PHOTO/ALLEN HARRIS
CHICAGO – Spring break at Chicago State University (CSU) was canceled in April.
The entire workforce—913 employees—prepared to lose their jobs, while its 2016 seniors looked forward to receiving their diplomas not knowing if they would be the last graduating class.
The South Side institution is in crisis because Illinois has become the only state without a budget. For almost a year, multi-millionaire governor Bruce Rauner has refused to approve the budget passed by the Legislature unless he gets the power to break the public-sector unions and make Illinois a right-to-work state.
Without money, state services in Illinois have been forced to cut back, lay off and even shut down. The whole state university system, including schools like Northeastern, Northern, Eastern, Southern and the University of Illinois itself, has felt the shock.
The public understands that what Rauner and his class are doing to CSU is not just CSU’s problem. It is linked up with all the other struggles for public education, especially in Chicago’s elementary and high schools.
In fact, the big picture shows that the political fight over public funding in Illinois is part of the same nationwide struggle.
The deadlock in Springfield “disproportionately affects Chicago State University,” says CSU president Thomas Calhoun. Students were hard-hit by Rauner’s veto of state funding for MAP grants that would enable working-class students to attend Chicago State and the other state universities.
The school’s announcement in early 2016 that it may close without state funding sparked action by students who conducted rallies on campus, marched in downtown Chicago and—most dramatically—occupied the traffic lanes of the nearby Dan Ryan Expressway.
Solidarity has come from Chicago’s activist movements and organized labor, especially the Chicago Teachers Union, which staged the tremendous April 1 strike. That strike was a broad-based political action around the slogan “#FightForFunding.”
The Illinois 2016 fiscal year will end on June 30, most likely with no budget for it. As of April, there was no sign the crisis will end. Instead, it will continue.
Chicago State University, which will be 150 years old in 2017, says it will be open in the fall, but without sufficient money it will still be in trouble, according to CSU political science professor Phillip Beverly.
As Rauner tries to loot the state’s resources that ordinary people need, the issue of public funding becomes a serious matter.
The students’ cry of “Save CSU” has been joined by volunteers from the surrounding community who have formed a council to help with fund-raising among the university’s alumni and the community at large.
Capitalism is dying. Corporations and private property interests are desperate for profits and they are taking over government at all levels in order to steal pensions, break unions and privatize everything from schools to water.
Gathering against them is a growing class of dispossessed Americans who are forced to unite, but not just for its own defense. The real fight is for all Americans to live in a new society, where this nation’s abundance is liberated and everyone has the right to quality education.
