We knew it wasn’t going to be easy.

But few expected that SUNY would be under attack on so many fronts, and that the battle would be brought right into our living rooms.

That happened in May, when Gov. David Paterson—who has done more to harm education than any governor in state history—attempted in an emergency spending bill to impose a weekly one-day furlough on more than 100,000 unionized state workers to cut costs until a state budget is passed.

We threw a monkey wrench into those works. UUP—along with Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, CSEA and PEF— won a May 11 federal temporary restraining order to block the furloughs. The governor had a May 26 court date to “show cause” why the furloughs shouldn’t be stopped. This issue, as well as the 2010-11 state budget, were still unresolved as The Voice went to press.

Before moving forward with furloughs, Gov. Paterson threatened layoffs and called for a lag payroll. He insisted we forego contractual salary increases, and then gave huge raises to a number of his aides. He quickly rescinded their raises after news outlets got wind of the spending. If the governor wants to talk, we’ll listen. But any deal worth considering will go to members for ratification, since it constitutes reopening our contract. Our members—not the governor—will control this situation.

SUNY, by the way, stood by quietly as the governor cut campus budgets and forced the furlough issue. SUNY’s Board of Trustees sat still in April, when Stony Brook closed its Southampton campus for “budgetary reasons. Inexplicably, SUNY found $3 million this year to operate The Levin Institute, an entity that lost its state funding last year.

That doesn’t mean that SUNY’s leaders have been complacent. Far from it.

Over the last few months, they kicked into high gear a campaign to press for approval of the Public Higher Education Empowerment and Innovation Act (PHEEIA), which would allow SUNY schools to raise tuition, and enter into contracts, leases, and other business ventures without state oversight. UUP opposes PHEEIA because we believe it is anti-union, will privatize SUNY, reduce access and erode educational quality.

We have stepped up our resistance to PHEEIA. Our members have made hundreds of visits to legislators and sent thousands of e-mailed faxes urging them to dismiss the Act. We created our Save SUNY website (www.savesuny.org), a Facebook page and a Twitter account to protest PHEEIA and state budget cuts to SUNY.

We also ran television, Internet and print campaigns against PHEEIA and Paterson’s cuts to SUNY, the state’s public hospitals and the New York State Theatre Institute.

So here we are without a state spending plan, more than two months after the state’s April 1 budget deadline.

Let’s use their delay to continue urging legislators to restore the $152 million in state aid cuts slated for SUNY. If those cuts go through, SUNY will have lost more than $562 million—or nearly 25 percent of its operating budget—over the last two years!

Rest assured, no matter what happens, we will hold the chancellor to her recent promise to expend $147 million in SUNY reserves to help cover state aid cuts.

Now more than ever, we need you, our members, to take a stand for SUNY.

Tell students, parents, business owners and other unionized workers about our fight and what saving SUNY can mean to them and all New Yorkers. Visit your legislators and tell them to restore cuts to SUNY, turn away PHEEIA and to vote no on any proposals advanced by the governor to breach our hard-won contract.

We negotiated that contract in good faith. We are expected to uphold our obligations under the contract and we will.

The governor should do the same.