III. Reports:

A. Chair: I’m glad to be back. During the last plenary I was in the hospital being operated on in my ankle. Yes, I was in Albany at the Regents’ meeting. I think we did some good. We got better monitoring, and we certainly built relationships with the Regents. I should have listened to Martha Bell who told me "stop running around Albany, take car service." I walked about five miles around Albany and then slipped on black ice on the way to the final meeting with the Board of Regents on the ending of remediation. I came back to work, had a meeting with my Executive Committee, the Chancellor, and Louise Mirrer, got food poisoning and ended up in the hospital dehydrated for three days. Anyway, I’m back in the realm of the living. I want to thank you for your cards, your phone calls, and your prayers. I now know all the people who have broken their ankles or had similar things happen to them. They have called and given me wonderful support. I thank you, Karen, Jamal, Martha, Lenore, you’ve been wonderful.

At yesterday’s Board of Trustees meeting – I watched it on television because it was too icy to get there – you know you can watch it on channel 75, two interesting things occurred. One was articulation. Shamsul, who’s here, talked about articulation and then Benno Schmidt went on and on about articulation. So it’s something we’re going to have to have more conversations about. There was also a serious breach of governance at City College. The information is on the back table. The Faculty Personnel Committee did not support the two distinguished professors that were recommended. The president overruled that and found his own committee to support his recommendations and then presented them at the Board of Trustees. From here on, all agendas for CAPPR and FSA will be put on the listserv. If you see a distinguished professor or if you see an administrative position coming through or a program that has not been passed by your local governance, please contact us. I don’t want this to happen again.

At the next plenary I thought we might do a session on the CPE, the CUNY Proficiency Exam. An e-mail from Queens College said many students were being dismissed for note passing the CPE, but they are able to take it again on appeal. What happened was the students didn’t show up for the exam. If a student doesn’t show up, it counts as a failure. Executive Vice Chancellor Louise Mirrer told me my figures were wrong, but I do believe it’s the question of students’ not showing up. The show rates have been dismal in some of the colleges. We should take a look at this.

Finally, the spring conference. It looks as if it’s going to be on the first Friday in April. I just had a meeting with the Status of the Faculty Committee and I think they’re going to help do this conference. Right now it looks as if it’s going to be on the centralized or integrated university and faculty governance. We might take a look at cluster hiring, articulation, ERP (which is the new data integration scheme), the honors college, curriculum, common course numbering, perhaps the EPA contract.

B. The Chancellor: Everybody well? You all had a good vacation? Wrote papers, applied for grants, you did all those things you’re supposed to do, right? I do have a sense of what the budgets look like and they are not good, but we’re going to stay the course just the way I said that we would. I don’t need to go into all the detail. I don’t want to discuss anything before the Governor presents his budget tomorrow, but I do know what the parameters of the budget look like. It’s not going to be easy, it’s going to be rough, but we’re not going to be overly affected in the ways that we have in the past in this University. Retrenchment is off the table. I don’t even want to discuss, and it’s just not going to happen, and we are going to continue to do what I’ve told you that we are going to do and we’re going to be aggressive in hiring faculty. We have about 500 people who have taken early retirement. That includes 222 professors that are taking early retirement, another 100 HEOs and CLTs for a total of 322 senior college instructional staff; in the community colleges, 89 teaching faculty, 26 non-teaching faculty for a total of 115; that brings us up to 437, and then the remaining are classified staff. I have written to all of the presidents in a very direct way. I think I’ve briefed you on this but let me just say again that we will continue to hire full-time faculty. That to me is a core value that we have to cherish, and we have to stay the course because I believe that we cannot be taken seriously as a university unless we not only sustain the maintenance of effort on full-time faculty but, to the degree that we can, grow the full-time faculty. And with this early retirement initiative we have a wonderful way to continue to reshape and renew the faculty, so we’re going to do that to the degree that we can. But these are going to be deep budget cuts and the way that we will handle this is to do everything that we can to get restorations. But at the end of the day the responsibility that I have and the Board has is to reconcile our expenditures with our revenues. There probably will need to be revenue enhancements but done in a way that tries to protect the most vulnerable among us, and I have to be very mindful of that and will continue to be mindful of that. But I don’t want to talk about this at this point because I don’t know exactly how all of this is going to wind itself down. It’s going to be a budget that is going to be delayed. I can’t imagine that we’re going to have a budget by April 1, I can’t imagine that we’re going to have a budget by May 1. I doubt that we’ll have a budget by June 1. So when these things go on, it’s problematic.

On TAP, the Tuition Assistance Program, we envisage there will be some problems. But I think that at the end of the day when the legislature starts working on their ideas and proposals, all of this is going to get moderated to some extent. And of course, the degree to which we are held out of harm’s way is the degree to which it gets moderated in a way that will allow us to do the good work that continues to happen here at this University. I’m going to give a policy address at the Harvard Club on Thursday. One of the things that I will be talking about is a rational tuition policy for both CUNY and SUNY. You cannot have an organization that can sustain itself with solvency—universities, businesses, not for profits, libraries, museums, whatever it is—if it has constant expenditure increases and no revenue to support those expenditures. It is a recipe for an organization that just cannot sustain itself, and we all know this. Everybody here are intelligent people that understand this. This is a very basic principle. But what I object to is the notion of a big spike, like we may get this year. SUNY, as you know, has proposed a 41% increase in their undergraduate tuition increase. I think that is without precedent in the history of SUNY, in certainly anything that we’ve seen. Those kinds of things I don’t think are healthy ways to manage an organization. If you know that you have to sustain revenue do it in a way that is predictable and manageable. And there are ways, I believe, to address this, and that’s one of the things that I’m going to be discussing, ideas that I have been talking to the Governor’s people quietly about for some time. I’m going to be meeting with the Mayor tomorrow, addressing his cabinet and talking about some of these things as well. So let’s just take a deep breath. We’re going to manage this. It’s not going to be easy but we’re going to do it in ways that will not destroy the soul of the University like we’ve seen in the past. That was I think not a very thoughtful way of proceeding. I’m not giving you information, I’m just giving you my views that, while this is going to be a difficult problem, we will find a way to manage it. We’ll work together, we’ll work with the Faculty Senate, we’ll work with the PSC, because I think ultimately we may have different utilities among us, we may have different weights that we put to things, but we all share one thing in common, and that is we care about this University, we care about the students, we care about the reputation of the University, keeping it vibrant and an exciting place to work and to learn. And that to me is the core values that I want to focus on.

I also will be talking about things that I’ve talked with you about but I’m going to put a little more flesh on this, and that is that we manage this University in the same way we’ve managed the University for 40-50 years. We haven’t changed. We’ve been doing the same sort of thing. We have every campus doing the same sort of things in their administrative functions and some do it better than others. There are ways that I think that we can do it better and that is to really use the notion of the integrated university, but we have to build structures before we do this intelligently: data structures, we have to build systems that are reliable and inform decisions, share data, and that’s going to take a little time, and a big investment. The State of California system invested $400 million to do just what I’m saying that we need to do. Fortunately this University over the past several years has quietly but methodically invested in things that you don’t see, they’re almost invisible to the eye, but infrastructure that was done somewhat intelligently I would say, and we’re positioning ourselves to build on that now. And we will at some point in time be able to do things organizationally that we really cannot do now because we just don’t have the architecture in place but we will have it within the next few years at a much reduced cost than what we saw at the University of California. Why do I think it’s important to do this? It’s important because we have to find ways to invest in our core business, and our core business, for me, is about giving the faculty the tools that they need to do the best work that they can. It means hiring faculty, it means providing support services for students, it means equipping laboratories at a level that people can do their best work, and it means providing instrumentation and equipment and libraries. This to me is what the University is about; it’s about learning, it’s about teaching, it’s about expanding the boundaries of knowledge, it’s about giving students the platform that they need to really change their lives. So the degree to which we can invest in all of that is a good thing from the way that I look at the world, and absent infusion of dollars that we have never seen at this University. Really the last time we saw infusion was in the heyday of the 1960’s. During the Rockefeller administration there was a tremendous amount of money put into public higher education. He cared about public higher education and really put a huge amount of resources in it. We have not seen that level of investment in New York State spanning many administrations, and there are lots and lots of reasons, but whatever it is we have not seen the investment and we have to start investing in the University. And I think one way to invest in the University is by focusing attention on developing revenue in ways that we haven’t developed revenue before and redeploying revenue to follow the things that we care most about. And that is one of the things that I’m focused on.

Last night was just another clarion call when I heard the three distinguished professors speak, three fabulous people that all of us would be delighted to know and work with as colleagues. This is what this University is about. It’s about advancing people that are doing extraordinary things both in the way that they nurture our students and in the way that they work to expand bodies of knowledge. I was just very proud and very touched. All three of them spoke magnificently. I assume some of you were there. You really ought to try to get a transcript of the words that they gave. It was really just a wonderful environment to see what this University is capable of in producing extraordinary faculty.

I have 20 minutes, so I’m going to stop. And I know there’s got to be a question in the audience. If we could stay on the important issues…

Professor Beaky (English, LaGuardia Community College) – I hope this is important. I just finished writing an article about the cluster hiring initiative and I was really struck by something. The first four areas that CUNY began hiring in, Foreign Languages, Photonics, Computers and New Media, Teacher Ed, there is someone from the community colleges at each one of those except Teacher Ed. And Teacher Ed has the most hires, 35, and there is not a single community college that’s included in the list of institutions that are part of this initiative. Since every single community college has at least two education programs, I’m just wondering why there are no community colleges included in the Teacher Ed cluster hiring. I believe you’ve talked about this before. / Chancellor Goldstein – I can’t answer. I honestly don’t know. But should there be? I would say certainly consideration should be given. I’m going to answer this in a broader way if you don’t mind. Last night, again, I spent a fair amount of time in my presentation about the component of the integrated university that I feel very deeply about, and that is the way that we integrate our two-year institutions and our four-year institutions around articulation and transfer. I think it is, and I’m going to use strong words here, but I really believe this to my core, I think it is disgraceful the way too many of our students are treated when they are transferred from a two-year institutions to a four-year institution. Sometimes there is legitimacy. They are taking courses that shouldn’t be transferred to a senior college because they were never designed to be senior college courses, and that makes sense. But otherwise I just can’t buy into that. So you’re preaching to the choir here. I think that community colleges need to be given greater attention than we have done in the past and integrated much more with senior colleges, and if that means giving more attention to faculty that are at two-year institution in cluster hires I don’t have an objection and I think it’s a good thing. / Professor Beaky – How might we go about doing that? / Chancellor Goldstein – I think that the thing to do is to meet with Louise Mirrer, who is not here, and ask her about how those decisions are made. I do know that there is a committee, and I think that that would be a very good thing for the Senate to work on, to really assist in our thinking of where you think good investments could be made straddling a number of campuses. I look forward to that advice and counsel. Professor Beaky – Great, thank you very much

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – The Governor’s position on TAP was leaked in the New York Times. The frightening thing about it is that it’s one thing to deal with a tuition increase, which everyone knows is going to come in one form or another, but it’s another things to do it plus cut the TAP, and I’m wondering whether the administration has any interest in arguing with Albany over that. / Chancellor Goldstein – I agree with you. Here it is very quickly, I don’t want to go into this in a lot of detail. The nightmare scenario is that when the legislature looks at financial assistance and when they look at the operating deficiencies our partners are going to be the independent factor in SUNY as it relates to TAP. We are all looking at this in a sense, so I think there will be opportunities to draw in forces and we’re going to be very vocal about this because that really places our students in harm’s way. The nightmare is that after all that effort people say "we delivered for CUNY, let’s go on and do Medicaid, or something else" and will still leave us with a gaping hole. But certainly TAP is an area where we have to fight strenuously, as we will with the operating budget. / Professor Cooper – I’m wondering if you have a report you might share with us about the number of students on foreign student visas who might have been expelled in the last few months? / Chancellor Goldstein – Expelled? / Professor Cooper – From the country. / Chancellor Goldstein – I don’t know if we have that data. I’ll look into it.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – …possible differential tuition at different colleges as the SUNY? / Chancellor Goldstein – I know that we have the authority to do differential tuition on the basis of programs that are unique to campuses, and as we discuss revenue we’re going to be looking at all of that. I don’t have any particular proclivity one way or the other. / Professor Philipp – In terms of transfers from community colleges to senior colleges, when people come in with prerequisites to courses that are accepted under the TIPPS transfer program, these prerequisites are not automatically locked into the senior colleges in the SIMS system. Therefore they have to be dome manually by department chairs. I’m one of those department chairs. It drives my up the wall to every day, almost every hour, have to enter prerequisites for students who’ve come from community colleges. It should be done centrally. / Chancellor Goldstein – I have just given authority based upon – you brought this up in one of our meetings – based on that conversation I’ve directed that chairs will have the option of getting that transcript online so that you’ll be able to look at it rather than having to wait for some paper thing, and I was told it will be done. / Professor Philipp – That’s part of it. The other part is automatic entry of prerequisites. / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s where the Senate can be really helpful here. You guys are on the front line doing this and as you see problems let us know, become a partner, let’s try to solve this together.

Professor Lewis (English, York College) – I know that the University is already planning tuition workshops to help out with the possibility of a large tuition hike and also that combined with TAP, but I also was wondering, is it possible for the University to organize some sort of emergency outreach to students, especially students close to graduation, after these situations come to fruition, who might not be able to continue and really need some sort of intervention? / Chancellor Goldstein – I think that’s a good point. We are doing a number of things. Starting February 1 we’re going to have two Financial Aid Seminars. We’re doing five of these seminars in each borough. We’re going to follow this up with individual letters, and I had a three-hour meeting on this today. Every student who is presently enrolled, every student who has been accepted to study at our University at a particular college - there are going to be custom made letters; this is going to be a Herculean task but we created the structure today to do it – every student will be getting a letter not only detailing TAP and PELL but also scholarships that are available at each individual campus. So for example if a student gets an acceptance to study at York we’re going to have a full inventory of what those scholarships are and we’re going to create this in a graphic way of showing safety nets. The first safety net is TAP and PELL and if you fall through that there are safety nets connected with private money that is raised, if you fall through that there are safety nets with jobs. So we’re going to detail this on a college basis because that’s about as fine as we can go. We’re going to be creating a lot of these systems so that they’re ready very soon to communicate with students. / Professor Lewis – Thank you very much.

Professor Friedheim (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – I want to ask you a question about university performance goals and targets, and one performance goal in particular: increasd instruction by full-time faculty is the objective; the indicator is percentage of instructional hours taught by full-time faculty. If I were a college president one devilishly ingenious way I could do this would be to not give sabbaticals, not give release time to faculty for faculty development and research, and in fact in part that’s the way it has been done at my college. My question is this: Can there be some kind of directive from central so that this goal is not met at the expense of faculty development and faculty research? / Chancellor Goldstein – Somebody mentioned the BMCC issue about sabbaticals. I think it was mentioned to me. I don’t know if I ever followed-up on it but I will follow-up on that and find out about it. It’s the only campus I’ve heard some noise about, and you may have been the guy that talked to me about it. Somebody write it down for me.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – To go back to TAP. The things leaking out of the Governor’s office seem to indicate that financial aid, especially TAP, is going to be based on rates of completion of study in ways they haven’t been before and the notion of four-year degrees and two-year degrees are going to be the rule. Now the key colleges and SUNY for the large extent aren’t as worried about that as we are. Our students take longer. Is there some strategy for convincing the legislature and the Governor that completion is important but perhaps the four-year and two-year timeline is something that is not appropriate for our students and shouldn’t be part of the financial aid package for them? / Chancellor Goldstein – We’ve done this before. This is not something new. / Professor Bell – But he seems to be more adamant about it. / Chancellor Goldstein – Every year they’re more adamant, and we’re going to have to fight those things. / Professor Bell – At one point President Kimmich when he was acting Chancellor suggested the TAP somehow be packaged by the number of credits instead of the number of years or semesters so that students could go at the appropriate rate for themselves as opposed to the rate out there. Perhaps that sort of idea could work. / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s one idea.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, Lehman College / The Graduate School and University Center) –People who aren’t returning to the University, who aren’t taking the ERI, because they’ve been fired, because they died, because they got a better job, are those lines going to be replaced as well along with whatever the right number is of ERI leavers. / Chancellor Goldstein – I met with the PSC this morning and that question was asked to me, and the way that I answered it is the way that I’ll answer it here tonight. In the main, the positions that become vacant by people leaving on their own volition or taking the ERI in my estimation should return to the campus, in the main, but there may be some opportunity to make some tweaking but it would be at the margins and not very significant. / Professor Baumrin – But the tweaking isn’t for money, the tweaking is for for example cluster hiring. / Chancellor Goldstein – Well, the tweaking could be for a whole lot of things like base level equity, or cluster hires.. I believe that certain campuses in the University were started, and you’ve heard me say this before, Stefan, without the critical mass that they really needed. So they started from a deficiency relative to the colleges that had been in existence for a long time. I believe there is still a legitimate reason for doing some tweaking but because across the board we are poor as an institution on full-time faculty I’m loath to do this in more than just a very small, incremental way. So if there would be some adjustment it would be to try to reconcile the history that created this problem and also to see if some of that could be for cluster hires where we want to make investments across a cluster of institutions. But in the main, I believe they should return to the campus. When it goes back to the campus it’s up to the president and the administration. / Professor Baumrin – My question was a much cheaper shot. You gave it a much better answer. All I wanted to know was whether or not we were going to save any money on any bodies. The answer is no, we’re just going to move them around. / Chancellor Goldstein – That’s right. / Professor Baumrin – I’m going to follow-up on another topic. I thought Martha was being very gentle on the question of acting Chancellor Kimmich’s recommendation about the pro-rata distribution of the TAP money. From the beginning it’s been scandalous that the use of TAP or the capping of TAP on a semester basis means that many of our students, probably most of our students, actually can’t afford to graduate. And it becomes sort of not so important the first three or four years of the program but then you run up into limits, so that a normal student going through five or six semesters at a community college gets two semesters at a senior college and then they’re out of tuition. So it seems to me that as a program for this University that solution to the problem is the more desirable one and it also would speak to the issue of part-time TAP. Don’t you agree? / Chancellor Goldstein – I do, and I support part-time TAP. The real problem, Stefan, and you know this as well as anybody, probably better because you’ve been around a while, on things like that you need partners. Unfortunately you can’t carry a policy effort like this without the independents and SUNY. The question is how do you enlist them in this, because I think that really is an intelligent way to package it and that is something that we’re going to talk about and work on.

C. Senior Vice Chancellor Allan Dobrin on Security and Emergency Plans: Chair O’Malley -- Our next guests are here: Allan Dobrin, Senior Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer, William Barry, University Director of Public Safety, and Dave Fields, University Dean. They’re going to discus the recent Bratton report on security at CUNY and the plans developed recently by each college to prepare for and/or react to various types of public emergencies. Do take your seats and welcome our three guests.

Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin: Good evening. This whole effort began with the Faculty Security Committee that started meeting two years ago, some of you were on it, as well as Vice Presidents and the Student Senate, and they looked at the issue of how we do security in the University. And I understand the kind of philosophical view was moving from a military approach to a much more collegial approach, or seeing the faculty and students as people to serve rather than perpetrators. It seemed like a sensible direction. The committee suggested that we go out and we have some good group of professionals take a look at how we do security and make suggestions. I started at the University on September 4. On September 11 I got a call from BMCC saying that parts of the World Trade Center were falling on the campus. I told the person that called that they should close the campus on my authority. They said "who are you?" I tried to explain that I’d been the Senior Vice Chancellor for four days and we closed the campus. But I believe after that that if we’re going to talk about security we go into a new world, and security does not mean what it meant the week before, which is thinking about people coming and robbing us or taking our cars. It means some other things also. I also got to see how the University responded in emergency and it was OK, but there are a lot of things we needed to do to improve that given the likelihood of having very different kinds of emergencies in the future. So we authorized two reports. We asked Bill Bratton to come and do the security report for us. Bratton is probably the most experienced person in the United States on these issues. As you know, he’d been head of the Transit Authority Police, he’d been I think Police Commissioner in Boston, he was then Police Commissioner in New York, and he’s currently Police Commissioner in Los Angeles. But just as importantly we asked the Kroll group to come in and give us a template for what we should be doing in terms of emergencies. And Kroll, as you may or may not know, is the foremost security emergency group in the United States. We asked them to develop a template that we could use for all of the campuses so that we can have real emergency plans on every campus and we’ve now done that. There is a set like this on every campus on CUNY. It’s organized by five codes and what you do if each one of these things happen starting with code one, which would be a pipe burst, and all the things you do when a pipe bursts and water comes into a room. Moving through the continuum, we just declared a type four alert recently when we were going to face a transit strike. That would have been a type four emergency if it occurred. A type five emergency would be a major terrorist attack, a major blizzard, an explosion that took out a building, something where you really needed to call in outside forces in order to have your campus preserved. There is a separate piece on every single building on the campuses. We know building by building, and we want to talk more to the faculty about these to make sure they are correct, what are the chemicals, what are the hazardous materials in each of these buildings, what are our vulnerabilities. We have command centers set up, where would be the command center, who comes to the command center, who are the constituencies represented in the command center, where is the back-up command center off the campus in case you lose a major part of the campus. If I had stood before you a year and a half ago I would have sounded like I’m crazy. I remember the last thing I worked on before I left the city, the police department came in and they talked about the four-year flood and a hundred-year flood and if you have the hundred-year flood eight stories of Manhattan would be under water and if you lose lower Manhattan…I thought "these guys are nuts, these guys watch too many movies." I don’t think any of us thinks anyone’s nuts who thinks about these issues. So we have a back-up command center. The thing I thought, and I’m sure of, was the greatest failure in this University on 9/11 was our communications. We lost the West Street station of Verizon, don’t ask me why when you lose the west street station of Verizon in lower Manhattan you lose Bronx Community College. Their phones run through lower Manhattan, nobody knows why. We basically couldn’t talk to them for a week. There are lots of campuses we couldn’t talk to. I never want to be in that situation again. So we set up the continuum of communication services, which may sound a little crazy, a little over done, but I don’t want to ever be in this position again. So number one, if there is a big emergency again we’ll have regular land line service. If that fails, which it largely did during 9/11 in Manhattan, we have e-mail. If we lose the e-mail we have regular Verizon phones and their network, which we’ll all use. But as you all remember from 9/11 this failed. Nobody could use these. So I asked each of the presidents also to have a Nextel because the Nextel didn’t go down and you can use the point-to-point walky-talky radio on the Nextels. So if we lose this we’ll have that and they’re set up in talk groups so you can press one button and be talking with all your senior staff, the Chancellor can press one button and be talking to all the presidents at the same time. That’s a back up in case we lose the regular Verizon system. I’ve also asked each of the presidents to have Blackberries. So if we lose phone service wherever they are remotely they can get e-mails. If we lose that system also…my former agency gave me many gifts before I left. One of the things they gave us is 800mhz radios for free, $400,000 worth, so every Security Director, all of the campuses have at least two of these radios; point-to-point, run through a separate system on the Empire State Building. Admittedly we can lose the Empire State Building, but if we don’t lose the Empire State Building these run. The Office of Emergency Management has their channel on these. Every single day now we get a call from the Office of Emergency Management campus by campus checking to make sure this is on and there is a human being manning this should there be emergency in the City of New York. And if we lose that also we have these: satellite phones. Now we’ve only got two of these admittedly, and I give them to presidents going out of town. One of them I always keep with me. And with these, if everything else goes down, as long as you are at a window or outdoors you can go directly up to the satellites. If you saw Independence Day you saw that the aliens shut down the satellites. I’m willing to take that gamble. So this is our last bit of resistance. If we lose this also, then we just pray. That’s the next step. I walk around with a lot of it, I got to tell you. This is the newest toy in the world. This is not only a Blackberry, it has online e-mail, wireless e-mail, but it also is a cell phone and a point-to-point radio, so I’m hoping I can carry less things now that I’m carrying this. Probably most important are emergency plans, as soon as they’re all approved by Bill’s office they would have been submitted by every campus. Some of them are very good, some of them are average, some of them need some work. They’re all being worked out now. Once they’re approved we’re going to begin to do drills, real time drills. We don’t tell people they’re going to have a drill. We’re just going to call and say you have a type four emergency, this is the scenario, react. And Bill’s office and my old friend at the Office of Emergency Management promised that they would review the drills and then ask for corrective action plans for each of the campus. If you don’t drill this stuff it’s not even worth doing, and we will drill it.

You all have copies of the Bratton report I believe. There are 17 recommendations there. We had the recommendations reviewed by a group of Presidents, special select committee on security made up of Presidents who then made some modifications but basically support them. We then met with the Student Senate leadership who accepted them as is and we met with several groups of faculty and now we’re here tonight to speak to the mother of all faculty groups to try to get your input for this also. I want to just highlight four rather than 17. The very wise man who’s sitting in the front row in the middle over there told me if I read all 17 I’ll put everybody to sleep and I know I’m all that’s standing between you and listening to the President’s Address, so I want to highlight just four of them just so you get a flavor, the ones that are important. In terms of craft Bill Barry is now going to also review and do a craft report and craft evaluation of the Directors of Security on the campuses. He will give that to the president and the president will make the final determination of the person’s qualities. Bill really is a security expert. I embarrass Bill with this all the time. Bill spent 30 years with the FBI. One day when I was new to the University Jeff Wiesenfeld, one of our Trustees was there, who also spent time with the FBI, he said to me "Is that Bill Barry?" I said "yes." He said "Why is he here?" I said, "He’s our Security Director." He said, "You know who he is?" "Yeah, he’s our Security Director." He said "No, in the FBI he was the guy who headed the squad who got the worst dirt bags the United States had apprehended. They said "send Bill Barry after them. He was the FBI’s bounty hunter." So when I tell him five student protesters are coming he doesn’t seem panicked, which is a nice thing. So Bill will do that and that will be the first time these guys will have craft supervision instead of just general administration supervision.

We’re going to ask for the ability to do our own peace officer appointments. Right now the NYPD does this for us. It means that it takes over a year. We tell them "you have responsibility to protect all of our safety including to arrest people when you see a crime being committed," and they are not really peace officers for no reason other than that bureaucracy takes a year and they’re overwhelmed. SUNY has the ability to appoint their own, and we’re going to get the ability I hope to appoint our own. We’re going to begin to track incidents beyond what’s called the Cleary incidents, which are the few major felonies. We want to build a system where regularly Bill’s staff sits with security officers and they understand what’s going on the campus. I know I’m not supposed to say this word but in some ways it’s like kind of a soft, mushy Comstat in that you take a look at the patterns of things that are happening, you take a look at how people are allocated based on concerts that are coming up or lectures or any place you think you need some security. But look at patterns because maybe the pattern is we put 50% of our security officers on between 9 and 5 because people think that’s a good idea but maybe 30% of the things that happen on a campus happen between 7 and 10 at night. So you begin to say why don’t we staff out more at 7 to 10, a little less during these hours, you get to see where in the campus things happen. We don’t do that now. This will force us to do that systemically. We are recommending that every police officer is trained in emergency medical response, that there will be at least one defibrillator on every single campus, maybe more, but at least one should any of us or our students have heart failure. If you wait even on the first respondent for the fire department and police department to come there is a good chance it will be too late. This will give us a much better chance. We’re going to recommend a CUNY ID card. Now I know this has a bad history. This has nothing to do with the effort that was done last time. Last time it was a bank card with a logo on it and it was idiotic. One of the problems with it being a bank card is when people no longer populate CUNY the bank’s position is you can’t take the card back because it’s their card, it’s not our card and it’s used for advertising, a dumb idea. But they have a CUNY card where the bar coding is uniform across the University even thought the individual card will say your campus, whatever logo they want. It’s a good thing. It makes it easier for us to use each other’s libraries, athletic facilities, concerts, so it’s all part of becoming a citizen of CUNY, not just a citizen of your campus. So we’re going to do that and that will be good for security also. And those are just five of the seventeen. There are twelve more, which you can ask questions about, but again I will take the advice of our colleague over here who said "don’t do all seventeen."

Just as an aside, it’s something I saw yesterday. As you all know we have a student satisfaction survey and of all the satisfaction measures on the non-academic questions that were asked this is what it looked like. This is the visual part of this test. See the line on the bottom that goes all the way across? That line was "how do you feel about campus safety?" So our students really feel that our University, our campuses, are oases for them in their communities. I was very heartened to do this. What do you think was the lowest rate, non-academic stuff? Cafeteria was second worst, but there is a little tiny line here much worse than the cafeteria. Parking is the thing that I think one person was satisfied about, and they were not on Staten Island. It was probably the president who’s got a space. The campus safety by a wide margin was the thing people felt best about, which is really important.

University Dean Dave Fields: During the process as we went through the review of security emergency planning we noticed a question coming up repeatedly: "are the security officers or the peace offices above the rules, above the law?" and the answer is "absolutely not." Security officers are under all of the same civil service rules and other rules on the campus about discipline and the like. And I just wanted to take a moment to say and let people know, and we’re going to hopefully get the campuses to publicize this because I understand this is not widely known, that if there is a complaint against a security officer or a peace officer there is a series of places you can go. First of all you can go, of course, to the Security Director on the campus. Not everybody wants to go to a Security Director, so you can go to the Personnel Director. If the Personnel Director is another place you don’t want to go you can go to the Vice-President of the campus or even the President’s office. Each one of those offices is willing to take a complaint and there is a process that would then be undertaken if the complaints have a basis. In addition, if you don’t want to go onto the campus at all you can directly reach Bill Barry’s office and we will start a review. There is a clear understanding that our security department is here to serve the University. We are not, as Allan said, looking at faculty and students as perpetrators. We changed the approach of security a number of years ago to take out the issue of things like guns on the campus and drugs on the campus so that we would have a much more collegial atmosphere, which is what colleges are all about. So if anyone has a problem with security, and we’ll try to get this into the college bulletins, there is a clear pathway, in fact a multiple of pathways that you can make complaints on.

University Director of Public Safety William Barry: I’m told I’m supposed to mention I’m a John Jay grad. I’ve been here for two years and I’ve taken small steps as I’ve gone along and this is just another step for me to come and talk with you. One of the first things that I did was a conceptual thing. When I came on, this was in the security department, they actually had to give me a badge when I came here. I carried a federal badge for a long time and the federal badge was about this big. Then they gave me this real badge, it’s got four stars, it’s really an amazing badge. My friends just marvel at this badge. But at the same time it said Director of Security. It no longer says that. It says that I’m Director of Public Safety for the University. I’ve tried to get that across to all the directors that that’s where the focus is, it’s on safety, it’s on service to the community. And with that, the first biggest thing that I wanted to get done was to create a training department. It took me a year. The right guy wasn’t around and he finally came back into the city. That was Steve Heuback. Steve also did close to thirty years in the FBI with me. He’s a master trainer and we’re thrilled to have Steve working for us. He just finished doing two separate recruit classes of forty a piece. It was a yeoman’s task to get done in a space of fourteen weeks, yet he got it done. The thing that was most impressive about it, and I’ve seen the trainees come out before prior to Steve coming on board, and the thing that really impressed me was the professional attitude that these gentlemen came out of these seven weeks of class with, and that’s a credit to Steve. I asked Steve to come because I wanted him to just give you an outline on exactly the type of service-oriented training that these peace officers get during their seven weeks. And in addition to that they also have in-service training, which comes along every year, in which we try to also include some sort of service-oriented training. Steve, if you don’t mind coming up…When Allan mentioned about me and what I did in the FBI, well, I came after Steve and he was sort of a mentor to me, so he did twice what I did.

College Security Specialist Steve Heuback: Thank you, Bill. Good evening folks, how are you? I won’t take long because I know it’s the evening hours. When I left the FBI in 1999 I considered myself a success. Why? Because there were a lot of problems the FBI had. When I left I turned in the original gun that they gave me, I turned in my laptop computer and I wasn’t convicted as a spy, so I figured in the scheme of things I really won. I wanted to be an FBI agent since I was twelve years old and I got that from National Geographic and it was a wonderful career. And I told these young men and women who come before me who are in the class, I tell them this about the business. I tell them that if you do law enforcement right, if you do this job with public safety right, it’s a calling. Just like many of you have chosen to listen to the calling of the academic, I viewed it as a calling. And with the calling comes that commitment and the responsibility of taking care of the families and the men and the women of the campuses and the students that they are there to protect. I have a very high bar that I make all of these students reach for because they are the ones that will make it right for you folks to allow you to have these wonderful places where you can impart the knowledge that you have to your students and do it safely and be able to come and go with that wonderful 1957 mentality that we had back when summers lasted forever and gas was 22 cents a gallon. That was really my goal. I’m thrilled that Bill asked me to be here. After I left the FBI I went into the private sector. I worked for Booz/Allen/Hamilton and we serviced a contract that was a combination of the FBI and the Department of Defense and it was called the Defense Threat Reduction Agency. If you remember when the Soviet Union fell, there were a whole bunch of nuclear weapons and chemical weapons out there that we wondered what we were going to do with. So this agency was designed to help find and identify those things and get rid of them. I ended up on the tail end of that working for a project with the FBI to deal with crisis management where we went into these four former Soviet block countries, Romania, I was is Kazakhstan, I was in Uzbekistan just before the war, I was in Budapest, Hungary, and we provided their middle and upper level management people with how to deal with crises, not unlike the programs that you had before you that were explained by the other speakers. So we’re all on the same sheet of music here throughout the whole world. We all want to do the right things that will protect us and our families and future generations from the evil that’s out there. That’s the premise that I took this job for, and I wanted to instill into all my students that this was a calling and that I have high standards and every single one of them so far has met them. One reason why the poll about what they liked on the campus that was non-academic is so high is that the quality of the young men and women who are in the training program is pretty high. So you can thank your Human Resources Directors and your Directors of Public Safety who select from the many people who are basically eligible to have these positions. And my job, like yours, is just to polish them up a little bit and get them to shine, and that’s my goal. In addition to that Bill asked me, with all these electronics things you have, to perform something I’ve never done before. By Monday I have to train 152 carrier pigeons in the event that this thing breaks down. About 149 of them are doing so good, the rest are going to have to go in for remedial training. I don’t know where they came from, these were renegade pigeons I think.

We have a pretty intense seven-week program. It involves over 160 hours of training that we provide. 35 hours of it is required by the State of New York by the Bureau of Municipal Police to make people peace officers and the remainder of the hours are all hours that the City University of New York has decided go into a curriculum that makes a good peace officer. I just want to run some number by you very quickly and tell you the kind of things that we teach other than the police business. But I want to tell you the one thing that I got going with this was I’m a very strong believer in interactive training. That was my forte in the Bureau. I like it when people go out to take what they learned and put it into practice. So one of the things we do is I send them two by two like Noah’s Ark out to meet people who have a script about an event that occurred on the campus and they conduct an interview. Sometimes there are students who volunteer but in this last evolution we had staff and faculty members at John Jay who stepped forward for a fee, it was payable, I gave them a script and they provided responses to questions that the young men and women would ask. They had to go write a report, when you know the paperwork is never done in our business, and then the last week I had them put them on moot court. I played the role of the defense attorney and they actually had to provide information and respond to questions based on the reports that they wrote. That’s so that when they step out in the real world and they come to find someone like you or one of the students who has a problem that they’ve learned all the beginnings of how to ask questions and how to be polite and courteous. And one of the questions that I asked the people being interviewed was that very thing: Were they polite, were they courteous, did they introduce themselves to you, did they conduct the investigation in a logical and professional manner? And they’re learning. That was a learning tool for them. So we’re doing a lot of things like that to make the training "real world" so that the first time they interview someone who’s had a car stolen or laptop taken it’s not the first time that they ever talked to a real person in a situation like that. We give them four hours of conflict resolution. Katherine Stavrianopoulos is an excellent instructor from John Jay College. They get a seven hour segment of instructional community policing, we give them three hours of diffusing hostility, we have a wonderful program on disability awareness, we have a four hour block of instruction on domestic violence and violence in the workplace, we do three hours of work dealing with suicide prevention and emotionally disturbed people, and we have a four hour segment of instruction on gender and cultural diversity. So we’re very much in tune to what the needs of you in the fields are, you as the faculty and staff members, and I am a needs based instructor and a needs based trainer. So if you see anything in your venues that you would like to see incorporated into our basic program I would be very happy to chat with you and if it’s at all possible we would develop some kind of program for you so that it would make your environment a better one to be in. Thank you very much.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – Allan, I know you and I know that you are the person at CUNY most dedicated to productivity savings, taking money from let me call it overhead and moving it into our core business. What disturbs me about this report is there are no estimates of cost. And I would like to suggest that we also ask how can we offload some of these costs from our operating budget to other people’s budgets. I hope that a lot of the high tech equipment you’re showing us is coming from the Office of Emergency Management and it’s not coming from the CUNY budget. If that isn’t the case why aren’t we requesting federal money for this? I also know that on my campus a number of years ago we had a security situation where the faculty leadership went to the president, she called us in, and requested that the New York City Police Department be invited into the campus. This cost us not a penny. We got some of the best-trained police officers on the planet Earth to come and help us. They were wonderful. In this plan what triggers the call to the New York City Police Department and can this enable us to do with a smaller operation as opposed to a bigger operation while still maintaining the same level of security? And finally I certainly hope that that high tech equipment also has among its numbers the New York City Office of Emergency Management, the Manhattan Bronx office or the one in the outer boroughs, so that you are in touch with the real professionals. /Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Let me answer as many pieces as I can possibly remember. This is not going to cost more money. There are pieces in here because it’s kind of what I do for a living and a hobby to worry about these issues. That’s when we talk about things like getting more equipment the idea is that if you have more equipment you probably in the long-term don’t use as many staff. One of the recommendations also reviews the staff in each campus because it’s different when you look across the campuses. If you look per security it’s entirely different and the campuses, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or not, have very different policies in terms of open access. It’s different from campus to campus, we know that. The ideas we have in here about hiring a couple of people centrally and maintain all the equipment is to save all that money that now we’re spending on private vendors campus by campus. The radios are automatically as I said in touch with OEM every single day. OEM calls us, we’re briefed regularly by OEM, we work very closely with them. There is a real cultural ethos I believe that says that you don’t want a lot of NYPD guys running around on campuses. That’s what I’ve heard from most of the faculty, the students I talked to. They like the idea that if something goes on their campus it’s our own employees, people part of the CUNY family, rather than calling the Police Department right away, that you only call them when you absolutely have to, and we have a protocol with the Police Department where only the president, I think myself and Matt are the only people who can call them in and Bill Barry. And we do it very reluctantly because the Police Department has another view of a demonstration possibly. We don’t want our students arrested. So only if things are really bad we invite the NYPD and I don’t think it’s the place we start. / Professor Levine – Thank you. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – You’re welcome.

Professor Wimberly (Hunter College) – I’m not clear in your discussion whether there’s a specific plan for the evacuation of disabled individuals of faculty members and students in the case of an emergency. Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Those will have to be in the emergency plans. In the individual college emergency plans are segments on what they’re supposed to do for people with disabilities. I watch that very carefully. It’s very close to my own interest.

Professor Savage (Sociology, Queens College) – I hear you say that this is not going to cost any additional money but at the same time there is all the high tech stuff and there is an establishment of an increasingly professionalized force and once these kinds of things get set up they tend to go ahead and argue their case for more resources. We’ve seen this happen over and over again. I’m an organizational sociologist, and it’s automatic. There’s no way to say that is not going to happen. So my question is would it be possible to provide detailed accounts of just how much this is going to cost, with numbers and with trend lines. And the second thing is what kinds of safeguards do you have in place to prevent this kind of initiative which is extremely important and could be, one could argue, the recipient of a hell of a lot of money because security, saving people’s lives, evacuation plans, how could you not be ready to put in a lot of money? But at the same time you’ve got to, since you’re the manager, make some hard choices. What kinds of safeguard do you have in mind? / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Again, if you look through the seventeen recommendations, we’ve got to buy the defibrillators, there’s some training involved, there are not a lot of things that cost a lot. The high-tech, we’re not going to buy a lot more high-tech, we’re going to replace it with things, we’re not going to buy a lot more communication devices but when we replace communication devices they’re now going to be so people can talk across campuses to each other. I can’t promise you what’s going to happen in the future. I didn’t hear the Chancellor’s speech tonight but I’ve heard the Chancellor’s speech many times in the year. As sure as I’m standing here the Chancellor said some version of, and I know this because that’s why I was hired, his highest priority is faculty, is getting more full-time faculty in this University. I know that I’m a reasonably intelligent person, not especially but reasonably, but intelligent enough that I’m not going in to the Chancellor and say "listen, I just got a great idea. Let’s hire more security guards instead of full-time faculty." So as long as he’s here there is a big safeguard, which is I don’t want to be fired. So that’s a safeguard. I have two children who are starting college, trust me it’s a good safeguard. So that’s not going to happen. I’m not worried about that at all because there are all these organizational imperatives. They’re going to plow everything towards the full-time faculty side. The reason I was brought in was to try to save money in all these other ways to try to have that turn into more faculty. So we understand that. / Professor Savage – OK, I’m very hopeful but remember our experience under Ann Reynolds was quite different. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I wasn’t here under Ann Reynolds. The reason I’m hedging it all is, because I don’t want to be dishonest, it’s not in anyone’s plan, it’s not that anyone’s thinking about it… I don’t know, you have more terrorist attacks next year one might have another view of this. And if we have that other view all of us together we’ll make a decision. But that’s so important to us because the number one thing we owe each other is a safe environment. But right now it’s not even close, full-time faculty is what he Chancellor wants to do.

Professor Fridman ( Kingsborough Community College) – You were talking about post 9/11 and coming in September 4 and issues coming up. Particularly you discussed in much detail thinking through issues of communication. I still don’t have a clear idea of the overall thinking process and planning for these kinds of contingencies. You spoke of them as being likely and I was wondering if there’s been any thinking through of specific geographical vulnerabilities of specific campuses. In other words, a campus in Brooklyn surrounded by water might be different than a campus in Manhattan with large buildings or a campus in the Bronx. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Lehman College is a good example. We have the reservoir right by them. / Professor Fridman – Right. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Each one of the campuses have been thinking through their individual issues. They’re also, which I mentioned before, very different in terms of the basic way they’re set up. Some campuses are open where everybody is welcome to go live on the campus versus these other places with lots of security. It’s the problem that runs from managing this University. There are really two philosophies that run through the University. I call it the central management contradiction. One is we believe rightly that they should become an integrated University with guidance and central programs and these great economies of scale you get from that, these great academic things for the students that come out of being a really integrated university, which is good values. Equally good values is the management philosophy to say to a President rightly "you’re in charge of your campus, you make individual decisions based on your community and your priorities to some extent and we moderate them to make sure that those are sensible." We have to balance between those two. So the individual campuses make decisions about how open they want to be depending on their geography, how much they want to have IDs shown and they discuss this with people in the campus community and there is a culture in each one of the campuses. We’ve got to balance that out against having basic standards. It’s a tough cause. Does that help at all or is that totally irrelevant to your question. / Professor Fridman – No, it seems to me that that’s the issue where serious expertise would be needed and that’s really complex. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – In the future it’s going to look more like good law enforcement efforts in the sense that Directors of Security are going to meet with Bill’s staff, they’re going to talk about how they deploy, there are going to be trained police, people like Bill with 30-40 years of experience in law enforcement will help to make those decisions based on their geographic situations also. The near reservoir, the siding on two sides by water and how do you staff and how do you protect against that. So they won’t be alone making those decisions on the campus, and I think that’s the right balance. / Professor Fridman – In terms of the information that you’re sharing with us I actually would be much more interested in having specific information about specific campuses than a rundown of all the various fallbacks of the communications. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Again, I was advised by somebody very smart that I shouldn’t read seventeen recommendations and certainly/I assumed that nobody wanted me to go through every recommendation per campus for twenty campuses. But if you have special interest in this I would offer you good services at Bill’s office and see if you could talk about Kingsborough in particular.

Professor Cermele (Mathematics, New York City College of Technology) – Allan, you mentioned the defibrillators, one for each campus. That’s certainly laudable but hardly adequate. I recall seeing some data that shows that time is absolutely essential, that the death rate rises sharply as the minutes increase. Some of our campuses as you well know are pretty spread out and to have a defibrillator one place that’s 10 or 15 minutes away from other parts of the campuses is virtually useless. We’ve had one on our campus for a few years now. The first year it was securely locked up except from 9 to 5. That’s no longer the case. No, they’re not that expensive considering what they do and it’s certainly probably better to keep faculty alive rather than to have to replace them. There must be a measure of efficiency there some place. I would hope you would consider a defibrillator for every building. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I have a lot of thoughts about that. One is, actually it is cheaper to hire new faculty, but certainly that is not a program that we’re going to do! Now that I’ve turned 55 I’m getting more and more interested in having more of these around. I think that’s a very well taken point. Again, it says at least one and many campuses have more than one. More is always more, even if we have two we can always have three and three can always be four. But I agree. Again, this was Bratton’s recommendation to have at least one. That doesn’t mean we can’t have more than one and they’re not that expensive. And if we save one life in the next ten years it’s worth any amount of money we spend. / Professor Cermele – If you buy a bunch of them it will be a lot cheaper. I would like to set the goal of having one in every building in the foreseeable future. / [Unidentified] – Right now we have an initiative where I’ve checked with all the departments as to who is buying what defibrillators at what time and departments are certainly not looking at one. John Jay for instance is looking to three or four. So it’s a question of a minimum of one on a campus because we want to get started and we are looking to package that. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – We’re very sympathetic to what you’re saying. I don’t know the right way to do this is always in the buildings, sometimes you want them in cars, depending on what kind of campus you have where somebody can get there very quickly in an automobile cruising around. But the point that more is better I agree with. They’re not that expensive. / Professor Cermele – There’s one other point, very quick. Training is available free and I think people should be widely trained.

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – First of all I do understand the sensitivity of the evacuation response plans in terms of the specifics but from informal inquiries ever since you briefed some of us there has been little or no faculty consultation in the development of these plans. And as the faculty are in the buildings that are the most crowded, administrators may be on the top floor but in a building that’s quite empty and safe and new, but then you have seventeen that those people may never have a chance to go in, much less know what the real problems are. And I know that chemical hygiene officers have not been consulted and I would really urge that under confidential arrangement that there’d be that. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I trust the faculty as much as I trust administrators. There is no reason not to include faculty individuals looking at it. I wouldn’t want to publish it on the web site but have individual faculty members look at it, sure. / Professor Kaplowitz – Great, because we want it to work. The other thing is just a follow-up. I would like to, and I’d be happy to have a private conversation, but I’d like to urge that in the training of security officers in terms of people with disabilities that there be demonstrable evidence that a person could look perfectly able bodied and have an extraordinarily severe disability. Two campuses today I was not helped through the electric doors because I looked OK and I don’t want to have to use my wheelchair to be able to use the access, or my cane. Today is the first day of class so I’m in pretty good shape, but I don’t want to have to use a wheelchair just to be able to use the access. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I agree with you. We have to do one of two things. One, either on the ID cards to have a little star, a little something, or just basically trust people. I don’t think people lie about this a lot. / Professor Kaplowitz – What I was told, including in this building tonight, the doors were shut off because of the cold. We didn’t look disabled so we didn’t need help. And there is no button to push and even at the other campus where I was where there is a button to push I wasn’t helped because I didn’t look disabled and the door was shut off because of the cold. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Nobody cares about efficiency more than I do but our first obligation is safety. / Professor Kaplowitz – Yes, thank you.

Professor Syd Lefkoe (nonsenator given unanimous consent to speak ) – I don’t want to take unfair advantage but I have three questions. The disabilities issues committee of the University Faculty Senate is a committee of which I’m a member and we’re very happy to see some concept of standardization of some of these issues and the committee has started to look at some of the things that might be related to the report. And I know there have been a couple of questions asked already and I’ve been very happy with your responses. You all seem to be a friend of these issues. When the question came up about an evacuation plan I think the idea was "well, that’s something that’s left to the campus." / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – The way the evacuation plan is part of the emergency plan, the campus develops it, the campus then has to submit it to Bill’s office, it’s reviewed, including issues like that, is then submitted back to the campus for revisions, it’s submitted back to Bill’s office for final approval and then it becomes a plan. / Professor Lefkoe - OK, so that’s already included in the things they want to address. Wonderful. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – However, one of the nice things having had four hundred jobs in my life is that I compare almost every job, but having been a Deputy Director of Special Ed for the City and having had the Mayor’s Office for people with disabilities, these are issues that we do care about. Giving you have a formal role with this institution, if you could spend a few minutes one day with Bill on behalf of your committee, just talk about some issues to make sure he censored everything possible I would appreciate it. / Professor Lefkoe – The chair of the committee was here and he was going to bring a report but he had to leave, Don Davidson. He might be the most appropriate person to do it. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – Either one or both. / Professor Lefkoe – OK, that would be great. Number eight in listings. I was hoping maybe you could clarify something about that, about the exception policy, what is that all about. And the other thing I was hoping you could clarify is item fifteen and what’s considered standard SIMS readable information. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I could certainly do the first. I was also a former Commissioner of Technology for the City, so I should be up to do the second. Peace officers have a special status in our society. If you become a peace officer you have authority to be able to arrest people but you also have an obligation that if you see a crime being committed you have to intervene, and it’s actionable if you don’t, so you have to intervene if you see something. It’s a very serious responsibility. Peace officers, to carry out that responsibility, are trained and given three pieces of equipment. They’re given hand cuffs, so they can restrain the person should they have to arrest them, they’re given an asp, which is not a snake but a baton, and pepper spray. There was concern by one president about the pepper spray and said that they had asthma issues on their campus and felt that they might want an exception for that. There was no exception policy built in before, so we thought it was worthwhile that should there be conditions on an individual campus where the president feels it’s important to have an exception they can appeal to the Chancellor for that exception. / Professor Lefkoe – So the exceptions are with the idea of reducing what they would have, not with increasing what they would have. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – That’s correct. But there’s no ability to do that, so we wanted to build in a way to do that should it be appropriate. / Professor Lefkoe – The standard SIMS information I was concerned about depending on what it was because of FRPA rules and regulations. I wanted to be sure that everybody was sensitive to that. / Senior Vice Chancellor Dobrin – I’m a little over my head with FRPA. I can do the readable part. / Dave Fields – Under FRPA, which is the Federal Right and Privacy Act, the college administrators who have a functional reason to see information are allowed to see the information. So if something comes up through one of our systems where we need to find a student or reach into the system to get someone to talk to them, there are a million reasons why that might happen, all of these machines have to be able to read that data. So that gives us the ability to find who the student is and go to that student. / Professor Lefkoe – Is this just on the encoded piece of it as opposed to what’s on the face of the card? / Dave Fields – If we make a university wide ID card there will be some way to read information from that card. / Professor Lefkoe – Encoded, not on the front, because I think New York State is saying you can’t have the social security number. / Dave Fields –We will no longer have the social security numbers on it. That’s off already, because it’s also a federal law actually. You cannot put social security numbers out on those ID cards. We’re cognizant of that but we still need a way to reach someone if we have to, if an ID card is found or whatever, and that’s the way we will do it. / Professor Lefkoe – Thank you very much.

D. University Student Senate President Shamsul Haque: Chair O’Malley -- I’d like to introduce Shamsul Haque, who is the current head of the University Student Senate. He sits with me on the Board of Trustees although he can vote! He received an AAS degree from LaGuardia Community College and is now a senior at Baruch College majoring in Computer Information Systems. He’s going to say a few words to us and then we can ask some questions and I promise this meeting will get over at 8:30.

Mr. Shamsul Haque: Good evening and on behalf of the University Student Senate I would like to thank of all you for what you do, which is change the lives of many of my fellow students including myself. You have actually the option to teach in many other universities around the country and around the world but you have chosen to teach at the City University. Many students like myself who are poor and minorities and immigrants come here and you make all the difference here at the University. Another very important thing is that I think at the City University we tend to get a different set of students than other universities such as NYU and Columbia. Many students who come here do not speak English well or they may be like myself, who didn’t speak English well enough to come to college but took one remedial class at LaGuardia Community College and wrote one essay, which I edited about seven times. You do change lots of students’ lives, including myself. I really appreciate what you do and thank you very much once again. One thing that Trustee O’Malley said, and it does not make sense to me why it is so, but I really think that if a student has a vote in the BOT a faculty member should have a vote in the BOT. I really hope that one day faculty can vote.

One of the very important issues that I’ve been talking about for the last couple of years is seamless transfer articulation. I have graduated from LaGuardia Community College with an AAS degree and I have received 76 credits. When I came to Baruch College - and I’m very proud that I went to LaGuardia Community College, I’m very pleased with the education that I have received there, I have no regrets for going to a community college - but when I went to Baruch College, which is another college that I like but I do disagree with some of their policies, which is transfer articulation, they felt that some of the courses that I took are not as good as the courses they teach in Baruch College. As a result out of 76 credits they accepted only 51 credits towards my degree. I started to knock on every possible door for two years and finally I was able to get 9 additional credits, which is 60 credits. Finally, there is the report on the Student Experience Survey which says that transferred credits is the second biggest reason for dissatisfaction. I spoke with the Chancellor, I met with lots of college Presidents, and I’m talking about it and I hope that they do something to improve it. Not that they’re going to eliminate this problem but to improve it. There is one other factor and one other key role that has to be played, and that is you. Here you have faculty members from all colleges and without your support I think the Chancellor will not go that far. We do need your help. Lots of students like myself who are going to graduate with 146-150 credits will take an additional year to graduate from the City University. So we do need your help. That is very much needed.

There are two other important issues that students are afraid of and worried about. One of those things is a tuition hike. Lots of students feel already that they cannot afford to come to college. Many of our students are single parents. For about 58% of our CUNY students their household income is less than $30,000 and if you have another tuition hike it’s going to kick out lots of students from the City University. We need your support. This is a very important issue for the students.

I’ve seen that over the last ten years the City University has not received enough funding and it is very disappointing to me because in order to have a good society and nation you’ve got to have an educated workforce, and the City University educates hundreds of thousands of students year after year. Why are these things happening? Students like myself will come and probably stay in the University for a few years and then just move on, and there is that role that you’ve got to play and you have to move on when time comes, but I would like to put forward this question to you that as a faculty member is there anything that you could do, is there any mechanism that could prevent this kind of attack on the University? We used to have 80-85 full-time faculty members at the City University and today we have 45-50 full-time members, depending on the college. But I would like you to think about this and see if there is anything we could do with both faculty and students, if we could put any mechanism in place that will continuously lobby in both the City and State governments to provide education funding for the University.

The last thing that I’d like to say is that I met a person from the Puerto Rican Day Parade who was one of the first persons who marched in the parade and he said that there were not too many blocks when they started the parade. It wasn’t too big. But today the Puerto Rican Day Parade is one of the largest or perhaps the second largest day parade in New York City. What we are planning in the University Student Senate is having a CUNY Family Day. Our goal is to start small, invite students, faculty, staff, right after the spring semester, right after the final exams, bring everybody together. We’ll have some music, we’ll have some food, we’ll have some activities. We’d like to invite people and our goal is to have more people come every year. And if we can grow bigger then politicians will come to these events eventually and if they do come that’s when we can catch them and say "if you don’t do this for us, we’re not going to do this for you," which is we’re not going to vote for you. So I would like to invite all of you. It’s going to be either May 25^th or May 26^th. The information on venues and times will be disseminated and I would like to invite all of you to come. Bring your family members, bring anybody you want to, but please come.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – My name is Sandi Cooper and I’ve been on this body since 1978. I want to suggest to you that we have studied the issue of the transfer students from two to four-year colleges as far as I know for about thirty some years and a few years ago the Faculty Senate proposed that the University create this TIPPS system, which would advise a student in the first year or so at any of the CUNY campuses what’s required in the other colleges to get a degree so that anybody who wanted to transfer from a two to a four year or from a four to a four year college would not be in the dark, and the system was supposed to be up and operating in every college library. In your case I’d like to ask you two things. Were you ever made aware of this and secondly, did anyone ever advise you that the courses in an AAS degree don’t usually transfer to a BA or BS degree? / Mr. Haque – Yes, I was. / Professor Cooper – It wasn’t something you were not told about. / Mr. Haque – No. / Professor Cooper – And were you ever advised about the TIPPS system. / Mr. Haque – I transferred about almost three years ago, two and a half years ago. At that time it wasn’t in place. / Professor Cooper – Do you have any idea whether the students are aware of it now? / Mr. Haque – I think a great number of students are aware of it. But one thing I would also like to address, and many people make this argument, that if you want to transfer don’t enroll in an AAS degree. But I actually came to the City University not knowing what I wanted to do, I just wanted to go to college. I didn’t know what I wanted to study until I took an internship and that’s when I realized this is what I like. And like myself there are thousands of students who are enrolled in an AAS degree. I think it is time for us to address those issues. We’re not going to be able to completely eliminate them but at least more students should graduate with 146-150 credits. / Professor Cooper – But students should be aware of the requirements. Those faculty who have to vote a Bachelor’s Degree, because we vote the Bachelor’s Degree to each student, have to vote a degree that they can stand behind, and we don’t want a degree that has not been supported by the faculty in the college that’s granted it. So we have something of a conflict of interest, which we have to face ultimately and talk about honestly. There is no way that every course will transfer and there are some programs, senior college programs, which require a scaffolded approach till you get to the senior year. You have to follow a certain order of courses. Otherwise you’re going to be behind the eight ball compared to your student peers. So what we try to do is I guess truth in packaging, and the TIPPS system is to be about as honest as we could. It’s going to take a while until it totally works. Those of us who have been listening to this issue now for 30-35 years probably have a different perspective on it than people who are in the middle of it, and I thought perhaps you should hear a bit of that. / Mr. Haque – Thank you and once again I will say that I am very pleased with the education that I have received at LaGuardia. I’m doing as well as the students that are in my class at Baruch College or I’m doing better than them and I actually have done much better than at LaGuardia when I started Baruch College. I think that there are lots of students who I’ve talked to from LaGuardia Community College who are attending senior colleges and are doing very well.