I understand that I am probably going to get skewered for this because of the audience I am appealing to, but as a neutral party to politics and my own education, I would just like to put this out there. Since we are going to talk about Cuomo’s failed attempts at cutting CUNY’s budget, I figure it would be a good topic for my first response.
Recently, Cuomo has come out with a statement pushing back his planned budget cuts to CUNY after the backlash he received from administration and the broader public. According to the article however, the director of state operations referred to what Cuomo did as a negotiation tactic. I am inclined to believe that it is. The way I see things, I think any personal rivalries between De Blasio and Cuomo are played up when both are somewhat liberal politicians. I think what Cuomo did was try to figure out a way to better his state’s financial state and suggested cuts to wherever he thought was appropriate. As a negotiation tactic, the idea is that if CUNY didn’t raise an uproar to the proposed cuts, he’d just cut the budget and save millions for the state. I doubt that Cuomo had any vested interest in causing problems for CUNY and I don’t think that he would act contrary to the beliefs of the people when it came to funding CUNY. The media can sensationalize things and I understand that the CUNY system has had a lot of problems with fighting this, but I think that the act of fighting it blocked things from changing. The ads on the App Store, the email blasts to students, the protests, and other political tactics I felt were unnecessary. A marked disapproval of Cuomo’s suggestion would have more than enough sufficed. At least that’s what I think. I could be wrong, but with the amount of backlash and bad press Cuomo’s been getting, I kind of feel bad for the guy.
I appreciated this fresh and interesting perspective. Everyone is making Cuomo out to be some kind of villain, but your response allowed me to see the broader picture. Cuomo was trying to cut back spending while minimizing the number of people who would be hurt by these cuts. Obviously we’re going to be surrounded by angry rhetoric because we’re on college campus. I’m glad that our collective voice made a difference, but reading this made me realize that it’s sometimes petty to blame the middleman.
What I found interesting when I was reading about the whole ‘Cuomo vs. Deblasio” thing is similar to what you talked about here. I too don’t believe Cuomo is a villain–any episode of House of Cards has taught me that the decisions that form any leader’s legacy are backed by a hell of a lot of background complications (yes, I know I’m relying on a TV show here…). According to Cuomo’s office, he was trying to ‘scare’ CUNY into getting its act together, because apparently, CUNY wastes a lot of money and is very disorganized. In other news, the Pope is Catholic and the ocean is salty. Though I do wonder if Cuomo’s threatening did shock some portion of CUNY into getting its act together.