THE TWO HUNDRED NINETY-FOURTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

March 25, 2003

The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:40 p.m. in Room 9204/5 at the Graduate School and University Center. 63 voting members were present:

Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Fridman (KCC), Friedheim (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), Rodriguez (Hunter), Savage (Queens), Sohmer (CCNY), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were present. 

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

II. Approval of the Minutes: The Minutes were approved as distributed.

III. Reports (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

A. Chair

B. The Chancellor (appearance was cancelled)

C. Representatives to Board Committees (written)

IV. Old Business

A. Panel/Discussion on Student Academic Integrity and Plagiarism – Recorded in Reports & Deliberations

                    B. Resolution on Student Academic Integrity and Plagiarism – No action was taken.

V. New Business

                    A. Resolution on the Integrity of the Promotion and Tenure Process – The following resolution was adopted by hand vote, with 61 in favor, 1 opposed, and 2 abstentions.

Whereas, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein overrode the decision of the Brooklyn College promotion and tenure process, including three levels of committees and the President, and

Whereas, he did not follow the established university by-law procedures for appeals and grievances, and

Whereas, the UFS reaffirms its commitment to campus-based promotion and tenure processes,

Therefore, Be It Resolved, that the UFS calls upon the Chancellor to affirm a policy of non-interference with established campus and university governance and contractual procedures, including appeals and grievances, and

Be It Further Resolved, that if there is a dispute after proceeding through all the stages of appeal and grievance, the Chancellory must follow due process with fair hearings of all parties including the campus promotions and tenure committees, faculty members, and the President, and

Be It Finally Resolved, that any promotion and tenure decision should follow the Board of Trustees by-laws and be based on academic criteria.

B. Resolution on Peer Review of All University-Wide Allocations for Research Support and Equipment Purchase – The following resolution was adopted by hand vote, with 49 in favor, 2 opposed, and 4 abstentions.

Whereas, accepted and revered traditions at all leading research and educational institutions and public and private foundations require that the merit of research proposals and related funding decisions be made only through peer review; and

Whereas, CUNY receives from a number of sources, including the operating budget, the capital budget, special state appropriations, and general purpose grants from public and private foundations, allocations for the purchase of equipment and for the support and initiation of research and/or graduate studies at the University; and

Whereas, by law, public institutions have the responsibility to demonstrate that funds received from public and private sources are allocated and awarded through a fair, open, competitive and deliberative process; and

Whereas, in those instances where peer review had been used at CUNY, such as in the PSC/CUNY awards program, it has proven to be successful and it continues to be perceived by both faculty and administration as a fair and equitable basis for project funding and for the distribution of limited University resources; therefore

Be it resolved, that all received allocations, except from the capital budget, for research initiation (excluding start-up funds for new faculty), research support and equipment purchases, irrespective of the source and managed by the CUNY Office of Academic Affairs, and which are not restricted by the donor to benefit exclusively specified programs/institutes, be widely publicized in a timely manner throughout the different campuses and on the University web site, and that decisions on funding of proposals submitted to share in any of these allocations/funds be solely a result of a faculty dominated peer review process based on merit and potential; and

Be it further resolved, that equipment and other research support allocations in the capital budget be subject to the approval of affected faculty before capital plans are submitted to the State or the Dormitory Authority, and

Be it finally resolved, that the Chair of the University Faculty Senate, in consultation with the appropriate Senate committees, negotiates with the Chancellor the mechanisms and structures required to fully implement this plan before September 2003, and that the protocol concluded between the FAC chair and the University Dean for Research be used as a template for those mechanisms and structures.

C. Latest budget developments (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:45 P.M.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps

Executive Director

REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS OF THE 294^th PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK 

March 25, 2003 

Chair: The Chancellor is not coming. At 5 o’clock he called and said that he had a “clandestine”, that was the adjective, a “clandestine” meeting, although it’s not so clandestine now that we all know about it, with the Mayor and the Governor’s people. So he will not be here tonight. He said he loves to come here and he loves your questions and he can’t wait until next time.

            Let me say first what the agenda is. I was asked by the Executive Committee to ask Al Levine to report on the budget because he’s head of the Budget Advisory Committee. Al said nothing has changed, but he’s willing to answer any questions anybody has on the budget. So why not do that at the end of my report, if people have questions about the budget.

            After my report we have two resolutions that have gone through the Executive Committee that I would like us to vote on: one is the Integrity of the Promotion and Tenure Process; number two is the Peer Review of all University-Wide Allocations for Research Support and Equipment Purchase. It’s very important that we vote on both of these tonight. In my report first I want to thank people who went lobbying on March 11: Lenore Beaky from LaGuardia, Barbara Weinstein from the Graduate School, Eva Richter formerly from Kingsborough Community College, John Davenport from College of Staten Island, and Martha Bell who was lobbying with SEEK. I lobbied with the Trustees and the Presidents. Thank you. However, we need to go to Albany again, so I’ll be pressuring you about that.

The UFS has been asked to testify on April 14 at a new committee. It’s called the Joint Ad Hoc Committee on Management and Budget Alternatives. It is made up of Trustees and members of the Chancellery. The topics to be addressed are price structuring, that’s tuition; administrative savings; and other efficiencies. I would appreciate your ideas. I will e-mail this to the UFS-FGL list for discussion. We already started the discussion at the Budget Advisory Committee. They discussed moving possibly to a credit system. In other words, tuition would be based on credit rather than the current flat fee. This might be a good idea. I’m going to put out the idea on the listserv. and people can respond to it. I’ll also put out some of the arguments of the Budget Advisory Committee.

The Faculty Survey Committee has met and is compiling areas of concern and possible questions for the faculty experience survey. We’re using parts of the National Survey of Post Secondary Faculty so we can compare ourselves nationally. This is to be part of the performance measures used to evaluate Presidents. Wouldn’t that be nice? And for that I thank Al Levine, Karen Kaplowitz, and Dean Savage.

Finally, the spring conference: “The Integrated University and the Status of the Faculty”. You have all been e-mailed and you’ve all been mailed this announcement. It’s Friday, April 11, at John Jay, at the old building on the second floor, the multi-purpose room from 9 am-1:30 pm. The Chancellor is interested in continuing to integrate or centralize CUNY through a number of initiatives. Instead of CUNY being a federation of colleges, the University is being restructured and driven from the Central Administration. It is important for the faculty to use their experience and wisdom to work with these initiatives and express their concerns rather than reacting after they have been passed by the Board of Trustees. It is also important that faculty governance be preserved in the restructuring of CUNY. The Chancellor has asked the UFS to participate in many of these initiatives. The conference will have eight workshops chaired by faculty with some knowledge of the proposed initiative. Participating faculty will make suggestions, recommendations, and perhaps warnings that will be presented in PowerPoint presentations at lunch and forwarded to the Chancellor. I have two sign-up sheets, so I would love you to sign up.

Finally, I want to say that Lenore Beaky has produced another newsletter with articles on the budget and on ERP written by Manfred Philipp. My column is on the granting of early promotion to Professor Johnson.

Does anyone have any questions for Al Levine on the budget? Yes. Al, come on up. 

Professor Levine: There are a number of issues that had been discussed. The State Budget Request calls for raising tuition at the senior colleges. In order to raise tuition at the community colleges the City would have to recommend the tuition increase. We have more support at the City for maintaining tuition than we do at the State level. This leads to the possibility of a large gap in tuition between the community colleges and the senior colleges. Whether students will then choose to spend their first two years at a community college to save money is not known. The consequences of this are not known. What is known is that a number of the community colleges are bursting at the seams and they don’t have space. So if there were a massive shift in our student body this might produce unintended consequences. We’re watching that. The second issue that is raised is if you have a serious differential in the tuition between the first two years and the last two years, assuming that for the last three or four years students will use up their TAP eligibility at the lower tuition and then be hit with a higher tuition bill when they get to the senior year. This is again an unintended consequence of the policy. One way around this would be to try to fight to have TAP not be based on the number of semesters but be based on a per credit rate. This also opens up the possibility that, instead of raising the tuition rate per credit, leave that fixed and we raise money by charging everyone a fixed rate per credit. Currently students can sign up for twelve credits and pay tuition or sign up for eighteen credits and pay the same tuition. I personally, as a faculty member, have great problems with students who are working forty hours a week, having a family, commuting, and signing up for eighteen credits to save money. This is not educationally desirable. It will be better if there were no advantage to signing up for extra credits. This might enable us to raise money without changing the per credit rate. There are a lot of advantages to this and hopefully people will consider this possibility. Stefan, did that cover it? 

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice and The Graduate School and University Center) – I wanted to actually inquire about changing the TAP, the per credit TAP. / Al Levine – I did that, but I’ll amplify on it. If we then change TAP into per credit TAP, students would not be using up their eligibility at any stage, if they took 12 credits a semester or 8 credits a semester and it took them 10, 11 or 12 credits to accumulate the 120 for the degree. They would be eligible for TAP through their entire college career. Frankly, this makes so much sense; I can’t believe we haven’t proposed it before. I’ll take any questions. 

Professor Savage (Sociology, Queens College) – One of the things the administration asked for at the time of negotiating the last contract was summer pay for Chairs. The union apparently agreed to that and it was signed by the administration and now that it is time to consider this issue they are on every campus saying that it’s basically an unfunded mandate. This had lead to a very strange situation on my campus, and I understand possibly on some others as well. Every single resentment that Chairs have had about all the overwork and everything that hasn’t been done for them and all the extra nonsense they’ve had to do is being loaded on this fact that they’ve been betrayed on the issue of summer pay. Now I had understood that this was something that got discussed at the Budget Committee meeting. What did central have in mind when they did this and why are they backing off now and what is their plan when one or two Chairs are paid and all the rest go home militantly for the entire summer. How are they going to get the work done? Or when they decide to pay no one and then they are actually up for a grievance for not maintaining the contract? / Al Levine – I do not have any clue as to what was in the mind of the management team that negotiated that feature of the contract. I might add that the Vice Chancellor for Finance and Administration stated: “I have no clue what was in management’s mind on that. I wasn’t there when it was negotiated.” It is true that it is an unfunded mandate. It is true that this University has a history of unfunded mandates that then end up taking money out of INDR. That’s the history of CUNY. This is just one more example of such an unfunded mandate. I agree with you. Having been a Chair for six years I put in many hours without getting paid. If I were a Chair this year I don’t think I would want to do it. 

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) – Your proposal for thinking about tuition per credit doesn’t take into account credit hours or equated credits by which a large number of courses in a community college run and by which a lot of courses in the senior colleges that have extra hours attached to them run. So either those courses will become freebies that the student takes, as in my department, of one or two credit courses that meet for six hours, or the kids will use up lots of TAP if we charge it at equated hours. So it is not a perfect proposal. Also, when TAP is funded for students it’s not funded at the same rate for every student, so that a student can get full TAP, a student can get only $200 in TAP. That proposal would work for students who would make full TAP but students that are getting some proportion of what is allowable for TAP would get almost a negligible amount of money at that point, and would that send all of TAP flying is another question. 

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island and The Graduate School and University Center) – The business of not being enough space in the community colleges is not a deterrent to doing the first alternative…/ Al Levine – I’m afraid of that. / …because once the space is made available at the senior colleges all they do is put the community college courses on the senior college campuses, and this has been a proposal that’s been floating around for 15 years where they say there’s underutilization of space. So I’m not altogether sure that that space consideration is necessarily a roadblock to the effects which you and I, I think, share some apprehension over. 

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – My question is related. In mixed campuses, where you have a senior and community college under one roof, how does this work? / Al Levine – Currently at Staten Island there is no differential tuition. Currently associate degree students at Staten Island pay the senior college tuition, and that’s also true at New York City Tech, and John Jay, and Medgar. So I think that in the current situation there is already an anomaly in the system. / Professor Philipp - In other words, those community college students pay more than other community college students? / Al Levine – That is correct. / Professor Philipp – That’s very interesting. The differential would even be larger? / Al Levine – That’s right. / Professor Philipp –Good luck.

 Professor Dreyer (Dental Hygiene Department, New York City College of Technology) – For those students, my department in particular, that are waivered at 67 credits as compared to 60 for the associate’s degrees ,it  can cost them to get the associate’s degree because they’re paying by…It’s just a thought. The professional programs are so expensive when they have to supply themselves with instruments and uniforms, and they pay for their patient sometimes, and then they pay those extra credits to meet the accreditation standards that we have because they’re national. / Al Levine – But they do that right now. / Professor Dreyer – No, they pay for their semester and they take, instead of 12, 15, 16 or 17. / Al Levine – That would be a group of students that would be hurt. I might add that one of the things that we talked about – again, these are just talking points: there is no real proposal on the table – would be that there are students who benefit from taking 18 credits because it means they can finish up their degree faster. So that one of the proposals was to put an automatic -- let’s call it scholarship -- for a student who had say a 3.5 index that would say at 3.5 index you wouldn’t pay anything extra for the 6 above 12; in other words you could still take 18 credits to get through faster. The only thing that’s been proposed is the Governor’s budget has left a hole. There is a written bill but still there is no proposal on a tuition hike yet. Now when that proposal is on the table we will see what features it has. Hopefully some of the suggestions we’ve made will be incorporated. On the other hand, we’ve made suggestions in the past that have not been incorporated, so we really don’t know. 

        Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – Are you worried, as I am, that if we go to a very intricate system of per credit and differentials and so on the whole tuition increase will be disguised and no one will know what we’re dealing with and it would be hard to muster opposition to something that’s so unclear, and that it will permit tuition increases in the future that will drive students out of college, and it will be so murky nobody will know what they’re dealing with here? Students are gone. / Al Levine – Our current policy is so murky that no one knows what they’re dealing with. / Professor Crain – It’s something you can deal with. / Al Levine – The issue of moving to a per student credit has such academic benefits that even if we were not going to raise tuition I think it’s time to put it on the table and discuss it in a serious fashion coupled with a change in the TAP program, because I worry very much about students who start out and then when they hit the ninth semester and tenth semester and eleventh semester can’t afford it. And that’s a very serious issue.  

Professor Lewis (English, York College) – I think one point that wasn’t mentioned here that might be added to this discussion when this does come to pass is to try and maybe see where there would be an equivalency. In other words, if you’re doing it per credit and you have the flat fee for tuition per term it would be good if they tried to set the per credit to let’s say the equal of 15 credits per term, or something like that, as opposed to 12 which would be the minimum, because this way students who are having trouble paying for tuition and who need to do the minimum of 12 credits to be considered a full-time student can sort of underpay one term and pay more another term when they could afford it. If they make the equivalency at 12 credits then there is going to be no benefit to students who are going to be marginalized by the increase and leaves them no working room. / Al Levine – What you are proposing is, if there were to be no rise in tuition revenue, how we could still shift to what I would think of as a more sensible system. / Professor Lewis – In a way to provide some working room for students who are marginalized. / Al Levine – We can’t solve all the world’s problems.  

Kathryn Richardson (Nursing, New York City College of Technology) – I just want to remind you once again about trying to get faculty, friends, family, acquaintances, colleagues to apply for the PSC CUNY Research Award Program as far as being on the committee that distributes the awards and does all the reading for the awards. I don’t think you want me to read all the areas again, I think that the folders are in the back. The in-service allotment of $6,000 over three years: In some areas that might be a lot of money, in other areas there are so many applications that you’re only getting paid peanuts, so you can’t really do it for the money. But I just want to ask you to look on your campuses and try to get people to run and to send their resumes to Stasia. It’s all on the yellow flier in the back. 

Chair: Now I wanted to do the panel on academic integrity, so if Phil Pecorino and Barbara Moore would come up. You all received the Diaz memo in your mailing. I hope you looked at it. The way this is going to work: Karen Kaplowitz is going to say something about the task force on academic integrity. This is a task force from 80^th Street and the committee that is writing this has no faculty on it. They’re writing a proposal, a recommendation and maybe a policy on plagiarism and cheating in the University. Karen is going to summarize that and also the Diaz memo, which is now the understanding in the University about plagiarism and cheating. Then Barbara Moore from Queens College is going to talk a bit about her experiences and her ideas on plagiarism and cheating and then Phil Pecorino from Queensborough Community College – his college actually devised a whole new policy, but it is put on hold until this task force reports out. I think it should be interesting.  

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – I assume, Susan, we’re going to take up the resolution on academic integrity and cheating after the panel? All right. So there will be the resolution that’s in your packet on academic integrity and plagiarism but first we’ll hear from the panelists. I’m going to be very brief. In your packet is an advisory memorandum that the then Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Robert Diaz issued in 1995. This is not University policy; it’s an advisory memorandum. It seems that many administrators at the campuses asked for guidance and so this memorandum was written. I’m from John Jay, and for a few years Robert Diaz after being Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs was Vice President for Legal Affairs at John Jay, and our Faculty Senate took up the issues raised in his advisory memorandum because what was in the advisory memorandum did not comport with the way the real world worked in many instances. And so I have for anyone’s interest a thirteen page verbatim transcript of our meeting with him.  In preparation for the meeting with the John Jay Faculty Senate in April of 2000 he surveyed the CUNY colleges; eight responded, four followed the practices advised, recommended in his advisory memorandum, four campuses did not do so. Being on a campus he acknowledged the difficulties of following the memorandum as written at 80^th Street.

Basically this memorandum distinguishes between academic and disciplinary violations. The premise is – and a lot of it is based on case law, on the assumption that students will sue, which does happen, not necessarily frequently and certainly not necessarily frequently at CUNY – but there is case law – that, as explained in the memorandum, there is difference between a question of fact, “did the student cheat or did the student not cheat,” in which case the issue is to go to the college’s disciplinary committee, which is the Judicial Committee, so that due process can be followed as outlined and as provided in article 15 of the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws; because – and this is the memorandum’s position, the Vice Chancellor’s position – it is not up to a faculty member’s expertise to determine whether cheating did or did not occur. I see some gaping mouths and looks of incredulity. That is something to be determined by the Judicial Committee. The Bylaws article 15 provide even a higher constitutional requirement than the 14^th Amendment does because there is a possibility of such penalties as expulsion, permanent record of cheating, of fraudulent behavior; and so that is supposed to be what happens. If it’s an issue of academic question, which is dependent on the expertise of the faculty member in what is referred to as his or her esoteric area of scholarship, then the faculty member’s judgment is respected and the faculty member has the choice of giving a lower grade or failing grade or bringing it to the Judicial Committee or asking the administration of the college to bring it to the Judicial Committee if the faculty member wants a greater penalty than an F grade, such as suspension or expulsion. But according to this memorandum if it’s an issue of academic judgment the faculty member has to – it says “shall,” which means must – go to the Chief Academic Officer, the Provost or the Vice President of Academic Affairs, for guidance on whether you have the right to give a lower grade as a penalty or to bring it to the Judicial Committee; because, as the Vice President Diaz explained to the John Jay Senate, it’s a question of fact in terms of plagiarism if the question is “did the student copy or download from the internet.” That has to be determined by a Judicial Committee because that is a question of fact. But if on the other hand there is not sufficient citations and the faculty member, he gives this example, says to herself “this sounds like John Locke, these are not possibly original ideas of the student, in my academic judgment this student did not come up with these ideas,” then the faculty member can give a lower or failing grade and does not have to bring it to the Judicial Committee, but can. The situation now is that every college does things differently. We each have our culture. So the University has created a task force on academic integrity and it seems like all the colleges are doing that now. Two colleges have developed proposals but from what I understand they’ve been told to wait because the task force is supposed to issue its recommendations. The task force is chaired by Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs Otis Hill; the members are the Baruch Provost David Dannenbring, the Bronx Community College Vice President for Academic Affairs Marcia Keizs, Hunter’s Vice President for Student Affairs Eija Ayravainen, the Dean of Students at New York City Tech Lynn Hall, the Central Office Lawyer Jo-Anne Weisberg, one of the members of Vice Chancellor Schaffer’s Office of Legal Affairs, a student Janet Peros, who is a student at Queens College School of Library Science, staffed by Roberta Nord.   Trustee Susan O’Malley is a member, and I’m a member. This task force is supposed to come up with a policy that would be University wide because students do transfer from college to college and if they’ve been socialized into one approach and then they transfer and there is a different culture and different practice at another college of course they are at a tremendous disadvantage. Adjuncts teach at many colleges, and if colleges have different policies and practices - and since so many of our freshmen and sophomores are taught by adjunct faculty who socialize the students and move from campus to campus - the adjuncts themselves and the faculty often don’t know what the practice and policy is. Though at a recent meeting it was acknowledged by the current Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs that if every case – and this does happen I gather at Brooklyn College and City College – of cheating and plagiarism be brought to the Judicial Committee, it would seem to me that no one would ever want to serve on a Judicial Committee because there would be either hundreds and hundreds of cases or faculty would just ignore the issue. So here we are and here we have our panelists and then we’ll have a resolution. Thank you. 

Professor Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – I’m just going to talk a little bit about something that we did at Queens College for students who were accused of cheating or plagiarism who, when confronted by their teacher, agreed or admitted that they did it, and whose teacher reported them to the Dean of Students, and the Dean of Students talked to the students and the students agreed to this particular consequence of their acts. The consequence was that they met with me in a group between five and eight students and basically talked about what they did, why they did it; and there were some readings involved, some writing assignments and also some personal reflection about what they had done. I think that any policy that CUNY generates about this might do well to take in some of the attitudes of students. I think I got a good way to hear some of those attitudes because they talked about them in the group. I think many students don’t really have a good idea of how serious this is or they do not take it very seriously. Some person in a group for example said she had taken her paper off the Internet for a small course and she said, “I decided it was such a great idea. I thought I could get the assignment without doing too much work.” And she wasn’t being completely disingenuous; I think she kind of meant it. I think also students frequently blame their teacher for the fact that they cheated or plagiarized. Often they said things like, “my teacher didn’t explain what this was, they never told us it wasn’t allowed,” but frequently even though there was the students would still say “but it wasn’t explained enough.” So there was also an inclination to see what they had done in a typical rationalization that this wasn’t something that reflected them, that this was something that just happened once, that this wasn’t reflective of who they were or their character or anything like that. And yet most of the students in the course of the six or seven sessions or meetings that we had together either kind of lied or plagiarized again in the course of the meetings. Just for example if I said, “did you read the assignment for the week,” often people would say, “well, I skimmed it,” but skimmed it really meant “no, I didn’t read it.” So there is a kind of inclination to distance themselves from what they did, and although in a kind of questionnaire on attitudes toward cheating everybody said that they knew that cheating was wrong, when they actually talked about it they tended to excuse themselves.

The other thing was that nobody saw it as something that was hurtful to other students in the college. They all said that cheating only hurt them, it didn’t hurt anybody else, that they weren’t trying to do anything to hurt anybody else or to be unfair to anybody else, that they just were under pressure and they had to get something done and they just did it and they hurt themselves because they didn’t learn in the course. There was very little sense of this as a community in which people have certain values that they respect. I should say also that, as well as talking to students that were guilty of plagiarism or cheating, I spoke to peer advisors, who are students that are active in the college and helpful to other students, about their attitudes towards cheating and they were very similar to the attitudes of the students that cheated. Even on the questionnaires that I gave both groups they performed pretty much the same. Often students would say that it wasn’t a big deal to look over at someone else’s paper. I would say that students were also extremely angry at teachers that for example walked out of the room in the middle of a test, read a newspaper, gave out tests that were the same semester after semester, “like they don’t care at all about what they are doing and they expect us to care” and things like that. I think that’s partially rationalization and partially sensitivity to the fact that if teachers aren’t willing to put themselves out for this then certainly students wouldn’t be willing to put themselves out for it.

Just one other thing I wanted to say. Many of the students it seemed, in talking about lying in other aspects of their life, especially towards authority figures like their parents, felt that it was somehow disrespectful to argue with their parents or confront them on a disagreement or on something that they wanted to do that their parents didn’t want them to do than to just lie about it, so that lying did not seem to them a disrespectful thing whereas confronting and arguing did seem to them a disrespectful thing. I think that any policy needs to take seriously how students really feel about this and the values and ideas with which they come. And I think also it’s important to be really clear about what cheating is, what plagiarism is, give many examples, and be clear about what the particular consequences would be. I found in a college in talking to students, both peer advisors and people in this group, that there were widely disparate consequences. Some teachers just say “you plagiarized and you have to do your paper over,” there is no lower grade or reporting to the Dean, and other students faced severe punitive consequences. And I would say that’s one way that not having a general policy could be really unfair to students, that they don’t really know what the consequences are going to be.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – I’ve been working on this one way or another since 1986. Let me start out with one of the final points raised by my colleague here. Two years ago when we started again at Queensborough to develop a program, student government leaders polled students. Two thirds said they cheated at Queensborough. They came right out, they admitted it on questionnaires that they did it, they gave their reasons for doing it, and none pledged to stop doing it. There have been national surveys that show that if you have a full program of academic integrity it will not eliminate it but it will maybe hold it where it is or reduce it. It’s a cultural problem that students have habituated themselves to certain approaches to the way in which they do their work and to what they think it’s acceptable. And, another point she brought up, students are very angry when faculty do not enforce academic integrity. Who? Not the ones that are cheating, but the hard working students who see that other people get grades and they are putting out tremendous efforts, overcoming tremendous obstacles, and the faculty member seems indifferent to what’s going on. It was for that reason I decided I’d continue on with this, but let me tell you, I’m back where I was in 1988. In 1988 the efforts at my campus were squelched by faculty leadership. And why? I was getting into areas they didn’t want me to get into. The words were “student rights.” And I was indignant with faculty leadership back then for being excessively fearful. I thought we could work it out, but they said, “no, we don’t want to go there.” And so for many years nothing was done. In ’95 I saw Moscowitz draft the memo that was worked over by Diaz, he was the Vice President; he was working in his office; made it a little worse than the way Moscowitz had it. An outcome to this memo, which thankfully is not University policy, but even as a guideline I’m grateful that mostly, largely, it’s ignored, because it’s ridiculous. In practice it’s just terribly unworkable. And I’ll differ a bit from Karen’s interpretation only to point out it’s worse than she makes it. I have my training in Philosophy and I could go into certain distinctions at great length, but we’ll touch on them just briefly. The words are “fact,” “academic judgment,” and then a couple of other things that come out of that memo. I suffer from a habit of thinking that people who run a University this large and this important must be very smart and very responsible, and I keep falling into it; it’s just one of those I find hard to break; but I also have a capacity to learn, and what I learned is that usually when I make that kind of adjustment it’s a mistake, and here again it is. When I heard that this task force was being formed by or under Otis Hill I thought it was a result of campuses like my own coming up with programs and sending them up the ladder to get reviewed and “oh, wow,” I thought, “they’re going to say look at all of this; let’s get a uniform policy for the whole University.” Then what do I hear: that the group is put together first with only one member of the faculty and then we got Karen on, but the group doing the writing has no members of the faculty, and that the Diaz memo is pretty much the guiding directive. I got some very unpleasant things to say about that memo but perhaps the worst of it is it’s got really nothing to do with preserving academic integrity. It’s CYA for the University against potential lawsuits by the students. There is not an inkling anywhere in that memo about any genuine concern for academic integrity. Nowhere. It is above all, I suppose, an issue of the faculty. We set up the programs, we run the programs, we perform the instructions, we perform the evaluation, it is in our great interest to make sure integrity is preserved. Some day I hope to address somebody in this University about faculty and academic integrity, but we’ll just focus on students for now. There are two handouts: one that you should have picked up on the table, which is a two-sided handout listing what is termed forms of academic integrity violations, which neither Diaz nor Moscowitz or Hill seem to care about. And unfortunately even the materials you received from the UFS talk about cheating and plagiarism. Well, there is a lot more than that going on out there; if you want to lump it all under cheating go ahead, but I’ll be making the reference to that list because of the silliness of the Diaz memo. The other handout is a one page, which gives my e-mail address and a couple of websites. If you want the URLs, send me an e-mail and I’ll send back those web sites in the e-mail. Tremendous amount of material on plagiarism that I’ve gathered over the years, how to do it, all the sites that your students go to to pick up the papers and sites that you can use to go and find out that they picked up the papers. I know that the UFS leadership wants to have the University consider purchasing services but in my years of performing these types of unfortunately necessary investigations, I found that with a variety of free services you can detect just about…let’s put it this way, for every student you think has possibly plagiarized there is a free service that will probably confirm your suspicion. And then the other document is our link to the comprehensive program on academic integrity, which we were told is now on hold. Vice President Mirrer sent our President, Eduardo Marti, the go ahead. She says, “we don’t see anything wrong with it, go ahead with it,” and then a half hour later after he made the decision to go ahead, he spent that half hour with the Vice Chancellor Schaffer and he decided “no, we’re on hold again.” So rather than have a program that will only have to be adjusted, wait and see what they come up with. Well, let me tell you what we came up with.

Our primary intention was keeping it confined to where it is right now. 90% of these cases are handled just between the offender and the instructor. That’s the person who detects it and in most cases it could be settled right there and then when it happens. Should the Diaz memo become the guiding light if the University, sorry, you can do nothing on your own. Any kind of penalty whatsoever is going to have to be reviewed by somebody, and if you look at the Diaz memo carefully anything that involves “a factual claim,” I guess it means kind of like it’s observable by other people than the instructor, must be processed through the Disciplinary Committee, and that involves the right of confrontation of the accuser and Legal Counsel. Faculty who see somebody drop a cheat sheet on the floor are going to say, “Is that yours? / No it isn’t / OK, I’ll just throw it in the wastepaper basket.” They’re not going to want to go through that process and students will learn faster than any other lesson that they learned from this University that it isn’t being enforced. Give it a couple of years and they will know what they can get away with. The Diaz memo says that if you think it’s plagiarism you submit that to the Office of Academic Affairs and the officer in charge of academic affairs will tell you whether or not it is a violation subject to your academic judgment versus one that involves cheating. Now if somebody gets a paper from a web site, is that a factual kind of thing or is it academic judgment? If they took it from the web site then I might say to put it through the disciplinary process because it’s factual. This list of infractions I’ve got distinguished with a legend showing what might be, according to Diaz, a factual kind of an incident versus and academic judgment, and then one or two that I don’t know which it is; it’s probably both. And in one way of looking at it they’re all factual. If I say, “hey, this sounds like John Locke’s interpretation to me and you didn’t give him any credit,” then I go to the text of Locke and isn’t that a fact? I check this, I check this, I say, “look here, look there,” I don’t have to be the only one involved in making this review. So this Diaz memo wanted to give some little bit of leeway to stopping everything from going through the disciplinary process realizing how onerous that would be. It only succeeds with the slight of hand of his pretended distinction between a fact and an academic judgment. If you want to do that you could play that game, you could jam it all through disciplinary if you want, but one of the important things about this handout that’s two pages is that there are a lot of things that they can do out there. Look at that! And it doesn’t look like just straight old cheating, neither is it all just straight old plagiarism. Some of them are a little bit of one and a little bit of the other at the same time and the Diaz memo says you can’t treat them both ways at once. Why? Because of legal exposure, not because it isn’t involving both at once but because of legal exposure. You get somebody plagiarizing, OK, you can impose a penalty on that. You get somebody selling those papers inside your academic environment, your campus, I think that’s more than plagiarism; promoting it is a disciplinary matter. So you can blur the lines. Everything gets reviewed by either the Director or Vice President, Dean of Student Affairs, the Dean or the Chief Academic Officer of the Campus, which is just what they wanted to do, I assure you. Two weeks to go in the semester, the final quiz before the final exam, how fast are they going to review that whole thing so that you can get your grades in? And if we had every suspected case being referred to those offices they’d do nothing else. They’d have to hire additional people to make these judgments of fact. I was very happy that it wasn’t promoted and in large ignored, because that’s what I think it should be, ignored.

Bottom line, the question that Susan wanted me to address is, “should there be a University-wide policy of any kind and how uniform should it be?” I’ve got this outline because, like I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and there are degrees of uniformity. I’ll tell you upfront, I think maybe the University could put out a set of guidelines for people to follow, definitely could put out programs of support services that help faculty to enforce and define, and proactive strategies to discourage violations of academic integrity, but if it dares to get into the areas of specifying what must be done that is where the horror lies.

So let’s go through this: First, uniformity of approach. What does this mean? That there would be one approach involving both the process and the sanctions that would spread across the University as a whole, spread across each college, each department, and even the instructors within a department. If you find somebody doing a particular act in one course, do you have to have the same penalty and approach to it as another student in another course you teach doing the same kind of violation? I don’t think that’s an obvious yes or no; you would say, “Well, it depends on other factors that are involved.” Maybe this student I have warned three times and I want to do something about it now, and this student comes from a foreign country and maybe I think he or she didn’t really understand. I confess, for plagiarism on a paper I have done nothing but a warning, I have given a zero grade, and I failed a person for a course. Do I think I was being unfair because I was being un-uniform? No. There were circumstances involved. How is the University ever going to come up with a policy that’s going to specify uniformity and yet allow me to make those kinds of judgments? I don’t think you can. So the more it gets into this it’s just going to be a mess, which, when it comes down as a burden on our shoulders, sorry to say, most of us are going to ignore it, and that will be the pity for everybody involved, particularly the hard working students who will see others can get away with violations.

University wide uniformity: is that both the process by which these infractions will be dealt with and the sanctions for them as well? In favor of this is the idea of the integrated University and uniformity and students being acculturated to one process wherever they go. OK. And there is the protection of the institution against legal liability. Fine. But opposed to it, as I’ve already indicated, is the great variety of circumstances, situations, and the kind of institutions that we have. The particular process that they would like to make uniform being the Diaz process is a horror for reasons I’ve already indicated.  The uniformity should not extend beyond insistence that there be a process of appeals and reviews for all actions taken to sanction the student. That I think is all that the law requires. So at Queensborough we came up with this, which is pretty much the case at LaGuardia. You catch somebody with any of these infractions, the instructor and the student work out what’s going to be done. The student signs a form saying I agree to it or the student can ask for a review. You know now every academic department must form a committee to review a grade. That’s what will be done. That committee will review the grade or whatever the sanction the instructor is imposing. Student accepts, it stops right there, just as it is now. If the student wants to appeal further than that, there is a due process now, then the Chief Academic Officer may review that the process was observed but cannot overturn the decision of either the instructor or the committee that reviewed the grade, only to ensure due process because that’s what that level of the review is for; not to deal with the substance but the process. And if the student still doesn’t like the outcome can appeal to the President, who again can’t overturn the decision but just make sure that the process by which the student had a right of appeal was observed. And that’s how most of the cases will end, except for this. And the reason for it all is that right now when that’s done that’s the end of it, but the same person who committed the infraction in one department may have done it two or three times elsewhere, and you don’t want them cheating their way to a degree from your institution. So because they’ve signed the agreement, they’ve accepted it, a copy of this gets sent to whoever’s in charge of student affairs and it goes into a file. Some officer at that office calls the person in and says, “Look you’ve committed a serious infraction. One more of these and you could be removed from this institution.” The person’s been warned. Now the second time it occurs in another department later in the semester, the same department, wherever, again the process is observed and the second report goes. When you’ve got two reports and the college has a policy that more than one leads to a disciplinary action, suspension or expulsion, when it gets to the disciplinary process you don’t even need to go through having the attorney cross examine you because you’ve got in the file the two signed agreements where the violator already confessed, they’ve said “I’ve done it, I’ve done it two times.” So it simplifies the procedure, observes article 15 of the Board of Trustees Bylaws, disciplinary actions, and the institution can have a process for dealing with academic integrity violations which pretty much keeps it the way it is now but tracks multiple offenders and can take appropriate action against them. Any offence committed by anyone can be referred to the disciplinary process because of additional factors. Maybe you catch one person cheating but this person had threatened the other one with the use of force; that’s disciplinary. Or maybe the person was selling papers in addition to using them; that goes through a disciplinary. So a case that can be handled by the instructor as an academic integrity violation can also be referred to the disciplinary process. To recommend to the colleges that they have a process that observes due process is as far as I think the University should go. Going deeper into what’s actually going to take place gets them into an area I don’t think they want to be in and it will just put off people. So wherever possible we should confine what’s to be done as it is now, as something to be handled by the instructor and the person making the violation.

As to sanctions, uniformity of sanctions, I’ve already pointed out that the same kind of violation, at least nominally it looks like it’s the same, maybe the sanction for it is to be distinguished through the other circumstances, and no uniform policy is going to be able to possibly get into all of those circumstances that could arise. As long as due process is addressed in the process at the campus level you don’t have to insist on uniformity of sanctions. You probably want to have a college-wide uniformity because you don’t want one department treating infractions differently than another. Why? Because the student might say, “Hey look, in that department the chairperson made a decision, in this department it’s a committee doing the reviewing.” OK, let them understand that there is a uniform process to be observed but let the college decide what it is. At our campus the chairpeople who had been doing things differently decided that they should do things uniformly and they made a decision how they wanted to handle the cases. Within a department you don’t want one instructor handling things differently than another instructor, so the department can say to the instructors, “Look, you all have to decide what you’re going to do, you have to put a notice in your syllabus some place and observe it,” but not telling the instructors exactly what it is because instructors who teach in different situations, different types of subject matter might have good reasons why they want to have different types of sanctions. Also a reason why one department might want to deal with one kind of an infraction differently than another: there are so many different types of academic programs. Departments know best how the pedagogic structure is set up in those programs, the importance of different kinds of assignments, and therefore the relative weight to be given to different types of sanctions. I wouldn’t want the University saying, “No department may do this or that.” Within a department, within the individual instructional program of the single faculty member, you’d probably want out of appeal to fairness that that faculty member have a common process for dealing with these things.

Scope: Will the policies on academic integrity cover all areas related to academic integrity or only cheating and plagiarism? I said I’m not going to fight over these terms. I know the documents say cheating and plagiarism but I gave you out a document from the University of Delaware. It was influenced by the Center for Academic Integrity, a nationwide organization, and it spells out fabrications and other types of misconduct that aren’t in their definition cheating or plagiarism. The definitions are there on the handout; everybody saw them? So I think if there is going to be anything done about academic integrity it should cover the wide range of things, not just cheating and plagiarism, unless you consider everything cheating; then fine. Jurisdiction, this is important: Where should the primary jurisdiction for dealing with violations be? You know already from what I’ve said I think it’s the faculty member, after the faculty member the department, after the department the college Office of Student Affairs. It should proceed up the ladder that way. According to the Diaz memo it goes directly to the Office of Student Affairs or Academic Affairs. It’s taken away from the instructor and the department. I think that’s a big mistake. Comprehensiveness: I think any effective program that really cares about academic integrity will be more than just a policy on how to process the infraction and a program will involve trying to define it clearly, educate people what it’s about, give faculty developments so that they understand what they can do proactively to minimize the temptations. And last, the student assessment of the whole process and the institutional assessment of the process: Is it working or isn’t it working? What more can be done? The current practices, well, I think Karen said there are a variety of things going on, right? I like LaGuardia’s because it was so much like what we were proposing, and now comes the University maybe trying to have a uniform practice but don’t know what exactly they’re intending by it. The distinction of an academic integrity violation from a disciplinary violation is an important one and the Diaz memo kind of glosses it. It treats them as being different because of fact versus academic judgment and I don’t think that’s right at all. I think the wide range of things that are listed under violations of academic integrity that’s what they are, and it’s got nothing to do with facts or academic judgment. So I think that distinction is just misguided.

What’s to be done to educate the students? There’s a great deal that could be done. As you heard Barbara say, a lot of them will say, and I think this is kind of legitimate, “I didn’t know.” They could come from high schools that nobody cared and they could have a few professors who didn’t care, and almost entirely legitimate is “I didn’t really know that.” Now the fellow who plagiarized tremendously, I mean he even used first person pronouns and said he had kids and he wasn’t married, it’s pretty obvious, he came from Nigeria only 18 months before. He really didn’t know. I said, “No, you’re not allowed to do that here.” Here’s how you should have handled it. So I made him redo the assignment. To another person I said, “You knew, I told you, and you get a zero for this.” And then another one I’d warned twice failed the course. A group I found in collusion passing around the papers and I threatened them with putting them through the disciplinary process saying I could have them kicked out of the college. They said, “Thank you for the F, thank you very much,” and that was that. I think they learned that they shouldn’t do that. So common practices are wide ranging. Faculty resources I think are a very important thing. I know that the measure before you tonight calls for our asking for a task force to look into a variety of things. One of them is that the program be comprehensive. Very Good. Another is that the University purchase the services of these engine software programs to go out and detect sources of certain texts. I already indicated to you I don’t think that that’s entirely necessary. It is not hurtful however and if the University really wants to help us they can do a variety of things in terms of educating faculty development support proactive strategies, and if they wanted to provide one or two of these services it wouldn’t hurt. But as I said, I think 90% of all the cases you suspect of being a case of plagiarism, you could probably use a free service to detect it. 

Chair: Thank you so much. Several people want to comment. I want to say that the task force on academic integrity promised me a draft, and I hope to have it by the time of the conference so you can go over it and tear it apart and make it better.  

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – Thank you, Professor Pecorino. I actually would approve if CUNY would adopt exactly the proposal that you gave as a CUNY wide proposal. But I’d like to take issue with one comment that fortunately the Diaz memo is being ignored. No, it is not. I’d like to read the text of a letter sent to us March 4, 2003, so that’s three weeks ago: “ The memorandum dated June 16, 1995 remains the legal position of the University.” Let me read the next two sentences because I couldn’t believe it. This is from Frederick Schaffer, the Vice Council of the General Council of CUNY: “The memorandum concludes that in situations where a faculty member has determined -  not a faculty member suspects - that cheating has occurred the matter should be referred to the chief Student Affairs Office to commence a disciplinary proceeding, and that pending the outcome of that proceeding the grade be held in advance.” So the first sentence is “the faculty member has determined,” then the second sentence reads “the determination as to whether cheating occurred should be the responsibility of a disciplinary panel, not the Chief Student Affairs Officer.” So the official policy of the University is that the cases where a faculty member has determined that cheating has occurred the determination of cheating has been made by someone else. Furthermore, on some campuses the Chief Student Affairs Officer has not brought a case to the disciplinary proceeding in five years. The Chief Student Affairs Officer “resolves it” by putting pressure on the faculty member to change their view that cheating has occurred. This is the worst of all possible configurations. Yes, we need a CUNY wide policy.  

Professor Tananbaum (History, Lehman College) – I’d like to ask Barbara if you could give us a sense of who the students were that were being referred to you on plagiarism. They sounded like 17-18 year old freshmen typically. / Barbara More - No. / That’s why I’m asking, you talked about them being in the habit of lying to their parents to avoid confrontation. Were they in fact more likely to be directly out of High School or were they more 25-30 year old students who were working full-time and part-time and therefore had time crunches rather than other problems or were they all across the board? / Barbara Moore – All across the board. There were young students, and students that were in their last semester at Queens. I did this with three groups over three semesters. One group had four graduating seniors out of the seven in the group, and graduating seniors of a variety of ages. / Professor Tananbaum – A comment based on Phil’s presentation. I agree with what you say that students have to be treated differently. An 18 year old right out of High School shouldn’t be treated the same way as a Master’s student writing an essay in which you discover plagiarism. Obviously, one holds the latter to a much higher standard. I was concerned early on in your presentation when you talked about the faculty member handling it that you could get a situation where the student basically tries it in each course because there is no central registry. So I like what you said about a form and everything, and in fact it does go beyond the faculty member if it’s reported some place. But if I’m a student why would I sign a second one of those forms, even if you caught me with my pants down? Why am I going to sign that form a second time, why not fight it with everything I’ve got? / Professor Pecorino – I don’t know why Nixon didn’t destroy the tapes. / Professor Tananbaum – Or Clinton the blue dress. / Professor Pecorino – I can assure you that if this procedure is in effect some students will sign the form a second time. 

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – I like your proposal, Phil, except – and I found interesting, Alfred, that you support it and yet your comments are reasons why you wouldn’t support it – my concern is that if that policy that you’re talking about were in effect it depends on administrators at colleges wanting to follow up on these issues, and my experience and Alfred’s is that the administration wants to in most campuses ignore, make it go away, pretend there is no cheating. And also, you want to retain students, you want to keep your enrollment up. So my fear is that students will sign it two, three, four, five, six times, no one will ever go through it, the paperwork will be enormous, it will be dumped in some file cabinet and the students will learn “just sign it, nothing will happen.” The other question I have is my concern about he F grade policy, which I think it’s time to revisit and I wonder how the body feels about this. If you remember when Stanley Fink was a member of the Board of Trustees he said that if he hadn’t gotten an F at Brooklyn College or if he had been able to retake the courses …that that F had kept him out of medical school and he wanted to change the policy because of that. So right now we have this F grade policy where the F grade is not the worst grade you can give a student. A D or D- is the worst grade because now an F can be retaken and if the student gets a C or higher only the higher grade is computed in the GPA. So often students who you give a D to will beg for an F grade and the F grade doesn’t indicate cheating or plagiarism. It could be a student who really tried hard all semester and just couldn’t get the stuff learned well enough to pass the course. A part of it is grading. But what about the issue of administrative? / Professor Pecorino – I’ll get to that. I’ll give them an F. I put my students’ grades on a website and they can see everybody’s grade; it’s by the last four digits. / Professor Kaplowitz – That’s against the law. / Professor Pecorino – No, the last four digits aren’t. / Professor Kaplowitz – And what if it’s in alphabetical order. / Professor Pecorino – No, it’s not in alphabetical order. / Professor Kaplowitz – It’s random? OK. / Professor Pecorino – Also, when they commit an infraction I put a question mark. So now they see somebody in this class violated academic integrity and that’s the reason for the F. Remember I said I’m in support of a program, not a policy dealing with how we’re going to handle the infractions, and in a program you need institutional commitment. So if the administration doesn’t follow through that says that you don’t have a program with institutional commitment. Why would the administration want to follow through, even with the CYA? When that first infraction takes place they meet with the student, have this discussion. Why? They want to minimize any more occurrences, and you’re most likely to have repeat offenses. So if you get to them after the first offense you’re going to reduce the likelihood of subsequent incidences. But if you look at the program that we developed it says that the Chief Office of Student Affairs must report every year to our Academic Senate on the number of cases being reported so that we can track it. They’re not going to pile up there and nothing’s going to be done, they’re not going to be just locked away in a drawer. A report has to be filed because we have to know what we can do to improve our program to reduce the number of cases being reported each year other than telling faculty “don’t report them” or ripping up the forms. So you’re right, it’s a program. It’s institutional commitment if you really want to make it work. The Diaz memo is a process, that’s to protect the institution and that’s about it. / Professor Kaplowitz – Thank you. I agree with you about everything you said. I just am more cynical.  

Professor Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – At least talking to the students that were in the groups that I ran it seemed that often students said, “I wish the teacher had just handled it with me and had not reported it to the Dean of Students.” There was an extra step of embarrassment and shame and feeling of getting into trouble when it went the extra step. Even if the Dean of Students either put them in my group or gave them some community service or asked them to write a paper about it, it still was an extra step that made them somewhat more painfully aware of what they had done. And I think that there is some good in that.  

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – I would like to add my voice about the danger of getting the administration involved in this process because most of the time they try to cover it. Begging your indulgence, let me tell you something that happened this year. I was coordinating the review of some proposals. One of the proposals I had sent to a referee, then the referee sent something back to me saying “Doesn’t this look very similar to that?” What had happened was that the faculty member had picked up a paragraph of eight lines without a change and put it in his proposal. Then you know, following the rules of the University of course we had to go through the process of the Chief Academic Officer etc. Well, it went to the Chief Academic Officer with the two copies and I thought that was a foregone conclusion. Surprise. Two weeks later it came back saying this happened because one of the students of the professor happened to have been working on the computer of the professor and then he opened up the web site of that other paper and somehow that paragraph migrated from one to the other. When I was a kid there was a story of the dog ate my paper. I felt that this was something very similar. So I think I agree with what everybody is saying that the more it’s kept away from the administrators the better off we are. / Professor Pecorino – And with the program that we put together at Queensborough the only role the administration plays, other than observing due process, is to track the multiple offences. They make no decisions whether or not the action took place. / Professor Manassah – I heard that and I completely support you on that.  

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – One of the concerns I have is how adjunct faculty are supposed to interact with this system. These people are paid on an hourly basis, except for office hours do not have the time outside of that, and if they’re involved in a hearing process obviously they don’t have time. So the proposals that are being floated, do they involve time outside the normal classroom for the adjunct faculty, would it be a burden for them, because they have other places to go to, they’re not full-timers after all. Can either of you comment on how this plays out? /  Professor Pecorino – Right now when an adjunct faculty gives a grade to a student and the student wants that grader reviewed the department has to conduct the review. So it’s no more than that. In the case of a flagrant violation that involved buying or selling a paper, some organized ring, some threat of force, “Let me see your paper or I’ll stab you” or something like that, then it would go through a disciplinary process and the faculty member would be obliged to attend the hearing. / Professor Philipp – Bingo. / Professor Pecorino – But that’s in the disciplinary case. I’m trying in my proposal to keep it all in the academic area where it wouldn’t be any different than right now except the report goes to the Office of Student Affairs for tracking purposes. / Professor Philipp – In one of the meetings of the executive administrators I asked an appropriate administrator that question and how it would be done with adjuncts and he said, “I have no idea.” 

Professor Donohue (Literature, Medgar Evers) – I just wanted to appreciate the remarks on behalf of adjuncts, being one myself. I just wanted to add what was perhaps the most difficult case, which is a paper that you know it’s not the student’s but you can’t prove it. In my experience I’ve gotten all sorts, at least one every year, every semester. The student has been submitting illiterate papers to be blunt and suddenly there is this paper which is absolutely sophisticated, learned, but there is no way to prove it and it’s not online. There are people on our campus who sell papers and I’ve gotten to recognize some of their styles after a while, but it is a difficult case. The one thing I’ll comment is that in my experience the way I handle it is I give specific enough assignments so that I can object to it on some sort of technical ground that it didn’t fulfill this or that requirement of the assignment. Just one further notice: in such cases when I’ve been wrong, when I’ve asked them to rewrite it I don’t hear again, they don’t come back, they don’t know what to do with the paper. And apparently if they got it from somebody that person is not willing to rewrite it or if they got it online. I just wanted to add that kind of problem into the mix. / Professor Pecorino – In thirty-two years I’ve only done this twice with opposite outcomes when I was in that situation, couldn’t detect the actual source. I don’t know why they agreed to it but I had two people sit down and I said, “You submitted this paper? You’re sure you did? Then write two paragraphs for me on this stuff.” And I don’t know why they agreed, but in one case it was clear this was not that person’s work and the other I was surprised, it probably was. And you suddenly discover a very bright student who’s very quiet in class. 

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – May I just add, I don’t know if the word will get around but I just started doing this two years ago, whenever students have to hand in a paper, the major paper, I then have them write in class a summary of it. And I often get blank blue books back because they haven’t even read what they downloaded or what they bought. / Professor Pecorino – And if you announce that ahead of time that’s what’s called the proactive strategy that’s going to discourage them in attempting it. / Professor Kaplowitz – And that’s what we want to do, deter. You could pay people to write that first draft and that second draft, but if right there in class they have to summarize the main points and the evidence they used to support them, the ones who wrote the paper can do it and the ones who didn’t can’t.  

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – Thanks for those two excellent reports. I agree with everything Phil said except the part about only the process can be reviewed. I think that infringes on the students’ right to appeal. I think they should be able to have a right to appeal both the content and the process. / Professor Pecorino – In the process they appeal to the committee of the department. They can review the judgment that was made. But beyond that level it’s just a review that the process was observed. / Professor Crain – I think that infringes on the student’s rights. / Professor Pecorino – OK. 

Professor Cooper (English, York College) – May I ask the Chair’s permission to speak? Thank you. I had asked permission to speak because I took retirement in January and so I’m really not here. I think that after all this is done we as a faculty would do well to initiate another process on our own. We’ve had very good suggestions here, I could give you a few of my own from long experience, but we might put together some kind of little pamphlet to help faculty to cope with these things so that we are not merely opposing the administration but that we are taking an initiative to provide faculty and students with something positive.  

Professor Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – I would like again to also reiterate that if teachers don’t feel strongly about that and convey this to their students and if they’re not willing to really talk to their students about it and confront them about violations then nothing will help. It has to be something that’s deeply felt and deeply believed in, and that deep belief has to be conveyed or students certainly won’t take it seriously.  

Professor Lewis (English, York College) – Two things. I think if you’re going to make a policy like this work it has to really end at the department. If you’re going to have any kind of serious review that’s being done by a Provost or somebody on that level then you’re going to scare away non-tenured people from reporting because they’re going to be more worried about getting reappointment or getting tenure than they are about catching people doing things illegally. And if you’re just having tenured people reporting, considering a lot of the 100 level courses are being taught by adjuncts in this University anyhow and there are all different degrees of security among those adjuncts, there is going to be a self-defeating…(switch tape) posting on every syllabus of what the different degrees of cheating or plagiarism are, what the policy is exactly. There has to be an understanding that there has to be some sort of review in certainly every introductory level syllabus about what constitutes cheating in that classroom and the teacher’s understanding of the penalties involved so that there is a sense of clarity all the way through. And I think what you can do is add another level of review within the department. I think the initial level of review and most of the incidents should be handled by the individual teacher. There has to be a much broader latitude to do that, and then I think it has to go to maybe a department disciplinary committee, and then from there it needs to be a review of that. The student could appeal to the full department and it can be taken up in a departmental meeting. If you send it beyond that to the Provost’s office it’s going to wind up in the wastepaper basket or you’re going to scare away most of the people who have to do the reporting.  

Professor Kaplowitz (English, The John Jay College of Criminal Justice) – Susan and I at the task force made a suggestion and I’m wondering what you think of this. To use as an example, right now on the CUNY home page you can go to sexual harassment, the policy is explained, then there’s a Q&A, you can abort and go back, then when you’re ready to take the test and you feel you know, you print out a certificate if you passed that shows that you passed, and some colleges require to do that. Using that model, we could have on the  CUNY home page, as we recommended, an explanation of the policy and issues of plagiarism and cheating, a Q&A, and then a test. A  faculty member has on the syllabus within the first three weeks that all the students in the class have to go to the website, which should be linked on every campus home page, study the issues, take the test, print out the certificate and hand it in to me by so and so date. And that means that all the students have been exposed to the issues, have studied them well enough to pass the test, and then they cannot say that they don’t know what cheating and plagiarism are. And they have the opportunity to learn on their own in the privacy of their computer, cubicle, wherever, and each faculty member doesn’t have to teach it all over again. What do you think of that approach? / Professor Pecorino – The Center for Academic Integrity that promotes both the academic integrity programs and honor codes recommends that kind of thing and in many colleges and universities they do have this sense of process where the student appropriates the material and makes a commitment. In our proposal at Queensborough they were going to sign saying that they have received the statement about academic integrity. We were going to require that every faculty member puts a statement in the syllabus saying, “I observe the policy, it is available on the website at …” So the student says I’ve read it once, at least signs that they had, they’d been notified again by the faculty member. But this is what I meant by that the University could provide resources, like establishing a website with a self-program and instruction and that kind of thing. All those things are possible, and according to the Senate that did the study the more of that you have it has a tendency to maintain or lower the incidence rate. 

Professor Moore (Student Personnel, Queens College) – I think it’s also important for the faculty member to teach it to the students and to talk to them about it so that it’s part of the class and the personal process between the faculty member and the student. It’s just another formality that could be dispensed with. So I think if you’re going to have that there should also be a personal statement by the instruction about their belief. 

Professor Lea Fridman (English, Kingsborough Community College) – I was curious about whether we had any data that clarified whether there’s more frequency of incidents of cheating in larger classes, where there is less personal contact, as opposed to seminars, where in some sense there is more of a dialogue kind of relationship going on. Do we have any sense about that? / Professor Pecorino – I don’t know, but if you send me an e-mail I’ll send you the places to go. / Professor Fridman – Because some of the comments that Barbara quoted had to do with this “the teacher doesn’t care” and it seems that that question of relationship and the sense that the student gets about to what extent the institution cares, to what extent the teacher is really involved in their own material and their connection to the material, the student’s connection to the material, all this plays a role. That’s why it seems to me that to handle this within a smaller community departmentally perhaps holds more potential.  

7B. Resolution on Peer Review of All University-Wide Allocations for Research Support and Equipment Purchase 

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – I have just a few minutes to tell you why I feel this is important. I may be breaking confidence here but I think it’s important. Recently, in the last two weeks, I came to know about something that probably most of you do not know. The University has decided to combine the science facilities at City College, at Lehman College, and at Hunter College in a new project that they submitted to the State under the name of SURF, which stands for Shared Use Research Facility. They submitted to the State a request close to $300 million in terms of capital budget that includes tens of millions of dollars in equipment. I have here a list of some of the equipment that has been requested. I know nothing about it. I don’t think anybody else in this room knows anything about it. This is one example that is very important. This is one reason why I feel that we have to speak up and speak up very quickly about this issue. Another issue that came recently to the surface: As some of you may know I chair the Faculty Advisory Council of the Research Foundation and one of the things that this faculty have been trying very hard to do has to do with the money that comes from the Research Foundation and what’s called the Centrally Allocated Budget (this is not the overhead recovery; I repeat, it has nothing to do with the overhead recovery; it has to do with some of the money, the 7.75% which is charged to the project, and some of which is used to support research at the University). It has been the tradition that it goes to the Office of Academic Affairs, which in turn dispenses it to people, sometimes with good judgment, many times with no judgment. One of the things that we have succeeded in doing was that the University Dean of Research, or I should say the previous University Dean of Research, who is himself a distinguished scientist and somebody who has seen how science is done properly in good universities, who understood that if we want to give credibility to this process so it doesn’t look like it’s a patronage system it was necessary to wind up creating a review system. We signed an agreement, he and I, with respect to that; you may find it in that material. Now, for whatever reason the University decided they wanted to dispense of that job or of the individual. I don’t know, we have heard all kinds of stories about it. However, the fact is that the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs went back and said, “Well, I had nothing to do with respect to that committee. This is a committee that the Dean of Research (who by the way was the proper authority in the University to enter into such and agreement), has made, so I don’t care.” The committee consisted of seven distinguished and very senior professors. So she went ahead, called the different people in the committee and told them “I don’t like it, I’m calling the committee off.” These are two instances that happened in the last two weeks that made me feel that it’s very important for this faculty to speak up.  

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – In the discussion prior to tonight’s meeting we’ve been discussing the general applicability of this motion. One of my concerns was of course the provision of start-up funds, which cannot be distributed by peer review because the person applying for a new position is hardly going to be willing to go through a peer review process; they’ll just go to another University. And I’m very pleased that the revised motion has the appropriate clause. I have stated that I would support this motion if it were in and I will follow through on that. At the same time, I have to say that there are a number of faculty in my own discipline who have read this as a result of the controversy that came about and have not been convinced. I think that this motion coming out of this body without their full support will be weaker and that would be sad. I had during the discussion promised to read a statement by the chair of Chemistry at Hunter College and I have to fulfill that promise. 

“This is an ill conceived idea as presented.  There are other goals such as building specific areas, infrastructure, etc. that need to be addressed, not just a specific proposal. The PSC-CUNY program does not work in the opinion of many research active scientists—too little money and it seems to be distributed on the communist theory that everyone is equal.  As demonstrated by those who are successful in getting competitive grants, not all research is equal and not all research deserved equal support.  Further, overhead funds that are given to provide facilities needed support to research projects—they are not some boon to the University to be distributed by writing further grant proposals.  I already wrote my competitive proposal, and I fully expect some of the over $100,000 in overhead to support that project by such things as providing air conditioners, administrative support, etc.  I would definitely vote no on this proposal. 

Signed,

Dixie J. Goss” 

I only read this because one, I promised to read it; two, I point out that in a purely political sense in terms of support a lot of work has to be done, and it would be better had this gone through the appropriate disciplinary committees and gotten their support before it came to the floor. The disciplinary committees still may act and go in favor or against this motion, and if they do go against it - it’s not under my control certainly, I’m not a chair of any disciplinary committee at the moment - then it would weaken it. That would be sad given the events that you put out. So I think there is an argument for moving this to table for a month so that the disciplinary committees can be consulted, even though, as I have said, I had promised to support it with this language and I do. 

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – Just a clarification: I think today what I found out by some e-mail that I received was that different people were receiving different forms of the resolutions and many people may not have received some of the attachments and what have you. As a consequence, let me also read something that I received at 5:40 PM. This is from the executive officers of the Graduate School. It says: 

“Dear Jamal, we appreciate the opportunity to see the revised motion concerning the resolution for peer review. We are pleased to see that the issue of start-up funds are specifically excluded and that the protocol between the FAC chair and the University Dean for Research of 7/29/02 is to be used as a template.”  

And this is signed by the Executive Officer of Biology and the Executive Officer of Physics, given the fact that the others have left by the time I managed to get here. But they promised that they were going to communicate that information to the others. I think part of the confusion was that different people have seen different versions of the resolution. 

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center) – The one thing that might be clearer to those of us who are not in the sciences is that a number of faculty members in the committee agreed with the Dean for Research on a certain protocol. There is precious little faculty governance at this University and the administration ought not to be permitted to forswear an agreement properly entered into. Whatever signals that is worth the faculty’s support. So I support the motion as presented. Thank you.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island and The Graduate School and University Center) – Also from a non-scientific point of view but from the point of view of governance I support this and I hope everyone will, with the proviso that Jamal has explained to these chairpeople who may have received earlier versions what the basic issues are. I think if some of them had heard what you reported this evening it might have made some difference. I think it’s rather important that this body make it very clear repeatedly that it is not thrilled with decisions made in an office by two people who have no experience in the disciplines. We have gone through this in the past in this University. I don’t understand why these administrations always reinvent the wheel but they don’t seem to learn from history. They cannot do academic program planning on 80^th street. There are two people there in that Academic Affairs Office who may have been in the classroom in the last fifteen years. And it’s just absurd that this continues to go on, particularly since it’s the faculty that generates all this research overhead money. 

Professor Rodriguez (Hunter College) – I’ve had several faculty members contact me about the earlier version of this resolution today and there was a great deal of concern around the start-up funds issue that Manfred raised earlier and the lack of sufficient information in terms of some of the points raised in the resolution. I would like to introduce the motion to table this resolution for further discussion in the disciplinary committees and have it brought to the UFS next month. Thank you.  

Professor Manassah (Electrical Engineering, City College) – I just want to make sure that the person who’s suggesting the tabling understands what tabling means.  

Chair – [Motion is ruled out of order since Prof. Rodriquez is not a senator.] Does anyone else want to speak for or against this? The original motion is on the floor. It is proposed by the Executive Committee. It does not need a second, although we did get a second.  

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) –When the maker of the motion said the next month maybe he just wants to postpone it to the next month. So if the maker of the motion was unaware of that would he accept it?  

Unidentified – According to Robert’s Rules, there are two kinds of motions to table, one is definite and one is indefinite. This one is definite, so it doesn’t require a vote to take it off the table. It happens automatically.  

Chair – I see. But we need a two thirds vote. But it has to be members, not governance leaders or alternates unless you’re taking someone’s place. Those people who vote to table please raise your hands: Eleven. How many vote against tabling: Thirty. Abstentions for tabling please raise your hands: Seven. The motion failed to table. Is there a second to call the question? There is a second from Bill Crain. Those in favor of calling the question raise your hands. Those opposed. Abstentions. Those voting for the resolutions please raise your hands: Forty-nine. Those against: Two. Abstentions: Four. The resolution passes.