The City University of New York is in abysmal financial shape ahead of the fall semester — and it’s time for students and faculty to “yell” for funding, a CUNY trustee declared. “If we don’t ask, we ain’t gonna get,” Henry Berger, a member of CUNY’s Board of Trustees, said in sounding the alarm last week at the 17-member body’s first in-person meeting since the pandemic began last year. Berger, one of five appointees of Mayor Bill de Blasio on the board, decried the city and state’s funding of the public university system as insufficient to address a range of rising costs that CUNY must now account for as the city emerges from COVID-19.
