BOSTON After winning a long fight to impose a surtax on the state’s highest earners designed to fund education and transportation, unions and educators from across Massachusetts are making it clear that public higher education is on the top of their.
After winning a long fight to impose a surtax on the state's highest earners designed to fund education and transportation, unions and educators from across Massachusetts are making it clear that public higher education is on the top of their priority list for the newfound funds.
Colleges Are Using COVID as an Excuse for Austerity. Unions Are Pushing Back.
Union workers protest layoffs at Harvard University on January 14, 2021, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Stuart Cahill / MediaNews Group / Boston Herald
By
As COVID-19 swept across the U.S. last winter and spring, colleges and universities adapted swiftly to the situation. Though it was swift, it was not without pain: Just as quickly as professors learned to teach through a screen on Zoom, administrations slashed budgets. In the early days of the pandemic, little was certain about the future if students would defer fall enrollment, how states might cut education funding or if the federal government would step in to offset the financial impact of the crises. Nevertheless, public and private higher education institutions across the country put in place austerity measures ahead of what they foresaw as a fiscal emergency.