Connecticut State Colleges and University union leaders said a $100 million budget increase is needed to avoid major cuts on all its campuses.
CSCU students and professors held a press conference in November in Central’s Student Center to criticize Gov. Ned Lamont’s lack of funding for the college and university system.
One CCSU Professor and Connecticut State University American Association of University Professors (CSU-AAUP) President Louise Williams said they aim to let the governor and legislators know they want sufficient funding.
“We had the press conference because we are concerned that we will not be given enough money from the state of Connecticut in the next legislative session to really be able to operate our system at the best possible capacity,” Williams said. “So, we didn’t get enough money last year, according to the chancellor of the system. We should have gotten quite a bit more money than we did.”
Willams also said one of their goals is to accommodate those students who don’t like large class sizes.
“And what we really want is enough funding so that we have enough faculty who have enough time to pay attention to students, to give them one-on-one attention so the class sizes stay small so there’s enough services,” Williams said.
Williams and her CSU-AAUP team hope they can get the students who need help paying for college the assistance they need, she said.
“And the other thing we’re going to be asking for this year is the free tuition program at the community college to be extended to the four state universities,” she said, “because we really like students to be able to concentrate on school and not on working or having to go into debt.”
Dr. Audra King, department chair of Philosophy, said she noticed a need for higher education funding for years.
“I’ve known about it for a while,” King said. “So, I’ve been active in the union. I think this is my sixth year. So, I’ve been testifying at Board of Regents meetings, at legislative meetings, going to the capital to agitate for more funding for a while. We’ve been getting increasingly defunded.”
Azzahra Syafira, a CCSU student, said she is worried about how the budget proposal will affect her final semester and how this proposal could affect other CCSU students.
“So, if our tuition became more expensive or, you know, became less affordable for a lot of our students, I think not only me, but I think so many other students here could have the same impact,” Syafira said.
Dr. King said budget shortfalls also hurt low-income students more than others.
“We live in a country that is run by what I would call neo-liberals who are basically trying to privatize everything, cut the funding government responsibility and push it off on private citizens and people who hurt the most are the most vulnerable and marginalized communities,” King said.
