MINUTES OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-SIXTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

November 18, 1997

Chair Cooper called the session to order at 6:30 p.m. in the Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate School and University Center. Present were Senators from the following campuses: Baruch: McCall, Otte, and Pollard. BMCC: Friedman, Price, and Reid. Bronx CC: Belilgne, Cummins, Galub, and Alternate Fuld. Brooklyn: Bell, Hager, Jacobson, London, Shapiro, and Tobey. CCNY: Connorton, Crain, Grossman, Reitz, Sohmer, and Weil. CSI: Cooper S., Levine, and Yousef. Graduate School: Baumrin and Rothman. Hostos CC: Canate, Rosario-Sievert. Hunter: Kurzman, Matthews, and Wonsek. John Jay: Bohigian, Brugnola, Davenport J., Kaplowitz, Rodriguez, and Alternate Davenport E. Kingsborough CC: Bellu, Galvin, O’Malley, Richter, and Alternate Staum. LaGuardia CC: Ladden, Mettler, Reitano, and Alternate Beaky. Lehman: Feinerman, Knobloch, Mineka, and Nathanson. Medgar Evers: Donohue, Harris-Hastick, and Umolu. Mt. Sinai: Levitan. NYC Technical: Cermele, Hounion, Norton, Walter, and Alternate Richardson. Queens: Cairns, Frisz, Kulkarni, Landazuri, Savage, Speidel, Alternates Diamond and Seley. Queensborough CC: Barbanel, Dahbany-Miraglia, Gellman, Greenbaum, Marti, and Alternate Specht. York: Cooper A., and Odenyo. Professors Brady, Donoghue, Neville, Pearson, and Sherrill were excused. Governance Leaders present: Cooper (York), Davidson (LaG), Feinerman (Lehman), Fuld (Bronx), Hampton (Hunter), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Kurzman (Hunter), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaG), O’Malley (KCC), and Specht (QCC). Trustee John Morning attended. The Parliamentarian was Alternate Staum. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present.

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

II. Approval of the Minutes of the 245th Plenary, September 30, 1997: The minutes were adopted as proposed.

III. Greeting of New Trustee, Honorable John Morning. [recorded in the Reports & Deliberations.]

IV. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]

a. Chair (oral & written).

b. Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (written).

c. UFS Committee Chairs -- Professor Leslie Jacobson, Academic Policy Committee.

V. Panel on Testing Issues. [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]

There being no new business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:10 p.m.

Respectfully submitted,

Bill Phipps

REPORTS & DELIBERATIONS

OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-SIXTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

November 18, 1997

III. Greeting of New Trustee, Honorable John Morning: Chair Cooper -- I would like introduce our newest trustee, or our second to the newest trustee, the newest being a student who couldn’t come tonight. But he said that he would like to come in December. This is John Morning. John Morning joined the Board in August of 1997 as a replacement for Robert Price. So far Mr. Morning has not concluded as Mr. Price has, that it is too much work. Who knows? If we keep inviting him to campuses he may come to the same conclusion. He is a different trustee than most of the others. He really seems to know what a university is about. He has a Bachelor’s of Fine Arts and is a practicing graphic artist. The list of Board’s that he belongs to is longer than the list of most of our publications. I won’t go through them all, but they include almost every major cultural institution in the city. And some of the more important social institutions such as the Henry Street Settlement. In addition he is an officer of the Association of Governing Boards of Universities and Colleges which truly makes him understand what trusteeship of a university is like. He seems to know what a trustee is supposed to do and he seems to know what a trustee is not supposed to do, which is wonderful. In any case, his appointment to the Board of Trustees lasts to the year 2002, which seems to me to be a very long time from now, but will probably fly. I’ve asked him if he would like to meet the faculty and he agreed to give you some words of greeting. It is my pleasure to introduce John Morning.

John Morning, Trustee: Thank you, Sandi. I apologize for the condition of my voice this evening. My horn is broken, but I think my brakes and windshield wipers work and maybe that’s more important. I also have to think perhaps it’s the Lord’s way of telling me that I should shut-up and do some listening. That is certainly appropriate in this audience. I am a newcomer as you have heard. I’m taking advantage of venues and meetings like this to learn as much as I can to learn about the CUNY system. So far, without exception almost, I think that everything I’ve been learning is inspiring and exciting. This is an extraordinary institution. As I’ve been saying, I’m struck again and again about the enormous gap between what we read in the newspapers and what’s really happening on our campuses. I think that what is happening in terms of our students, our faculty, our administrative leaders, is something that our public simply doesn’t know about. I think there is a challenge for the public to know more about the many great strengths there and I’m hopeful that in time they will. But I think that is part of the work that all of us have to be involved in. I really don’t want to make a speech or attempt to pontificate in any of these ways. I really do think that it’s important that I’m listening to you, and I’d be happy in the time we have available to answer any questions that you might want to pose to me. I can’t stop without saying a word of thanks not only for your time, but a word of thanks to you, Sandi, my formidably articulate and insightful colleague on the Board, to whom I owe the pleasure of being here this evening.

Professor Speidel (Geology, Queens College) -- "Trustee Morning, there was a report in the paper today about consideration of naming an acting chancellor. Do you find it worrisome that the report also included that these individuals have paid courtesy calls to both the Office of the Mayor and the Governor?" / Trustee Morning -- That is a good question. I did see that article. I was not at all surprised that that happened. I think that’s just one of the realities. I don’t have to tell you what a political environment New York City is. At the same time I don’t necessarily read into it a drastic influence, I don’t jump to the conclusion that any influence from those sources has to be bad.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) -- "Along the same lines, but more generally. For about a quarter of a century, faculty have been involved in searches for senior administrators. We seem too evident by our absence at the present stage. Is there some account that can be given about this? And what is the future likely to be with a search for three Vice Chancellorships and a Deputy to be appointed?" / Trustee Morning -- When you talk about an absence of faculty, are you referring to searches for presidents and senior administrators or the search for the chancellor? I’m not quite clear. / Professor Baumrin -- "What I mean by senior administrators in this context is the Chancellor and the Vice Chancellors." / Trustee Morning -- My understanding, and I don’t pretend that my knowledge is all inclusive here, but I can tell you what I have understood or have been told. In the past, the appointment of an interim chancellor could well be made by the Chair of the Board, on his or her own authority. It was not necessary to have a search. I understand further, that this has been an attempt to democratize that process, by having a search committee for the interim now and by moving away from the idea of a designation by a single member of the Board. And that much is positive. I think that it is possible to say that in hindsight it was perhaps unfortunate not to have a faculty input in that search committee and maybe in other sources as well. I guess I’m giving you a sort of half a loaf answer. I think where you had no loaf before, we have half a loaf and I think that we can get a full loaf. I certainly can’t guarantee this, but I would hope that in the search for the permanent Chancellor there will be a broader committee and one that does draw upon various sources in the University. As you know, we’re in the process of revising presidential guidelines for a search. My understanding is that they are to shape the broad outlines of the search for the chancellor as well, and there are very specific recommendations in that as you know for the structure of the committee, including presidents, faculty, and other members of the University community.

Professor Reitano (Social Sciences, LaGuardia Community College) -- "Based on activities by the Board last spring, and some of these newspaper articles, some of us have deduced that the community colleges are a primary item for the Board in the coming year. Can you tell us whether or not that is an accurate perception and if so in what way." / Trustee Morning -- I have to ask you, what do you mean by a primary item? How do you mean that? / Professor Reitano -- "Well, all of these questions have been raised about community colleges and their academic standards, et cetera, and we were just wondering what you think the future might hold in terms of that ?" / Trustee Morning - It still isn’t entirely clear to me what you are meaning by this. But I guess I sense that you’re implying that community colleges are at risk in the system or threatened in ways that other campuses may not be. I don’t believe that, I don’t perceive that. I think that many things that are said in the media of course could lead you to any number of conclusions, but I don’t think that accounts for their accuracy or truthfulness. One of the things that I hear as I talk to people in the system about the Board, and I think it might be worth repeating here, is that I don’t think that we have a monolithic Board with an overriding view or sense of what should be going on in the system. In fact, with so many of us new, I don’t think we’ve had an opportunity to come to any kind of monolithic consensus yet, and I’m not sure that we’re ever going to do that. And I’m not sure either that we should. I would hope that among the group of us, in conjunction with other elements in the University, we can arrive at certain agreements and goals that are rational, valid, and defensible, but not necessarily monolithic, but right for the system. I can’t see how we can have decisions right for the system that aren’t going to be right for the community colleges as well. / Professor Reitano -- "O.k. I hope so."

IV. Reports:

a. Chair: I won’t detain you with a very long report tonight because we do have a panel of invited colleague guests. But I would like very much to spend one or two minutes updating people with some information that might answer some of the questions that were just asked of Mr. Morning. I have been advised that by next Monday’s Board meeting, it is the regular meeting of the Board of Trustees, an interim chancellor will be selected from a list which is suppose to be secret. The outcome of the meetings that will occur sometime this week in which the three candidates will be reviewed for the interim position. The outcome of that meeting is anybody’s guess. It is just unclear at this point that the Trustees can coalesce around a single candidate.

As far as a permanent search committee, I understand that the Chair of the Board plans to announce its membership next Monday as well. It will consist of, I believe, six trustees, and I believe the Chair of the Board will chair it. There will be either two or three presidents on it, and there will be two students and two faculty. One faculty member, by virtue of office, is the Chair of the University Faculty Senate. The second person is generally selected from a campus chair of a PSC Chapter, perhaps a community college person. It isn’t clear yet. The students I believe reflect graduate and undergraduate, but I’m not positive. Certainly the Chair of the Student Senate must be one of them. He is currently a graduate student at City College in economics and has an undergraduate baccalaureate degree from York College. If he were free, he would have come tonight and I would have introduced him. I understand in addition that on Monday, the names of the search committee for the New York City Tech presidency will be picked. That committee will reflect the new search guidelines. As far as faculty representation, in terms of numbers, it does not change at all from previous guidelines. There are still three faculty.

I called the coordinator of the New York City Tech Faculty Council today, Rhona Noll, and left a voice mail message for her, telling her to expect a call from the Board to organize an election amongst the faculty at New York City Tech. It is to elect the faculty to this committee. There are some differences in the proposed current guidelines for search for presidents from the 1995 guidelines. The guidelines themselves have yet to be approved, they have to be approved this Monday. They were the subject of testimony yesterday by Bernie Sohmer and Fred Greenbaum from the Senate. At the public hearing of the Board, both Bernie Sohmer and Fred Greenbaum had some criticisms to make of the new proposed guidelines. I’m not altogether sure whether the criticisms will be listened to. One of the changes that might trouble us in the future, is the fact that in the past on the campus level, when the visits occurred there were four or five constituencies on the campus that interviewed the finalists. In the past the constituencies were fifteen persons each. So they would be fifteen administrators, fifteen faculty, and fifteen students, and so on. That number has been cut to ten on each campus constituency. There was another change that stated, if there was any disagreement in the search committee about who will be sent to campuses for visits, the decision would only be made by the Trustees on the Committee, of who should be selected for final visits. The other major change in the proposed guidelines is a change which basically eliminates the role of the Chancellor in presidential searches. I’m not altogether sure if this total elimination will survive into the future. It is awfully hard to imagine anyone coming to be chancellor of the system where they are not permitted a say in the selection of the executive officers who they have to work with. I suspect that there will probably be some modification of that practice in the future. However the new guidelines have to be approved this coming Monday before the new search committees for the presidencies can be put in place. I understand that as of Monday all of this will happen. So maybe in the December meeting we will be able to bring an interim chancellor in to address this group, I don’t really know.

One or two other things before moving on to tonight’s panel. Some of you are aware I think, by virtue of communications I have made or presidents and provosts have made or by your attendance at the governance leaders meeting last Friday, or maybe just by general knowledge that we face in this university, collectively all of us -- the faculty in most of the colleges, a major potential crisis in terms of teacher education. There are a number of issues floating around about this and because the subject is so fraught with problems, the Senate is going to have a panel on it next month. Leslie Jacobson will introduce the panelists then, since this is sponsored by our Academic Affairs Committee. Many of us in the Executive Committee and in the Governance Leaders, have spent some time being educated about the problem which was brought to our attention quite astoundingly with no notice last April by the Vice Chair of the Board of Regents of the State of New York. She showed up at a Board of Trustees meeting and sort of made it clear that by the Year 2000-2001, if CUNY student pass rates on the Teacher’s Certification Exam did not improve, those colleges that had low pass rates would lose their right to certify teachers. At that point nearly every CUNY campuses pass rate, which are the lowest in the state, were below what the Year 2000-2001 would allow. In deconstructing and analyzing the data, in which we are now drowning, and I brought none of it today because it is not appropriate for this evening, a number of issues became clear. I don’t want to go into those issues. But just take my word for it, that they involve faculty at two and four year colleges because students transfer from two to four year colleges. We are all involved in the problem of liberal arts education. In those colleges, there are only two or three exceptions that do not give teacher education programs in CUNY of some sort or another. And even if your undergraduates are graduating from John Jay or New York City Tech or Baruch where education is not a major issue, they can still go and sit for the exam and claim that they came from your college. I don’t quite know how we are going to get out of this mess but I do know that we are all in it together and we all have to deal with it. This is not just by any means a problem for the schools of education or the departments of education where they exist. The presidents are going to hold a meeting early December and then in the Spring they will hold another one to which a significant number of faculty will be invited.

One recommendation that is being made to me, which seems to make a certain amount of sense and you may want to think about, instead of trying to create a discipline council in education, we ought to try to create one with liberal arts and education faculty in it so that we can figure out some kind of model proposals that we might consider. I said proposals in the plural, I didn’t say it in the singular, that we might recommend to our colleagues. The first thing that we must do of course is educate ourselves about the problem. Therefore we will hold this panel in December. I urge you to invite your colleagues if you wish. This is not a closed thing, if we had the time and energy we might have run a whole conference on this. It is an appropriate subject for this evening’s panel, on proficiency testing, for us to think about.

Finally I just would report that a batch of us went to a demonstration at the computer center at 57th Street to see what that Maryland system actually looked like, the system by which the whole State of Maryland is linked. That is the two and four year colleges are linked with each other. So the student could plug in on the Net and get a clue from the two year college they might be attending, about what courses they have to take to succeed at the University at College Park or Baltimore, one of the four year campuses. The system did a lot of other things besides just demonstrate a rational articulation pattern. Whether or not we need to buy that system or develop our own is not the issue for me. I don’t much care what the system looks like. But I do think that this might well be the best way for us dealing with the articulation problem. The only problem with this is that if the input isn’t there from the faculty it won’t work. In Maryland apparently the provosts from the four year colleges managed to pull together faculty groups in every discipline state wide to discuss what had to be in an intro course in order for it to articulate with the sophomore and junior course, etc.. across the system. One of the two speakers today told us how many bytes are in the system and the number is gargantuan, I can’t possibly remember it. It is a lot of work but evidently the structure is there and by no means would we be the first system to put something like this together. He mentioned Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Maine, and a couple of Southern states. This is not ICAM. This was in fact in Maryland developed in an effort not to have to do common course numbering which was what the state had mandated. This was a response and they managed by persuading the legislators that this was a more rational and less expensive system. This was a response to the legislators’ effort to insist that all courses have a common number in the state of Maryland. When we heard about it last year I began trying to get 80th Street interested and I think we have an administration that is listening. But what we don’t have is the data that goes into it for all of the disciplines. So what we have here is an indirect plea to you to do something about those disciplines which seem to be refusing to speak to each other across campuses. And there are still serious gaps-economics, business, education, are the three that come to mind to start with. Although I’m not altogether sure what the future of education is going to be like.

Professor Speidel (Geology, Queens College) -- "Two corrections on the Committee of Faculty, Staff, and Administration Reports that were circulated. The one on October 7, 1997 where it refers to (in the first paragraph, the third to the bottom line) a promotion to the associate professor of English without Ph.D. at Bullrush. That was an error of transcription not an ecosystem statement. Also, on November 6, 1997 (the end of the first paragraph), writer and residents visiting professor approved, that was also at Baruch.

[SECTION OF REPORT GIVEN AFTER PANEL]

Chair Cooper: Let me add my thanks also to the panelists. I think this is one of the most important meetings we’ve had in a long time in terms of airing issues and exchanging information.

A word about the role of Discipline Councils. The Senate has been as some of you know, urging the creation of Discipline Councils for some years now. Because of the fact that the people participating in them are elected, by their peers, as opposed to being appointed to task forces by central administrators who frequently went shopping to find some folks, by no means all, but some folks who might celebrate preconceived recommendations and policies. It may be an imperfect system, but it’s as imperfect as representation always is. If you dislike a policy that your peers are recommending you have the right to elect a different chair. I am very mindful of the fact, for example, that the Mathematics Discipline Council, several of whose representatives are in this room, chairs of Math Departments, have been meeting for some years, and have made serious proposals for changing the CWAT which I believe are being implemented now, and that most people seem to support. We hope the Board will as well. Because that in fact is a faculty driven set of decisions, as good as we can get.

I want to make a point and then conclude by fixing a mistake I omitted before. There has been, as some of you know, talk in the Board about re-writing the mission statement of CUNY. This talk is idle and loose at the moment. There has not been to my knowledge any step taken to do it. But the Board claims what it’s doing now is collecting data. One of the things that it has done is asked each college to draw up a profile. Most of the data in the profile comes from the Office of Institutional Research at 57th Street which is part of Vice Chancellor Rothbard’s operation. At this point your presidents are being asked to sign-off on a profile of your college. This profile includes an enormous range of information. We hope it’s accurate, there is some question about a few points I’ve seen, the accuracy of them is questionable. They include questions about your student body, how many pass all of these assessment tests, each one or all three. How many remedial courses are offered on your campuses, what kinds of majors, how many in each and so forth. They have questions about the faculty, the publications, number of Ph.D.’s, percentage of adjuncts, the full-time employment. There is a very long list. Each college is going to be looked at in terms of these profiles. I will obviously do everything I can to get my hands on all of them and submit them to appropriate faculty groups for review for each campus. I can’t guarantee I’ll be able to do it so fast but you can be sure that will be something the Senate will do.

This whole question about the mission, means we also go back and look at the state law. Because after all this is a public entity. It is very clear to me that the very basic mission of the University is inscribed in a statute of law and that cannot easily be changed by trustees. The mission revised in 1979 insists that in the post-secondary education in the City of New York, that there be an articulated system between two and four year colleges, that these be jointly conducted by similar procedures so that the University is maintained as an integrated system with articulation between the units. And that the University commit itself to academic excellence and to the provision of equal access of opportunity for students, faculty, and staff from all racial and ethnic groups and from both sexes. The University is of vital importance as a vehicle of upward mobility of the disadvantaged in the City of New York. The next item goes on to discuss the importance of SEEK and CD programs. It talks about the commitment to an urban constituency. This is in the state law which would have to be changed by the legislature as far as I can tell. That doesn’t mean that the trustees cannot move things around. They can create recommendations such as we have already seen, some of you have even noted. Some colleges no longer, for example, have the most introductory ESL courses or the most introductory remediation courses. They can restrict or permit some colleges to alter their admission policies.

There are presidents who are supporting, at least verbally, a three tier system. This would affect funding. So that there are ways within this larger set of missions for changes to occur. Some small ones have already. I can’t guarantee what we have by the end of this decade resembles what we had at the beginning of this decade. Thus far however, there has not been a single clear cut recommendation from any of the Board committees or leadership. I would point out to you though, if you think about the Chair and Vice Chair of the Board, both of them were born in foreign countries and learned English as a second language. Both of them very proudly point out that they had no help from anyone. Not in any ESL situation or environment. This doesn’t make the job any easier from folks who are trying to communicate some of the things we learned about tonight, particularly from Mr. Ward. Before you leap upon a band-wagon, attacking your colleagues for attempting to deal with the new realities, perhaps you might want to think of the parameters of the environment we’re operating in, which is slightly different then they were a year ago. Considerably different than they were a year ago.

In any case, the thing that I forgot to mention and I apologize, there was a memorial service for our colleague Estelle Davis, a librarian from City College who had been a devoted member of the Senate and a particularly devoted member of the Research Committee of the Senate. I am grateful to Joanne Reitano for writing a statement from the Senate which was inserted in the memorial book. I did attend the ceremony along with a lot of other people in this room. It was at City College last week. She was I think fifty, and she died of cancer. She had an exemplary life, and was a really devoted faculty member.

Finally let me remind you that this Friday we have this really exciting conference and I’m sure all of you have signed up. We have close to I believe 90-100 faculty who are coming and some very fine speakers. I hope to see everybody there.

V. Panel on Testing Issues: Chair Cooper - I’m going to ask Leslie Jacobson, Chair of the Academic Affairs Committee, to come up here. When the Executive Committee was trying to figure out what the most useful things we could do for the faculty in CUNY would be, it became clear to us that what we needed to do was to have a public discussion on two issues. Teacher education in December is one of them, and the second issue is this whole uproar over testing and how to deal with testing in CUNY. We are lucky tonight to have with us four colleagues who have worked on this and who have thought about it. The two co-chairs of the English Discipline Council have been among the most devoted and committed of our colleagues, spending a lot of their summer on this issue. Marc Ward from Lehman, Acting Director ESL, has published a widely well regarded article in the Chronicle on the ESL issue. Wendy Maloney is a long term reading specialist at Brooklyn College who will address who will address the issues of testing. I turn it over now to Leslie Jacobson of Brooklyn and invite the panelists to please come up to the front.

Professor Jacobson (Chair of Academic Affairs Committee) - The format of this evening’s discussion on assessment will be that Professor John Todd and Philip Eggers will speak first. They serve as co-chairs in the English Discipline Council. They have spent this summer working very diligently on some reconstruction and assessment themselves. Marc Ward will discuss ESL and assessment and Wendy Maloney from Brooklyn will discuss the question of reading and assessment. I’d like to first call on Professor Todd who is Chair of the Department of English at Baruch College.

Professor Todd (Co-chair of the English Discipline Council, Baruch) — It is a great pleasure to appear before you this evening. Sine the English Council was formed, three years ago last spring, one of the sources of stimulation for me as English Chair has been the regular meetings with fellow English Chairs of both senior and community colleges in CUNY. We have had an opportunity to discuss many of the problems that face us all as teachers of English, and teachers of reading and writing. We have over the past three years expressed considerable dissatisfaction with the Writing Assessment Test, the WAT, which I am sure you are all familiar with in one way or another. I should tell you that even before the crisis at Hostos last May, the English Council had been discussing ways of differentiating the WAT from another test which would be given to students after they had passed the standard writing courses in their respective colleges. We felt very strongly that the issues of writing assessment should be handled by teachers of reading and writing. At a meeting on June the 13^th, Friday the 13^th, last June in the middle of the summer, we met and unanimously the English Chairs adopted a resolution deploring the controversy on the use of the writing assessment test as an exit exam. We stated in our resolution that it was never designed as a graduation requirement as it had suddenly become. We believe, we stated, that it should be used, if at all, primarily as a placement test for entering students and should not necessarily be considered a criterion for exit from remediation or for any other purpose. I want at this time to pay tribute to your leader of the University Faculty Senate who was the midwife in all of this. Sandi Cooper is the one who really urged us to get together once she realized that we had, in May, come to a general conclusion about the kind of new test that we wanted. She was the one who kept at us and really has seen the process through thus far. I think you are all aware of what a magnificent leader she has been of the University Faculty Senate as a friend a colleague in this process. In the course of our deliberations over the summer, the English Chairs felt there should be another kind of test at the end of the students’ English courses in the colleges. The test would be administered after students had completed the last course and by the time they had accumulated 60 credits in CUNY. As we continued to meet in the hot summer months, we agreed that a Kingsborough model that was presented to us was the best kind of test that we were aware of. Many of you have seen the Stephen Carter essay on honesty which forms the basis of this model that we used. We felt that the test we were envisioning should be based on a substantial contemporary essay or a series of essays because obviously you need to have more than one test — a substantial contemporary series of essays of the type found in readers for college writing courses. We also hit on the idea of giving students the single essay for the particular test distributed in advance of the test itself giving students the chance to read the essay, to digest it, to form study groups if they so desire and then come into the exam where they would be given actual questions based on the essay itself. We felt also that these tests should be developed by faculty at all of the CUNY colleges. The process that we have been involved in has been a very democratic process to involve all faculty, not just English Chairs, but ESL faculty, the CAWS, Council of Writing Supervisors — people who had expertise in any way we wanted to involve in this process of developing a test that would serve to certify students as having minimum competency and proficiency in English. After all of the devastating attacks on CUNY in May and over the summer, we felt it important that students by the time they have finished two years of their CUNY education should demonstrate a certain minimum level of competency. That is what we worked on during that time. Not only did we work very collegially with Sandi Cooper, but we found another friend in a remarkable new Vice Chancellor Louise Mirrer, who listened to us. One of her great strengths I think is her ability to listen to what the faculty have to say. She listened and even though her experience in Minnesota had been quite different -- she had worked with another kind of assessment, portfolio assessment -- she realized that CUNY would need a different kind of assessment. It needed a test which would enable us to say that students by the time they reach 60 credits had achieved a certain level of competency in their reading and writing. So since the summer we have worked to develop two committees. We have proposed these committees and she has largely accepted the proposals that have come from the Council of English Chairs. One, to enhance the WAT. There are a number of objections to the WAT. As we all know for the past 20 years people have been grumbling about the WAT as an inadequate testing mechanism. Yet we are unable somehow to get rid of it. I think we separated the WAT from this other test, and we are seeing that the WAT can be very useful as a diagnostic test which it was initially designed to be anyway. How students pass from remedial English, or from ESL English, can well be left to the individual colleges. What we need is a strong test at the end of a students’ work in standard freshman composition that will enable us to assure the public as well as other colleagues in other disciplines that the students have reached a certain level of competency in reading and writing. So there have been two committees established under the aegis of the English Council. One for the enhanced WAT. We are reconsidering, for example, the length of the WAT. The idea that this would be a 50 minute test goes back to the idea 20 years ago when classes met largely three times a week. I think now very few classes meet three times a week. So the idea of 50 minutes — matter of fact, this question was raised in one of our English Council Meetings. Why 50 minutes as opposed to 60. It didn’t make any sense until we looked back and revisited the whole notion of course planning and realized that years ago classes met for the most part three times a week. So we are considering the length of the test; we are considering the whole nature of the questions. Certainly we need more questions for a test which many students manage to memorize the answers to. As we all know, on our campuses a number of students are able to memorize answers and come in and pass the test on the basis of work they themselves have not done. So we feel we need to reconsider even this diagnostic test. How effective is it? How long should it be? How should it be graded? For the most part this test is in terms of correctness. I think there are other criteria that need to be brought to bear. Perhaps Marc will want to discuss this issue because I think it affects both tests. The scoring of the test — there are other elements that should be taken into account. Organization, clarity, for example, quality of the ideas in these tests should be evaluated as well as the correctness. The other test is of course one that has been set up to determine a kind of experimental test to be set up, a pilot testing program which we can evaluate with the use of psychometricians in CUNY and with all the experts we have available to us in this great University. What we want to do is to take plenty of time to consider possibilities of testing to find a test that is going to do the job, that is going to be effective in showing us when students have reached a certain level or performance in their English work. That is basically what we have done. This is a work in progress and we are interesting in involving the total CUNY community at all levels, not just English Departments, but other disciplines that have a vested interest, clearly, in the reading and writing of the students at our various colleges. I will now turn the mike over to my esteemed colleague, Phil Eggers, who serves as co-chair with me.

Professor Eggers (Co-chair of the English Discipline Council, BMCC) - I just want to say a few things about the possible effects on community colleges and community college students and faculty on the issue of changing assessment procedures. A few weeks ago I underwent an attempt to become a certified reader for the CWAT thinking that as a chairperson it would be appropriate for me to be certified, having taught for thirty-two years and being Chairman of the English Department. Upon leaving the certification room at 80th Street I felt again how vulnerable people are when they take tests. Why should I feel that. This is really a low stakes matter. It doesn’t really matter whether I’m a certified reader or not. But I had no idea whether I’d be certified. If that’s the way I feel with my experience facing something that isn’t really a test, but something of that sort, what our freshmen, sophomores, and juniors must feel when they take a high stakes test in an area where they know they are deficient. They have a time limit and they feel stranded without a dictionary and without any supports. It might seem from that point that we should have no assessment at all. Because none of it is fair and in a way none of it really is, it’s all terribly imperfect as George Otte can tell us. I’m sure George knows all of the complexities of assessment. He probably knows more than all of us combined about assessment. Maybe he doesn’t want to, but that’s been the history of recent efforts at CUNY. It’s terribly complicated, but at the same time certain really blunt brutal facts face us. If we don’t do anything, something else will be done for us.

Why hasn’t it changed over the years? I don’t know a single iota in which it’s changed over twenty years or so that we’ve had it now. I guess the answer is that when you have a test throughout the whole system, it’s a little bit like the British driving on the left side of the road. Maybe it would make more sense if they changed. One British suggested that they change gradually! That’s kind of how we face assessment, you can’t change gradually. But that is also why, as much as possible, we should do assessment on campuses where we can be flexible and we can suit assessment to the needs of our students, our faculty, and so on. Some of it will be system wide and it does make sense it seems to me, not to have the same test, the WAT or the modified WAT at several levels. Particularly I don’t like it as an extra test in remediation. It fossilizes everything for us in a way that we really don’t want. For two year colleges however, this whole issue of assessment at the upper level raises a lot of difficulties. I don’t know the answers but I think we have to do it.

I’m in favor of the project that is going forward. It hasn’t been decided yet whether the two year graduates must pass this proposed test in order to graduate. The alternative I would imagine is continuing the WAT as a graduation requirement. Then the question is, if those are the alternatives, which is worse? I’m not even sure of the answer to that either. It seems to me that the two year college students are going to face, almost all of our graduates want to go onto four year schools, if this will be the requirement for the students of four year schools, at least our graduates will be facing this test. So it should be as fair as it possibly can be. I also would hope that it would be as low stakes as we can make it rather than a one shot test, if you fail it you don’t graduate. Or if you fail it you get one more shot and you don’t graduate or you don’t go on to the junior year. I hope that instead it would be used to improve the writing across the curriculum within the disciplines. Here again, I’m worried about the two year colleges. I know that at BMCC, I don’t blame anyone in the other departments. If I had five three-hour courses a semester with 45 students in each, I would teach them sociology or history, or business, I wouldn’t teach them writing either. Not in any effective way. I might make a stab at it. As a result our students don’t write in the other courses and it’s all left up to the English departments to prepare students to pass whatever this test will be. If the result would be that there would be, if we somehow forced the system to care about writing, I hope that’s what the consequences would be. I am worried though, because I’m afraid that both tests could easily turn into high stakes tests, and I think, George could correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe most of the people that know the field well would agree that writing assessment is a lot more valid, a lot more reliable for low stakes purposes than it tends to be for high stakes purposes. We should try to remember that because we could be terribly unfair to our students otherwise. I did get certified, by the way.

Mr. Ward (Acting Director of ESL, Lehman College) - I am here to speak about standards -- those we apply to the work of our ESL students and those we apply to our testing procedures. I will also raise some issues for faculty and policy makers to consider in planning programs within a changing university that now include an unprecedented number -- nearly 50% -- of first-generation immigrants, or Puerto Rican migrants, many of whom are adult second language learners. Although 1 will use the terms adult L2 learners and ESL students interchangeably, we should remember that many children and some high school students also learn English as a second language, but they enter CUNY in mainstream rather than ESL programs.

It is obvious that the world economy is placing new demands on institutions of higher education. One consequence of political and economic changes in the world is the fact that more adult language learners then ever before are entering public universities in North American cities. These historical circumstances have created unprecedented challenges for the immigrants themselves and for the institutions that nerve adults who wish to learn English for academic purposes.

I am an administrator, not a researcher. If I have had anything original to add to this topic, it has been to point out that there are obvious linguistic implications to the demographic changer in our cities, and that policy makers must take into account the natural, probably hard-wired, human limitations of all adult L2 learners -- if our standards are going to be realistic. I have reported on research suggesting a principled basis for now standards for the impromptu writing of college ESL student". These new standards would not include the expectation that adult L2 learners can consistently produce "correct sentences" or standard English grammar on timed tests.

In a testing program as large as the one that CUNY has conducted since 1978, it is important to remember that what is true for individuals may or may not be true for large populations. When a CUNY community college president testified before the BOT in 1995 that he supported the idea of language immersion because he had become fluent in Russian in three months through an army immersion program, I questioned NOT his sincerity but rather his logic. He assumed his own experience was relevant, and he never explained what he meant by "fluency". The point here is that we cannot base policy decisions and academic programs for large populations on individual opinions about language. But because language is such an intimate thing, some of us may find it a little too easy to jump to conclusions about what massive numbers of people should be able to do in a L2 after studying it for only a year or two. We must investigate and take into consideration the linguistic realities of large populations, and we must apply professional standards of large-scale testing to our assessment measures. I do not believe that we have invested enough time or money in either of these enterprises. Eduardo Cascallar, Jack Gantzer, and Ricardo Otheguy among others have all made similar points in the past.

Two quick points about the names and functions we assign to CUNY tests -- actual or proposed. First, the ACE was conceived of as a certification examination (and so named)

-- The Academic Certification Examination. What it was supposed to certify was student readiness to undertake upper division study. With the WAT — the CUNY Writing Assessment Test --, on the other hand, the term "assessment" has stood for several functions, most notably the certification function just mentioned in connection with the ACE, and also it serves as a placement test for incoming students. On many campuses it has other functions as well. Some at CUNY have suggested that when a new English proficiency test is developed, it may be something other than a certification measure. But the name proficiency will not change BOT-mandated testing policies. Unless the Board reconsiders its position with respect to certification, it in clear that one function of any new proficiency examination will very likely be to certify a student's readiness to move into the junior year. Proficiency -- in the language testing world -- is a relative concept that encompasses a range or ability from zero proficiency to high proficiency. Proficiency exists in the student. Certification is a function of a test that says yes to some students and no to others. "NO" means no degree at the community colleges or no registration at the senior colleges. Let us bclear that there can be no real functional difference between an English certification examination and an English proficiency examination administered university wide -- unless Board policy somehow changes.

Point 2: During the development of the ACE "correct sentences" were identified as something important that the test should measure. Since then, I have tried to explain why many adult L2 learners will have trouble meeting a uniformly-applied requirement of standard English in impromptu writing. The time frame for developing this ability, in fact, seems to be rather long -- something on the order of 4 years to possibly much longer depending on the individual and depending on the researcher you ask. These two issues, certification policy and correct sentences, were the focus of my dissent on the ACE. Although that examination is history, these two issues remain very much at the center of any debate over writing standards and ESL students at CUNY.

Very few people, myself included, believe that there can be much flexibility in the standards we use to judge the grammar of edited written work -- published documents, reports, term papers -- or any formal writing done in advance of a deadline providing time for editing and revision or for the use of resources like learning centers and tutors.. This standard is usually called standard English.

A test like the CUNY WAT, however, is a very different situation.

-- Timed test, not a conventional writing task

-- short time limit

-- not based on previous work, background reading or discussion.

It is an impromptu writing sample. How long it takes an adult L2 learner to develop this ability depends on many factors, but an important one is how long the student has been using academic English. I said before that the current situation at CUNY is unprecedented, and unfortunately we do not have a lot of research about adult L2 learners at CUNY or anywhere else. So any conclusion about adults must be tentative and cautious.

-- There is more and more research indicating that immigrant schoolchildren, not adults, need about 5-10 years in school before they can compete easily in classed with children who are native speakers of English.

-- But adults are different from children in language learning, and some things seem to come easier and some things come harder for them. Adults often understand grammar rules and concepts intellectually (probably better then children) even when they have trouble in their spoken and written performance. But while adults may struggle for years with aspects of grammar and vocabulary and certainly with pronunciation, it also seems to be true that in a much shorter period of time -- around 2 years, plus or minus -- many ESL students can begin to handle some college-level work in English. Students are able to understand academic language -- to read or comprehend it -- long before they are fully competent in producing it accurately themselves.

There are very, very few adult L2 learners -- probably less than 1% -- who can speak a second language without a foreign accent. There is close to complete agreement among linguists that adults have a very hard time learning to pronounce a foreign language correctly. But in regard to learning grammar, there is controversy. Some researchers believe that there are no limits on adult L2 learners, no that over a period of years -- 4, 5, 6, 7 -- these researchers believe that it is possible for adult L2 learners to achieve grammar control close to that of a native speaker.

There are other researchers, however, -- more of them in the last decade -- who believe that during puberty the human brain matures and changes, and that these biological or maturational changes in the brain create limits in language learning abilities. They say it is different after puberty and that adult L2 learners cannot achieve the name level of grammar control as native speakers or as children who learn a second language.

So we have two alternative views: On the one hand, if there are no biological or maturational limits on language learning, it probably takes most people more than the 4 years of a traditional college program to achieve native-like control of grammar. On the other hand, if native-like proficiency in grammar is not possible, because of maturational changes in the human brain during puberty, adult ESL students will never be able to achieve the same kind of grammar control as native English speakers. Either way - if we accept bio/maturational limits or if we don't — a test like the WAT which is

-- an impromptu writing sample

-- highly grammar sensitive

-- given to students in the first or second or third year at school

A test like this will not be a good indicator of what ESL students can do under other circumstances.

In fact, there is evidence at CUNY (in particular the 1994 Report of the CUNY ESL Task Force) that shows that most ESL students are doing as well as other students in terms of grades, retention, and graduation. Smaller studies have found similar trends at several campuses.

In the next year we will probably see some proposals for changes in testing practices at CUNY. While some still may feel that the WATS can work as a one-time test for initial placement, there is a growing awareness that any proficiency test or measurement should be something different, or possibly not one thing but several things or multiple measures.

I would urge everyone to try to understand better how our tests function and how these functions change students’ lives. All students, including those in USA, will need time, background reading, and a dictionary if we expect them to do their best, college-level writing. "Time" means not just a period of two hours or more to take a test but also a time frame like four or five years; for English language proficiency to develop progressively in a college environment. In the end, we may need to recognize, accept, and even to celebrate the fact that adult second language learners have built-in, human limitations. These students bring to CUNY and to our society not only those limitations but also their obvious strengthen end talents, which have been long recognized by faculty and now by some researchers as well.

In supporting these students we must continue to challenge the myth that ESL students or classes are remedial that ESL students are less successful than any other group of students. In any diverse institution of higher education there will be some student who are stronger and some who are weaker, come who succeed and some who do not. ESL students are similarly diverse, and their lower English proficiency does not mean lower academic potential. As we document and make public the success of our ESL students and programs, I would encourage you to join your ESL colleagues in making the arguments to keep student of limited English proficiency on all of our CUNY campuses.

Thank you very much.

Professor Maloney (Reading Specialist, SEEK Program, Brooklyn College) - Thank you very much for having me come. I teach reading which is a recursive skill, which is something that grows, which is certainly closely related to writing. This test, which is all I know of the work that the people have done in the English Discipline Council in working on the new test. It seems to me on the face of it, to be a reasonable test for someone who has learned to read college level tests. I hope that in pursuing models that reading faculty will be able to participate on the committee I hope that there will be a latitude in the choices of texts that the different campuses select. It occurred to me when reading the Carter article, that it was significantly middle aged and middle class. If you are familiar with it, the example deals with a husband of 50 years acknowledging infidelities on his death bed. I wondered about the relevance of the test. Although I do certainly subscribe to the relevance of honesty and integrity as issues that should be discussed. I think that in preparing our students to be competent, I listened carefully to what Marc was saying, the interesting piece in this test, which is directed at students finishing 60 credits. It is that they have the latitude, they have the time to take it off campus, to work in study groups, to apply those skills that they have learned and to come back to a test situation where in effect they’ll be ready to produce a more edited piece than they are in the kind of impromptu writing that the WAT asks for. I hope that we can continue to move forward in all kinds of testing. That pitches more of the emphasis toward what is a realistic task for students to do. I think the issue of a one time, all or nothing, or a two time all or nothing, two strikes and you’re out kind of focus is inappropriate. Particularly when everyone of us uses a spell-check, particularly when some of us hand our drafts to our colleagues and ask them to give it a quick read, please. I think we have to address those kinds of behaviors in realistic writing for our students as we ask them to think and to read and to write and to speak in ways that we know show their excellence and their training.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) - "I have a few questions. One is, should we develop these most serious policies on the basis of critics’ wild charges? Is that the best reason and the best motive for developing policies that affect our students’ lives? I think that you can make a reasonable case that the trustees and the powers that be want to use these tests as little more than a gatekeeping function, as a way of downsizing the University and undermining open admissions. These tests will serve that purpose beautifully. I think that most authorities on assessment recognize that you never should use a single indicator for a student’s abilities. When the issues are so great, you always want to use multiple indicators. You would never just use one test, no matter how many times you give it when there are other indicators available. I think that we should look at tests at a minimal in conjunction with grades. Especially when grades far outweigh any test throughout the whole assessment business in terms of predicting future college success. Grades are the best measure. High school grades are the best predictor of college grades and college grades are the best predictor of future college grades. Grades are an authentic assessment. We grade their work. I think that using any single test independent of grades is really wrong and we should have many measures. It is only fair to students to have multiple measures. You talked about what the experience was of a single test, when it didn’t really matter to you. Imagine what this experience would be like for our students who come from foreign countries, who come from cultures that are very different. I would urge us to work toward a great deal of flexibility. Local campus flexibility and the use of multiple measures which most experts have acknowledged as the right way to go." / Professor Todd - One of the issues we face with this test is the point in the student’s career that he or she will be allowed to take the test. And should this test be used for example as part of a final exam. For the final course in standard English. This is something that is quite controversial. The correlation with grades I believe is very problematic. I think that many of us are aware of grade inflation which has occurred in educational institutions throughout the country and the great divergence in grading policies. I think we’ve got to find some way of providing consistency in the means we use for determining competency or proficiency. Perhaps one test is not enough. On the other hand, when we have large numbers of students how much time and money can we devote to assessing the skills that students have acquired at a certain level. Ideally of course we would have a battery of tests. But I think that we have to be realistic about this in terms of the cost of tests and I think that the English Chairs have reached agreement that unfortunately for better or for worse a single test of this kind is probably the best measure we can come up with to determine a student’s readiness to graduate. The original resolution that the chairs passed in June indicated that this test should be required for graduation from the community colleges. This is also a very controversial issue and some college presidents and some faculty members would strongly disagree with this policy. As long as we are discussing the issues, this is one of the issues that needs to be addressed.

Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) - "I think that I as long as the expectation is that the English faculty in the few composition courses that students are required to take are responsible for preparing the student in academic English, and as long as there isn’t writing across the curriculum where there is continued attention to academic English, the further away the ESL student gets from those composition courses and the more disadvantaged he’s going to be. I think that by the time he gets to that 61st credit he will have a lot of trouble trying to pass the proficiency exam. This is as long as there isn’t continued attention to standardized English in other courses. My other comment is, I think that when the Trustees decided upon this policy, they are expecting a uniformity of results in a system where there is great variability. We know the variability that exists campus to campus and we know the variability that exists in the students that we have on the different campuses. And the variability in the courses we are teaching, in the core curricula that we have at the various campuses, and I think that as long as that variability is there, I think there is a great deal of difficulty in developing one test that is going to fit all students. I do think that we do have to think of some other kinds of models to measure proficiency." / Professor Eggers - Just to make a point about the proposed test. The hope would be that the test might be actually fairer to ESL students than the current WAT. Because the WAT is a 100 meter sprint, you can trip and you’re out. We would hope that second language students at that level could show some of their academic and intellectual development which might counter-balance some of the drop at the endings and so forth. There is a phrase used with disabled students called reasonable accommodations. I agree with just about everything Mr. Ward was saying about reasonable accommodations for second language students or any other students. But we shouldn’t I think fall into the trap of unreasonable accommodations. Any chair can tell you, any faculty can tell you, this student in English-2, or in Literature, how did they get this far? They can’t write a word of English. How did that happen. For our own reasons we want to maintain some kind of reasonable standards. The important thing is that they actually be fair and reasonable. We used to make some exceptions with the WAT. We had something that we called an administrative over-ride. At some point, if students had tried hard enough, they worked with the system, had a high enough GPA, and enough credits completed, we would waive the whole requirement. I can tell you that was about 5-10 students a year. So there was some correspondence between the inability to pass the WAT if you try to pass again, again, and again, and some level of writing competence. I’m not very trustful of any kind of test doing it very well or very precisely. But I do think that there is such a thing as unreasonable accommodations.

Professor Hager (Music, Brooklyn College) - "Both Phil and Cecilia referred to the subject that I wanted to mention, which is writing across the curriculum. Writing isn’t something that happens by simply taking a semester of English composition. We get students who have come from high school who have never written a paper, have never taken an essay exam, and we’re inheriting a problem that needs to be addressed in our conversations with the Board of Education about CPI and other initiatives in the high schools. I think that we should find a way to ensure that students get writing intensive courses not only in English but in other areas of the college curriculum. This might be a subject that could be addressed if there is some kind of conference or presentation on testing. How can we do that when we all have large classes. It does become onerous. But somehow we have to find a way not to perpetuate the problem we inherit. I know that from the faculty I’ve talked to they’re resorting more and more to short answer tests, True/False tests. They’re giving up on the writing assignments that they used to give because they have sixty students and they can’t read that many papers and respond in an appropriate fashion to student writing. These are real problems we face and I think that the board needs to understand that writing is a process that is acquired over a long period of time and requires fairly attentive faculty relationships with students. There may be alternative models to teaching certain classes which will assure that every student gets writing across the curriculum at all levels, starting down in the elementary schools."

Professor Cairns (Linguistics & Communication Disorders, Queens College) - "I wanted to thank Mr. Ward for incredibly intelligent and informed commentary on the difficulties that adult second language learners encounter. I just wanted to point out another source of complexity and variability which is that in the first language of an adult second language learner, there is tremendous amount of difference. Not only in the absolute level of difficulty he or she will have in acquiring English, but also in the particular grammatical structures that that person is going to have difficulty with. This is simply another source of variability and complexity in testing such adult second language learners. Thank you, Mr. Ward."

Professor Richter (English, Kingsborough Community College) - "I have a number of questions about the whole question that was raised about the difference between proficiency and certification. The kind of test that is being proposed is indeed certification, but I am not exactly sure what it is certification of. Is it certification of exit from remediation? Is it certification of a more advanced ability in English language? Is it certification for the ability to undertake advanced study? It seems to me that we are creating a grab bag here without any very clear idea of just exactly what it is we are testing for. I was very taken by Professor Todd’s suggestion that the exam might in fact be given in the context of a course. This it seems to me would be the very best way of giving such a test. The fact is that when the test was created at Kingsborough Community College it was created as the exit test from the first semester of regular English composition. That is when students had already finished their remedial sequence and were already into a regular course. However an exam that is given at the end of a course is a very different thing than an exam that is given as a singleton in a situation like that that is described by Professor Eggers. Therefore I think that it would be indeed fairer to give this test, whichever test it is, at the close of the regular freshman sequence, whether it is a one semester or two semester course. Give it in the context which the students will already have developed a community which they can use for discussion of this test, for preparation of this test, and give it in a way that is at least meaningful and has something to do with the way a student is graded in his abilities and not as a single kind of hurdle that the student has to pass when the student has already passed all the hurdles of being graded for so many courses." / Mr. Ward - I guess I just have a brief comment about that. I think that any test is going to have different effects. The Kingsborough test would probably be much better than what is happening now with the WAT in terms of freshman composition classes or ESL classes. But some of these functions of the test seem to be very clear in the Board Resolution. I can excerpt a little here, it says, "Since the faculty has expressed the satisfaction of the current use of the freshman skills assessment tests for multiple purposes including placement of incoming students and certification of student readiness to undertake upper division study, therefore be it resolved that [so and so] shall develop a proficiency examination to assess student readiness to undertake upper division study at CUNY." So it seems that the Board has spoken very clearly about that particular function. Now the actual timing of when that test happens I’m sure is an open question and I’m sure can be worked out on the different campuses at different times, the opportunities for re-testing and so forth. What it actually means in terms of the certification sounds, well.... I’ve kind of listened to a number of people recently that in our discussions with George on the ACE Committees, there was more of a sense of policy in development. Now there is a sense of policy established. That may not be the case, it may be that there is more flexibility than I’m perceiving at the moment. Any policy will be interpreted and there will be things I suppose like appeal procedures and so forth, I’m speculating at this point. How that works in practice is the future. I’m not sure anybody is really clear on what that will be like. But it does seem at least to me that the Board has spoken fairly clearly and the boundaries have been drawn in. The focus is narrower, certainly in terms of the competencies, but also in terms of the policy questions than it was when we were working on the ACE. / Professor Richer - "May I make one further comment, and it will be brief. It seems to me that this question of certification goes right to the heart of a function of the faculty. It has been our prerogative to certify the students for graduation and it seems to me that the introduction of another extraneous test, which is put in the middle of absolutely nowhere really undermines this responsibility and function of the faculty. That is one of the major reasons that I oppose the test."

Professor Jacobson (Chair of Academic Policy Committee) - Before we have our next speaker, I just want to say in our committee meeting this afternoon we wondered whether it was not a test of the faculty and whether the faculty was doing its job.

Professor Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay College) - "It’s interesting how each one of the panelists came so very close in their analysis and it was rather good, to showing the short-comings and difficulties of doing this I was waiting for the conclusion. The obvious conclusion is that this test should obviously not be in place. Mr. Ward read from the Board Resolution and it is clear that the Board Resolution refers to faculty. I don’t ever remember this body or any other body taking such action or such a position. I think the time has come for us to really take a hard look at this and instead of complaining about it as all of you have done, is to take a stand against it. This seems to be the first step towards all sorts of potential repercussions. Why not institute an exam after the science sequence is finished? After the math sequence is finished? After the language, psychology, or philosophy? This is a bad precedent. It doesn’t serve a legitimate purpose and it also opens the door for substitutions. Suppose a student comes and says, ‘I can pass this test, so I don’t have to take any English courses.’ It sets the agenda, it seems to changing the very nature of this University. I think it is the kind of thing we have to take a very strong stand against. If we’re not, then I have to broaden the perspective. I’m disturbed, from my perspective as a mathematician, by students who cannot do analytical work. I think we should have analysis across the curriculum. Students cannot read data, they cannot read tables, they can’t read charts, they can’t interpret statistics. Why not institute an examination for that? I think we should be treading very carefully here. I think that we should return this to our purview. I’m not concerned with what the Board tells us. We our the faculty, in this regard we should be telling the Board and unless they give us that opportunity we shouldn’t respond or deal with it." / Mr. Ward - Just a quick comment on the idea of it being a precedent. This again came up with the ACE. I think the precedent was established way back. The source text is the 1976 Board Resolution, and the WAT has been serving this function for 20 years. At Lehman that is what I know, we’ve managed to work out accommodations. We have appeal procedures and we do look closely at every student who gets to the 61st credit and students can appeal individually for extensions. But eventually uncertified students get stopped and have been for as long as I’ve been at Lehman. The working practice has been the Board Mandated Certification Measures and I believe this is true throughout CUNY since it has been established back in 1978. / Professor Bohigian - "May I just comment here. I’m not so sure that this is being Board driven as some of you seem to suggest. I think that the resolution that the Board passed was based in large measure on what was drawn up with the help of the English Council, with the help of Sandi, with the help of Vice Chancellor Mirrer. It was our intention that we start with something that we could experiment with. Obviously it has got to pass the test of usefulness in CUNY. If it doesn’t it seems to me it is not going to be rammed down our throats by the trustees. I think we’ve got to find something that we can live with. We welcome reasonable alternatives for this. I think that although the English Council members have agreed on certain basic principles, we haven’t taken a hard stand on anything. We want to cooperate with the CUNY community at large. I think that it is unfair to say that this is trustee driven. It is a kind of suggestion, experiment that we would like some reaction to. The only way we’re going to find out whether any particular kind of test is going to work is to try it. I think that the committee that is entrusted with coming up with a test proposal is going to have to fly this up the flag pole and see whether we like it." /  - [Unidentified Speaker] That’s the very point. The point is, which flag pole are we flying this up? Has it been run by us or just by the English Chairs? So if it isn’t the Board’s fault, then we’ve seen the enemy and it’s us possibly. This is a very dangerous precedent and I think it has to be looked at by the entire body. For example, for the English Chairs as you mentioned, to impose this standard first on the community colleges, this is a standard ploy. It is always one level lower. It’s like the graduate school imposing it on the four year colleges, and the four year on the community colleges, and community colleges on the high schools and all the way down the line. This has to be passed by a body as a whole. It can’t be passed by a few chairs sitting around deciding what is good for the community colleges. / Professor Bohigian - "At least these chairs include the community college chairs, it is not just the senior colleges imposing it on the community colleges." / But it is just the chairs, it didn’t include the faculty. / Professor Bohigian - "I know, but the chairs represent, they are elected. I’m not saying you’re entirely wrong about this. But I would just like to suggest that the chairs are elected representatives of their departments. The English departments are charged generally with teaching reading and writing in the institutions. I’m so glad that you brought this up because one of the items that I had on the agenda that didn’t make this agenda, but I hope it will in the future, is the basic question of who speaks for the University Faculty Senate? It is the same issue here. Who speaks for the particular department or college? Is it just the chair? Or is it the faculty? And under what circumstances can the chair speak to the faculty. So this is a very big issue. It can’t just be swept under the carpet.

[Unidentified Speaker] - Let’s take it up as a separate issue because I think you have a good point there.

Professor Levine (Applied Science, College of Staten Island) - "I’d like to raise an issue related to the ESL students. Our adult second language learners come with very wide diversity of backgrounds. Some are already doing college level work in their native language whether it be Spanish or Chinese. Others are undoubtedly bilingually illiterate. It would seem to me that the ESL people together with the language departments could develop a test to certify the ability of the student to do college level work in their native language. Once the student has demonstrated that, they can be given additional time. They still have to learn English, but given additional time to demonstrate competence in this second language. Have you considered this?" / Mr. Ward - I’m not sure what the connection is exactly. / Professor Levine - "The connection is the reasonable accommodation. The issue that if we have a person who is currently studying say mathematics in China and then comes to the United States and we expect them in a very short period of time to pass the same test that we are giving to someone who is a native speaker, we are ignoring the ability of these students to do college level work. We are penalizing students in ways that we wouldn’t want to be penalized. I would hate to go to China and have to pass an exam in Chinese in one year." / Mr. Ward - Again, I may not be understanding completely, but that sounds like selective admissions criteria as one would have to say at graduate school. And in fact I think that many graduate schools do have those kinds of considerations for non-native speakers who are coming in. What that would mean at CUNY that would be hard to say. We would have to look at the policy and what the practical implications would be. As far as native language assessment at CUNY, I think that would be a very complicated business. I don’t know what it would mean to have to certify ESL students not only in English but also in their native languages. We don’t really certify other senior college students in a second language. We have a Spanish requirement, they take Spanish I & II and they’ve met the requirement. That level of Spanish proficiency is probably far lower than what we expect of the ESL students. Many people have suggested that native language literacy is an important factor that needs to be considered in a time frame. The time frame that I gave was based on zero. Starting at zero is what I’m talking about. Some students are adults starting at zero. It certainly is an important thing, I don’t mean to discount it. But again, in terms of large scale testing and the practical implications of this, it’s very hard to know exactly what that means.

Professor Rosario-Sievert (English, Hostos Community College) - "I want to see if I’ve got this straight. ESL does not mean remediation. ESL students do as well academically overall as other students. Adult language learners change their patterns of language learning. Then as a faculty of a public institution, I want to ask you what we are doing by developing a single instrument to all students despite all of these variables. I would like to suggest that there is an implicit bias here perhaps created by the changing demographics of the student population. If all of that is true, then what are we doing?" / Mr. Ward - Is the glass here half empty or half full. You can look at the CUNY graduation rates or whatever measure you want to look at to determine whether we are being successful or not. The overall point about ESL students and success, is that when you think of ESL classes, you should just think of them as any other students in any other classes. In terms of their success rates, in terms of their graduation rates, their grades and so forth, they are pretty much comparable to native speakers and to the rest of the University. Let’s pick a number for our graduation rate, 50%, 60%, 40%, 35%, whatever you think the graduation rate is, ESL students seem to graduate at about the same rate. The point about the classes being remedial or not, this is an old argument that has been made for many years. What ESL students are expected to do is not analogous to what goes on in Spanish 101 or 102 or French or any of the other languages. I don’t know if I’ve responded to your comments but that’s what has occurred to me. / Professor Rosario-Sievert - "I’m just wondering whether we can respond and whether or not our response shouldn’t be somewhat more measured than it has been." / Mr. Ward - There is just one other thing that should be pointed out, I focus on a very narrow issue which is grammar proficiency. Writing composition and reading encompasses many things, and especially if we are going to generalize to student readiness to perform well in the upper division. The one issue that I focused on, grammar ability, native like proficiency, it’s certainly related to some of those things but it isn’t the same thing. There are lines of research in all of these areas so I wouldn’t jump to conclusions from any of my remarks about grammar about what students may or may not be able to do in other areas.

Professor Cummins (English, Bronx Community College) - "I just wanted to say that the first test was instituted right after open admissions, so that already tells you something about what was involved. I think that at this particular point, what the Discipline Council was worried about from my understanding of it, was that something would be imposed that wouldn’t take into account some of the values we are teaching in writing. Something like an ETS multiple choice, was the worry. So the Discipline Council said that they would develop a test of their own. Ideally of course I think that if a student passes our courses, that is all of the certification that should be necessary for graduation and for going on to doing upper division course work."

Professor Speidel (Geology, Queens College) - "Mr. Ward, would you please expand on your digression about the role of the emerging institutes in all of this." / Professor Ward - That digression was on the point of placement testing. Some people have suggested that the certification issue, because it is what gets students thrown out of the senior colleges, even if they are in good academic standing, and now students can’t graduate from the community colleges because of that issue. Some have suggested that the placement function is more of an innocuous one. Those of us who have had objections to the WAT, we’ve learned how to use it for placement purposes. For example, at Lehman we have other measures so we use it in combination with other things. So we can use it, we can live with it, we can figure it out. If University policies were to change and if access to the University were different in the future, placement testing would assume a new role in the overall scheme of things that it doesn’t have now. Right now at the CUNY Language Immersion Program, it is mostly students of very low English proficiency. What happens to some of them when they come to Lehman, we don’t have courses for students of low English proficiency any more. We used to. Students are allocated to Lehman before they are fully tested, so we don’t know their level of proficiency when they are allocated to Lehman. So I’ve actually been making the cut on some of these students during registration. They’re coming to Lehman, they think they are going to Lehman, and in fact some of them find out in late August or early September that they need to make some choices. One possibility for them is to go to the CUNY Language Immersion Program. Other possibilities would include transfer or doing it on your own, finding another program outside of the University. Where policies that changed the access to the University either at the senior colleges or at the community colleges, the placement function would take on a new role and new importance in determining which tracks students would fall into.

Professor Otte (English, Baruch College) - "A number of people have brought up CUNY’s past and a legacy of assessment. I just want to say a couple of words in clarification of that. First of all because it’s been evoked a couple of times, assessment review had to do with a lot more than the ACE. The now defunct and quickly and sooner the better forgotten Academic Certification Examination. The findings of that multi-committee task force were really three. That the WAT shouldn’t be used for anything but placement, and should then be reinvestigated and supplemented with multiple measures. That it should not be used for exit from remediation and ESL, and that it should definitely not be used for proficiency. And having made that recommendation our back was against the wall and we had to come up with an alternative. So the people understand what this is about, and Marc has eluded to this, John has, everyone has, in 1976 the Board passed a policy. It mandated extra-curriculum measures at the 60 point level. We’ve been living with that legacy from the beginning. It has its good points and its bad points. Very briefly, what CUNY does, and it’s the reason assessment is so much less a controversy than most other places, is that we focus assessment after the students have been admitted. At most places, assessment is screening. And those who are not assessed as highly proficient don’t get in. The legacy of CUNY open admissions has been to bring students in, work with them, and then conduct assessment on their proficiency. The down side of that is obviously that it has created real problems for us, not the least of all in a time when the demographics have changed radically. When Michael Berube, who spoke before this body and noted in the last decade and a half the adjunctification of the professoriate. Many things have changed to make this more difficult than it was before. The fact is, and this is the only point I really want to make, that this is to a whole body of decisions, very complex and problematic nexus of concerns that has to be handled by the faculty. The one thing that I can promise you is that there is no model out there that’s going to solve our problems. That’s where the Board is looking, that’s where this faculty cannot look. We have to look to ourselves, and we have to argue amongst ourselves. I think that controversy is very important I think realizing how complex these issues are is absolutely essential. But I think that whatever we do has to be faculty driven. It has to be under faculty control and we have to accept a certain amount of responsibility for that.