THE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-FIFTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

April 29, 2003

The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:30 p.m. in Room 9204/5 at the Graduate School and University Center. 60 voting members were present:

Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Fridman (KCC), Friedheim (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), Rodriguez (Hunter), Savage (Queens), Sohmer (CCNY), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were present. 

I. Approval of the Agenda: Added as item V.B. was Resolution on Government Surveillance. The agenda was adopted as amended.

II. Approval of the Minutes: The reference to "Lynn Hall" was corrected to read "Lenore Gall" (New York City College of Technology.) The Minutes were then approved as corrected. [A missing section of transcript of item 5A, Resolution on the Integrity of the Promotion and Tenure Process, is appended to this minute.]

III. Reports: (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

A. Chair

B. The Chancellor

C. Welcome New Trustee Carol Robles-Roman, Deputy Mayor for Legal Affairs &

Counsel to the Mayor

D. Professors Allan Wernick and George Sussman on Immigration and the Patriot Act

IV. Old Business

Resolution on Student Academic Integrity and Plagiarism – Adopted unanimously by voice vote:

Whereas, CUNY faculty are reporting an increase in the number of plagiarized and improperly or inadequately documented papers they receive, and

Whereas, A University-wide program and initiative is needed to prevent and address problems of plagiarism and cheating by students, and

Whereas, The easy access to material on the Internet, including both free and for-purchase term papers, is viewed by many faculty as a contributing factor to this serious academic situation, and innumerable websites on the Internet pose a challenge for faculty who wish to prevent plagiarism and who wish to respond effectively and appropriately to suspected and actual plagiarism, and

Whereas, In recent years, CUNY students have cited plagiarism by students as one of their issues of concern, and

Whereas, Colleges have available many resources to deter and to verify suspected plagiarism, such as providing to faculty online subscription services like turnitin.com and plagiarism.com that allow faculty to compare papers with extensive databases of billions of documents, and

Whereas, The Chancellery has established a Taskforce on Academic Integrity,

Therefore Be It Resolved, That the UFS recommends that the Taskforce include in its study the possibility of subscribing to a web-based company such as turnitin.com or plagiarism.com as well as study policies and practices at CUNY and elsewhere, and be it further

Resolved, That the University Faculty Senate recommends that the work of the Taskforce be only one part of a larger CUNY-wide course of action to define academic integrity and plagiarism and to address and deter problems of plagiarism, and that this larger CUNY-wide course of action – which may be part of the work of the Taskforce – include the education of students about the issue; faculty development programs to provide faculty, including adjunct faculty, with information about best practices; and the posting of links on the colleges’ and CUNY homepage to provide students and faculty with information that is easily available and that can be accessed privately and as needed, and be it further

Resolved, That should the Taskforce recommend and the Central Office concur that CUNY shall subscribe to an online company such as turnitin.com, the UFS recommends that it shall be University policy that all CUNY students be informed of this fact and be informed on a regular basis so as to provide a deterrent to plagiarizing others' work and also to provide a deterrent to the purchasing or borrowing of work written by others, which might have been plagiarized by the seller or lender of that work, and be it finally

Resolved, That the UFS recommends that the Taskforce consult with the UFS and other relevant groups and report its recommendations for comment with regard to best practices, policies, and services.

V. New Business

A. Resolution on CPE Exemptions - Adopted unanimously by voice vote:

Whereas, students who entered CUNY prior to Fall, 1999 had been exempt from the CPE if they were able to graduate before September, 2003; and

Whereas, students who transferred to CUNY prior to Fall, 2000 had also been exempt from the CPE if they were able to graduate before September, 2003; and

Whereas, students entering prior to Fall 1999 or transferring prior to 2000 had not been informed officially that they had to take the CPE before this current (Spring, 2003) semester or if they did not graduate by August 2003, they would be subject to the CPE exam requirement ; and

Whereas, it is now unfair to require that they now take this exam after having been allowed to proceed towards graduation without being required to take the CPE; therefore

Be it resolved, that these students continue to be exempt from this exam.

B. Resolution on Government Surveillance - Adopted unanimously by voice vote:

Whereas, a free and open atmosphere is vital to a university; and

Whereas, The City University of New York is very much an international community, with students and faculty from many countries making valuable contributions to its intellectual life; and

Whereas, recent federal government polices include

(a) the requirement that all colleges register all international students with the Bureau of Immigration and Customs Enforcement through the SEVIS system and report any student's change in course-load or major to the bureau;

(b) a Patriot Act clause that empowers federal agencies to inspect all library patrons' records without any notice to the patrons-a power opposed by the American Library Association; and

(c) the Special Registration program that requires males over the age of 16 from numerous countries who are not U.S. citizens or green card holders to report to the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, subjecting both those who do report and those who do not report to possible arrest; now therefore be it

Resolved, that the CUNY University Faculty Senate objects to such federal government surveillance policies which undermine the free and open atmosphere of its campuses and which create fear and intimidation among the international students and faculty that belong to its collegiate family.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:45 P.M.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps, Executive Director

Transcript of Item 5B, Resolution on the Integrity of the Promotion and Tenure Process, at April 29, 2003 Plenary:

Professor Sohmer (Math, CCNY): This emanates from the Executive Committee. It must be mentioned, I think, that the Board of Trustees Bylaws, by one of their own articles, incorporates the campus governance structure, so that's referentially in there.

Chair: Is there any discussion on this?

Professor Davidson (Computer Information Systems, La Guardia Community College) – I'd like to second the motion.

Professor Burke (History, Lehman) –I rise to speak against the motion. And in terms of intellectual truth in advertising, I should let everyone know that I was one of the 24 historians who signed the letter drafted by Professor Akira Iriye at Harvard University asking Chancellor Goldstein to turn down the recommendations - it's not 'overturn' the recommendations - of the committees at Brooklyn College and President Kimmich and in fact to grant Professor Johnson tenure and promotion. It strikes me odd that this is a resolution dealing with one particular case and the case of this faculty member is not mentioned. It strikes me odd as well that since the resolution does talk about due process that Professor Johnson, who claims that his due process was violated systematically at Brooklyn College, has never been contacted by the University Faculty Senate. Professor Johnson would be glad to talk individually or collectively to the Executive Committee or the Faculty Senate in this case, but I do wonder why the haste to pass this resolution without discussion with one of the participants. Along those lines I wonder as well why the University Faculty Senate in fact is asking the University to change its Bylaws. That is to say, if the Chancellor follows your suggestions of non-interference on campus procedures, you're asking the Chancellor in effect to withdraw from his position as the Chief Academic Officer of the University, you're asking him in fact to merely rubberstamp decisions that are made on campus and decisions that are passed by the college President. And it strikes me that Chancellor Goldstein in this case by intervening after getting recommendation from the Vice-Chancellor for Legal Affairs that serious violations of procedure had happened at Brooklyn College. Chancellor Goldstein in fact was carrying out his fiduciary responsibility towards the University. And finally, while I certainly don't want to suggest counter motions since I'm not familiar with the parliamentary procedure of this particular body, I do want to point out both to the Executive Committee and to the University Faculty Senate a recent resolution passed by the Student Government at Brooklyn College, if I can quote two small sections: "Whereas Chancellor Matthew Goldstein resolved the Johnson tenure case controversy by appointing a select panel of distinguished scholars from other CUNY institutions, therefore be it resolved that the CLAS, College of Liberal Arts and Science Student Government, urges Chancellor Goldstein to appoint a select panel of distinguished scholars from other CUNY institution to review the Brooklyn College personnel process and to recommend improvements therein." I will be voting against your resolution and I strongly suggest that you take into consideration the voice of the students on Brooklyn College's campus. Thank you.

Professor Sohmer (Math, CCNY): Can I respond to some of that? As proposer it seems to me I have the right of response. We have suffered as a University for some years antedating Matt Goldstein and we've lost a Chancellor or two as a result of that. The important thing that this resolution is about is not Professor Johnson. The important thing that this is about is faculty self-governance. Were the Chancellor ultimately to have done what the Chancellor did with the following of procedures, this resolution would not exist. There was a leap to judgment and an action by a board, which overturned governance the way things are done at Brooklyn College. They may not be very good - I think they are as a matter of fact; I've read much about governance - but they followed the governance procedure and the Bylaws to the letter …(tape switched) …and some people who were not involved, and I think governance was at no point addressed in the actions and we are worried, and I speak for the Executive Committee but I believe I speak for them correctly that a slippage in the enforcement of governance is always a dangerous thing. As I said, we've had several Chancellors prior to this Chancellor who did all kinds of bizarre things to our Bylaw and our governance, and for a claim to be made that this would be an abnegation of authority by the Chancellor were he to have permitted the governance to have taken this course is just specious.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island and The Graduate School and University Center) – I also rise to support this resolution and to point out that, in addition to the correct point that it is not about a case and individual, the individual in any case in CUNY who has been rejected for tenural promotion has an opportunity to use the appeals process, which is in fact contractual and part of the Bylaws. That was circumvented in addition to the governance. So both the Union and Conciliar or Senatorial organizations of the University and the campus were overridden. This is not the first example in the last two years of an initiative from the Chancellor and the central administration based on intervention from Trustees, and I don't believe we would be doing ourselves a favor to roll over and play dead and pretend that collaborating in this kind of way is going to further our interests in any case. I hope we can get as close to a unanimous support for this resolution as possible.

Chair: Tonight we have with us a new Trustee, Carol Robles-Roman, and I’m greatly honored that she agreed in her very busy schedule to come and speak to us. She has to leave by 7, so she’s speaking first. Let me just say a little bit about her. She was appointed by Mayor Bloomberg in June 2002 as a member of the Board of Trustees. She was sworn in as Deputy Mayor for Legal Affairs on January 1, 2002. She serves as Counsel to the Mayor and oversees several City agencies, including the NYC Commission on Human Rights, the Criminal Justice Coordinator’s Office, the Mayor’s Office to Combat Domestic Violence, the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, and the Mayor’s Office of Immigrant Affairs and Language Services. She received her law degree from NYU School of Law, receiving the Vanderbilt Medal for extraordinary contribution to the law school community, and she received her Bachelor of Arts from Fordham University at Lincoln Center. Please welcome the Honorable Carol Robles-Roman.

Trustee Carol Robles-Roman: Thank you, Professor, for this invitation. I just wanted to have this opportunity to introduce myself. You will hopefully be seeing me at your campuses. That is the main commitment that I made to the Chancellor and to the Mayor when I accepted this appointment, that hopefully by the end of the year I will have visited every single one of the campuses and that’s actually one of the reasons why my schedule is so busy in addition to working with the Mayor of the City of New York. I take this responsibility very seriously so I’m doing sort of a Clintonesque kind of listening and learning tour and I’m speaking to students and faculty, such as yourselves, and I’m speaking to parents also, believe it or not, who have students in the CUNY system who are also giving me information and helping me focus on where our priorities should be. One of the priorities that I’ve identified for myself, and I will be speaking to other individuals such as yourselves as to what else we should be focusing on, is the issue of placement of CUNY students. No secret that we are in a downturn in this economy and it’s going to be critical that we provide our students with every bit of assistance that we can in terms of securing jobs when they graduate, and I think that’s obviously something that the Trustees should be focusing on, and I know that everybody in this room already does everything that they can, but anything that we can do to defer to that mission I think it’s going to be very important, and other creative partnerships. I don’t know if folks have read about the 311 call centers that the Mayor has announced, which hopefully once we have it running full steam ahead will truly revolutionize the way we deliver City services in the City of New York. We have hired and will continue to hire CUNY students part-time to serve as the main engine that runs that, the call center operators. I think that’s a demonstration of creative synergistic partnership and we would love to continue thinking of other ways that we can work with CUNY. Obviously the budget is going to be a

serious discussion that we’re going to be engaging in from here on in across the board with all City agencies and that’s going to include CUNY, and I also want to be candid and frank once we reach those points. But the Mayor clearly, no secret here as well, has made education the number one priority of his administration. Reforming the Board of Ed is number one on every Deputy Mayor’s agenda, in some way part of their portfolio, which makes my position here at CUNY very important to both the Mayor and to myself personally. So again, thank you for the invitation, and you will hopefully be seeing me in your colleges.

Professor Benenson (Mechanical Engineering, City College) – I’m sure you’re aware that there has been some criticism in the past of the Board of Trustees of CUNY for a number of reasons. / Trustee Robles-Roman – I’ve never heard that before! / Professor Benenson – Well, I’m here to teach you I guess--that’s what I do for a living. One of the criticisms has been that the Board of Trustees has been more attentive to the wishes and the desires of the politicians that appointed them as opposed to those of the students and faculty and staff that make up CUNY. In fact there is a bill in Albany, I’m sure you’re aware of this as well, that would preclude you from being a member of the Board as a Mayoral appointee. My first question is what’s your view on that issue and my second question is what role do you think the Board of Trustees should play in fundraising? In our University, they have often played a role in attacking the very institution that they run. / Trustee Robles-Roman – In terms of fundraising, you have different Board members that can or cannot fundraise. I would be guided by Counsel in terms of what is the legal position first of all in terms of fundraising and if there are no legal impediments then I would be guided by the Chancellor to find out what is the Trustees’ overall responsibility. We haven’t really addressed that as a body yet. Philosophically I can tell you generally that I think that we are in dire straits financially across the board, not just CUNY, the City of New York is as well, and I was actually quoted publicly about a month ago in the New York Post stating that we need to start thinking as City officials and as public servants--myself I am prohibited from fundraising--that the laws need to look at ways to allow me in my public capacity to be able to fundraise on behalf of a public institution that so clearly is serving the public interest. So I’m on record in terms of my public position. / Professor Benenson – And what’s your position regarding the political independence of the Board? / Trustee Robles-Roman – Number one, I think that the thrust of the question is whether the folks have been serving CUNY well, I think that really is the bottom line, and CUNY has made tremendous inroads and is really at the forefront of public education in the country. Whenever I travel around the country, people recognize this body as top. So the people who have been serving in the past, whether they were political appointees or not, they did something right in order to be able to accomplish that type of reputation. Speaking personally in terms of being a political appointee of an elected official, I’m in a very wonderful position because I am appointed by a Mayor whose marching order is "sit on that Board and do the right thing" for the students, and that’s it. I don’t get a phone call, I don’t get directives, I don’t get vote up and vote down. As a matter of fact every single appointment that the Mayor of the City of New York has done for the most part has been in that vein. Those were the directives that he gave to the members that sit on his Judiciary Committee, his Guidelines Board, his Conflicts of Interest Board. He looks at them before he appoints them and says "you’re not going to get midnight phone calls from me telling you what to do, but you better damn well properly serve the people of the City of New York or else you’ll get the phone call." / Professor Benenson – Thank you.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I’m Chair of Chemistry at Lehman and member of the Executive Committee of the UFS. A little over a year ago over 200 faculty members of this University petitioned the Board of Trustees to initiate a $1 billion fundraising drive and since then the University at 80^th Street through the college Presidents has made some motions in that direction, but there still hasn’t been a clear public declaration of a drive, which in fact to some degree was inspired by the Mayor’s own actions at Johns Hopkins University where he’s donated personally and led fundraising drives for that institution that were in the hundreds of millions of dollars. So I think you’ll find that the faculty of this University would be very much supportive of fundraising by the Trustees as well as by other parts of the University. / Trustee Robles-Roman – I would love to get briefed on that issue and get up to speed.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – You’re concerned with immigrants, is that right? / Trustee Robles-Roman – The Office of Immigrant Affairs is one of the agencies that report to me, yes. / Professor Crain – We’re concerned with the immigrants at the City University. Many live in constant fear and trepidation that the Federal Government is requiring us to report through the SEVIS system any international student who drops a course, who changes his major. Many are required to go to special registration where undocumented students can get arrested and deported. They don’t know whether to go, not to go. I know several wonderful students who’ve been arrested and deported. / Trustee Robles-Roman – Arrested for what? / Professor Crain – Arrested for having their papers not quite in order. The question is whether there is any chance that the Board of Trustees will take a lead and say that we’re no longer willing to live in a police state with respect to our international students. We’ve done it as faculty at City College--the Faculty Council adopted a resolution saying we’re not willing to sacrifice the free, open, democratic atmosphere of our college. I’m just posing that as a challenge. / Trustee Robles-Roman – It’s an interesting challenge. I’m not sure if I would necessarily agree with the first characterization of us as a police state, but I understand that there are problematic issues post 9/11 in particular that present new reportive requirements for the college. Certainly as a lawyer I would love to look into it.

Chair: Thank you for coming. And now I’m happy to welcome the Chancellor.

Chancellor: Let me just review with your some late breaking news. This is about an hour and a half ago. I assume you don’t know this because I just found this out about an hour ago. The State Senate just voted unanimously to override the Governor’s veto on legislation giving school districts more time to act on their own local budgets. This followed what the Assembly did, and within a day what we’re going to see that there will be a composite bill now for sure, that conference committees now are just refining, and that there will be some joint Assembly/Senate bill that will probably look very much like what I will share with you this evening. Where that’s going to go I don’t know. It’s getting to be contentious in Albany and I would imagine that resolutions on this budget probably will be occurring a little faster than some people might have believed a day or so ago.

Let me bring you up to date. I don’t know how much you have been briefed by your leadership on the Assembly/Senate bill that has been in response to the Governor’s Executive Budget. We do know the following, that for the senior colleges the joint bill recommends $1.126 billion in the budget. This is an increase of about $7.3 million dominated by full restorations in SEEK financial assistance, which is very good news. The Assembly and the Senate did something very interesting, I would say without precedent as far as I can remember, but some of you may have longer memories than I. Let me just review again some of the numbers that are critical in this exercise. You do recall that the Governor presented a budget for CUNY that recommended slightly over a $90 million cut in our operating budget with a revenue budget of about $121 million. Those are big, imposing numbers for this University at any time. I have been deeply concerned, I’ve shared this with this body, I’ve shared it with the PSC, I’ve shared it with the leadership in Albany on many occasions, that for this University where I see our vulnerability most is on the operating side or in some sense it’s nearer on the revenue side, much more so, I believe, than in TAP, for the following reason: obviously we want TAP fixed and it looks like it’s pretty well on its way to being fixed, but so many of our students are not even eligible for TAP and that is a characterization in part of CUNY that differentiates itself from the independent sector and certainly from SUNY. Many of our students just do not qualify for TAP in part because so many of our students go as part-time students. So unless there was some relief on the operating side or on the revenue side the result for those students would be particularly problematic because tuition obviously will be rising much more significantly and there will be no safety net. So I have been a lone voice. SUNY was not saying this. Obviously the independent sector was not saying this. There was no momentum for this, but something interesting happened towards addressing part of this problem for in-state students. The State Assembly and the Senate took that $121 million and partitioned it into two pieces: a piece that will be levied for revenue for in-state students and a piece that will be levied for out-of-state students. So the $121 million now, as it appears in the Senate/Assembly bill, shows two pieces that aggregate together to $121 million: $32 million, which the University is obligated to raise from students outside of New York, and about $90 million for students in-state. The way the $121 million came about, if you recall, was a very simple calculation: they took the number of FTEs that we have in this University multiplied by $1,200 and bang, $120 million came out of that calculation. Now the calculation is such that $950 would account for when you multiply the number of FTEs the students that live in NY State would calculate along with the number of FTEs times some unknown number yet, depending on how we would distribute that between graduate students and undergraduate students, to the $32 million. When you’re hearing a $950 tuition in-state number, that is calculated from this bifurcation. Now that’s the good news for in-state students, it’s bad news for students living outside. What’s unclear in this is what happens if you don’t generate that $32 million. Suppose there is a fall off of students. We know that some students are having difficulty coming from out of the country to study here. So that is an area that we’re in a little fragile position because we really don’t have sufficient information at this particular point and quite frankly we probably won’t know until pretty close to when students are arriving. This is the first time that I’ve ever seen a budget bifurcated in that way between in-state and out-of-state students but asking you to reach those revenue targets. As you know, we created a joint committee on budgetary alternatives that is essentially dominated by members of the Trustees and members of the Chancellery. We have now completed our initial due diligence. We have met with the Senate leadership, this body’s leadership, we have met with the Student Senate leadership, with the PSC. Tomorrow morning we brief the Business Leadership Council for its input into ideas. We have yet to meet with District Council 37. So we have reached widely to get ideas and reaction to preliminary plans for how to address the revenue and the expense problem and we will come to some closure fairly quickly. We were out, as you know, very early in February, where we said we would in no circumstances do a couple of things: retrenchment, as I assured you was off the table, and number two, when I testified in front of Assembly Ways and Means and Senate Finance we indicated that for us a $1,200 tuition increase was a non-starter. This was I just thought morally reprehensible and bad judgment with respect to how to put together a financial plan for CUNY. It may work fine for SUNY. I’m not going to second guess that leadership, I’m not close enough to the student body nor am I close enough to the numbers, but for us this was truly a non-starter. So we have come forward as you know with a very comprehensive set of ideas and they need to be put together in a puzzle and weighted with respect to dollars so that we can reach a revenue target, reach an expense reduction, and for me it is protecting the most vulnerable among us. I don’t want this budget to result in students not being able to come to this University because of an inability to pay.

Let me just get back to a couple of other things about this budget. There is still no definitive decision, at least in the Assembly and Senate, in lining out our capital program. You do know that we have slightly over $1 billion that has been recommended by the Governor in his budget. When we leverage those dollars up by using some of the public-private initiatives that I’ve shared with you before, we believe that we will be able to extend those dollars when we use some of these initiatives to about $1.3 billion. In addition, we will be able to use some money that was appropriated but never spent in the last 5 years, so we’re probably talking around $1.4+ billion, which is nothing near what this University really needs but it is something of a robust budget relative certainly to the operating side, but that budget has not been lined out by the Assembly and Senate and we’re working very closely with the leadership to get that done very quickly.

On the community college side, state aid has increased by slightly under $22 million above the recommendations that the Governor has proposed, and let me line out for you how that $22 million comes about. Slightly under $20 million is an increase in base aid for full-time equivalent students at our community colleges, essentially reversing the $345 in base aid for community colleges; $1 million in work force development additions, about $600,000 in building rentals and about $400,000 for College Discovery. The community college capital budget has been unchanged by the Assembly and the Senate over what the Governor has recommended. It is still at $55 million, predicated as you know on a one to one match by the City and that’s still an open question. The Assembly\Senate budget agreement rejects the executive budget recommendations on restructuring TAP. The TAP funding provides for a tuition increase up to $950 for senior colleges and two-year colleges. Things that are a little less interest to us: the independent sector got full restoration of Bundy Aid, which is about $18.7 million. These are all subject to a final agreement. $10 million was restored for STAP and C-STAP -- that’s very good news for us -- and about $6.5 million for the Liberty Partnership Program.

Here is a problem that is a tough problem for us that I’ve shared with you two months ago and let me share it with you again now that we have a better sense of how this budget has been parameterized, we sort of know the boundaries under which we operate here. We’re going to have a non-inconsequential increase in tuition for our senior colleges. It’s very clear that these numbers are going to lead us in that way. We will be able to moderate this because of other approaches that we’ve taken: we have a hiring freeze, we’ve restructured things, we have efficiencies that are real, so we’ll be able to moderate some of this by other actions that we’ve taken, but even with all of this moderation we are still going to be required to levy a tuition increase that is not going to be inconsequential. I can’t tell you what that number is, but we are approaching where that number ultimately is going to be. On the community college side, however, if the Senate/Assembly bill stands, the community colleges are in very good shape relative to the senior colleges. Right now we have a gap between the community college tuition and the senior college tuition that is what, about $700? That gap could widen measurably. If that gap widens measurably I would submit that that would have effects at this University that nobody in this room truly can predict at this particular point. To say that it will be a paradigm shift in how people would relate to the University, I don’t know if I would go that far but certainly it would create different kinds of problems that we really have not experienced in this University for a long time. You have also heard me talk over and over again about my concern about the very low proportion of classes especially at our two-year institutions that are taught by full-time faculty. Two factors suggest that we should levy a tuition at the community colleges. This is a personal view. We’re going to have more and more students starting at two-year institutions with the intention a priori to go to a senior college. We have to ensure that the education experience that they’re getting comes a little closer to what is experienced at a four-year institution, for no reason other than that the four-year colleges have much greater robustness in terms of their full-time faculty ranks than we do at the two-year institutions. I would also submit that if we do have this very big gaping hole between where community colleges and senior colleges, there would be dislocations that would take some of our campuses that right now are very fragile and make them much more fragile and brittle in terms of their ability to sustain a structure. So we have to be very mindful of this. We must invest in our community colleges. They need more full-time faculty, they need more academic support services, and that if we do levy charges beyond what their needs are in terms of the financial underpinnings that are provided to us, those dollars must be invested in the two-year institutions to bolster them beyond what they are today. That is a view that I have and I feel very strongly about it. I’m going to stop at this time. I have a lot of other things but I wanted to concentrate on the budget situation so I’ve now shared with you everything that I know as of about an hour and a half ago.

Professor Petratos (Political Science, Economics and Philosophy, College of Staten Island) –Happy Easter, Happy Passover, Happy Orthodox Easter and Mohammed’s birthday is coming up. I heard a very bad rumor that the University does not honor some parts of your contract and the contract of some of the Presidents, and I’m not referring to housing allowance or anything like this, I’m referring to remuneration for work done, and then I found out that it was only a rumor. But in reality the University is refusing to honor its contract to the Chairs for remuneration. Up to now Chairs have been donating their time and I have here a resolution from the Chairs of Staten Island [attached to these minutes] whereby we ask the President to designate all departments as ten month departments and departments may request eleven month departments. / Chair - This is really a union issue. / Professor Petratos – No it’s not. I’m a Chair and I’m also a member of the Senate. If I’m not a member of this body then I’ll leave. / Chair – It’s just that the body is murmuring "union." / Professor Petratos – I’m a Chair. The President is not honoring the contract for ten months or eleven months designation. I won’t take the time to tell you what the Chair does but I will give you this and I’d like this included in the record. / Chancellor Goldstein – This is what the Chairs do? / Professor Petratos – This is my write up. They do more…/ Chancellor Goldstein – This is what one Chair does. Let me respond very quickly. We did meet several times with the PSC on this issue and I agree, there are some difficulties in implementing the contract in part because of clarity about what some of the provisions mean. I believe that there is yet another meeting tomorrow with Vice Chancellor Brenda Malone and members of the PSC or some time this week. I think it’s going to be resolved.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – The number that you gave us for the total senior college budget was $1.126 billion. Is that correct? / Chancellor Goldstein – You got it right, and it’s still not enough. / Professor Levine – Well that’s the point. That seems to be simply the restoration of the $8.7 million in HESC funding that we had in last year’s budget. In other words, it doesn’t appear as if the Assembly or the Senate has given us another penny. Am I missing something here? / Chancellor Goldstein – No, this is over what the Governor’s recommendation was in his budget, that’s all I’m saying. / Professor Levine – That’s right. I understood that we had that previously restored to us. / Chancellor Goldstein – By the Assembly and the Senate? / Professor Levine – No, by the Governor’s Office. / Chancellor Goldstein – I don’t know, I don’t recall about that. / Professor Levine – Because it appears as if the Assembly and the Senate have not added a penny to the senior college budget, straight senior college budget. / Chancellor Goldstein – For SEEK they have restored what the Governor took out for sure. It’s about $7.3 million overall. / Professor Levine – So my understanding is we’ve got nothing from them. Next, in terms of the total community colleges we have a preliminary budget of $371 million. If we raise extra money through tuition do we have authorization to spend it? / Chancellor Goldstein – We don’t have authorization like we do on the senior colleges. We don’t have CUTRA accounts and we’re working on that and hopefully we’ll be able to convince the executive and the City Council to do that. I think it’s an important thing for us to be able to do because we don’t have the ability to carry it over as we do at the senior colleges. / Professor Levine – Thank you.

Professor Lewis (English, York College) – Two things: number one, the feeling I get from what you just said is that even if there is some sort of increase at the community colleges the tuition increase at the senior college will be larger so it will open up the gap a little bit further. What kind of enticements can the University offer freshmen who are coming in to pursue a senior college as opposed to a community college in order to keep some of those campuses that we talked about with fragile enrollments more viable and to allow freshmen who are seeking college education to pursue that without feeling as if they’re being penalized. / Chancellor Goldstein – I think it’s a hard problem for some students. For most of the students who want to start at a senior college and are very focused I don’t think that widening the gap would have that much of an effect but there are other students who are really not that driven and are just looking at this from a purely pragmatic standpoint: "If I go and study at LaGuardia or BMCC for two years and get full credit and then transfer to a four-year college I can amortize the cost," and they will be focused in that direction. I don’t know how many people reflect on that and we will see. / Professor Lewis – Can I ask maybe one thing that could be done or considered. Right now we offer our top students who are coming in for honors programs and things like that quite a few really important kind of perks. Can we do a watered down version of that maybe for certain students who have promising grades and who might be caught in this dilemma financially of which way to go to have them pursue the senior college route with some moderate perks to entice them. / Chancellor Goldstein – I think the way really to do that is what I have been pressing our presidents to do, and that is to get out and raise money and deploy those dollars for scholarships and other enhancements, and we’re seeing some of our presidents doing really remarkable work. I think that’s having an important effect. That’s really the way to do it, that’s the way that most universities do it and hopefully we will continue. / Professor Lewis – Thank you.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – I don’t know the exact phrase but it’s within the University too: "If we have to raise tuition in excess of student’s needs at the community colleges then it will go to full-time faculty." / Chancellor Goldstein – …and academic support. / Professor Crain – You want reaction so I’ll give you my reaction. We should not raise tuition in excess of student’s needs. It doesn’t matter. Never should we raise tuition more than students can afford. We should not raise tuition. It’s not a source of revenue; students have to be able to afford the University. We should take a position we will not raise tuition. If we take the position we will not raise tuition students will rally, faculty will rally, we would take a moral position. The tuition is high enough already. There should be no tuition raise for no reason whatsoever. I do not take any pleasure when my colleagues talk, "We’re getting new hires." I wonder, "Is this on the backs of our students?" No. It’s fool’s gold. It’s going to demoralize us, don’t do it. We should be fighting against any tuition increase. The State has the money, there is the money in there if all those tax cuts are in there, there is the money. Fight against the tuition increase! That’s my view. I hope my colleagues will join in.

Professor Hastick (Medgar Evers College) – Your last passionate statement about the investment in two-year community colleges prompted me to ask you about Medgar Evers, which as some of my colleagues may not be aware is both two-year and four-year. My question to you is where do we stand in your assessment of how resources will be allocated. / Chancellor Goldstein – I think that we have to incrementally improve some of our very fragile campuses and Medgar Evers, I would submit, is one of those campuses that when it was chartered and created it was never given the kind of financial underpinnings at the minimal level that it really needed. And we have to work incrementally to do that but at the same time we have to preserve and expand those colleges that are better endowed and are doing great work as well. It’s really a difficult balance to do but we have to be focused on it, we have to invest in it, and we will continue to do it.

Professor Friedheim (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – My head spins when I hear talk about budget because I have difficulty with budgets, with numbers. Your presentation was very clear but I’ve got a couple of related questions and I wish you’d bear with me. One, I want to be educated about authorization. The University is now authorized to raise tuition up to $950, it doesn’t have to be $950, but up to $950 for community colleges as well as senior colleges? / Chancellor Goldstein – No, I was only talking about the senior colleges. / Professor Friedheim – So you would have to get authorization from the City to raise tuition at the community colleges. / Chancellor Goldstein – We would need to get authorization to expand the revenue budget. How we do it, we do it. And we don’t have authorization yet on $950 because we don’t have a budget. All I’m reflecting on is what the Senate/Assembly bill presumes. / Professor Freidheim – So obviously before you do it you’d have to get authorization from the City and, getting back to Al Levine’s questions, authorization to spend additional money at the community colleges. Obviously as somebody who teaches at a community college I would love for the full-time part-time ratio to be changed in favor of full-time. I certainly want more academic support services but some of my concerns are the same as those expressed by Bill Crain. I don’t remember the exact figures but I believe that among public universities or public community colleges in the United States we have the fifth highest tuition. Traditionally, if you look at state systems and city systems and what have you, community college tuitions are lower than senior college tuitions, and I think there’s a good reason for it because a lot more non traditional students, if I can use that term, end up at early start at community colleges than start as freshmen at senior colleges. This is a population that I think our community colleges, our senior colleges too, but particularly our community colleges have served well over the years. TAP as I understand it really penalizes many of our non-traditional students if they have no children and if they’re not living with families, and so if tuition is raised I think these people in particular would be discouraged from entering community colleges. So this is my concern, that if you begin to increase the tuition of community colleges, which is already high given the national standard, I think you’re going to end up turning away a lot of the students that have ended up being a real asset to this city. One of the things that I’ve enjoyed the most in my 30+ years of teaching is seeing non-traditional students start at a community college, go to a senior college. I run into them in the subway or in the streets and some of them are lawyers, some of them are academics at CUNY, and I wonder if this is going to be stopped dead in its tracks if you start raising tuition. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’ll just remind you that we haven’t had a tuition increase in 8 years, and we’re probably out there if not alone in a very small universe of state universities. I don’t know, in the absence of State and City support, which is well documented over a sustained period of time, how you operate any organization, a university, a not-for-profit hospital, a museum, without having additional revenue, and that’s something that we have to be mindful of. We must give the students the best possible opportunity to learn and thrive and I submit we will not be able to do that to the degree that we are capable unless we invest in the academic life of the University. And I hate to do it by increasing our students’ tuition, I think all of us agree, but it’s a choice that we have to make and we’re just going to be compelled to do it in a balanced way. Your concerns are legitimate concerns, I think they are real concerns, and we’re going to have to watch it carefully.

Professor Erickson (Music, Queens College) – The last time we met I was Dean of Arts and Humanities. I have been appointed by President Muyskens to the task force on general education at Queens College and we have been meeting weekly. It’s taking a lot of time, but we’re beginning this week to have open forums on the campus. There was one issue that came up in the first meeting that we had yesterday that I wanted to share with you and also the members of this body because I think there is interest in it and was raised here at the last Senate meeting. One of the professors of economics who clearly was dedicated to his teaching was beside himself with the difficulty of teaching students who take 18 credits and work 40 hours a week. And when I told him that there had been some discussion very preliminary about the possibility of pegging tuition to the credits rather than a flat tuition whether you take 12, 15 or 18 credits, there was a lot of support among the faculty that were present at that particular meeting. By the way, I’m not in any way representing my committee or anybody else, although I must say personally I found that a very attractive idea. I simply want you to know that and hope that the Chancellery and all those that are responsible for this will consider this idea among other things for academic reasons. / Chancellor Goldstein – Yes. I’m very much aware of it and it is very much in play in discussion.

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – I’m really concerned about the tuition issue as we all are and I know you are in the broadest sense, and I’m particularly concerned in terms of this body that we’re able to hang together through this as we represent faculty from the community colleges through the comprehensive colleges and seniors and the Graduate School. This discussion that a number of speakers raised in terms of how we deal with the potentially widening tuition gap is a very serious one and I hope that it will not fracture us, because while we have our own unique situations and concerns, and that’s within the six community colleges as well and each of the senior colleges, we really have to keep solid on this. One of my questions, and I’m grappling with this, is I guess a little related to Bill’s, is it possible that we raise the community college tuition basically because we need to generate revenue? We don’t want to widen this gap for the reasons that are obvious. Have you thought about the possibility of losing lots of our community college students, especially in the poorest areas? Our students at Hostos and Bronx Community for example are among the absolute poorest in the nation and as Bill said and you said most of our community college students do not get TAP. At LaGuardia it’s 40% or less, at BMCC it’s below 50%. So if we start to lose students at our end we generate less FTEs where revenue is heavily tuition based, how does this promise of more faculty and more money weigh in?. I don’t think you can answer these but I think we need to really put this into the equation as a possibility. / Chancellor Goldstein – We do. We have to and we will.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – My question deals with the foundations that exist on each of the campuses. As you know, at two of the colleges these foundations were in litigation in terms of the membership of the Boards of Directors of these foundations and most recently in the last month according to news reports a business manager of a college was escorted by security guards off campus in connection with a dispute of the management of the local college foundation. I wonder if you would consider encouraging the college Presidents to mandate them that they include a representative of faculty governance on the boards of these foundations so that these events that have taken place on campuses do not occur, so the foundations operate more in the light of day, in the light of public. It’s an important issue because these foundations are important in your efforts to raise private money and confidence in their operation is important in raising this money from the public. / Chancellor Goldstein – Manfred, you and I have discussed this privately. I for one am very supportive of opening up these bodies to faculty. I’ve discussed this with Presidents, I did it at Baruch, I did it at Adelphi, I think it’s good. I don’t think it diminishes anything, I think it enhances because it provides a perspective, but I’m not going to be heavy handed with the Presidents and mandate that they do this. First of all they’re out of my jurisdiction; these are separate organizations. I just think it’s a good thing to do, I agree with you. / Chair – I just want to respond and say that governance leaders did pass out your resolution. We’ve sent it to all the Presidents and I’ve gotten responses from many of them talking about the inclusion or even in some cases saying that they are going to include faculty. It’s been quite heartwarming all the responses I’ve gotten. / Professor Philipp – Hopefully that will prevent this kind of issue.

Professor Hollander (Hunter College) – In the last comment of your presentation I think you very strongly implied or maybe assumed that adjunct faculty are the cause of a lower quality of education at the community colleges. / Chancellor Goldstein – Shame on you, I would never say such a thing. You know that’s not true. You’re not an adjunct, are you? / Professor Hollander – Oh, yes. / Chancellor Goldstein – Just wanted to make sure. / Professor Hollander – Make sure that I’m not or that I am? If the quality of education that adjuncts are able to deliver is compromised it’s not because of their professional abilities. / Chancellor Goldstein – I agree with that. / Professor Hollander – It’s because of the lack of support. / Chancellor Goldstein – I just want to see more faculty on our campuses. That’s why I supported in the last contract with the PSC giving opportunities for adjunct faculty to be paid if they provided office hours or other kinds of support. The more that a faculty member is involved in the life of learning with our students, the better it is. With that I’m going to have to leave.

Chair: Let me quickly do my report just because we have a long agenda. On the remaining agenda after my report is Allan Wernick and George Sussman, who are going to speak on Immigration and the Patriot Act. Then we have the nominations for members at large of the Executive Committee. Then we have two resolutions on Academic Integrity and CPE Exemptions and perhaps other resolutions, if we have time.

First, I was very pleased with the spring conference. There was excellent turnout in lousy weather. The transcript of the three key note speakers, Henry Wasser, Bob Picken, and Sandi Cooper will be available soon. We’re already building on the results of the workshops. The workshop on ERP, which is the new data system that will supersede CUPS and SIMS, passed a resolution to include a faculty governance committee, and that’s already been adopted. The Cluster Hiring Committee is getting under way; Leslie Jacobson has formed the Cluster Hiring Committee and Sandi Cooper and Leslie are contacting Chairs of departments. Judith Summerfield will report to the UFS on her general education project in the fall. I met with Louise Mirrer on the School for Professional Studies and the Committee on Academic Policy discussed this tonight. The lead story of the May Senate Digest will be a summary of the conference. I testified for the Joint Committee on Management and Budget Alternatives on tuition, restructuring administration and efficiencies, and reported our discussions about the possibility of moving to a credit based tuition, about the problems of tuition indexing if there is not a commitment by the State to increase funding by a similar percentage and the erosion of the public sector. I said that a faculty of 5,200 cannot afford 361 administrators on the executive compensation plan, and that willing faculty could be cycled into administrative positions for extra compensation, then after a period of service return to the ranks of the teaching faculty. That would save a lot of money. Finally, I suggested efficiencies based on the discussion on our listserv.

I do have some good news. After meeting with the Faculty Advisory Council to the RF and a number of executive offices of the Graduate School this afternoon, Professor Jamal Manassah was requested to put his resignation as Chair of FAC into abeyance and he agreed.

Finally, I want to read the list of Senators and alternates who are here tonight for their last meeting:

BMCC Sandra Neis and Mike Vozick

Brooklyn College Mary Howard

CSI Sheying Chen

Graduate School David Olan

Hunter College Barbara Hampton, Paul Kurzman and John Wallach

Lehman College Duane Tananbaum and Martin Burke, who’s now in the Graduate School delegation

NYC Tech Kyle Cuordileone and Adrianne Wortzel

QCC Nora Tully

 

Also the following members resigned or retired:

Karen Leslie, George Moriber, Paul Sheridan, William L’Amoreaux, Haig Bohegian, Gary Schwartz, David Speidel, and Alan Cooper. Let’s give them a hand.

 

I would also like to introduce new members. Anne Friedman, do you want to introduce the new members at BMCC and the reelected Senators?

 

Professor Friedman: I’m pleased to introduce the body to Rani Chigurupati of our CIS department. Rani has been at BMCC since the Fall of 2001. She’s a member of her department’s curriculum committee and is working as a member of the advisory board of a group called The Working Connections on Faculty Development and I think that she will bring a lot of energy and talent to the group. Unfortunately Carlos Alba, the chemist from BMCC who actually did his graduate work here at CUNY, is not able to be with us tonight but Carlos did his fourth year at BMCC and he’s been a member of our Faculty Council and the Academic Standing and Admissions Committee at BMCC, and I hope we can meet him in the fall since he teaches on Tuesday evening this year.

Chair: Now we can get to the Immigration and the Patriot Act, which I’m really looking forward to. We have two speakers. You probably all know Allan Wernick or have seen his column in the Daily News. He writes the immigration column. He’s a professor at Hostos College and chair of the CUNY Citizenship and Immigration Project. George Sussman is a professor of history at LaGuardia Community College. He’s taken quite an active interest on his campus in these issues, so I was eager that he would come and speak.

Allan Wernick: Before I go into the talk about the Patriot Act and immigration issues after 9/11, I want to point out that in the handout at the very back there is a list of three centers where we provide a hundred percent free counseling for the CUNY community, which is the faculty, staff and students. We do not turn people away, so if friends and family of your students or yourselves have questions we’re happy to help you. We don’t market it outside the University because we have limited resources but we don’t ask people for their CUNY affiliation before we help them.

Let me give you a few observations I have about life in the immigrant community in CUNY after 9/11. First of all, in speaking to immigration lawyers and advocates who have been around a lot longer than I have, they will tell you that this is the most restrictive immigration policy that we’ve had in this country probably in this century. Some of them are not old enough to know about the Palmer Raids, which is probably the most restrictive, but after that they know about McCarthy era and they will tell you that it is worse now than it was then. Some of the aspects of how it is worse that impact our students, faculty and staff: first of all, just in terms of the procedures in immigration; the delays are worse than ever, cases that used to be easy are now difficult, cases that used to be difficult are almost impossible, and the reason is because of the extra scrutiny that is given to pretty much every application that passes through the hands of the new agencies, which are now part of the Department of Homeland Security. So the Immigration and Naturalization Service doesn’t exist anymore. All immigration enforcement and services are now part of the Department of Homeland Security, so, I don’t know, sometimes I feel pretty subversive doing immigration advocacy.

There are three things I want to talk to you about: I want to talk to you a little bit about the Patriot Act, I want to talk to you about SEVIS, which is the new monitoring and record keeping program for international students, and I want to talk to you about the Dream Act. The first thing I want to say about the Patriot Act is that I think that in terms of immigration there is a little bit of an overstatement that I hear in terms of the impact on the immigrant community. The INS always had a lot of power, they always abused that power and they always went after people who were political dissidents, that is not something new, but the Patriot Act legitimized a lot of the things that the INS was already doing. You may know that there was a big case in Los Angeles. These were Ethiopian and Middle Eastern individuals, mostly international students, who were part of a political organization handing out literature. They all popped and put in secret proceedings in an effort to deport them from the United States because of their political activity. So that has gone on before the Patriot Act, but the Patriot Act was sort of piled onto that. The biggest changes in the Patriot Act that are going to impact our CUNY community are the following: First of all, there is a special program for monitoring people from certain countries who come in to the United States. So these individuals are going to go through extra hassles. When they come in at the airport they’re going to be put through a special screening, some of them are going to have to, depending what country they’re from, - by the way Saudi Arabia is not on the list, where most of the hijackers came from – certain people from other countries that are designated state sponsors of terrorism are going to have to come back to the INS 30-40 days after their entry. This includes international students, and then periodically at one year intervals they are going to have to report to the INS. It’s a hassle but it’s not such a terrible thing except for the fact that I think what it does is discourage foreign international students who want to come to the United States. There are many opportunities for bright, well-educated international students. They could go to Australia, they can go to England, they can go to Canada for instance, if they’re English speaking and of course if they speak other languages there are other universities, if they feel that the education they would receive in their own country is not adequate. So that’s just going to discourage people from coming here. Also there are increased delays for people from many countries but particularly from the Middle East and Muslim countries. So, for instance if a person is trying to get a student visa to come to the United States, where before they would walk in in the morning and come back in the afternoon to get the visa now the delays can be two or three months, and the reason for that is because of the increased scrutiny of their backgrounds through various federal agencies. When I tell you about SEVIS you’re going to see what a terrible problem it is. Again, that doesn’t on the surface seem to be so terrible, but because of time lags in the processing of admissions this can be quite a big difficulty and quite discouraging for some of our students. Those of you who follow the civil liberties issues know that there have been additions to the grounds of inadmissibility and deportation, which we now call removal, for individuals because of their political views. I won’t go into those details. They don’t directly affect us in CUNY any more than they do the rest of society, that’s not why I’m mentioning them; it’s a little bit outside this talk but if you have questions about it I’ll be happy to try to answer them.

The biggest thing that’s happening on our campuses is the SEVIS program, which is an Internet based record keeping program for international students. It is a program that will apply to every international student. Students who are coming in for the first time this coming semester will have to be part of the SEVIS program. Any new documents that they get, for instance if they have to travel, they have to get permission. They will have to get their papers through this Internet SEVIS program. Students who are already in CUNY must be part of the SEVIS program by the August 1. It’s a huge problem for the campuses. The SEVIS program is totally mucked up. I’m not directly involved in the implementation of it but I can tell you in talking to the international student advisors that they are way behind in their ability to enter these people into the programs. It’s a huge workload. The system that the INS has is not very effective, there are a lot of complaints about it; it’s a big computer nightmare. That’s something that, again, is going to discourage, and some students are not going to be able to do it. For instance, I’ll give you an example. A student has been through UAPC, they’ve been admitted - I’m not that comfortable with explaining the procedure, you probably know better than I do – let’s say City College. In order to come to the United States that student must first get a document from the international student advisors called an I20. If it’s a new student, generating that document must be through the SEVIS Internet based system. There’s one person at City College now that has the authority to use the SEVIS system, one person. There are scheduled to be more but right now because of all kinds of computer problems there is one person, so that person has to deal with all the international students who are already on campus who want to travel because they need new documents, and those who want to work need documents. The admissions is as far as I know as of today no new international student has been issued an I20 at City College to attend in the fall. Not one. I don’t know when that first one is going to happen but it hasn’t happened yet. So there is going to be a decrease in FTE’s at your campuses because students are not going to get the documents that they need. When they do get the documents, if they’re from one of those countries which have been targeted for individuals to have extra scrutiny, it takes two or three months for them to get the visa that they need to come to the United States, so if we give them the document in May they might make it by September, but if we don’t give them the document till the middle of June it could be very tough and they might not make it in time, and of course they may go to another college which may have a more advanced record keeping system. The other thing about SEVIS is that it’s going to be very strict in the monitoring of international students. By the way, this is not permanent resident or undocumented students. Permanent residents, green card holders, and out of status, undocumented students, are not included in SEVIS. They’re only international students and J1 researchers and scholars, which are foreign researchers and scholars. If the student or scholar changes address it has to be reported, it’s a violation of status for them not to, and that information must be placed into the Internet database by the international student advisor or his assistants which, like I said, at all the colleges at CUNY there are no assistants yet authorized, but there will be in the future presumably. So you can see it’s a nightmare. If the student drops classes, if the student drops out of school that information is going to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security through the Internet database because the way it works is that all this information eventually will be updated periodically. Every two weeks a button will be pressed and that button will send to the Department of Homeland Security all the information about all the international students at your schools as to whether they maintained the minimum number of credits, which is 12 credits at CUNY. There are some exceptions but I don’t want to go into too much detail about the exceptions, but like I said it’s a nightmare. There’s an explanation about how SEVIS works in your handouts.

I skipped over one thing under the Patriot Act. One of the things that the Patriot Act has done is force the government, first the INS and now the organizations, to do something the Congress has been trying to get them to do since 1981, and that’s keep track of people. SEVIS is the first part of that but eventually there is going to be what they call control entry and exit system. Now when you come into the United States, let’s say if you’re H1, which is a professional worker, many of our colleges have H1B professors. So the H1B professor, when he or she comes to the airport, they get a little card but when they leave no one keeps track of that, so no one knows when they leave, and what’s going to happen is that there is going to be a controlled exit so that person will have to show documents when they leave as well as when they come in. The Congress has mandated that happen by 2005. So SEVIS is sort of the first part of this kind of record keeping system.

The other thing that I didn’t mention about the Patriot Act that I just recalled that I need to talk to you about is the special registration. Special registration was a program where individuals from certain countries had to register with the INS and the last group just registered. They were for men over the age of 16 and there are certain exceptions. Again, this does not apply to permanent residents and, by the way, it didn’t apply to undocumented. So if you’re here illegally you didn’t have to register. You only have to register if you came as a student or temporary worker or visitor, but a lot of our students and faculty did have to register and the ones who are here unlawfully because let’s say they overstay or they came as a visitor are going to end up being deported.

Finally, the Dream Act is a law. They called it the Dream Act in the Senate, in the House it’s called the Student Adjustment Act. It’s a technical term, "adjustment of status" is the term the statute uses, meaning changing to a permanent resident status or green card status, and what it would do is give college students and, depending on the version …if any version becomes law, Junior High and High School students, permanent residence, by virtue of having been in the United States for five years and by virtue of being students. This is obviously a very good thing for us if a law like this should pass. The Chancellor has written to Congress in support of it, so the University is on record at supporting it through the Chancellor. I’ve been asked and have testified at the City Council on the City Council resolution, so in the next few weeks and months we’re going to try and get student groups on campus more active around this issue. Our two senators have not signed on two the bill, by the way. The primary proponent in the Senate is Orrin Hatch, which is why some people think that has a chance of passing. The INS estimates are about 50-65,000 students nationwide. I think that’s a little low. I guess it would be closer to 100,000, maybe 120,000, but it’s not amnesty for everyone and my suggestion is that after Bush had a backtrack on his promise of amnesty that he made before 9/11, he may be willing or be forced to support this sort of piecemeal amnesty, this amnesty for High School and College students, my guess is sometime before next summer, just before the conventions. So I think there is a good possibility -- both in the House and Senate there is bipartisan support, and we’ll see; of course there’s bipartisan opposition as well. That’s sort of an overview of what I think some of the issues are.

George Sussman: Allan’s the expert on this. I don’t know anything about it actually, but Susan asked me if I could just tell you a little bit about an enterprise that we did at LaGuardia when we heard about especially the special registration. I actually didn’t know anything, or maybe it was somewhere on the periphery of my radar from reading the Times or something, but I didn’t know anything about this until a workshop we had on diversity for faculty in late January, and it was specially focused on Muslim students. There were a number of Muslim students speaking to the faculty, and they told us the harrowing story of this new kind of requirement, the special registration that Allan introduced us to. There were already certain countries that were already registered and others that were coming up in late January, and their story is that you would be summoned through the INS, you could expect a wait of 8 hours or so outside, rain, shine, whatever. Some people say it’s as late as 6am the next morning if you happen to sign up late, that once you were in there you were photographed, fingerprinted and questioned and anything that you said could be held against you, and they would question you about things like, well, almost anything, your opinions of Osama Bin Laden, whether you had taken any work, and so on. And some of these were traps if you had violated some minor provision of your visa, which had never been enforced before. Many of our students for example are not supposed to work, is that right, if you’re on a student visa? / With limited exceptions. / Yeah. So there’s a question if I’m taking a job and if I’m working for a couple of hours at Wendy’s trying to make a little extra money how should I answer it if I’m asked, because what they could do and did do often if they found any problem was keep you there or force you to come back for a hearing at some future date, and the hearing led to deportation. As the students talked about it I thought, "What are we doing about this?" Here are our students in awfully isolated positions, very vulnerable, and it’s an interest to the college itself too, as well as to our student, and we should be showing some sensitivity to this. Let me say that at LaGuardia - I just got the figures today - we have right now 83 visa students from countries that were required to register. Now not all of those would be males, although I would say many more than half are because these tend to be traditional Muslim societies. The biggest group is 41 from Bangladesh. I once addressed the Bangladesh Club at LaGuardia and I think there was one woman in it and all of the students were computer majors. We also had 17 Pakistanis, 14 Moroccans, and then small numbers from a bunch of the other countries that were required to come in. I think also in some ways the Muslim students at LaGuardia are a very well organized group. There is a strong Muslim Student Association that has I think a not always comfortable relationship with certainly some faculty, only because they tend as a minority, a very self conscious minority, to be sort of out in the open and defensive in some ways. For example, they have regular afternoon prayers in the atrium at the college; it’s kind of the crossroads of the college. I know some faculty have felt that that was a sort of a violation of state issues, and in fact that came up at our workshop with students. In any event, at this point it seemed to me the balance was clearly in favor of our students to reach out to our students. It’s a very vulnerable situation. I was at this time having lunch regularly with a group of faculty, some of whom are here, who were concerned about a prospective war in Iraq and talking about how we at the college should be engaged with that, and I brought this up and I think they sort of deputed me to be chair of a community that would do something. And so we organized very hastily what we call an information session on INS special registration for our students, and the idea here was to show some interest on the part of the college. While we might express our personal indignation at the infringement on civil liberties, the main point here was to inform the students about what to expect and to give them some idea of what their rights were. For the large number, I think at this point the Bangladesh students were just beginning to be registered. We had less than a week minor publicity for it but I was very surprised to find that we had a full standing room only large classroom and a lot of interest, including interest of faculty and staff who came and showed their support for this … [tape ends] … relations but also gave him some very sensible advice about how they should confront their registration. I think there were some tough questions the students asked: What would be the consequences of not showing up? What should we answer if asked this or that? One strong demand came out and that was that the college should do something to provide legal advice for students before they came in. So after the meeting, by this time I had also involved the international student office and they scheduled another meeting a couple of weeks later at the beginning of our spring semester, which is an unusual schedule, and in connection with that we got the lawyer from the Asian American League of Defense and Education Fund come and schedule some hours at the college for advice. And although, as you might not be surprised here, not that many students had signed up at that point, we did also pass out information about places where they could get free legal advice and I think a number of students took advantage of that.

I just want to mention one final thing, that it was curious, something about the college’s responses to this. I think that I was struck at the slow response of our International Student Office to this issue. I think that part of the reason was the fact that we had an excellent long time director of that office who was in the process of retiring at the very moment that this occurred. I think another reason was the introduction of what Allan referred to as the SIVAS system, which was creating quite a lot of headaches for them and they were overstretched. SIVAS, I’m not sure if this is clear from what Allan said, I think it has a very interesting effect: It means that the International Student Office is no longer just the advocate for the student. The International Student Office becomes part of the policing apparatus of the United States and I think it creates a certain distance between what was formerly a service office for our students and maybe makes our participation as independent faculty a little bit more important. When the private attorney came I met with her and welcomed her and she came accompanied by a producer from Bill Moyer’s Now program and apparently he’s taking quite an interest in this issue. So I talked to her a little bit about what we were doing and what college is like and afterwards, I guess this was just a reaction of a former administrator, I was a good boy and I informed our publicity people at the college that I had had a contact with the press. And then I got this wonderful e-mail from an administrator. I used to write sentences like this but I want to read this to you: "While I support the effort to bring information and good legal counsel to our student regarding what can be vexing and complicated issues for some of our students, I’m at the same time concerned about any undue and unwelcome attention press coverage might bring." I told him that A, I didn’t invite the guy, and B, I could see no harm in bringing public attention to a serious intrusion on the civil liberties of our visa students, and he invited me to a meeting.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – Old enough for this to be déjà vu from the 50’s, only this is worse, although, who knows, maybe it’s not worse. The biggest problem we obviously have is the students but I am also equally worried about faculty and free speech and we have already had, now we have two cases, in which CUNY’s fear of publicity has interfered in the appointment of an individual teaching in one of our campuses and now a speaker at the law school graduation, and of course at the University of South Florida they’re breaking tenure on Sami Al-Arian, and we’re in for more of this. The AAUP will slowly get around to handling some of these things. I know that this is really an added topic. I also am aware of the fact that a Swiss collaborator of mine, somebody who works in the threatening field of peace research in history was stopped at Kennedy and shipped back to Geneva and told she was no longer able to come to conferences in this country and that we’d all have to go there. The Swiss are now required to have a visa to come for an academic conference. So I think we’re facing an issue which is spiraling out of control. I don’t think the faculty have begun to wake up to the implications of this. I know these services that you’re providing are as stretched as can be, but is there any way we can add this whole business of academic freedom or weave it in, because we can lose the faculty as well as the students. Some of us will soon be stopped from taking airplane trips because we’ve been active in groups like peace movements. / George Sussman – Well, it’s not our portfolio so to speak, but if there is anything we can do to help--I’m a faculty member too, so I can help with that – but it sounds like something that we as faculty need to take up, and certainly if there is anything we can do to help, and I know that I and others are available to speak, to write and to talk about these issues. The example you gave, I don’t know the facts about your colleague, but that’s an example of the easy becoming hard. I don’t know why she was turned back exactly but as these kinds of things are happening people are taking longer. People coming from concerts, for instance, are missing their concert dates because there is such a long delay in processing their application. It really is a political problem more than anything else. The situation that happened to your colleague is not because of the Patriot Act per se, it’s because of a restrictionist policy by the Federal Government, so the response to that is really a political response, not so much a legal response, and we’d be happy to cooperate in that, but we exist primarily to provide legal services.

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – Is it possible for somebody to accompany somebody who’s being questioned, even if it’s just to sit there and listen and be an observer, and if that’s so that might be a way that we may be able to organize accompanying students or getting other students to accompany students that might give them more courage and it might just send a message. / George Sussman – I think you have to be an attorney. / Unidentified – I don’t think so. There is an example out there where the President of Adelphi sometime in January accompanied one of the students to special registration and we thought of that idea. Some of us were a little discouraged when we thought of about an 8 hour wait, but I think it’s a wonderful thing if you can do it and probably an education for us to see. We then can publicize, I think that’s some of the response to Sandi’s question too, we need to do all we can to publicize the kinds of things like the Swiss peace scholar. I want to mention that came up at LaGuardia that many of you may have read about in the PSC Newsletter, the Pakistani student of ours at LaGuardia who was photographing his neighborhood in Flushing for an assignment and was suddenly surrounded by a half dozen policemen and it’s an awful story, including that he was held for 6 hours not able to contact anybody and at one point repeatedly interrogated. One policeman, detective, came in and closed the door and said this is just in case I have to beat you up. I think he thought that was a joke.

Chair – I think that this body needs to perhaps do something more formal and concrete, and I’m wondering if this would fall under Student Affairs or if it’s bigger than that and maybe we need some kind of working committee.

Professor Yousef (Engineering Technology, College of Staten Island) – As one of the CUNY faculty typical cases of not being paid highly enough, I had to take that loan from my SRA. They sent me a notice now with a payment slip saying that due to the Patriot Act you have to send me the payment in a check, you have to have a checking account in other words. You cannot send me like say a money order or cash or anything like that. My point to you is that there are other organizations within the CUNY family that are now coming up with their own additional regulations because of the Patriot Act. The other thing is that I understand the Patriot Act was passed after assurances that certain parts will sunset and now there will be an effort to make the sunsetting parts to be permanent. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that but that’s a technical part that I read. And then I want to share with you horror stories I’ve been hearing about so called undocumented aliens going to the INS and uniformly just getting immediately arrested as soon as they say "My name is Mohammed Yousef and I’m undocumented here. I was born in Egypt…," whatever it is. In any case, they immediately say "You’re under arrest." And the sad part is not so much that you will give them a hearing, some similar cases have been in there for 9 months without knowing anything about them. I think the New York Times has reported a few of these instances and I don’t know why we’re not really acting with more anger. I have the feeling that the populace in general are saying that they deserve it. I really don’t understand it, so I just hope that people like yourselves and the rest of us in leadership really do something concrete about this fact. I remember when we had that session with the University Vice-Chancellors and Deputy Chancellors for security and they were saying that we may have five events at the same time, all these things are just an imagination of a sick mind that keeps saying this to us to get us all to feel fear. I’m glad that you brought this topic and I think we’ll have quite a bit to do about it. Thank you.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I have a much more mundane question and I appreciate very much the previous comments. I’m on the admissions committee of one of the doctoral programs. Before 9/11 it was fairly clear that there was increasingly a restrictive regime in granting student visas from China, from other countries, and an increasing proportion of our student who we admitted were being arbitrarily rejected at the consulate level and if they came back twice they were told they could never come back etc. Do you think this is some sort of intent to be restrictive that started before 9/11 that 9/11 provided an excuse for? The second part of the question is on the graduate level in the University are they all also going through this one computer at City College? None of them have been submitted so far? / George Sussman – To the first question the answer is your judgment is as good as mine about whether or not this is just an excuse to crack down but I would note that with the economy in decline historically the concern about immigrants and having immigrants come here also declines and the restrictiveness of society declines, so I would suggest that your instinct is correct, that 9/11 is just an excuse because many of these people are clearly not a threat of committing terrorism. What’s happened is every college has been allowed to have 8 or 9 individuals who are authorized to enter data into the SEVIS system. My understanding is as of this morning there is no college that has more than one person, so that means there is only one person at a computer. The INS estimates about a half an hour to enter once, assuming the system works well and the person is familiar with the form. Because of the existing students who have needs - like I said, a student with a four-year college or a graduate degree can work for a year after they get their Master’s or PhD but they need a paper in order to do that because they need to submit to the INS that paper. If they don’t have the paper they can’t get the work permission, so the priority has not been, from some of the international student advisors, with the new admissions but it’s with our existing students. Like I said, at City College my understanding is that no I20’s have gone out to new students. Now, you still have a little time for the students who presumably are going to start in September. Hopefully this is all going to get worked out. The people who are dealing with SEVIS on behalf of CUNY say that INS has promised them that this is all going to be fixed, but right now at City College there’s one person with a master’s degree who spends all his day inputting data into a form on a computer. That’s what he does. As my mother would say, for that he needed a master’s degree? He basically is not making any decisions, there’s no discretion here, he’s entering data into a machine. In any event, that’s my knowledge as of today. It could change tomorrow because I know that people are working on it. / Professor Philipp – Lehman used to have a campus in Japan. Maybe we should reopen it.

Professor Fridman (English, Kingsborough Community College) – You mentioned the administrative delays in processing paperwork due to the need to scrutinize incoming international students and actually this is a point of information. I have no idea how one would scrutinize a total stranger unless one was doing that making contacts with foreign governments and intelligence services. / Allan Wernick – They use the FBI, the CIA, the Department of State, Interpol. There is a list of about 45-50 countries. If you’re from one of those countries in order to get any kind of visa, business visa, H1B to be a professor or international student visa, all those clearances have to be completed. / Professor Fridman – So the information that would be available to the FBI, the CIA etc., this is based on foreign contacts and that’s based on our accepting information that can come from any kinds of sources. / Allan Wernick– You’ve read the same novels I have. The CIA gets its information wherever it gets it, they have a database. If John or Mary Smith wants to get a visa his or her name is put into the database, among other places.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – This is nothing new. The United Sates oversees its embassies. All have processes that were established after WWII because any one of us who’d have the task of trying to bring a foreign scholar here for a conference in the 50’s and 60’s it was a nightmare, but there is a system set up. For example, I know how it worked in Athens when they were making sure that nobody got in here who had been in the Greek Civil War. This was well known in the Consulate. There’s a huge spy ring that was operating and anybody who tried to get in…we tried once to bring in a Belgian scholar who was a well-known Marxist economist at the University of Brussels. It took 3 years and the President of Yale to get that to occur just so he could give one lecture. He was never permitted to travel more than 5 miles out of Manhattan. There’s an old system that goes on in this country for this kind of thing. It wouldn’t be that hard for them to expand it. /Allan Wernick – Let me just make one comment. The guesstimate of the number of foreign born students at CUNY is about 50% of our total student body. That’s of the matriculated students as opposed to the continuing ed students. I don’t know what the numbers are there. When I say the process is stalled, it’s stalled in every way. So people becoming citizens: You can’t become a citizen, you can’t bring your brother here, he doesn’t come here, he can’t bring his children here. This is the flow of CUNY students. So the delays that I’m talking about for international students, yes, that’s relatively small. I think it’s a consequential group, a very important group, but it’s still only a small percentage of our student body. These delays are also prone to affect other kinds of activities. If you can’t become a permanent resident you can’t get financial aid; you can’t get financial aid, a lot of people don’t go to college. So if there is a two-year delay in getting permanent residence for someone who marries a US citizen, let’s say, that’s two years that that person is not eligible for financial aid. So this is going to have a very broad impact on the University.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center) – Two things. First of all, you guys are really terrific. I have a suggestion, though I don’t know how to implement it yet and I wonder if you would give it some thought and get back to the Executive Committee and the Senate--to set up small student run extensions on each of the campuses at least for the distribution of the appropriate literature, telephone numbers and so on. The students would be enriched by participating and it would make the dissemination of information much swifter and maybe more effective. Extensions of your programs: Just like if you have a sentencing project in a law school. Very often it could be done by students, they can have a faculty mentor, but you have the information and it’s the appropriate information at a certain level of expertise and it’s a question of getting it around. It may be that it would come out of the Dean of Student’s office or the Student Senate Offices. / Allan Wernick – We’ll work on it. First of all the project that [Mr. Sera] and I work at does have a contact on every campus, a citizenship coordinator, among the faculty administration usually, but in terms of students we would like to do that and I’ve been talking to some people in the Student Senate about that and hopefully in the next 6 to 9 months we’ll do that but I’ll also think about it and talk to the chairs. Let me say about this Dream Act though. I don’t mean to disparage the students but I will tell you that every time I meet a student who is active in the least bit I ask them about the Dream Act and I e-mail them my memo, and so far they’ve said I’m behind you a hundred percent but I don’t need people to be behind me, I need people to be in front of me. This is really an issue that’s going to impact the students more than anything, so if you know activist students on your campuses who are concerned about immigration issues we’re ready to work with them but the lead has to come from the students, that’s the way I look at it. I can provide them the information, I’ll go anywhere anytime to talk to anybody, but I can’t organize classroom to classroom on the campuses. Somebody has to do that. / Professor Baumrin – Susan will do it with the head of the Student Senate. / Chair O’Malley – Yes. How about the law school, does the law school want to say anything? I think the law school representatives left. /

Chair O’Malley – Thank you so much. We need to move quickly to nominations.

Nominations for Members -at-Large of the Executive Committee

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – On behalf of the Executive Committee, this is a resolution in your packet, Resolution on Student Academic Integrity and Plagiarism. There are series of whereas clauses that speak to the issue of the concern by students at CUNY as well as faculty about increased plagiarism and cheating and our need to do something about it. Then there is a series of resolved causes that basically make recommendations to the University through the task force of the University that the Chair has already appointed. Since it’s from the Executive Committee it’s already moved and seconded, so it’s open for discussion. [Unanimously passed.]

Chair O’Malley –Barbara Moore is going to move the resolution on CPE Exemptions… [tape ends]… Is there any new business? Bill.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) –This Resolution on the Patriot Act was on the table last time and we didn’t get to it under new business. It’s been presented to you not from me this time but from the Student Affairs Committee. I don’t have it on, so I’ll read it and if it’s too hard to do we can do it next time but if people can follow it maybe we can do it this time. [It was agreed that he would work on it and get it back to the body at a later date.]

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – I move the Resolution on the Senate Forum . This business of the Senate Forum--my fingers are getting tired of deleting, and I’ve got a colleague who’s afraid to post and I think that’s the limit. When a respectable member of the faculty can’t reach out to this electronic device created by this body with a legitimate purpose to contact her colleagues, something’s wrong and has to be fixed there. My resolution would stop those who want to communicate on any subject whatsoever from communicating. It’s just that we ought to distinguish a place where people go to receive important information and to keep that information flowing towards as wide a number as possible and maybe enter into behaviors that are discouraging, intimidating and pushing away colleagues and faculty. And I think it’s within the power of the body to maintain two such vehicles or places and it might service if we could do that. I know you say we wish we could. So my proposal ends up saying that we’re going to maintain this open free for all list, and then this other list, which I think is more along the lines of what the Senate Forum was supposed to be, where you the executive body determines who has authority to post but everyone receives. And not only can everyone receive but everyone can reply to at least the individual who did the posting, who had the authority to post. And anyone can send to any of you who doesn’t have the privilege to post for them. And in that body, what I’ll call the Senate Forum, we put people there as recipients even though they may not ask to be but they can ask to be removed. In other words we go from what, 350 we have now?…I think we should have at least 8-9,000. And at the rate at which it’s going and the way it’s operating we’re not going to get there but with thousands of people receiving these bits of information it’s a more effective vehicle and this body becomes a more powerful organ of this new integrated University. So that’s the resolution and I’m willing to accept a friendly amendment.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – I’m opposed to it. Things are messy, democracy is messy, giving everybody the right to post…I just think that once you restrict who’s going to be able to post and I don’t know, probably I couldn’t post, I don’t want these kinds of restrictions. People by now know who to delete if they don’t want to hear the discussion of Iraq or personal insult or so on. I just think once you start restricting you get into the same thing we’ve been objecting to everywhere else. Keep it open.

Professor Farrell (Behavioral Sciences and Human Services, Kingsborough Community College) – I just have a point of information. I thought we had created two lists, am I missing something? / Chair O’Malley – We have a list, the UFS News, that only the Executive Committee can post to and everyone can read. We also have the free for all list and we also have a list that I think has worked very well with the governance leaders and the Senators. So we have these three lists. / Professor Farrell – And I thought it was that third one that we can respond when people ask questions about CUNY or governance or issues or you ask us and we respond to you or anybody else. / Chair O’Malley – Yes, that has been a very effective list. / Professor Farrell – Right. So I thought that’s what we had created to create that discussion about CUNY issues. / Chair O’Malley – You see, it’s only the governance leaders and the Senators.

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – I sympathize with what Bill is saying. So if we can formulate it a tiny bit differently, basically saying that when people want to post to these things that they make a classification, say something with an asterisk and something with a dagger. Something with an asterisk means that it’s a University related business and if it is with a dagger it’s something else. That would be one way to address the problem and people who are not interested in the daggers can read only the asterisks. That would be one way to do it. Everything it would require would be for people to erase whatever else they don’t want to read, but I think it will be useful to identify things so that people who do not want to look at the stuff with the dagger don’t have to spend time on it.

Chair O’Malley – I’m intrigued by Jamal’s suggestion. What I would like is to keep the free for all and then I’d like to have a list that spoke only to CUNY and higher education. I’d like to have both. Now if we can do it with daggers, all right, but I was thinking of two lists. I’m willing to monitor that list for a number of months and if someone is speaking off the topic, he or she would be bumped onto the other list. I think though we’re fast not going to have a quorum and that maybe we should come back to this next time. But I’m glad that you brought it up because I think it’s important that we resolve this.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I was only going to mention the lack of perceived quorum. This is a very important topic and it’s too important to leave to the small number of people who are left here. So I think we should call for a quorum.

Chair O’Malley – OK, there is not a quorum. It will not be forgotten. We spend more time on the Executive Committee on this very issue. It will not be forgotten.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – Can I just mention the charming idea of daggers and asterisks? The problem is that there are people who think that because we’re a University, every topic is relevant to CUNY and therefore everything would have an asterisk.

Chair O’Malley – This meeting is adjourned. See you in a few weeks.