MINUTES OF THE THREE
HUNDRED AND FIFTEENTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY
OF NEW YORK
December 6, 2005
The meeting was called
to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:35 p.m. in Room 9205/6/7 at the Graduate School
and University Center. 74 voting members of 113 were present.
Baruch: Present –
Hill, Martell, and Pollard. Absent – Freedman, Myers, Smith, and Vora.
Vacancies – 2. BMCC:
Present – Agwu, Friedman, Martin, Rani, and Roy. Absent – Belknap,
and Price, Bronx CC: Present
– Alozie, Asimakopoulos, Durante, Skinner, and Ismail. Brooklyn: Present –
Antoniello, Bell, Bloomfield, Jacobson, Morawski, Shapiro, and
Alternate Cherukupalli. Absent
–Cunningham, Rodman, Tobey, Viscusi, and Wills. CCNY: Present
– Crain, Daglish, Leonard, and Sank.
Vacancies – 5. CSI: Present – Cooper, Klibaner,
Levine, Petratos, Yousef and Alternate Schumann. Absent – Farkouh. CUNY Law
School: Present
– McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancies – 1. Graduate School:
Present – Baumrin, and Alternate Burke. Absent – King, Lerner, Nolan, and
Orenstein. Vacancy – 1. Hostos
CC: Present – August, Falcon, and Alternate Czarnocha. Vacancies -
2. Hunter: Present –
Doyle, Finder, Kaye, and Matthews.
Absent – Friedman, Guzzetta, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill,
and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John
Jay: Present –Crossman, and Kaplowitz. Absent – Brugnola,
Caldwell, Kubic, and Romero. Kingsborough
CC: Present – Barnhart, Galvin, O’Malley, and Ruoff. Absent – Farrell, Hume. LaGuardia CC: Present –
Beaky, Lerman, Mettler, Rushing, Shean, and Alternate Green-Anderson. Absent – Davidson. Lehman: Present – Aronowitz,
Philipp, and Wilder. Absent – Jervis, Kolb, and Mineka. Medgar Evers: Present –
Daly, Hastick and Alternate Stewart.
Absent – Simmons. NYCCT:
Present – Cermele, Dreyer, Horelick, Hounion, and Alternate Pinto. Absent
– Karthikeyan, Richardson. Queens: Present – Bird,
Casco, Gonzalez, Moore,
Savage, and Zevin. Absent – Brody, Habib, and Tse. Vacancies – 2. Queensborough CC:
Present – Barbanel, Hest, Jacobowitz, Pecorino, and Alternate
Dahbany-Miraglia. Absent
–Weiss. Vacancies – 1. York: Absent – Divale, Frank, Lewis, and
Rosenthal.
Dean Steve Shepard, School of Journalism, attended. Professor Ibrahim Habib (CCNY)
attended. Ron McGuire, Miguel Malo,
and Jan Nordon attended.
Governance Leaders present: Anderson (BMCC), Baumrin
(GSUC), Burke (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCTC), Kaplowitz (John Jay),
Leonhard (CCNY), Levine (CSI), Martell (Baruch), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino
(QCC), Savage (Queens), andYoung (Hunter).
Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative
Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were also present.
I. Approval
of the Agenda: The agenda was
amended to include Item IV. B. Resolution on Miguel Malo’s
Sentencing. The agenda, as amended,
was adopted.
II. Approval
of the Minutes of September, 2005:
Senator Dalgilish corrected page 37, line 5 to read, “have this
Patriot Act overview of faculty, so that the…” The Minutes were adopted as corrected.
[The order
of business was modified. It is
recorded as stated on the agenda for consistency.]
III. Reports:
(Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)
A. Chair.
B. Chancellor Goldstein.
IV. New
Business:
A. Resolution Regarding the Proposed Online
BA Degree. The full discussion is
recorded in Reports & Deliberations.
The resolution was adopted with 61 senators in favor, 3 opposed, and 2
abstentions. Professors Petratos,
Bloomfield, and Stewart voted nay.
Professors Bell
and Pecorino abstained.
Resolution
Regarding the CUNY Online B.A.
Resolved, that the UFS cannot with
confidence support the proposal as outlined in the document below.
Proponent: Executive Committee
The CUNY Online Baccalaureate
Planned
to start in Fall 2006 with 300 students, the CUNY Online Baccalaureate is
intended for "degree completers," students who began college but have
been unable to complete their degree work. A variety of life pressures, from
work to family obligations, mean classroom-based instruction isn't an option
for these students. With this key
exception – that the only way they can complete their degree is online
– they are just the students targeted by CUNY's mission: students given
access to higher education who would otherwise be denied that opportunity.
The
CUNY Online Baccalaureate is not just a perfect mission fit for CUNY– a means
of giving access and opportunity to students now outside the constituencies
served by the existing campuses – but it is in every way to be a regular
CUNY degree, developed and delivered by CUNY faculty, if distinctive in its
mode of delivery. The School of Professional Studies is the ideal place for the
degree; the relatively new school, now two years old, already has a track
record of working with CUNY faculty to deliver quality instruction entirely to
their satisfaction, and to do this quickly, flexibly, with careful attention to
support services (so critical in this venture). SPS will be able to draw on
online instruction throughout CUNY but also to provide it with a single support
structure, ensuring that students get the support they need to succeed.
A
half decade of exemplary work in online instruction and course development
means CUNY has rich resources to mine for this degree: hundreds of instructors
have undergone extensive faculty development for online instruction, many of
whom can now claim years of experience with multiple courses in online formats.
Developed by such CUNY faculty, this degree's curriculum will be one in which
features of online learning—computer-mediated communication, interactive
inquiry, use of web-based resources—will give an added dimension to
instruction. Still, forging existing and prospective online courses into a
rigorous, coherent, quality curriculum is a challenge. The Steering Committee
for Online Resources and Education (SCORE) has been meeting since the start of
2005 to consider issues of curriculum, policy, and resource management posed by
such a degree. Faculty from SCORE have volunteered to serve on advisory
committees to take such thinking further, but final decisions must rest with
the SPS Curriculum Committee (yet to be named), and approved by the SPS
Governing Committee.
The
Chancellor himself has proposed that the CUNY Online Baccalaureate be
developed, taught, and overseen by full-time CUNY faculty who have joint
appointments, both at their home campus and in SPS. It is important that these
joint appointments are for service – things like curriculum development
and oversight, teaching evaluation, and so on – as well as for some
teaching, so that a joint appointment might entail one course a year, for instance,
plus committee service. The exact nature of these joint appointments is being
worked out (one challenge is to avoid making instruction in the online degree
happen at the expense of the colleges' teaching resources), but the decision to
make joint appointments has been made and will be implemented.
To
round out offerings and accommodate growth, the online degree will tap other
CUNY faculty with experience teaching online, contracting them to develop
courses for the program and paying them to teach these courses as adjuncts in
keeping with the University rules on faculty pay. As the program grows, it will
add not just other adjunct faculty but also full-time faculty, not just as
joint appointments, but as full-time positions teaching in the CUNY Online Baccalaureate.
B. Resolution on Miguel Malo’s
Sentencing: The resolution was
adopted with 69 Senators in favor, 1 opposed, and 3 abstentions. Professor Burke was opposed and
Professors Binder, Doyle, and Dreyer abstained.
Resolution
on Miguel Malo’s Sentencing
Whereas, Miguel Malo, a
Hostos Community College governance leader, was arrested in August 2001 while
protesting cutbacks and fee hikes for bilingual and ESL courses at Hostos; and
Whereas, following his
conviction in October 2005 on a misdemeanor charge of reckless assault and a
violation of disorderly conduct growing out of his arrest, Mr. Malo faces up to
a year in prison;
Therefore be it resolved, that the
University Faculty Senate requests that Miguel Malo be allowed to perform
community service as is common in misdemeanor cases, and not be sentenced to
jail.
III. Reports:
Continued. (Recorded in Reports
& Deliberations)
C. School of Journalism,
Dean Steve Shepard.
D. Results of the Faculty Experience
Survey, Professor Dean Savage (Preliminary
Report,
12/6/05, appended).
E. Representatives to Board of Trustee
Committees (written).
There
being no further business the meeting was adjourned at 9:05 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Bill Phipps
Executive Director
REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF
THE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTEENTH
PLENARY
SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY
OF NEW YORK
December 6, 2005
III. Reports:
A:
Chair: Susan O’Malley: I want to start by saying our parliamentarian just
got tenure at the Law
School. I couldn’t
be more pleased. She doesn’t have it yet in her hands, so it’s
unofficial, but I just want to say that she has worked so hard. The chancellor
is not coming today. He is at the Law School because they are interviewing candidates for
the Dean of the Law
School. So he was unable
to come which means we don’t have our entourage, which is fine with me.
At 7:15 Dean Shepard arrives to talk about the Journalism School.
Until then we have time to go over a few issues. There are three things that I
would like to talk about tonight. One is the reorganization of the doctoral
Sciences. There was a retreat yesterday about this. I also want talk about the
online computers degree in the School
of Professional Studies
and the Perez decision that came down last week.
First,
the Online Completers’ degree program. (agenda item IV. A.) The meeting
took place Nov 30th and everyone except me on the Governing Board of
the School of Professional Studies. voted for the
Curriculum Committee for the online SPS degree. The UFS names three members of
the SPS Governing Board, of which I am one. We had extensive discussions and
governance leaders talked to the members on their campuses. Barbara Weinstein,
one of the UFS appointees, left to teach. The Chancellor called most of the
members at home or at work and said that the UFS was essentially doing a power
play, and therefore, they should vote for the Curriculum Committee of the
online SPS degree. So there we are. I spent the meeting arguing that the document
that we looked at her was insufficient. Bert Flugman asked me why I thought it
was insufficient. If you read it, you will see that it is not substantial at
all. I asked why of the 12 people making up the degree, there was not one
scientist. And the answer was, “The 12 people know scientists.” No
one objected. I was amazed. I said I didn’t know why of the six people
making up the upper level courses, four are social scientists. That’s not
a very good balance, and three are from community colleges. I said I am from a
community college, and I know well that community college faculty tend not to
have the experience to design upper level courses even though some of us do
teach at senior colleges. (I teach at City College’s
Center for Worker Education). We don’t have the experience of senior
college curriculum committees. George Otte said that the community college
professors on the curriculum committee all would like to teach the material of
their dissertations. Now that’s a non-sequitur. I kept hammering and
hammering, but I didn’t get support and I think it’s the people in
the committee – Bert Flugman, Mimi Abramowitz, Dan Atkins, Allan Wernick,
Gerald Markowitz, Barbara Weinstein, Robert Paaswell – they’re all
very reputable faculty, but they hadn’t been brought into the discussion
until the very last minute. So when the vote came, I said I have been directed
by the 127 members of the University Faculty Senate and by the 19 governance
leaders not to vote for the curriculum committee. I said the 19 governance
leaders include your governance leaders. and, you cannot get much better than
Phil Leonhard (City College), Joan Tronto (Hunter), Karen Kaplowitz (John
Jay), and Stefan Baumrin (Graduate
School). I listed them
all and the governing board members looked a little dead. They then proceeded
to vote for the curriculum committee. They said privately to me, “Susan,
you don’t have the votes, why would we cross the Chancellor?” It
was a very sad day for me. I don’t know if you want to ask questions or I
don’t know if we want to move on to the resolution that we have. Why
don’t you ask a few questions and then Michael Barnhart, who is chair of
Academic Policy, is going to reshape the resolution a bit, because of our
discussion.
Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Sciences and Physics, College of
Staten Island) – I am from the College
of Staten Island. The
vote was to form the curriculum committee. It was not to approve a letter of
intent. / Chair O’Malley - That is correct. You should have a list
of the curriculum committee members listed on the document. And then on the
other side of the sheet are the people making up the degree. / Professor
Levine – I believe the appropriate party to review and approve this
and all other CUNY-wide degrees is the University Faculty Senate. I want to go
on record as pledging that when I receive the letter of intent, I will consider
it carefully. I will make my judgment solely based on the quality of the letter
of intent. I will not care who developed it. Therefore, as far as I am concerned,
let it be this curriculum committee that develops it. If it’s an
excellent letter of intent, I intend to vote yes. If it’s not an
excellent letter of intent, I will stand up, state my reasons and vote against
it. / Chair O’Malley – I had been promised that the letter
of intent would be available today and then I could have brought it to our
Academic Policy Committee to look at. However, today I was told that it was not
yet ready, but perhaps would be tomorrow. But it’s hard to proceed until we
see the letter of intent. We need to vote on the preliminary document, but I
very much want feedback from the UFS on the letter of intent.
Professor Bill Crain: (Psychology, City College)
– The question is what if they go forward without the UFS approval? / Professor
Levine – We have to state that they cannot do so? / Chair
O’Malley - We can state that. / Professor Levine – And we can
threaten to go to court. / Chair O’Malley – We are going to
talk about Perez, which is a decision that moves us into a much stronger
position than we have been before.
Professor Anne Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan
Community College) – But I hear them say or imply that this committee was
going to create the letter of intent. The charge to this committee, or the way
it’s described here, this committee is not going to write a letter of
intent but this committee is going to proceed with developing the coursework,
syllabi, admission, pre-requisites and so on. My understanding is that the
letter of intent is coming from the Executive Vice Chancellor. But the
committee is formed and already told what to do but eventually we’ll get
the letter of intent from her. / Chair O’Malley – Yes, I
think it comes from her although these are the people who are working on it. /
Professor Friedman – I think we do have a problem with that. It seems a
little backwards to me. / Chair O’Malley – The letter of
intent will be circulated to your college presidents to make sure there is no
overlap. We’re exploring that right now. Catherine Gorlin of the Office
of Academic Affairs – she is convinced there is no overlap. Until we see
the degree, it’s hard to know. The major is Communication and Culture.
Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island): The SPS
committee that voted to approve the members of a Curriculum Committee –
it seems that they could not have had anything more in front of them than this
page and quarter document that we have. / Chair O’Malley –
That is correct. / Professor Cooper – This document called the CUNY Online
Baccalaureate, which we have had floating around for about two weeks. It has no
signature and no date on it and no letterhead. There is an uncanny resemblance
to the way the SPS arrangement was presented to us. That was about a year ago.
This document does not indicate who produced the variance permitting SPS to
give a Baccalaureate. It was entirely supposed to be certificates, graduate
programs and what I used to call “just in time” education depending
on who needed somebody trained for something. So it was a specific prohibition
against Baccalaureate degrees. Therefore, the people who have voted on this on
my money are doing something which is totally outside of their charge and their
purview. But it seems to me that 80th
Street only pulls laws out when it’s
convenient. I don’t think that the resolution that the Executive
Committee is presenting tonight is out of line. It simply states that the
attached document, which is this nameless, dateless, un-letterheaded piece of
paper, describes an anticipated degree to be offered. And we are asked to
assess the document we are given. SPS obviously assessed it. On what grounds, I
don’t know. We have not had the advantage of having private phone calls
from the Chancellor. There I think we can be more independent and less
intimidated although I don’t think personally a phone call would make me
change my mind. I think the body should vote on this. It will provide a
direction for the leadership of the Senate in the next few months and it will
send a message, which clearly has to be delivered to those folks who are
violating all the promises they made last year. / Chair O’Malley -
Perhaps it would make sense to move to the resolution. It was sent to you in
your packet and we have extras in the back. I do want to say that on next
Monday the School
of Professional Studies Governing Committee
is being reconvened to vote on the letter of intent. I have said that I must
have it with sufficient time to study it. We will see if that happens.
Professor Campbell Daglish (Media and Communication Arts, City College)
- In this letter of intent what I would like to see is if it implies that there
is a path to a goal that they will achieve successfully. And I would like it
described what that path would be, who would be included, and how they will
succeed in the school. SPS at NYU failed with an online degree and so did Columbia University. Have either of these
universities been contacted, asked to give some input, find out what mistakes
were made, why it failed, how much money did they lose? Are we entering a fatal
path towards a goal that we cannot successfully accomplish? And if so, what
path do we need to follow in order to be successful? / Chair O’Malley -
Phil, do you want to respond to that or not? Or do you know the answer?
Professor Phil Pecorino (Social Sciences, Queensborough Community
College) - I volunteered to help out with
developing this thing. I volunteered for the group that’s working on
support services.
Chair O’Malley: Can you answer about why
the Columbia
and NYU failed?
Professor Pecorino: They knew what they were trying to do. What this is trying to do is
something different so it’s a different path. It does not mean that they
are not going down another path that’s fraught with as many potential
errors and mistakes and opportunities for failure. It might be helpful to know
a bit about the initial target group. The office of Institutional Research
identified about 66,000 people who had stopped out of CUNY with the following
characteristics: they had 30 or
more credits, they left in good standing meaning a GPA above 2.0, and they
didn’t give reasons why they weren’t returning. Of that number,
44,000, I believe, had stopped progress at community colleges and the hope is
that somehow they will be enticed to return if this program offers them an
opportunity to complete their degree. That would only be true if the reason why
they didn’t continue would be surmounted by the instruction being offered
online. But every time we get into a discussion of the potential group –
we had an excellent series of questions given to us a month or so ago about
marketing – more questions come up. For example, these folks stopped
completion of a particular degree, maybe in physics or chemistry or in
sociology or whatever. They’re not being offered an opportunity to
complete that degree. They are being offered only a program with one track in
it to become a holder of the baccalaureate degree. So the belief is that
somehow from that group of 66,000 they are going to get folks, by and large, that
don’t need remediation although 44,000 stop out from community colleges
where its quite easy to get 30 credits without having completed your remedial
courses such as English 101. And of that group, there will be enough willing to
take this program to obtain a baccalaureate degree in Communications and
Culture for whatever use…I’m not sure. We’re talking about
support services for advising and counseling people and job placement for
people and it’s kind of like designing a wonderful program where the
core, your curriculum, may not be attractive enough to create a community
that’s going to enter into the program. Nor to deliver the wonderful
things you’d like a person to leave the program with. This is not to say
you cannot do a good job on delivering online instruction. I’ve seen it.
You can. But there are a whole host of questions and issues about this one. You
also ought to know that in developing this, in order to deal with the practical
questions, issues have come up such as: people who are out of state, what
tuition will they pay? People who are not in the country, what will they pay?
So my thinking is, when I hear those questions, that this is not just for this
one specific program that might attract a variety of people from all different
backgrounds (who also happen to be CUNY stop-out people) but it might then go
on to attract lots of others from lots of other places who like the idea of the
online degree. But the core of our governance issues is still there to be dealt
with, looking at the particulars of the curriculum and the organization. / Chair
O’Malley - Thank you. And did you write some of the letter of intent?
/ Professor Pecorino – Yes. I told you, I’m more concerned about
the budget than the letter of intent. The budget tells you what really the
intention is, what’s actually going to be there. / Chair O’Malley
– Okay, let’s look at the resolution. Michael Barnhart is going to
offer some amendments to it.
Professor Michael Barnhart (History, Philosophy and Political Science,
Kingsborough Community College) – I thought that Phil did a very good job
articulating what bothered us in the committee on Academic Policy when we
looked at this proposal. One of the big things that impressed us was that there
seemed to be a big mismatch between the target audience and actually what was
being offered. So we did in the end feel that perhaps it was worth taking a
stand against the actual document that’s come out so far because we feel
that the direction is perhaps very flawed, and not to mention the sorts of
governance issues that were alluded to in terms of the way in which it was
hatched. But also we’re reluctant to come out against the concept of
online education or to imply in any way that we thought it wouldn’t work.
So, we sat down and tried to recraft the resolution to some extent so it would
reflect our concerns about the document itself, and it looked like it was going
to be a lot of whereases but Sandi Cooper provided a nice handy reference to
CUNY’s “Revised Faculty Handbook for Preparation of Academic
Programs,” and if we take a look at the requirements in there, they are
fairly specific about how a program should be designed. It’s very clear
that there has to be some kind of rationale in terms of the demographic appeal
of a particular program and it’s clear, from the kind of thing that Phil
said and from the proposal as it stands, that it does not seem to have been
approached with any great care. So we re-crafted the resolution to refer to
those standards. So it now reads, “whereas the reference document (the
one that’s attached to the resolution) fails to meet the standards
required by the CUNY Revised Faculty Handbook for preparation of new academic
programs.” The date on that handbook is January 2001, and, “whereas
no letter of intent relating to the proposal for an online degree has been
provided to the UFS, be it resolved that the UFS cannot with confidence support
the proposal as outlined in the attached document.” / Chair
O’Malley - Do I have a second? / Audience – Yes. / Chair
O’Malley – Yes, discussion. The vote is not to express
confidence. / Professor Barnhart – We have resolved that the UFS
cannot with confidence support the proposal as outlined in the attached document.
/ Chair O’Malley – So everyone is clear about that? Sandi,
did you want to offer something? / Professor Cooper - For those
who are wavering, I would like to read the criteria that the University itself
requires every one of us incorporate in a new degree proposal. a) Academic
Quality b) Justification of need. Next, societal needs in terms of regional,
state and national needs. Then, career opportunities for graduates. Student
interest. Relationship to other programs of CUNY. Centrality to other campus programs
and to college and university locations. Resources available to implement the
program. Conformity with the standards of accredited agencies for the
profession. Conformity with the regulations of the State Education Department.
Now if you open up this document and you find these items in there, I
congratulate you. / Chair O’Malley - I think we could move the question.
Dean Shepard is coming in 15 minutes.
Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College)
- I’m not against online instruction per se but it has to be done
in a very high quality way. CUNY deserves that. In addition, my own college, Lehman College,
has a Mass Communication major, which is very close and very much overlapping
with the proposed major, in my view.
Professor Martha Bell (SEEK, Brooklyn) -
The phrase “confidence” bothers me. It seems to me that it implies
that we could approve it but not with great confidence. I would ask the maker
of the motion to strike “with confidence” and leave that we cannot
support it. Is that all right with the maker of the motion? I don’t think
that helps. Yes? I would also like to say that Brooklyn
has at least two and probably three majors that are an overlap with this,
including an interdisciplinary Communications major and major in Speech Communication.
/ Chair O’Malley – The letter of intent will be circulated
to the presidents. It’s very important to determine if your college has
programs that overlap with the proposed major in communication and culture and
that if this is true, that your President has enough courage to say so. / Professor
Barnhart – I understand Martha’s complaint. I do think it goes
to the whole procedural question that we constantly face which is that on the
one hand, they craft these proposals and bring them down without any
consultation on our part and then we give them actually a mixed message because
we often say to them, “Well, if you had consulted us we would have more
confidence in it.” And then they say, “Well, we are consulting you
and it’s not a finished document” and then we say, “You
didn’t give us a finished document, we don’t like it.” So we
tend to give them a mixed message on these sorts of things. / Professor
Friedman – I think that we can only vote on what we have. The Chancellor
is very aware of what Sandi read and if they are not, then we have bigger
problems than I think we think we have. I feel no hesitancy or wishy-washiness
or concern or...Down the line, we can always look for fabulous documents and
change our minds, but today, this is the last meeting of this semester. I think
we have to make our statement.
Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate School) – So, an
interesting layout. What the language implies is “come back to us with a
different document with a different theory, maybe we’ll have a different
view.” So I don’t care. The wishy-washiness doesn’t bother me
because you’re saying to the administration, “No, it’s not
good enough, come back.” That’s not what they usually think they have
to do. That’s new. They may not come back. And then we’ll complain
a different way. But they may decide that they have to come back because if
they don’t come back and get our approval, they can’t get it
through the State Education Department.
Professor Vasilios Petratos (Political Science,
Economics & Philosophy, College
of Staten Island) - They
have no budget, they have no estimate…they say it’s going to be a
money-maker. They have no plan. They have no letter of intent or un-intent.
They have absolutely nothing. We have been asked to vote on a number of things.
Martha was very kind. If she accepts, my amendment would be to simply say,
“We reject this document.” They did not even have the courtesy of
supplying the chair of this body with the letter of intent. I think we should
say we reject it. Stefan mentioned it before, we are the only ones that can
approve a degree and grant a degree. So it’s time to take a position and
a strong one. / Chair O’Malley - Someone called the question. One point
to consider is that the plan calls for this degree program to be up and running
in September ’06. I am against wishy-washiness. All in favor of calling
the question on the motion as it stands? Michael, read it again. / Professor
Barnhart – Okay, so as it stands, the Resolved is “Be it
resolved that the University Faculty Senate cannot with confidence support the
proposal as outlined in the attached document.” / Chair O’Malley
- All in favor of calling the question. / Audience – Aye! / Chair
O’Malley – Any opposed? One opposed. Any abstentions? We have
to name them. We will have lessons on the Perez decision later. There
are no abstentions. Michael, read the Resolved, and then we will vote on it. / Professor
Barnhart – Be it resolved that the University Faculty Senate cannot
with confidence support the proposal as outlined in the attached document. / Chair
O’Malley – All in favor of the resolution? Do we need to count?
How many nos? One, two, three, four, five. How many abstentions? One. We have a
count of the votes. Has Dean Shepard arrived? Because of the Perez decision,
we have to have the names of the people who voted “no.” Put up your
hands once again. The “nay” votes: Bloomfield, Stewart and Burke.
Abstentions: Bill, Pecorino.
We’re learning how to do it properly. Has Dean Shepard arrived?
[Chair’s Report continues after items C and D.]
III. Reports (cont.):
C. Journalism Dean Steve Shepherd:
-- Chair
O’Malley - Dean Shepard has arrived. I asked for his bio, and I
wasn’t given one, so, I’m making it up. Dean Shepard was Editor of
Business Week for many years. He’s extraordinarily prestigious. The last
time he came to the UFS, I had a long bio ready, but we didn’t let him
speak because we were so involved with the online degree. We went on and on and
on and I thought we were reasonably rude. He had to leave for a previous
engagement. I am so pleased that Dean Shepard, the Dean of the New Journalism
School, is going to address us tonight. Dean Shepard.
Dean Shepard: You lost my bio. I lost my notes. So I just have to wing it. Good
evening, everyone. Thank you. The most salient thing about my biography is that
I went to City College. I was an Editor of a magazine
called Vector, which was the Engineering School
magazine because I was an engineering student at City College.
And it was the start of fulfilling an ambition to become a journalist. I
started as a science writer and worked at McGraw Hill editorial training
program at Business Week for nine
years, a couple of which were in London. Came back and worked there for a
little longer and left to teach at Columbia in
the Journalism School – Economics and Business
Journalism and then went to Newsweek
where I was a Senior Editor for five years and back to Business Week. I became Editor-in-chief in 1984 and served as
Editor for 20 years until last March when I left to take this job as Dean of
the new Graduate School of Journalism in City University.
So, in a way, coming full circle. As I said, when I left Business Week,
I thought this is something that stirs my soul; this is something that needs to
be done. You know, there is no publicly supported graduate school in
journalism, not just in New York City
but the entire Northeast. So if you don’t have $45,000 to go to Columbia, you are out of
luck. So I don’t have to tell the people in this audience what that is
like. So, we’re starting a Masters program in Journalism, leading to an
MA degree.
We
will start in September with our first students. We will start with 50 students
and ramp it up over three or four years to 150 students, which will be the
capacity of the school. It is a three-semester program – fall, spring,
summer internship (of which I will talk about in a minute) and then the fall
semester again, 16 months. It is a full-time program. The curriculum (because
we are 3 semesters compared to just 2 at Columbia,
Northwestern, and some other graduate schools) we will have a chance to do not
only media tracks (broadcast and increasingly online journalism) but also
subject concentrations. We will start with 3 sorts of subject concentrations.
One in Urban Reporting, one in Business and Economics, and the third one in
Health and Medicine. And then in the second year, we’ll have some more
students who’ll have a fourth concentration in Arts and Culture. So you
can see that those four areas are very germane to New York, meaning the industries are
substantially located here, whether it’s culture or business. Urban
reporting - New York
is the best possible place to do this, and this is also the Health and Medicine
center. So, each of those concentrations, depending on which one you choose as
a student, students can take three courses in each of those concentrations. So
the curriculum is a bit of a matrix – it’s media tracks on top of
subject concentration. We think it’s very important to have subject
concentrations, not simply because of something you might want to be, you know
like business reporters, but because having a concentration means you can do
in-depth journalism, gain a certain amount of expertise in the subject, you
develop sources, you can do a more analytic form of journalism or in-depth form
of journalism. So if you’re asked to help some other beat, you will
understand what that means and learn how to do it. I mean, you can tell
potential students, you can think of it as a major in college which
doesn’t mean you end up doing what you majored in but you learn how to
learn. So that’s the curriculum – three semesters.
The
school will be located on 40th
Street between 7th and 8th
Avenues in the old Herald Tribune building, which ceased publication
(for those of you who remember that wonderful paper) in the 1960s. So
it’s almost 40 years. They’re going to have a commemoration in our
building in fall of ’06. Those of the people who’re still around,
some pretty famous journalists. The other thing about the building is that
it’s next to where New York Times
is building its new headquarters. So this is nitty-gritty New
York, where it’s half a block from Times
Square, half a block from the Port Authority Bus Terminal and in
the Garment District, next door to the button shops. It turns out to be a great
place to do a graduate program in Journalism. It’s not just that the New York Times will literally be the
next building but you can walk from that building to 50 major media companies
in New York,
literally walk and a cab ride from another five. It’s really very good
and makes it easier for adjuncts to come in and do some of the teaching.
We are often asked, what makes this
graduate school different from all other graduate schools? Why should somebody
come to this school? And there are several things that make it special. In the
summer internship program, we are going to pay everyone. In other words, if
students get a summer internship at a place that pays (I remember when I was at
Business Week, we paid interns),
that’s fine. But if you don’t, we’ll pay them a stipend,
something approximately $3000 for the summer, so that they don’t have to
go work at some other job. I think internships are a critical part of the School of Journalism and this is a good
opportunity. And of course, these things often lead to jobs, which of course we
are very concerned about. So the summer internship program as a paid summer
internship program is a rather unique proposition. We are going to be very,
very strong in new media – interactive journalism. We are going to call
it citizen’s journalism, meaning we use web logs (I hate to use the word
blogs because it has such a pejorative meaning for so many people), but web
logs basically done in communities become a form of citizen’s journalism –
from–the–bottom kind of reporting for local communities that just
doesn’t get done. So technology makes that possible. We will have as a
part of the Urban Reporting concentration a community news service that will be
a wire service basically, except it will be on the web which means you’ll
have video and audio as well as text, which will be student stories sent out
under faculty supervision and sent out on the web to any of the hundreds of
community and ethnic newspapers in New York City that want to run it. So it’s
a great outlet for student journalism. Another outlet for student journalism
will be CUNY TV. I believe I am right in saying we are the only university in New York that has a
television station 24/7, and it’s in this building. And so the broadcast
students will be able to produce programming for CUNY TV. We will also have a
network of radio stations on a number of the campuses, which have radio
stations, and we are going to form with them a CUNY radio network and
we’re trying to do this with either NPR or Bloomberg or both. We can make
it something really special. We will have a strong emphasis on the New Media
part of it. We’ve hired a man names Jeff Rogers, who’s one of the
leading figures in this new world to run the New Media program. So that’ll
be a strength. If I had my notes, I’d look at what I’m forgetting.
/ Chair O’Malley - Faculty and students. / Dean Shepard
– Yes, about faculty. We’ve hired and announced four faculty
people. I’ll tell you who they are in a second. We’ll hire two
more. So the core faculty for the first year will be six faculty for the 50
students and we’ll start off from there. And we will have a bunch of
adjunct faculty from various news media in New York. So for the Business and Economics
concentration, we’ll have a course in covering financial markets on Wall
Street and that will be taught by an adjunct who is at Business Week or Wall Street
Journal or New York Times,
whoever can come in and teach that course. / Chair O’Malley
– Will any present CUNY faculty be teaching? Dean Shepard – There
will be some consortium faculty on the model of The Graduate Center but nowhere
near as extensive. Graduate
Center has roughly 120
full-time faculty people here and 2000 or more consortium faculty based on one
of other of the campuses. So that’s how it works and it works really
well. We will have just a handful of consortium people from the campuses. There
are some very good people like Paul Moses from Brooklyn College
who is a Pulitzer Prize winner when he was at Newsday, and there are others around like Glenn Lewis who is active
in the University Faculty Senate. So we will have a handful of people from the
campuses. We will probably try to integrate some of the Graduate Center
faculty, who are not journalists but as specialists in obviously one field or
another. There are a lot of urban experts here among other things. And we will
try to work them in. So three categories – full-time, adjuncts and
consortial. And before we’re fully ramped up, it’s hard to say how
many full-time faculty we’ll have. Six for 50 students. I doubt
we’ll have three times after 150 students but something in that
direction. Students. We are recruiting. The admissions process has started. The
deadline is later than it normally would be. It’s February 15th.
I guess we had a little bit of a late start. Applications have just started
coming in. They will be handed by the Graduate Center
and we have an online application process. We will digitize all writing
samples. It’s very rigorous admission standards. We’re asking for a
3.0 GPA, which is the rule of the Graduate
Center. We are part of
the Graduate Center. The GRE exam, writing sample,
faculty recommendations and all the rest.
When we come through the applications, there will be a second tier which
is if you make the cut, we will ask people to come and take tests, which a lot
of graduate schools in journalism do. A writing test, a current events text. Do
you read the newspapers? Do you what Darfur
is? And some sort of grammar test as well, and there will be interviews. So
anybody who passes the grammar test will be a miracle, I think. Doesn’t
mean there aren’t enough writers with grammar. So it will be a rigorous
admissions process. So we’re looking for 50 students. I have no idea how
many applications we’ll get. A little more about facilities, which I hope
you’ll come and see in the fall. That building is now owned by Research
Foundation of CUNY, so we’ll have 2 floors totalling 40,000 square feet
with an internal staircase. It will have a broadcast studio in there, television
and radio. We’ll have all the latest equipment – it’s
team-designed in philosophy and in the plumbing from the ground up to take
advantage of all the new technology. It will be a wireless environment so
students can have their laptops and go anywhere on those two floors and be
connected. / Chair O’Malley – Will you attempt to recruit
CUNY students or give them in some way some kind of scholarships? / Dean
Shepard – What we are doing is recruiting. We are going out to all
the CUNY campuses, a lot of those campuses, and we are looking for students who
are interested in journalism and demonstrate some proficiency. We are finding
out we know who all the student editors are and all the papers. I spent a lot
of time up at City
College, for example.
They are reviving The Campus, which
was published since 1907, and it was there when I was there. I worked on it for
a while. It was defunct for a while when City College
was going through bad times. They are now reviving it and there are wonderful,
wonderful students and they are doing a very good job and there is a lot of
faculty support for it. A lot of colleges are renewing commitment to
undergraduate journals. Baruch is stepping up its program. York College
is stepping up its program. City
College is. Queens and Brooklyn are strong. Lehman has a multi-language
journalism program, the only one I know of in the whole country. So I think
there are going to be a number of CUNY students who want to come to this
school. / Chair O’Malley – Tuition, scholarships? / Dean
Shepard – It’s what the tuition is for masters programs
throughout the university. So it’s $6400 a year plus fees. So, I call it
$7500 a year compared to $35,000 at NYU or Columbia in their masters programs. So
it’s one-fifth. You all know that for many students the choice is not
between $7500 and $35,000. It’s between $7500 and nothing. So there are
students who come to us and say, “Well, I need to work.” What does
that mean? You need a job on a Saturday afternoon. “Well, no, no I need
to work full-time.” Well, what we say to them is, “Come and see us
and we will talk about what kind of financial aid we can make available,”
but this is not a program that can be done on a part-time basis. Maybe in the
fullness of time, we will be able to do that but the faculty needs to be
enormous then. With 50 students, you can’t do that. So you have to come
in and take the five courses in the first semester, the next five, whatever
tracks you choose and then five more. But the one thing you can’t do at
night is reporting. You can’t start calling people at nine o’ clock
at night. You must do reporting in the day. It’s very hard for students
who have full-time jobs so we’re very frank about it. But we’re
saying we’re giving out all the need-based scholarships. We’re not
going to do what Northwestern and Columbia and Berkeley and some of the
others do, which is to compete for the very best students for $40,000.
We’re going to reserve the money so that we do have scholarships for
people who can demonstrate need.
There
is an outside Advisory Committee that we have set up with Howard Rubenstein.
Journalists don’t usually like PR people, but Howie is a PR man and he is
just a wonderful, wonderful man and he runs an exceptionally good business. And
we have between us put on Maude Zimmerman who used to publish at the Daily News and the US News and Mark Whitaker who is the Editor of Newsweek, Matt Winkler who is the Editor-in-Chief of Bloomberg, Roz Abrams of the WCBS,
Rossano Rosado who is the publisher of El
Diario, Anna Perez of NBC-Universal, David Weston who is the President of
ABC News…people of that sort. In fact, we have a larger board meeting on
Thursday with them. And they’re just very eager to take our interns and
hire people from the school partly because they know what the student body is
going to be like and all journalism organizations including the one I ran have
a problem with diversity. And we made a push for this and we will have a very
diverse student body as well as a very high-quality student body. And I’m
not a person who sees any conflict between the two, which is an issue that has
gone on at this university for way too long. We’re going to have quality
and diversity. / Chair O’Malley – I think that’s it.
Any questions? / Dean Shepard – Linda Carl from City College,
Sara Bartlett who has the Bloomberg chair, Wayne Svoboda who was from Queens College.
He used to teach at Columbia
and was at Time magazine and Economist.
Professor Bill Crain (Psychology, City College)
– It sounds wonderful. I still am worried about how representative
it’s going to be of low-income students of color if you have five
courses. Lots of the poorer students do have to work. Five courses full-time.
You can try to get as many scholarships as you can but we’ve had
experiences with other master’s programs, where the tuition keeps going
up in order to support the programs. Outside funding never can do it and then
that sets up a cycle where it gets harder and harder for low-income students to
get in based on scholarships. You get a percentage but it’s sort of like
the same thing I do and everybody else does. They have scholarships but it ends
up they are white upper middle class students. Maybe we need some guarantee. / Dean
Shepard – We’re saying to the students…the lapse time of
this program is 16 months. We will expect some students to take out student
loans. This is not medical school. They are not going to come out $75,000 in
debt. That is not going to happen. We’re saying to you, we’re going
to commit to you a very good faculty, a very good facility, a very good
curriculum and we’re going to train you, mentor you and get you your
first job as well as the internship. In turn, we expect commitment back, which
is, you come to school full-time and that’s what the program is. You can grill
me again and I can give you data and we can say you’re right, I’m
right. I just don’t end up believing that we are going to end up with a
student body that’s not diverse. When I say diversity, I mean people of
color plus immigrants; I mean this is the population, population of New York, population of City University,
and it’s okay by me if we have some white Eastern Europeans. That counts
as diversity as far as I’m concerned. I just think we’re going to
have a good student body that’s very diverse. Maybe some students of
color who can’t afford to come full-time, that’s how it will be,
but the people who’re going to be there are going to be very diverse. So
that’s all I can say. I don’t know how to do this on a part-time
basis. And I think we’ll all have a very high-quality education. And I will promise you that we will have
a very diverse group of students.
Hold me to it. / Professor Crain – We will.
Professor Eda Harris-Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers
College) – First of
all, I’m not sure that you answered his question in terms of the student
population that he was describing, number one, who are not Eastern Europeans.
They look like me. That’s number one. So perhaps you can answer his question
after. My question is whether
you’re aware that there is a BA in journalism at Medgar; and perhaps,
some of those bright, energetic, willing-to-work, willing-to-take summers off,
etc. might just come from Medgar. / Dean Shepard - I would hope so. / Professor
Harris-Hastick – Thank you. / Dean Shepard – We will be
recruiting out there. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you so much.
D. Results of Faculty
Experience Survey: Professor
Dean Savage (Sociology,
Queens College) – This is a preliminary draft report that is comprised
primarily of tables that I will walk you through, so everybody should have a
copy and I’m simply going to give an introduction to the Faculty
Experience Survey. Then I’m going to talk for a while about where we are
going to be taking this next. If you remember, the UFS put out a survey last spring
to 6200 people on a list that was provided to us and we got back about 2000. At
Tolga’s insistence, we added adjuncts at the end. We did 800 adjuncts at Brooklyn College
and CLTs and I had distributed it to 200 people, part-timers at Queens College.
For whatever reason, we got a very low response rate from the part-time faculty
members and so the results I’m going to be recording tonight are going to
be exclusively for full-time faculty. We’re not sure why we had a low
response rate from the 1000 part-time faculty but it was possibly because some
of the very first questions on the survey asked about research facilities and
maybe a number of part-timer’s simply concluded seeing this questionnaire
appeared in their mailbox but was not actually intended for them. At some point
in the future, we’re going to have to do a survey that would concentrate
specifically on part-time faculty, tailored for them. In the meantime, maybe
the best thing to suggest is that Eric Marshall for PSC-CUNY did a pretty good
survey about 5 years ago. The Union has that
survey. I have it on my computer but it’s basically embargoed. I’d
love to turn a grad student loose on it. I think it’s got very good data.
We just have to get the okay from the Union to
go ahead. So what I’m going to be reporting tonight is based upon the
results for the full-time faculty, about 2000 full-time faculty that responded
to this survey, roughly a 33% response rate. Not terrific, but this is a
one-shot survey and I think we have a large enough number of cases on a
complete sample of the entire universe. So we’ve got enough cases per
college to go ahead and get a pretty good idea. On the first table, numbered
Table 1, we had a number of background questions, demographics. Rank, gender,
years in place, race/ethnic, age. And we’re reporting the results for
these variables on a single outcome factor which is how happy are you with your
teaching position at CUNY? There are basically are no differences worth noting.
While the demographics do not turn out to be a major explanatory factor for
most of the items that we have, when we get into the detailed analysis it will
on a campus-by-campus basis turn out to be something interesting. But for the
purposes of this presentation, data for CUNY as a whole, background demographics
basically don’t count. Going to the second table, Table no. 2, we get an
idea of 17 items, what CUNY faculty really like, what they really don’t
like. So we can see at the very top, faculty do rule, I think they rule in
terms of authority of what they actually do in the classroom. Where they
don’t say they are very much satisfied is everything related to research.
TA’s, research assistants, sabbaticals, research equipment, research
laboratories, all those items are down at the bottom. The items that are up at
the top are the fairly traditional standard ones like voicemail, mail, mailroom
services, secretarial support (interestingly enough!), fax, etc. Some of the
computer-related things – after the Tech Fee – have turned out to
be fairly high-ranking on a number of campuses although I still feel there are
a number of rather striking campus–by-campus differences. And then we
have a bunch of things in the middle. But then the astonishing thing here is
the range. Look at the range. Some things are 90% happy, other things are 6%
happy. That is a questionnaire that is delivering the goods as opposed to one
where everybody pretty much said the same thing. You can say, back to the
drawing board, this questionnaire does not differentiate, it does not discriminate.
So this one shows there are some things CUNY faculty are quite pleased with and
there are things they really, really hate. Going on to the third table. If we
took that previous table and we divided it down campus by campus – what
you had in Table 2 was a picture for CUNY as a whole – it’s a
mythical creature that doesn’t really exist. We exist on campuses, we
exist in particular local environments. So what I did is break it down campus
by campus and so I said okay, how many items on your campus are above the
mythical CUNY mean and how many are below the mythical CUNY mean? And then I
did the ranking and here we have four distinct groups that emerge and one of
them is the group at the top – Baruch with the $14 million in endowment
and the new campus and all of the perks and the incredible library facility,
and all of those things that all of us now should really start to pay attention
to a little bit more. The people at Baruch are pretty happy. Or maybe
it’s really nice administrators who are respectful toward faculty. I
don’t know exactly what it is but this is very interesting because many
of us would have assumed that the tradition hierarchy would be respected when
faculty members talk about how satisfied they are in comparison to other faculty
members. If you’re at the Grad
Center, you’re
going to feel great, right? And if you’re at an underserved two-year
college that is starved for faculty and resources, you’re going to
express your dissatisfaction in the survey. Not so. What we have here instead is
a violation of the standard hierarchy – Grad Center,
four-year colleges, new senior colleges, two-year colleges. We don’t have
that. We have Queensborough and Kingsborough. Then we go down to the middle and
then we have right at the middle, two fairly typical CUNY campuses – Queens and Lehman – right there at the middle
point. And so then moving on down, we get…I’m just going to leave
those middle campuses as sort of okay, they are kind of undistinguished and
they don’t stand out from the CUNY norm, and then we go down to BMCC,
Tech, John Jay, York and all those people say, “Yeah, we’ve got
problems.” And then down at the bottom and this is a stunner for me --
Medgar. Medgar’s been starved for a long time and they’re finally
getting their building. They hadn’t had resources forever and so
that’s not a particular surprise. In fact, they take it as badge of honor
in some sense. But City College. This is kind of interesting. This is our
flagship institution. What’s going on here? Is it that finally their physical
plant decayed to the point where they simply couldn’t stand it anymore or
does it have more to do with campus leadership, or does it have to do with a
number of things that have been happening over the years? One of the things
that’s emerging from this is that in this unified system in which
we’re all under the same Chancellery, we’re here as a body uniting
the entire system, we’ve got the same rules of academic freedom, same
rules on a whole bunch of things, and we’ve got incredible differences
campus by campus. We have distinct campus cultures that are really different
that perhaps those of us on individual campuses were not really aware of how
different things were at other campuses. This served to highlight this and I
can assure you that the Chancellery and many persons have already expressed a
lively interest in this document. I’m getting requests for specific data
runs that are going to go and find out exactly what is going on from certain
administrators and, of course, we’ll be happy to comply. But this is
actually turning out to be a project with legs. Going on to Table 4. What we
are happy about. There’s no differential from the top to the bottom here.
We are faculty-ruled in terms of course content. You could have fooled us given
this discussion on the SPS and how a full online degree is going forward
without our approval. But in terms of what we think we have control over on our
local campuses, we think we have it and there is not much differential between
the top and the bottom. Table 5. What we don’t have. Nobody thinks that
they have research assistants and this includes the Grad Center.
The Grad Center is not happy with the research
assistants. That’s pretty interesting. Just wanted to show that this was
a not knee-jerk survey in which everybody said, “this place stinks”
or “this place is great” and everybody responded in exactly the
same way. No big differences. Going on to Table 6. I’m just touching here
on a few things that I thought you’d all want to know about -What do
faculty members really think about office space? In here, we see that the
people at Baruch are happy again. We must get invited over sometime because it
really must be pretty nice and they’re all pretty happy over there. When
I did my follow-up study of 5300 CUNY PhDs, by turning my grad students and
undergrad research assistants loose to look for CUNY PhDs and faculty listings
on every college catalog in America, but we found that there was a range again
and an astonishing range in placement rate in academic positions for CUNY PhDs
all the way from 70% of academic positions down to 4%. People strewn all the
way along in between. Of course, the winner again in the end…you can
think I’m a plant...the winner again was the Business PhD at Baruch. 70%
placement rate. All you had to do was click your little finger; you can get an
academic job coming out of CUNY whereas down at the bottom of the pool was
German. Two placements out of all of them. German PhD is not a winning program.
And has since paid the price. So you’ve got the whole range on that kind
of thing. So I’m obviously a shill for Baruch that’s disguised as a
Queens College faculty member. Office space
– this was a big thing. These are physical plant-related things.
Restrooms okay. For restrooms, Grad
Center is the king. The Grad Center
really has the finest restrooms. Baruch, I don’t know. People are
satisfied, you know, but they are more satisfied at the Grad Center.
And CUNY Law, best not to visit CUNY Law anytime soon. I want to direct your
attention over to columns 3 and 4. We’re adopting a somewhat lighter note
here. Can’t resist directing your attention here. There are four people
who have no opinion about restaurants. I cannot imagine people who have no
opinion about restrooms. Now just to show how quickly things can flip, the next
table, Table 8. Rating of PCs and local networks. Grad Center
might have good restrooms but not feeling too well about PCs and local
networks. Now some people told me that the survey was administered during that
three-week period at the Grad
Center when all the
networks were down for a sustained period of time. However long it was, that
was not a good deal. And if its true, that will bias the outcome, that will
make it seem really terrible. But again, it’s interesting, look at the
reach. You’ve got…even if you exclude the Grad Center,
you’ve got a forty percent differential there. The difference of the
campuses is the thing that again and again is leaping off the page and
we’re saying, “Wow, who knew that things were that
different.” Now bearing in mind, these are opinions, these are faculty
impressions of how satisfied they are, they do not represent actually going and
looking how good the network is, how fast it is, what the down time is. These
are not actual measurements of behavior, these are faculty reports on how
satisfied they are and I think what we’re really going to see that if we
look at the mixed table, Table 9, the level of respect shown by administrators
to faculty – we’re starting to get now to something that is best
measured by a faculty experience survey – and here again the range is
60%. This is a lot. Susan keeps toying with the idea of calling in Karen
Arenson. / Chair O’Malley – She was going to come tonight,
but she is on a deadline. / Professor Savage – I don’t think
it’s a good idea to call Karen in on this one. (Audience laughs). But in
any case, she will look at it as maybe grist for her mill, I don’t know.
But again you’ve got you know, Queensborough, Tech, Russ Hotzler, I mean
that’s rough. That’s a vote of credit for us right there. And then
you have down at the bottom, some of the campuses have a reputation for being a
little more proletarian, some more faculty contribution to shared governance.
This is the revenge of the faculty after all these many years and it’s probably
going to get a little bit of press. This kind of thing like respect shown by
administrators for faculty, I maintain, spills over into a lot of other areas.
Next table, look at shared governance. A lot of faculty, I don’t think
they know about shared governance because they are not really participating in
it very much. The level of respect is the kind of thing that causes people to
have an idea on how shared governance works. And so we’re seeing the same
kind of range here. That record of collation is very similar. The collegiality,
this is something that CUNY faculty are pretty happy with, but when you break
it down campus by campus, you get this ranking again. 40% point differential in
the level of respect shown by administration and this satisfaction with
collegiality of the colleagues is something that is closely related. It kind of
mirrors it and then we finally go into quality of department life. So my
argument on this is that I think we’re having a situation here where
there are campus cultures; a part of this is due to administrative leadership.
The administrative leadership with the good or bad spills over into faculty
evaluations of the success of the kinds of aspects of campus life, and at some
point we will be able to figure out a way of devising a measure of what the
costs are in terms of the effectiveness of all campus function. If I could
convert this to student dropout rate, or if I could convert this to how quickly
people graduate, student satisfaction or maybe the donation rate or whatever,
then we would have a better way of getting attention here. The differences here
are so great. You know, there is no reason why they should be that great. This
might be something that could be integrated into the performance evaluations of
all the colleges on an annual basis or on a tri-annual basis, depending on how
often this gets redone. What if college presidents knew that the faculty were
going to give them a resounding vote of low satisfaction and then the
Chancellor was going to talk to them about it? That would be okay. And there
are other ways of using this stuff. What I haven’t done so far? At the
end of the questionnaire, there are two questions. What’s the best thing
about your institution? What’s the worst thing about your institution? I
just finished entering those. I’m going to have grad students tab them
and flag them and have them see if there are patterns. I was really looking for
wonderful comments that would really summarize everything and I’m afraid
we’re not going to get those. I don’t know quite
why. The one comment that I love was, “The college is in a very bad
section of town. It blends in rather nicely.” We’re going to figure
out a way of working those in. And they’re
going to add some interpretive push to these bare bone tables. The danger of
this kind of report is that it just kills you with tabular presentations, but
it does make the point about campus-by-campus differentials. And the other
thing that we not yet done…because we’ve just not had time…is
to go ahead and take advantage of the fact that several of these questions were
stolen from the National Study of Post-Secondary Faculty – a national
survey that has a representative sample of 16,000 faculty, a very high response
rate. It serves us as a very reputable national baseline. There’s one
every three years and the recent one is just in the field. What we want to do
next is to get the recent national baseline data for how happy the faculty is
on other campus around the country. If they are, then we will go present the
CUNY data in the national context so we get some kind of measure of the degree
to which people are happy or unhappy. Now the last thing, I have prepared
tables…individual tables…campus-by-campus for you. And basically it
is Baruch College faculty responses compared to
all. And I have five sets, one for each campus. / Chair
O’Malley – You can
pick them up right here. / Chair O’Malley – Questions!
Professor Julian Aronowitz
(Math and Computer Science, Lehman College) – Two
possible things to consider within the survey. First, to consider the idea of
the full-time equivalency aspect of students now. We now no longer have day and
evening and that could also contribute to how teachers have to deal with things
as well as quality, etc. Then the last part is how students are being pushed to
get through their education – whether teachers pushing them or advisors pushing them or they’re
pushing themselves – because I’m finding that in the class
I’m teaching they are doing a lot worse and worse because they are doing
too many courses, don’t have enough time and most of these people work
full-time. Professor Savage – We have some very interesting responses in that section what’s
the best thing and what’s the worst thing? The best thing is we have all
kinds of faculty saying the best thing about CUNY is the diverse, working-class
student body that is really trying hard. And then the worst thing is
we’ve got tons of under-prepared students who are not motivated and
don’t work hard. We’re getting both.
Professor Esther Wilder
(Sociology, Lehman
College) – I was just wondering if you could comment a
little bit about the overall response to the survey. Looking at some of these
tables, it seems to me that some of the colleges have really big response rates
such as Queens College, whereas Medgar Evans College seems to have a very low
response rate, and I was wondering if you could comment on how you think that
might have affected the results. / Professor Savage – I meant to have prepared for this meeting a
table campus-by-campus on response rate and I didn’t get around to it and
part of the reason I didn’t get around to it is that we have some
problems that I’m just going to have to sit down and have to tough out.
For example, at Hunter
College the listing to
which the questionnaires were sent included all the teachers at the Hunter
Campus school. For others, I’m not quite sure exactly what happened. The
range at the low end is about 20, high twenties. The high end is in the
mid-forties. You can’t look at these numbers and know anything about the
response rate because the campuses have drastically different numbers of
faculty. Medgar doesn’t have very many faculty. Brooklyn and Hunter and Queens have a lot of faculty. It so happens that the
response rate at Queens was quite high because
I was pushing it very hard and I had a lot of help. But the response rate at
other places was quite high and you would not see them simply from the raw
numbers. These are raw response rates rather than a percentage who responded.
I’m going to take a break for a little while.
Professor Nehru Cherukupalli
(Geology, Brooklyn
College) – I have a two items to mention here. Number
one, is there any breakdown in terms of senior colleges versus community
colleges? / Professor Savage – I didn’t do that. That was going to be one of the variables. That
was going be for me a very big analytic variable and then I started to look at
the campus-by-campus breakdowns, and I didn’t find the senior college
versus junior college breakdown to be very good in terms of explaining
anything. Instead, we have some senior colleges where we have very happy
faculty and senior colleges that have really angry faculty, and we have
two-year campuses that are happy, happy, happy and there are some two-year
campuses that are unhappy. I don’t think this is going to carry much
analytic weight. It’s not going to do any lifting. / Professor
Cherukupalli – Thank
you for that comment. I have one other observation to just mention here.
I’m not looking for any kind of answer from anybody. On the second page,
the Table 1, it’s very interesting to see that the Asian ethic sub-type
has the lowest percentage in terms of satisfaction. I’m an Asian,
I’m an American citizen, and I’ve put in more than 40 years in the
CUNY system. Asians are the first ones to be satisfied. They don’t
complain. This is the normal type but on the other hand, when it came to the
numbering system here, they are the lowest by quite a few points – 65. /
Dean Savage – I can give
you a response to that. I’ve done a number of surveys –
undergraduates and graduates of Queens
College –
it’s one of the things I did, that’s why I got this job. And I had
a lot of surveys where I paid special attention to racial-ethnic breakdowns and
I always found out that my Asian respondents were my hard-nose respondents.
They were the ones that called a spade a spade and they’re the ones that
said, “No, this is not good. What you’re doing here is not a good
job. You’re not really doing the kind of thing that you need to be
doing.” And I was a little bit startled on this and I asked a couple of
my Korean and Chinese colleagues and they said, “Oh, yeah,” and
that this is something they don’t hold back on. Is that an explanation? I
don’t know if that’s an explanation or not? I’m choosing then
to simply see less than a 10 to 12 point differential there. And I’m just
not going to bother with that when I have 60% differential in other areas.
That’s where the real story of this survey is. / Professor
Cherukupalli – How
close is the Asian response rate compared to the percentage of other ethnic
people? / Professor Cherukupalli – Response rate. / Professor Savage – Actually, I do have a breakdown and I can
work on that. There is a breakdown and I can try to go ahead and see what that
is.
Professor Gail August
(English, Hostos Community College) – I’m just wondering about Table 3
because I see Hostos wasn’t included. Was that just left out or was that
a low-response…? / Professor Savage – Oh, I’m so sorry. I have no idea what
happened. This is my error. I’m sorry. I’ll find out what Hostos
is. / Professor August – Can I email you? Because I’d like to get a little summary…
Professor
Savage: Why don’t we get it from Susan right now?
Why don’t you get the Hostos table? And you’ll be able to count the
proportion above and the proportion below and you’ll be able to get the
answer right away. What does it say at the very bottom line right there? 20% of
Hostos. Hostos is down to the lower end of the distribution, and they would
probably be with City and Medgar at the bottom. / Professor August – That makes sense. / Professor Savage -
That’s the answer you want.
Professor Manfred
Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College):
I don’t have a question about the data. I just have a question about the
fact that you haven’t been thanked yet for all the hard work. We ought to
thank you…(Audience Clapping). / Professor Savage - We didn’t know
how this was going to turn out. This was the idea of the Executive Committee
and then I worked on getting the questionnaire out. Susan and Stasia did all
the work getting the thing out the door, and Matt Goldstein paid for it, and
then the results came in. And then you don’t expect too much, but. And
then all of a sudden you got these amazing differences. Well, this has been a
lot of fun. You all realize we’re following the Chancellor’s here.
What the Chancellor wants is for all of us to be part of the same institution,
break down those campus boundaries, be part of that same encompassing
environment, and we’re kind of playing along here.
Professor John Asimakopoulas
(Social Sciences, Bronx
Community College) – I would be interested to see co-relations in
terms of some of these questions, how they’re answered at all the
campuses, and salaries. Would you be interested in seeing if some of these
questions co-link with salary levels? / Professor Savage – The measure of salary would be rank and we
saw in Table 1 that rank did not correlate with job satisfaction. That’s
an interesting thing, isn’t it? And I think that would be one way of
getting a take on that. My guess is that there is not going to be that much of
a differential in terms of assistant professors, associate professors, or full
professors. But you have to think that maybe, maybe the fact that Baruch is up
there at the top, is partially a reflection of salary differentials. That could
be. I don’t know for sure. However, I won’t be able to answer that
because I have no salary data. All I’ve got is surrogate measures. The
surrogate measure will be rank and then possibly even though it’s a very
bad surrogate.
Professor Terrence Martell (Weissman Center of International Business, Baruch College)
– For a small fee, I will be happy to offer advice on how to become
happier. Well, let’s start off with…let’s put this in
perspective…what Baruch is relatively most happy
with…bathrooms…and we at the Faculty Senate use this to our
advantage. We gave the Vice President for Finance and Administration an award
at the last meeting. We gave him the ‘King of the Commode’ award
and he was truly speechless. Everybody’s got their priorities. Now here
is something I would like you to concentrate on between now and the next
meeting. We’ll look at Baruch at 83% and we’ll look at City at 17%
and if anyone who knows anything about the funding of this institution knows,
on a per capita basis
City gets more dollars
than Baruch does. So why was it that we are happier? There’s obviously
some reasons that have nothing to do with money but there are some reasons that
have something to do with money. And I hear it from time to time and that has
to do with the success we’ve had in raising money. Now, it is my view to
this group that we do not spend enough time holding our administrators’
feet to the fire to what is clearly in my perspective the most important fact
of the issue and that is incremental resources. Because if we wait for the
Central Administration to give us something, we’re going to be waiting a
heck of a long time. So if you take anything out of this, any smiley face out
of this, you go back to your campus and you say, “What’s wrong with
Queens, what’s wrong with Lehman? Their
students graduate, their students do well, their students succeed, why not
them?” Baruch’s endowment is not huge. It’s a $100 million.
Harvard’s is $22 billion. That can salve a lot of wounds…it pays
for a lot of travel. So I would encourage you to take this as a call and ask
ourselves, “What as a faculty can we do to get more resources to the
faculty because we know it’s not going to come from 80th Street.” Thank you.
/ Professor Savage - One of the things that I found quite interesting is that a
large number of administrators are sensitive to this type of thing. This is
about prestige, this is about looking good and it’s not as if it’s
going to be anything other than public embarrassment. Public embarrassment has
its uses and this is, I hope, a very public document. A few people have
individual requests for tables. We’ll run it by and send you some
additional information and try to give further clarifications, further
specifications about what’s really working, what’s not working.
Professor Sandi Cooper
(History, College
of Staten Island) – Thanks again. This was great. And when you
come back for Round 2, and do it again in the future, we have to figure out a
way to include the Central Administration now that they’ve gotten into
the business of curriculum development, and I’m trying to find out which
faculty body has to evaluate the Central Administration for shared governance
and curriculum development. I mean, if these are people who plan on actively
stirring the pot, then they have to be under the same microscope. / Professor
Savage – Ideally, it
would be the Provosts and Presidents of individual campuses but I have no
comment as to whether they are actually going to step up to the plate. They
don’t get tenure. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you again.
Chair
O’Malley -- I do want to say that the results of the survey are being
used in the evaluation of President Gail Mellow, LaGuardia, and I expect they
will to be used in the evaluation of President Gregory Williams in the spring
and Jennifer Raab, Hunter, in the spring. They will become part of the faculty
evaluating Presidents. They will be used by the governance leaders in their
discussions with outside evaluators. I couldn’t be more pleased. We are
thinking in the spring our conference will be based on this survey. We would
look at best practices. Why are some campuses doing so well? How could faculty
on campuses that are not doing so well use the survey to improve conditions?
III.
Reports:
A. Chair’s Report (cont.): Now I want to talk about the Perez Decision. The first thing we need to do is convene
the Legal Affairs Committee, perhaps with Ron McGuire, to determine what the
lawsuit says about secret ballots and about quorum. We need to present this to
the faculty governance leaders in the spring. We need to be educated about this
decision. The Perez
decision came down last week. It has to do with the Open Meeting Law and
Hostos’ governance body. This decision, and it excites me, states that
college senates, and the University Faculty Senate are major policy-making
bodies and are not advisory. In the language of Perez,
a College Senate and its Executive Committee are exercising a quintessential
governmental function. Your College Senate, your local governance body and the
University Faculty Senate, recommend policy to the Board. According to Perez, “the College Senate is explicitly imbued
with the power to formulate new policy recommendations and review existing
policies, forwarding those recommendations to the Board of Trustees in areas as
far-reaching as admissions, degree requirements, curriculum design, budget and
finance. … The College Senate is the sole legislative body on campus
authorized to send proposals to the CUNY Board of Trustees, and although the
policy proposals must first be approved and forwarded by the College Presidents
they overwhelmingly are.” So it seems to me, Perez
moves us from being an advisory to a policy-making body. Sandi Cooper tells us
that the Article 78 resulting lawsuit reaffirmed the by-laws 8.13 and 8.6. (The
8.13 concerns the University Faculty Senate.) These bylaws state that the
faculty must “conduct the educational affairs customarily cared for by a
college faculty” and our Charter agrees. But we have not been acting that
way. We have been acting in an advisory manner. Vice Chancellor Schaffer has
told me that we are an advisory body. Well, that day is over. But we need to
figure out together how to move us from being advisory to being the policy-making,
the academic policy-making body of the university. It’s going to take a
lot of shoving …, but, we’ll figure out how to do it together.
Stefan, do you want to say anything more? Then I’ll wish you Happy
Holidays and see you in January. Stefan, you have the last word this year.
Professor Stefan Baumrin
(Philosophy, Graduate
School) – I just wanted to say a couple of things
about the Perez decision. Since the time that we initiated
student-faculty re-organization of governance in 1970 and ’71, this is the
most significant event in the City
University’s
history because the Court of Appeals has changed the locus of power and
it’s going to take the Central Administration an awfully long time to get
used to the fact that it’s changed. It may take us longer because we
don’t really know how to exercise power any more. We’ve been out of
the loop for 35 years, and in that regard we have a lot of retraining of
ourselves to do. Nothing that is done by the Central Administration that
doesn’t include a legislative vote by the campus and the University
Faculty Senate will pass the State Education department after this decision.
You will hear from Rick Schaffer who is hard at work trying to accommodate
himself after losing two major lawsuits, accommodate himself to this.
He’s working on it right now. The Provost at the Graduate School
tried to stop me from discussing this today in my own committee meeting and I
assume we’ll have a report by …sometime within the next six weeks
before the beginning of this next semester. I will ask the Faculty Senate
committee to forward my commentary on that material after we’ve had a
chance to review it and then you’ll have some ideas for me. You need to
get your own faculty governance body geared up to revise your habits. You may
not have to revise all the by-laws but you are going to have to revise the way
you do business. The President is a conduit, not a source of law and nothing
more than a veto of what the body has passed. The President is no more,
according to Judge Kaye, the chief academic officer who decides this on his or
her own or as he or she sees fit. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you. I want to say that there were
some concern about a previous case -- Friedman versus Antonio Perez
that occurred after the Article 78 decision. I have met with lawyers at the PSC
and discussed this case and the Perez case with them. Their belief is since that
case was not referred to in Perez, that it may not have been filed. Their
conclusion is we do not have to worry about that case. Friedman v. Antonio Perez has been haunting me for years. I was
worried that it would change the Article 78 ruling. / Professor Cherukapalli
– I was very much
interested in hearing about the reorganization of the graduate programs that
you alluded to earlier this evening and I have not heard anything about it
after that. / Chair O’Malley – If Manfred is willing, if he hasn’t
gone home.
Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College)
– Over the last few months, if not longer, the Chancellor has been
speaking about the issue of the science doctoral programs in CUNY. It’s
actually been over the last two years. Under UFS auspices, he met with the
science executive officers over a year ago and expressed concern about some of
the programs. He initiated and pursued a new central facility for the sciences
at City College, sometimes called the Advanced
Science Research Facility, which is in the budget. It hasn’t been built
yet. This was during the era of Vice Chancellor Mirrer. With Vice Chancellor
Botman this thrust has continued. Yesterday, Vice Chancellor Botman had a
meeting with selected science faculty. We had an Executive Committee meeting
where we questioned this thrust. And as a result, the Vice Chancellor asked
Susan to nominate two grant-funded research-active scientists to attend a
retreat that she was holding. There were five Presidents invited to this
retreat and they nominated several faculty. Susan wants me to help with this
nomination process since I am in the Biochemistry program and it turned out
that the first several people that we nominated had already been nominated by
Presidents and other people. So that we had to continue the nomination process.
This is not to say that those who were nominated were lesser in our eyes or
anything like that, of course. And in the end, we nominated Edward J. Kennelly
Chair of Biology at Lehman College and then Nan-Loh Yang of the College of Staten Island who is a very
distinguished research member of the Chemistry doctoral program. Kennelly is in
the Biology doctoral program. They’re going to give us, the Executive
Committee, a report on the retreat that took place. And I can describe what
happened. Basically, Vice Chancellor Botman expressed the need for better
sciences and said that her ideas and the Chancellor’s ideas are at an
embryonic stage. The Chancellor did appear even though he was not on the agenda
and spoke off the cuff at the meeting. It was said that the City College
Central Science Facility was partly seen as a core instrumentation facility for
all the sciences at CUNY. According to Dean Gilliam Small, 50% of that would be
a core instrumentation facility and the other 50% was left open. I’m just
reading my notes. I apologize, Susan, I’m a little disorganized because
after all, I just got this about an hour ago. One of the thrusts was that the
number of doctoral students is to be decreased while increasing the number of
monetary supports available to each student. By decreasing the number, they
will be able to get larger packages in support for the first two years, after
which the mentors will be expected to pick up the necessary support for the
facility. It was said at the meeting that there is a need to empower campuses
so that they, the campuses, could give PhD degrees in the sciences. The Graduate Center consortial model is a good model
but they say it’s not worked well for the sciences. Now, to get back to
the Science Facility, there could be five central research areas for this
facility. I wrote them down to the fourth and then I didn’t catch the fifth
one in that conversation –
Photonics, Nanotechnology, Biosciences, Neurosciences. After this presentation
by the Chancellor, by Gilliam Small and by Executive Vice Chancellor, the
faculty present broke up into small groups to discuss these questions as to
what they needed to include in the science doctoral programs and then at that
point Chancellor Goldstein left. And in the presence of Dean Small and the
Executive Vice Chancellor Botman, the Presidents…the five college
Presidents questioned Executive Vice Chancellor Botman and Dean Small closely
on the nature of the Science Facility. It was stated that they had not seen any
business plan for this facility, and how it was to be funded, and one of the
responses by the administrators was that the business plan was on the
University Faculty Senate website. I haven’t seen it there. Now, I have
to emphasize that this was verbally transmitted to me recently, very recently,
in fact and I will be getting written reports that will be forwarded onto the
University Faculty Senate. So we will see. This process has been going on for
more than a year now, if not two years, and the intensity of it has increased.
The linkage of this process to change the nature of the doctoral programs, the
Science doctoral programs, with this facility at City College
is more and more clear. You’re free to ask questions but I’m not
sure I’ll be able to answer at this particular point. / Professor Baumrin – Is there any
sense you can make out this sentence, “available at the University
Faculty website?” / Professor Philipp – No, I cannot. I didn’t have time after
I heard this to actually investigate that and of course, I have to emphasize
that this was verbally transmitted. / Professor Cooper – There was something said to us which may be
in the minutes some years ago within the Senate, about raising money for that
City College-based facility from a bunch of private corporations, there was a
document when Mirrer was around… / Chair O’Malley
– It’s in the Master Plan.
/ Professor Cooper – Okay,
so that was the closest thing that ever came out regarding funding. Is the
President aware of the possibility that the funding for this thing was for SPS
and everything else is going to come out of our of the campus budgets? / Professor
Philipp – Of course,
they are aware. Especially since the Chancellor made it clear that capital
budget for the science facilities on the campuses had been reduced in order to
fund this. On my campus alone the new science buildings have simply evaporated
as soon as Advanced Science Facility was announced. / Professor Cooper -
In your opinion, are these proposed changes in academic programs a
university-wide concern which would throw them into our basket? / Professor
Philipp – Of course.
/ Professor Cooper – A-ha.
/ Professor Baumrin – Also, as those people who are members of the Graduate Council of the Graduate Center
will recall, I posited the idea that this is also a natural concern of the
Senate of the Graduate
Center. I didn’t
get any dissent from the administrative structure although they didn’t
seem to be pleased about that statement. / Chair O’Malley
– Thank you, Manfred. One more
comment: last night at the dinner for governance leaders and Trustees, it was
announced that graduate students are not going to have a tuition increase this
year. They will not be included in the section of the proposed compact that
raises tuition for undergraduates. Because I don’t see you until the end
of January, Happy Holidays and Goodbye.