Chair Sohmer called the session to order at 6:30 p.m. at the Hunter College School of Social Work. Present were Senators from the following campuses: Baruch: Bird, Majete, McCall, and Pollard; BMCC: Friedman, Herz, Price, Reid, Vozick, Young, and Alternate Garely; Bronx CC: Belilgne, Cummins, Fuld, Read, and Alternate Skinner; Brooklyn: Antoniello, Bell, Harrison, Jacobson, Landolphi, Shapiro, and Tobey. CCNY: Connorton, Crain, Grossman, Sank, and Sohmer. CSI: Cooper S., Foleno, Levine, Petratos, Svenningsen, and Yousef. CUNY Law School: none; Graduate School: Baumrin and Rothman; Hostos CC: Alternate Jones; Hunter: Hampton, Kurzman, Rai, Sherrill, Steinberg, and Wonsek; John Jay: Bohigian, Clark, Hartmus, and Kaplowitz; Kingsborough CC: Galvin, Goodkin, O’Malley and Alternate Farrell; LaGuardia CC: Beaky, Gallagher, Mettler, and Reitano; Lehman: Bullaro, Feinerman, Jervis, Knobloch, and Mineka; Medgar Evers: Bennett and Harris-Hastick; NYC Technical: Cermele, and Hounion; Queens: Brady, Cairns, Diamond, Frisz, Kulkarni, Savage, and Alternate Hemmes; Queensborough CC: Barbanel, Dahbany-Miraglia, Greenbaum, and Specht; York: Cooper A, Kirkpatrick, and Alternate Majerovitz; Professor King and Richter excused. Governance Leaders present: Bird (Baruch), Cooper (York), Feinerman (Lehman), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Kurzman (Hunter), Levine (CSI), and Perlstein (BMCC), Specht (Queensborough), Taharally (Hunter), and Tobey (Brooklyn). The Parliamentarian was absent. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present.

1. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as proposed.

2. Approval of the Minutes of May and June, 1999: The Minutes were approved as distributed.

3. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]

Chair (oral and written.)

Chancellor Goldstein.

Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (written.)

College Liaisons on Campus Conditions, Enrollment, Class Size and Course Availability (written.)

4. Resolutions Honoring Former Trustees Everett and Murphy and Former Interim Chancellor Kimmich – All were passed unanimously by voice vote.

WHEREAS, Christoph M. Kimmich served as Interim Chancellor of CUNY from December 11, 1997 until September 1, 1999, and

WHEREAS, he inherited an institution besieged by critics and torn by divisions but left it in better condition than he found it, and

WHEREAS, he enjoyed the rare distinction of being a Chancellor who was filly respected and esteemed by the faculty both as scholar and administrator, and

WHEREAS, he worked for the good of CUNY untiringly as though there were no tomorrow and suggested many innovations that will stay with CUNY in perpetuity, and

WHEREAS, we much admired his wise tactics and strategies while pretending not to discern them,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the University Faculty Senate affirms its appreciation and admiration for Dr. Kimmich and, glad he will still be with us, wishes him great success and happiness in his new position as President of Brooklyn College.

WHEREAS, Edith Everett has been a member of the Board of Trustees for the past 23 years, and vice-chair for most of that period, and

WHEREAS, both she and her husband have been active participants and philanthropists in many religious and eleemosynary affairs, and

WHEREAS, as a social activist, she has participated in developing the CUNY early childhood literacy program and the CUNY Jobs Fair, and

WHEREAS, consistent with these activities, she worked arduously to forestall the implementation of the ill-considered rules affecting accessibility to the university,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that the University Faculty Senate extends its her significant and selfless acts, and wishes her well and lengthy future socially-motivated endeavors.

WHEREAS, James P. Murphy has served on the Board of Higher Education (and its Board of Trustees) for a quarter of a century as member and chair, and

WHEREAS, he has passionately, with vim, vigor and wit defended the university and its students, and

WHEREAS, he has continuously taken seriously the principles of Access and Excellence, and

WHEREAS, Jim Murphy’s positions on innumerable questions have fitted the faculty comfortably and permitted us to enthusiastically join with him over the years,

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, that, now, upon the occasion of his leaving the Board,

We, the University Faculty Senate, The Authentic Voice of the Faculty, mark his irreproducible services and designate him University Treasure.

5. Approval of UFS Standing Committee Slate – The slate was approved as proposed.

6. Annual Committee Reports (written) – The reports were received.

7. New Business – There was none.

There being no further business the meeting was adjourned at 8:15 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps

Executive Director

a. Chair: Since last we met several presidents have resigned, several acting presidents have been named, and one not acting. A letter I wrote to the Board Chair protesting appointments without a search was included in your packet. The searches for the presidents of Baruch, Queensborough, LaGuardia, and Kingsborough, are to start immediately. The three faculty members who have already been chosen are working on it this very moment. New members have made it to the Board of Trustees. The Schmidt Report has appeared, and the Senate has written and distributed an analysis of the possible implications. There is a new chancellor.

The Graduate Center is in the process of becoming habitable. Are there any questions about any of the things that have occurred since last we met?

[Question off-microphone] / Chair Sohmer – The Presidential Search Guidelines from 1997 say that there shall be three faculty members chosen by the faculty of the governance bodies on the particular campus searching for the president. I believe that there are various folks at 80^th Street who do agree with me that that’s an inadequate collection. However, those are the rules they are playing by at this moment. / [Question off-microphone]/ Chair Sohmer – The question is, is there a representative from the University Faculty Senate on the Presidential Search Committee. And the answer is, there never was. But it was one of the things that we keep dreaming about.

b. Chancellor Goldstein: It’s very nice to be here. I thank you for inviting me. It’s good to return to the City University after a relatively brief absence. I look forward to working with you. We have much to do. This University has been through quite a few things, some good, some not so good. I hope that we can work collaboratively and get the University into a position that I think it deserves to be. It is going to take a lot of resolve and hard work, and some risk-taking. I can assure you, everything we do will not be uniformly applauded.

Let me tell you about some of the things that I have been involved in, in the last couple of weeks. I will indicate to you what I consider the important matters. First, starting with the earliest action taken this morning. I testified before the City Council Higher Education Committee. It was very well attended. I decided to speak extemporaneously. I took a lot of questions. Many questions were about my vision of the University, what changes I see for the University, and what my feelings are about the January 1999 Resolution. I don’t need to tell you about that; all of you are well tutored. But I would be very happy to answer any questions.

I am going to limit my remarks and give you the opportunity to ask whatever questions may be on your mind. I have spent a fair amount of time with Commissioner Mills. I am on his Advisory Council, which is a group of university presidents. I started in that capacity when I was President of Adelphi University, and now I have segued into that same role, but with a slightly different portfolio. I know the Commissioner quite well, and have worked with him over the past year and a half on a number of higher education matters. My last encounter with him concerned the Resolution ridding remedial courses from the formal curriculum of senior colleges. I spent a fair amount of time with Chancellor Carl Hayden, and certainly with a number of Regents, and with all of the consultants.

I have also spent some time with Sheldon Silver. We know each other from many encounters, especially when I was President of Baruch College. He and I are talking about a very interesting opportunity that I see for us. The opportunity is in using much of the good work we do in our computer science programs here in the University, and making note of the fact that there are approximately 40,000 people working in this industry in just the five boroughs. I think that the latest count is 3,300 companies which have sprung up in the past few years. We can utilize the good services of our faculty in the new software design center that will be approved at the end of this month by the Board. Also, there is a fair amount of liquidity now resonant in deep appropriation bills at the Federal level and at the State level. I think there is a good opportunity for us to get significant dollars.

I am very concerned that there isn’t a kind of bootstrapping -- opportunities for new revenue streams for the University. Aside from the faculty, who continue to do good work in attracting grants and contracts, we don’t have a very good track record. We don’t act like a major university in the way we employ our resources in the marketplace, nor do we act as a strong and adept university in attracting donors to support academic programs and students. If we look at the numbers, compared to any other major state university on a per capita basis, we look pretty sad. I think that we have to start turning that around. We certainly have to work hard to do that. I’ve made the point over and over when I’ve been asked by the Governor. Certainly I’ve said this many times to the Mayor, and reaffirmed it today at the City Council.

I’ve been spending a lot of time on our testing program with the President of the College Board and other testing experts. I know about some of these matters from my own work as a mathematical modeler and statistician. I worked with ETS many years ago as a consultant, so I am fairly up to date on the latest research. What I’m really appalled at is how uninformed so many people are about very basic issues such as bias.

We are in the midst of doing four searches this year. We will start very soon in search of a permanent president at Baruch College. We are in the early stages of searches for our community colleges: Queensborough, Kingsborough, and LaGuardia. The Trustees and presidents have been appointed to the Committees. We are working with the various governing bodies at the colleges now to get these committees in shape. I wanted to jump out of the box quickly on this. I don’t believe that this University has addressed some of the significant challenges that face us. We must have strong leadership on our campuses. This means getting out into the marketplace early, and making a case to attract the most able and promising leaders. I made a pledge that we will have four new presidents in place by the Fall 2000. We have, as you know, a new president who will be starting at Brooklyn College in February -- Christoph Kimmich.

Let me review some highlights of the 1999-2000 adopted budget. With respect to the senior colleges, the numbers are not terribly impressive. I would say that this was yet another flat year. The good news is that we received $2 million in additional SEEK funding. We received $1.9 million in additional funding for full-time faculty. This has been a recurring theme in our recent budget messages. There have been recommendations to the Board about the need to recoup the full-time faculty ranks at this University. As all of you know, about 12-13 years ago, we had almost double the number of full-time faculty that we have today. If you look at the teaching power, which is full-time faculty, full-time equivalent, and part-time faculty, our ranks are rather low.

We are going to convert part-time faculty dollars to support additional faculty lines. We’re also going to deploy those faculty lines in a way that is not uniformly distributed. I am not somebody who believes in uniform distribution. I believe that you really have to deploy your resources in a way that revitalizes academic programs. We will do that this year and continue to do this in future years. That was a little bit of good news.

We have about $800,000 in new child care funding. We did have a reversal in $5.2 million for collaborative programs, that were originally put into the Board of Education budget. We were successful in getting it back into the University’s budget. Also, we have to fund about $10 million for collective bargaining agreements ourselves. If we did not have a reserve this year, this would have come off the bottom line. I want to underscore a couple of things in the budget that all of you should embrace and understand. They are potentially deep problems for this University, unless we are able to turn them around. One has to do with this assault on collective bargaining. We bargain in good faith, we agree, we come to an understanding, and then we are told, "fund it out of your budget." That is certainly not in keeping with the spirit or intent of genuine collective bargaining.

Secondly, we have a problem that is starting to rear its ugly head in this University around un-funded waivers. We have a program now at the University, where the last semester is given free, if you started here. That has grown to an $8.4 million subsidy, and is growing fast. It is going to grow even faster because our retention rates are going up. Graduation rates are going up, and those are good things to be proud of. But at the same time, it is going to have a cost. We are going to have to think about how to do this because this number can potentially be explosive. Understand that if you are given X dollars, those dollars come right off your base. Those are dollars that we will not have for hiring faculty, academic support personnel, buying equipment -- all of the things that we need in a university.

On the community college side, we do have a base aid increase of $75 per FTE. This has grown now to $2,125. That is generating about $2.7 million after adjustment for enrollment decline. We also have full-time money which we will leverage up for the senior colleges and for the community colleges. We have about $1.3 million in funding for the community college, full-time faculty ranks. We also have a restoration of $1.2 million in the College Now Program. This is something that I would like to see more ubiquitously developed at the University. The data indicate that we’re on to something that is really important. The College Now Program has been in existence for some time. It started at Kingsborough Community College and now is in place at about 72 high schools. Our intent is to have the program at all high schools. The City Council has been very supportive in helping us get these additional dollars. Shelly Silver is very interested in helping us. I would imagine that that is going to be a prime area for us in our next budget message.

I would encourage you through the good work of Bernard Sohmer, who sits as a member of the Board of Trustees and your Executive Committee, to help me with some ideas with respect to priorities for the next budget. Certainly, things like hiring full-time faculty, performance- based budgeting, and multiple year budgeting are now very fundamental and part of the fabric of the budget process. I think that should continue. I believe we ought to have some additional things. One of the things that is very clear to me is that our information systems at this University are deeply lacking. We have organizations that generate wonderful data, and that can inform policy debate on our campuses. The systems are not linked. The systems don’t relate to one another. The relational data bases we have need to be redefined and redesigned. Some of the things we need are going to cost considerable dollars. We have to have this in order to move ahead. That is going to be a prominent part of our budget message.

I also believe that as we change the way we do basic skills instruction in this University, there needs to be more academic support services provided to our students. I would like to see additional money provided to students. I’m also very interested in moving ahead with ideas I have about a flagship environment of very distinguished programs. It is a principle that is going to force us to make some changes. We have the opportunity, after some audits of some of our programs, to really catapult into a very different orbit of competitiveness and do something quite significant. This is going to be an intellectual challenge in terms of how you devise funding differentials and how you engage the community to get some of these things done. We also need planning money. I must tell you, when I run in the morning and have about 45 minutes to myself, it is the model that I am deeply reflecting on, because it is going to be very delicate. It is going to be politically unpopular with some entities and constituencies. It is going to be an interesting and formidable way of putting together a financial model. We are going to see the planning money this year.

I received the latest SAT scores for the Fall 1999. They are quite impressive. We have well over 90% of our students in baccalaureate programs now taking the SAT. The troublesome data point is that if you look at the applicant pool in places like City College, Baruch College, Hunter College, Queens College, and Brooklyn College, the SAT scores of the students who are applying are significantly higher than the SAT scores of the students who are actually enrolling. The ones who are enrolling at some of these campuses are above the national average. But I lament the fact that the differential between the scores of the students who apply and are accepted, but don’t enroll, is quite high. We are losing those students, and we shouldn’t lose them. You know and I know that the schools they are going to don’t really compare, and I know a fair amount about some of those schools, in terms of the depth of the faculty, the research, and the facilities. We have to attract those students back to City University by overlaying an honors university.

The enrollment represents, university-wide, about a 1% decrease when compared to the Fall 1998 enrollment. But our undergraduate full-time head count is even. There are plusses and minuses at certain colleges. We have lost some, because of what I would consider, a roaring economy in the City. A number of our adult students are now fully employed. Those students are less persuaded about the need to study at our university. A number of our graduate programs have seen a dip as well. That typically is related to a full economy. Enrollment I think is fairly stable, with a slight decrease overall. FTE’s have actually increased, graduate enrollment admits at some of our campuses are up, others down. If you look at each of the programs, it makes sense around the economy issue. With that I will conclude, and will take any questions that you have.

Professor Bohigian (Math, John Jay) - "Chancellor, you mentioned that you didn’t believe that the distribution of resources should be uniform. Can you indicate to us what criteria you would be using for the distribution of resources." / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me give you an example of what I did at Baruch, which I don’t think is necessarily transferable to every other campus, because of the uniqueness of the academic programs. At Baruch, the largest single school is the College of Arts and Sciences. It is a wonderful school with a very prominent faculty. The students who come to Baruch College are largely drawn because of the uniqueness of the School of Business, and more and more, the School of Public Affairs. When we closed the School of Education, it was closed with the intention of re-deploying our resources in a way to address the demand for those programs. When I told the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, that Arts and Sciences are very fundamental to the overall experience that a student has, but don’t expect me to be sympathetic to the School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch and to all of a sudden come in with an explosion of new academic programs, when those programs are resident up the street at Hunter College. That is a way of deploying resources to support the strengths relative to the other campuses in the City University. I don’t think that we should be thinking, campus to campus, as entities unto themselves. I think that we really ought to look at our campuses and say that we are going to try the best we can to bolster all of what is appropriate on a campus, but really look to see what some of the other campuses are doing. That is the kind of thing that informed my decision at Baruch. That is the kind of thinking I would like to see more ubiquitously at this University.

In 1997, the Trustees signed an agreement with the PSC and myself recognizing the faculty’s authority to control admissions, curriculum, and retention standards. I can get you a copy of the legal papers and send you the Board Minutes of June 1997. Not one faculty group has agreed to or approved such things as "Prelude to Success" and all of these other programs attached to the January 1999 Resolution. It is time for the Trustees to understand, that they have been passing one resolution after another without any consciousness of the impact one has on the other. All they are doing is turning things upside down. We were in the process two years ago of trying to rationalize some of these problems. We are now in the process of trying to keep morale out of the basement. This is really a nasty mess. We are in court, we are fighting with the Regents, and the counselors out in the high schools don’t know what to tell anybody."/ Chancellor Goldstein – Let me tell you what is going to happen. I think we made a very profound move last week. It’s taken longer to deal with these Freshman Skills Assessment Tests than it took to uncover the structure of DNA. I spoke to Louise Mirrer and I said, "That’s it. This is where I think we ought to be going." It is two and a half decades -- I think we as a University can put this behind us. Nobody is happy with these Freshman Skills Assessment Tests. My unhappiness is largely about the multiplicity of uses that they’ve had. Let’s talk about what is going to happen next. You are right, Sandi, there is a muddling here of so many policies. Some are going to be put aside. This is where I see us going, and this is the recommendation that I am making to the Board of Trustees. I believe that the SAT is an important instrument for us to use for senior college baccalaureate applicants.

The literature is very clear. If you use the SAT as the only predictor for performance in the first year of baccalaureate work, it is a lousy predictor. Nobody advises that you use it alone; certainly I don’t. When you use the SAT along with a battery of college preparatory courses that a student has taken in high school, high school average, class rank, type of high school, and other measures, the composite you come up with becomes a powerful predictor of what kind of GPA a student is going to have after the first year. We really should only do it for the first year. If we don’t, we get more contaminants into the system. The first year is when you have a commonality of courses that most students take, that is different than any other time of college experience. What we are going to do is work with each college president, and whoever is involved in the process, to come up with a composite that they believe will be useful in assisting statements about readiness for baccalaureate work.

We are working with the College Board now. The College Board has a very rich data set on the CUNY experience with the SAT. What very few of us perhaps recognize is the fact that many of our students, over many years, have taken the SAT. They enrolled at CUNY, but we were never sent the scores because we never asked for them. The College Board has those scores. They have tens of thousands of SAT scores over a span of time for the CUNY population. I have a meeting tomorrow night with Rudy Crew, myself, and the College Board, to really talk about how we can best put this puzzle together so that we wind up with an instrument at CUNY which makes some sense with respect to accessing readiness for baccalaureate work. Let’s assume that will be done.

The cut point is very low with respect to various university settings. For example, at SUNY-Buffalo, the cut point for readiness is about 440 on the verbal part of the SAT. This is the one that I am concerned with. So we are going to engage with the College Board, look at the distribution, and come up with cut points that will be associated with other measures that we now have with students – GPA, college preparatory courses, class rank, etc. We will come up with a mechanism for the first time, in the way I view the world, that is a rational way of making that kind of judgement, certainly relative to what this University has done before. Now, we go through the process, and a student is determined, by these measures, that they need to have some remedial instruction. The question is, how do you place the students? What kind of treatment do you give to the student? We are now in the market to find a placement test. We have sent out an RFP. It has been sent out widely.

Clearly, we are going to be very careful in assessing what people are telling us they are going to do. This RFP was structured in a very thoughtful way to address every issue we would need to deal with, e.g., our ESL population, our adult learners, students out of high school for many years. We need to have that entire composite understood with respect to the test that we get. It will be a test that will stand the scientific merits of confidence coefficients, reliability, validity, and it will be normed appropriately for the CUNY population.

I don’t know about the validity and the reliability of the Freshman Skills Assessment Test. It’s never really been tested. People say, "they are not valid." No one really knows because there hasn’t been a study done. The best treatment and scientific statement that I’ve seen is the study done by the RAND Corporation. I was heartened, because the person who did the data analysis was David Friedman, one of the country’s leading statisticians at UCLA-Berkeley. I have a comfort level that this was done well. For the first time, we will have instruments and we will have the confidence that they are designed for the purposes of their use and they will stand the test of the highest challenges on validity and reliability.

I think that this is a major step forward. I hope that when all of this is brought to the attention of the Board at the end of this month, that it will be approved, and we will get this thing put in place. Sandi, if that happens, you’re right. There are policies that are resident now on the books that specifically identify a Freshman Skills Assessment Test in Reading and Writing. We will have to deal with that, you are absolutely right, and we will. The one test that I feel a great comfort level with, because of the way that it is designed is the Math Aptitude Test. The Math Aptitude Test I believe was designed by the Math Discipline Council. It is largely a faculty test. I have looked at it very closely. It is a test that is done sequentially. If you get to a certain marker, a certain decision is made. If you get to another marker, another decision is made. It is a rational way to test mathematics readiness. At the end of the day, we will have these composite measures, a new placement test, a Math Aptitude Test, and I hope that we will finally put to bed this kind of discussion that has really ripped the community apart. That’s where we are.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – "Definitely, some of the direction you are proposing will be an improvement in terms of more valid tests. There is information on the FSAT’s and they are poor predictors of college success. It’s in the RAND report. The Math Test that you admire correlates 0.24 with freshman college grades. That’s inadequate. The Writing Test correlates more poorly. The SAT’s correlate about the same according to Klein and Orlando. They are inadequate. My question is, where are we in doing this? This is going to take some time. This can’t be done in a month. In the meantime, we have a policy that is discriminatory and disproportionately excluding students of color. That’s what’s going to happen with the FSATs until there is a more valid measure. We are in a mess, we are in a limbo. We shouldn’t go forward. This whole thing should be halted for at least a year until we can see what we are doing. We need to take time. We should not be coming in with a new exit exam for remediation because the Mayor said that he will hold up the money if we don’t do this. This is outrageous. We should not be succumbing to this kind of pressure. The Mayor doesn’t know anything about our University. Every statement that he has made has been false and derogatory.

Chancellor Goldstein – I know that you speak with great passion and I deeply respect you for it. You and I have talked over the years. The fact is, we’ve been at this for 30 years. I think the time is enough. When you say we don’t have the time, we do have the time. The SAT has been around for a very long time, grade point average has been around for a long time, College Preparatory courses have been around for a long time, class standing has been around for a long time. These are not magical things; this is not the Manhattan Project. This can be put together very easily with a little thought. I think we can do it and we can do it very quickly. The reality is that we have an appropriation that not only the Mayor, but the City Council, has approved. The City Council has supported this University. The City Council voted that no dollars would be appropriated for the community colleges unless an exit exam is in place.

Professor Crain – "They slipped up, too." / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s the world that we are living in, and we have an obligation to deal with it. The RFP for the placement exam is probably going to look very much like the kinds of things that our faculty wants to test. It is going to be piloted this particular semester. We are going to get the kind of data we need to inform the decision. One never has enough time. You say a year. There are other people who are going to say that we ought to study it for two more years, or three more years. It’s time to make the move. Let me get to the other thing you brought up. First, ridding remedial education from the senior colleges. I want to correct one thing, Bill, that you said on Senate-Forum. You invoked my name, you quoted me exactly. It had to do with my Regents testimony. What I said was, and this is what I want all of you to understand: that we must continue to remediate at the senior colleges. Baruch continues to remediate, and we must do it at City College, Hunter, and at Queens. What this Resolution talks about are remedial courses. There are tutoring centers, writing centers, math laboratories. There is a panoply of what I would call legitimate, well thought out academic support services that we must continue to do. Look at Baruch, where this started. My two friends, Trustees Everett and Murphy, were the most passionate, committed Trustees that I ever had the pleasure to work with. I count them as my good friends, too. They did not support what I did at Baruch. They voted against me voiding remedial education at Baruch. But it was the right thing to do. Why? If you have admission standards, then they will drive this decision. If you have lousy admission standards then it makes no sense to do what I did at Baruch. But if you require three years of College Preparatory English, three years of College Preparatory Math, then I don’t believe that we should also provide remedial education as we have defined it at Baruch, in terms of courses in English and Math. Did we have tutors? Yes. Should we have tutoring? Yes, we should have tutoring. Should you have writing labs? Yes. Should you have math labs? Yes. Should you have immersion programs? Yes.

All of these things should continue at the senior colleges. Nobody is more supportive of those things than I am. Students are going to run into academic difficulties. Every one of you who is a professor knows it, and I know it. When I taught at City University, it was mainly doctoral students. That’s what I was recruited to do, to start a Ph.D. program in statistics. Some of the students I had needed remediation. We didn’t have a remedial course for them in the elements of differential calculus. We provided them with supplemental instruction. I think that is what it is that we should be doing. I think it sends a very powerful message. It also really says that the student has some responsibility.

I’ve done the data analysis. I’ve looked at so called disparate impact. It’s not what you’re saying, and not what a lot of other people are saying. Do the data analysis. Look at the data. It is my experience at Baruch that I want to talk about. I was there at the time when we forced these policies to happen. People said to me, the African American population is going to precipitously decrease at Baruch if you do this. The black population has not changed in any appreciable way. Indeed, some of the other populations went in various ways and there are spiked horns. Look at the latest data books from CUNY and you will see.

We are going to have to watch this very carefully. Disparate impact has a very legalistic component to it to test. If you look at disparate impact, it has absolutely no validity on the Baruch experience. It is not happening to the degree people are saying. This out-migration of the University, it’s not going to happen. We just got the data, the projections from the models that have been created. We just got the actual data and they are right on the money. So when I hear people talking about this impact, show me the data and then we can have a discussion.

Chair Sohmer – There are some people who are leaving the University who we would like to welcome and thank for their historic involvement. We have several resolutions for you to vote on. [Resolutions are reported in the Minutes.]

Former Trustee Murphy – It is a pleasure to be here and be with my colleague who I served with for 20 of those years. Leaving the place is kind of a sad thing. I heard a great Yogi Berraism yesterday, and it’s a true story. The founder of the Association for the Help of Retarded Children, Ann Newberg, called for a list of members of the AHRC, and found out that instead of 7,000 members there were only 6,000 members because we had on our books 1,000 that died. Ann’s complaint was, "how could we have lost so many, because most of them were life members?" In reality, I hope to be a life member of the CUNY family forever.

We have our immediate issue, and I’ll speak to that just briefly. I think we would be mistaken if we looked at the battle we are in now, out of the context that the very many battles that the City University and its antecedents have had for over 150 years. There were worse times than this. Not many, but there were worse times. One of them was in the 1940s regarding academic freedom, when what was happening was going right to the heart of the professoriate and the functions of creating and disseminating knowledge were being challenged by forces that were nearly overpowered. The nation was fighting this battle. I became a convert to academic freedom in those times, because I was an undergraduate at Manhattan College. I heard a fellow named Al Lowenstein give a speech at Columbia. He convinced me that McCarthyism was an evil, and we had to mobilize and fight it. I think apart from the bad news in terms of the history of the University, there is much great news. There is not only a legacy that is CUNY, but there is an actuality which is the City University.

That actuality is largely created by what you folks do and by what your students do. The faculty is the heart of the University. They are the providers of the knowledge creation and the knowledge dissemination. Everybody else exists to empower and to enable, and to foster the function of learning, and the function of knowledge development. I see that as the role of the Trustees, the presidents, and the administrators. Don’t be disheartened; I’m not disheartened. I think we are going to win this battle. What the solution will be, I don’t know. What its form will be, I don’t know. But I am hopeful that the Regents are getting the message. And because of their peculiar role by the Constitution of the State of New York, they are the protectors for over 200 years since the first Constitution of this State, going back to the time of the founding of the Republic. They are protectors of higher education in this State. They must be the target of our efforts.

I won’t comment on what the Chancellor has said, because you will have him on a regular basis as part of your structure and it’s an important part of your function. I think that we can not lose sight of the fact that access must be maintained. We cannot have as the ultimate result here a situation where gratuitously we exclude the people who can succeed and will succeed because their predecessors have been successful. They must be allowed to succeed. I have worked with Bernie and Sandi as colleagues on the Board. There are also many of you around this room whose faces have been very familiar to me for very long periods of time, serving on Board committees and search committees. It has been a pleasure to be associated with you. I wish you well. Be assured that I will personally will try to be helpful in terms of the issues that are facing CUNY. This is a challenge in time. The forces are formidable. We are going to persevere and we are going to prevail.

Former Trustee Everett – When you mentioned that there was going to be a vote, I’m reminded of this story about the rabbi who was taken ill and sent to the hospital. A committee of the congregation decided they would visit him. The chair of this little committee approach the sick person’s bed and said to the rabbi, "you’ll be very happy to know that by a vote of 5 to 4, we wished you good health." I want to take just a second, because I think Jim said mostly what was on my mind and on our joint minds here in this room. I think that we are of one mind as to what has to happen at this University in the sense that it has to open to people who are qualified to take advantage of what it is that we have to offer. I just want to urge two things.

One is that we try to move out of our box of thinking. We have to think differently, evaluate things as they come to us, not have knee jerk reactions, perhaps occasionally give the benefit of the doubt. I have been here for a very long time and there were many occasions where we came up with an idea, everybody was nervous, we worried that it was going to undermine the University, the things were tried, they worked and they were successful, and they weren’t harmful at all. I’m just urging you to consider when something is brought to you, not give the automatic reaction, and say, "that’s not the way we used to do it, let’s try it differently." Having said that, you need to be very vigilant. We have to watch what happens if new things are tried and they are not what we had expected them to be, we have to speak up quickly and decisively and see that they are reversed. I would like to urge you to try to cooperate with Matthew Goldstein. He knows the University and I think he loves the place. As he told you, I had a difference of opinion with him. Not because I think that remediation perhaps couldn’t be tried in different ways. Faculty members could work with three instead of 100 or 50 or 20 in a classroom.

There are different ways to give the service. What bothers me was the access part of it. That’s the part we have to be most concerned about. The people have to get here before we can help them. What we need to watch out for, is all of this structure a way of keeping people out? Or is it a way of helping? Our consideration always has to be, what are we doing to make education better and more accessible. We don’t help the student who is not competent to take advantage of a senior college. I have to say that straight out, if a person isn’t up to snuff. If a person cannot really read, I don’t think we have those people, but if they couldn’t, they shouldn’t be in the senior college. I think we all know that. We have to say that. By the same token, we have to see that as many people as possible can access this University and we have to be prepared to give it all the help we can. We have to fight for more money. It’s a joke when we say we can do more with less. OK, you try to do more with less; it just doesn’t work that way. Sometimes we can do things more efficiently. We haven’t had enough for a very long time, almost the whole time I’ve been in this University. These are the things that we need to be concerned about.

I think that the new Chancellor does in fact care about the University. I would urge you to try to support in the best way you can the kind of positive things. We have a Board that is not to be believed. When I think of the Board I have this mental image of a puppet show, when someone pulls the string, all the hands go up or down. That’s where it’s at. You have to understand that the people at the helm, people like the Chancellor and the people in the academic offices are this way or that way. You have to take that into your consideration. It could be worse. You have to fight the good fight. You have to support where you can, you have to be flexible, you have to evaluate, and in the end you have to be vigilant. I hope that you understood my message. It was a message of understanding and insight and flexibility and hope for the future. I think that it can get better than it has been in the past couple of years. There may be a Democratic mayor in a couple of years and things can maybe really get a lot better.