MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND EIGHTEENTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE
March 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
Baruch: Present –
Hill, and Martell. Absent – Freedman, Myers, Pollard, Smith, and
Vora. Vacancies – 2. BMCC: Present – Belknap,
Friedman, Martin, Rani, and Roy. Absent – Agwu and Price.
Governance Leaders present:
Anderson (BMCC), Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCCT), Kaplowitz (John Jay),
Leonhard (CCNY), Levine (CSI), Martell (Baruch), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino
(QCC), Savage (Queens), and Tobey (
II. Approval of the Minutes of February 2006 –The Reports & Deliberations section was not available. The Minute was distributed. Approval was postponed to the next session.
III. Reports (Recorded
in Reports & Deliberations)
A. Chair
B. The Chancellor
IV. Panel
on the
V. New Business
A. Resolution on Conversion of
Courses to Online Format – No action was taken, a quorum being
absent.
The meeting was adjourned at 8:25 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Bill Phipps
Executive Director
THE THREE HUNDRED AND
EIGHTEENTH PLENARY
SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY SENATE
OF THE
March 28, 2006
III. Reports:
A.
Chair, Susan O’Malley: I put out a report, in the back, the Chair’s
report, so I wouldn’t have to talk too much. I have six points. I thought
maybe before the Chancellor came I would announce one thing that’s kind
of nice. If Sandi Cooper’s here maybe she wants to announce it. Sandi, do
you want to say something about the appointment to head the Calandra Institute?
Professor Cooper - Apparently the university is offering the position to
Antonio Guilian Tamboori, a professor of Italian and Italian American
Literature at Florida Atlantic. I gave Susan a copy of his Vitae which is
stunning. He has a Berkeley Doctorate.
The Calandra Institute under the previous leadership of Phil Canistrari had
become an important center of scholarship in Italian-American and Italian
History, Literatures, and Interdisciplinary studies so it’s expected that
this younger man will keep it going. / Chair O’Malley - According to the
Chancellor yesterday at the Staten Island Borough hearing, he has accepted the
job. First, there is a CUNY Task
Force on Retention Report that was just released. If anybody is interested in
seeing the Report, let the office know, and we’ll send you a copy of
it. It’s not online. Number
two - we did send material, the UFS’ objections to the online BA, and it
has been received by State Education Assistant Commissioner Joseph Frye. I
talked to him today, and it’s been forwarded to the evaluators of the
online degree. I have a copy of what we sent with me. It’s very much what
we were talking about at the UFS concerning budget, governance, curriculum, and
faculty. The Chancellor has just
arrived. Before the Chancellor speaks, le me thank the people who went lobbying
in
B.
Report of the Chancellor: Chancellor Matthew Goldstein - Do we have a quorum? /
Chair O’Malley - We have a quorum; do you want to vote on something? /
Chancellor Goldstein - I’m just trying to give him the business,
that’s all. / Chair O’Malley - We have a wonderful parliamentarian,
and she’s already informed me that we have a quorum. / Chancellor
Goldstein - Thank you for that introduction and it’s always good to be
here. I have some wonderful news to share with you. It has to do with the
resources that we hope to get this year to operate the University and to
continue on our very aggressive building program. You will recall that our
budget message that was unanimously embraced by the Board and then forwarded to
the Governor was around this new concept of putting together a financial
platform that would serve to free up dollars for investment in the University,
and we refer to this model as the CUNY Compact. Very briefly, what we were
looking for was slightly over $100 million dollars. Two things need to be
stated. One is that the Executive very strongly embraced the Compact and just
recently the Joint General Conference Committee, which is composed of the
members of the higher education committees of both the Senate and the Assembly,
also endorsed the Compact as the vehicle to create the kind of investment that
we need. When the Governor came out with his budget, our budget asked for a
modest tuition increase and we knew in an election year that that was going to
be problematic, although people saw the wisdom of the approach that a tuition
increase was there in part to serve as a lever to get state support, which we
have, quite frankly, in probably a couple of decades not really seen. We have
not really seen investment, what we have seen is mandatory costs paid and a
very modicum amount of dollars for investment, so this approach was to say that
if we had other stakeholders that would be prepared to participate in the
support of the operating request, we would ask the state, instead of a dollar
on a dollar when we’d always get zero, to give us $.20 on the dollar. And
that kind of concept now has developed the traction and the momentum and here
is where we are. In the executive budget the Governor, instead of asking for a
tuition increase of $130, asked for a tuition increase for CUNY of $300. And we
knew that that was not going to go anywhere, but that was a revenue target that
we had to reach. The Governor also recommended for the first time consistent
with the Compact, an infusion of investment dollars of slightly over $16
million, and then some ancillary other kinds of support around escalating needs
around energy and other small items. That led us to a deficiency of slightly
over $18 million to get the Compact fully funded. And obviously we have been
very aggressive. Thank you for the work that Susan and other members of the
Senate have done. Our students have been incredible. The board has been very
much involved, our presidents, I mean everybody really has pulled in a
direction, some taking issues with parts of the Compact. But at the end of the
day, we’ve got it done. So I’m here to tell you and to share with
you that the recommendations coming out of the Joint Legislative Committee
which was endorsed now by the Full Conference Committee has in addition to the
$16 million of investment proposed by the Governor another $21 million. So we
now have about $37 million of real investment money and that doesn’t even
deal with the amount of money that we’re going to put in through
enrollment growth, through restructuring and through philanthropic dollars. The
only thing that can derail this is of course the Governor coming out with his
red pen, and start reducing. We have not seen any indication of this at all. So
I’m just pleased to say that we are going to have an infusion of
investment dollars for the first time in this university in a very long time.
And a non-inconsequential amount of dollars for a significant hiring of faculty,
for equipping our scientists, in particular with the starter funds that
they’re going to need. And that we will be able to really make a
significant step this year in addressing base level equity issues. We have a
couple of campuses, and I’ve told you the reason for this, that when they
were formed 40, 45 years ago, they were never given the base operating support
that they really needed, unlike the older campuses, like City College and
Brooklyn College, if you look at the very basic fundamental needs that all of
these campuses have independent of their size. Some of these campuses that
started more recently were just not given that. And we will be able for the
first time, to make a real movement in this. And obviously the presidents of
some of these institutions, and of course the faculty and others, will be very
pleased by that. So that’s the first part of the good news. And the Joint
Conference dealt with, if memory serves me, about $269 million of add-ons. So
let’s just hope that this holds and we’re going to move forward.
The second very good piece of news is that in addition to the support of the
Compact, which is now written into the Joint Conference Committee report, and
written into the Governor’s executive budget request, there is a recommendation
for another $700 million of capital construction dedicated for SUNY and CUNY,
and we have operated under the split of about 60% of this money for SUNY. They
are a much bigger, they’re a much more of a loose grouping of
institutions than we are here at this university. They will probably get on the
order of magnitude of $400 million and hopefully, again if all of this holds,
and we don’t see problems typically with bonded money because people
don’t see it in the same way as operating money. And the projects that
we’ll be supported by, something on the order of $250 million - $300
million for CUNY, will be those projects that the Assembly has very much
endorsed. And this is over the amount of money that we have already in bonded
money. Monies, the bonds for these projects have already been sold and we have
about $2.2 billion already in the system that will be expended over the next
4-5 years. If we get the $250 million - $300 millio,n we’ll be up in the
order of magnitude of $2.5-$2.6 billion, and I just want you to recall that in
1998 the biggest infusion of capital dollars that this university had received
to that time was $1 billion. So this is an order of magnitude much greater than
that. So both on the capital side and on the operating side we are in the
strongest position in my memory, and I’m pleased that these dollars
largely are going to be going, other than the capital money, largely going to
be going to the academic life of our institutions, the true investment that we
have all been anxious to receive, and much of it certainly in the master plan.
In addition to the monies devoted explicitly for CUNY there are significant
dollars for TAP restorations, something over $83 million. For us the most
insidious part of the proposals in the Governor’s budget was about
increasing the definition of full-time status of a student from 12 credits to
15 credits. That bandwidth, the bandwidth of students that fell in that 12-15
credit, was about 40,000 students at CUNY. That would have had a really
devastating impact and we fought very hard to get that restored. On the
community college side, we have less than ideal news from the state. We asked
for $250 million increase in base aid. The Joint Committee voted out $75
million in additional base aid for the community colleges. The one issue that
we have is that we now have to work on the City side to get the tuition picked
up that the Executive is not picking up for the community colleges.
That’s the way it’s always worked. Remember what has happened here
in the Compact is that the Joint Committee has assumed the obligation for
tuition, and the thing of course that we worried about was that if that would
happen the quid pro quo would be that there would be no money for operating
aid, and for me that was a non-starter. So we still have this issue with the
community colleges, but now our focus, if we do get a budget as we hope to get
on April 1st, will be directed at the city. All of our energies will
be directed to the City to get the kind of restorations that the City Council
will hopefully embrace over what has been recommended by the Mayor. And
hopefully we will be in a position where we can report back that we’ve
had the success there. Now, I’m a little less concerned with community
colleges, because relative to the senior colleges they’re in a much
stronger position. Remember, we did the Community College Investment Program
two years ago that led to 300
additional faculty being hired and another I think 150 academic support
personnel, which was probably the biggest infusion of investment that
we’ve had. Obviously there’s still great need, but relative to
where we are in the senior colleges of recent time, that has been the real
impact on the community colleges. We’re also very active on the federal
scene, very, very active around the reauthorization. And I haven’t really
talked to you in great length about that, but a joint letter that we were very
supportive of to Secretaries Rice and Spellings about various components of the
reauthorization is something that we are watching very carefully. I don’t
want to go into that tonight, but if any of you are interested I can share with
you communications about this. A lot of other things are happening; the
Campaign for Success is really getting some traction. Vice-Chancellor Selma
Botman is here if people want to talk about that. The Black Male Initiative--
we have a major conference scheduled on April 26th. John Hope
Franklin is going to be talking about his autobiography, Mirror to America,
which I hope some of you have read and if not to at least listen to him. I
don’t know if any of you saw the fabulous piece that Orlando Patterson
wrote in the Times a couple of days ago. He’s a very distinguished
sociologist at Harvard. That came after a few others, and this is just in the New
York Times. People are really waking up to this difficult problem that we
have in society and I’m just very pleased that we in the university have
gone out in front. And we’ve devoted about $2 million thus far to seed
some programs that have been proposed to us by members of the faculties from
across the University and they’re working away on those projects.
The Science Review Team that I think I may have
mentioned the last time that I was here, met for two and a half days. They met with
our research scientists, they met with science faculties across the university,
they met with students, presidents, provosts. They left with a sense that the
students are wonderful, they are motivated, they are interested, they are
working hard, many of them are doing good work. They were impressed with many
of the faculty that they met. They left a little befuddled because this is such
a complex university. It’s much more complex of a place than MIT where
the Dean of Science, Bob Sibley, led the team. And even though he is a graduate
of
Professor
Alfred Levine (Engineering
Science & Physics,
Professor
Professor
Lenore Beaky
(English,
Professor Bill
Crain (Psychology,
City College of New York) - There still may be a tuition increase at the community
colleges as far as we know. / Chancellor Goldstein - There won’t be a
tuition increase. All I was saying is that the revenue that is built into the
budget assumes a tuition increase that can only be addressed if the City comes
forward with it. If they don’t, we’re going to have to find a way
of eating it but we’re not going to impose a tuition increase. /
Professor Crain - Then I want to see if I am clear on this-- the Compact has
been agreed to and that’s a four year compact, the State is picking up
the tuition increase part of the Compact, as well as the three hundred dollars
in the executive budget tuition increase. / Chancellor Goldstein - That’s
correct. / Professor Crain - The board is now, as I would put it, off the hook
for the next three years. / Chancellor Goldstein - No, each year it’s an
annual budget request. So each year we will come forward with a new budget
request and so whether the board endorses it or anybody else endorses it is
subject to discussion and deliberation. / Professor Crain - So the Board has to
reaffirm the Compact each year? / Chancellor Goldstein - That’s right. /
Professor Crain - Every year, thank you.
Professor
Vasilios Petratos (College of Staten Island) - Let’s revisit an issue that has
been revisited several times, we hire Vice-Chancellors, they’re changing,
they’re going, they’re coming and so on, the number of students
taught by adjuncts is still around 60% around the university and I wonder
whether anything will be done ever. I mean, we’re relying on people with
$3,000 a course for a 3 credit course, forget about that it’s $3200 to
teach half of the students and over that, an underclass has been created, I
want you to know that, and another underclass is being created now with the
full-time faculty with salaries remaining the same or lower by 40% since 1972.
So, you see I ask the right kind of questions and therefore, what’s
happening with the contract? / Chancellor Goldstein - I am hoping that we will
have a contract that we will agree to very soon. And, we are converging on
that. I think we should have converged a while ago but we didn’t and
I’m hoping that it will be agreed upon and that when it is brought to the
membership for their endorsement. / Professor Petratos - Keep in mind that if
you agree to a contract lower than the rate of inflation, our salaries are
eroding and therefore you’re creating another underclass. I’m
telling you, you may be gone 5, 10 years from now as Chancellor but this is
what’s going to happen around this university. Chancellor Goldstein - You
may be gone also as an adjunct. / Professor Petratos - I will certainly be gone
but at least my kind will remain, namely the faculty. I just have another
couple of questions for the Vice Chancellor. / Chancellor Goldstein - Why
don’t you wait until I leave if he can stay because I really have another
couple of meetings that I have to be at? / Professor Petratos - OK, thank you.
Professor Bill
DiVale
(Anthropology, York College) - Last year I chaired a task force under Dean
Small for the UCRA, the PSC/CUNY grant award, and we also surveyed over 600
faculty and recently I sent you a report and a letter and the basic conclusion
was that we really needed more funding, that the amount of dollars in that has
been the same since about 1985, and in terms of 1970 funding it’s
currently $3.3 million and in terms of 1970 funding it should be like $6
million. Now you wrote back and said that this is a union contract negotiation.
What I’d like to ask is that I’m sure if you went to Barbara Bowen
with an offer of increasing that, then I’m sure they wouldn’t
refuse. The point is that this is one of the most successful programs that the
university has. And because we have increased faculty and an increased emphasis
on research this year, the average grant dropped below $3,000. So, the Natural
Sciences can’t even use it and outside of the Humanities it’s even
difficult for the Social and Behavioral scientists to do a project with that
little money. The average grant was lower when you consider that when we gave
people, some people, release time that’s almost $4,000 that had to come
out of other people’s so we really need, if that thing is $3.3 million,
if at least with this contract it gets put to $5 million, that would make a
tremendous difference, and I’m sure the union wouldn’t fight with
you on this. / Chancellor Goldstein - I’m not so sure about your
conclusion but I would say that the PSC/CUNY award program has been a very
successful program. I would like to see it enriched but I also would like to
see much more aggressiveness on behalf of, we the University, in attracting
more research grants, in particular from federal agencies, and that’s
something that I am concerned about, So I think we have a lot of work to do not
only to get the PSC/CUNY program enhanced, and I support it, but I think the
bigger issue, because the money is much bigger and much more flexible and it
also comes with an investment piece for indirect cost recoveries, that we need
to find a way to invest with our faculties across the University so that they
can use that investment to leverage monies coming from the federal government.
/ Professor DiVale - Exactly, within the Behavioral and Natural Sciences,
that’s what it’s used for, in fact the survey showed 43% of the
PSC/CUNY recipients applied for outside funding, Although I’m sure they
all didn’t get it / Chancellor Goldstein - That’s probably true. /
Professor DiVale - But that means that those grants are being used as seed
money to do pilot studies. / Chancellor Goldstein - I share the frustration in
the faculty that we don’t have a contract yet. It is I think disgraceful
that we had to wait so long to get this, but in that contract there will be
provisions for helping faculty to get their research done in lots of different
ways. / Professor DiVale - Thank you.
Professor Jack
Zevin (
Chair
O’Malley
– Do we want a question for Vice Chancellor Botman or should we move on?
Or Vice Chancellor Schaffer? Any questions or are we going to move on?
Professor
Petratos (College
of Staten Island) - In your memorandum some time ago, it must
be back in December, having to do with the Perez
decision, you had said that the Faculty Councils and Senates and so on are
considered as bodies covered by the recent court decision and all of their
committees. Is that correct? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Yes. /
Professor Petratos – And that’s the extent, right? / Vice
Chancellor Schaffer – Yes. / Professor Petratos –The next question
is you had said that it is your understanding that the reasoning of the court
was that the P&B committees are not covered by that. Is there any place
where you can refer me to the court decision or the law or anything else where
the P&B committees are excluded? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – The
issue wasn’t before the court. What I said was that my analysis of their
reasoning would lead me to the conclusion that the P&B committees are not
covered. / Professor Petratos – Can you refer me to that reasoning? Do
you have a copy of that? / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – Well, I think
it’s explained in my memo. / Professor Petratos – In your memo, but
not in their decision. Can I get that decision somewhere? / Vice Chancellor
Schaffer - The decision didn’t address that issue. / Professor Petratos
– Therefore it is your own deduction. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer –
It’s my interpretation of the decision / Professor Petratos –OK,
but as far as the Faculty Council and the Senates and the committees they are
definitely covered with that. / Vice Chancellor Schaffer – The Councils
and Senates which are the governing bodies are covered by it, . and all of
their committees.
Professor Sandi Cooper (History,
Professor Phil
Pecorino (Philosophy,
Queensborough Community College) – A question for Vice Chancellor Botman.
The Campaign for Success-- I hope there are a lot of resources behind it. We
are all here hoping that all of our students will be a success at what they
endeavor to do in our University. Will you allow me to convince you that equal
attention should be given in our public reporting of our stories of success to
that those many people who attend the community colleges for reasons other than
to complete a degree program at that community college? And extend the notion
of success to, for the community colleges at least. When a human being arrives
at that college with an academic objective, and achieves that academic
objective, thanks to our instruction and assistance, that is a success. / Vice
Chancellor Botman – I don’t disagree with you at all. I think that
it is clear to people in my office that there are different types of people who
attend community colleges. One group of people attends in order to achieve an
Associate’s Degree. There are other people who go for purely enrichment,
workforce development, language, and training and skills. Those people we want
to achieve the success that they seek. But the intention is not in any way to
undermine or belittle the populations of people who attend community college
for other than degree purposes. / Professor Pecorino – I think it’s
important, particular with the City Council, that they know what a good job the
community colleges are doing with helping people achieve their academic goals.
There are people who go to community colleges deliberately with the intention
of transferring to another unit of CUNY to get a four-year degree. And they
matriculate anyway. And they act as if, yes indeed they want to be there, but
the truth is from their behavior that they do not. Some of them had no choice.
They elected to go somewhere else. They ended up at community college. The AAS
students, they’re dedicated, they usually want to complete. But
it’s the AA and the AS. So allow me to send you something arguing for
this and why the university ought to be reporting out at least to the City
Council, that the true story, the complete story, is that our successes are
higher than the graduation ratio. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Yes,
I’d like to see that. You know, I would only say that I think the easiest
case to make to legislatures is the community college case. I think it’s
even easier than the baccalaureate campuses, because of workforce development
purposes. I think legislators do recognize the enormous advantage of community
college, and when I think about the establishment of community colleges I
really have to attribute a sense of --brilliance is not too glowing a term--to
the person or people who actually developed the idea of a two-year campus that
offered a variety of programs to students. / Professor Pecorino – Thank
you. I’ll be sending that to you. / Chair O’Malley –Thank you
very much.
III. Reports:
A. Chair’s Report: (cont.) Two
quick things before we start. One is the UFS Spring Conference entitiled
“How Satisfied Is the CUNY faculty?” Friday, April 7th,
John Jay College. A good number of people have signed up, but we could use
more. It’s going to be very interesting. Already, there has been a
presentation to the Chancellor by David Crook on the Survey about possibly incorporating
parts of this Survey into the performance measures of the presidents and their
administrations. If you haven’t signed up, there are blank signup forms
in the back. Finally I need to
mention UCRA. We need people in
Sociology, Anthropology, Chemistry, Computer Science, and Education. That is
faculty to apply to head the panels. It’s interesting work, and you
actually get a little money too. Finally, in terms of the Campaign for
Success. I did e-mail Selma Botman
about the lack of faculty governance involvement. Once again I said, “Involve
faculty in the beginning of the initiative.”
IV. Panel on the
Professor Laurel Cooley- My understanding of the Teacher Academy, the background, is that the
schools of education at CUNY have done an excellent job of preparing teachers,
but most of the teachers currently, particularly in math, and I understand also
in science, coming into the field in middle school and high school, have been
coming through alternative certification routes. So they have people who
already have a Bachelor’s Degree who come back and decide that they want
to teach math or science. There are very few undergraduate students who major
in math or science and become high school math or science teachers, which is
what you have to do if you want to be a secondary math or science teacher. You
must major in Mathematics, like any other major, or major in some science in
order to teach that science in school. So, I understand it’s not very
healthy for the profession if very few people are coming in through the more
“traditional route” of the undergraduate. There are very many, very
good teachers through the alternative certification route, but the concern is
that we really need, now, to turn our attention to the undergraduate programs.
So the Teacher Academy idea came up, because they have funding through grants
to initially start the program and it’s in conjunction with the
Department of Education and NYU, although NYU has a very small piece and
they’re doing something very different - - it’s really not
connected as much to what CUNY’s doing - - and so this grant is helping
them begin with a cohort of 300 teachers, I believe, in Math and Science.
They’re estimating about 50 students per cohort at 6, four-year colleges
at CUNY, and so these are supposed to start in September and they’re already
recruiting people. I don’t know what else to tell you. Each
program’s a little different, so now I’m at
Professor George Shapiro -
We wanted to recruit the strongest students, but I think we haven’t gone
about it the right way. I mean CUNY altogether started this thing kind of late
in the year. We just saw this past week our first 11 applicants and I would say
they were above average, but not outstanding students, so whereas the Math
Chairs wanted to set something like readiness for calculus as a CUNY wide
prerequisite for this program, we were told not to by the, academic
administration and now each school is feeling its way. Now in fact it
wouldn’t work at
Professor Jane Coffee- I’m
a professor of Mathematics but I’m also the Director of the
Professor Leonard Ciaccio -
I’m a biology professor at the College of Staten Island who was about 18
years ago, literally kidnapped by teachers in the Staten Island High School
system, and I got involved extensively working with teachers first in science
and then in mathematics and this developed into something called the Discovery
Institute at the College of Staten Island. In that capacity I was able to be
involved in a number of activities with teachers and with college students
working with those teachers that made the opportunity presented by the Teacher
Academy a really interesting and exciting experience and an opportunity for
looking at some of the real issues that seem to me to be at the heart of
problems in education in the New York City school system. One of those has to
do with getting the kids, getting young people, to seriously consider teaching
while they’re training, while they’re in college but equally
important, and I saw a good deal of this just on Staten Island, and
there’s lots of evidence that this is an issue throughout New York City,
but probably throughout the country and certainly in urban settings. Even in
situations where all the pieces come together and we turn out really good
teachers, really prepared teachers, they often go into situations that are not
really prepared for them and the career leaving rate for teachers in
Professor Bill Crain
(Psychology, City College of New York) - You give the image of surviving in the
Professor Alfred Levine
(College of Staten Island) - I would like to say to everyone that Jane has been
educating math teachers since 1970 and doing an excellent job and Len has been
turning out science teachers and improving science education in the Staten
Island schools in a fabulous way, and so I think we should all be grateful, and
I assume the other people on the other campuses have comparable experiences so
we should all be grateful for the staff and I applaud all of you. I would like
to ask for a possible improvement. It is hard enough for any student to
complete a Bachelor’s degree in mathematics or science in four years at
any school on the planet Earth. To add to that an internship which takes them
away from the college science courses and still try to complete it in four
years is putting things into a rigid box. I would urge that you modify the protocol
to allow, yes, maybe some students can finish in four years, perhaps some
should take four and a half, perhaps some should take five. And put the
emphasis on the quality of the students you’re turning out and not on the
rigidity of how this must be a four year program. Do you have any comments? /
Professor Coffee - We’re talking big time. Yeah, we’ve got it on
the radar. / Professor Ciaccio - At the Discovery Institute we had a lot of
funding and we were able to simply recruit students from the various
departments, History, English, Math, Science and so on to work as teacher
helpers. They were nothing more than teacher helpers; there was no commitment
on their becoming teachers. The point that I need to make is that we found that
grades for math majors, for science majors actually went up, and if you went
over 15 hours of work they started to go down. I think embedded in here
somewhere down the road is the sense that CUNY kids work no matter what major
they have, they all have jobs and I think that if I were able to say
“where do I want to be?” in one year, two years, three years, I
would like to be able to offer students the opportunity to work as their
abilities allow them at this kind of work. To be somehow involved in the
schools for pay and get away from the reality that so many of our students are
working and that does affect their lives. We know that the lucky kids who get
stipends to work in the research labs, their grades go up even though they
spend all kinds of hours in the lab and I think the issue about the internship
is to build it in a way that it keep the kids engaged. / Professor Levine -
There’s no question that keeping them engaged will improve their grades,
but I’m still dubious about the four year straight jacket. / Professor
Ciaccio - Hopefully, as we work through this part of what we’re going to
do as professional educators is start talking about “How do we do this,
is it the best way possible? Are there ways that we can think about the
development of math and science teachers that are different from what
we’re going now?” How do you train a teacher in biology to be a
good biologist and a good teacher and still do it within the confines of a
Bachelor’s degree? I think ultimately those conversations have to happen.
/ Professor Levine - Thank you.
Professor Gail August (
Professor Jack Zevin (Queens
College) - Forgive me but I’m a life long education professor and
I’ve heard everything that you’ve said at least four times over the
last four decades, and I think the reason there aren’t enough math and
science teachers is structural, deeply structural and I have a couple of words
of advice, so I hope you’ll forgive me. One of the things that’s wrong
with the whole process is that if math people, science people and the education
people don’t integrate, really integrate, you’re not going to be
successful. I have intimate knowledge of this because I work everyday with a
terrific colleague who’s made every mistake and already knows the hard
way what to do. And I would also suggest, and I hope I’m not booed by
this audience, that the research shows in the American Education Research Journal that one of the major
impediments to training math and science teachers are the math and science
departments. They murder them. We push ‘em in, they push ‘em out,
and part of the problem is that the math and science departments need to pay
some very careful attention to thinking about the sequence of courses that they
make students take. And the second thing I want to say is that the attitude
that you’re going to get the very best students, I would suggest, may not
be very effective in the sense that most of the really great math and science
teachers I know come from rather humble backgrounds and may not have looked as
if they were the most terrific students. They’re the ones that survive at
teaching in the schools and have prospered and the very terrific students are
all at MIT or
Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy,
Professor Sandi Cooper (History,
College of Staten Island) - I do recall as a small child in WWII in the public
schools a delegation of teachers coming, from I think it was Wisconsin, into
the Kindergarten and first grade - studying the best school system in the
United States and they picked this tiny little dump out in the South Bronx to
come into and that was us. So something’s happened and what has happened
is a huge withdrawal of money that occurred when the whites went to the
suburbs. At the moment it is my understanding that the History major who wishes
to teach Social Studies in high school and junior high school has to take a
bunch of Education courses. Are yours liberated from these courses? /
Unidentified speaker – No.
They have to be certified. / Professor Cooper - So that means they have
to trot through the classes of the faculty who teach the pedagogy piece of
this, and what have you done to make nice to our colleagues in the Teacher
Education Department? / Professor Coffee - They are participating actively in
our endeavors. / Unidentified speaker - Why shouldn’t they? / Professor
Cooper - Why shouldn’t they? Because some of them consider this a slap in
their face, but this always happens. / Professor Ciaccio - I don’t think
that the issue here is that what we’re trying to do is throw away this
piece or that piece as much as trying to get all of the pieces to effectively
talk to each other.
Professor Martha Bell (SEEK,
Brooklyn College) -A number of years ago I thought that my SEEK students
weren’t achieving enough in Mathematics and I convinced George to create
special sections of Calculus and Pre-calculus up through Calc III, and to boot
I made him teach them all; and there are a number of SEEK kids who, in effect,
majored in George Shapiro and became math majors. Three are now on his faculty
as teachers of calculus and pre-calculus - at least as adjuncts - and what I
discovered about almost all of this cohort, this first cohort, there were about
a dozen or fifteen kids that George had himself until he picked them up, was
that they all went into the schools and almost all of them left and left very
quickly. I know how hard it is to
reform those schools so that even minority kids, especially SEEK kids, going
back to their old neighborhoods can’t do it. So, I think 5-8 schools for
each college is insane-- it is too many schools. If you can reach out to 2 or 3
you’re probably more than you need to do. I remember the days when NYU
put 65 people into one school and it worked. You want to create this support
system that goes on 3, 4, 5 years out and I’m very worried that you do it
well so that these kids stay in there. And I do want to echo what Stefan says.
I think there has to be something that clicks in for deferment for those kids
who can go on for their Master’s right away and who want to go on for
their Ed.D.’s and so maybe their TAP goes in retroactively or something
else to cover their tuitions. But I don’t want to cut off graduate school
for these kids. I have kids that never thought of graduate schools as freshmen
and all of a sudden they’re into Ed.D. and Ph.D. programs and these are
the very cohort of kids we want to encourage so there needs to be something in
there. / Professor Ciaccio -
Professor Vasilios Petratos (
Professor Angela Crossman
(John Jay College) – This seems like a very wonderful
initiative to help students who are getting access to a college education
provide service back to the community that we’re trying to serve. I have no problem actually with the idea
of service, if you’re paying their tuition for a certain number of years.
Teach for
Professor Leslie Jacobson (Nutrition,
Professor Yang (Kingsborough
Community College) - Just wondering with all the talk about attracting
excellence and problems that you’ve mentioned about a lot of neighborhood
high school students don’t have the opportunity to do maybe calculus and
so forth. Many of those students actually end up at community colleges, and
then graduate either being pre-calculus ready or calculus ready. Is there any
provision or thought to attract students like that from the community colleges?
/ Professor Ciaccio - One of the shaping principles was this sense that we were
going to try to build something that would place the students in schools
immediately. Now obviously we’re beginning to think about what that means
and one of the comments has been exactly the one you made, that there are other
places to find these excellent students and I think that the next year -
preparation for our next class - will be exactly this conversation and
we’ll be looking for ways to bring the students from the community
colleges that have already distinguished themselves into this program and we
haven’t worked that out. But it’s obviously there to be worked out
and we’ll be looking for your suggestions.
Chair O’Malley-
Thank you so much for an informative panel. You were terrific. We don’t have
a quorum, so we cannot vote on to the resolution on changing face to face
courses to online courses. Perhaps
we should enumerate the problems and bring it back at the next plenary. When we
put out the resolution, there was a firestorm so it needs to be reworked, and
rethought. Motion to adjourn? / General assent / Good! See you next month.