On a cool and rainy weekend in Lake George, over 120 faculty and staff from 27 community colleges across New York gathered for NYSUT’s 47th Annual Community College Conference.
Attendees were buoyed by a spirit of optimism and determination, thanks to the results of the midterm elections earlier in the week, which delivered a strong rebuttal to two years of harsh and harmful federal policies and funding cuts that have affected campuses and communities nationwide.
While the election results provide energy, they don’t change the challenges facing higher education and community colleges in particular. In welcoming attendees, Dante Morelli, chair of the conference’s planning committee and president of the Faculty Association of Suffolk Community College, described community colleges as being “on the front lines of the future of New York.”
Said Morelli, “This weekend has always been and will always be about teaching each other successful techniques and strategies, supporting one another, increasing our collective strength, and gaining mentors and mentees from around the state.” Morelli noted that while the conference happens over just a few days, the mentoring relationships forged there continue throughout the year.
Through a range of speeches and interactive sessions, the message was remarkably consistent: now is a moment of great opportunity, and for organizing around pressing needs: greater investment in community colleges, especially given the early successes of CUNY and SUNY Reconnect; better regulation of AI, driven not by administrators, but by the faculty and staff who work directly with students; and stronger protections for workers and academic freedom in the face of federal overreach.
Before remarks from James Werner, Higher Education Member of the Year and president of the Westchester Community College Federation of Teachers, NYSUT Executive Vice President Jaime Ciffone shared her own experience as a student at WCC, where early in her career, she earned the credits necessary to become a certified teacher.
Ciffone highlighted the straightforward math of CUNY and SUNY Reconnect’s success: if thousands of new students are studying at campuses across the state, more faculty are needed to teach them, and more staff are needed to support them.
“We can't expand access to higher education without investing in the people who make education possible,” said Ciffone.
CUNY and SUNY Reconnect are important not just because they are responding to the needs of New York’s economy, but because they are helping New Yorkers ages 25-55 earn degrees debt free, which is vital in an economy of ever-rising costs, where the dreams of generations ago, like home ownership and a well-funded retirement, feel increasingly out of reach.
NYSUT President Melinda Person spoke to the energy of the moment, and what millions of voters nationwide are feeling. “What they voted for was a possibility of that American dream ... an economy that works for everyday people so that they can have a chance, so that they can dream of better lives, so that people can keep their freedoms.”
“They want the American dream that unions have been fighting for for a long, long time,” said Person. That idea aligned perfectly with the conference’s theme, planned long before election day, “Community Colleges at the Crossroads: Defending Our Mission & Organizing for a Just Future.”
The conference featured a broad selection of sessions over three days, from campus-focused topics like dual enrollment, presidential searches and navigating campus leadership transitions, to other essentials like contract negotiations, lobbying at the county and state level, federal policy updates, and building power to defend academic freedom.
The hottest topic of the conference was AI and its largely unchecked spread through college campuses. Alissa Karl, vice president for academics at United University Professions, led a standout session on AI’s impacts on higher education. Karl covered several facets of campus AI concerns, including its effects on instruction, academic integrity, privacy for students and staff, workers’ rights, and the environment. Karl also highlighted a few key victories, including the expansion of the state’s LOADinG Act — which bars state agencies from replacing human workers with automated decision-making systems — to include the education sector, including CUNY, SUNY, BOCES, and school district employees; and how higher education unions have been able to introduce strict worker protections and build on each other’s successes, both in New York and around the country. Karl stressed that the fight to regulate AI is just beginning, and that unions must be at the forefront.
NYSUT is currently laying the foundation for further advocacy and action related to AI on college campuses, and will convene a working group that includes higher education workers from UUP, PSC and community college locals. In the coming months, the working group will examine how AI is reshaping teaching, labor, academic freedom, equity and governance across SUNY, CUNY and community colleges, and develop a set of principles and policy recommendations related to AI.
Said Ciffone, “We want our positions to reflect the experiences, the expertise, and the professional judgment of the people who are actually in classrooms, working with students, and keeping our campuses running.”
Closely tied to ensuring that members have input on campus AI policies is another issue of vital importance in higher education – academic freedom, and the right of faculty members to control their own research and teaching. In the last two years, campuses across the higher education spectrum have faced unprecedented challenges to academic freedom, including federal funding cuts, increased surveillance and online harassment, as well as attempts to control not just what is taught in classrooms, but who is hired to teach and who is allowed to study on American college campuses. To address these threats, local and national unions are fighting for shared governance and giving faculty a voice in campus decision making; ensuring strong contract language and protections for workers, especially non-tenured faculty; and above all, collaborating across the higher education sector to respond quickly and emphatically as new challenges and threats emerge.
As attendees return to their respective campuses, they benefit from what they learned at the conference and the new connections they've made, energizing them for the fight ahead.
Shelly Polakowski, biology professor and vice president of the Orange Community College Faculty Association, shared how attending the conference helps her and her local.
“Making connections with colleagues at other colleges is so valuable, as is the high-quality information and updates that I learn from the speakers each year.” Polakowski added, “Having members of NYSUT leadership attend each year makes us feel both seen and valued. I truly wish every one of our members could attend with us each year.”
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