MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH PLENARY SESSION

MINUTES OF = THE THREE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIV= ERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

April 25, 2= 006

The meeting w= as called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:35 p.m. in Room 9205/6/7 at the Graduate School and University Center. 68 voting members of 116 were present.

Baruch: Present &#= 8211; Hill, and Pollard. Absent – Freedman, Martell, Myers, Smith, and Vora. <= span class=3DGramE>Vacancies – 2.&= nbsp; BMCC: Present – Agwu, Belkn= ap, Friedman, Martin, Rani, and Roy. Absent – Price. Bronx CC: Present –Asimakopoulos, Durante, and Alte= rnate Ismail. Absent – Al= ozie, and Skinner. Brooklyn: Present – Bell, Bloomfield, Jacobson, Morawski, Rodman, Shapiro, and Tobey. A= bsent – Antoniello, Cunningham, Viscusi and Wills. CCNY: Prese= nt –Daglish, Khalil, Lascar, and Sank. Absent R= 11; Crain, Habib, and Leonard. = Vacancies – 2. CSI:= Present – Cooper, Levine, Petratos, and Yousef. Absent – Klibaner. CUNY Law<= /st1:PlaceName> School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancies – 1.&= nbsp; Graduate School: Present –Nolan and Orenstein. A= bsent – Baumrin, King, and Lerner. Vacancy – 1. Hostos C= C: Present – August. Absent – Czarnocha and Falcon. Vacancies - 2. Hunter: Present –none= . Absent – Doyle, Finder, Frie= dman, Guzzetta, Kaye, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 2. John Jay= : Present – Caldwell, Crossman, Kaplowitz, Kubic and Soto-Fernandez. Absent – Brugnola, and Romero. Kingsborough CC: Present – Farrell, Galvin, Hume, O’Malley, and Ruoff. = Absent – Barnhart. L= aGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson, Lerman= , Mettler, Rushing, and Shean. Lehman: Present – Aronowitz, Jervis, Philipp, and Wilder. Absent – Kolb, Mineka, and Montero. Medgar Evers: Present ̵= 1; Daly and Hastick. Absent – Simmons, Sparr= ow, and Stewart. NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Horelick, Hounion, Karthikeyan, and Alternate Matloff and Pinto. Absent – Dre= yer, and Richardson. Queens: Present – Bird, Casco, Gonzalez, Moore, and Savage= . Absent – Brody, Habib, Tse<= /span> and Zevin. Vacancies –= ; 2. Queensborough CC: Present – Barbanel, Jacobowitz, Pecorino and Alternates Burleson, and Dahbany-Miraglia.&nb= sp; Absent –Hest and Weiss. Vacancies – = 1. York: Present – Divale, Lewis, and Rosenthal. Absent—Frank.

Senator elect present:= Tronto (Hunter).

Governance Leaders present: Anderson (BMCC), Cooper (CSI), Kaplowitz (J= ohn Jay), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecori= no (QCC), Savage (Queens), Tobey (Brooklyn)= and Tronto (Hunter). Syd Lefkoe (Queens), Felipe Pimentel (Hostos), and Kimberly Reiser (= SUNY) attended. Parliamentarian And= rea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were also present.

I.    = Approval of the Agenda – The agenda was amended to delete the Report of The Chancellor, who had to be at another university function. As amended the agenda was accepted= .

II.   Approval of the Minutes of February 2006 –The Reports & Deliberations section was not available. The Minute was distributed. Appro= val was postponed to the next session.

III. Reports (Recorded in Reports & Deliberation= s)
        =      A. Chair

        =      B. Representatives to = Board Committees (distributed at the meeting)

IV.   = Nominations for Officers and Members-at-Large of the Executive Committee: Professor Sally Mettler (English, LaGuardia), chair of the Elections Committee, presided over nominations. Nominees for Cha= ir were = Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College), for Vice Chair Lenore Beaky (English, LaGuardia), for Treasurer Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay), and for Secretary Martha Bell (SEEK, Brooklyn). Nominees for the at-large seats we= re (in alphabetical order) Stefan Baumrin (Graduate School), Thomas Bird (Queens), Sandi Cooper (CSI), Anne Friedman (BMCC), Eda H= arris-Hastick (Medgar Evers), Alfred Levine (CSI), Terrence Martell (Baruch), and Philip Pecorino (QCC).

Nominations = can be made by self-nomination in the form of a notification letter to the Elections Committee at the Senate Office any time through May 16, or from the floor at the May 17 plenary.

V. Pa= nel on Conversion of Face-to Face Courses to Online Courses:
Professors Divale (York), = Reiser (SUNY CC Council Chair), and Pecorino (QCC) participated. The discussion and questions are recorded in the Reports & Deliberations section.

The meeting was adjourned a= t 8:45 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps
Executive Director

= REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF

THE THREE HUNDRED AND NINETEENTH PLENARY

SESSION OF THE UNIVERS= ITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

April 25, 2006

III. Reports:

A. Chair, Susan O’Malley: It’s my pleasure tonight to have with us Kimberley Reiser, who is chair of the Community Col= lege Governance for SUNY. I’= ve really enjoyed working with her. She’s going to participate on the pa= nel, about policies at SUNY in terms of changing courses from face-to-face to online. Kimberley Reiser, why don’t you stand up so people see who you are? She’s from Nas= sau Community College a= nd she’s a biologist, when she’s not doing governance. I put on the back table the Chair’s Report. I’ll just quickly go through it = and you may ask questions. At yesterday’s board meeting, Michelle J. Ande= rson was appointed as dean of the CUNY Law = School. It was not a particularly safe, conservative appointment. I think Michelle was the one that the faculty most wanted. She’s young, she’s not from New York, she has m= ore energy and more smarts, she demonstrated that she had done more homework ab= out the Law <= st1:PlaceType w:st=3D"on">School in the hour I spent with he= r. She is one of the nation’s leading scholars on sexual assault. I’m pleased that the Chancel= lor chose Michelle Anderson. Do you want to say anything?

Professor Andrea McArdle (CUNY Law School at Queens College)- Just= to second what you said, that she is full of energy and certainly well schoole= d in what we were and who we were. We were very impressed with that and with her energy, her knowledge, her abilities and we look forward to working with he= r. We look forward to the next years of her tenure, and I think we’re all excited about it. / Chair O’Malley- At the board meeting when she gave her acceptance speech, what did she talk about? All of = the accomplish-ments of the faculty of the CUNY Law School. I loved it because everyone was looking around going, “Hmmm,” and she’s going on, “and this faculty member did this and this and look at this.̶= 1; I thought, “Right on.” I don’t know much about Gary W. Moore who has been appointed Vice Chancellor for Student Development. The person = on the search committee was Robert Freedman from Baruch, so I’ll have a conversation with him. Moore is taking Otis Hill’s position and looks to be a good choice. The Chancellor said that he was eager to have someone who would work more close= ly with the Office of Academic Affairs. Moore= was Associate Provost as well as Vice Chancellor for Student Life at East Carolina University.

  &nbs= p;     Number 3 is quite a surprise. Emma <= span class=3DSpellE>Macari decided to retire as of June 15. She is the Vice-Chancellor for Facilities. There’s been an amazing amount of building that’s gone o= n in this University over the last few years; VC Macari manages an enormous budget. Her retirement came as quite a surprise. The UFS has a new Facilities Committee that has been working with her. Eduardo Del Valle has been appoint= ed interim Vice Chancellor for Facilities. We will make sure that we get a fac= ulty member on the search committee for her replacement. He may also apply for t= he position I was told. People seem quite pleased with him; he has been working for about the last year as Director of Design, Construction and Management = in Emma Macari’s office. At the last plenary I announced that Anthony J. Tamburi was appointed Dean of the John J. Calandra Italian-American Institute. That came through = the Board yesterday. You’ll= see in my report the many books that he’s written. I think it’s just good to get a scholar in charge of the Calandra Institute. He’ll also be a great additi= on to Queens College.

  &nbs= p;     Next, the Chancellor has received the report on Doctoral Sciences programs prepar= ed by the external team of reviewers. I have just received, through indirect channels, a copy of the report, and it seems to me the report is quite favorable. It has a very important sentence in it saying that for undergrad= uate science, it’s important that there are high level research labs on campuses so that undergraduate students can work in the research labs and become involved in research. I’ve appointed Bill Hersh, Queens College, to the committee to imple= ment the report and he has accepted. I hope to appoint other people to that committee.

The UFS spring confere= nce on the Faculty Experience Survey was wonderful. Proceedings will be published = in June and there will be a booklet of survey results that Dean Savage promise= s in June also. The survey has been very useful in the evaluation of the Preside= nts. Every time a President gets evaluated, in the Executive Session of the Boar= d of Trustees, I take out my survey results and say “Look at this.” I think it’s very important that we can continue educating the Universi= ty on the results. Campaign for Success reports -- I do believe we have them all now in the office. If you = have not seen your college’s Campaign for Success reports, you should ask = your provost for a copy. They should be available to you. At Queens College, it’s on your website. But we do have all of the reports if you need to see them. Number 8 in my Report: another draft of the policy on acceptable = use of computer resources has been sent by Vice Chancellor Schaeffer to committ= ee members. Hopefully, that will be voted on at the June Board meeting. Nine, = this one should upset you. A second draft of a policy entitled “Recommende= d Procedures for Handling Student Complaints about Faculty Conduct in the Classroom̶= 1; has been sent out by Vice Chancellor Schaeffer. Karen and I had a meeting w= ith him and he did incorporate a lot of our suggestions although I think there = are a few problems. The proposal will come to the Executive Committee and to the plenary. VC Schaffer said that he wanted to be prepared in case suddenly we were under attack from the Right, Horowitz and crowd coming after us. He wa= nted to make sure that there was a clear policy in effect. We have been spared m= ost of that, except for one incident at Brooklyn College. Karen, do = you want to speak to this issue?

Professor Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay = College) - One of his concerns is that students have a procedure that they know exists if the= re are complaints they would like to lodge. at Columbia at least students perceived that they had no process for making complaints and therefore they turned to groups outside o= f Columbia. So, thi= s is to provide students with a solution. / Chair O’Malley- The proposed poli= cy is very much within the college and within the department. Tomorrow the conference, Black Male Youth: Creating a Culture for Educational Success= , will be held at John Jay, starting at 8:30. According to Vice Chancellor Botman, there are 700 people signed up so if you are = one of the 700, I would get there early; otherwise you will be in the overflow room – if you can even fit in the overflow room. As you know, John Hope Franklin will be the keynote speaker. I put on the back table the article on the New York Civil Rights Coalition asking the U.S. Education Department’s Office for Civil Rig= hts to stop the Medgar Evers programs and to block CUNY from following through = on a planned black male initiative. I had hoped to have Vice Chancellor Schaeffer here tonight to speak about that Committee, but he will speak to the Execut= ive Committee about it soon. The Coalition is saying that it violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and a= lso Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which prohibits sex discrimination because it is the Black Male Initiative. Herman Badillo is a member of the Coalition, as is Michael M= yers and Edith Everett, a former trustee.

Lenore Beaky has been appointed to the committee implementing the reading and writing task force report for people who are interested in that. She also won the AAUP electio= n, which is super. She’s also editing the next UFS newsletter. Susan Jacobowitz has been appointed by the UFS to the Commi= ttee on Faculty Development to determine this year&#= 8217;s grant recipients. Retention Report -- I told you last time that if you want= ed it we’d send it to you and some people asked for it. I found it rather dismaying. It ha= d some inaccuracies: it had SEEK at = the community colleges and General Education as a major. Also there wer= e almost no faculty involved in the drafting of the Report. If they had had more faculty, maybe they would have had fewer inaccuracies and if they’d had more English Professors, maybe it would have been written better. Over and over = again the Report discusses mathematics. The problem is that students are accepted into the senior colleges and they’re not at an appropriate level to take colle= ge level math because the CUNY math exam is not at an appropriate level. There are also problems with the R= egents and the SAT as indicators to do college-level math. So students come in and they fail their first math course or their chemistry course -- those courses that require math. At least the Report is looking at it and saying that it&= #8217;s a problem. Eliminating remedi= ation in math at the senior colleges has caused, it seems to me, an enormous prob= lem that the OAA hasn’t figured out how to solve. The passing score for t= he math test could be raised, but then you’d hurt admissions. The report also says CUNY suffers from an attitude problem in the faculty’s not believing that our students are competent.= It also talks about “Killer Courses:” Calculus, Pre-Calculus, Quantitative Analysis, Accounting, Economics, Chemistry, Biol= ogy, Physics, Developmental Reading and Writing, and Composition Courses. I think you should take a look at = this Report because I think it’s a good example of how reports should not = be done.

Just two m= ore things, I called Canestrari’s office this afternoon to see if any more movement had happened on the budget. The assembly has overridden the Governor’s vetoes, restoring TAP and CUNY’s capital budget and operating money for the senior colleges, but the Senate still has not acted= , so everything is still bogged down. Finally, number 16 is a party. You’re all invited to my hou= se May 21 from 5:00-8:00. It’s= a celebration to end my four years as chair of the UFS. Vanessa Roe’s b= and, Paprika, is playing in my backyard. If you’ve ever heard Vanessa Rose’s band it’s supe= r: it just makes you happy. Lots of food, good talk and music= . (Vanessa was formerly a UFS Senator from Hostos.) Glenn, do you want to say something about applications to the Journalism School? =

= ;

Professor Glenn Lewis (English, York College) - Actually, this week we’re having our receptions, two days of receptions for the accepted students. / Chair O’Malley- How many students have you accepted? / Professor Lewis- I think we sent out about 90 all together, with a wait lis= t of about 20 and we’re going to accept 50 ultimately. The good news is the quality of the students that we sent acceptances to was incredible. We had a lot of students with 3.9’s from Harvard and Pr= inceton and places like that. We turned down somebody who had won multiple EmmyR= 17;s because we felt he didn’t belong in the mix. We also took a good numb= er of students from CUNY, from all of the different campuses, students with a = mix of backgrounds, a lot of them with very strong academic backgrounds with 3.7’s, 3.8’s, 3.9’s, also some students who had done a lo= t of publishing, or a lot of internships but had 3.1’s and 3.2’s, and they got in also. / Chair O’Malley – Diversity? / Professor Lewis- A lot of diversity. We got a lot of the same studen= ts applying to us that applied to Columbia, to Medill, to NYU. We were lu= mped with those schools. We’re already considered in the top 10 in the cou= ntry and we haven’t opened our doors yet. I got six or seven calls from accepted students this week who were interested in the feature writing cour= se that I’m going to be teaching. A lot of them were saying, “All right, we’ve eliminated = NYU, now convince me I should come to CUNY instead of Columbia or instead of Medill.” They don’t see the other sch= ools as really worth the difference in tuition. / Chair O’Malley - But you didn’t answer the diversity question. / Professor Lewis - I would say= at this point that a good 30-50%, depending on how you judge what falls into t= he diversity categories, would be from those categories. Age wise, we took an = age range of accepted students that goes from about 21 to about 53, so I think = we covered ourselves there; we have a preponderance of women that we accepted. It’s really exciting, we have a good numbe= r of foreign students from China and from Japan, from <= st1:country-region w:st=3D"on">Poland.= I would say about 30% of the accepted students were from CUNY, so that’s pret= ty good. We’re holding the first day of the reception, at the New York Times. So hopefully that will impress them. That’s Friday night and t= hen Saturday we’re doing, from 10 in the morning until 7 at night, worksh= ops and meetings with the faculty at the Graduate Center. So anybody = who wants to come and help sell the school, you’re welcome to come. / Cha= ir O’Malley- Thanks. Questions?

Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) -= On the business of student complaints, I understand that whatever process that is = to be set up is campus based. Does it have to be approved at 80^th Street? /Chair O’Malley- It’s campus based. / Professor Cooper- Now you mentioned that this was partly in response to the Horowitz threat and that thing. / Chair O’Malley- Yes, that is what= he told us. / Professor Cooper- There’s also this business of websites t= hat exist, all over the place where students can post anything they want to abo= ut a faculty member which does not get answered and which stays there forever ou= t in cyberspace as gospel truth. Some of it goes by the name of student evaluati= on, outside of the standard forms, another is just obviously who did poorly and they’re finding a way, finally, to get even. I don’t know how a= nd what can ever be done about this because obviously there’s a libel is= sue, a free-speech issue, and all the rest of it. I don’t have a proposal = but in one or two cases in this university and elsewhere these statements have = been brought in by the equivalent of P&B committees in tenure reviews and I’m not altogether certain that anybody knows how to handle this, starting with me. It’s actually a part of the same issue though it isn’t quite as systematically organized as Horowitz’s crowd. / Chair O’Malley- Have you had any experience in a P&B of this kind= of material being used? / Professor Cooper- Not in my coll= ege, but outside of CUNY.

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Professor Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay = College) - First of all, in CUNY of course the personnel process is supposed to be limited to what’s in the personnel file. But to the first question, Sandi, it is a university policy that’s being presented for the board= to act on, possibly in June, and the implementation is to be figured out at ea= ch campus. Sort of like the academic integrity policy that the board passed a = year ago. / Professor Cooper- The second point I was going to make is that I do think we need to find some time to have a discussion on this retention repo= rt. This is one of the most destructive documents I have read in a long time - = and this is a year of destructive documents. Here is a statement, that is basic= ally blaming the faculty for student failure in tough courses after the universi= ty did everything it could do to undermine the support systems that faculty had once created for students; and now it is asserting that we should focus on teaching and learning as the heart of our enterprise. Well, that’s fi= ne except that it’s a violation of the board bylaws which also mentions scholarship. I don’t know where these people were coming from when th= ey wrote this but they seem to be on another planet. At least on my campus, th= ey came up with a list of so-called “Killer Courses”, meaning this faculty member had an enrollment of 40 students, 25 finally finished, a bun= ch disappeared, this many got F’s. / Chair O’Malley- How about if = we write a response to this Report and then circulate it? People should send us their responses. [Unidentified Off-mic.] – Who’s the group = who did the report? / Chair O’Malley- Different committees wrote different parts.

Professor Philip Pecorino (Social Sciences Department, Queensborough Community College)- I rose in order to make a similar suggestion. When I heard from Judith Summerfield at a conference of our faculty at the end of January, the phrases “Killer Courses” and attitude problems, I = was embarrassed. I felt bad for my colleagues and now that I’ve seen the report, I’m disgusted. I’m embarrassed for the folks who put it together. Where do you accuse a group of people of having an attitude probl= em with no data whatsoever to support that? I think that’s slanderous, a= nd I think it’s fully worthy of a response on our part for the sake of the faculty of the university. We may not be able to set them right but at leas= t we have to uphold our position within the university and not allow ourselves t= o be slandered and characterized in that way. I will say that the “Killer Course” phrase came from another report but they adopted it all too readily and they speak it on every campus now. I second the idea, and I volunteer to help. / Chair O’Malley- People should email me their responses. Some of the people= who wrote the Report are Timothy Stevens, formerly of John Jay who is now a Fac= ulty Fellow in the Office of Academic Affairs; Phyllis Curtis-Tweed who is from Medgar Evers, Assistant Provost; David Crook, University Dean for Instituti= onal Research; Crys Benedicks, Deputy to Judith Summerfield; and Paul Arcario, Dean of Academic Affairs at LaGuardia.

Professo= r Vasilios Petratos (Political Science, Economics and Philosophy, College of Staten Island) - On the previous m= atter having to do with the transparency issue, and cyberspace, and the evaluatio= n of college faculty, this is precisely the reason we should accept the public m= eetings law. We should support the law. We should also make sure that the P&B committees are not exempt. We should insist on minutes taken at the P&B’s<= /span>. These are decisions that affect the lives of people. If we don’t do it in our own P&B’s then wh= y do we expect the same thing then that anybody can put anything on the web and anybody can read it? You said something about the executive sessions of the Board of Trustees, am I corre= ct? / Chair O’Malley- That is correct. / Professor Petratos- You do keep = minutes there, don’t you? / Chair O’Malley- = No. / Professor Petratos- According to the decisions = of the court, there is no confidentiality as such and also the votes have to be recorded and made public afterwards. / Chair O’Malley- I can’t = vote on the Board of Trustees. / Professor Petratos- Well, if you did. There is = no reason why anything should be confidential in a public institution. / Chair O’Malley- It is on the transcript and that is your opinion. / Professor Petratos- Including its budget. / Chair O’Malley- Others do not agree. =

Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, Coll= ege of Staten Island) - I’d like to switch gears to the discussion of the CUNY programs for b= lack men. Everything I’ve heard about this initiative has been positive, y= et when trying to defend it I am totally ignorant. Could I ask someone from Me= dgar Evers to stand up and spend three minutes just describing what the program really is.

Professor William Daly (Library, Medgar Evers College) - I’m not a teaching faculty, I’m a librarian but my college has been involved in the Black Male Initiative and we are especially looking at= men at risk. It is not the case that we are necessarily targeting just black me= n, but black men at risk. We are trying to hold them in the college. We might pull in a hundred men and= in the graduation for the two year we might only graduate 20 and that has been= our problem all the time. So, our president has spread throughout the campus th= at we have to intervene directly, don’t be afraid, if you see a person struggling. He would ask us to counsel them, mentor them, “don’t wait to be termed a mentor, please go after them.” Don’t forget he’s a pastor too. He has cultured that kin= d of environment in Medgar Evers and that is how we got that initiative. I see t= hat the law is actually looking at that because it is against the law of the United States, and I was worried about it from the beginning. / Chair O’Malley- Well, that’s a question whether it is or isn’t. I’ve heard seve= ral students speak very highly of the program who have been through it. / Profe= ssor Daly- It may be discriminatory because I remember one female student and she says, “They don’t have any studies for lesbians. Why can’t they do that? I am at risk.”.

Professo= r Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) - I just wanted to point out another inaccuracy on this retention report. T= he senior colleges, at least my senior college, do offer remedial courses, they just do it off of the tax levy budget. I= n fact I have taught a remedial course at Lehman within the last year, advertised = as such. Just not on the tax money. / Chair O’Malley- How is it paid for= ? / Professor Philipp- Our Research Foundation money – grant money. There= are remedial courses. In fact I&#= 8217;m in one of these “killer” disciplines and this was in fact a “killer” remediation course in chemistry. Thank you. / Chair O’Malley- Thank you.

Professor Lawrence Rushing (Social Science Department, LaGuardia Community College) = - What I’m hearing here tonight is different from what I’ve heard previously about the journalism school when it was presented by the Dean and the Chancellor. I think the minutes will attest to that. That is, that the rationale for the school was that it was not going to be so much competing = with Columbia and NYU but it was going to be an alternative to those schools and= it was going to be a different type of institution, in that it was primarily g= oing to serve our city and our students and the students from CUNY who could not afford the $40,000 or $50,000 that it costs for one year at the Columbia school. We never heard that it was going to be a place that we were recruit= ing students from Harvard and Yale who have so many more alternatives than our students who are coming from Lehman and Medgar Evers and York and Hunter an= d so on. My son went to Columbia Journalism School, but very few students come from CUNY to Columbia. They take a handful, really a token number. One of my son’s best frie= nds came from Hunter there, and he had a problem with Columbia, he felt like he was overwhelm= ed by the fact that so many of those students came from Ivy League institutions. = So our place was supposed to be a different place that takes our students and gives them the self-confidence that they can compete with anybody, anywhere= , in journalism school. So I think we ought to have more coming from CUNY, be a higher percentage. Another thing is diversity; they sold it as it’s g= oing to be a place with diversity. I’m very happy to hear that we have students coming from Poland and from China, but I’d also like to hear who’s coming from El Barrio and from Harl= em to this school, and from South Jamaica, because that is our responsibility. That is a harder task and I think that’s the task that we shou= ld do.

Professor Glenn Lewis (English, York College) - Once we took the students that were clearly deserving and g= ave out offers to those, we went over students that were on the bubble and overwhelmingly the students who got the benefit of the doubt were students coming from CUNY, students of color, students with different ethnic backgrounds. As far as the foreign students, we limited it to five. The oth= er thing, also, is what are students going to get as an outcome here? Ultimate= ly, if we wind up having out of the first 50 students, 15 or 20 coming from CUNY and they’re going to be in a school that’s considered comparabl= e to Columbia and is going to give them those kind of opportunities, internships= at a very high level, and they come out with that degree, that’s going t= o do a hell of a lot for them. What we didn’t want to do is to create the impression that we’re overwhelmingly just taking students from CUNY a= nd taking just students of color and going to produce a mediocre school with students of mediocre accomplishments. The students who come out with this degree are guaranteed a career on a high level. The other thing that should= be pointed out, if you look at what Baruch did for years with their graduate <= span class=3DGramE>program, they had a record of having one CUNY student = in three years attend there, or two at most every year. We’re going into this with the opposite kind of intent. Now, the only students that we eliminated that applied from CUNY were the students that were clearly nowhe= re near the qualifications. Any student that was close got in. / Chair O’= ;Malley- And how many students from Harlem, El Barrio or South Jamaica? / Professor Lewis- A good number = in comparison.

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Professor Julian Aronowitz (Math and Computer Science, Lehman College) - Getting = back to the idea of “Killer Courses” every single course is now a ki= ller course and I can tell you why. I have students who are taking four or five courses, are working full time and have a full family load all because it allows them to get out of college faster and meanwhile, they don’t ha= ve the time to do the work. If you do what they’re doing then a simple course where you just have to do a little reading for it and nothing more becomes a killer course. / Chair O’Malley- Thank you. Before we move onto the nomination= s, I want to say two things. At the next plenary we have elections and yet the U= FS office does not have election results from the following campuses: Baruch, Bronx Community College, CUNY Law School, Graduate School, Hostos Community College, John Jay, Kingsborough Community College, LaGuardia Community Coll= ege, Lehman College, Medgar Evers College, and York College. We realize that som= e of these colleges have held elections, but the results have not been sent to t= he UFS office. I also want to say tonight the following Senators and Alternates are completing their terms, a= nd we thank them. Hyacinth Martin has been active on the research committee; Anthony Creaco, BMCC; Laura Weingarten and Geor= ge Cunningham, Brooklyn College; College of Staten Island, James Kaser, Steven Monte, and Alice Farkouh who has resigned; Hunter, Tony Doyle, Lisa Finder,= and Jane Matthews who is retiring and who has done many years of service on the UFS; Lehman College, James Jervis, Esther Wilder who done wonderful work on= the Disabilities Committee; and New York City Technical College, Carl Mazza, Marcos Pinto, Dennis Bake= witz; and, finally, Queensborough Community College, Paul Weiss who had been a me= mber for many years. Let’s h= ave a round of applause for these people.

V. Panel on Conversion of Face-to-Face Course= s to Online Courses

Chair O’Malley- Why I decided this panel is important is that faculty have informed me that some administrators have told faculty to put certain courses online, and some administrators ha= ve refused to allow faculty to put courses online. Questions to be addressed by the panelists: Should control= of online courses remain with departmental curriculum committees? Should it go= to a college-wide curriculum committee? Should it just be left up to the facul= ty? Who owns the online course material? If a faculty member leaves CUNY, does = CUNY own the professor’s online material? Should faculty have to attend faculty development sessions on how to teach online or can one just decide = to put a course online? Then there’s faculty evaluation online. What we = did was ask a group of people to say a few words on this topic. It is Professor Divale from York College, and Phil Pecorino fr= om Queensborough, and Kimberley Reiser from SUNY. =

Professor Kimberley Reiser (SUNY) - I teach a “killer course” but I do not do it online. Susan and I have a very vital email relationship and Susan comes to our faculty council meetings and I’d really like to formally thank her for that. She’s very well received = by the faculty at SUNY and I had the opportunity to observe your Chair in Albany at the con= ference board meetings and lobbying and also with our faculty, and I’d just l= ike to congratulate you on electing Susan and supporting her over the last four years on behalf of the faculty at SUNY. Susan asked me “What’s going on with SUNY and online courses?” and certainly I’m not an expert at all and I will not be speaking for 10 minutes, but I will tell you the results of an informal survey I conducted on our Listserv last week when Susan posed these questions. It only involves the community college faculty members from the 30 community colleges of SUNY. The first question Susan po= sed was “Can faculty members decide to put a course online without training?” Of the 30 community colleges, 18 responded to my question = and 15 of 18 responses said that they are required to do training. So the major= ity of our faculty are required to do training prior to putting a course online= and on the three other campuses that do not require training, it’s very m= uch encouraged. The next question “Does a department curriculum committee need to approve a changed course?” Pretty much the answer was no to t= hat. Because the way it’s viewed in SUNY is that the course is a change in mode of delivery but the course is primarily staying the same so because it= ’s a change in the mode of delivery it is not necessary but on 5 campuses it d= id need to go through curriculum committee approval and three campuses the department weighed in on that issue. The last question really delighted our faculty and that was the question: “A faculty member is told by an administrator to put a course online, what is the procedure?” Basical= ly the overwhelming response was that these courses are owned by our faculty. A faculty member may be urged by administrators but the faculty has the last = word. At one school it was very interesting, one of our community colleges they s= aid that an administrator will ask the full time faculty, and if the full time faculty say no, they go to the adjunct faculty. If the adjunct faculty is qualified to teach that course then they will be allowed to do so. At SUNY = we have SLN-SUNY Learning Network- that many of our campuses participate in, it’s a huge endeavor from our provost’s office. We award 100 complete online degree and certificate programs, 4300 online courses annual= ly, 100,000 student enrollments, 2000 faculty participate. My home campus is Nassau Community College.&nbs= p; We don’t participate in SLN, we do our courses ourselves. That’s what I have to report to you. I’m sorry it’s so br= ief and I’m not an expert but I just did a quick survey. Thanks.

Professor William Divale (Social Sciences, York Community College) = - Can I ask what is the training that the faculty have to go through? / Professor Reiser- It depends on the campus. With SLN training it’s several work= shops, very involved workshops. Some campuses offer one-on-one training. / Profess= or Divale- I’m one of the ones who was just picked out of the haystack at the last minute, I found out yesterday. So that’s my excuse. I’= ve been teaching online for 3 maybe 4 years and the last couple of years, completely online. How I got involved in it was that my wife is doing a Doctorate online and I saw how she was taking her courses and she used to a= sk me to help with editing and so I could actually see her papers and the cont= ent.   Her Doctorate is in Technolo= gy and Education so I was also reading some of the literature about teaching online and I said “Yeah, I think I’d like to try this.” One of t= he things is that there is a tremendous literature out there. There are journa= ls, this has been going on in terms of the Internet almost 15 years, at least 10 years, and there are reports and studies. I think one of the things I’= ;m going to do is put on our website at York, just a series of links where you can find guides on how to do it, stuff like that. There’s plenty of literature out there. We are not inventing the wheel here. Now, the York College Senate just passed a three page curriculum committee proposal on online courses. They’ve been working on it for a couple of years now. How it a= ll started was one professor started teaching online and he almost did neglect= to tell the students. They showed up the first day of class and all of a sudden they were told it’s an online class. I couldn’t believe it. So = from all of that and the complaints, the Faculty Senate made a proposal that the curriculum committee should look into it and they pretty much sat on it for= a couple of years not knowing what to do. About the same time I just started teaching online and one or two other faculty at the college did as well, an= d at one point the college curriculum committee asked me for some advice and pre= tty much this is what they developed. When you read it, you’ll see itR= 17;s a little bit too much college wide control. Basically, the suggestions are = that the first time you want to try a course online you go to your department, t= he department approves it, you do it for a semester= . If you decide you want to do it ag= ain then you have to make a new course proposal that has to go to the college curriculum committee with a report from the department. I think that’= s a little bureaucratic, because it’s really the same content and the only thing that’s changing is, as you said, the delivery. So I don’t think it should have to have a whole new curriculum process. And then the college curriculum committee is going to form a subcommittee to vet these course proposals, which all have to be people specialized in online teachin= g. So it seems that the few people who are teaching online are going to be the ones who have to vet the courses so why go through all of this bureaucratic stuff to begin with? One of the suggestions that we make is that the person should undergo training but basically it’s to learn how to use BlackBoard; which is really kind of minimal. If you’re going to start to = do a course online and you want to encourage some of your faculty, let me tell y= ou what some of the benefits are. My discipline is = very small; in Anthropology we have few majors but decent enrollment because they take the intro courses. But I always had trouble offering electives if they were not required by a larger major, like Social Work requires “Peopl= es of the Caribbean” and that sort of stuff. If I offered something else, often it wouldn’t go. The first couple of semesters I offered courses online, they only enrolled 5 or 6 peo= ple and the Provost wanted to close it. I said “Look, if you combine thes= e 5 from this course, these 5 from the other, let me teach both of them and you just treat it as one course.” Fortunately he let me do that and after= 2 or 3 semesters the concept became more familiar with students because all o= f a sudden, all of these courses enroll completely. At one point we let the limit in introductory courses go as high as 30 and I think it was 22 or 24 for elect= ives. Now I think the whole thing is going to be 22 for electives. You can’t let online courses get too big because there’s a lot more writing involved and you’re going to be correcting papers like crazy. You won’t have time to do anything else so the enrollment has to stay dow= n. Anyway, the benefit for my discipline is now we offer many more electives t= han we did a few years ago, students take them, not because they’re dying= to take Anthropology but because of the convenience and especially CUNY studen= ts, who are parents, work full time. Being able to squeeze that extra one or two courses in where they ca= n be at home with their kids and work in the evening does it for them. We’= ve had another benefit where they’ve taken one or two courses simply bec= ause they were available, they maybe also took Anthropology 101 for a baccalaure= ate general ed requirement, and they find “Gee= , if I take two more I can have a minor.” I picked up probably 10 or 12 mino= rs in Anthropology that I didn’t have three years ago and that’s a= ll because of the online. So the small disciplines really have a lot to benefit from this. I’ve taught probably 12 different courses online, different topics, and I haven’t found a problem with any of them except the met= hods course. I haven’t quite figured that out because that’s much mo= re of a hands-on thing although I see that the methods courses are taught all = over the country. I saw the ones that my wife took that maybe the student had to= be at a higher level but it’s still going to be manageable. Also I’= ;ve taught 3 of my adjuncts -- they wanted to do it online and I taught them ho= w to do it. One was an excellent person who I couldn’t get to teach if it weren’t online because she worked in Manhattan<= /st1:City>, she had a child and she didn’t want to come all the way out to Queens. She’s a specialist in Africa. I helped her a little bit to get started so I have three adjuncts teaching.= The first time you do a course takes a lot of time, you have to lay out the who= le course from beginning to end, and you really have to plan everything. The second time, it’s like any other course where you’re tinkering = with it the first 2 or 3 times you teach it; except online you’re maybe do= ing a little more tinkering. The other thing is it’s not perfect the first time you do it and it doesn’t have to be. You learn skills as you go. I’m at the point now where I did some short voice/audio lectures, now I’m doing audio lectures with a little bit of graphics. I tried videotaping and it takes to much bandwidth and for students it’s no g= ood. You have to compress it so much it’s a horrible looking video -- it’s not worth it. Basically, what the tradeoff is that you’re = not doing all of those lectures, you’re doing smaller chunks, the students don’t have the commuting time and the classroom time but as a result I’ve been able to assign twice the reading I normally could assign an= d at least twice the writing. Whenever they complain I tell them “Look, you’re not spending time in class, and you’re not traveling.= 221; I firmly believe that the students are learning more than when they would listen to me talk for an hour, because they̵= 7;re doing so much more reading and they have varied writing assignments. In oth= er words, it’s not just the term paper. There is the term paper but there’s also book reports, there’s also internet reports, there’s field work reports, in other words people learn. One of the things I’ve learned, we’ve had no pedagogical training. We go through grad school and we’re dumped in a classroom and I’d had= no pedagogical training on teaching until my wife, who’s a teacher, told= me. Reading the online literature I learned about learning theory and pedagogy = and stuff like that so I’ve developed many kinds of assignments because different people learn differently so they have many opportunities. I’= ;ve had one instance of cheating in a term paper and I caught the person becaus= e I do internet searches and I found where she got her book report. So now I don’t do many book reports because that’s the easiest way to ch= eat. But you can design papers and projects that are so unique that they canR= 17;t cheat. And if they had to pay, it would cost so much because that person wo= uld have to do original research for it. Even when I give multiple choice tests online, essay tests, I’ve had no trouble there because you can time t= he test. Make the availability a certain bit, scramble the questions so each student gets a different test. All of this is available on BlackBoard, plus= the student evaluations I put up on BlackBoard as well. There’s a survey component w= here you don’t see what a particular student said but you get the aggregate results. So you can do just about everything, and I find that the only thin= g is that you’re at your computer more, there’s a lot more emailing.=    This sounds crazy, but I kno= w my students better online, although I don’t know what they look like. Because nob= ody can stay quiet, there’s discussions every = week and it’s part of their grade. If someone’s not participating I know, I can see it right away and I get on them so everybody has to partici= pate and I make it a big enough chunk of the grade, 15%, so that means no A if t= hey don’t take part in the discussion. So you can see= , BlackBoard also has management tools. You can see how often people go online, when they go online, what ti= me of day, you can track what’s going on. You’re emailing much more, = so I know the students. It’s funny because a student comes up to me and sa= ys “Oh hi, I’m so and so” and I didn’t know who they w= ere, didn’t know what they look like but yet I kind of know about their ki= ds or whatever. So that’s it, I’m kind of sold on it and it’s just like an interesting challenge, that’s all. I wish on my campus t= hat administrators would encourage us, there is none= of that, although I know they like it because we don’t have any classroom space. They’re starting to hold classes on Friday nights, on Sunday afternoon; they’re forcing people to spread out their schedule becaus= e we don’t have rooms. They don’t need a room for online so I know t= hey kind of like it but there’s been no leadership about wanting to do it. They don’t ask the faculty for it. Thanks.

Professo= r Phil Pecorino (Social Sciences, Queensborough Community College)- I’ve been teaching online for 6 years, I’ve taught over 60 fully online classes, probably more than 1600 students, none with a face. I’ve taught hybrid, which means partially online, about 30 or so classes. I do it for the students because I believe in access and opportunity and this modality extends that.= I don’t believe that it’s significantly better in terms of produc= ing the learning outcomes but people who otherwise wouldn’t be taking cla= sses are taking classes and are at least doing just as well at my classes as compared to my face to face classes. For myself I do it because it has impr= oved me as an instructor. It’s had an impact on my teaching style, in fact= , I can now say, without wincing, the word “pedagogy.” I’ve a= lso increased my vocabulary. I can say without embarrassment things like instructional design, modalities, learning objects, lea= rning units, modules. I’m going to focus on just the one topic and my conce= rn is with governance, faculty prerogatives, and academic freedom. The one question is how we should go about bringing it about that faculty will chan= ge the way in which they teach and teach online, or= the conversion of an already existing course into an online modality. I should point out I teach both in CUNY and the SUNY systems.= I received training in the programs that are used in both systems and fortunately I was given, not in CUNY but in SUNY, as an adjunct release tim= e as to go to workshops. Not just the programming, what they call course managem= ent system, but in instructional design and for more than a year and a half I h= ad available to me an instructional design assistant. They call them MIDS, Multimedia Instructional Design Assistants. CUNY is starting to acquire a f= ew of these now. But I learned it’s a whole lot more than knowing the mechanics. It’s how do I accomplish what I want to accomplish? All th= ose learning objectives, using the modality of instruction, and then assess how well it’s all doing. Over these six years I’ve learned quite a = bit from my students and from my colleagues across the coun= try who are engaged in this. I’ve been involved in workshops, shar= ing what I’ve learned with others. But the question is how we go about permitting, allowing, encouraging and never pressuring or forcing faculty t= o do this. I’ve seen every kind of variation. You don’t have to be an online instructor to use Google. You go to Google and you type in “on= line course approval process” and lo and behold you will find on the vario= us links just about every variety that you can imagine of how colleges are goi= ng about doing this. None of that really interests me because what I’ve observed over these years is that the faculty themselves have not been enga= ged in what’s been going on as much as they ought to be, and we have lost= the lead on this. We’re playing catch-up. I suppose it’s better to = come late into the whole arena than never to show up at all but when we do show = up we have to reassert, in some cases, that it is our prerogative to make a wh= ole host of decisions. The worst scenarios I can imagine and I have witnessed, = is when management or the administration is making the decision “we are going to put courses online,” “we’re going to offer progr= ams online,” “we’re going to develop classes here and here and here and here, now we’ll go find the faculty to do it.” That is= not good. Then you end up with the scenarios that Susan began to enumerate as to why we’re here tonight. Thinking a good deal about it and with my tremendous concern about academic freedom I’ve come to realize that t= he best way we ought to go about it (I’m going to use normative language here) is to keep the decisions with the faculty and where the decision is, = as to how an individual faculty member is going to teach, keep it as close to = that individual faculty member as possible and by that I mean, an individual fac= ulty member makes the decision to attempt to go into this area. Of course any professional educator would advise that person “do you know what you’re getting into? Do you want to undergo some training? Do you wan= t to see what goes on elsewhere with colleagues who are doing this?” A responsible faculty member would say, “Yes, of course I do.” So I’m not worried about faculty members’ bizarre behaviors of say= ing, “I want to teach online, I don’t know a thing about it but I wa= nt to start next week.” I haven’t heard of too many cases of that. I’ve heard a lot of horror stories and some of them are the fault of faculty on the basic responsibilities. But the way to address it all is to = keep the decision making with the faculty and as close to that faculty member as possible. So, I would say the first order of business would be as in doing anything. I’ve heard numerous times very good advice that with regard= to all of this online stuff it should be handled as close to how we handle all= of the other things we do when we educate. It’s a modality of instructio= n. I would not think that you would want to submit some faculty member that says, “You know, next semester I’m going to use group project work in= my course,” or “I’m going to use the problem solving approach,” or the case study approach, or any other pedagogic techniq= ue to a review process involving committees outside of that department and out= side of that discipline, beyond the reach of his colleagues or people experience= d in the discipline he or she is teaching. Why would you do that? Who knows best= how to teach that subject matter than the people who teach that subject? Who kn= ows best what variations work and don’t work but the people who have tried those variations? Why would you want to invite in people from outside to ha= ve an effective role in the making of the decision whether or not the instruct= or is going to be able to teach that course as she wants to teach it? I think a department that regularly reviews faculty performance would have a great interest in ensuring the efficacy of instruction. We do that by conducting observations and annual evaluations and if a faculty member is doing someth= ing that no one else in the discipline or department has ever seen before, you would think the department would call in people from outside who have exper= tise in that area and invite them in for a consultation and assistance, until the department develops the resources on its own to make those judgments and evaluations. What we’ve done at Queensborough is create a committee on distance education. The department might say, “yo= u know, we don’t have enough folks in our department that can tell whet= her or not Professor X is doing a good job or whether even this discipline is suited for that kind of instruction.” So you turn to some folks that might have this kind of experience and expertise and you’d ask them to consult. But to give them the authority over how a department is to schedule its classes and offer its classes and teaches its classes starts us down a dangerous road. What is that? The concept of academic freedom is that we ha= ve to do as academicians what we thing best in our academic judgment we ought to = be doing, in our research, in our publication and in our teaching. The freedom= is from outside interference. Where’s the outside? Certainly it would be contributors to the college, politicians -- they’re way outside. Also outside are the administrators, management, and outside are people in other departments. I think that in preserving our respect for academic freedom and our exercise of academic freedom we have to be sure that we do not allow outsiders into our prerogative into making academic judgments, and if we mu= st go outside of our disciplines and our departments because we lack the exper= tise we only go outside as far as we need to go to get that expertise brought in= . So what I’m advocating is that college curriculum committees stick with = what they’ve been doing. They approve courses, they approve programs. What= if a biology department says, “hey, we’= ve been teaching this biology class for 30 years and next semester we’re going to use a problem solving approach.” They don’t run to the curriculum committee for approval of that. A couple of people want to pilot= it and then they report to the department on how well it works compared to what they had been doing. It’s kept within the department, within the discipline. They care about how well they’re teaching and they know b= est how to teach what they teach. A central committee of the college starts us = down the road of bringing in people way beyond the expertise and the discipline = and that begins to invite in outside interference. My fear is, you mention Horowitz = and the Academic Bill of Rights, they have this thing about intelligent design = and they want people to “teach the controversy”. Suppose we said we will now set up an outside committee that will have authority over the pedagogic modalities we employ, and then that outside committee says, “from now on all the people who teach that discipline in that departm= ent (of which no member of the committee is a member) will use the ‘teach= the controversy approach.’” We would raise a hue and cry; they have= no right to be doing that. Why? Because who are they to tell the department and those skilled in the discipline how best to teach what they know best? So my fear is, and I’m sorry about your college doing what it did, that some people are getting into this interference with the decision making process = who have little background in the online and maybe are somewhat afraid of it, t= he unknown, and are suspicious that maybe it’s not that good, or that fa= culty are cheating and they’re not really teaching and they want to pass safeguards that set up decision making authority outside of the department.= So, I’m up here to say that in the course conversion process if we’= re going to have a review of what’s being done it should be kept as clos= e to the faculty member and the department of that faculty member as is possible. I’m not going to go through what I handed out to you; I won’t r= ead what you can read so I’ll stop there and just answer questions. / Professor Divale- I just want = to say that I couldn’t agree with Phil more and I just wish that we had this a couple of weeks ago before my school acted. It’s going to be hard to change it now but they started out well with first the department approval but then immediately it shot up to the college curriculum committee and then with a separate subcommittee. / Chair O’Malley- The intention is to keep faculty control of curriculum and = to think about what a sane policy should be. Questions?

&nb= sp;

Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) -= First of all I want to thank the members of the panel. I found myself agreeing wi= th every single thing you said. It was a great presentation. I would like to change gears and discuss the budgetary implications of online instruction. I first of all would like to applaud your college for stating, “Enrollm= ent in online courses is limited to 20 students per section,” because fra= nkly in an asynchronous teaching mode, 20 students is pretty much the limit. If = you get 40 students you spend twice as much time as you spend on 20 students. T= his is different than in other modalities where going from 20 to 40 students do= es not represent a doubling of the time spent by the instructor. Now, if you actually stick to this 20 students per section and then you provide, what y= ou called the MIDS, as is clearly necessary, and you provide 24/7 technical support for your [tape flip, in which he states that distance education was conceived and developed in part as a way to reduce the cost of education, b= ut it is now known in fact to cost more]…continuously by economists over= the last 45 years where the goal was to figure out a way to reduce the cost of instruction. You have contradictory impulses here, you have people who have never been in the classroom who believe that there must be a way to lower the cost of instruction and have come up with modalities that, if done properly, will increase the cost of instructi= on. I do not see a way out of resolving this tension. Perhaps you could comment= . / Professor Pecorino- About the cost, it is more expensive. I said it’s about access and opportunity. So the institution will be investing in exten= ding those and it will cost them more to teach classes online well. That’s= a key thing. There are a variety of faculty supports that need to be in place and student support services, if this is to work well, and that’s expensi= ve. In my ideal world, here’s the way I would see it go. The administrato= rs of a university realize that they’re there to serve the faculty, who = are there to serve the students. The faculty would tell the administration what= it needs, to do what it needs to do as best as it can do it; and some faculty group on a campus would go to the governing body and make the proposal that this modality of instruction be supported on the campus and the governing b= ody would adopt a multi-faceted policy that would insist on infrastructure of support, with all of those services, spelling out exactly what was going to= be done because the faculty would want it done well. Once the governance policy was adopted the administration would figure out how to get it funded and pu= t in place. Instead, what we have had are administrations who are encouraging faculty to do these things, putting in piecemeal a little bit here and a li= ttle bit there and faculty because, bless them, they want to teach, they want to teach well, be more effective, reach out to students. They’re engagin= g in unfunded experimentation with a lack of total support. Although the informa= tion is out there as to what’s needed to be effective, we did not build our structures based on that information. We moved into this haphazardly, almos= t, trying to play catch-up after years of underfunding. Now we want the glorio= us toys, the bells and whistles as quickly as possible. So yeah, it’s an expensive proposition, and more and more of the colleges are realizing that= . At BMCC it’s probably the only way they’re going to increase enrollment, given the limited physical space. Otherwise it’s somethin= g that you’re going to get into if you’re a President or a Provost bec= ause the Chancellor is pressuring you and your annual evaluation will have that = item on there that they’ll go over, “Show us how the educational technologies are being used on your campus.” But if you’re doin= g it because you want to have a more effective educational program, then you hav= e to realize that it’s going to cost you. It will. / Professor Divale- I t= hink everything that starts, starts this way -- underfunded= , haphazard, whatever it is that’s probably the process. We now require= a student to take a one hour workshop on BlackBoard before they start. Once t= hey take that workshop they don’t have to take it again, and the same thi= ng with the faculty. If there is any saving it’s in the room and that’s a big cost. A classroom is probably hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is, I think, = some savings. / Professor Levine- So as long as the faculty is overseeing the on= line instruction it will be more expensive, probably, in the long run. So the on= ly way an administrator can use this modality to save money is to set up online instruction that is not governed by faculty, to set up online instruction w= here there will be contingent labor teaching the course, where there will be no faculty oversight and where it will be subject to a board that really is not controlled by faculty. Hopefully CUNY will not go this route. / Professor Pecorino- Faculty who want to ensure quality education must act out against= the attempts of management to offer education on the cheap, no matter what form that approach takes.

Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island)- Maybe Staten Island is unusual, but at least onc= e a year colleagues in my department come to a meeting and list the number of History majors, who were presumably going to get honors, who have to be kic= ked out for plagiarism, and this is with in-class courses. I think I have one e= very three or four months who has done something. Eve= n I can find them, the old lady who’s not interested in this stuff. We are all wondering how you can prevent a student from having his mother, who has a degree from Barnard, fr= om doing the work, which is one of our cases, especially if you never get to s= ee this person and all you get are the writing samples from the mother. Phil, I think one of the things that troubles me also ab= out your position is that, as a faculty member, I vote on degrees along with my colleagues every year. I am responsible, college wide, along with everyone = for what goes on in every class. That means a college wide curriculum committee plays a certain role in supervising. In our place, courses are beaten up al= ive by that college committee before they’re approved. We are very rough = on people and when that course finally goes through, it’s something everybody is willing to stand behind. We have senate meetings which get hun= g up over one course. This of course is what the administration calls, “ridiculous, waste of time, faculty obstructionism,” that list = of phrases. This is what I call my responsibility and I think it covers everything, whether it’s a course that’s done with a quill pen = or the laptop. I can’t see the notion that department supervision is sufficient since I have seen too many departments behaving less than admira= bly. One last point, I can see one area of savings, it would cost me far less to= do this. I wouldn’t have dry cleaning bills, I wouldn’t buy new clothes and my gas and toll bill would be nothing compared to the $20 it co= sts me to commute. It would be a cinch to start putting some of that money away= for some grandchild or another. / Chair O’Malley- Response? / Professor Pecorino- I get the plagiarism question quite a lot, in fact. If you go on Google and type in “plagiarism” I have a website that comes up somewhere in the top 30 and I get communications from people around the cou= ntry asking about the information I have there. There are strategies to reduce plagiarism in every instructional setting and in particular in the online setting. I don’t think I get anymore plagiarism in the online classes= as compared to the face-to-face classes. It’s the way you structure your assignments. Now if Mom’s writing the paper, I wouldn’t know th= at but when I read the written assignments, since half my grade is based on di= scussion interaction with me and others, I would say, “Oh, I wonder…this= is a different writing style and a whole other level than John Doe writes every single day to me.” I would be suspicious, so my suspicions might lead= to me asking John, “could you come meet with me?” or “could you submit another piece of writing on this topic?” Fortunately in = the community college where I teach, and this is going to sound funny, most of = the people who plagiarize are not that bright, and so just like Bill I can usua= lly go and find out where they got it from because they don’t have a lot = of money to go to the custom order places and so they’ll just go out the= re and Google it, so I’ll Google it. I’ll put what they put in and= it will take me to right where they got it from. So I haven’t had that m= uch of a problem with plagiarism as compared to the basic face-to-face setting because my instructional design is one that mitigates against it. I have checks, ways in which I can take a look at the way they write, the way they think and I can say, “Well, this work is totally different from your answer to critical thinking questions on my discussion board.” But the other question you raised was about the curriculum committee. I chaired our college’s curriculum committee for seven yea= rs and served on it for another three, and we beat up a lot of course proposals th= ere and degree proposals. For some years people thought of me as a tough guy an= d I wouldn’t allow them to get through, but I kept saying, “All the “t’s” have to be crossed, the “i’s” dot= ted, it’s got to add up, it’s got to work.” But I’ll tell you what that process is like. Never did we, after the approval of a course= and a program, go asking departments, “how are= you teaching the classes? Please tell us, please submit samples of what you are= doing, we want to review that.” And I think it’s a mistake if we treat this modality as essentially different from any other modality of instructi= on in terms of the way we handle it in governance. I think it’s a mistake because of the implications for academic freedom. I’m sorry but that’s my position. / Professor Divale- 100% I agree. Some colleges subscribe to service= s like Turnitin.com and Plagiarism.com. There are also good programs and good serv= ices. In fact at my wife’s school you have to submit it to this plagiarism website and a copy of that report has got to be attached to your paper and = they do that the first couple of times. There’s also another company’= ;s site that schools subscribe to where the students are advised the day befor= e to submit their paper or draft and they get a response back which analyzes the= ir writing style and the logic of their paper. This helps them to rewrite befo= re they submit. But I think the most important thing tonight is the last thing Phil said, that this is a different modality, it’s not different cont= ent and really the department level is the best place for that. / Professor Rei= ser- If I could respond, I actually agree with Sandi on this although the data t= hat I have from our SUNY schools, as I told you, most of them just refer to thi= s as a mode of delivery change. At Nassau Community College where I’m a professor we do require curriculum committee approval and our departments h= ave to sign and present a lengthy form entitled “A Letter of Sameness,= 221; demonstrating that the course is comparable, and certainly in a discipline = like micro-biology, my discipline, that has I believe significant implications, = that whole concept of “sameness.”

Professo= r Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College)- In terms of the recent controversy= about CUNY’s online BA, one of the issues that came up was, in fact, the le= vel of technical support given to the faculty members who teach in that program. We’ve heard some good things about the SUNY experience and I think in= our own discussion, at least in my participation, it was in terms of college laboratory technicians, but you have a different word for it, MIDS or somet= hing like that. So my question for the group is, in terms of the CUNY experience, how much support will the faculty members get in= our programs or are they going to do it, as Bill described, essentially alone? = Which is really in the long run, especially if you’re g= oing to be doing scholarly work, perhaps particularly for young faculty members,= not really supportable because they also have to do other things. So do = you think that in the CUNY offerings there is going to be administrative support for quite expensive technical help for the faculty? / Professor Pecorino - = When I got involved in the online baccalaureate program development, when SCORE = got diverted to that, we were asked to volunteer for different sub-committees a= nd I volunteered for Faculty & Student Support Services. We put together a l= ong list which was well received, but not by the decision makers, the funders, = but when it went up to funding, funds were provided. I’m happy to say in addition to having technical support and physical apparatus, the software, = the hardware, and mechanics who know how to work that and can teach that to faculty, they have hired a very highly skilled, knowledgeable, experienced, media instructional design assistant. I keep asking, “when can I call her, when can I call her, where will she be,” but soon. They’re working out details with campuses. I’ve been pleasantly surprised giv= en my CUNY experience that it seems like they are moving along to fulfill the recommendations that we made about what you need in place in order to have a successful online program and I think it’s because the administration really wants it to succeed. If I’m involved in it I’ll be looking forward to it becoming a mod= el of how to do these things, but it will be an expensive model. / [off mic] - Where’s the money coming from? / Professor Pecorino- Probably, as you know, it’s taken from tax-levy funds. / Professor Divale- Also, it= 217;s really not that much. It’s not enough because they plan to offer 40 courses and with one person as a technical adviser, you can’t get much time, especially if you’re at different campuses. They are paying an adjunct rate to develop the course. &= nbsp; It’s not as good as I’d like but I’m just happy to= see something. / Professor Pecorino- You may not have heard that they are proceeding to have what are called consortial faculty and the consortial faculty are to receive a reduction in their teaching loads at their own campuses in return for teaching just one section and serving on committees. I’m hopeful that included in those committees will be faculty develop= ment and those sorts of things where faculty can assist other faculty in what th= ey need to know to do these things well. / Chair O’Malley- Maybe we did = have an effect, the UFS, in pushing the consortial m= odel.

Professor Leslie Jacobson (Health & Nutrition Sciences, Brooklyn College) - First of all, I’d like to ask you who owns the course? That was one= of the questions that Susan had asked. That’s question number one. / Profess= or Pecorino- Pretty much it’s the faculty member that owns the course an= d if you’re experienced in doing these things you’re creating someth= ing which would give someone else a basic idea about how to go about it, but be= ing individuals it’s probably too idiosyncratic for someone else to just = pick it up and go use it. What they’re doing right now is what’s been done over the last few years to get faculty to develop courses -- they give= stipends and then it’s your material, you teach it. Right now they are offering whoever develops the course, in case anyone else ever teaches the course us= ing any of their materials. But I believe that the materials are yours but you’re giving the right for other people to use them if they so choose. / Professor Jacobson- So if you= go to another university you can take your course with you? The college does n= ot own it. / Professor Divale- Yes. / Professor Pecorino- That’s correct= . / Professor Divale- That’s even been earlier policy.   Also it’s no different= than when you teach a new course you might ask a few faculty members at other pl= aces “can I have your syllabus?” and it’s that kind of a thing. Baruch has probably been more involved in this technology and support for a while. I’ve been to a couple of their conferences and they do some th= ings which I don’t think are good. In other words, they’ll videotape= a professor’s hour long lecture and then put the thing online. I don’t think that’s such a good idea because all of the research= is that nobody is going to sit and watch a video for an hour of somebody doing= a talk. Also, that could be a way of canning courses but it takes out all of = the spontaneity. Baruch is a little more ahead in terms of pushing this stuff b= ut I don’t think it’s necessarily good. / Professor Jacobson- My sec= ond question has to do with the fact that it’s very expensive. It is my understanding that the Un= iversity of Phoenix makes zi= llions of dollars. How do they do th= at? / Professor Divale- High tuition rates and it’s all done by part time faculty. / Professor Jacobson- I think that’s what might happen here = as well. / Professor Divale- In fact my wife’= ;s tuition is $10,000 for two semesters. So their tuition is high and thatR= 17;s how they make the money. I think it’s heavily adjuncted. / Professor Jacobson- It is, heavily, and I got a call from them asking if I would join their faculty. It’s all adjuncts. / Professor Divale- The adjunct facul= ty really can’t develop courses. They really need full time faculty to develop courses, to develop curriculum. If you look at the good online plac= es like Nova Southeastern that have a regular campus, or = Capella, or the other big state universities, they don’t go the whole adjunct model. It’s only these private business places that only have three or four majors, usually psychology, business and education, not a wide range. / Professor Pecorino- Those decisions should be kept as close to the people involved in the actual activities, and that means it’s the department= . The department schedules classes. =

Professor Diane Sank (Anthropology, City College) - I think = the issue that should have first been discussed was whether we should go along = with this at all? Because I really= think this is the end of institutional education. I think this is a disaster. It dehumanizes education. It’= ;s the low point of the computer age where people are going to get their complete education at home, except for maybe lab courses and people will not interact with people. I think it will have a negative effect. I hear stories about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and injuries from the Blackberry, or whatever. The o= nly people I think who are happy about it are the politicians who see this as a cheap way to educate. I don’t understand why we’re going along = with this. It may be inevitable but really I think it’s the worst thing th= at could happen. At City College several yea= rs ago without our knowing it one of the departments, I think it was History, star= ted an online course. We suddenly woke up and I saw it in the catalog, an online course. We never had any input. The point is there was a time when I first = came to City <= st1:PlaceType w:st=3D"on">College in the 70’s when the= y said “would you please tape your lectures because it would benefit the students. We’ll put it in the library and the students who miss class= es because of illness will come there.” We fought it, we said no because that was the beginning we saw of getting rid of teachers as employees. Perh= aps it should be limited to exceptional cases, people who are so disabled they can’t get to the college, people who have job or family commitments.<= span style=3D'mso-spacerun:yes'> Limit it to those people with valid reasons, but to open it up to everything I think is horrendous. I think you’re just signing your death warrant. / Professor Pecorino- Faculty should have been involved from the beginning on the decision of whether or = not these courses would be offered and then how they would be offered. ThatR= 17;s one of the four things the Supreme Court said is involved in academic freed= om, the decision who teaches, what to teach, how it’s taught and to who it’s taught by setting pre and co-requisites. I agree with you that it’s not for everyone and presents a threat if you throw it open. Not= a threat to everything that we’re involved in but a threat to the stude= nts because they’ll generally withdraw or they’ll fail if they̵= 7;re not suited for this mode of instruction so we, the faculty, should be invol= ved in putting in place the curriculum safeguards for students taking this moda= lity of instructions. / Professor Sank- I say we should not accept it because you’re losing that interaction when there’s a live student body= in front of you, the interaction. They have conference methods where you can access different colleges and different classrooms through electronic means. It’s not the same as having the physical presence. It’s the ana= logy between watching a movie and watching a live play. The people from the thea= ter will tell you that there’s a difference when live actors are on the s= tage interacting with one another and the audience versus seeing a movie. I thin= k we should oppose it. / Professor Divale- I think you’re correct that the traditional form of education is better. But unless you’re middle cla= ss and traditional aged where your parents can take care of you and send you to school, for most of our students at CUNY that’s not the situation. They’re non-traditional; they’re adults, full time jobs, with children or not even jobs with children. In other words, in many cases they wouldn’t be able to take these courses if they weren’t offered = this way. / Chair O’Malley- I had hoped Roberta Kliba= ner from Staten Island in Computer Science w= ho does believe that many courses should not be taught online could have spoken tonight. / Professor Sank- I would like to revisit this whole issue of whet= her we should oppose online courses except in exceptional cases. / Chair O’Malley- One final question.

Professor Lenore Beaky (English, LaGuardia Community College)- On this question of governance, we’ve just he= ard about how the dynamic has come in large part from the administration to individual faculty members. Y= ou wake up and you suddenly see “Oh, look we have courses, who knew!R= 21; It seems to me that you keep faculty governance involved precisely by invol= ving departmental and college curriculum committees. I do not think it should be necessary to take a course, English 101, that we accepted before and make it go through identical processes if it’s on= line but I would like to see something go through departmental and college wide.= I think that is how faculty as a faculty, as a group, hav= e some sort of control over what’s happening. Otherwise the dynamic is strictly between my provost or my administrator and me. Why do we have unions? Becau= se we want to assert ourselves as a group and I think that the way we do that = is through curriculum committees, just to know what’s happening and to h= ave some sort of control over what’s happening. / Chair O’Malley- T= hank you very, very much.