During the COVID crisis, the CUNY administration has threatened to cut funding to City College. As of this petition's writing, CUNY is funding City College on a month-to-month basis. As a result, departments have been forced to increase class size and cut sections. One of the more egregious examples is in the Math department. The budget constraints compelled the department to increase class caps by 95% or more to provide space for students' fulfillment of required classes. This strategy is pedagogically unsound, especially given that these are lower-level classes and the basis for the rest of students' academic careers.

Also, for many part-time instructors in the Math department, class size remains just under the CCNY Guidelines for Workload and Released Time (December 2011), which states:

"Large Classes. Instructors who teach a large section with an actual enrollment of
80 students or more may be granted double credit. To receive the additional
contact hours, the instructor should be personally responsible for grading and
supervision of all class activities. It will be up to the determination of the Dean
whether teaching assistant support for large sections is also appropriate."

Doubling the class size means that their pay is reduced by half and reinforces the existing inequity by taking advantage of part-time faculty and graduate assistants' vulnerability to the burdens of CUNY's budget crisis.

We ask that you direct Provost Liss to immediately restore funding to the Math Department to the Spring 2020 level. The Math department administration should immediately reinstate the class caps of the Spring 2020 levels and in time for the Spring 2021 registration. We also ask that the Provost restore funding to departments whose funding was cut from the previous levels of Spring 2020.