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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC and with the new school year now underway for colleges and universities, with us now is the chancellor of the CUNY system, Felix Matos Rodriguez. CUNY is going largely but not entirely remote this term. CUNY is the largest urban public school system in the country with 25 campuses boasting over 270,000 students across part-time, full-time, undergrad, and graduate programs. In fact, CUNY remains almost evenly diverse in addition with students across the demographic spectrum sitting between 20% to 30% of the school's total population in white, Black, Latinx, and Asian-American backgrounds.

More than 9,000 international students representing more than a hundred countries, but is the school prepared for COVID-19 and to go this much remote after recent layoffs? Joining us is Chancellor Felix Matos Rodriguez. Chancellor, welcome back to WNYC. Thank you so much for coming on.

Felix Matos Rodriguez: Thank you, Brian. It's great to be with you. Although I would admit that I miss not being in the studio with you. Also, when I visited last time, you so proudly also introduced me to so many of your staff members in the studio who were CUNY alumni or students, so I miss the warmth of the student.

I look forward to doing that whenever it's safe to do it again.

Brian: Thank you, and we look forward to having you back when we can all go back. Why almost all remote? CUNY is mostly a commuter school. I read that another school in the area, Montclair State in New Jersey also largely a commuter school gone back to in-person learning. What went into that decision?

Felix: The first priority was safety. We needed to guarantee that our students, that our staff, that our faculty in whatever instructional modality we picked would be safe. Based on that, based on the fact that our stakeholders depend on public transportation, we thought that going almost exclusively online would be the best way to proceed and that we will use the things that we learned when we converted about 50,000 courses last spring in our emergency situation. Now we have learned to use it this semester to guaranteed academic momentum for our students, but also the safety of all our stakeholders, and so we thought that was the right mix for us.

We don't have a large residential component, which is what has been creating probably a lot more of the situations that we've been seeing in some of the campuses that have reopened, so we thought that was the right thing for us to do at CUNY. Then we've used the summer, and we will continue to continue providing professional development to our faculty so they can be better prepared to teach the students tools for the students so they can also be better online learners and to the staff in terms of the student support services. We thought that that was the right mix for us at CUNY.

Brian: You probably heard the agreement that was reached this morning and announced between the UFT for the pre-K through 12th grades and the City of New York. They're going to delay opening, and then they're also apparently going to do random testing throughout the school year to determine the prevalence of COVID in the classes. It looks like that CUNY is planning on simply asking faculty, students, and others to complete a wellness survey prior to entering the campus. Is that your plan and is that enough?

Felix: Two things, the presence of personnel in our campuses and classes is minimal. We have about maybe 6% of our staff in our 25 campuses in a central office working, so we are mostly working remotely, and just about 1.2% of our sections are face to face. That's about 2,800 students in the entire system taking classes face to face. We really have a very low density in our campuses. The screening invites people to do a safety check first, and if they have issues that then they go seek either testing or consultation with their medical provider. This is a system that's being used in many companies and other places that have reopened and even have larger numbers of folks in presence.

We think that we're taking every precaution, we're following the very meticulous state guidelines that were created for reopening, so we feel that it's the safe approach. If there are things that we need to modify as we go along, there's one thing that we have learned about navigating with this pandemic that you need to be flexible.

Brian: There's a big controversy now over layoffs and cuts to health insurance among CUNY faculty members. We have some people calling in about that, and I'm going to take a couple of callers to ask you those questions. Andres on Staten Island, you're on WNYC with Chancellor Rodriguez. Hello, Andres.

Andres: Thank you, Brian. Chancellor, I lost my health insurance today, even though the College of Staten Island president's office requested specifically from your office that I'd be given health insurance due to my service at the College of Staten Island. I wanted to also ask that if you view cuts to faculty as cuts to student services because faculty so often are the ones who are directing students to the counseling centers to and other places.

Brian: Chancellor Rodriguez.

Felix: Thank you, Andres, for your call. I don't know the specifics of your scenario, happy to touch base after the call with our colleagues in Staten Island. To the general issue, let me just clarify a number of things. There's been no layoffs to any full-time CUNY faculty or staff member over the last year, even with all the losses in revenue that we incur, or this year. Some of the things that have been highlighted in the press have been reappointments to part-time faculty. In many cases, faculty that were teaching just one course. There was a group of those faculty that do receive healthcare as a result of teaching multiple sections or more.

We worked with the union and we protected 80% of the faculty that we thought that we could not reappoint and we kept them. There was a group which we couldn't reappoint. We asked the union for more time to be able to have a better budget situation to support them. I actually went out and fundraised. We got a grant from the Mellon Foundation and we got 500,000 from them and we put 500,000 to be able to support those items. We did everything we could.

Brian: Let me jump in. That's an adjunct faculty member who lost his health insurance, and here's a caller who says she got laid off on Friday. Antoinette in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC with the chancellor. Hi, real quick.

Antoinette: Hi, good morning. I have a very quick question to ask the chancellor. Why were people laid off when $132 million was allocated to CUNY through Care Act Program with a specific provision to keep employees on the payroll. Also, in my department, we were only six college assistants, and all six of us, we got laid off on Friday. My last day, last week was Friday, and they told me don't come back in because, unfortunately, you got laid off.

Brian: I'm going to have to jump in. I apologize because we only have two minutes left in the program. You heard these two callers. I know Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and other members of the New York Congressional Delegation wrote a letter to you about reversing the layoffs of 2,800 employees and the cuts in health insurance to some of the adjuncts. They say the cost would only be about $30 million based on the current semester's data. As that caller points out, CUNY received $132 million in the Cares Act.

Felix: The assertion that the Cares Act provided a direct mechanism to keep individuals employed is something that the courts have already adjudicated. It went to federal court and the court sided with our interpretation. We did use funding because we had not laid off one full-time person. If you look all across higher ed in New York State and elsewhere, there's furloughs, they've been laying off all full-time people, we have not done that. We did it to make some adjustments to some departments.

Brian: She talked about six people in her office.

Felix: Who are part-time individuals in the case of those college assistants. In many cases, we've been keeping them employed month to month. Some of them because their duties might not be needed, might not be asked. In this pandemic, we tried with incredible budget strains, Brian. We lost about 80 million last year directly from COVID expenses that we didn't have budgeted for.

Brian: Chancellor, I'm going to have to jump in because the show is ending and I know we got reduced time compared to what we were planning today because we went long with the breaking news earlier about the deal with the UFT for the pre-K through 12 grade. We look forward to having you back soon and talking more about the academics in the special year in CUNY. Thank you for coming on with us today and let's do this again soon, okay?

Felix: Any time you want, Brian. Thank you for the opportunity.

Brian: The CUNY chancellor, Felix Matos Rodriguez. Brian Lehrer on WNYC.

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