MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND SEVENTEENTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 28, 2006

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. 69 voting members of 116 were present.

Baruch: Present – Hill, Martell, Pollard, and Vora. Absent – Freedman, Myers, and Smith. Vacancies – 2. BMCC: Present – Agwu, and Rani. Absent – Belknap, Friedman, Martin, Price, and Roy. Bronx CC: Present – Alozie, Asimakopoulos, and Alternate Ismail. Absent – Durante, and Skinner. Brooklyn: Present – Antoniello, Bell, Bloomfield, Jacobson, Morawski, Rodman, Shapiro, Tobey and Wills. Absent –Cunningham, and Viscusi. CCNY: Present – Crain, Daglish, Khalil, Lascar, and Sank. Absent – Habib and Leonard. Vacancies – 2. CSI: Present – Cooper, Klibaner, Levine, Petratos, and Yousef. Absent -- Farkouh. CUNY Law School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancies – 1. Graduate School: Present – Baumrin, Nolan, and Orenstein. Absent – King, and Lerner. Vacancy – 1. Hostos CC: Present – Czarnocha and Falcon. Absent – August. Vacancies - 2. Hunter: Present –Kaye. Absent – Doyle, Finder, Friedman, Guzzetta, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 2. John Jay: Present –Kaplowitz, Kubic, and Soto-Fernandez. Absent – Brugnola, Caldwell, Crossman, and Romero. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart, Farrell, Galvin, Hume, O’Malley, Ruoff and Alternate Fridman. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson, Lerman, Mettler, Rushing, Shean, and Alternates Gluck and Green-Anderson. Lehman: Present – Aronowitz, Kolb, Mineka, and Wilder. Absent – Jervis, Montero, and Philipp. Medgar Evers: Present –Hastick and Stewart. Absent – Daly, and Simmons. NYCCT: Present – Dreyer, Horelick, Hounion, Richardson and Alternates Matloff and Pinto. Absent – Cermele, and Karthikeyan. Queens: Present – Bird, Gonzalez, Moore, and Savage. Absent – Brody, Casco, Habib, Tse, and Zevin. Vacancies – 2. Queensborough CC: Present – Jacobowitz, Pecorino, and Alternates Burleson and Dahbany-Miraglia. Absent – Barbanel, Hest and Weiss. Vacancies – 1. York: Present – Lewis. Absent-- Divale, Frank, and Rosenthal.

Professor Liesl Jones (Lehman), Syd Lefkoe (Queens), and Panayiotis Meleties (Bronx CC) attended.

Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCCT), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Martell (Baruch), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino (QCC), Savage (Queens), Tobey (Brooklyn) and Tronto (Hunter). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were also present.

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

II. Approval of the Minutes of January 2006: The Minutes were adopted as proposed.

[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. Representatives to Board of Trustee Committees (written)

IV. Panel on “Restructuring Science Education at CUNY?”: Recorded in Reports & Deliberations.

V. New Business:

A. Resolution on Campus Academic Freedom Committees:
Professor Bobbie Pollard, Chair of the UFS Academic Freedom Committee proposed the following resolution. It was unanimously adopted by 69 voting members present.

University Faculty Senate Statement as to Why Each CUNY College

Should Have a Standing Academic Freedom Committee

The University Faculty Senate has long taken the position that academic freedom is fundamental and essential to our academic community and that, therefore, it is necessary that faculty be vigilant and committed to actively upholding and preserving principles of academic freedom. Consonant with the views of the University Faculty Senate, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, in his October 2005 Message on Academic Freedom, also stated that “the principle of academic freedom is so essential to colleges and universities that it could be said to be part of the genetic code of higher education institutions. Indeed, it is a self-evident truth of a university’s constitution.”

The University Faculty Senate has long had a standing committee on academic freedom, as do many colleges in CUNY and around the country. The existence of an academic freedom committee demonstrates that the faculty understands and acknowledges its responsibility to uphold academic freedom. It is important to have a standing committee in place in order to explore academic issues on a particular campus.

Therefore, Be It Resolved, that in order to uphold and preserve academic freedom, the UFS Committee on Academic Freedom urges each CUNY college to establish a standing committee on academic freedom if it does not already have one. The purposes of this standing committee might include:

· to monitor, examine and report annually to the faculty of the college on the status of academic freedom at the college;

· to investigate possible violations of academic freedom;

· to address issues of academic freedom through the college’s existing channels of communication and governance structures;

· to make appropriate recommendations regarding academic freedom policies and practices to the college’s governance bodies and, as appropriate, through those bodies to the University Faculty Senate.

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:25 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps
Executive Director

REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF

THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTEENTH PLENARY

SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 28, 2006

III. Reports:

A. Chair, Susan O’Malley: First, before I forget, the PSC buys one thousand AAUP memberships and everyone in the UFS may be a member of AAUP. I think many of you do not receive Academe and are not in the AAUP. If this is true--I just determined that there are two hundred places going begging -- sign your name on this purple paper and where you would like Academe sent to you.

I have some start notices. One is that Baruch is looking for a provost, and that John Jay is looking for a provost too. Also NYCCT, and so, if you have any ideas, contact Karen Kaplowitz at John Jay kkaplowitz@jjay.cuny.edu, and Terrence Martell at Baruch terrence_martell@baruch.cuny.edu, and Lois Dreyer at NYCCT ldryer@citytech.cuny.edu.

At the Law school there are three finalists for dean. The faculty will report out, I believe, on Monday? The three are: Michelle Anderson, law professor at Villanova. Catherine Abate, who is president of Health Care network, and a past state senator; and Margarita Rosa, executive director of the Grand Street Settlement. I’ve met all three candidates, and I think they’re superb. They used no search firm, none, zero search firm. I have never seen such wonderful candidates in any search that I’ve participated in, over the past four years.

Lobbying Day, March 21, come to Albany. We’re setting up appointments, and we’re doing well. We’ll get you all there, and the conversation will be good. I promise you all coffee and donuts on the way. We are doing our lobbying points flyer. Heading the list is more full-time faculty. Other points are Restoration of the senior college operating budget, restoration of full funding for TAP, an increase in FTE funding for community colleges. and consideration of escalator costs for construction on projects already started. I’m going to start really bothering people about lobbying soon. To prevent that, sign up so I don’t have to bother you. Anyway, lobbying is very important. It’s kind of fun, so I hope some of you will volunteer. I just spent the weekend before last up at the Black and Puerto Rican Caucus weekend, and had a marvelous time. It’s an election year; and Albany is hopping-so sign up for lobbying.

Other things. I don’t have much to say about the Teachers Academy for Math & Science. It’s going full steam ahead. Whereas last month they had qualifications that were unreasonable, now it seems they’ve opened the gates much wider, now people don’t even have to be Calculus ready to qualify for this special math and science teacher academy. I don’t know if anyone here participated in their large meeting Bob Fienerman did; I don’t know if anyone else did. I hope to bring in Ann Cohen and Laurel Cooley who are working on it to the next plenary to educate you about the Academy.

I also need to tell you about the Online B.A. Degree, OLBA. It did pass the Board of Trustees yesterday. I had a statement very similar to the statement that I gave at CAPPR. It’s appended to the minutes that are in the back of the room. It will be entered into the record of the board about the UFS opposition to OLBA: the curriculum is much too thin, for a BA/BS degree, faculty need to have true consortial positions, governance needs to be reworked both for OLBA itself and for the School of Professional Studies; and the budget will be coming from tax levy funds to support an online degree whereas the School of Professional Studies had promised to give money to support graduate students, which is apparently not happening. At the School of Professional Studies after three years there are 263 students and these are part-time students. And they have a large staff for 263 part-time students, but I guess the online degree will really increase their numbers. We will be submitting objections to OLBA from the academic policy committee, governance leaders, the executive committee, and the plenary to the State Department of Education. I think they’ll attend to some of them. Any questions so far?

Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate School) - Do we know exactly how many administrators the School of Professional studies has? / Chair O’Malley- I think it’s about ten but we can go to the website and count. Some of them are part time but there are a lot. Considerably more than the CUNY B.A. that the UFS is sort of the godmother of. / Professor Baumrin-Which has what? Two? / Chair O’Malley- Four, for about 800 students, maybe five.

Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island)- When this letter to the State Department of Education is finished, are we going to see it? Or isn’t this something you think crucial? / Chair O’Malley- I’ll circulate a draft but it ought to be done soon. It’s based on, the CAPPR statement, the UFS Minutes, and my SPS statement. Tomorrow I’ll post what I gave out to the Board. But I think it needs to be more detailed, to make four or five points, and then give supporting evidence. / Professor Cooper - The School of Professional Studies, if my memory serves, was supposed to undergo an evaluation at the end of 3 or 4 years - I’ve forgotten. Isn’t that time near? And what’s the procedure? Has any been announced? / Chair O’Malley- I mentioned it at the SPS Governing Board meeting. It is due this summer. This summer the School of Professional Studies will be three years old. The Governing Board Resolution said then there will be evaluation after three years. I have to look and see who’s doing the evaluation. It may be CAPPR I think we need to do our own evaluation too. / Professor Cooper- Is there any way that Middle States could come in on this? / Chair O’Malley- We could ask and find out. Certainly the online BA it is subject to Middle States, and it says so in the proposal. But again, Middle States won’t come until several years later, not initially. / Professor Cooper- But the thing that’s striking about SOPS is the promise that this thing would be generating Graduate School scholarships, and now we have a situation with about 260 part-time students, 8 or 10 administrators, Lord knows what the salaries and office expenses for them are, and I can’t imagine that any of this is leading to scholarship money for the Graduate School. / Chair O’Malley- They gave $100,000 their second year to the Graduate School and no money has been given since. I don’t think there will be more money. SPS is also moving into the Graduate School, I think this week. They took over a good chunk of the Graduate School. There’s not enough room for them at 80^th Street. / Professor Cooper- Thank you.

Chair O’Malley- OK, about flash enrollment. It’s interesting to see what’s up and what’s down although you can’t really trust it because it is a flash enrollment. First time freshmen are quite down in numbers, part-time student numbers are way up, particularly at colleges that have the poorer student bodies. / Unnamed Speaker- Do you mean this current semester or the fall? / Chair O’Malley- I’m talking about the current term. Graduate student numbers are down, I think that’s particularly education at Brooklyn College and maybe at Queens College graduate students, particularly in Education, are going elsewhere and not coming to CUNY. That may be the increase in tuition that we put in place for the fall. There may be cheaper places. Also I am told the teaching vouchers given to teachers already employed have been stamped Empire State, and people don’t know why. They don’t have to go to Empire State, but suddenly their vouchers are stamped Empire State.

Professor David Bloomfield (Education, Brooklyn College)- I know we’re way down. I think a number of the private programs - because of the tuition increase at CUNY - are at least competitive. So, I think Touro, for instance, in Brooklyn, takes a lot of students. I don’t know about Empire State, but I do know that the tuition increase has been disastrous for Brooklyn.

Chair O’Malley- Any place else in terms of graduate students? I do think that Brooklyn was the worst hit. What about Queens, does anyone know? I see Dean Savage is here so I can mention the UFS Spring conference. There will be a conference on the Faculty Experience Survey on April 7^th at John Jay College. The conference is still being structured. We talked at the governance meeting Friday about how the colleges have been using the survey. I find that quite exciting. At Baruch College the President is using it and paying attention to several of the items. That’s also true at Kingsborough, where President Peruggi called a committee together to address some of the results that could be improved. I’ve heard that it the survey was used at City College, but there was one meeting and not much has happened. At LaGuardia, President Mellow has decided to have a task force to redo governance.

The conference will talk about how the survey got started, the genesis of it, and then we’ll move, looking at four or five questions into best practices, to try to understand why there is such an enormous spread between the highest and the lowest scores. Why are some faculty so unhappy and others relatively happy and try to understand that. We will also look at CUNY measured against a national survey of faculty satisfaction to see how we stack up. Dean, do you want to say anything about the conference?

Professor Dean Savage (Sociology, Queens College) - I got a call from David Crook, the Dean of Institutional Research, and he wanted a rapid update because he was having a meeting in an hour with Vice-Chancellor Botman, who wanted to be brought up to speed on this survey. So I think that you know for whatever reason this has worked out very well, and I said, “David, you know the obvious direction to go on this is to repeat this on a regular basis and have it built into the performance assessments of how college presidents are doing?” and he said, “Yes, we’re looking into how that might be done”. So I think that even if they don’t decide to go ahead with it, this body should go ahead with this survey because look what it has done-- it succeeded in getting the attention of administrators in a way that is not all that common at CUNY.

Now, in terms of what we’re going to have ready for the conference, the fabled comparison with the national data, I haven’t had time to do it-- I’ve had three promotions and two searches and I’ve been completely consumed on my campus. Ned Benton has done some national comparisons and I hope that he shows those; and we may not have a full complement of national comparisons but we do have everything in hand to go ahead and work on some of the best practices kind of issues. And I think that there’s certainly a lot to discuss in terms of how some campuses have used it. I found it quite amazing and interesting that the campuses ranked at the high end have been the ones who embraced the survey and decided to work on those few things in which they fell somewhat short, but that colleges like City at the low end found the task simply too daunting - and would have to deal with almost everything - and have apparently dropped the project. But it’s focusing attention and I think that’s a very useful kind of development.

Professor Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College ) - I think it would be interesting if at some point we looked at the student satisfaction survey that CUNY administers and see if there’s any correlation between what the students at each campus say and what the faculty at those campuses say. / Professor Savage- We can take a look at the questions. Generally they tend not to be the same questions, the student satisfaction surveys that have been done both by CUNY central and on individual campuses, ask about the library, the bursar’s office, about satisfaction with the registrar. They tend to ask about satisfaction with instruction. The students don’t have an opinion, they’re not competent to answer, when you ask them what do you think about your college administration, it’s simply not part of their universe. / Professor Kaplowitz- I know, but some of the questions are about how much time they spend on their courses -- I’d have to look at it again./ Professor Savage- Oh, there were some questions that I think have a possible kind of room for expansion, put in some questions there on, you know, how much students actually put in for each course and how much you think they actually put in. They did have some questions in NESE which was administering the national survey of student engagement, which asked all of the students how many hours do you actually invest for each hour of class; of course the national ranking was the professors say 3 hours for every hour of class, what do you think you get, an hour and a half, students say “I put in half an hour”.

Chair O’Malley- If people have ideas on the conference do email us or go to the mic right now.

Professor Eda Hastick-Harris (Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evars College) -- We devoted some time at Medgar, during the Faculty Development Conference, to looking at the survey and we also invited one of our colleagues, Professor Pecorino to present on academic freedom. I won’t take your time talking about what we are doing at Medgar as much as to ask you to guard against using the survey, and taking a giant leap into seeing what is happening nationally, I am suggesting strongly that you not use outside speakers to come in and explain what’s happening within CUNY and then making general statements about CUNY versus national, and so on. Secondly, / Chair O’Malley-I think you’re right about that. / Professor Hastick-Harris- I also think that we underestimate the intelligence of our students by saying that they do not have opinions. Students are very opinionated. They might not show it, but they have their own opinions and their observations.

Chair O’Malley- Finally, Perez. At the governance meeting on Friday we did a lot of talking about Perez we talked about the campuses that are really struggling, the campuses that have no problem with Perez. maybe a little tweak here and there, and those in the middle. We want to help those campuses that are having problems implementing the Perez decision. If you call the UFS, we can address some of the problems with you. Perhaps the problem is getting a system with alternates so that you have a quorum and perhaps it’s revising your governance plan. Many of them are very old and if you have 202 people in your faculty governance body, maybe governance should take a look at that (Hunter has 202 members) and have a more workable number if it is not working. Perhaps there should be fewer students if the students do not attend. Certainly there shouldn’t be more students than faculty, as is true on one campus. It’s time to look at our governance plans and make them stronger and more functional.

Professor Diane Sank (Anthropology, City College) - I just wanted to add a few points that I should have added when it came up earlier, first of all in terms of graduate enrollment. At City we have had a big drop in graduate enrollment and they haven’t been able to figure what… / Chair O’Malley- What programs? Education? / Professor Sank- They didn’t indicate the specific programs. / Our education program seems to be very good but they didn’t specify. But what we have had is a big influx of undergraduates, general undergraduate enrollment but then we get that tremendous drop off, and I just wondered what was happening at the other CUNY colleges regarding that. Do they lose students after the first or second year -- we seem to be losing them tremendously. The other thing is to clarify about the faculty experience survey, we did have a meeting with the president last week regarding the faculty experience survey, the heads of several committees academic freedom and so forth met with him, and after that meeting we questioned whether we would meet again. There was no discussion, but it wasn’t as negative as perhaps was indicated earlier-- it was sort of neutral. The third thing is I would love to find out about other CUNY colleges; the history or the tradition has been that student surveys of teacher evaluation and course survey, student teacher evaluation and course evaluation, has historically been done for non-tenured non-full professors, but about two years ago our administration said we want everyone evaluated, tenured, full professors, whatever. I was just wondering what’s happening on the other campuses, if this is true on other campuses. / Chair O’Malley- That would be a good question to put out on the Listserv. / Professor Sank- At City, the tuition was raised quite dramatically for the school of engineering and the school of architecture. If you could find out, if the drop is in those programs because there is the differential tuition increase. It would be important to know when proposals come forward, if they do, for tuition increases whether there is a connection between them.

Professor Lois Dreyer (Dental Hygiene, NYCCT) - I want to do the survey again on our campus. We had a different president, in house at the time the survey was done, and a very, very low response rate. / Chair O’Malley- You could administer it yourself. / Professor Dreyer-Also, in terms of best practice and the conference I’d like to look at campuses and what they’re doing in terms of mentoring. Botman had talked about this when she first came, something about mentoring. It seems to me that on our campus, there has been a shift in adjuncts and hires to a caliber that no longer reflects what we would like to see as teaching faculty and that they need more mentoring. I’m not saying they’re not good people and they’re not smart, but they’re coming with a lack of educational savvy, classroom smarts, language problems, interpersonal relation problems. I have to tell you the number of students and emails that I get are going to be different than yours as chair of council, and the number of faculty that complain to me are different than the ones that complain to you. All I’m saying is that as educators wouldn’t we want to mentor these people? I’m not saying we shouldn’t hire them but I’d like to know what other campuses are doing to help raise the level. / Chair O’Malley- Again, that might be a question for the Listserv and we also might include it in,

Professor Frances Ruoff (English, Kingsborough)- I did a survey throughout the college for the adjuncts and mentoring was a question and the most frequent response was “What mentoring?” That was college wide, that wasn’t just within the department. / Chair O’Malley-Thank you

Professor Julian Aronowitz (Math & Computer Science, Lehman College) - The question about mentoring how are you going to do it? To whom and how? How do you choose? Whom do you choose to mentor? And who do you chose to be the mentor? And who do you choose to be de-mented? Number two, in terms of the surveys I can truthfully say that there was one aspect of the evaluation surveys done both at Baruch College when I was there and at Lehman College when I was there, where we tell the students that the last part of the survey gives them a chance to make recommendations on everything else about the college, about the classroom, about the books, about things that can help themselves and others as they go along.

Professor Phil Pecorino (Philosophy, Queensborough) - Just as we’re going to gather best practices with regard to faculty involvement in governance, I propose that over the next year I would head up working with a standing committee or a special committee to develop a model Comprehensive Faculty Development Program that would be submitted here, and if this body adopts it, as a recommendation for the individual campuses to emulate in actual practice. / Chair O’Malley- This sounds great. It’s in the minutes; we have a record of this / Professor Pecorino- I’ve already got a lot of material on it. / Chair O’Malley- This is good, particularly as Queensborough Community College is our star campus of the happiest faculty. / Professor Pecorino-I’d say that’s a relative judgment.

Professor Katherine Richardson (Nursing, NYCCT) I’d like to ask the faculty to encourage the faculty on their campuses to become UCRA liaisons or members. We’re looking for people in the following areas: Anthropology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Education, Health and Human Services, Health Sciences, Psychology and Sociology. And the closing date is Friday, April 28, so there’ll probably be only one more Senate meeting before that to encourage people to ask their faculty. The other thing was that we had a task force last semester and I don’t know if Bill Divale is here tonight / Chair O’Malley- I don’t think Bill came. / Professor Richardson- Anyway Bill Divale was chairing this UCRA task force, and basically one of the things that we came up with, which is no surprise to anybody, is that there isn’t enough money in the PSC/CUNY grant awards program, and we were looking at different ways to get more money into the program. The results I assume were brought to the Chancellor, and I have a letter here to Bill Divale from the Chancellor. And I’m not going to read it because of time constraints, but basically what the Chancellor is saying is that it’s not really the university’s problem, it’s the PSC/CUNY’s problem. And where is the money coming from? So, what Susan and I were speaking about before was there’s a pool of money and that pool of money is not going to increase. So the pool of money can be used for the Welfare Fund, it can be used to increase salaries, it can be used for the PSC/CUNY grant program, and that’s the way it’s being looked at. I don’t know how fair that is but I think that’s the way it’s being looked at at this point. / Chair O’Malley- Right, I think what we need to do is have a meeting with the Chancellor and try to find other sources of money; instead of having the Chancellor blaming the union and the union saying we don’t have any more money. I think you should sign up to be on one of the UCRA panels. Chairs of panels get paid, I think we can get some money and it’s kind of fun. / Professor Richardson -- It’s $6,000. That’s to make up for the fact that you can’t apply for a PSC/CUNY grant. These grants lead to other larger grants, which is really very beneficial. / Chair O’Malley- What’s the percentage? It’s pretty high, 47%? / Chair O’Malley- 47% of the PSC/CUNY grants lead to more external funding, which is not bad, given that a lot of faculty in the Humanities have a hard time finding any external funding.

IV. Panel on “Restructuring Science Education at CUNY?”: Chair O’Malley- Thank you. Let me say what this is about. Outside evaluators were brought to look at the possible restructuring of the Doctoral [Sciences] at CUNY. The UFS was asked to name six people, and we did. The scientists got organized and did the most incredible job at their meeting with the outside evaluators. Our team consisted of Liesl Jones of Lehman, Al Levine of CSI, Bob Engels at Queens College, Spiro Alexandratos from Hunter, who was coming tonight, but his mother is not well, Shirley Rapps from Hunter, Nan Lo from CSI. The evaluators were led by Dr. Robert Sibley, Dean of Science from MIT. He was a most impressive man. Tonight Professor Panayiotis Meleties, co-Chair of the Chemistry, Biology, Biochemistry Discipline Council is also with us. I think it’s very important that faculty know what is happening in the reorganization of doctoral science.

Professor Liesl Jones, (Biology, Lehman College) -- I had a unique position on undergraduate research and I spoke on this because I am also coordinator of the MARC program at Lehman College, Minority Access to Research Careers; it’s an NIH funded program that’s trying to increase minority students going on to Doctoral programs I also coordinate the SCORE program, which is the faculty research program given to minority institutes. Essentially, my job was to try to help the evaluators to understand how the consortium model that we have for our Doctoral Program in Sciences benefits the undergraduate students. So, essentially the information I gave them was that most of the graduate students that come into the consortium model mentor our undergraduate students and that the hallmark of all of the minority research programs, are the research programs that we can provide these students and the fact that most of these students do go on to doctoral programs and in order for undergraduates to get into doctoral programs at tier 2, tier 3, and tier 1 institutes, they all have to have a research background. And if they want to get into tier 1 programs they have got to have publications and presentations under their belt when they’re applying to these schools and the same is true of medical schools, and for Master’s programs and for Form D programs, and this is just the way the world is moving and undergraduate research is required. It’s so important that schools like Bronx Science and some of the other magnet schools have research programs built into their high school science curriculums, and I’ve had several students that have come from around the Bronx area that have worked in my lab and have gone on to Harvard and Columbia, and my graduate students have helped mentor undergraduate students that are now going on to Cornell, Harvard, Albert Einstein. So our undergraduates are getting into very good graduate programs based on undergraduate research, and if we do what the Chancellor wants to do, which is to dismantle the consortium model and put the programs on lead campuses, one of the things that I explained to the evaluators is that that makes specialty science programs on the campuses. And what ends up happening is, instead of a biology department, in my case you have a plant science department and you cannot educate kids going on to medical school, kids going on to graduate programs in Bio medical sciences with a plant science department. It also hampers your ability to recruit young faculty to your department and you also then lose faculty from your department who are in programs like Neuroscience or MCD or EEB that can no longer have collaborations on their campus or that have a difficult time getting funding. And I also pointed out that NIH will then remove programs like MARC and RISE from particular campuses because there will no longer be enough bio-medical research on-going at the campuses for them to fund these programs on the campuses. The evaluators actually agreed with that, and they felt that that would happen if this did happen with the consortium model. And it was my understanding from when we left, and I think you’ll hear more, is that the evaluators felt that the programs itself, the doctoral programs itself worked well in the way they were but that there were certain administrative problems and that the administrative problems if addressed would help the doctoral program remain prosperous and work even better and some of those. I’m sure you’ll be discussing what the administrative problems are. / Chair O’Malley- Let me give you some background. Two years ago the Chancellor had a meeting with all of the Science Executive Officers at the Graduate School, a meeting I attended. He essentially told them that their graduate students are not very good, and that they had not done a good job recruiting. I was quite amazed. I’ve never heard him speak quite so frankly and roughly. It looks as if the proposed plan is to reduce the number of graduate students and get them better packages, although some of the packages, particularly at Hunter, are quite good, and then establish lead campuses. City and Hunter would get most of everything and there would be a little bit spread around, but not much. The campuses that would be hurt would be Lehman, Brooklyn College, Queens College, and Staten Island. And so this is why the evaluators were brought in. I think the Chancellor would like the evaluators to agree with his proposed plan. If this happens, Lehman would lose Liesl because she would go elsewhere because she would have no graduate students and no lab. / Professor Jones- They did meet with graduate students from the programs and they were extremely impressed. I was very lucky because my graduate student got to speak with them and they were very impressed. He’s a minority graduate student and he came up through the ranks, he started at Lehman College in the biology department, was a research technician in my lab and went on to the Doctoral Program and he’s currently being fought over by several post-doc positions at Mount Sinai and a couple of other places. And we also have, a young man by the name of Chris and he’s someone that I don’t think you’d ever see come through this school again. He is a double major bio-chem with a math and physics minor and he is a 4.0 and he has 5 acceptances and he’s been accepted at UCSD, University of Illinois, Stony Brook and he’s waiting on Cal-Tech and Berkeley and I think he is also in at Stanford. So he is a very impressive young man and would not be here if the MARC program did not exist, since he comes from an underprivileged background. He takes the money that we give, which is $1000 a month, and gives it to his family to help pay for rent and bills and we pay his tuition. Without the MARC program this young man would not have finished college. So, he’s a hallmark of the program and NIH loves him because he’s exactly the young person that they are looking for. / Chair O’Malley- Thank you.

Professor Panayiotis Meleties, (Chemistry, Bronx Community College) - I am the Co-Chair of the Physics, Chemistry, Bio-Chemistry and Biology Discipline Council of the City University of New York. As Council of Chairs we are communicating and sharing common problems that each individual department science department that the City University has. One of the basic problems that was recognized across the board for all of the colleges was the under-funding for the science departments. Most of the science departments are operating with budgets that were designed to meet the needs of the 70’s, that each individual department had in the 70’s. That is a very common problem. There is some progress recently, especially for the community colleges- through the community college incentive program, and for the Senior Colleges we are told that there is going to be a similar program. In terms of my department at the Bronx Community College we can recite similar successes like the ones from Lehman and I guess all the other departments of science across the university can cite similar stories. Recently, we have talked about the review of the graduate programs, and this became a major concern across the university, and there are many stories or rumors that are circulating around. We are hearing about different plans that are going to be developed, addressing the structure of the consortium order. For some reason, or for well understood reasons, science research cannot be done at the Graduate School because there are no laboratory facilities, and usually this is done at individual campuses. Most of the graduate programs have participation from five colleges, but recently there are other colleges that want to participate using the dimensions of the consortium model. I think recently York College, the department of Chemistry for York College, became part of the consortium for the program of Chemistry. I think any restructuring that is going to happen at the graduate school should encourage these colleges to develop their science departments towards graduate programs, instead of limiting the number of the departments that participate right now in the graduate program. They should encourage these colleges to develop their graduate education for strong undergraduate science education that exists in most of the CUNY colleges should lead into having a strong graduate education as well, not trying to limit a graduate education to one or two colleges and eliminate it from the other campuses because it’s going hurt at the very end for the undergraduate education as well.

Chair O’Malley for Spiro Alexandratos- Spiro Alexandratos is a very impressive scientist. At the meeting with the evaluators each person presented. When it was Spiro’s turn, he takes an article from the New York Times, published a few years ago, reads it to the evaluators: “For years, there has been talk about elevating one or two colleges of the City University of New York to flagship campuses with research capacity, prestige and drawing power like that of the Berkeley campus of the University of California. But CUNY officials have found it difficult to make the case. Top-ranked research institutions are extremely expensive. New York City and New York State already have an abundance of first-tier private research universities. And elevating one institution over another would be virtually impossible politically in a city where borough presidents and other government officials cherish their Hunters and Lehmans. Rather than trying to make the case for a flagship campus, Matthew Goldstein, CUNY's Chancellor, has begun trying to sell a different vision, one that he says would achieve some of the same benefits in prestige and economic impact but cost far less.” What the article says is that the Chancellor is looking for a flagship environment, not a flagship campus but this goes totally against what the Chancellor had told the evaluators. The evaluators said, “What, where did you get this?” and Spiro said, “I got it from the New York Times, October 31, 2000.” And then he quoted Chancellor Goldstein, “ ‘You might ask why we do not have an Ann Arbor or a Chapel Hill or a Berkeley,’ Dr. Goldstein said, naming some highly regarded flagship academic institutions at an N.Y.U. breakfast. The answer is, ‘It's not appropriate,’ he said”. The evaluators' mouths dropped open and said, “My goodness,” and then, Al Levine spoke.

Alfred Levine, (College of Staten Island)- Seventeen years ago, I was the UFS representative on the CUNY task force, examining CUNY programs in Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics. The committee included administrators from inside and outside of CUNY including Chancellor Goldstein. We debated the isolation of science instruction on “one or two campuses.” I argued that to be credible, the traditional senior colleges must offer Baccalaureate degrees in at least Biology, Chemistry, Physics, Mathematics and Computer Science. Chancellor Goldstein, then president of Baruch, argued that a specialized business school did not need to offer these degrees but agreed that every traditional senior college should offer at least those five. Parenthetically, I might add a similar list could be for Humanities and Social Sciences, for example “all senior colleges should offer a degree in history.” Now, to provide a suitable background for students to continue in PhD programs in the laboratory sciences, Biology, Chemistry or Physics, the undergraduate majors must be given research opportunities as part of the undergraduate education. Exactly what Liesl describes she is doing, this implies each senior college should have research-active faculty. It is the genius of CUNY’s consortial arrangement together with Chancellor Goldstein’s flagship environment, that provides research-active faculty residing in undergraduate campuses who can supervise the research done by the undergraduate majors, as well as having them work together with doctoral students. Consolidating the doctoral work on lead campuses will destroy this arrangement. Furthermore, reducing by 50% the number of PhD students will decrease the number of research active faculty attracted to CUNY. This is not the way to improve science education. We can speculate on the motive for these proposals. Consider the airline pricing model--some passengers pay full-fare first class, some business class, some coach class, and some have complimentary tickets and pay nothing. To maximize revenues, the airlines try to increase the number of full fare passengers while decreasing the number of comp tickets. At CUNY our undergraduates pay coach fare, MBAs pay business class fares and the new clinical doctorates in areas such as physical therapy will pay first class fares and in the end each group will be getting good value for their money. But PhD students in the sciences and other liberal arts disciplines should be getting full tuition remission; in other words, complimentary tickets. To maximize the tuition revenue in this model it is necessary to reduce the number of PhD students while encouraging the Graduate Center to develop high-cost Master’s programs. The root cause of this problem is that tuition provides 50% of our operating budget. With respect to higher education, our society’s highest values seem to be cutting taxes and destroying public institutions. My values are different. I believe that a democracy requires an educated electorate and that our economic well-being requires more PhDs in science. I believe that Chancellor Goldstein agrees with my values, and I agree with him that we must face the reality that our society believes that a large portion of our revenue should come from tuition. What I disagree with is that I believe academic decisions should not be based on a desire to maximize tuition revenue. Thank you. / Chair O’Malley- Stefan, you’re sort of the official respondent?

Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate Center) - I found that really very interesting. Let me add a fact to what Al just said at the end. I had been told that the Graduate School is going to reduce the number of PhD students and increase the number of Master’s students because Master’s students pay tuition and they’re easier to teach and they’re more of them. I said that’s a good reason not to do it, because where are we going to get the faculty, we don’t have any faculty at the University to spare. So, this really is the plan, and the plan has been vetted through the President’s and it’s been vetted through the Provost. I thought that the case that you made was terrific and with all due respect, they can take your sense of humor a lot easier than they can take those individual anecdotal refutations. But the real problem for them will be, and this is a problem for us, to get this past the faculty, because it will involve curriculum revision, it will involve the reallocation of resources, it may require some institutional changes, and it requires a significant activism on our part to do something. It’s one thing to know what the plan is, as nefarious as the plan is, because I think that it will, in fact, lead to the dismantling of undergraduate science education at the senior college and that will be irreversible. You will never again mount full-fledged B.A. and BS programs at our senior colleges, were we to let this happen.

Professor Liesl Jones, (Biology, Lehman College)- My understanding though was that the evaluators have a huge say in this, that if the evaluators felt that this would be detrimental to undergraduate and graduate education at CUNY, then this would not happen or the plan that they have and the plan that the evaluators have is an administrative plan, and the administrative plan is not to change the consortium model. I don’t know if you are aware, but we are not the only group of schools in New York City that has a consortium model. Memorial Sloan Kettering is actually beginning a doctoral program, a graduate school, and they have a consortium model of 5-7 other Universities in the city, so their consortium model is not within their own campus but outside, so we’re not the only one. And the administrative changes are that what they would like to have happen is that CUNY provide tuition for graduate students for the first two years that they are within the graduate school, and then the students would go out to their host campuses. A host campus could be anybody that participates within the consortium model, and the host campus would pick up the tuition for the last years; whether it be how Lehman does it for the most part, which is adjunct teaching time, or tech time or off of a research grant. So that was one of their ideas. The other that came out of this was also that the graduate students would have dual memberships so to speak, that they would have ID’s both at the Graduate Center and at their host campuses, because currently graduate students do not have rights on their host campuses. They are not given ID’s, so they cannot use the library or the computer center, the gym anything like that on their host campuses, so this was another administrative thing. And one of the ways that they think they can shift the budget, is the cluster hires- that there’s double dipping off the cluster hires so if you single dip off the cluster hires either the host campus pays or the Graduate Center pays for the cluster hire, then there’s a nice budget line, that can then pick up tuition for the graduate students.

Professor Alfred Levine (College of Staten Island) - One of the members of the panel, said to me, “Well, what happens if you have n students, CUNY can support n students and you currently have 2n? How do we cut it back?” There is no question that the plan is to first cut back, and that is what is really behind it. My response was then you do your best to fund them coming into the campuses and CUNY has less money, and he said we have to be very careful not to produce a downward spiral where each year we have to keep cutting students. So, one feature of this is to simply reduce the number of PhD students, first in the sciences.

Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) - I’m listening intently to the increase in Master’s students and a decrease in Doctoral students as an issue which suddenly concerns everybody beyond the sciences. A couple of related questions: What about the E.O.’s at the Graduate School here in the Humanities and Social Sciences? Where are they on this? Are these Master’s programs to be parachuted into this building? At the expense of the outlying Boroughs and the inlying Boroughs that are running Master’s degrees and in some of our cases, mine being one, just built six or seven new ones in the last few years at considerable exhaustion of the faculty. I have the impression that we invest in things in this place and are rotten capitalists; we don’t allow the bloody things to generate the income they’re supposed to; we cut them off at the pass. There is one Master’s program here as far as I know, the Master’s of Liberal Studies; does this mean the Graduate School will give a Master’s in History, and English, and Sociology and Music? Is there any reading at this point of the temperature of the Executive Officers and the faculty here, in the non-Sciences?

Professor Jones- I think most of the E.O.’s in Science were against changing the consortium model, and the graduate students were against changing the consortium model and all of the faculty that showed up. As well as, I know that the Dean and the Provost at Lehman’s campus were going to support the consortium model, both of them are Scientists, and so I’m pretty sure that they were showing up to support the consortium model. As far as the Social Sciences, Psych would be involved in this. And Psych will move off to a lead campus and would have reduction. So yes, Psych is involved.

Professor Dean Savage (Sociology, Queens College) - The three items that are mentioned here--one of them is reducing the number of Doctoral students, another one is introducing Master’s programs for all of the programs here (a number of the PhD programs already offer a Master’s degree, so it won’t be new for certain programs), and then the third item is the one we started with, which is concentrating science research at City College primarily but also perhaps at Hunter College. And somehow number three is the one we started with but that’s kind of fallen by the board and all of a sudden we’re talking about Master’s students supporting a reduced number of PhD students. I don’t see the connection between the first two and the third, so that’s one thing I’d like to hear from the panel about. But then there’s another issue, and that has to do with the number of Doctoral Students and what the market will afford right now. I actually had been frustrated over the years with the job placement success of lost generations of Sociology Doctoral students, so first I went ahead and constructed a complete list of all of the Doctoral students in Sociology and where they got placed, and then I was dissatisfied with that so I decided to go and expand my research to cover all 5300 PhD’s at the City University between 1965 and 1994 and I unleashed a team of Grad students (burned out quite a few of them actually), to go and find CUNY PhD’s by looking through the faculty listings of every college catalog in America. We succeeded by dint of a really serious labor outlay in finding 1500 of the 5200 doctorates, 30%. What I found was is that the placement rate for business PhD’s was 70% in academic positions, terrific, the low program is German- 4% placement rate in academic jobs. The other programs are strung out all the way up and down the line. So then I went ahead and said, OK, we’ve got some problems in some programs, if you figure out that only 50% of the people who start a PhD finish, and then only half of them get an academic job, that’s one in four, that’s really something that the students need to know about when they start out. So I’ve been telling them but I’m not sure this information is widely shared in all programs, and one of the things that I found particularly interesting, I also found out that in response to the fiscal crisis of higher education, in response to the massive drop in the number of academic positions, the privates cut back. The SUNY’s and CUNY did not cut back. There’s no market mechanism operating here, but I think we could stand to cut back on the number of PhD students.

Professor Levine- Dean, I usually agree with everything you say, but this time I don’t. In the case of Biology, Chemistry and Physics, you have the problem that you’re looking in Academia. Twice as many of our graduates go into industry, in the case of the Physics PhD’s that I’ve dealt with, most go out to industry, only a small number have gone into Academia. There are jobs, and furthermore there is a national redistribution that we need more PhD’s in science. When I made my comment about that I believe that the economic well being of this country requires more PhD’s in the laboratory sciences - I really mean that.

Professor Jones- We have in the Biology areas, pharmaceutical companies go to the conferences; just to hand-pick the graduate students off their posters. I have seen this happen, Kevin being one of them who was hand picked by a couple of pharmaceutical companies, because of the research they’re doing. There’s a lot of real good research going on within CUNY so a lot of companies are pulling the students right out of the labs. The problem is not placing them, the problem is recruiting them to come here and we do have a difficult time because we’re sitting in New York City which is one of the most competitive cities - other than California as a state and Chicago - for lab, bench top research. And being in the neuroscience program, I can tell you that we compete with Columbia, Cornell, NYU, and Einstein. Our program only takes 4 students a year because we take two that we can fully fund for the first two years and two that we can find somebody that can fund for the five years they’re going to be here. So we are highly competitive with the other programs within the city.

Professor Savage- To follow up, that sounds like a program that really works, the number of PhD programs that only accept doctoral students that they can fully fund is not a very large number. We accept all kinds of people. I’ve seen the numbers on loan, borrowing and going into debt and all that. We have lots and lots of people, including people who really should be counseled otherwise, who are going and borrowing to the hilt and then they’re coming out the other end and they do not have a job. I will not argue that there are some programs that absolutely do deserve to continue at exactly the rate they’re going, but I think it’s not probably unlikely that there are some that maybe should go ahead and get a review.

Professor Bill Crain (Psychology, City College of New York) - I know in terms of African-American and Latino students in the PhD lines, percentage wise that CUNY is probably not much better than anybody else in the nation. Are we a leader in the nation in terms of absolute numbers in terms of minorities that are getting PhD’s? My instincts are that cuts will hurt students of color.

Professor Liesl Jones, - I don’t know if we’re leading in number of minorities -- no not in granting PhD’s. We do have many of them come in. We have an interesting problem at CUNY which is retention at all levels, and even within our doctoral programs we have retention problems, and that’s an issue that needs to be addressed across the board whether it’s undergraduate, master’s or doctoral students. I would imagine that there are other institutions that probably grant more minority doctorates just from the fact that they grant more doctorates to begin with. And that we probably take in more minority students than some other programs, but it takes many of our doctoral students longer than the five to seven years that’s average.

Professor Eda Hastick – (Behavioral Science, Medgar Evers College) – I would like to request that we have a Part Two to this discussion and that it include written information. This topic is much too important and it impacts students of color and we need to treat it even more seriously. Number two, again I would like to see some participation of the minority faculty who I know happen to be involved and engaged in programs such as MARC. Bring them in and others who are working in collaboration with you and let’s have a fuller discussion of this issue. Number three, this whole discussion sounds like part of a larger discourse that is taking place in academia -- the whole issue of what is happening to minority students and minority faculty. For example, take a look around this room. We need more minority faculty input in the discourse, in the discussions. They too have opinions, and they too are impacted by what you are talking about. Thank you very much.

Professor Leslie Jacobson (Health & Nutrition Science, Brooklyn College) –I want to stress what Liesl said. But, before I do that I do want to say that if one does away with graduate education in the sciences, we’re really doing a disservice to higher education and to the people of the City of New York. That should be a given, because the campus programs will disappear or will disintegrate into very poor second class science programs. I have been involved in the MARC Program in Brooklyn. I brought the Graduate Program, the Bridges to the Doctorate, and I’ve been involved in Bridges for the Baccalaureate, so it goes from the Community Colleges all the way through graduate education for minority students. The MARC students have generated outstanding PhD theses and programs and they’ve been absolutely exemplary, and you must thinking of that because all of your NIH funding will go. I have been a consultant on MARC, and I will tell you it will go. So if we’re looking at diversity, or more than that, if we’re looking at upgrading our science education, and not dumbing it down, we’ve got to stand very firm on this issue.

Professor Francis Ruoff (English, Kingsborough Community College) – May I suggest that the Chancellor look at an article that was in Time magazine about two weeks ago about the dumbing down in America and the lack of sciences in this country. And the article said that we are going to be in big trouble if we do not encourage more students in the sciences, and help them in schools so they’re not leaving here and going off to China to do their research. It’s an extensive article and the numbers are excellent. So I would suggest looking it up and showing it to him. It might help your argument.

Chair O’Malley - Are there any more questions? I would like to thank our panel. Their comments will be transcribed. I didn’t realize how important the transcript was, until I saw Richard Pizer’s report on the state of science. And what did he do? He quoted the transcript of the University Faculty Senate when the Chancellor answered a question about the reorganization of doctoral sciences. President William Kelly when asked “How do you know so much about what goes on in the university?” He said I read the transcript of the University Faculty Senate.

Professor Tom Kubic (Science, John Jay College) - On this Perez business, at the last minute one of the Faculty Senators spoke to the Vice Chancellor about the total vote once a quorum is present. She spoke about the General Construction Law and my understanding was that Schaffer was going to get back to us on that vote. Because I notice today for instance you counted, abstentions. Has anybody heard from him about that vote? Because my understanding of the general parliamentary procedure is once a quorum is present a majority vote only has to be those who are voting and I have it in Roberts’ Rules right here if you want to see it. My understanding is once a quorum is called and is present according to Roberts’ Rules, when you then have a majority vote all you need is the majority of the people voting. Abstentions do not count. I have it right here for Stefan if he wants to see it. That’s the general rule. Now whether the statute in New York is different and therefore and if you have a hundred senators and you had to have fifty-one here; that interpretation would mean that we’d have to have 51 votes. / Chair O’Malley –No, it’s not. Perez supersedes Roberts’ rules. / Professor Kubic – That’s if there’s a statute on the books, and if you remember last meeting when the senators from Hunter, I think the name was Tronto, mentioned the Construction Law, and Schaffer said send it to me. I want to know have we heard anything / Chair O’Malley – That’s true / Professor Kubic – I looked at the Construction Law and for both corporations and non-profit corporations. / Chair O’Malley – Could you send me what you found? / Professor Kubic – Yeah, yeah, but you could also go on the Net…General Construction Law Section 41 it’ll come right up. / Chair O’Malley – But I don’t know what you or she is referring to. If you can send me the phrase I’ll send it to Schaffer.

Professor Pat Kolb (Sociology & Social Work, Lehman College)– I just want to support the suggestion by Eda Hastick that there be follow-up discussion, perhaps with people from additional schools to talk about the controversy about the plans for the science graduate programs. And that includes discussion about what we can do back on our campuses. / Chair O’Malley – OK / Professor Cole – To help involve people on the campus with interest in this in terms of advocating. / Chair O’Malley – If you have any ideas on how we should do that, whether it should be a plenary, if it should go through the Academic Policy Committee with a presentation, or in a report, I would appreciate your ideas.