MINUTES OF THE THREE
HUNDRED AND FOURTEENTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY
OF NEW YORK
November 1, 2005
The meeting was
called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:30 p.m. in Room 9206/07 at the Graduate School
and University Center.
79 voting members were present.
Baruch: Present – Hill,
Martell, Pollard, and Vora. Absent – Freedman, Myers
and Smith. Vacancies – 2. BMCC: Present – Agwu,
Belknap, Friedman, Martin, and Rani, Absent – Price
and Roy. Bronx CC:
Present – Asimakopoulos and Skinner. Absent –
Alozie and Durante. Brooklyn:
Present – Antoniello, Bell,
Jacobson, Rodman, Shapiro, and Tobey.
Absent – Bloomfield, Cunningham, Morawski, Viscusi,
and Wills. CCNY: Present – Crain, Daglish and
Leonard. Absent – Sank. Vacancies – 5. CSI: Present – Cooper, Farkouh, Klibaner, Levine, Petratos, Yousef and Alternate
Schumann. CUNY Law
School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancies – 1. Graduate
School: Present –
Baumrin, Nolan, and Alternate Burke.
Absent – King, Lerner, and Orenstein. Vacancy – 1. Hostos CC: Present – August, Falcon
and Alternate Czarnocha. Vacancies - 3. Hunter: Present – Doyle, Finder, Kaye,
and Matthews. Absent – Friedman, Guzzetta, Krishnamachari, McCormick, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John Jay: Present – Brugnola,
Crossman, Kaplowitz, Kubic, Romero, and Alternate
Soto-Fernandez. Absent – Caldwell. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart,
Farrell, Galvin, O’Malley, and Ruoff. Absent – Hume. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson,
Mettler, Rushing, Shean, and Alternate
Green-Anderson. Absent
– Lerman. Lehman: Present
– Kolb, Mineka, Philipp, and Wilder. Absent –
Aronowitz, and Jervis. Medgar Evers:
Present – Barker, Hastick and Alternate Stewart. Absent – Daly, and Donohue. NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Dreyer,
Horelick, Hounion, Richardson,
and Alternates Matloff, and Pinto. Absent
– Karthikeyan. Queens: Present – Bird, Gonzalez, Moore, and Savage. Absent
– Brody, Casco, Habib, Tse, and Zevin. Vacancies – 2. Queensborough
CC: Present – Barbanel, Jacobowitz,
Pecorino, and Alternate Dahbany-Miraglia.
Absent – Hest, and Weiss. Vacancies – 1. York: Present – Divale,
Frank, and Rosenthal. Absent
– Lewis.
Chancellor Goldstein, Executive Vice
Chancellor Botman, Vice Chancellor Schaffer and
Executive Assistant Cura attended. Professor Bernard Sohmer attended.
Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Burke
(GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCTC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Leonhard (CCNY),
Levine (CSI), Martell (Baruch), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino (QCC), Savage
(Queens), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle,
Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary
Blanchard were also present.
I. Approval of
the Agenda: Item III. B. was
removed. Senator Crain requested under
new business the consideration of a resolution on tuition. The agenda, as amended, was adopted.
II.
Approval of the Minutes of September, 2005: Senator Dalgilish
corrected page 37, line 5 to read, “have this Patriot Act overview of faculty,
so that the…” The Minutes were adopted
as corrected.
III.
Reports: (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)
A. Chair.
B. Chancellor Goldstein.
C. Representatives to Board Committees.
IV.
Old Business:
A. Update on the Proposed Online BA Degree. There was a straw vote 27-7-3 that the UFS
would not be a part of the Online degree. The full discussion is Recorded
in Reports & Deliberations)
B. Update on Development of a Computer User
Policy, and Privacy Concerns. (Recorded
in Reports & Deliberations)
V. NewBusiness:
A resolution about tuition was proposed by Professor Crain. It was referred to the Council of Faculty
Governance Leaders since a quorum was not present.
There being
no further business the meeting was adjourned at 9:00 p.m.
Respectfully submitted,
Bill Phipps
Executive Director
REPORTS AND DELIBERATIONS
OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND FOURTEENTH PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY
SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY
OF NEW YORK
November 1, 2005
[Please note that several agenda items were taken out of
order.]
III. Reports:
A. Chair.
I want to announce the conference,
“Institutional Autonomy, Why Academic Freedom is Imperiled and What To Do About
It,” on Friday, November 11 at John Jay, Roger Bowen, General Secretary of the
AAUP is speaking. It’s a great honor
that he is coming. We will then have break-out groups on academic freedom on
campus; political appointees in the University, chaired by Joan Tronto and
Sandi Cooper, that’s going to be a hot one; lack of a privacy policy; the
Solomon Amendment, chaired by Dan Pinello, John Jay
and Ken Sherrill, Hunter; the Student Bill of Rights, Academic Bill of Rights,
there will be somebody from NYPIRG chairing and Bill Friedheim. Dean Savage is going to do a presentation also
about relevant issues on the faculty survey. So sign up; we have quite a good
number, but we could use a few more.
Just two announcements: there has been a description
of the CUNY Teacher Academy
that Ann Cohen, the new Dean of Education in Health Professions, is chairing.
If you’re interested in that description, let me know, and I’ll get it to you.
Maybe I should just e-mail it to all of you.
Our representative on it is Laurel Cooley from Brooklyn College,
and she’s been doing a smashing job. Also, you got a lot of emails last week on
the Enterprise Initiative and all the tech fee. I’m
compiling a list of all of the tech fee faculty members on various campuses. If
you want to know more about the EI let me know.
It went through the IT Committee last Friday. Some were approved, some were not. Our
representative on the IT Committee is Bonnie Nelson of John Jay, who is also
doing a smashing job.
Also, I wrote a letter in support of the SUNY
Council of Community Colleges supporting their resolution opposing the Academic
Bill of Rights after consulting with the Executive Committee. They are very grateful for our support.
IV. Old Business:
B. Update on Development of a Computer User Policy, and Privacy
Concerns.
Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate
School) – As it were already informed at the last meeting, we were very
disturbed about the draft, and finally we put together some pieces of paper and
some ideas.Phil drafted the principal piece of paper,
and we confronted the Task Force on Friday, a week and a half ago. We were not
happy, and we were not going to agree to the materials that were distributed to
us. And we said that we would take some steps to short-circuit this process if
there wasn’t some movement, and then there was a lot of back and forth, some
acrimonious discussion, and after an hour and a half of getting nowhere, we
left. They said to us they reviewed 80 programs, policies for the computer use
privacy issue, and they all were just like what they gave us, when we had
reviewed no policies; I actually reviewed one; it is different. Bill Phipps was
able to ferret out the Columbia
policy, which was not like what they said, and the Penn policy, which was not
like what they said, and so we gave that to them and the Vice Chancellor averred
that he thought the Penn policy was a step in the right direction. It is a step
in the right direction that is completely different than what they gave us
before, and we’re now in something like a waltz. We’ll have much more to report
to you later, but at the present stage the Penn policy involves the faculty in
the decision making process as to whether or not a faculty member’s privacy
will be invaded, and that’s where we are now. / Chair O’Malley – I liked it
that Vice Chancellor Schaffer proposed that a president would have to consult
with the Chair or the Vice Chair of the University Faculty Senate to decide
whether or not he should go forward in invading privacy: the President, the
Chair of the University Faculty Senate, plus Vice Chancellor Schaffer. We’re not quite sure about that
configuration, but the UFS was brought in, which I thought was a major step in
the right direction.
Chair O’Malley – Moving on to the proposed online BA
degree. My sense is that what we should do is have a conversation about this. I
will outline a few things and then we should have a conversation. Based on that the Executive Committee should vote whether or not we
go forward in appointing three people to the SPS Curriculum Committee for the
online degree. As you know, there is a CUNY Online Baccalaureate
Completer’s Degree that has been proposed, and there are people in the room
that know a lot more than I do, Bill Divale, York College,
and Phil Pecorino, Queensborough CC. We told Executive Vice Chancellor Botman
we cannot appoint anybody until we see a description. This is the description.
We emailed it to you, and we also have it in the back of the room. I wish it
were fuller or more descriptive. Some faculty feel very strongly against online
degrees, and some do not, so that is part of the discussion. I thought that the
majority of faculty were for the online degree if it
were done properly, but that may be an incorrect assumption. The letter of
intent is to go to CAPPR in January and the whole degree is to be up and running
by September. The curriculum must be approved by CAPPR, the BoT, and State
Ed. 300 students are to be admitted for
the fall. This will be a degree completer’s program; students will have done at
least 30 credits, and they have to do 30 credits residency requirement. My
sense is there are three advisory groups; correct me if I have this incorrect.
One advisory group is looking at general education; one advisory group is
looking at what a major or concentration might be, because, as you know, in the
School of Professional Studies degrees cannot be duplicating any degree given
by a campus; then there’s a third advisory committee that is looking at service
things, faculty development, counseling, those things. There would be nine
faculty on the Curriculum Committee if we appoint three. The same faculty who are in the advisory
groups and who have been part of a group called SCORE are developing the
curriculum, and in the Curriculum Committee passing the curriculum. I feel
uncomfortable with the same faculty designing the curriculum and then approving
it. I’ve also been told whom to appoint.
Three quite fine faculty, but I’ll be damned if I’ll be told by the Executive
Vice Chancellor whom I’m supposed to appoint.
The three faculty I’m supposed to appoint are
on the SCORE Committee. So that’s where
we are. / Unidentified –The Vice Chancellor gave you the names of whom to
appoint? / Chair O’Malley – Yes, they did, and then George Otte
did the same thing. Two of them are
here, and I consider them friends. There should be separate faculty devising
the curriculum from a Curriculum Committee of faculty who know something about
online education and general education.
Those would be the very best people to appoint. In addition, there is no compensation for
anybody who’s on the Curriculum Committee. Faculty are
supposed to do it above their 27 or 21 hours.
The Chancellor is talking about joint faculty appointments. He promised
Stefan a good number of joint appointments. However, faculty
who have joint appointments won’t get released from any courses they are
teaching on the campus. A faculty who holds a joint appointment would get
summer salary and teach in excess of 21 or 27 hours. That worries me. How can
this be an excellent degree if faculty are teaching
above their contractual unit? / Professor Kaplowitz (Vice Chair) – Just a
clarification that the Executive Vice Chancellor will be naming six faculty and
you three, and she could name the three that she wants you to name. / Chair
O’Malley – Yes, if we withdrew she would just appoint the three that she wants.
She’s already appointed the 6. I have their names. They’re all from the SCORE
committee.
Professor Bill Divale (York College)
– A couple of things. One is just a clarification point. I think that the thinking
is that these nine people, the three that come from this committee and the six
that the Chancellery knows or three from The Graduate Center. / Chair
O’Malley – No, The Graduate Center has decided not to participate. But also, if
you look at the Board resolution it doesn’t say that they’re supposed to
participate. / Professor Divale – The thing is, if
those nine people are really the governing committee of that college, they
probably will appoint different committees, because there’s going to be, like you
said, just too much work for nine people. / Chair – But why can’t there be a
description of how this thing is going to work? / Professor Divale
– Actually, what’s happening is that we’re working on it right now. I’m on the upper division committee, and
we’ve just recently decided on the concentration and now we have to break it
down. The reason that they’re doing
joint appointments with summer salary rather than release time is that the
Presidents of the colleges don’t want their faculty to be taken off their
campuses, and it might be possible for a course to be offered both to campus
students as well as the online. / Chair – That might be tricky actually in
terms of the Board policy. / Professor Divale – The
other thing, in terms of the concentration, yesterday we finally decided that
the concentration is going to be in communication and culture. / Chair – And we
do not have that any place in CUNY? / Professor Divale
– No. And within that there will be probably three tracks for September; that
we haven’t worked out yet, but it will all be multi-disciplinary and not
duplicating. / Chair – The reason why the Presidents don’t want this is that
they’re being judged on the percentage of the courses taught by full-time
faculty, so they don’t want faculty teaching elsewhere because that would hurt
their performance evaluation. But if faculty teach on
overload, you would think that would hurt their teaching on the campus. Faculty
should come to the mike. Let’s have a
conversation about this.
Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and
Physics, College of Staten Island) – At the last meeting you delivered a very
eloquent talk on the importance of multi-disciplinary research in CUNY and
every place else, and I had a sense of déjà vu because I remember a committee
that you and I served on 17 or 18 years ago, a committee that looked at
science, engineering, technology and mathematics, and you gave the identical
talk then and it was just as eloquent and I supported you just as much then as
I do now, and that committee made some specific recommendations, for example on
the importance of having joint appointments where faculty doing interdisciplinary
work are appointed to two or more departments. That was one of many
recommendations and at the time what happened to that report is the Chancellor
did not believe in joint appointments and so basically the proposal went no
place. Well, you are now the Chancellor. Why don’t you pull out that report and
do what we said? / Chancellor Goldstein – Al, let me make it easy for you
because I’ll invoke another invariance principle, and that I do believe in
joint appointments and I’m going to make that happen. We’re going to start with
the Graduate School. I think, as you know, and this
is for another time because I would need a block of time to talk about this and
it’s still in its nascent stage of development, but we are going to make a very
serious effort to look at how we conduct ourselves in graduate level science at
the University, and you and I have had discussions about this. I think one of
the things that we must start with is to give opportunities for our faculty to
have real joint appointments between the Graduate School
and a campus, and that’s the way we’re going to start. Stefan Baumrin, who I
think is sleeping because he has probably heard me wax ineloquently about this
subject before, put an idea in my head which I must say, and I told you,
Stefan, at the time, was a burst of brightness that I hadn’t thought of before:
the School of Professional Studies needs to have a faculty and I think a lot of
what we can do is to start breaking the barriers that separate disciplines with
joint appointments. And now I’ll give you the third piece of this. So I’m
saying yes, yes, yes, I’m with you and this will get done. We have to just
think it through because I haven’t studied all of the personnel ramifications
of what joint appointments mean but it doesn’t seem to me like this is the
Manhattan Project; we should be able to move this forward. When I was talking
about the compact, and I don’t know if any of you were really listening
closely, what I would really like to do is to do just what you’re saying. The
emerging disciplines, and I think you would agree with this, certainly the
sciences – I know Manfred and I have talked about this, you and I have talked
about this, I’ve talked with a number of scientists in the University – are
truly interdisciplinary. I’ve often said tell me who the physicist is, tell me
who the computers scientist is, tell me who the mathematician is, those are
three easy ones, but you can use your imagination and look at other emerging
disciplines where there is truly an interdisciplinary component. We’re going to
have to find a way to fill the vacuum that we have right now by not having
those particular disciplines covered by our faculty, and the only way that I
can see doing it is by having joint appointments. / Professor Levine – I would
urge you to realize that a lot of work, including graduate work, is done at the
Master’s level, interdisciplinary work at the campuses; this doesn’t
necessarily involve the Graduate
Center. It would be of
great help if we could have the principle of joint appointments extended
throughout all of CUNY. / Chancellor – I like the idea.
Professor Manfred Philipp
(Chemistry,
Lehman College) – I hate to admit it but I was
on the committee that predated that one. I’d like to go back to many issues
today. First of all congratulations on your fundraising campaign and just as
much congratulations on the Capital Budget, which, as we see, is the largest in
CUNY’s history, so it’s not all negative in CUNY in terms of money. But I’d
like to go back to the Operating Budget. Barbara Bowen early this week gave out
a figure, it doesn’t include a timeline, but she said that over a certain
period of time there was a 17% inflation and a decline
in funding for CUNY while at the same period there was a 57% increase in
funding for SUNY. It led me to thinking that perhaps CUNY has a structural
disadvantage in relationship to SUNY in getting tax-levy funds out of the State
Legislature, mainly that SUNY proclaimed to serve almost every district in the
state where CUNY could only serve the downstate districts; it’s a structural
fact that’s inescapable since we became a part of the state system. In
connection with that I’ve been asking myself why would a person like Nicholas Spano who represents Yonkers
want to vote for money for CUNY? In connection with
that it struck me that when we do teacher initiatives, like the Teacher Academy,
we don’t include Spano’s district, we don’t include New Rochelle, we don’t include Yonkers, even though
they’re very close to us. We could do those things and encourage those
representatives of those districts to vote for us and perhaps even the balance
between CUNY and SUNY. / Chancellor Goldstein – I would strongly debate those
numbers that you put out. It’s certainly not true on the operating side; if
anything it may be on the capital side. There are a lot of earmarks that SUNY
is able to get because they have every county in the state and those are sort
of off balance sheet dollars. We don’t; we are beholden to the City of New York and that’s about
it. So, structurally, because they are spread out and have campuses in just
about every county in the State of New
York they can get county dollars which SUNY
traditionally has gotten, so when you add up those things that’s what it is. It
has not happened in the State Legislature through the appropriation process
other than perhaps on the capital side and probably even more so on the hospital side, where SUNY I believe has four
medical school hospital affiliations. But I think that’s a good idea. I don’t
see why we should be restricting our reach just within the five boroughs and I
think there are opportunities for us to cross into other counties and develop
the political support for some of our programs; I think that makes good sense.
Professor Susan O’Malley (Kingsborough Community
College) – Quick question following up on Al
Levine’s question about joint appointments. After Stefan spoke with you about
the joint appointments for the School
of Professional Studies,
I had a meeting with you at which you also promised joint appointments. I think
joint appointments is a really good idea. My
understanding now is that the joint appointments are only on an overload
basis. In other words, the faculty
member does 21 or 27 hours at her campus and then gets appointed to teach it on
an overload basis and gets paid summer salary. It would be better if we could
move instead to true joint appointments. / Chancellor Goldstein – The reason
that the thinking has evolved, and it hasn’t been cast in stone yet, is that we
have to be very sensitive here that if there are two parties to a transaction
and one party is believed to be financially disadvantaged, the transaction
could just implode. That was the case some time ago when faculty were hired say
at Queens, just as an example; chemists, mathematicians, historians were hired
by the Queens College administration and faculty; it came out of the Queens
College budget; efforts were made to recruit three stars and then all of a
sudden those stars were not to be seen on the Queens College campus, they were
seen in this particular building. The second component that created some
tension was how the financing worked, how people on one side of the transaction
were reimbursed for releasing the people and when the money came back to the
campus did the department that freed up the faculty member get the money or did
it go into some college pool and wind up on the south side as opposed to the
north side of the campus. These are metaphorical things. Those are the kinds of
things that we’re going to have to look at that really
have not been solved at this particular point, but I believe they can be and I
believe that if you roll up your sleeves and you do this with resolve, we’ll
get it done.
Professor Phil Pecorino (Queensborough Community
College) – It’s one issue, two parts. The issue
is the decline in public support of public higher education that’s been going
on for a couple of decades now. You put together this compact addressing the
problem to get us through another year and every time you speak about it my
anxieties grow because if any element in the constituency doesn’t bear its fair
share, the compact is in effect dissolved, and that would be if the State
didn’t do the rather modest thing you’re asking them to do, the students
wouldn’t get asked to do their share. / Chancellor Goldstein – That is correct.
The compact has to be all parties participating. / Professor Pecorino – So if I
asked for a long term, if that were the project to deal with this, I may be
worrying but I’m optimistic thinking that this University has very fine people,
tremendous resources, that if we were to pull them together with the other
constituencies and develop not a Manhattan Project but a rescue public higher
education project, a five to 10-year sort of project on how to get the public
to support public higher education once again, I think we might be able to make
some headway, because if we don’t do it, who else will do it, and I’d like to
see as much interest in the long-term solution as the short-term addressing a
very acute problem. / Chancellor – I would welcome this body and any other
constituency in the University. I had started this in part by this compact. I
don’t think that we can get out into the marketplace and ask for support in the
ways that we’ve asked for support before. And in New York State,
when I look at the social services, they have a different texture than in any
other state. Let me give you the most glaring example and why this affects
public higher education. We are the third most populous state in the union
behind Texas and California. I was with Mark Udoff a week or so ago; the two of us were giving a speech
on the role of Hispanics in higher education. I started to question him on how
the State of Texas
puts together its budget on certain of the social services and he said
something to me and I said, Mark, that can’t be right. And I went back and I
checked it and here is the case: we are the third most populous state; we spend
more in New York State
on Medicare and Medicaid than the combined states of California
and Texas.
There probably are other examples beyond Medicare and Medicaid that have
enormous popularity and political support and it’s going to be very
difficult. We’re going to have to give
them an incentive to increase support, and one of the ways this compact I think
could really accomplish this is that we’re saying we need to raise this kind of
money but, instead of giving us dollar for dollar, be part of an agreement that
if we raise it here you do it, and if you don’t do it, I’m not going to raise
it there. In our discussions with, again, the top people that are going to be
making these decisions, there is a sense of trying to embrace this kind of
concept. So I am prepared to work in partnership with this body or any other
body in the University because I think we all want to get to the same place,
but we’re going to have to have a fresh way of thinking; we just can’t have the
same rhetoric and say we want more and we’re not prepared to do anything to
help get it along. / Professor Pecorino – Mr. Grove, an alumnus of the
University, did a very nice thing. Having his involvement in a sort of thinking
to come up with new ideas for how to get the public to support is what I think
might bring value, and we have lots that are just like him; we have fine people
in the administration, the faculty, and the alumni of the University and all of
the friends of CUNY, political strategists, public relations; bring them
together for a long-term process of renewing the fate of the public higher
education. / Chancellor – I’m with you and I will be giving a major speech just
on this topic in two weeks. Our Business Leadership Council meets and we have
some very distinguished members of the business community. We’re meeting with
them I think on the 18th of this month and the topic is just the one
that you’re bringing up. So I’m starting to mobilize not only on the state
level but business people, and I would really like some subset of this group
who really have the kind of passion for this approach
to join with me; I would welcome it. / Professor Pecorino – I think you’ll find
people will accept that invitation. / Chancellor – I think I’ve taken enough of
your time. / Chair O’Malley – Thank you so much.
IV. Old Business:
A. Update on the Proposed Online BA Degree
Chair O’Malley – I’d like to resume our previous
discussion for a bit. We’re going back to the Online BA Degree. There are two
ways we can go: either we withdraw and let them, the Office of Academic Degree
and SPS, appoint or we say we’re going to appoint the people we want.
Professor Pecorino (Queensborough
Community College) – I
was thinking about this particularly, the degree proposal in the context of SPS
and governance. It’s fairly obvious that SPS is not going to go away. It’s also
fairly obvious that this proposal has a lot of support behind it and some form
of a program will eventually materialize. I think it is also an indicator of
things to come that if it does come forward and if it does succeed, even
minimally, you’ll see other programs fairly close to it come along right after,
which changes the whole idea of what SPS was proposed to be about. So if the
University is going to look to this program as a harbinger of things to come
then it behooves us now that there have been several significant changes in the
way SPS is going to operate to reopen the whole idea of the role of faculty in
SPS. In particular I’m concerned that the head of the Graduate
Center has refused to nominate or
appoint three people saying the Graduate
Center has nothing to do
with undergraduate programs, which says that there is another change in the way
SPS is working. So I think that we should take it as an opening to renegotiate.
Obviously that document is no longer operative. / Chair O’Malley – This is the
Board resolution. It is operative and it doesn’t say that the Graduate School
appoints people to the Curriculum Committee. / Professor Pecorino – No, but
they had in the past. / Chair – They do appoint to the Governing Board.
/Professor Pecorino – Yes. So I think it might be an opportunity for us to
negotiate or discuss the role of faculty in any SPS projects in the future. I
heard a person say that the school should be perhaps renamed from the School of Professional
Studies to maybe the School of Special Studies
or in some way change the name to make it fit what the future idea is, the role
it’s going to play, rather than the way it was originally established. So I’m
concerned that we be involved in the broader discussion of the reconceiving of SPS. / Chair – The UFS is on the governing
committee of SPS; we have three representatives so we participate in that. If
there is another degree program there will be another Curriculum Committee to
which we will appoint one third of the people. This Online Degree is only the
first degree that we’re being asked to appoint three people.
Professor Lenore Beaky (English, LaGuardia
Community College) – I’m not sure I should speak because I’m on the Executive
Committee but I haven’t had a lot to say up until now and I haven’t known what
to do. In fact every time that SPS comes up I can’t understand it, I don’t know
what it is, and now I really don’t know what it is. A few
points about this. This is called a completer’s degree. That means that someone with 30 credits could
complete a degree with 90 more. That doesn’t sound like completing a degree. I
know the statement from Vice Chancellor Botman: “It is in every way to be a
regular CUNY degree developed and delivered by CUNY faculty.” That has nothing to do with what is actually
happening here. “Forging existing and prospective online
courses into a rigorous, coherent, quality curriculum. The Steering
Committee for SCORE has been meeting since the start of 2005 to consider issues
of curriculum, policy, and resource management imposed by such a degree.
Faculty from SCORE have volunteered to serve on advisory committees to take
such thinking further but final decisions rest with the SPS Curriculum
Committee yet to be named,” but it’s the same SCORE people. Every time I hear
more about this it just sounds that’s a really corrupt process; you don’t have
people involved in developing a program sitting on the Curriculum Committee. If
they’re concerned about knowledgeable people, if I’m sitting on a Curriculum
Committee and I don’t know all the details of a program I ask somebody, but I
should not be the one to judge a program that I have developed. “A joint
appointment might entail one course a year, for instance, plus committee
service.” So the joint appointment is only teaching one course a year. Why?
“One challenge is to avoid making instruction in the Online Degree happen at
the expense at the college’s teaching resources.” So this joint appointment
person is going to be only teaching one course a year to round out offerings. /
Chair O’Malley – On an overload basis. / Professor Beaky – Yes. And then “To
round out offerings,” round out sounds like it got all this stuff set up and
we’re just going to add a little bit, “and accommodate growth the Online Degree
will tap other CUNY faculty with experience teaching online, contracting them
to develop courses for the program and paying them to teach these courses as
adjuncts.” At bottom, this program to be rolling out in September, less than
ten months away, is just not defensible. / Chair – As Anne Friedman said, this
is a very weak proposal.
Professor Alfred Levine (Engineering Science and
Physics, College
of Staten Island) – I’d
like to follow up on the remarks of the two previous speakers about negotiating
the role for the UFS. When a program is developed on a campus there is a
Curriculum Committee that develops the program; typically it’s a departmental
Curriculum Committee that then brings it to a college Curriculum Committee of
some sort and then it brings it to the Faculty Senate on every single campus. I
think that’s a wonderful procedure. The appropriate Faculty Senate for a
University-wide program is the University Faculty Senate. We have people here
who have taught courses online-- I have. We are not opposed to online
instruction, we are capable….[tape turned over]… has
real substance.
Professor Manfred Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College)
– I’m glad that my colleague made that suggestion about the Curriculum
Committee of the University Faculty Senate since it’s been a subject of my own
thoughts for quite some time. It was going to be my procedure to get the
Executive Committee to pass on it but if there’s sentiment for such a notion I
would make that notion. The reason is not only the current controversy. This
issue of the Online BA is only going to be one of many central curricular
initiatives, this is not going to be the last one, I’m sure of that, because
for any central administrator one way for them to make their mark is to create
central programs; we will see this again and I think that we have to have a
preexisting Curriculum Committee as part of this University Faculty Senate to
deal with those things now and in the future. So I think that it would be
appropriate to make this motion at the next meeting of the plenary, or we could
do it now if there’s a sense to do that. On a purely technical matter, since
Bill Kelly of the Graduate
Center has declined to
name three members, I think we should name three members for him. But to get to
move forward I think that this Online BA is part of a race to the bottom. I’m
in favor of online instruction, by the way. I think it should be done and it
should be done right. I’ve talked to several people who are running the online
programs at the University
of Maryland. They do it
in a completely different way. They have between three and four people to
design each course, web designers, graphic designers, people who help with
determining the exams in advance. It’s a large investment in each course, in
addition of course to the regular faculty member who does it full-time. We
don’t have that kind of resource allocated to this and if we did it would be
taken from the colleges and I would be opposed to it. So I think we should be
opposed but, having said that, the best way to oppose it is from the inside. / Chair
O’Malley – So you’re saying we should appoint three members to the Curriculum
Committee? / Professor Philipp – Absolutely.
Resolutely oppose it once we do.
Professor Roberta Klibaner (College of Staten Island)
– I want to say I support the opposition to this degree. It’s hard to call it a
degree because I don’t see a curriculum, and, more than that, at this point
seems to be a completely adjunct degree with no full-timers associated with it,
so then why don’t we just outsource it to India? I believe in online teaching, but I do not
believe in online degrees. You need to see students occasionally. They make the
culture belonging to a college. We’re not the University
of Phoenix, and we’ll never be the University of Phoenix if we have anything to do with
it, but we need to oppose it perhaps from the inside as well as from the
outside. We need a curriculum; before we can even talk about it we need to know
what it is and how we’re going to do science courses; there are courses that do
not lend themselves to being 100% online; they can be online part of the time.
I know Blackboard has a wonderful interface for it because I’ve just run a
class for the last three months from Colorado
while my husband was recovering and we were every week in Blackboard online in
a chat-room, so we were able to conduct the class, but I looked forward to
meeting my students for the first time last Thursday. I think we have to oppose
it both for the curriculum, from the inside and from the outside, and we have
to ask for a curriculum. It’s going to be teaching that we don’t already do on
the campuses. / Chair O’Malley – Should we appoint three people to the
Curriculum Committee? / Professor Klibaner – I think
we need to.
Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island)– I’m afraid I have to disagree with the last two speakers.
There’s no inside opposition. If we appoint people that means we have committed
to the contract, or whatever that word is we should use, and we might appoint
three obstructionists but they’ll be outvoted by the other six. It’s a strategy
which is so self-defeating I can’t believe anybody would take it seriously but
maybe I’m wrong on that. If there were more people here I was going to propose
a non-binding straw vote that would help the Executive Committee get a sense of
two or three possibilities. I don’t want to get a straw vote on whether or not
we like online courses, that’s not the issue, but whether or not we want to
participate in this particular proposal or whether or not we would participate
in a proposal in the future after a rational amount of time, which seemed to
suggest there was some intellectual thought that went into it. What I see so
far--I’m sorry to offend the folks who have been participating-- is some very
clever bureaucratic and technological fixes. I haven’t seen a single thing that
strikes me as an intellectual idea, and my feeling is that’s why I was hired in
CUNY and everywhere else I taught. I wasn’t hired to band-aid problems of
students who might in fact be able to come back to campus based classes, were
there social and financial supports for them, as Bill Crain and others have
proposed. I am also unaware of a single piece of data sustaining the allegation
made to us that there are thousands waiting out there for this. Let us have a
count, a census, some data, of who these thousands of students are who want to
come back to complete degrees online over the Internet, which some of them are
probably too old to figure out how to use, like me.
Professor Nkechi Agwu (Borough of Manhattan Community College) – I want to
speak to the deeper issue, which is why this is happening, and that, as we talk
about whether or not we’re going to appoint people, we really engage in a
conversation of how do you prevent all, how do you put steps in the process so
that if another Vice Chancellor will come with another centralized program this
body is really involved in the process of how this happens. That is a
conversation that I would like us to have as we are talking about whether we
are going to approve this or not.
Professor Waldabi Stewart (Economics, Medgar Evers
College) – I represent
the adjuncts and that’s one reason I rise on this issue. I’m going to make a
presentation that differs from all of the conversations that I’ve heard up to this
point. I see this as a business venture. In fact they present this as something
that will raise money. As a businessman, I would not enter into a contract for
which there are no specifics, for which there is no business plan, and up to
now no one has presented me with even a justification for this business. The
statement that because there are people, a universe out there, you have a
market is a fallacy, and the fact that a person chose not to be in college may
have a multiplicity of factors that would have to be carefully teased out by a
specialist in the study of the markets. And yet, Madame Chair, you are seeking
to validate and enter into contract by appointing three members to this body.
In other words, it’s like the people that call you up from the telephone
company and tell you, just say yes and we will give you a no down payment
contract that will expire in six months and then we’ll tell you how much it
costs; that is in essence what we are agreeing to do right now. For those who
are anxious to enter into this business, I don’t see any problem that you’re
rejecting the offer to join the business on the specifics, and up to now we
don’t have them.
Chair O’Malley – Does it make sense to have a straw vote?
We are implicated in the School
of Professional Studies
because we are on the Governing Board but we do not have to be on the
Curriculum Committee of this degree or we could decide to appoint the best
possible faculty. Those who think we should simply not appoint, raise your hand; 27. How many people think we should appoint
the best possible people? Seven. Abstentions: three.
The vote is 27-7-3 that we are going to happen and we are not going to be a
part of this particular online degree.
But this is a very strong straw vote.
Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, The John Jay
College of Criminal Justice / The Graduate School and University Center) – The
sound point, which is that we don’t have a business plan, doesn’t prevent us,
if we get one, from reconsidering whether we’re going to participate.