Crumbling CUNY

Some days when I'm working with motivated students, I question my decision to quit my tenured, full-Professor job at the end of this year. And then I'm greeted by things like this, which physically indicates how tragically broken The City University of New York is, and is one small indicator of the indignities our amazing students face on a daily basis. This is our electronic equipment store room, containing tens of thousands of dollars of gear, accumulated over 20 years of scraping together precious dollars in a college of technology. The giant hole in the wall was jackhammered in 2016 right next to a shelf containing delicate electronic equipment (audio mixers), which they stacked like cord wood instead of talking to us about it. I almost quit that day in 2016 after fighting the bullshit since 1999. And then of course the hole was never fixed, and last year they torched three giant pipes in the room--again without talking to us, and used my personal tools which they left out. This time, they covered our gear with some thin plastic which of course they burned right through. They then forced us to move all the equipment out of that room for construction--cutting another lab space in half--and of course that construction still hasn't even started. The building was mostly empty for two years; you would think they would have expedited all that work then, but no. And now concrete chunks are raining out of this hole. I saw the sign the other morning while I was preparing for a disastrous lab--probably the worst I've had in 20 years--run on cobbled-together computers that were old and breaking six years ago when we started asking for them to be replaced. The sign and the cardboard--of course--was put up by one of my colleagues, who have always been great. In fact, my college and CUNY as a whole is full of well-meaning, passionate faculty and staff trying to do their best for the students, but every department--academic and administrative--is short-staffed, overloaded, burned out, and just treading water, all because there's just never enough money to do even the most basic things right. I've just got to make it through December without losing my mind, but I feel so bad for our students--most of whom overcome immense challenges just to be in school. They deserve a functioning institution.