REPORTS & DELIBERATIONS

OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND SIXTY FIFTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

December 7, 1999

a. Chair: Many things have occurred since we last met in November. CUNY has been exposed to some painful acts and incidents, which have unfortunately, as usual, ended with disuniting us. I will enumerate them as valuelessly as I can. There was a well-attended Brooklyn Borough hearing, with four Trustees present. There were many positive comments about programs at New York City Tech and Kingsborough, and current and past community leaders.

One of our presidents has been quoted, I believe authentically, as diminishing our students.

The Board acted, in a draconian fashion, to articulate curricula, ignoring all the presented impediments, and altered the most foolish language to language which is probably not capable of parsing.

The Board of Regents acted on the proposed Master Plan Amendment, altered by them at the request of several of us. The alterations were student friendly, concurred in by the Chancellor and Vice Chancellor; now, two weeks later, disputes have arisen about language, intent, and implementation.

Last Friday was a conference at BMCC run by the Senate Library Committee. Jane Davenport is the Chair. It was on the various Web-based databases available at CUNY, and the potential Web-based course programs. It was very well attended and very well received.

Last night was the annual reception for faculty academic award winners at CUNY. It was an event honoring what we are largely about.

A concern has been raised about an unrealistic deadline imposed for colleges to show compliance with the new State requirements for teacher education, which may not leave enough time for proper governance procedures. Under New Business, we are scheduled to continue our conversation about future directions for the UFS. Now we have a question period.

b. Chancellor: Let me begin by wishing a good holiday season to you and your family. As we all get a little older, I say to people, as long as you have your health, the rest of it is easy to navigate. I hope that is true for you and your families.

Let me begin by responding to some of the issues that I was asked to speak about. I will try to be brief. I think it is better if I just take questions that most of you are interested in hearing me respond to.

First, this has been a very busy semester. November 22^nd was a very active day, certainly with the Regents vote. This morning I had the pleasure of meeting with Carl Hayden [Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents], in my office. For those of you who haven’t met him, he is really a very fine man and distinguished Regent. On November 22, the University Board passed a number of policy items. First and foremost was the endorsement of the budget. The budget is a very important document, because it reflects the values of the individuals who constructed it. It also reflects the kinds of resources that we need. We have started serious discussions with the Governor’s office. We hope that there will be consideration given to some of what I consider critical elements of that budget. First and foremost is our insatiable appetite for more full-time faculty. In addition to more full-time faculty, I think we need also to reflect on more academic support faculty. As the pedagogical environment for learning changes, and especially as Internet tools become much more imbedded into the fabric of how our students are going to learn, we are going to need more people to work with our faculty. In particular, we need to start utilizing some of these tools in the classroom. In addition, we need these personnel to help support some of the infrastructure that is needed to allow this to take place. The budget is going to request funding, not only for full-time faculty, but for academic support services as well.

We also have made a very important statement in this budget about the need for more counseling and advising support for our students. This support would serve as a safety net for our students who may run into academic difficulty. There are many other things -- the notion of a flagship environment, which I am particularly interested in and which is deeply needed to reorient and redirect this great University; also the notion of an honors academy, and a whole bunch of other things that I think are going to be critically important. We’re not going to get it all by any means. We are asking for about $97 million, over and beyond what was appropriated last year, which represents slightly over a 7% increase in our budget. We will see, and we will start our lobbying efforts very soon.

The second item passed by the Board on November 22^nd had to do with an articulation policy that I think is critically needed. If we really think of ourselves as a student-centered university, and truly reflect on the complex lives that our students continue to have, we need to make the transition between a two-year institution and a four-year institution as effortless as we can. I know that has been very controversial. I will say that we are taking this very seriously. There is work to be done. There is some disjunction, we all know that, between some of what the student experiences at a two-year institution, and a transfer degree, be it an A.A. or A.S. degree. There is also the issue of what our faculties expect when the student reaches a four-year institution. I believe that these things can be worked out, and they will be worked out. We are forming a Chancellor Advisory Committee. The Senate has been asked to supply names, and the Discipline Councils will be participating in this, and certainly the college administrations will be participating as well.

The third item passed was a by-law change reflecting a more sharpened focus on the governance of the University, particularly how it relates to the Chancellor, the presidents, and the Board of Trustees. For too long there has been a heavy regulatory environment at the City University. With the by-law changes, we are going to start to see campuses, that have demonstrated a capacity to do the kinds of things we need them to do, being given that responsibility. We are going to have to do this very carefully. There are a lot of legal issues and a lot of regulatory issues that we have to address.

In addition to those particular actions taken by the Board, there was a ratcheting-up of the process of how we admit students into our baccalaureate programs. It was in the mid-1990s when as President of Baruch College I became vocal about changing the manner in which we assess the readiness of students to baccalaureate programs. That resulted in a change in admission posture. What we did this year is really to take the next logical step. Those of you who have had experiences at other major universities know that it is common practice to take a composite view of students’ experiences in high school and to use that composite in a way that can best inform how students will eventually react to a university curriculum.

What we did is the following. We developed a series of indicators that most people would agree is a fairly comprehensive list of variables, that one would want to look at in assessing students’ readiness for college. We looked at 1997-1998 data of students who enrolled. We saw how we can model these students’ profiles from 1997 and 1998, and predict what would have happened in the class of 1999. Those were independent data sets. We tried to find a composite of variables that would best associate with good performance in the first year of a college experience. We were associating how we could bring together a composite of a smaller set of variables, from the ones that we started with, and associate those variables with performance in the first year of collegiate life. What we found when we went through the analysis was that there were four variables that really dominated the association. That had to do with high school average, SAT score, number of college preparatory courses, and the amount of English the student had in high school. We are talking about regular admission students. We are not talking about students who were away from college for a long time.

Vice Chancellor Mirrer has sent out a memorandum to each of the senior college presidents explaining how this process works. These are regression equations. Each regression equation is slightly different for each individual college. What we found is something quite interesting. Uniformly, with all of the campuses that we used this formulation with, the size of the class was the same, which we insisted on. But the profile of the class was slightly better in some cases, and much better in some other cases. There is nothing magical here. It is something that most state universities and large private universities have been using for quite some time. It is really the next logical step that we will use here at City University.

Each of the campus presidents was asked to engage their faculties through their various governing bodies, to really understand how the process will work. I think it gives a much clearer and focused view on how admissions should be working. We are pleased with that, and we think that is going to enable us to better assess our students. We are also making a judgment that if students have over an 1100 SAT, all other things remaining equal, that student should be admitted without any kind of discussion. There are lots of various components to this. For example, at Baruch, which is very similar to Queens, Hunter, and Brooklyn, it is dominated by college preparatory courses in English and mathematics. That really was what drove the process. For those campuses that want to use that as part of the overall modeling, there is no objection to that at all. We are giving those campuses an opportunity to reflect their own values and culture in the process as well. But we have really changed the way in which we are approaching this in very profound ways -- I think profoundly better ways.

Let me just finish by saying two other things. We are working very aggressively now with the Board of Education. We are working in a much more focused way than, I am told, we have before. This started with discussions I had with Chancellor Rudy Crew. I asked if we can really join hands and find a way in which we can build up the College Now Program. I think it is a wonderful model that brings together the best thinking of our faculties in CUNY and our faculties in the high schools. I think we are in about 90 high schools today, out of about 213. The hope is that we can generate sufficient dollars through City and State appropriations to get the College Now Program much more deeply embedded into the fabric of the high schools. Right now, we stop at about the 11^th grade. We are going to try to get down to the 9^th grade. It is an early interdiction process of identifying problems early on, testing the students, and giving them various treatments. Then by the time they are ready to approach university life, we deem them ready for the curriculum they would face. I think that is a very important program. The data that we have show very clearly that those students who go through a College Now experience have a leg up, all things remaining equal, over other students that did not have that. We would like to see if we can find a way to get the funding to do this much more ubiquitously than we have so far.

The second component is the crisis of providing teachers for the New York City schools. Within the next five years, there are approximately 40,000 teachers who can, if they desire, retire from the school system. Quite frankly, the pipeline is not sufficiently robust with teachers or students who are going through teacher education programs. Not only do we need more teachers, but we need better teachers. If our students cannot get the kind of learning environment that they need in primary and secondary school, we have a very big problem here at City University. Not only do I think that we have a moral obligation as a University to try to train the best and most promising students who aspire to be teachers, but we have to do it in a very aggressive and profoundly focused way, especially in certain areas where there are now large numbers of teachers teaching out of license. This is most profoundly seen in science and mathematics. We really want to see if we can do something to correct that. We are going to work with the Board of Education. We have a position paper that is now in a draft stage. It is the result of a project team that Chancellor Crew and I put together. I am reviewing it, as is Vice Chancellor Mirrer, and Rudy Crew and his staff. We will see if we can move this ahead.

The last thing I will mention is that I have appointed a committee to advise me on the notion of a flagship environment. I have asked President Designate Kimmich of Brooklyn College, President David Caputo, President Horowitz, and Vice Chancellor Mirrer to be on the committee. Just to start the process, we are going to have to get the Senate, at some point soon, to start recommending people who we can put into this and other processes. This is going to be complex. It is going to be a very different environment if we can get this thing moving. Of course, the flagship environment has an honors academy associated with it. We are going to appoint one or two campuses to serve as the administrative organ for the honors academy.

One of the things that I have talked about is establishing a cultural passport. I have a particular interest in this. The idea simply is to open up the City of New York with its vast cultural resources to be part of the learning environment that students would experience when they go through this intense and exciting environment. I’ve just spoken to a few people about this, and already we have raised about $260,000. I think that we are going to start seeing things change. I was recently appointed to the Lincoln Center Institute Board. I will be in discussions with Matt Levinthal, the President of Lincoln Center, to see if we can get Lincoln Center involved in this. One of the things that I received great joy from at Baruch was when we brought the Jean Cocteau Repertory Company as a theater in residence. It was great to see the smiles and excitement on the faces of students, who hadn’t been to a play, or hadn’t seen classical plays done in a repertory environment. I would really like to see this even go well beyond the focus we have right now.

Those are some of the things that are on my mind, I will stop here and I will take any questions that any of you have.

[Please note that the floor microphone malfunctioned. Questions are briefly reconstructed.]

Professor Friedman (Developmental Skills, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – Could you could say something about projecting a positive, strong image of our community colleges, which someone recently called "anemic"?/ Chancellor Goldstein – I would not use the word "anemic" at all. It is the price we pay for living in a democracy. People can write editorials, they can go on television, and they can be quoted with impunity. We do have to project a much more positive image. You’re going to see something, probably in a week to ten days: we are going to take out some large ads in the New York Times, lauding our students from community colleges and senior colleges. There are going to be two foci. One has to do with students who have graduated from one of our institutions, and then have chosen to pursue further education in a master’s program, Ph.D. program, or professional program. When you look at the breadth and the depth of this, it’s quite impressive, and I think it will be a very joyous thing. The other component, which will be a separate ad, will be students who have also left the University and gone on to do very impressive things with their lives in a work environment. These are the kinds of things that I think we really need to start talking about. The Salute to Scholars last night was an extraordinary event, with more people talking about the quality of our faculty. We need to talk about the quality of our students. We absolutely need to start talking in a much more positive way about the University. Unfortunately, there are still many in this University who have negative things to say. But I think that we have to join and really have to shift that conversation. So I agree with you.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – The data show that the admissions formulas, including the SATs, and new entry tests will damage enrollments in the senior colleges, especially of minority students. / Chancellor Goldstein – Bill, I think you are doing a great disservice because you speak without having the facts and the data to support it. If you show me the data, then I would be very supportive of what it is, but you are absolutely wrong. Show me the data. I’ve reviewed all the data. I’ve heard you say it over and over again. You can show it to me and we will have a public discussion.

Professor Beaky (English, LaGuardia Community College) – How are you going to include the community colleges in the honors academy? / Chancellor Goldstein – We are going to try and take the best honors programs that we have at our campuses and find a way to integrate them overall into the honors academy. We don’t want to compromise what is going on, but we want to get it integrated in a way we haven’t before. It is going to evolve over time. But certainly, everybody is going to be able to participate in this. It is not going to be restricted to one, or two, or three campuses. / Professor Beaky – You would probably like to see a community college president involved in the honors environment… / Chancellor Goldstein – As I said, we are just starting the process now. It obviously is going to have to be much more ubiquitous throughout the University structure.

Professor Mineka (Math & Computer Science, Lehman College) – Could the data bases being used in the new admissions formulas be made available to the faculty? / Chancellor Goldstein – Sure, I would be happy to. / Professor Mineka – What is the range of R squared among the variables? How do ESL students fit into the formulas? / Chancellor Goldstein – You are asking a lot of technical questions, and I will get all of that to you. What I would tell you is that the solutions are very stable. This is one of the first things you do when you do diagnostics on this. We took a group of colleges and we found that the solutions were stable when we looked at these sub-populations, and when we aggregated them. So that is a very strong indication of stability. But I will be very happy to give you, or even put you in touch with a lot of the statisticians who worked on this. There are no secrets here. Anything that you feel that you can contribute to make the methodology better, we would certainly welcome.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science & Physics, CSI) – There appeared to be sufficient financial resources for 85-100 new faculty lines this year. A memo from Vice Chancellor Mirrer says, "the University will pursue a policy whereby all new financial resources for faculty positions will be assigned to specific areas targeted for development." But she did not give a number. At this point, of the 85-100 how many new faculty will we be hiring, and how many of those hires have been, shall we say, subverted to administrative positions? / Chancellor Goldstein – None of them is subverted for administrative positions. The faculty hiring is really a bifurcation; it has to do in part with cluster hiring. We are really starting a process of deciding where we want to build up strength in various areas. The strengths that we started with this year included foreign languages, teacher education, photonics, and computer science, new media, and information systems. That is one part of the process. The other part of the process is more ubiquitous across the entire academy. / Professor Levine – How many lines will there be? / Chancellor Goldstein – I don’t know the answer to that. How many, Louise? / Vice Chancellor Mirrer – About 60 lines. A number of the lines are being used to hire high salary end, and it is more expensive. / Professor Levine – There will be sixty more faculty next year. / Vice Chancellor Mirrer – There will be the maximum number of lines that that we can carve out. / Professor Levine – In addition to the Maintenance of Effort Policy, there will be retirements in the coming months. We will have the current number, plus sixty? / Chancellor Goldstein – These are new faculty lines, which will be in addition to any vacancies. It is being driven by the dollars, not by lines. Lines are just an artifact here. They are not real. What is real here is money. You have to take the money and convert them to positions.

Professor Gallagher (English, LaGuardia Community College) – What is your comment about one CUNY president’s alleged use of a derogatory term for remedial students? / Chancellor Goldstein – About President Sessoms in particular, is that what you are reflecting on? Are you talking about what was reported by the Bar Association of the City of New York? This is a "he said-she said" kind of thing. I recently stated this on Channel 1 when I was interviewed last week. As far as I know, President Sessoms has categorically denied saying those things. There are others who refute that. When you have a situation like that, you have a standstill environment. It is a standoff. Beyond that, I can’t comment, because I don’t have any further information. / Professor Gallagher – It would be helpful to have a written statement from President Sessoms. / Chancellor Goldstein – President Sessoms has denied in writing that he ever said this. I believe the letter was sent to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York. It is for them to release or for President Sessoms to release.

Professor O’Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) – Chair Badillo was quoted in the newspaper recently saying it was now time to turn attention to reforming the community colleges. / Chancellor Goldstein – I think his comments were restricted to graduation rates. I think all of us are concerned about graduation rates throughout the University. We would like our students, especially those who aspire to get a degree, to get their degrees. For those who don’t aspire to a degree, I don’t think we should count this against the data with respect to retention and graduation rates. But unfortunately, we don’t have an acceptable methodology, unless we do it unique to CUNY. I believe that there are students who go to a community college with no intention of getting a degree. I believe that there are students who leave a community college in good academic standing and transfer to another institution. And that should not reflect badly on an institution. I don’t think that there is any disagreement with me and what you are asking rhetorically. The question is, how we can report data that are consistent with the way other universities are doing it. That is a real challenge that I think this University has faced for a very long time. We need to be challenged about how to report this in better ways than we have.

Professor Vozick (Science, Borough of Manhattan Community College) Is there an intention on the part of CUNY’s leadership to try to downsize enrollment? / Chancellor Goldstein – I think yours is a great question. I thought that I had reported on enrollment data before. But I’m very happy to report again. We have about 195,000 students enrolled in Fall 1999. I have written to six presidents at our colleges, who I think need to respond to me with respect to why they are leaking enrollment. These are some of our prominent campuses, the very large four-year campuses and some of our two-year campuses. I have a sense of why we’re losing some enrollment. I think it is clear that a lot of the negativity that has been rampant in this University has got to stop. I think there is much less now than there was, but there still is some negativity. I think this is creating a great disservice for this University. That is the first point that I would mention. The second point is that we are very passive with respect to enrolling students at this University. I have used the metaphor, it’s almost the Field of Dreams here. You open up the doors to our campuses, and expect the students to come in. There is a very aggressive set of actions being taken now by private institutions in particular that live or die by tuition dollars. We live or die, if you will, by enrollment. I have asked each college president to provide me with an enrollment management plan, and a recruitment plan. As I said, there are six campuses, for reasons that I can’t quite understand, which are losing enrollment. Others are profoundly strong. We have to really understand this. Our campus presidents have to be responsible in engaging faculty and other members of the administration to ensure that we get out there and start bringing students back to this University. I think one of the ways that we do it is by changing the conversation about this University -- talking about the depth of our faculty, the extraordinary experiences that thousands of students have. You don’t hear that. You have not heard that for years at this University. So why should students want to come to the University when all of the private universities, in particular, are talking about all of the wonderful things that can happen. We have to start acting in a way that’s going to provide us with a competitive advantage, and we don’t. / Professor Vozick – The number of full-time faculty lines is increasing rather slowly. This is an issue of the quality of the University. How hard will you work on this problem? In the intervening decades that it is going to take to deal with that, somebody has to either face the adjunct question, or recognize that they are not. / Chancellor Goldstein – We value our adjuncts but, having said that, we still need to build up our full-time faculty ranks. They are about half of what they were 12 years ago. That has to change. It’s not happening as fast as we would like, because we don’t have the funding to hire the faculty, but we are going to have to work at it. We are going to need everybody in this room to be advocates. This is not something that one particular segment of this University is capable of doing itself. /

Professor S. Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – According to a colleague of mine, on a television program about three or four nights ago, you were quoted as disparaging David Lavin’s work as inaccurate. Many of us would feel a lot more secure in the results of the Regents’ future site visits and study of the impact of the remediation resolution if David Lavin were permitted to see the data. / Chancellor Goldstein – I’ll tell you exactly what I said. I said that the data were quite aged, and that things have changed dramatically since those data were compiled and analyzed. I happen to think that David Lavin is a terrific researcher, and I highly respect his work, but the data are quite aged -- little change in the overall ethnic and racial distribution. There are changes. You have to look at the data carefully, even at a place like Baruch, which I am much more familiar with. There are changes year to year -- Black population, Hispanic population changes. But overall, the population across the ethnic and racial grounds is about the same. There are statistical variations. But to say that there is an outpouring and a great dislocation is blatantly false. If I felt that I needed the counsel of David Lavin, I would ask him to come in and advise. / Professor Cooper – That is not the question. A research project with a long history has been suspended because its outcomes are inconvenient. / Chancellor Goldstein – I haven’t suspended David Lavin’s research at all. I encourage him to continue his research. Chancellor Goldstein – I haven’t blocked him at all. I haven’t even had a discussion with David; how can I block him?

Professor Kulkarni (Mathematics, Queens College) – (Question is attached to these minutes)/ Chancellor Goldstein – If you would leave your prepared written statement, I will look at it and get back to you.

Professor Greenbaum (History, Queensborough Community College) – Does the new articulation policy make the TIPPS program irrelevant? / Chancellor Goldstein – Why don’t we ask Vice Chancellor Mirrer. / Vice Chancellor Mirrer – Most of the information in TIPPS is entirely consistent with the new articulation policy. A lot of it has to do with all of the articulation agreements that have been made relating to majors, and also relating to those associate degree programs that articulate with specific programs at senior colleges. The policy translates specific general education requirements that have been completed by a student who, let’s say, receives a degree from Queensborough, transferable into a senior college. But on TIPPS it is a much larger scale project than that.

Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) – Will students in Prelude to Success programs be allowed to take courses on permit? / Chancellor Goldstein – When we met with Assemblyman Sullivan and others on Thursday before the vote on the Regents, we indicated that University policy allows matriculated students to petition on any campus for an opportunity to take a credit-bearing course. If the structure on that campus -- be it a faculty member, a chair, or a dean -- approves that particular request, then that student has the ability to exercise that option. What I indicated to Assemblyman Sullivan was that we not only are not going to prohibit students from doing that, we would encourage it, with the following caveat: that since students in Prelude to Success are at some risk, it would be difficult for me to imagine that we would have more than a trickling of students who would want to take a course in addition to what it is that they have. The program is highly structured and rigorous. But if they want to, they are perfectly entitled to petition a faculty member to do it. I certainly have no objection.

Professor Galvin (Library, Kingsborough Community College) – How many students who come to CUNY have taken the SATs? / Chancellor Goldstein – In the baccalaureate programs, a dominant number of students are taking the SATs now -- our latest statistics showed about 93% of the students. We’re not certainly requiring the SAT for two-year students.

Professor Grossman (Elementary Education, City College) – Flagship schools at CUNY will create inequities just as they have in the public schools…/ Chancellor Goldstein – Could I just interrupt you? There is a factual error in what you are saying. The notion of a flagship environment is not restricted, in your terms, to tier one, tier two institutions. It is ubiquitous across the University. We are going to do this on a program basis. And those programs are going to be identified wherever they reside.

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) – City College was singled out as the only college with a vacant presidency but no search committee this year. What message is this sending out to potential students and their families? / Chancellor Goldstein – In part because I am an alumnus, I care deeply about City College. City College whether you are a faculty member or not, is emblematic of City University. City College has a considerable number of problems. They have lost a tremendous amount of enrollment over the years. There is a great disjunction between need and allocation of resources. It just has not been a well-managed institution for a very long time. The irony is that it has an absolutely extraordinary faculty, and some extraordinary students. I think that before City College gets the distinguished president that it deserves, and will get, there is some work that needs to be done. City needs to start to redress some of the issues that have not been looked at in a long time. That’s what it is that we are doing. I have been working quietly with the President and the Provost. I have met with the distinguished faculty in the School of Engineering, as we look for a new Dean of the School of Engineering. I’ve met with the cabinet, I’ve met with several groups of distinguished alumni. We are doing our due diligence in trying to do the things to correct some of the structural deficiencies that we have at City College. I think we will be able to do it without too much time weighing on us. After that is done, we are going to look and find a very good president for City College. There is disparate treatment, but disparate treatment to get the organization better calibrated, than what it has been. The fact is that we are seeing today in University life a lot of very talented people, who we would like to engage in higher education in administration. People don’t just want to do it because the jobs are, quite frankly, very taxing and exhausting. I think that City College is better positioned to attract a very talented, energetic person, a man or woman of vision, if we do some of the things that we are doing now, before we start the search. I think that if we were to start it now, we would have a smaller likelihood in getting the kind of person who I think City College deserves.

Professor Sherrill (Political Science, Hunter College) – Could you provide us with an operational definition of ‘lower division’ courses? / Chancellor Goldstein – Probably not. I guess a lower-division course is one that requires no prerequisite.

Professor Young (English, Borough of Manhattan Community College) – You spoke about the change in the by-laws regarding the Chancellor’s prerogatives and also structural issues with presidents. What other changes in the by-laws do you have in mind for the future? / Chancellor Goldstein – I don’t think that we are going to be addressing any other by-law changes very soon at City University. There are just a whole host of other issues. I think one of the reasons that I insisted that the by-laws be adjusted, and I will be very candid, is that this University really can’t do the things it needs to do for its students without having strong leadership at our campuses. We need to have goals and objectives set very early in an academic year, and then exit interviews at the end, and performance-based assessments with respect to budgeting, and other issues of accountability. We are doing these sorts of things to make these campuses more accountable through leadership. I am one who believes that you can’t have a great institution unless you have strong leadership. Strong leadership does not mean authoritarianism. That is antithetical to anything that I believe in. When I talk about a diffusion of responsibility, away from the central administration, onto a campus, the flip side of that is that can only happen if you have good leadership. We have a lot to do, but I think that the by-law changes gives us a vehicle to help accomplish that objective.

c. Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (written).

d. Academic Policy (Professor Richter) – The single concern of the Academic Policy Committee for the last couple of months has been the question of the articulation and transfer policy, the new Resolution passed by the Board on the 22^nd of November. It of course raises a great many questions. We recognize the fact that anything that will facilitate the transfer of students from one level to another within the University is a very important and necessary thing.

The Committee has raised a number of questions about the particular phrasing of the Resolution and, of course, its implementation. I think that there are certain things that we must recognize about this Resolution. It is a Resolution that addresses only general education courses, and not other courses. I recognized that there was a question about the intersection of the Resolution and the TIPPS, for example. I wrote a letter, which you have a copy of in your packet, to Chair of the CAPPR Committee of the Board of Trustees, Nilda Ruiz. I asked her specific questions that the Committee had raised. She answered in a letter that you also have in your packets. One of the questions that was raised is the intersection of the Resolution and the TIPPS. We were told that the TIPPS has to do with the more advanced courses. The transfer policy has to do primarily with the general education courses. The general education courses comprehend 45 credits for A.A. degrees, 30 credits or 20 credits for A.S. and A.A.S. degrees.

There are a great many other issues that the various members of the Committee raised. For example, in the course of an A.S. degree, most of the general education courses are taken in the sciences, leaving only something like 9 credits, or in some cases as little as 6 credits, in the areas of the humanities and the social sciences. What do you do about that? How does this guarantee a properly educated student for transfer? There are all kinds of questions that are still not at all addressed by the answers that we have gotten so far from Chair Ruiz. For example, many students in two-year colleges may not have certain disciplines covered by their general education requirements, which are disciplines that are required by the senior colleges -- for example, foreign languages. Would the student than be required to make that up in the senior colleges?

The amended Resolution reads that one course in a discipline will be required. That too raises a great many other questions. What do you mean by one course? Is that one semester of a foreign language? Or is it a sequence? Is that only one discipline that can be required to be made up? Or could there be more? There are many questions about that. The whole question of what constitutes a discipline also comes up, of course, because there are such things as inter- disciplinary courses and programs. Where in Women’s Studies, if that is a discrete discipline, does something like biology, history, or literature fit in? Are these part of biology, history, literature? Or are they part of a different discipline called Women’s Studies? These are also questions that need to be addressed.

Another is the question of upper and lower division courses that was raised just a few moments ago. Courses that do not need prerequisites, said Chancellor Goldstein. That is also something that may raise more than a few questions, like what constitutes prerequisites in the first place? Prerequisites to a program? Prerequisites to a course? What are we talking about? There are, as you can see, many questions which are still to be discussed.

However, I do want to point to something in Trustee Ruiz’s letter that I thought was extremely important. She talks about the fact that even though there may be great differences between the various colleges in their requirements, she was looking at the summative experiences. She felt that the summative experiences of the student in the two-year college, who has successfully completed a liberal arts core, would be equivalent to that in the senior colleges. In other words, they are not talking about exact equivalencies in any of these things. We are talking about a general experience, a general kind of education.

With that in mind, I would like to refer back to something that was presented to the University Faculty Senate in April or May. I drew up for the Committee a statement about a general education, which was, I believe, quite well received by the University Faculty Senate. The idea was that at the time we were being threatened with a common core, which would be applied to all two-year and four-year colleges. In order to maintain something very precious to all of us -- our independence in terms of determining the educational requirements for our particular students -- we drew up a statement that outlined what a general education should be, in very specific terms of goals, competencies, and skills that should be required. We based this upon the two years of work at SUNY, which has so summarily been set aside by their trustees, when they simply mandated a core program. Not wanting to be saddled with such a core, we came up with a general idea of what constitutes a liberal arts education. It seems to me that it might be helpful for us to re-invoke that at this particular point and to consider whether our courses at the two- and four-year colleges -- the core courses that we require of any very well educated student, in any program at all -- fulfill these particular goals. If they do, perhaps we should consider that transferring courses like that is far from a very bad thing, and might indeed be a very good thing.

Of course, one of the major questions is who will adjudicate these questions as they arise? When they come up, and they certainly will, in the context of any particular college’s requirements, to whom do we go? Is it to the discipline councils? As some people have pointed out, the discipline councils have not really been charged with the question of general education, but far more equivalencies on a much higher level. That may be problematical. I was rather interested to hear that Chancellor Goldstein was talking about a Chancellor’s Advisory Committee. I’m not exactly sure what he meant by it, whom he had in mind, or how this is to be implemented. But this might be one thing that we could ask about and consider a little bit more, getting some kind of advisory or supervisory committee to adjudicate these questions; also to jealously guard the implementation of this kind of transfer. If the transfer facilitates the students’ success, I think that is what we are really looking for.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate School) – What is a "summative experience"? / Professor Richter – I really can’t speak for Nilda Ruiz, when she wrote this particular thing. This was the first time I had seen the phrase. By summative experience, I would hope that she meant the sum total educational value of a degree. I would hope that she is saying that the value of the courses taken in one college should approximate the total value, whatever that is and however it is to be judged, of another.

Professor S. Cooper - The articulation resolution ignores all the work faculty have put into the TIPPS project for the last three years. It also violates the right of each faculty to set its own distribution requirements to prepare its students according to its own mission.

Professor Richter – May I just make a couple of comments about that. I think that you are absolutely right about the loss of faculty autonomy. It bothers me very much. This was the burden of the letter that I wrote the Trustee Ruiz. There are however, another couple of things that could be said here. First of all, many of our students do not know what they are going to major in when they come to a community college, or when they come to a senior college. They develop that along the way. To ask them immediately in the very beginning, to tailor their course of study, let’s say at Staten Island, or at City, Queens, whatever. It may be a little bit premature, given the preparation of our students. In addition to that, we need to provide much better advisement for our students. Also, the negotiations between programs are not superseded by this particular transfer mandate. There are still articulation agreements that are reached course by course, program by program, by various people at various colleges. We are only dealing with a maximum of 45 credits. That still leaves you 75 to 90, in some cases, to deal with. Within those parameters, I understand, the loss of complete freedom appalls me too.

Professor Greenbaum – The Board has done away with the articulation that has been done with TIPPS on lower division courses. They have no idea what they have done. / Professor Richter – They may well.

Professor Sherrill – There is no reason why we can’t use our intelligence to make sure that we establish upper division graduation requirements to ensure that our students have the core liberal arts education that we want them to have.

Professor Diamond (Mathematics, Queens College) – The effect of this resolution will not be mainly to give credit to students for courses they have taken, but to exempt them from taking courses at a senior college. We will see students taking many fewer courses in history and language, and so on. This will hurt departments economically, as well as students’ education. It will also unfairly enable transfer students to take many more courses in their majors.

Professor Gallagher – You are going to have to work with people at the two-year colleges, make compromises, and work things out. Otherwise, we are going to end up with a core curriculum.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) – My understanding is that 80^th Street regards the resolution on articulation and transfer as allowing a senior college to require only a total of one course in order to fulfill its discipline requirements.

Professor Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay College) – The loose articulation we had in the past is preferable because there are so many variables here. We have to resist any kind of a rigid system.

Professor McCall – We need some sort of faculty committee to be put in place to adjudicate these issues as they arise; also to anticipate what the issues may be, and to come up with some suggestions for them. We have to take this one head on and deal with it, so that we deal with it together and not as a divided faculty.

d. Student Affairs (Professor Crain) – Discussion of this Committee’s proposed admissions model was postponed until January, due to time constraints.