The most basic and intuitive criterion for determining the publicness of a university is its open accessibility to local constituents, made possible by public funding. One may also imagine that the public university stands in some way in contrast to the private university. As a point of comparison, in many countries in the European Union, a university’s public designation—which applies to the majority of universities—necessarily implies that the institution is publicly funded and administered. Students across Europe typically pay minimal administrative fees—a few hundred euros per semester—and admissions are based on fixed requirements that, if fulfilled, suffice in securing a place.[iii] This is not to say there aren’t barriers to, or inequities in, accessing public higher education in Europe—social and economic factors undoubtedly affect access—or that these universities haven’t also become increasingly neoliberal, seeking out grants from private corporations and foundations to fund research. It is also important to note that universities in Europe, and Germany in particular, similarly suppressed student protests in solidarity with Palestinians and against the war in Gaza.[iv] However, at the core of European universities, and in their often centuries-long histories, there is an ethos that treats higher education as a public good, resulting in an objectively more democratic system.
In the United States, there are very few institutions that are public in this sense. Public primary and secondary education are among the few such thoroughly public entities, and are often the most present public institutions in the daily lives of US residents (along with police forces, the military, and some fire departments). The fact that primary and secondary education are legally compulsory suggests an implicit but unequivocal avowal that education is fundamental to democracy—that education has a central role to play in cultivating and sustaining a democratic citizenry. Yet the reality of public primary and secondary education in the United States, historically and currently, is characterized by egregious systemic inequities, to say nothing of the political interference in curricula mentioned above: its funding relies heavily on local property taxes and state-level allocations that necessarily reproduce and compound already extant social and economic inequities. Access to higher education in the United States, then, is already limited, by inequities in early education—whether a student’s early education has adequately prepared them to successfully enter and navigate higher education—as well as its cost. The burden of the resulting debt crisis has inevitably fallen more heavily on those students already affected by social and economic inequities, often foreclosing any economic mobility a degree may have enabled, cementing and compounding existing social and economic inequities.[v]
Privatizing the public
The public university, it would seem, is an indispensable resource in this context, typically offering high quality education at a significantly lower cost. But in the United States, public universities are not funded through public sources, at least not entirely. They still charge tuition, and they also rely on endowments and private fundraising. According to a financial report from 2021, SUNY derives only 28 percent of its revenue from the state; other sources include healthcare operations (28%), net student tuition and fees (13%), and grants and contracts (11%).[vi] The report refers to SUNY as “a multi-billion-dollar enterprise.”
This hybrid public-private funding model is typical for universities and other nonprofit organizations in the US and it is a result of the country’s distinctive history of charitable organizations. As Peter Dobkin Hall narrates in his account of the US nonprofit sector, this public-private corporate form was established in the earliest days of the colonies, spearheaded by Harvard College.[vii] The seeds of what we now call neoliberalism were already planted at the close of the Civil War, when “the notion of private responsibility for the public good” came to administrate social and political life between the ruling class and proletariat.[viii] Higher education and its expansion were central to this project of civil privatism, involving vast private investment and the intimate participation of businessmen in establishing and shaping higher education.
Most of these early institutions for higher education were private, but early public universities typically adopted the same or a similar model. SUNY’s example—an unusually young one—offers a different story, at least in its early days in the mid-twentieth century. The legislation establishing SUNY dictated that “the University shall be responsible for the planning, supervision and administration of facilities and provisions for higher education supported in whole or in part with state moneys, and to perform such other duties as may be entrusted to it by law.”[ix] SUNY was not set up to be funded exclusively by New York State, yet, for a long time there was an informal prohibition on private fundraising, and the system managed for decades without endowments that support universities across the US.[x] A report from 1960 on “Meeting the Increasing Demand for Higher Education in New York State” argued that strong public higher education is integral to New York’s prosperity and that the future quality of the state’s institutions for higher education would depend on state expenditures.[xi] The authors were adamant not only that the state should be fiscally responsible for SUNY, but that, given the growing wealth among New York’s citizens, it would be more than capable of doing so.[xii] Until 1963, SUNY had free tuition, and through 1980 the state continued to bear around 80 percent of the cost of running SUNY.[xiii]
This all began to change with the broader economic shifts of the 1980s, which Hall describes as being driven by the assumption “that privatizing public initiative through the use of voluntary agencies was more flexible, responsive, economical, and ‘democratic’ than statist alternatives.”[xiv] By the start of the twenty-first century, SUNY had fully implemented the private university’s hybrid model as New York State increasingly disinvested from them. This was a result of tax cuts under Governor Mario Cuomo that fueled budget shortfalls, which eventually prompted unprecedented tuition increases and the state legislature’s request to reassess SUNY’s “cost efficiency” in the mid 1990s.[xv] This has involved a marked shift from tenured faculty to part-time and adjunct faculty, a greater emphasis on disciplines—STEM in particular—that can attract private and corporate funds and readily translate into jobs in the disproportionately fintech economy, and a concomitant paring down of the humanities (when outright elimination isn’t an option).[xvi]
The economics of SUNY
All of this is palpable on SUNY campuses today, and the corresponding logic has become the norm. Even Governor Kathy Hochul’s plan to revitalize SUNY, announced in 2022, uses the language of private enterprise, skirting many of the abovementioned structural issues.[xvii] Hochul’s 2024 budget boasted “Historic Investment in SUNY,” a welcome change after years of stagnant direct state appropriations, which remained relatively unchanged between 2012 and 2021.[xviii] The plan includes increases in operating support, investment in full-time faculty, and an increase in funding for programs that support “educationally disadvantaged students.” This comes on top of the 2017-implemented Excelsior Scholarship, which provides full tuition to full-time undergraduate students who have resided in New York for at least twelve consecutive months prior to the beginning of a term and whose families have a combined federal adjusted gross income of $125,000 or less.[xix]
These investments and programs reflect SUNY’s ostensible commitment to providing high quality, affordable undergraduate education. But this does not substantiate SUNY’s publicness. In fact, the state omits a crucial aspect involved in maintaining the affordability of SUNY’s undergraduate education: that SUNY relies on graduate teaching assistants and adjunct faculty whom the state pays far below local costs of living.[xx] That is, New York State subsidizes undergraduate SUNY education with underpaid graduate workers and instructors. In order to sincerely fulfill its mission to serve the people of New York, and thus qualify its public status, SUNY would have to recognize that those instructors are indispensable to the education it provides and calculate their living wage into the cost of providing high-quality, affordable higher education.
Just over a year after Hochul announced her revitalization plan, the Simons Foundation announced a $500 million endowment gift to Stony Brook, the largest unrestricted donation to an institution of higher learning in US history.[xxi] Conveniently, Hochul’s investment in SUNY includes an “endowment matching fund” for private contributions made to any one of SUNY’s four university centers (Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo, and Stony Brook).[xxii] Theoretically, a $500 million endowment gift could be dedicated to fulfilling Stony Brook’s promise of publicness, including investing in the people who make SUNY education possible. In fact, the Graduate Student Employees Union petitioned the university to invest the donation this way, to no avail. Stony Brook’s president’s office responded that the donation would be used for “expanded funding for student scholarships, expansion of endowed professorships, investment in innovative research, development of new academic fields, provision of excellent clinical care, and much more.”[xxiii] Paying a living wage is decidedly not on the agenda.
Toward a free SUNY
Setting aside SUNY’s responsibility to graduate and adjunct instructors, why should the quality of public higher education at Stony Brook—its “commitment to educational excellence, research innovation, and community support”—depend on the philanthropy of a private individual’s private foundation?[xxiv] Why won’t New York State proudly assume the financial responsibility, especially if it is sincerely committed to providing “the best and most equitable statewide system of higher education in the country”?[xxv] In other words, if New York State can’t fulfill the commitment of public higher education with public resources, what makes SUNY public at all? Is it merely proximity to the vast majority of the state’s residents? Is it that some—but not all—students qualify for tuition-free education? Taking SUNY’s history into account and the exceptionalism the state is so eager to claim for the education SUNY provides, why does the state charge tuition at all?
If a genuinely public spirit is at the core of SUNY, free tuition would simply be calculated into the cost of providing public higher education, as would paying graduate workers and adjunct faculty living wages. And if New York State recognizes the importance of higher education not only to the individual lives of its residents but also to its own—primarily economic—interests, it should bear the entire cost of operating SUNY. That would certainly be a feat to brag about. It’s also attainable: As the state home to the nation’s richest city, raising taxes by 5% on residents earning more than $250,000 per year would fund a host of social and public services, including public higher education.[xxvi] It also isn’t unprecedented: For much of the twentieth century, New York was an island of social democracy, which included free public higher education.[xxvii]
If this proposition seems idealistic or overly impassioned that’s because it is. I am deeply invested in the availability and utility of public higher education and in SUNY in particular: not only because I am a current graduate student worker at SUNY Stony Brook, but also because I am a lifelong New Yorker with thousands of dollars of lingering student debt from a bachelor’s degree awarded by a private university a decade ago. That I could obtain that degree was only possible because my parents had access to low-cost undergraduate education at SUNY that directly enabled their upward economic mobility. What should and can be special about public institutions is that they should and can operate differently than private institutions—they are for us and beholden to us. We should demand that SUNY fulfill its founding promises and hold the university accountable to its commitment to the public.
The ideals of public higher education I have in mind are already illustrated in SUNY’s seal: an open book and the New York State coat of arms encircled by the words TO LEARN – TO SEARCH – TO SERVE. It’s less elaborate and pompous than so many private university seals, promoting a pursuit of knowledge inextricable from a responsibility to community and public service.
[i] https://www.suny.edu/about/history/
[ii] Dennis M. Hogan, “Who Has the Right To ‘Disrupt’ the University,” Jewish Currents, May 3, 2024, https://jewishcurrents.org/who-has-the-right-to-disrupt-the-university. For stony brook https://sbstatesman.com/127448/news/stony-brook-university-senate-demands-dropping-protest-arrest-charges-investigates-police-response/.
[iii] https://eurydice.eacea.ec.europa.eu/national-education-systems
[iv] https://blnreview.de/en/ausgaben/2024-06/henrike-kohpeiss-student-protests-gaza-germany-adorno https://apnews.com/article/germany-palestinian-protest-university-berlin-4af21a2d89f07292610bffa223df6b2e#
[v] https://www.forbes.com/advisor/student-loans/average-student-loan-debt-statistics/
[vi] https://www.suny.edu/media/suny/content-assets/communication/publicationsreportsdata/FactBookforJune302021FY.pdf
[vii] Hall 16–17.
[viii] Hall 36
[ix] https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/EDN/352
[x] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/education/25suny-t.html
[xi] Heald Report
[xii] Heald Report, 13–15.
[xiii] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/education/25suny-t.html
[xiv] Hall, 7.
[xv] https://againstthecurrent.org/atc082/p915/ , https://www.suny.edu/media/suny/content-assets/communication/publicationsreportsdata/rethinking.pdf
[xvi] These transformations have been well documented in a variety of sources: https://againstthecurrent.org/atc082/p915/
[xvii] https://www.suny.edu/suny-news/press-releases/1-22/1-5-22-gov/gov-plans-for-suny.html
[xviii] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-advances-75-million-suny-transformation-fund-improve-student-success-support https://www.suny.edu/media/suny/content-assets/communication/publicationsreportsdata/FactBookforJune302021FY.pdf
[xix] https://www.suny.edu/smarttrack/types-of-financial-aid/scholarships/excelsior/
[xx] Insert HUD data for 2023/24
[xxi] https://news.stonybrook.edu/newsroom/press-release/general/simons-foundation-announces-historic-500-million-gift-to-stony-brook-university-endowment/
[xxii] https://nyassembly.gov/Press/?sec=story&story=105859
[xxiii] From email to author, August 3, 2023.
[xxiv] https://nyassembly.gov/Press/?sec=story&story=105859
[xxv] https://www.budget.ny.gov/pubs/archive/fy24/ex/book/highereducation.pdf 88
[xxvi] https://socialists.nyc/press-releases/statement-socialists-in-office-condemn-new-yorks-failure-to-support-immigrants-and-asylum-seekers/ https://taxtherichny.com/why/
[xxvii] See Joshua B. Freeman, Working-Class New York: Life and Labor Since World War II (The New Press, 2001), and Kim Phillips-Fein, Fear City: New York’s Fiscal Crisis and the Rise of Austerity Politics (Macmillan, 2017).
