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The COVID-19 pandemic is providing a stark reminder that higher education institutions, and faculty in particular, exist in a constant state of precarity. The crisis triggered by the pandemic is revealing the underlying contradictions at the heart of the employment relationship between faculty and administrative managers at colleges and universities. We suggest that without the protection provided by shared governance, tenure, and academic freedom, the core mission of colleges and universities to pursue truth and produce knowledge—as carried out by its faculty for the betterment of society—risks being eroded and eventually eliminated altogether. A brief review of the City University of New York and the evolution of the Professional Staff Congress, the union representing 30,000 staff and faculty at CUNY, as well as administrators’ attacks on faculty at Ithaca College, shows that it is crucial to organize beyond the walls of academia during moments of crisis and establish connections with broader social movements. Responses to the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic are an opportunity to fight back against the commodification of public goods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1969 and 1976 the City University of New York (CUNY) experienced two monumental policy transformations. These transformations were a result of changes in the political economy of New York City and State leading class struggles to erupt between and among groups. This article highlights two of these struggles: first, what came to be known as the “open admissions” policy, one of five demands made by students and their supporters in 1969–1970 at City College, and second, the imposition of tuition for undergraduate students in 1975–1976, a neoliberal condition set by business and political elites designed to privatize and commodify CUNY. In contrast to existing policy studies and sociology of education approaches to the study of CUNY, which are approaches limited by their ideologically liberal focus on outcomes that lead to “racial disparity” and inequality of individual achievement, an alternative class analysis is proposed that entails the concrete historical, political, economic, and ideological context of these struggles and their causes. The examination of both policies reveals an ideological struggle between meritocracy, as grounded in the individualist ideal of the American Dream and equality and democracy, as grounded in calls for inclusion, access, solidarity, and empowerment. The resulting class analysis offers a critical context for understanding the current transformation of higher education beyond CUNY. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]