This has been quite a week, folks.

Monday 4/24 we had our union chapter meeting and voted to approve a set of GC demands we want to organize around and push the PSC’s bargaining team to fight for.

Tuesday 4/25 was Wendy Hensel’s “community meeting” at the GC. You can listen to the recording or read the full transcript here. PSC and Reclaim the Commons activists used this as an opportunity to push back against the austerity and rhetoric of false unity which comes from our corporate overlords. We passed out flyers with community updates, the demands from Monday’s meeting, and bingo cards highlighting management’s disingenuous and predictable platitudes.

23.4.25 Community Mtg flyer Organizers also hung the dirty laundry tendedero, which HR had taken down, above the entrance to the auditorium in defiance of sexist censorship.

During the meeting’s Q&A, students and faculty called on Hensel to address our poverty wages, rent hikes at GC housing, the labor issues that CUNY’s online expansion poses, the GC’s dysfunctional bureaucracy, and more. Conor Tomás Reed addressed the audience, encouraging us to celebrate the way the GC community has “dreamt beyond, surpassed, circumvented and outorganized President Garrell, Provost Everett and the upper administration…I just want to name that we have taken a leap in collective governance by reaching towards each other to focus on how to improve our working, learning and living conditions. And to not allow these unelected, unaccountable and grossly over compensated strangers to CUNY to dictate the terms of how this building operates.” He ended by asking Hensel, “what is your salary?” [For the record, it’s almost 500k]. Hensel evaded these questions, acknowledging their importance but insisting that we are “all on the same side.” Zoe Hu, the chair of the GC PSC chapter, responded clearly and simply, “We are not on the same side. I’m a worker. You are on the side of management.”

Students also held up posters and banners in protest, including a banner that read “Living Wages Now.”

By the end of the meeting, a clearly frustrated Hensel exclaimed, “I didn’t have to be here today.”

Hensel is correct that CUNY’s funding crisis is above even her ridiculous paygrade. Ultimately, we depend on government funding, and no Board of Trustees or slate of politicians is going to get us that. Only we, the students and workers of this university, can win a fully funded, free CUNY that pays all its employees a living wage. Take a look at our upcoming May Day events that are geared precisely towards that struggle, and please share these with your friends, colleagues, and communities.

Wednesday 4/26 was the beautiful and powerful “CUNY Struggles Across Generations” event and our weekly potluck, where six amazing speakers shared stories and reflections about CUNY’s radical history from the 60s to the present. A great resource for learning more is the CUNY 1969 Project. Folks also shared about the 1991 Graduate Center student takeover, the Student Liberation Action Movement of 1996-2004 (SLAM), which was particularly strong at Hunter College, CUNY Start, and the Free CUNY movement. Many of the speakers expressed how glad they were to be in the People’s Commons with us.