Draft: Subject to Senate
Approval
MINUTES OF THE THREE HUNDRED AND TWENTY-FIRST
PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE
Tuesday, September 26, 2006
The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair Philipp at 6:35 p.m. in
Room 9206/7 at the
Baruch: Present – Albright, Dumas, Freedman, Hill, and
Vora. Vacancies – 1. Absent – Martell, Pollard, Smith. BMCC: Present –
Friedman, Martinez-Lopez, Persaud, Rani, and
Chancellor Goldstein, Executive Vice Chancellor
Botman, Vice Chancellor Schaffer, President Kelly, and Executive Assistant Cura attended.
Governance Leaders present: Anderson (BMCC), Baumrin
(GS), Cooper (CSI), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia),
Pecorino (QCC), Savage (Queens), and Tobey (
Greetings from President William Kelly.
I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as proposed.
II. Approval of the Minutes of May 2006: Minutes were approved as distributed.
III. Reports (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)
A.
Chair
B. Chancellor Goldstein.
C.
Representatives to Board Committees (written).
D. PSC (oral)
E. Annual Standing Committee Reports (written).
IV. New Business:
A. The City University of New York
Policy on Acceptable Use of Computer Resources:
Professor Pecorino and Vice Chancellor Schaffer started the discussion,
and it is recorded in the Reports & Deliberations section.
B. Recommended Procedures for Handling
Student Complaints about Faculty Conduct in Academic Settings: The discussion was introduced by Professor
Baumrin and commented on by Vice Chancellor Schaffer. A full account of the discussion is recorded
in the Reports & Deliberations section.
C. College Learning Assessment Test: The discussion was introduced by Professor Beaky and the full transcript is recorded in the Reports & Deliberations section.
There being no
further business, the meeting was adjourned at 9:00 p.m.
Respectfully
submitted,
William Phipps
Executive Director
THE THREE HUNDRED AND
TWENTY-FIRST PLENARY
SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY
FACULTY SENATE
OF THE
September 26, 2006
Chair, Manfred
Philipp: I’d
like to welcome you to the 321st plenary of the University Faculty
Senate. We have an agenda, which you
have before you, but we’re going to have to immediately revise that agenda,
because of events, and I will introduce you and us to each other later when I
give my report. But the first thing I’d
like to do is to introduce the President of the
Greetings from
President William Kelly
President
William Kelly:
Welcome to my house. I’ve never thought of it in quite those terms, but lovely
to have you here. I’m very happy that
Manfred asked me to give greetings this evening. It’s a source of joy on three
separate accounts: First, it’s a personal pleasure to see so many friends that
I don’t get to see nearly enough of.
It’s always nice to see my chair that Karen borrows for each of these meetings
and always returns in excellent shape.
Thank you very much for that, Karen.
Secondly, we refer to it as the Kaplowitz chair, in my office. Second, it’s a pleasure to be here and to
note the institutional affinity that links the graduate center with the UFS,
another reason why we’re so pleased that you meet in our house. We’re both institutions that try to see CUNY
whole, and we derive our membership, of course, from across the university’s
constituent colleges. We are, in that
sense, the embodiment of the integrated university, and that is so in more than
a demographic sense. We are both, I think, charged with representing the
University as a whole, rather than individual colleges, trying to be something
that is greater than the sum of its parts, and in our different ways, we are charged
with advancing the University’s cause, promoting its mission and protecting its
interests.
Rightly imagined, we stand
beyond parochial concern. We try to
address ourselves to broad interests and to realize the twin goals of this
great university: excellence and access. And if in practice we sometimes fall
short of that non-partisan status and fail in our panoptic ambitions, it’s not
from a want of commitment or a lack of goodwill. Finally, I’m very pleased to be here, because
it gives me a chance to say thank you, not just for your good work on behalf of
the university, but more particularly for the minutes that you’ve
produced. I’ve said this to Susan
O’Malley a couple of times: I know no better digest of university opinion, both
in terms of the speakers who come to address you as the Chancellor is this
evening, but also from the comments that follow. There’s I think no better place to gather
information from every corner of this diverse university, and I assure you, I
am an avid reader of all that is produced and have profited mightily from
that. So many thanks. Again, welcome. I hope you will see this as your house, as it
truly is. Nice to be here and have a
good meeting, have a good year.
Chair Philipp:
Thank you
very much. The Chancellor and Executive
Vice Chancellor Botman are here and I think it’s not inappropriate that we go
immediately to the next part of the meeting, which would be the
Chancellor’s. I’ll give my report and
then we’ll do some other things like introducing new senators immediately
afterwards. So next thing is welcome,
Mr. Chancellor, Dr. Chancellor, it’s a pleasure to see you.
III. Reports:
B. Chancellor, Matthew Goldstein: I’d like the record to read,
I am not an avid reader of the minutes of this body. They are just too long and there’s just too
much being said. In any case, I always
enjoy the exchange with this body and myself.
I promised you last time that I would restrict my comments to a minimal
set of words and use the time to respond to any questions any of you might
have. So I will make this a set of
measure zero and not have any particular report because I think Manfred could
probably fill you in on the board meeting that occurred last night, at least
that which he is comfortable communicating, and we now produce so much material
that I don’t think anything is below the radar screen -- you see it all. I have about 20 minutes, 25 minutes, and then
I have to run to someplace else. So I
will --
Chair Philipp:
Just as a
note, please identify yourself before speaking.
We have a hypothetical shillelagh at this meeting, that is to say that
if somebody is in front of you at the microphone who speaks and gives a long
disquisition, you may beat them on the head with the shillelagh so that you
also will get a chance to speak. If you
do want to give a long disquisition, please go to the back of the line so that
the people in front of you do get a chance to say something before the
Chancellor has to leave. So with that,
Professor Cooper.
Professor
Sandi Cooper (History
Department,
Every campus does this in a
different way to provide the faculty representatives. We will need a student representative, and we
will need a representative that comes from the alumni or the foundation. However, the college wants to proceed. Once that committee is put together, I will
meet with that committee, give the committee its charge and Marlene Springer
will continue to serve as president of the institution until we find a
replacement.
I’d like to really sit down
with the next president and determine a sense of direction for the
Professor
William Crain
(Psychology Department,
When someone says “this is
my home,” this is not my home, this is our home. This is the home for the entire University
and I think that’s the great potency of this great university. So this is going to be done delicately,
thoughtfully, and if it can’t work in the way that the president envisaged it
might work or that I envisage it might work, we will not continue down that
direction and find a different way. But
the access is going to be as it is today and we’re going to give John Jay an
opportunity to build in an area that they really should be building because of
their unique position here in the University but are impeded from doing
so. The faculties are really impeded
from doing so because of the way in which the institution is resourced. So we have to think about this very
carefully, and we will. / Professor
Crain - Just a quick comment. A lot of
the students for whom college is a very new experience, they can develop a
sense of home, being at home in one place, and it’s a lot easier to do so in
terms of their feeling of the college experience. If they could start at an institution and
stay there, it would be easier for them.
So I hope you consider that. /
Chancellor - I think that’s a legitimate point.
Professor
Lawrence Rushing (Social Studies Department,
Baruch brings in
approximately 3,000 students a year.
Half of them are first-time freshmen, half of them are transfer
students, and the dominant number of those transfer students are students that
are transferred from within the
Professor
Lenore Beaky (English Department,
Professor Anne
Friedman
(Developmental Skills Department, Borough of Manhattan Community College): I
just want to take a minute and follow up with a question related to the issue
that Dr. Rushing raised about the article in The New York Times, which
talks about significant drops in African American enrollment at the three
colleges that he mentioned. I know you
have a great respect for data and for doing the right thing and even
revisiting, perhaps, if we maybe possibly made a little error in judgment. I’m
sure you remember that at the time of the discussion and the debate on whether
or not to eliminate the open admissions policy at the senior colleges, there
was a tremendous amount of testimony presented from a tremendous number of
faculty pointing to research documenting the fact that students at the senior
colleges at CUNY who needed a remedial course in either math or reading or
writing, when they took those courses, and they passed them on the first shot,
they had as good a chance, if not a better chance, of persisting and graduating
in good standing at the senior colleges. I very specifically remember some of
that testimony, because I presented some of it myself, and I quoted directly
from a report coming out of the Chancellery, known as a Judith Watson report.
Some of my colleagues might remember that, and the data that I just mentioned
to you came right out of CUNY’s own report, and so in light of that, I would
like to ask you if you might reconsider your response to Dr. Rushing and think
about, looking back, perhaps, that with this really startling, startling drop in
statistics, that perhaps maybe we need to look back and think about piloting
some remedial courses back at the senior colleges and bring in students who
might need one semester of that work, and seeing if the same results will occur
six or seven years later, and that those students will do as well if not better
as the students who are being accepted now under the higher standards or
whatever. I’m really serious about this question because I think it’s a total
complete, if not embarrassment, outrage at
Professor
Martha Bell
(SEEK Department, Brooklyn College): In light of the new contract and the
seven-year tenure clock, could you talk to us a little bit about your
expectations and our expectations for what somebody needs to do to achieve
tenure. Will it change from those people
who have the five-year tenure clock to those that have the seven-year tenure
clock? / Chancellor Goldstein - It was
never my intention to make more onerous the requirements for tenure or
promotion. I would be very opposed to
doing that. I think the requirements
that we have right now in place across the University are where they should be. What I have always wanted to do is to give
our faculties across this university adequate time to provide a portfolio of
their research which legitimately is the right lens on the quality of their
work. I remember when I published, and I
published quite a bit, in the early stages of my career. By the time a manuscript was sent in and then
revised and sent back and then accepted, in those days it was maybe a
year. Now it’s closer to two years in
the field that I wrote in. We are making
a big move in this university, Martha, to invest heavily in the sciences, and I
gave a major speech today where I outlined some of this. Today, to get a lab set up, to get your
graduate students working with you, to do the experiments, to worry about
funding and new grants that you have to write -- it is an enormous amount of
time, and quite frankly, very good people who are working very, very hard can’t
really show what they are capable of getting done in that very, very short --
because it’s not five years, the decision is made even before that. So I thought for me, the seven-year clock was
not about making it more difficult at all.
It was to give people an opportunity, and that’s why I agreed when
Barbara Bowen and I talked. I was
sympathetic to the issue of release time, and it’s costly, but I think it was
the right thing to give new faculty who are coming to the university some time
off from teaching, and it was an effort to really get people up to a point
where they can show, “Look, this is what I’m really capable of doing, and I
have the time to do it.”
Professor
Diane Sank
(Anthropology Department, The City College): There was a survey done at Hunter
College and reported in the summer edition of The Clarion, you probably
are aware of it, reporting that 62% of the faculty surveyed believed that they
would suffer retaliation if they expressed any view or opinion or opposition to
a decision or action of their administration.
As Ombudsperson at
Professor John
Asimakopoulos (Sociology Department,
Chair Philipp: One of the innovations
that we’re doing this year is not only we’ve heard from the Chancellor, but a
report from the PSC, and I’m glad to see Barbara Bowen here. So we’ll go straight on to that, and I’d like
to make you aware of the presence of Vice-Chancellor Shaffer who will be important
in our discussion later on in terms of new university policies. So now I’d like to welcome Barbara Bowen,
while she welcomes some of the members of her executive board. Barbara, welcome to the University Faculty Senate.
D. PSC,
Professor Barbara Bowen: Thank you very much. Thank
you, Fred. It’s not my first time here,
but it’s my first time reporting as the PSC president, and I’m very grateful to
Fred and also to all the other members of the leadership of the Faculty Senate
for thinking of a structural way to build our connection. We have always worked closely and we worked
closely when we’ve had other leaders of the faculty senate, many of whom are
here, but one of things that Fred ushered in, which I think is a great thing,
is a regular set of meetings between the leadership of the PSC and the Faculty
Senate and also cross-reporting. So we
are going to include a report from the Faculty Senate at our Delegate Assembly,
probably a written report, and Fred very graciously asked me to give a very short,
which I will do, a very short report here.
I’ll do it orally, and I think this is a very important time for us to
work closely together.
Obviously, the
There
are serious things happening at this moment in higher education and in higher
education employment. We have gone through some very tough struggles at CUNY,
as every person in this room knows, around the last contract, and it’s an
atmosphere of difficulty, I feel, in higher education and for a public higher
education institution like CUNY in the current political climate. We are
constantly seeing attacks on working people and attacks on people who are
students. So it’s an important moment
for us to work together, and I look forward to that. I think there are ways that we can reinforce
each other and cooperate, and I really look forward to Fred’s guidance in that.
I’ll start with an important
Union initiative: On two Fridays in
September, the PSC held workshops on the new contract for department
chairs. More than 100 were there, and
from the community colleges and senior colleges to come and have a workshop on
the details of implementing the contract.
I think that was very helpful, and we are going to repeat that. Some of you were at that.
There was a question here
earlier, I think Martha Bell, you asked the question about tenure. I was very glad to hear Matt Goldstein say
that he was, very opposed to making more onerous the requirements for tenure
and promotion. I think we should
remember that. The extension in the
tenure clock was something we thought long and hard about in this
contract. I know the Senate thought long
and hard about that issue too. We in the
union had always taken the position that we would entertain a longer tenure
time, untenured period, only if there were additional supports put in for the
people who had to face that untenured period and also if some of the things
that normally go with the longer tenure clock were put in place, such as
sabbaticals that you could really take instead of sabbaticals that no one could
afford to take; also a decent amount of reassigned time to do your scholarly
work. So the Union’s position had been,
from the start, that we opposed unilateral change -- on the part of the
Chancellery -- in the tenure clock, which is what they initially sought to do
by going to Albany and change the legislation without consultation with the
Union. Instead, we insisted that we make some gains for our members along with
that change in the tenure clock, and I feel that we’ve done that in this
contract, with the reassigned time and the better sabbaticals.
I want to say one word about
sabbaticals. I’m glad there are still
some members of the Chancellor’s Office here.
When we negotiated this, we were insistent that there be new money put
in to fund the sabbaticals. I know that
there is a little buzz going around various campuses that even some college
presidents have said there will be not as many sabbaticals. I don’t know if any of you heard that, that
the number of sabbaticals will be reduced, the standard for getting sabbaticals
will change, don’t expect to see any of these 80% sabbaticals -- it’s a
fiction. That is not true. I see Vice-Chancellor Schaffer, I know that
he can attest to this too. A substantial
amount of money on an annual recurring basis was put into the contract to fund
the sabbaticals at 80%. Not only did we
put in money to cover the difference between 50% and 80% pay, but we also put
in money to cover the anticipated increase in the number of people who would
take sabbaticals, given that the amount of money was something that would make
the sabbaticals more attractive. Also in
discussions with Matt Goldstein, he has told us that he is restructuring the
way that colleges are allocated money for the sabbaticals, so the college
budgets will not lose money on sabbaticals.
I think that’s a very important assurance that we’ve had from the budget
office and that you should know as leaders on campus.
How many of you have heard
on your campuses that there are going to be fewer sabbaticals, and don’t expect
to see these 80% sabbaticals? Okay, so
people are hearing that. We are going to
put out something in writing again, because it’s important. If you’re hearing it, others are hearing it
too. That was a funded provision, it’s
not an unfunded mandate. The idea of that was really to allow there to be
sabbaticals that people can take, and one of the things the Union is
concentrating on right now is making sure that the provisions that we worked so
hard to create, and the good ones in this contract, can actually come to
fruition.
Just, finally, on the
contract, I would say that having met this very tough ceiling imposed by the
City and State on the amount of salary in the contract -- which was the amount
they held the SUNY union to and also the City unions, a blend of those two
amounts -- we bumped up against this very low ceiling on salaries, and in order
to get more money into the contract and to bring more benefits to you, we put
money in places other than salary, in addition to salary. One was increased contributions to the
Welfare Fund. Another was the sabbaticals,
another was the reassigned time, and some other provisions there. So some of the economic benefit of the
contract is not in the salary, it’s in other provisions.
One quick question that
everybody wants to know the answer to is when will we see a better dental
benefit. Right? You were thinking, “When was she going to say
that?” By the end of this calendar year, we will have a vote on it-- I went to a meeting this morning where
we were trying to choose responsibly what way to upgrade the dental plan with
the funds we have. They are still not a
princely amount. I want to be honest
with you -- they are not going to fund the dental plan of everyone’s dreams. We still believe that the university should
increase the funding to the Welfare Fund so we can have a full and beautiful
dental plan so we can all hold on to our teeth and not outlive them, but we are
trying to do the best we can, and responsibly, with the money we have, and Bob
Cermele knows, because he’s the Welfare Fund treasurer, and he was there at
that meeting this morning.
I’ll just say maybe one more
thing. A couple of policy issues. Just a couple of quick points. Diane Sank mentioned the Hunter Academic Freedom
Survey. We in the Union take that very
seriously, as does the Hunter chapter, as does the AAUP. If 62% of those who responded, which is not
the whole universe of people, if 62% say they feel that they will be retaliated
against by the president or by the administration if they express contrary
views, I take that very seriously, and I don’t question whether their
perceptions match reality. If that’s
their perception, we need to address their perception, and there’s a reason for
that perception when it’s that widespread.
It’s not 62% at every campus. I
would say that, it is not. I don’t think
it is at Queens College, my campus, but it is some places, and we in the Union
take that very seriously and we’re working with the Hunter chapter to address
that. And I know that’s a serious
concern of this body, as you are so deeply involved in issues of academic
freedom. We must protect that at
CUNY. We don’t have high salaries; we
don’t have fabulous working conditions.
We’ve got to have academic freedom.
So we’re working on that.
We have also notified the
Chancellor’s office that we see contractual problems in the proposed CUNY
policy on computer use. The Union is
entitled to call for a consultation with the Chancellery on policy, upcoming
policy. We have called for that on the
computer use policy because we feel it raises some contractual concerns. We haven’t had the discussion yet, so we’ll
hold off on that. And finally, I just
wanted to mention that we are engaged as a Union, since we have a little break
between the last contract and the next one, we are engaged in an active
campaign of listening to our members.
You will see us on campus. We do
a lot of other kinds of campaigns, legislative and contract. We’re taking the next few months to do a
listening campaign, and very much want to hear what’s on members’ minds, what’s
on your minds, to shape the direction in which we can go in the future. So I thank you very much for giving me the
time. Thanks a lot.
Chair Philipp: If any of you have been to
a Delegate Assembly Meeting at the PSC you know that Barbara runs a very tightly
controlled meeting in terms of time. Not
in terms of content, but in terms of time.
The agenda has time points, and I thought of doing that for the
University Faculty Senate, but I don’t think that’s going to work here. Well, okay.
But nonetheless, I thought we could have questions in the same
style. Brief questions as done with the
Chancellor. Diane, you were so good in
the first round, perhaps you could continue now.
Professor
Diane Sank:
I noticed in the handout today regarding new salaries for administrators, that
the different presidents of the different colleges, even within the senior
colleges, do not have the same salary, and at City College we are honored, or
embarrassed, by the fact that our president has the highest salary. Doing a little of that arithmetic, I seem to
see that the increase in salary from the present year, from 2004/2005/2006
seems to have increased greater for City College’s president than for even the
president of the Graduate Center, and I would just wonder what criteria are
used in determining the salary of the presidents. Especially since we’re in a crisis, always,
of budget, and especially in terms of the Welfare Fund, why does one president
get $250,000 and another get $199? /
Chair Philipp - Let me respond to that before Barbara does. These tables were determined at a Board of
Trustees meeting yesterday, and I don’t know if Barbara’s had the opportunity
to look at them. They’re on the table
because we, the UFS, put them there. So
I don’t know if it’s a fair question for Barbara. Having said that, I will now yield the
microphone back to her. / Professor
Bowen - I will say that that is not our purview, and it’s not that I’m trying to
avoid the question. I do have comments
about those salaries, which I, of course, am tempted to make, but in answer to
your specific question, the Union of course does not set the salaries. In some world, we might imagine that the
Union would set the salaries of the Chancellor and the Vice-Chancellors and so
on, but we don’t, and those criteria are set by the Chancellor and the
Chancellor’s Office handles those. I
know that they set criteria and all I have seen is what was in The Times
today about the new salaries. I do have
some questions about that myself, but the criteria are not the Union’s
purview. / Chair Philipp - I’d like to
make a comment. Diane, we’d put out a
sheet on the back table that did give the criteria that were listed by the
Chancellor.
Professor
Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy Department, The Graduate Center): My calculation, rough and
ready calculation, is that approximately one-seventh of the tenured faculty
should anticipate desiring an 80% sabbatical.
That comes to roughly, give or take a couple, 700. In a discussion at the Budget Advisory
Committee with Steve London present, he reminded the Vice-Chancellor that there
was no limit on sabbaticals, to which the Vice-Chancellor agreed. There are two things about this. I don’t see that it’s conceivable that it be
funded, but let’s suppose it is. What
steps did your administration take in providing adequate substitute teaching
power for this? / Bowen - Let me go back
to the first thing. Steve London, the
First Vice-President was correct, that we did not negotiate. In fact, we specifically negotiated that there
not be a cap on the number of sabbaticals.
So the Chancellor has made a strong commitment, and I take him at his
word, that the goal of the administration is to allow people to take advantage
of those sabbaticals.
And I would encourage people
to do that. Obviously, there is still
the channel that’s laid out in the contract for applying for sabbatical. It’s described in Article 25 of the Contract,
and that procedure is unchanged, which is a procedure of approvals, and
P&Bs, College P&Bs, College Presidents, are still a part of the
process, and department chairs have asked us their question about it, which is
related to yours, Stefan, about staffing.
What if everybody applies at once?
That may happen in some departments.
People wait 35 years for a decent sabbatical. We’re hoping the chairs can work well with
people and be able to work out a just system so that we understand, and I think
the faculty understands, that it is not possible for every single full-time member
of a department to be on sabbatical at once.
But your question was about
replacements, and the funding for sabbaticals is in part a funding to enable
the university to cover your teaching while you’re not there. Unfortunately, the Union does not control
what level of hiring is put in place, whether it’s a substitute position, or a
full-time substitute, which is done on some campuses. Some campuses routinely replace somebody on
sabbatical with a full-time substitute position, and some routinely replace
them with adjuncts. There is no reason
for there not to be replacements for people on sabbatical. So we should not see courses going untaught
because of the sabbaticals.
Professor John
Asimakopoulos:
I asked the Chancellor and his answer very simply was, let them do as they
please. I’m asking you, when it comes to
clearly, quantifiable and measurable criteria for the tenure-track faculty,
what is the position of our Union. Are
you in support of this; what can we do hands-on? I think this is a class-action lawsuit
waiting to happen. We don’t have
measurable criteria for how we appoint our faculty. / Professor Bowen - I guess I would disagree
with that. I feel that we do have
measurable criteria. We have different
criteria in different departments even, and different campuses. I don’t want to set forth academic policy
here; that’s not my job. But I would be
very leery of a proposal to have uniform criteria, to have page counting. I have to say that I don’t agree with the
Chancellor on several items, but I firmly agree with him on the idea that
page-counting or doing some kind of arbitrary measure would be a bad idea.
The Union firmly supports
academic governance and the right of faculty to make academic judgments. It seems to me that we would be tampering
with that in a way that would not help us.
I understand your impulse. I
do. I understand what you’re saying,
that how can you write a book at one place and you write two articles somewhere
else, or worse, your senior colleagues have published one article and you’re
coming up and you have to write two books.
That doesn’t seem right. I
understand that, but I don’t think the right answer to that is a uniform
rubric. I think the right answer is
fairness, working closely with your chair and P&B.
And the last thing that I
would say is that the existence of a union and a grievance procedure helps the
tenure procedure to be fairer. Not that
everybody should wait until they don’t get tenure and then grieve, but the fact
that we have it sitting there, that there’s a clear process, I think helps the
tenure process to be fair. If you’re
finding it not fair, I would really ask you one on one to call the Union. Let’s talk about it before you come up for
tenure. But, off the cuff, my impulse
would be to turn to the Faculty Senate and say to the Faculty Senate, would you
endorse the kind of rubrics that John has proposed, and I think that’s really a
topic for the Senate to discuss. /
Professor Asimakopoulos - For the record, SUNY college campuses do have that,
for the record. Some of them.
Chair Philipp: Again, thank you, Barbara,
for coming to the meeting. We have a
tight agenda and there are some business things that we have to attend to. First of all, I’d like to have a motion for
the approval of the minutes, which are in your package. All in favor.
Very good. The next item is the
Chair’s report, which I will skip for the moment. You have a written copy of my report. That is in the back, on the back table. If we get time to it, I will deliver it in a
verbal sense. The Chancellor’s already
been here. The PSC report of Section D
has been done. The representatives of
Board Committees and Committee Reports are written. The next item on the agenda is a discussion
on the acceptable use of Computer Resources in the university. It’s very important to us that
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer is present, and I appreciate your presence, and I’d
like to ask a member of our Executive Committee who has been involved in the
formulation, Phil Pecorino, to conduct the discussion on the next part. Phil, thank you for doing this. Please.
IV. New
Business:
A. The City
University of New York Policy on Acceptable Use of Computer Resources.
Professor
Philip Pecorino (Social Sciences Department, Queensborough Community College): I’m
glad to be here. I think this is the
third or fourth time I’ve stood before you on this matter since the taskforce
was formed. But I’m in a different
position today because at the start of this semester I started to teach a
course on computers, information networks and ethics, values, and society. And now this topic is one of the topics of my
course, and a chapter of a book I’m putting together. So I see it anew, so to speak. I had reason, very recently, to speak with
the Vice-Chancellor about how I’ve come to view it from both sides, and this
has come to be a very complicated and difficult thing.
I guess I have to deliver a
message as discussion leader to provoke our subsequent discussion and invite
the Vice-Chancellor’s participation, but the message I have to give is, we live
in difficult times, and if you haven’t noticed it, things are not as they once
were if they ever were as we thought they were, and with regard to privacy,
this is especially the case. I think it
is wrong for us sensible, rational, mature, adult beings to hold as a demand or
expectation that any human being can give us an absolute guarantee of privacy
concerning just about anything. If folks
want to find out what you’re doing, there are ways they can find out, and the
more we enter as we do as faculty the mission of this university, to teach, we
communicate, and the many different ways in which we communicate can be and are
monitored. So the more you engage in
what you do as members of the faculty: teaching, research, advising,
counseling, you’re likely to be generating lots of information that can be
viewed by others.
And I think subsequent to
this policy, however it may turn out to be finally approved, we have a major
education effort, which we’re good at, to educate one another on those steps,
those measures, we must take to safeguard as much as can be safeguarded those
things we do for which we want to expect our privacy to be respected. I know that I’ve had colleagues who have
wanted to insist that the university give a kind of ironclad guarantee that no
one connected with the university would order an invasion of their privacy, and
that if anybody was tempted to consider doing so, it could only be an order
given after a number of faculty reviewed the situation and gave their approval. I have some sympathy for that. I wish I had that kind of security. I wish my mother still tucked me in bed at
night and told me all would be well, but I don’t think even that would work,
because there are folks out there who are going and looking as a matter of what
they do everyday for an electronic communication system to be maintained, and
there are others that will look because they have court orders or other decrees
from the judicial body saying that this is required.
What we have before you is
the latest draft of a policy to be set before the Board of Trustees. In it, the three faculty members on this
taskforce, Harold Sullivan of John Jay, myself, and Stefan Baumrin, attempted
to convince the university, as much as we could convince them, that faculty are
not ordinary employees of a corporate or business structure. If we were, the case precedents are quite
well set out that we have no expectation of policy. Employers may look at anything employees are
doing on the premises or with the resources of the institution, but I believe
you can see in the policy, I think it’s in Section 13, that if it’s not an
emergency situation or one required by an outside agency with a warrant or a
subpoena or something, the current draft says that a president who would then
consider ordering security staff or the information technology staff to go take
a look at something or make a copy of something should stop first and consult
with the Office of Legal Affairs, the legal counsel to the board, and with the
head of the UFS, who would represent the interest we faculty have in ensuring
to what degree we can ensure that there will be no unreasonable invasions of
our privacy, for lack of a better word at this time. I will now invite the Vice-Chancellor to give
his presentation on what he thinks about the current draft, but I personally
think as one of the three members that I’m not sure I could actually conceive
of what further we could be given. What
you have in front of you is not an absolute guarantee. Be comforted somewhat in the notion that we
have no evidence that there’s regular monitoring, that there’s a high frequency
of violations of what we would consider our privacy. What consolation that may give you, take it,
but next we should hear from the Vice-Chancellor and then we’ll have questions
from any or all of you.
Vice
Chancellor Frederick Schaffer: Thank you, Phil.
Maybe I should just say a few words about the origins of this
draft. Some time after I got here six
years ago, somebody asked me what’s our policy on computer use, and I said, “I
don’t know, I’ll look it up.” And I looked around, and I couldn’t find
one. I went to the web site, which I
think was pretty much new at that point, and I did find a statement of some
guidelines related to computer use, and when I asked a few questions and dug a
little bit more deeply, I was told that this had gotten drafted at some point,
a few years back, and had never been presented to the Board of Trustees or
really, for that matter, any other body.
So in effect, we had no policy on computer use, and it is seemed to me
that was not a good situation. Most
universities have such a policy. So I
asked a member of my staff to spend some time and pull up policies at other
universities, which she did. There are
hundreds of them out there. I asked her
to look at the ones, which she thought were the best models, and she pulled
together 12 or 15 that seemed to be sort of the consensus view of what
universities do in this area, and then I asked the Chancellor to convene a
taskforce to begin drafting one for CUNY.
We’ve been at it a couple of
years -- these things always take longer than one anticipates. The taskforce is made up of members from the
central administration, two presidents, three faculty members. I think that pretty much covers it. One of my attorneys and I worked through a
number of drafts, to try to come up with a policy. The draft of the policy that you have in
front of you is very much like the vast majority of policies around the country
in universities. It was not our intent
to be particularly original or out of the mainstream. We just thought there ought to be a policy
that reflected the consensus within the world of universities, and most
importantly, I thought it was very important and the reason for having a policy
is so that you the faculty would know what to expect. It’s not only important to have rules, but
it’s important for people to know what the rules are, so they can conduct
themselves accordingly, and then to have some safeguards against abuse. So with that very general framework, we set
to work in drafting this policy. I
think, from my perspective, it’s, as I said, very much in the mainstream of
what universities around the country have.
I think it provides actually somewhat more protection than most of them
do.
When we began the
discussions some of the taskforce people raised some questions immediately
about issues of privacy outside of the area of the computers and I assured the
taskforce that we would get to that, that I thought we ought to take it one
step at a time, come up with a computer use policy which involved some things
other than privacy issues, get that done, and then we would reconvene and look
at other issues of privacy outside the realm of computers, and we’ll do that
once we get this done. I just thought it
was important that people understand, as I didn’t initially, how a large,
integrated IT system works, and what kinds of things go on that have to go on
in major maintenance. So there’s one
aspect of this that just has to do with sort of letting people know this is
what happens when you maintain a large system.
And then the other area that impacts on the issue of privacy relates to
generally the category of investigation of potential wrong-doing, and I thought
it was important to establish some clear procedures and a limited number of
people who could authorize such things, because none of us likes to have our
emails read or other contents on our computer looked at, but at the end of the
day it is a fairly standard practice, not only among employers outside of
academia, but among universities themselves that there are provisions made for
those rare contingencies, and they are rare.
In the time that I have been
at the university I am not aware of any investigative intrusion into anybody’s
email or computer systems, and I think I would have known. It’s possible -- things go on in the campus
that you don’t always know about, but certainly if it is was coming from
outside the university, I would know about it.
I’m regularly in contact with the presidents and with their labor
designees and their HR people, their counsels, and so on. I’m not aware of any instance of this, and so
one might say, “Well then, why not just leave well enough alone?” But I think it’s worthwhile to set out the
rules of the road, to set out what your expectations should be, and one of the
reasons why you should want to know what the procedures and rules are is
because if people violate them, that is to say they violate your privacy
without warrant under our policy, we can’t discipline them if we don’t have a
policy. People on both sides, those like
yourselves, at least in your imagination see yourselves as potential victims of
an invasion of privacy, and those people who have access to computers because
they’re IT workers or others and therefore in this scenario might be seen as
the perpetrators. Everybody’s got to
know what the rules are and then if people violate the rules, it has to be
clear enough so that they can be appropriately disciplined.
I’m sure you saw in the news
the other day that the reevaluation of the medical files of that poor little
girl who was killed about a year ago.
Some people at the hospital out of sort of idle curiosity decided to
take a look at her medical records, and the hospitals quite appropriately are
bringing disciplinary actions against those people. Well, if those kinds of things happen, and,
as I said, I’m not aware of their ever having happened in the six years I’ve
been here, we need to have the basis for saying, that’s not proper, and so part
of what this policy gives us is sort of a clear set of what the rules are, what
the expectations are, and as I said, trying to keep the possibility of any such
intrusions for investigatory purposes in the hands of a very, very few people with
annual reporting as to how many times it’s occurred. I expect that in most years it will be zero,
and so that’s sort of a general overview.
I don’t think it’s helpful
to try to draft in a committee this large with the few minutes that we probably
have available to us. My email address
and my telephone number are published and well known, and I’m happy to receive
comment from anybody at any time. But I
think if you have some major conceptual questions or concerns, this would be a
good time to start discussing them. I
should point out that we very much valued and appreciated the input of faculty
members on the taskforce. The draft
policy was passed with one dissenting vote, and I hope that reflects the fact
that there was, I think, a general consensus and this was an appropriate
policy, but perhaps you’ll disagree.
Professor
Michael Barnhart (Philosophy, History, and Political Science Department, Kingsborough
Community College): I read through it. I
find it interesting. The one thing that
concerned me, has to do with the final page, the final claim, which is that
CUNY reserves the right to change this policy and other related policies at any
time, and there didn’t seem to be any provision made in there for faculty
consultation as I guess there has been in the case of the drafting of this
policy. So I was wondering if that was
exactly a wise move, if perhaps that we should write into the policy some sort
of expectation of faculty consultation, especially since, obviously, it’s
faculty who will be involved. /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - I appreciate the comment. Nothing tricky was intended by that
closing. Look, at this university,
legally, policy is set by the Board of Trustees, and the Chancellor and the
Board are always sensitive to the fact that this is, after all, a university,
not an automobile manufacturer, and it has always been our custom when we do
policies, whether it was this policy or the prior intellectual property policy,
to seek out input across the university, and if we were to amend this, we would
do the same. If we weren’t going to do
that, why would we have done it the first time out? So perhaps we don’t need to say it, and if
that raised a red flag, I apologize, but that’s just the way we operate. / Professor Barnhart - It wasn’t so much that
I didn’t think you would do it in general, it just seemed to me that it might
be more reassuring if it was actually in black and white on a piece of paper.
Professor
Pecorino:
Two points. One is that the Vice
Chancellor’s received a considerable number of comments and suggestions about
the language -- certain phrases that need some greater clarity and where it’s
applicable to all users and where the faculty are distinguished from other
users. So I think at least those things
are going to be worked on. The second
point is, as he alluded to, this group will have to continue on and somewhat
shift focus to privacy in general and in particular confidentiality, where the
focus will be, in order for us to honor our pledges of confidentiality in search
committees, advisement, counseling, human subject research, social work, and
wherever else confidentiality is part of our contractual or implicit
arrangement, what steps must be taken by both the university to respect that
and by faculty to protect it? So that
will become subject for future actions, and I imagine it’s possible, and this
maybe is why the last section is the way it is, that when we look at those
things, there may be some tinkering required back on this policy. / Chair Philipp - I call now on another
member of the group that’s familiar with this policy, Professor Baumrin. / Professor Baumrin - Let me call your
attention, Vice-Chancellor, to section 6 on page 3, no doubt the very line that
Professor Pecorino was referring to just now, which I myself have only recently
seen the text of, the last sentence, I call your attention to: “CUNY employees
must take precautions to protect the confidentiality of personal or
confidential information encountered in the performance of their duties or otherwise.”
Are you going to provide us with the means by which we are going to take the
appropriate precautions, or should we just use our own personal computers? / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - I think it’s a
double command. It is a command to users
themselves that whatever this policy says or doesn’t say, you still have
whatever your normal obligations are to protect confidential information to the
extent that you can. It’s in part a
command to the users of the resources that whatever normal procedures you have
for protecting confidentiality remain the same whether you are using your
computer or not. Those procedures may
not be absolutely airtight, but you should follow them whatever they normally
are. I’ll come back to that in a
second. And then obviously, it’s a
cautionary command to those that run the system. Now, we’ve had some discussions and I think
maybe we need to have some more about the very specific issue of faculty who
deal with very, very sensitive information as part of, say, human subject research
on the one hand or at the other extreme, who may be doing defense or foreign
affairs research that makes use of classified information. We don’t yet have a specific procedure for
that, and maybe we should.
To my knowledge, there has
never been an instance in the history of American universities where an
administration’s servicing of a computer system or going into a computer system
for investigatory purposes has resulted in the compromising of confidentiality
about human subject resources or other kinds of classified data. I’m not aware of an instance of that. What it may be, and Phil and I were actually
talking about that over breakfast this morning, is that as a safeguard we might
want to develop a system of what I call registering, where faculty can advise
the appropriate people that they are working on something that is highly
confidential or classified, such that if the occasion ever arises where there
might be a need for either maintenance purposes or investigatory purposes to
view the data on that faculty member’s computer, it can be done with
appropriate sensitivity to that fact.
Nevertheless, it’s still no
absolute guarantee and the federal agencies who, you know, regulate things like
human subject research or classified information are aware of that, and either
they accept the normal assurances that a faculty member gives or they tell the
faculty member “don’t do this on your university system, we’ll give you a
separate computer with an encryption program, and all of your work must be done
on that computer.” So I think we can work through that, but I think it’s a fair
point, Stefan, that this document doesn’t set forth the particular procedures
or safeguards to be followed, and maybe we need to do that now, or maybe that’s
something we need to revisit once that policy is adopted. / Professor Baumrin - I suggest that it be
held off until we finish up the work on the implementation of that
provision. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer -
It’s a fair point and I certainly would consider it, and I need to learn more
about it.
Professor
Emily Anderson
(Social Science Department, Borough of Manhattan Community College): [I am] a
computer novice in every sense of the word.
I have a couple of concerns about the same section that he mentioned
about protecting confidential information.
I know that in many colleges that are documents that are sort of shared
on the computer, they have been prepared by another member of my department,
but are on my computer. What is my
responsibility to protect, or whatever, this information? What about emails among the P&B going
back and forth? Another question is,
lots of people have access to my computer.
Guys come in and do stuff to my computer while I’m at home sleeping or
whatever. / Professor Baumrin - I’m in
the same situation. / Professor Anderson
- God forbid that this guy likes to watch videos on BET, you know, and someone
decides to look at my computer and they say, “Ah! Professor Anderson has been
watching Puffy” or whoever, I don’t know.
What other ramifications, how much responsibility do I have for a
computer that really doesn’t belong to me, it’s sitting on my desk, anybody can
have access to it? I do have a password,
but somebody else can log onto that computer.
/ Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Let me try to answer this quickly. The first question, as a recipient of
information that other people have sent, I don’t think there’s anything you
really have to do. I think the point of that
sentence is as a caution to you as a sender of information. We have federal laws, for example, that
govern the disclosure of student records, and computers are no different from
any other situation. You should know
that that information is confidential, you shouldn’t use your computer in a way
that makes it available by sending an email even to your best friend in the
department that says something about a student that perhaps just came to see
you in a conference that would reveal what would otherwise be confidential
information. So I think that’s really
what it’s intended to address.
With respect to your
responsibility for what other people might do, or look, we have an IT
department that’s pretty good, I’m told, and is very serious about training its
people appropriately as to what they should and shouldn’t do. I’m not aware of any major or minor
violations in that regard, but obviously, this all assumes a responsible IT
department, and I think we have one. Is
it going to happen someday that somebody with an idle curiosity does something
that he or she shouldn’t do? By the laws
of chance, yes, but we’ll deal with that when we must. [tape flip]
Professor
Roberta Klibaner (Computer Science Department, College of Staten Island): ...And the
second question has to do with old machines.
When our machines are upgraded, our hard disks that had all of our
information, possibly with student records on it, exist. Who is responsible for making sure that that
hard drive doesn’t fall into someone else’s hands? / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Manfred should
invite Brian Cohen, the Chief Information Officer, to come and talk about such
matters. / Professor Klibaner - I think
Brian is the right person to ask this.
/Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - I’m sure he’s thought about all of those
things. He did it for the whole City of
New York. / Professor Klibaner - I
know. I thought Section 7 was
interesting, on the integrity of computer resources. I know we’re talking, you started talking
about malicious programs that will infiltrate down through all the computer
resources, but the second part says “cause excessive strain on any computing
facility.” The bandwidth that we have currently is minimal and if anyone wants
to create streaming video, it sort of overwhelms the bandwidth
immediately. Is that meant to be in
there that way? / Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer - If you didn’t know that it would overwhelm and you did it, nobody’s
going to take you to task for it. On the
other hand, if you’re knowingly putting stuff in there in order to jam the
network, you shouldn’t do it. /
Professor Klibaner - No, not to jam it, but the online BA. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Check with your
IT people before you install something.
/ Professor Klibaner - It’s not the installation. / Professor Pecorino - Two comments. While I have no expectation and any absolute
guarantee of privacy, I fully expect that ten years from now a conversation on
these topics will sound a good deal different, and between now and then, a
number of policies and procedures and practices and educational efforts would
have taken place. On the subject of
email, I could give you lots of examples that -- none of this is going to
comfort you. With regard to email, if
you said, “How can I be sure that my email is safe and secure?” I’d say, “from
whom?” “Well, from the university, of course,” as if you’re the principal
nemesis and watcher of what we’re doing.
I would say, “Well, get off campus, don’t use any university resources,
get yourself an email provider, AOL or Gmail from Google, and only email people
that have non-university email addresses.” But guess what? Google will be watching, Yahoo will be
watching. Somebody else will be watching
everything that moves in that network.
You’re not going to be sparing yourself an overseer, and a regular
overseer who’s checking out what’s being done with its resources. The university is far less vigilant in that
regard than Google is, or Yahoo.
Now, with regard to your
email, Roberta asked a very good question and I did a little bit of research on
this, not in every place, but I’d say roughly every place it’s somewhat similar
-- you delete something that came in or something you sent, there’s a
copy. You all know by now, you’ve got to
delete it twice. Well, guess what, you
have access to another area that’s called “recently deleted mail,” which your
IT folks would direct you to if you said, “Oops, I made a mistake, I deleted
that, I really need it back. I double
deleted it,” “Well, don’t worry, you have to triple delete.” So if you triple
delete it, is it gone? No, it’s
not. The IT people can still get
it. Well, suppose a week goes by, can
they still get it? Yes, they can, and
they’re putting in devices that will keep it up to one year. After one year, I’m not so sure that they
could still get it. If you triple
delete, it’s a pain in the neck for them to go looking for it, so if you think
that it will make you a little bit more comfortable, you can do it.
Professor
Sandi Cooper
(History Department, College of Staten Island): I have no hope that this thing
is ever going to look the way those of us who would like absolute security
would like it to look, and I’ve tried it out on a few colleagues who are much
more savvy than I am about this, and they also feel sort of a
semi-despair. But they would hope, and I
do too, for some greater oversight and protection, and one thing I don’t
understand is what the University Faculty Senate Chair’s role is in all of
this, except to be a recipient of an announcement that something is going to
happen. I would be a lot happier if the
campus president were required to consult with some faculty on the campus at
least to announce or explain why this was happening on the campus and see
whether or not we could develop a process campus by campus that reflects what
we do with all the other things that are issues, such as student appeals, and
so on. It seems to me that that would at
least show some respect for the faculty member who we hope is the rare object
of this kind of targeting. But mentioning
it to the Chair of the University Faculty Senate, whom I suppose is expected to
keep confidentiality -- you might as well stand up on a mountain and cry up to
the sky. It’s a wasted step, and I’m not
trying to offend the current or any previous inhabitant of this august post,
but it does strike me as pointless. /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Well, the provision was obviously a compromise and
it follows very closely a model that had been recommended in the policy of the
University of Pennsylvania. The
administration people on the taskforce, for reasons that I think are sufficient,
were not willing to have, if you will, a court of faculty who would pass on, in
effect, search warrants, that in situations where a president of a campus
supported by the general counsel of the university felt that this was necessary
-- to take one example -- because there is a reasonable basis to believe that
federal law was being violated, that was simply not a situation for calling
together a committee of faculty and seeing whether they agreed. Now, I understand you disagree with that
judgment, but this was the compromise that was arrived at. / Professor Cooper - Look, if you think
something criminal is happening, isn’t it the obligation of the university to
call the proper civil authorities, which neither you nor the chair of the
senate are? I mean, if there’s some
suspicion, I’d assume with grounds, that federal law, some criminal activity is
afoot, or some huge kind of scam, it seems to me that that would come to the
attention of the university from those authorities, rather than somebody on the
campus. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - It
might or might not. / Professor Cooper -
And I find it very insulting that the local faculty should be treated as if
they’re going to immediately side with their colleagues. I know my colleagues, and they’ll as easily
eat everybody up, as they will support them.
It depends on a whole lot of factors.
They’re not automatically our cheering section.
Professor
Alfred Levine
(Engineering Science and Physics Department, College of Staten Island): I have
two questions. One relates to the future
and one to the past. For the future, I’d
like to echo Phil’s comments that this is an area that’s changing so rapidly
that whatever we write down now will look silly in three years. Therefore, I would suggest that you add another
category, a 17th, that calls for a continuous review of the actions taken as
well as the need for updating the policy, and that this review should involve
the same kind of task force that put it forward. So I think that given the rapidly changing nature
of this area, this would be a wise move.
I’ll let you respond to that. /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Let me think about it, Al. I think it’s true of all of our
policies. We don’t have that many that
it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on in the world and updating them. We recently updated our policy on
discrimination to take into account some recent changes in New York City
law. / Professor Levine - This is a
trickier one. The second thing looks to
the past. A good portion of my life is
spent advising students, and under the current scheme that requires that to
remove a stop on their registration, I must sign on to this wretched program
called SIMS, and to do that, I must put in the student’s Social Security
Number, the full Social Security Number.
Each time I do that, I cringe.
It’s clear to me this is a violation of confidentiality rules that the
university should attend to, so I pass that on to you, looking backwards. I know hopefully we’ll get rid of SIMS and
get son of SIMS soon enough.
Please. / Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer - Son of SIMS already has a name, it’s called ERP. Any other questions?
Chair Philipp: Okay, thank you, Phil,
thank you Vice-Chancellor Schaffer. We
have a crowded agenda and I’d like to go on to the next part of the agenda, and
the next item -- but before I do that, I’d like to remind all present of one
salient thing. We’re giving you a lot of
information. That’s our job. We expect that you will be transmitting this
information to your College Faculty Assemblies and your College Senates. That’s one of the reasons we do these things
that we do, so that the university as a whole can learn about this
information. So when you go back, what
we ask is that you ask your own college leadership to put you on the agenda so
that you can present what has happened here and what else you’ve learned about
the university. The university should
know about these things, in general; not only you, but everyone else. Next item on the agenda is our discussion of
the recommended procedures for handling student complaints about faculty
members. I think this concerns most of
us. I’ve asked Professor Baumrin to lead
this particular discussion. Professor
Baumrin is very familiar with this subject matter. So again -- I didn’t mean that in all the
worst ways -- again, this is the result of a document which you have that was
formulated with the great assistance of Vice-Chancellor Schaffer, so he will be
clearly a great participant in this session.
Professor Baumrin, thank you for volunteering for this present job.
B.
Recommended Procedures for Handling Student Complaints about Faculty
Conduct in Academic Settings:
Professor
Baumrin: -
There was an incident at Columbia University not too long ago where some
student complained about some faculty member, and the university found that it
had no procedure. So it decided to make
a procedure. Not to be last on the
block, the City University thought, “Gee, we don’t have a procedure
either. We should have a procedure.”
So what you have before you
is an early run on a procedure for dealing with student complains about faculty
conduct in academic settings. It’s a
face and back page. It lays out in the
beginning an attention to the issue of academic freedom and then it has a
procedure which the Vice-Chancellor for Legal Affairs thinks on the whole will
deal effectively with student complaints without their becoming cause celebre. It may be true, it may not be true, but since
we don’t know, nothing has happened yet, so I would invite you to look at it
right now. It’s not that long or that
onerous to read. It says the student
should show up and complain to the chair of the department unless the complaint
is about the chair of the department. If
the complaint is about the chair of the department, show up at the dean. One or the other of those individuals will
listen to the complaint, probably will call the faculty member in and say, “So
what’s going on?” And I will say, “What?
How dare you?” And the chair will say, “Well, I dare, because I’m supposed
to. I have the university’s policy on
student complaints about behavior in the classroom. This student thinks you misbehaved by,” let
me spare you by giving you an example of what I might say, and I profess
innocence, and having said it, but it being important that the student not hear
it, so I say something like, “Well, you know, this is for his enlightenment.”
And the chair says, “He doesn’t need that kind of enlightenment. You should apologize.” I say, “Over my dead
body.” In any case, it moves on through the process that you have before you
until the chair or the dean writes up a report saying how it’s going to be
handled or not handled, and we say to the student, “Forget it.” Or we say to
the faculty member, “You’re a bad boy, this is going into your personnel file,”
or something like that. Then the faculty
member or the student appeals, and the appeal goes to the Provost. The Provost has a certain period of time in
which to examine the record without going through yet another investigation and
decide on a disposition in the case. In
my case, they finally will have a reason to get rid of me. In the student’s case, perhaps they’ll be
given unofficial withdrawal without an F grade.
Who knows? I’m not there; it hasn’t happened. None of this has happened. But the Office of the Vice-Chancellor for
Legal Affairs thinks the procedure before you protects academic freedom, is
efficient, does not offend faculty or student rights as he understands them, or
as the university understands them in this case, and I think we’re ready for
questions.
Chair Philipp: Very Good. Vice-Chancellor Schaffer, do you want to add
to that presentation?
Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer: I
hadn’t realized Stefan was such a fine dramatist.
Chair Philipp: Of course you knew that.
Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer:
Stefan has actually captured really the essence of it. From time to time, students complain about
faculty members. They don’t know who
they’re supposed to complain to, and faculty members who do receive the
complaints from department chairs, whoever, don’t know what they’re supposed to
do with them. This is not an effort to
encourage such complaints. It is simply
a way of setting forth the procedure so that everyone will know that when this
happens, this is what’s supposed to then proceed. We want to be scrupulously fair. Look, I understand that a lot of times
students complain and there’s nothing to it, and I assume that under these
procedures that that conclusion will be reached as readily as under the regime
of non-procedure that we currently have, but I think it’s fair for students to
know who they’re supposed to go to and how to proceed if they have such a
complaint, and it’s fair for faculty to know who’s going to handle it and what
the procedure will be.
By the way, this only deals
with what I’ll call preliminary, or informal complaints. If anything gets serious enough to get to
what Stefan was talking about where somebody thinks that something should be
put in a faculty member’s file, this procedure essentially, once it’s been
followed to get to that point, it goes up in smoke, because it very
specifically provides that anything covered by the contractual provisions on
discipline and the bylaw provisions must be strictly adhered to. So this is really a way of sort of dealing
with things prior to that, and as I said, it’s a way of trying to give students
and faculty a clear understanding of what the pathway would be, and doing it in
a fair and expeditious way. I think the
idea is also to leave some of the details to individual campuses to vary and
experiment with a little bit. I know
we’ve had a number of conversations with members of the executive committee
about why should it be just the Provost who’s essentially the court of
appeals? Couldn’t we have a small committee
that included a faculty member, and I confess that I’ve almost been won over to
that view, or at least to the view that a campus should have that much
discretion to decide for itself whether it should be a provost, or maybe a
small committee headed by the provost.
Again, you can email me your
comments and suggested changes in language, and so on. Again, I think it’s generally a better idea
to have procedures than not to have procedures.
I think Columbia University was, for whatever, the merits or non-merits
of that dispute were, were justly criticized because the students claimed, “we
didn’t know who to turn to,” because there were no procedures. Maybe they would have gone outside the
university anyway, but I think it’s fair and we owe it to both students and
faculty to have a clear pathway for these kinds of events.
Professor
Barnhart: -
When I had first heard of this, it didn’t bother me too much, but when I
listened to Stefan, it really began to bother me. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Stefan often has
that influence. / Professor Barnhart - I
guess that’s his legal training. In any
case, there are two things that kind of bother me about this. The first is that the university’s been
around for a long time; universities have been around for a long time. The way Stefan presented the history of the
development of this policy, it sounded as though Columbia got into trouble,
therefore CUNY had to do something. But
I’m not aware, at least on my campus, of any student complaints that haven’t
been dealt with in ways that people generally felt were fair. So my first concern is that it is a policy in
the pursuit of a non-problem.
My second concern has to do
with the way in which particularly the introduction is phrased. Usually when you have a policy, it targets a
very specific kind of issue: grade appeals, academic integrity violations,
etc. This has no clear mandate,
right? It violates what seems to me the
provision in logic that you don’t define things negatively. You usually come up with some sort of
positive attribute that characterizes that which you are trying to cover. So that would be the other general concern
about this. /Vice-Chancellor Schaffer -
Those are fair points. Let me
respond. I don’t think it’s a policy in
pursuit of a non-problem. Unlike the
computer issue, which may be a policy in pursuit of a non-problem, I hear every
year of a number of problems or incidents on the campus where students complain
about faculty members, and it gets at least to a sufficient volume that I hear
about it. I’m sure there are lots of
things that go on that I don’t hear about.
I know there are lots of things...
but if I hear about four or five of them a year at 80th Street, then I
think there’s actually at least a small problem out there.
I don’t want to oversell
this. This isn’t the world’s most
important thing. But it wasn’t just a
question of following Columbia. It was a
question of asking ourselves the legitimate question in response to the beating
that Columbia took in the press: “Are we any better?” And would we, should we,
be criticized if an incident like that arises and we say, “Duh. We don’t have a policy on this.” So I think
it’s just an ounce of prevention. With
respect to what this is supposed to cover, you absolutely hit the nail on the
head. Look, we have policies at this
university that cover a lot of specific things.
We have grade appeal policies, we have sexual harassment policies, we
have discrimination policies. We’ve got
a lot of them, and I didn’t really know how to define this policy, to be honest
with you.
You know, I had the example
of the Columbia case, and I’ve heard of a few others, and I said, “Okay,
students sometimes complain about faculty members, and there ought to be, if it
doesn’t fall into one of those other rubrics, then there ought to be a
procedure.” I actually, in a very early draft that none of you saw, I listed
some examples, and my colleagues at 80th Street said to me, “Are you out of
your mind? If you put this out, people
will think those kinds of things go on.” For example, somebody coming to class
drunk. So they said, “No, you’ve got to
take all the examples out. We’re going
to define it by what it isn’t.” Now, that may defy some or more of the rules of
logic. I’ll leave that to Stefan, that’s
not my line of work. But that’s exactly
right. It’s intended to deal with
situations that fall between the cracks, that we don’t really want to give
specific examples of, but I think we all know what we’re talking about.
Professor Susan O’Malley (English Department,
Kingsborough Community College): I think in my English department at
Kingsborough, we probably have 20 complaints a term. Now a lot of them are grade complaints, or
whatever, and they’re handled within the department, and I think probably handled
pretty well. So in number 2, you have
“students should consult with the dean of students.” Now, if it’s going to be
resolved informally, students don’t necessarily have to consult with the dean
of students, right? / Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer - No, that’s just if they don’t understand what the procedure
is. The Dean of Students just tells them
the procedure. / Professor O’Malley -
Now, this says, in b, the written complaint, gets sent to the Provost. It seems to me, it’s kind of early when the
written complaint is made and the investigation hasn’t happened, and suddenly
the Provost has it. I would think that
would make, particularly an untenured faculty member, shiver in their boots. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Would you email
that comment to me? That strikes me as
something that involves an area that I’m not all that familiar with and you may
be right.
Professor
William Crain
(Psychology Department, The City College): We don’t know how to do this sort of
thing. They didn’t teach us this. I don’t know.
It seems, when I first read it, it seems to legitimize the attacks at
Columbia that came out of that, and I share Michael’s concern about the
open-ended nature of this. Also, is
there a procedure with respect to faculty who don’t like student comments, or
the content of their speech? /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Let me respond.
It’s not intended to either legitimize or encourage complaints about the
content of faculty member’s speech. I
have to assume that those kinds of complaints will get very quickly dismissed
under this or any other procedure where they so obviously would impinge upon
academic freedom. On the other hand, to
go back to the impermissible example I gave a moment before, if a faculty member
comes to two or three classes inebriated, the student ought to know whom he’s
supposed to go to complain. It’s very
simple. You only want to imagine the
particular situation at Columbia. But
there are other situations that occur that might even in your mind have greater
legitimacy, and it simply is providing an avenue for the students to know where
to go. / Professor Crain - I
understand. I’ll bet you at every
campus, they go to the chair. I don’t
even think you need this, because these things do come up; like faculty members
not showing up on time. Everybody says,
“Go to the chair.” / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - But maybe they go to the chair
because it’s already in the student handbook on those campuses, in which case
it will still be in the student handbook.
This is just to make sure that they all have it. / Professor Crain - Let’s consider it
again. You mention academic freedom and
then you invite complaints. It just
seems open in a way that, it’s hard for me to articulate. Can’t procedures be, harmful if they’re
unnecessarily vague? If it gives you the
right to attack anything, then it seems to be based on the precedent where the
students were complaining about what the guy was saying in class. It gets into speech.
Professor
Karen Kaplowitz (English Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice): I
appreciate your being open now to the suggestion by the UFS Executive Committee
and the Faculty Governance Leaders about the possibility of campuses’ choosing
to have a faculty committee rather than the chairperson or the academic dean,
to let campuses make that decision, and I think that might address some of the
concerns. I also want to say that I
think it’s very wise to not give examples because I can imagine that examples
could trigger complaints by saying, “Oh, use of profanity, well, my professor
used profanity.” Of course, it was a passing remark, or was quoting from
Hemingway or something, but the word was used, and therefore complaints. So I think it’s wise to not give examples.
My question is, about the
term “academic setting,” which was changed from an earlier edition of this
draft, which was “classroom.” It had been student complaints about faculty
conduct in the classroom, and now it’s in “academic settings.” Does academic
setting include a quad and so forth, where student and faculty members cross
paths and supposedly something is said?
Is that an “academic setting” because it’s on the campus? / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer – No. / Professor Kaplowitz - Does that mean a
faculty member’s office? /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Yes. A
colloquium, seminar, laboratory. /
Professor Kaplowitz - Library? Right,
right. I think that’s important, because
otherwise it becomes too broad.
Professor
Diane Sank:
Three points. One, I agree with former
Chair O’Malley’s comments about the role of the Provost. I’ll get back to that. But presently, I thought there is a method
that we tell students that if you complain, you go first to the faculty members
themselves. If you’re not satisfied, you
go to the chair. If you’re not satisfied,
you go to the Dean. You go up the
ladder, even to the president. So there
is already a procedure. /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - I did look on the web sites and at the various
campuses. Some do have a procedure. Most don’t.
/ Professor Sank - But it’s sort of common sense procedures. It’s not written. So perhaps you need something written. Whether you need it in this form or not is a
question, but my concern is on item 5.
It says that “the Provost shall review the appropriateness of the recommendations
made and shall not conduct his own investigation and shall write a written
decision within 20 calendar days.” What happens after the Provost? What happened to the president? Why is the president left out of this? / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Because I took
the president out in the last draft.
We’re trying to streamline it so that it doesn’t wind up that it takes a
whole semester to get one of these things done versus how many layers of
review, and by the way, in the last draft, the president had discretion whether
to hear the appeal or not. So there’s no
guarantee that you got to the president anyway, and it was suggested by a
number of people that it was just too much, and that two levels was enough. / Professor Sank - But all decisions, whether
on reappointment or tenure, or whatever, go to the president, and I don’t think
the president should be left out of it.
I think it’s the president’s responsibility as the chief officer of the
college to act. The last point, and it’s
not because I’m Ombudsperson, but that a student can complain directly to the
Ombudsperson at
Professor
Levine: Two
very fast points. Number one, under
“Subsequent Action,” it states, “following the student complaint on these
procedures, a college will decide the appropriate action they’re going to
take. For example, it may decide to
bring disciplinary charges against the faculty member whether or not it has
completed the entire investigative process described above”? Now, it seems to me that at a minimum, if
we’ve gone to this trouble to put in a clearly-defined investigative process,
the college should not be allowed to have both a disciplinary procedure as well
as this investigative process. /
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - There’s a simple reason for that, Al. They want to be, at least in theory, cases
that are so serious, so dangerous, whatever the case may be, so criminal, that
upon learning enough facts, you don’t want to say, “We absolutely can’t have a
disciplinary process until this thing is settled.” / Professor Levine - So the disciplinary
process -- / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - That’s right, the discipline process
would suspend this. / Professor Levine -
Fine, but then specify that, because that isn’t what this says. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - Fair
enough. / Professor Levine - The second
point is that I am disturbed by the idea that we must try to resolve these
complaints. I would suggest a b2, you
know, a category between b and c, where if the department chairperson and/or
committee determines that the student’s complaint deals with the faculty
member’s academic freedom or freedom of speech, a concept that I’m afraid most
of our students are totally ignorant of, then at that point it be ended, the
investigation be ended, even though the student may say, “No, I don’t agree
with academic freedom.” Come up with some wording. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - So what you’re
suggesting is that the concept of academic freedom which is touched upon in the
introductory paragraph be reiterated down the line?
Professor Eda
Hastick (
Professor
Pecorino: I think we’re probably better off with a
policy than without one. At
Queensborough in 34 years of observations, I’ve seen cases handled in a number
of different ways, starting with a student complaint, and what I’m most
concerned with is protection for both the student and the faculty member having
due process and appeal, and I’m concerned that we can’t leave it open, because
I’ve watched students shop for the most sympathetic venue. They go to one administrator, another,
another, until one is going to be sympathetic to their case, and then the
faculty member is finally called in by that Dean, Assistant Dean, Provost or
whatever. It’s better to have one
procedure, and in the one procedure, whatever it turns out to be, because of
the academic freedom issues, if the complaint is about an academic setting or
an academic matter, it’s best that academicians make the judgment. And so, I think better than the Provost, it’s
a committee of faculty who are sensitive to the discipline and know what’s
appropriate and inappropriate to that discipline, to make that call, and the
review of that decision by a Provost is only in terms of due process being
observed and no obvious misrepresentations of facts or policies during the
process. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer -
Well, as I said, I’m more than halfway there.
I think the Provost should participate in that committee. But I think faculty input is probably a good
idea.
Professor
Leslie Jacobson (Health and Nutrition Sciences,
Professor
Juollie Carroll (
Professor
Angela Crossman (Psychology Department, John Jay College of Criminal Justice):
...Going to the Provost, and then it’s unsupported. So really, the idea of having a chair as the
first step is, I think, wonderful, and then not moving, not going to the
Provost, not going higher up, until there is at least some reason to believe
that there’s something that should stick.
Because it is really frightening to think about. The bad things stick harder than the good
things. / Vice-Chancellor Schaffer - I
heard the point when Susan said it, and I hear it again, and it clearly has a
lot of force.
Professor Gail
August
(English - Language and Cognition Department, Hostos Community College): I would just like to say I would like to keep
the Provost as far away and as far down the line as possible. My experience is no Provost wants problems on
the campus. The first thing you’re going
to hear is “There’s a problem with the student.
Whatever you’re doing, don’t do it.” And that’s where it’s going to
sting, and I think the Provost has to be way, way down the line to keep
academic freedom where we want it.
Professor
Frances Ruoff
(English Department, Kingsborough Community College): I’ve been sitting here
listening to all this, and I’m going, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but
before this goes to the Provost, I want my union rep around.” I mean, wait a
minute, we’re being accused of something, where is the faculty committee, wait,
I want my union rep before this goes any further. If we can’t do this satisfactorily in the
chair’s office with the chair and just resolve a simple problem, before this
goes to the next level, that’s why we
pay union dues. / Vice-Chancellor
Schaffer - Well, whether it’s a union rep or some other, I certainly as a lawyer
have no problem with the idea that somebody should be able to bring a
representative to any of these things. I
think we ought to specify that.
Chair Philipp: I’d like to thank
Vice-Chancellor Schaffer for doing double duty this evening. Thank you, Professor Baumrin, for
coordinating this discussion. The next
item on our agenda is the discussion of the Collegiate Learning
Assessment. We’re not going to have a
complete discussion, because this has been a long evening. However, Professor Beaky, who will introduce
the subject, I think knows how to be succinct.
C. Collegiate Learning Assessment Test
Professor
Beaky: Yes,
I do, and I hate to disappoint you. I
know you’re all waiting for a real rip-roaring discussion that would go on for
at least an hour, but I don’t think we can do that. So, let me just say that in your packet you
should have this handout, which is the company handout describing the portions
of the test, the CLA, and I had prepared a one-pager which I think there’s no
more of that out there, so maybe we should put them on the email or
something. I’ll just say that this test
has been administered in the past academic year to Lehman and to City College
in the fall and again in the spring, and at City College again, a little in the
summer. It is going to be administered
at Queensborough and LaGuardia this fall, and what we want to know, number one,
is, whether it is being administered at your college, because there’s been no
faculty consideration, barely any even academic administration.
It’s really the presidents
and the testers who are deciding to give this, not to all students, but to a
small cohort, defined as what is called a “Value Added.” And this test, as the
Chancellor said, has national footprints.
Margaret Spellings probably mentioned it today in her speech, and that
is really where some of the pressure is coming from. Benno Schmidt is the chair of the Board of
Trustees, and Eduardo Marti, president of Queensborough, are on the Board of
Trustees, or the CAE and so there’s a kind of confluence of people, Selma
Botman, Judith Summerfield, people who are interested in this, and meetings
that have taken place at the Council of Presidents, at the Academic
Provosts. So it’s hard to accept that
there’s not central office push on this, but we don’t know, and we need to find
out from you, whether this is being administered at your colleges? Is it going to be? Is it going to be administered at other
community colleges besides LaGuardia and Queensborough? There were meetings this summer. So you, please, find out and I think we will
have a full discussion of this at the next meeting.
Professor
Cooper:
Have you any idea whether this is only to be applied at public
institutions? Are they recommending it
for privates as well? / Professor Beaky
- Privates as well. / Professor Cooper -
They are? Because originally it
was. I can say as of this point, Staten
Island is not doing this, but maybe that’s why the president is leaving. Who knows?
/ Professor Beaky - No, privates as well. It was originally designed for the senior
colleges and now is being expanded to community colleges. / Professor Cooper - But not just public
institutions? / Professor Beaky - That’s
correct. / Professor Cooper - Because
the original report out of Washington criticized public institutions
specifically. I will just say as an
editorial comment, and then go away, that anything that’s connected to the Rand
Corporation leaves my antennae, my suspicious antennae in high operating
mode. This group is one of its
offshoots, Council for Aid to Education.
If anybody wants to go back and read the 1995 or 6 Rand Corporation
proposal for not a five-year, but a 25-year plan for higher education in the
United States, this fits exactly into the tiering proposal in which we would
basically be the kind of institution that turns out the drones in some kind of 1984
social scenario.
Professor
Crain: At
Chair Philipp: Thank you. At this point, I’d like to introduce many
more people, but this is not the time.
Lenore Beaky is our Vice-Chair.
Andrea McArdle, who is sitting there, is our parliamentarian. She’s a lawyer from CUNY School of Law and
she does this service wonderfully well.
How long have you been doing it?
Professor
Andrea McArdle
(Law Department,
Chair Philipp: Several years. At least she’s forgotten how many years she’s
been doing it. Bill Phipps, the
Executive Director of the UFS. Stasia
Pasela, our person for all duties who’s now tending to the recorder. This is a team I inherited from Susan. It’s a great team, and I’m really happy to be
working with these people. Look, I hope
you’ve had an informative evening. You
notice that my report was not given verbally; it’s given in writing. I certainly can take questions about it. But why don’t you go home, read it, and ask
me questions by email if you wish. There
will always be another plenary. And
please report to your Faculty Assemblies and Plenaries, and, last but not
least, give your badges back. Thank you.