UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
SPRING 1999 CONFERENCE
The Graduate School and University Center
25 W. 42nd Street, Manhattan
Proshansky Auditorium
June 8, 1999
"Recommendations of the Mayor's Task Force On CUNY -
The Promised Objectivity: Is It There?"
I. Greetings:
Professor Bernard Sohmer, Chair, University Faculty Senate
Professor Frances Horowitz, President, GSUC
Professor Louise Mirrer, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs
II. Speaker:
Benno C. Schmidt, Esq., Chair, Mayor's Task Force on CUNY
III. Panel:
Professor Fred Lane, School of Public Affairs, Baruch College
President Marlene Springer, College of Staten Island
Professor Rina Yarmish, Mathematics/Computer Science, Kingsborough Community College
Professor Dean Savage, Sociology, Queens College
IV. Question and Answer Session
I. Greetings
Professor Bernard Sohmer (Chair, University Faculty Senate) - Welcome to the University Faculty Senate's Spring Conference and the 262nd Plenary Meeting. They flow together. We'd like to have a presentation by Mr. Benno Schmidt. Then we will have four panelists, who will speak on various aspects of the Report. Then there will be a question and answer session.
The Conference title is, "Recommendations of the Mayor's Task Force On CUNY - The Promised Objectivity: Is It There?" We had hoped to have the Report available sometime before this so that you could be immersed in it when this meeting took place. All of you, whether immersed or not, certainly must have some strong opinions.
We have greetings from the President of the Graduate Center. I present President Horowitz.
Dr. Frances Horowitz (President, Graduate School and University Center) - Welcome. Not only is this your last meeting in this room, but you are among one of the last events in this building, before we prepare to vacate. We hope that our new facility will be a benefit to all of CUNY as a University Center. I really look forward to greeting you in the Fall at 365 5th Avenue.
At the risk of sounding somewhat presumptuous as greeter and host, I want to take the liberty of extending my ceremonial greetings role, to move beyond the perfunctory in an attempt to suggest a perspective that I hope will contribute to setting the tone. This is likely to be a lively discussion this evening, and I hope a constructive one.
All of us in this room chose our careers in higher education for a number of reasons. We love our disciplinary fields, whether it be Psychology, English, Biology, or Chemistry. And also because we really believe in the efficacy of education to transform lives in very profound ways. We've come to know what that transformation means and how it happens, whether it's in a lecture, giving students mastery, or helping to create a community of learners. People get a different sense of self that moves them into a sense of greater competency with broader understandings. All of this excites us about being part of higher education, and that excites us in the classroom.
The second aspect is that all of us in this room share a deep commitment to the City University. It is a quite special institution; it has a history, a mission, and it is quintessentially New York. We are energized by this City, and the City energizes the University. There is a lot of passion about CUNY. Perhaps more passion about the City University than other universities in this country. This of course enlivens, and makes more serious, the kinds of discussions and debates in which we engage. But having said all of this, I think that we are also all very painfully aware of the stresses and strains upon this University: the relentless budget cuts, the loss of full-time faculty, our budgetary inability to take on the challenges of technology, and so much more.
I am finishing my eighth year at CUNY. In those eight years, there have been only two when there has been any real incremental funding beyond the mandatory costs, and in some years not even the mandatory costs. The rest of these years have been characterized by challenges to cut the budget. Retrenchment was really the worst. There were never any good choices, only bad alternatives. All of this was on top of an inadequate initial funding base. When I came to CUNY, my strongest impression was that this University was clearly thread-bare. It's a mark of my own adaptation that I rarely use the term anymore, which is a little dangerous. We know that wherever we have true excellence, and we do have true excellence, we should celebrate it. But we also know that it is an excellence that we hang onto by our fingernails, a very fragile kind of excellence. With each budget crisis, it becomes harder and harder to hold onto that fragile excellence, to say nothing of strengthening it. We've all just come through commencement ceremonies in which we’ve celebrated the triumphs. We have really amazing students who come through this University.
Now we have before us an interesting and very important Report. Whatever its origins, whatever its original motivations, taken at face value, its observations, with which we may agree or disagree, really represent a critical and oftentimes sympathetic appraisal of our condition. In some instances, it details how we got to where we are now. Undoubtedly, criticism of this Report will not be in short supply. But I hope that this evening's exchange might be seen as an opening of a conversation -- an exchange within CUNY, within the community, and with some outside the community -- an exchange about the options we have with respect to where we go from here as a University. Charting new or different courses for an institution, in particular in the academy, is never easy. Indeed it's often very threatening, especially when stipulated from those who we perceive as not sympathetic to our mission, our problems, and our goals, especially when it is all too easy to dismiss the call for change as politically motivated. Yet all of us who are in CUNY know its problems. I hope for CUNY's sake, and for the sake of the students we serve, that this evening will be the beginning of a thoughtful consideration of not only this specific Report, but a consideration of how we as a community, in the spirit of the tradition of shared governance in the academy, take up the challenge of thinking constructively about the options for making a better future for CUNY.
Dr. Louise Mirrer (Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs) - Good evening, Mr. Schmidt, Professor Sohmer, President Horowitz, distinguished panelists and guests. It's my pleasure to bring the greetings of the University to the 1999 Spring Conference of the University Faculty Senate. The late spring is a very special time at the University, the time of commencement, of recognition and awards. It's a time to pay tribute to students and faculty as well, for their hard work and persistence, and to congratulate them on their accomplishments. I've had the good fortune to attend several such ceremonies these past two weeks. I can attest to how gratifying they are to all of us who chose to pursue careers in education. I believe these events are of special significance in public higher education venues, for the stories associated with our ceremonies can be very touching.
Since its founding in 1847 as the Free Academy, CUNY's mission has included a commitment to academic excellence and to equal access and opportunity. Our student body now includes students who trace their ancestries to over 130 countries, as well as a growing number of students of color, women, immigrants, older adults, and disabled persons. As a University we are very proud of our achievements. We take great pleasure in naming faculty who have earned Nobel and Pulitzer Prizes, or been designated Teacher of the Year, and students who have earned prestigious fellowships, and alumni who have achieved success in virtually every area of human endeavor. We are proud, too, that we continue to fulfill our mission, even as the demographics of the City change, and as people with new and often greater needs seek the opportunity they might otherwise be denied. CUNY's diversity reflects the diversity of our City. It lends strength to the University's continuing efforts to expand opportunities for those for whom education is a path to social and professional mobility. Most of you here are involved directly with students. You know the demographics and the obstacles that many of them have overcome to complete their education. You know that many have graduated from poor and overburdened educational systems in inner cities, or in other countries. You know that as a public university, you must deal with the vagaries and rhetoric of the political alliances in our City and State. In short, you know what is both wonderful and problematic about an urban University.
In studying our University, the Mayor's Advisory Task Force faced a daunting task. It was not surprising to those of us involved on a day-to-day basis that it took longer to complete than expected. For the Task Force was dealing with very complex issues. This evening you will discuss the objectivity of the Task Force Report. Objectivity in my view is a difficult quality to discern and certainly to agree on. But I believe that I myself can speak objectively when I commend Mr. Schmidt and his fellow Task Force members, specifically for reaffirming CUNY's historic mission, its importance to the City, and its potential as a model to the nation. Since we can all, I think, agree on those points, it might be a good place to start.
Without further ado then, I'd like to introduce the Chair of the Mayor's Task Force on CUNY, Mr. Benno Schmidt. Mr. Schmidt took on this job with impeccable credentials. He's a graduate of Yale and Yale Law School and was law clerk to Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court. He is a former professor and dean at Columbia Law School, a former president of Yale, and presently the CEO of the Edison Project. Mr. Schmidt is trained in the analytic way of the law. He is accustomed to being in the public eye, and knows how to wend his way through complicated institutional systems. Whether the Report he shepherded is, as the Task Force suggested, a historic opportunity, or will be, as The New York Times put it, "a tool or a weapon," depends on what comes next. I look forward to Mr. Schmidt's and the panel's comments, and to working together to bring the University, to which we are all committed, into the 21st century.
II. Speaker
Benno C. Schmidt, Esq. (Chair, Mayor's Task Force on CUNY) - I want to start with a caveat. I have not had time to prepare remarks especially for tonight. I'll try to say a few words, as Bernie suggested, about the highlights of this Report. The Report, and the appended studies that support it, are up on the City's Website. You can have access to it that way. There will also be copies available in all of the CUNY libraries, and a number of copies over at 80th Street.
Let me start with a few words about the premises of this Report. The premise of this Report is CUNY's historic mission. Its mission is to be a great public urban university, providing a wide range of excellent higher education programs, suited to the diverse needs of New York City's residents, and to provide broad access to educational opportunities for those residents. This Report takes the position that that historic mission is likely to be more important in the 21st century than it ever has been before. The reasons for that have to do with the Report's view about the absolutely central place of the search for opportunity and freedom in American society. We live in a time, as I suspect most of you would agree, when the key to opportunity is education. This has never been so true as it is today. I think it will be more and more true in the century ahead. Education increasingly is the only real and important source of opportunity for our people. It follows from that that New York City, our nation's leading city, in some ways perhaps the leading metropolis in the world, is a place historically committed to be the gateway of opportunity in America.
New York City especially needs a great public urban university, committed successfully to the historic mission that CUNY has represented. We point to certain evolving aspects of the New York City economy and the demographic changes that are taking place at CUNY. This supports the proposition that educational opportunity of excellence is more important to the future prosperity and well-being of New York today maybe than it ever has been. Education is also important to New York's great historic commitment as a center committed to principles of democratic justice. We make some arguments about what a great public urban university in such a setting ought to look like. How should it be constituted?
Here I want to make a very important point about this Report. This Report is addressed to the City University at a broad strategic level. It is not a Report that presumes to evaluate the work that is going on at individual campuses, in individual programs, and much less in individual classrooms with faculty and students. Our Report makes the point that it is obvious, that across the range of this great and expansive University, there are many good, excellent, and creative things going on. But the Report, at a strategic level, finds this University to be essentially adrift. The direction of the University's evolution in certain very important respects ought to be cause for alarm, especially for all of those committed to the critical importance of CUNY's historic mission for the century ahead.
Let me just highlight some of the trends that we thought, at a strategic level, warrant a great deal of concern. A great urban public university needs to be closely and integrally related in its educational activities to the educational activities of the public schools that provide many of the students who come to the University. We were disturbed by what we thought were some failures of leadership and opportunity, opportunities that CUNY possesses to improve the quality and the standards of education in New York's public schools. We tried to be very fair about this. We tried to be clear. CUNY is not primarily responsible for the fact that so many of the graduates of the New York school system, who come to CUNY, are not prepared for college work. That is the school system's responsibility. However, we believe that there are a number of ways that CUNY could exercise leadership that would be very helpful to the school system. We believe that this issue, CUNY's relationship to the school system, can be mutually-reinforcing. These are critical issues for the leaders of the University to review. In particular, we recommend on this front that CUNY should make absolutely clear to everyone, most especially the students in New York City's schools and the teachers there, exactly what standards of college readiness are required in terms of levels of basic skills in reading, writing, and mathematics for different levels and types of college programs.
We think it has been a mistake for CUNY in effect to delegate to the school system the standards of readiness -- standards necessary for there to be a reasonable opportunity for success and completion of college studies when entering as a freshman. We believe that CUNY needs to help the school system in its efforts to develop clearer standards of academic expectation throughout the system, through primary and elementary grades right through high school. We think CUNY should look hard at the effectiveness of its teacher preparation programs, and do everything possible to assure that, as the primary source of teachers for the New York City public school system, CUNY is equipping them well for their critical responsibilities.
I want to make clear that in calling for clear standards of college readiness, and for those standards of admission to be explicit and communicated to the school system, we are not proposing to restrict access to CUNY as a system for young students who graduate from the school system, immigrants, returning adults, or others who need higher education opportunities who do not meet, upon arrival at CUNY, the various admissions standards that we suggest CUNY should promulgate. We call for CUNY to continue, therefore, to engage in widespread remediation activities. But we believe remediation activities, along with other fundamental academic programs, ought to be placed within CUNY and situated in an institutional sense in a way that makes sense in terms of the particular institutional mission and strengths of the different parts of the CUNY system. We argue that the proper institutions within CUNY, which should focus on remediation among the range of their academic responsibilities and mission, are the community colleges.
We argue that CUNY possesses, as a public university system, some unique potential strengths. It is the only public university system of this scale that is located in a single metropolitan area and served by a public transportation system where mobility, while not necessarily easy, is nonetheless very feasible. We argue that it is neglecting tremendous potential benefits for CUNY as a system to be so lacking in system architecture and the mechanisms for making coherence of the whole of the system be greater than the sum of its parts. We argue for the importance of relationships among the various CUNY campuses and programs, one to another, their relationship to the central administration in CUNY. We argue that these relationships have essentially never been charted; that CUNY has never constituted itself as a coherent, well-integrated, mutually-reinforcing system of institutions serving New York's needs, not only at the particular campus level, but effectively as a system. We argue that there are tremendous potential benefits that could come from careful attention to issues of system architecture and relationships and governance. We argue that none of this is likely to happen unless CUNY's governance and decision-making processes work well. We do not think they do. Our impression is that the fundamental responsibilities of various central players in CUNY's governance and decision-making are fundamentally confused and uncharted. We think that the relationship between the Board of Trustees and the Chancellor, and the Central Administration, is highly confused, and is not working at all well. We argue that the Central Administration, as a result, has not been able to perform as constructively and effectively as a central nervous system for the University as a whole.
We argue that the relationships between the various campus institutions and programs, and the center, are likewise highly confused, almost random in some respects. It seems to us that the current situation is not a good one, and that one could go in either one of two directions to try to improve it. One direction is disaggregation. We heard some thoughtful recommendations that the best thing to do about governance at CUNY is for the different colleges, as they once were, to be largely separate and independent institutions, pursuing their own academic missions and destiny.
But in this Report we call upon CUNY to constitute itself as a system. To figure out what the Trustees are supposed to do. What's the Chancellor's job? There is extraordinary confusion on these basic questions. What is the relationship between the Chancellor and the presidents of the various colleges? What is their relationship one to another? It seems to us that all of these questions really need to be resolved. The idea is not to create a heavily centralized bureaucratic system; not at all. The idea rather is to create a system of accountability, where resources can be allocated according to rational academic planning. We commissioned three studies from Price-WaterhouseCoopers. I think most people would agree that they are the most experienced higher education financial analysts in the country. Certainly they do more of that kind of work, by far, than anybody. I urge you to read their reports. One of their reports is on financial planning and budgeting at CUNY. The conclusion of their report is not that it is done badly, but that it's not done at all.
Their report concludes that there is no process of planning that leads to the most critical decisions about the allocation of financial resources. It proceeds through a kind of inertia, and in response to certain external factors that may or may not have anything to do with defined academic missions that the CUNY faculty and others seek to promote as their goals. This confusion, this absence of planning and strategy, the absence of a clear role for the central administration, the absence of any system architecture that defines how this thing is supposed to work as a system – we think that it is time to attend to that. Enormous academic energies and benefits should come from that.
We urge that CUNY take the lead among higher education institutions in becoming a system that functions according to clear academic standards. We argue that it is in CUNY's interest to try to be clear about the productivity and the quality of its various programs. We were troubled by the fact that, in the various remediation programs, for example, there is very little objective information about what's actually happening in the tremendous range and variety of remediation programs that currently take place at CUNY. We argue that CUNY's commitment to remediation is laudable. We argue that CUNY's honesty about facing the fact that many students coming to it are not ready for college is laudable and should continue. But we argue that the way CUNY goes about remediation is very flawed. The tests are not thoughtful. They don't measure up at all to modern assessment science. They are not used in a diagnostically discriminating way. Most important, the results of remediation are not measured in ways that would permit CUNY to make discriminating judgments about which of its remediation programs work best, for which kinds of students who need it, for which kinds of academic basic skills improvement. So we call on CUNY to assess the quality of its remediation efforts according to explicit and objective standards that will enable CUNY to be guided by these data internally for important decision-making purposes. This is critical for rational allocation of resources and defining academic priorities. But equally important for a public institution is to be able to prove to the world the actual quality of what various remediation programs and other academic programs are accomplishing.
I know the graduation rates are one of many controversial things in this Report. We think that CUNY's graduation rates, and the time it takes the minority of students who succeed and get degrees here, are probably a sign of real trouble. We believe that the graduation rates should not be acceptable for the world's best urban public university. We were mindful of the fact that virtually 70% of CUNY’s senior college students are essentially full-time students. And the number of full-time students in the community colleges here is about twice the national average. In the senior colleges, it is about 10% less. Taking these very important factors into account, it seems to us that CUNY needs to give urgent attention to measures that will improve the graduation rates and the time until degree. In particular, we argue in this connection that it is important for the students CUNY serves that remediation be financed, and available at no cost to students. But we argue that it is important for remediation to be financed out of resources other than the financial aid sources that generally support students' efforts in college degree programs. Indeed, we think that mixing remediation funding into college financial aid funding is probably one of the factors that is lowering CUNY's graduation rate. Because we believe that some students run out of financial aid before they've had the opportunity to complete their college studies. They run out of it because they have used a good portion of it in remediation. We think that is a mistake. We think that remediation ought to be separately financed.
When we look at CUNY as a system, we think that there are several strategic issues for the University to look at very seriously. I've mentioned the most important one, which is, do you really want to be a system? I would argue that you are not an effective system now. You need to constitute yourself. I think that this is tremendously important and potentially beneficial. We argue in this Report that, as a system, it should be your objective to offer a very wide range of higher education opportunities to the residents of New York. We argue that as a system, there are currently some omissions that seem to us pretty glaring in terms of the range of opportunities that you are offering. It strikes us as an important question for you that you alone, among all the public university systems of comparable scale in this country, don't have any senior colleges that are attracting students at the upper end of the college readiness scale in terms of students’ academic readiness. There is not another system in the country that has made that choice. I don't think it was a choice. I actually think it was a result of the absence of choice in this University, because there is a lack of an architecture and governance in the system that permits such questions to be raised and analyzed, and then decisions made about what kind of system architecture makes sense for you as a University, and in terms of New York City's needs.
We argue that New York City needs public higher education opportunities at the more selective levels of senior colleges -- at all levels, at mid-levels, at completely open access levels, and for people who are not ready for college programs of an associates degree of any kind. For these students we urge that CUNY provide a whole range of academic opportunities as well. We think that range of opportunities is not there in the system now. This is not to say that there aren't extremely able students at CUNY; there obviously are many. It's not to say that there are not very high quality programs. But when you look at the choices that students make, and who comes to CUNY, I think you ought to look hard at those choices. Ask yourself whether you are satisfied as a system to be serving the students you are serving. These students need to be served, and we urge that they should definitely continue to be served. But we think that there are students in the upper ranges of academic preparation for college who also need public higher education opportunities here in New York City. Their choice should not be limited to private colleges or going out of town. You're the only public university system of your size that does not offer, among the range of offerings, top tier selective colleges. Is everybody else wrong?
Finally, we address a number of recommendations to the New York City public schools. About 40% of their graduates come to CUNY. Nearly two-thirds, about 60% or so, of your full-time freshmen come out of the New York City public schools. You know the statistics about their readiness for college as well as I do. We do not think that that reflects a sound, well-working school system. So we have a number of recommendations in this Report about what the school system should do. I mentioned some ways in which we think CUNY can exercise leadership for the benefit of the school system. I think they are important. But obviously at the end of the day, if the school system is to raise standards, the system has to take the primary responsibility for doing that. We urge that the system do that. We urge that remediation, that is, addressing deficits in basic academic skills, should occur absolutely as early in a student's career as those deficits and problems begin to appear. We urge the school system to do much more careful assessment. We urge the school system to provide much wider opportunities for early remediation, for prevention, so more students can have adequate levels of college readiness by the time they arrive at CUNY. And in some respects, I think our recommendations for the school system may be some of the more consequential of the recommendations we make, if any of them are adopted and taken seriously.
The final point that I want to make is that I am pleased that at least some people who have responded to this Report have used the word "optimistic." It is used as one of the senses they have gotten from reading this Report. I personally feel that CUNY has a unique opportunity as a university system, for some of the reasons that I said at the beginning. If CUNY is successful in addressing some of these rather basic problems of governance, of constituting itself as a system, of organizing itself around clear standards of measure, so that accountability can play a role in the way resources are allocated, and so on -- if CUNY can successfully do some of these things, there is no doubt that in the 21st century the historic mission that CUNY has represented will be carried out with great distinction. I think that if you don't do it, then some of the trends that we describe in this Report that have disturbed and alarmed us are likely to continue. I think that would be very unfortunate for the City and for the country.
We think that the country needs a model of a great urban public university now as much as the country needed to invent the great Land Grant colleges in the 19th century to extend academic opportunity to the frontier. We argue that of all the university systems in the country, it is clearly CUNY that is in the best position to provide that model. But we think that it will take the kind of fundamental institutional reassessment that we call for in this Report to get there.
These are some of the highlights. You can read it on paper or on the Web. I'll be happy tonight to continue the discussion. When Bernie and the Senate asked me to come I said, "Look, I'm basically a professor at heart." I'm not going to write this thing and disappear. I'm happy to engage with the faculty, students, alumni, and anybody else at CUNY who cares to talk about this. These are very important issues for us. I know they are vital issues for you. I am happy to be here tonight. I am happy to come to other sessions, formal and informal, to discuss what we found in this Report.
III. Panel
Professor Fred Lane (School of Public Affairs, Baruch College) [one graphic is attached] - My reaction to the Mayor's Task Force Report is to try to put it in some sort of perspective. If our goal is to be a great public urban university, and that certainly is our goal, how did we get in the trouble we are in here at the City University of New York?
This [referring to the overhead graphic] is a quick picture of the last 40 years at the City University of New York. With an emphasis down the middle, on either side you see governors, mayors, and chancellors. We see twelve events. We see the creation of the system and the first chancellor around 1961 and we see the decision for open admissions as the 1960's end. We see the fiscal crisis, which many of you remember, in the 1970's, the end of free tuition, the State takeover, and the new Board. But we don't see dramatic developments in the 1980's, except for the physical reconstruction of the University, not unimportant. We see the College Preparatory Initiative in the 1990's, then the end of remediation at the senior colleges, if the Board policy becomes in fact practice. Then we see the Schmidt Report, and I've taken the liberty of predicting so-called general education reform to round out the 1990's. I just want you to remember all this, because we are going to go quickly through an attempt to explain how we got here.
How does politics since 1960 affect CUNY? The color black indicates that this is going on at the national level; it's not just New York. Green indicates that it is New York State, and blue indicates New York City. We always had anti-urban and anti-intellectual attitudes in American life. They were manifested in New York by up-State, down-State friction. I grew up in Milwaukee, and it was Milwaukee versus the rest of the State. The absence of state-wide policy direction in higher education has been very common in this State except for the Nyquis Hollander period at the State Education Department, when the State Commissioner allowed the Deputy Commissioner to exert some leadership. I don't want to leave out Governor Rockefeller's leadership here; we will come back to it.
Public higher education in New York somehow was never able to develop a cohesive, forceful constituency. I would argue that this is true, at least until now. Moreover, New York City was always an "in your face," highly political town. When things occurred here, that's the way they happened. What happened from the 1960's to the 1990's? Public higher education gets bigger; costs accelerate. Then we have student protests in the 1960's, primarily about the War. Institutions get greater visibility and greater attention; that isn't always good. There is a good deal of stereotyping and friction between academics and politicians. The easiest way to notice it is to see the way presidents and chancellors are treated when they testify before state legislative committees. They are not treated the same way they were in the 1960's. In addition, there is competition among sectors, which increases, and among institutions of higher education, public and private. Remember, this is a City with 91 institutions of higher education. Also, increased funding demands from other state and local services become more important -- criminal justice, public schools, health, social services, and local government.
When we talk about what is distinctively New York City, there is the under-performance of the New York City public school system. But it is not the only big city public school system under-performing in this time period. You get the New York City and State fiscal crises of the mid-1970's, and subsequent scares that result in the emphasis on economic development. We get less responsiveness to higher education's new constituencies. You get a perceived difficulty in managing the CUNY system. And there seems to be no attempt at re-invention. We get re-invention in corporations, some re-invention in government (especially the federal government) but not much reinvention here. And, of course, we get replacement of the liberal political leaders of the 1960's with the new conservatives or even moderates of the 1990's, and associated with them are newly-activist trustees.
Finally, we see emerging new competitors: corporate universities, for-profit universities, all sorts of institutions involved in education. In that sense, then, we get dramatic change during the life of the system.
Thus, we have started by looking at the history of CUNY as a system. The question then becomes: If we add all of this up, with any luck at all, what is the impact? How do we see the impact today? How do we see the Mayor's Task Force in this long-term historical perspective?
There are three categories. The first is unprecedented politicization. We get indirect governance and paralysis. You understand indirect governance. It means that mayors and governors and others on the outside are more important than boards and chancellors and acting chancellors. An example of paralysis is when we don't have a permanent chancellor for two years. When the search committee isn't looking anymore, when the list of three names has been rejected, it's paralysis. You get an intrusion into academic decision-making in the most fundamental way. We are not just talking about the decision dealing with remediation, but really the collective advice of faculty and academic administrators. With no disrespect to Mr. Schmidt or the Task Force, we finally get a politically-inspired investigation.
You get significant disinvestment by both the State and the City. For those of us at four-year institutions, if you think the problems with the State are bad, the community colleges are far worse off. We get a failure to see public higher education as an investment in the future of the City. And we get a claim that some critics seek efficiency, but they really just want lower costs. In the last ten years, only one state has had a negative change in state appropriations for operating expenses of public institutions of higher education. It's New York. The public disinvestment can be documented, both for the State as a whole, and for the City University of New York.
Third, in terms of the impact on CUNY, we get discrimination against many of those who can benefit the most. We are in the middle of a U-turn, if we are not careful: from elite to mass, to nearly universal higher education, and back again. The question is, how far back? From open admissions to closed admissions, with real restrictions on developmental education?
What bothers me specifically about the Report? Four items that are included, and two that are not.
First, what about remediation? Unless, or until, New York City public high schools and all those big city public high schools in Philadelphia, Detroit, and Chicago change, it seems to me that all urban universities need to be involved in remediation. If someone can pass the reading test, the floor that allows them into college, there is no reason why senior colleges shouldn't join the six community colleges and be involved in remediation. And the mission of community colleges is far more than only being awash in remediation.
Second, there is the flagship argument. Here is where we really have some differences. In SUNY they have the flagship system. SUNY has four university centers and a bunch of state colleges, and the funding formula is far richer for the four centers. The comprehensive senior colleges at CUNY are part university center and part state college. It is a different model, but it is an appropriate model for an urban university. There is no reason to think that we can't fund these institutions in this way, instead of in some other way that is done in California or somewhere else.
Third, I am bothered by the system leadership arguments. Yes, we need to be a system. But yes, you should know that there is another great urban university, not so far away, even more decentralized than CUNY, and, yes, that city is integrated by a single transportation system. It is the University of London -- far more decentralized than we are. It's one thing to have system goals, and it's another thing to decide from the top exactly what the goals are, and what the buy-in is for each of the colleges in a very diverse 19-campus system. There ought to be a way for colleges and systems to plan together. And for colleges to have some control over their destiny as well.
Finally, I'm bothered by the rhetoric gap that I find in the Report. The periodic, unsubstantiated "zingers" distort the discussion here and in the media, and bother me a great deal.
Let me mention two things to which I don't find enough attention given. One is financing. We've already touched on that sufficiently. President Horowitz's comments are indicative of the real problems we have. New York State has a nice reputation for funding K-12 education, but not in funding public higher education.
Secondly, I'm concerned that the Report is seriously deficient in not looking at the future. If I were writing a Report about the future of CUNY, I would talk about the change in technology, the change in the lifelong nature of higher education, the need to work in partnerships with corporations, non-profit institutions, and government agencies, and also the need to serve the City -- the rationale for a separate City University, separate from the State University of New York. The question is how we can do better in new ways as well as in traditional higher education to serve the people in this town and to be that great public urban university that we all seek to be.
President Marlene Springer (College of Staten Island) - Let me just preface my remarks with a couple of things. First, in case y’all haven't realized already, I am not from New York City. Second, one of the things that I learned early on is that I don't speak for my colleagues. What I am going to talk about tonight is certainly not the opinion of my colleagues or of the management, whoever that might be.
As I stood up here, I thought of some wonderful talks with Blanche Cook. When I hear Blanche talk, she is always quoting Eleanor Roosevelt. I wish my scholarship had been on somebody as witty as Eleanor Roosevelt. Most of my work was on Edith Wharton and Thomas Hardy. You know that anything after those two looks good.
When I was thinking about what I was going to say tonight, I first thought that I was going to have a good week to read the Report. Then I thought maybe, six, five, four, or maybe three days. It got right down to the bottom line. I will say that I have read the Report, but haven't read the eleven volume appendices. So that anything that I talk about that is missing, may be in those. When I started thinking about this, prior to reading the Report, I thought, "What are you going to stand up there and say if you haven't got a chance to read the Report at all." It's going to be a very short talk. Then I thought, what will I say as someone who has come from the outside of CUNY, who has worked in three state systems, and studied many more. What were the things that I found unusual? That is the understatement of the year. Then I went back and said, let me look at the legislation that brought CUNY into being and how well are we fulfilling that. To start out with I will talk about what I think CUNY needs to do, and what CUNY is already doing. First and foremost, I will talk about the disturbing things, too. I might as well be very frank about this.
There are five things in the legislation. One of the things that the legislation says is there must be easy articulation between the community and the senior colleges. Let's face it: we haven't done that. It is not there. And the thing that scares me the most about that fact is that we as a system, we as a faculty, we as leaders, have not facilitated this. The trend in the rest of the country is for the legislature to say, thou shalt articulate; they pass a law, and it is done. I think that's the worst thing that could happen to CUNY. It has been done in Alabama, Missouri, Texas, and in some Northern states, too. I think we need to avoid that. One of the first things I would hope the faculty would look very seriously at, is easing articulation agreements. Otherwise it is going to be shoved down our throats in a way we don't like.
Secondly, one of the things that surprised me about CUNY, and I'll be blunt about this, too, is that we don't have any way that we are measuring ourselves by national norms. I know and you know that the SAT's, PSAT's, and the ACT's are seriously flawed. There is no question about that. To use them as the only indicator of access and admission to colleges should not be done. It is not done in most places in the country. But, we have no way of saying that our students can compete on a national level, because we don't have any of the tests. I hate tests, and I don't like the idea that we have to give tests. But let's face it, our students have to compete in the national arena, and we have to be able to say, yes, our students can do as well as students from Kansas, Milwaukee, and California. Whether we like it or not, that's where it is.
One of the things I would like to see happen at CSI -- and I think the faculty is working on it -- is that every person admitted to a graduate program should at least take the GRE's. We need to have some sort of diagnostic feel. We may not have to set test levels for admission, but we must have national tools to see how we are doing. We’re never going to make a case for being the wonderful system that we are, if we only compare ourselves to each other.
The third thing in the legislation is SEEK and College Discovery. I think they do a fine job. They give an entry way that is needed and the kind of help that's there. But I think the one thing we need to do more of, at least in the areas that I know, is to figure out not only what we are teaching people, but how people can best learn. I'm not sure that we don't have a lot of room. Once we solve that problem and figure out different ways that different people learn, than we can do better in our SEEK and College Discovery Programs. Remediation. I don't think the sin of remediation is the cost. I think the sin of remediation is what it says about the public school system. I'm not in favor of vouchers. If we have to have vouchers, I for one am not afraid of the competition. I think we can prove that we can do it better. I think that we can prove that they will get more for their voucher at CUNY. At CSI, whether it is continuing education or through any other remedial process, we are doing it better than at Kaplan or at Sylvan. I think that we can do it better and we have done it better.
Finally, two other things. First, we need to examine our curriculum. At CSI, I am not going to speak for my other colleagues, we did examine our core curriculum. We changed it, and it went through our faculty governance system. That's the way it should be. That's a process that's got to happen, and it's got to continue to happen. One of the things that we found out was that we had programs, quite frankly, that were antiquated, and needed to be totally revitalized. The faculty took that on as a project. They did it very well. But we can't sit there and say that it doesn't need to be done.
The second thing is, obviously the New York City school system is in disarray. More test aren't going to help. We have a situation, and I will use Staten Island is an example. Four years ago, one of our best high schools had an entering freshman class of 1,100 students. This past Spring, they graduated 650. Something happened to those people in between the time they came in and the time they didn't go out. We'd like to say they all moved to New Jersey, but we know better. If you turn around and look at the facts and you talk to some of these people, they say we have a graduation rate of 90% at this high school. That's because they start counting them after they finish their junior year. That's what happens and that's a crime. Something has got to be done about this. I think that the only way we can do something about it is to work directly with the school teachers. We are at this point on Staten Island, in every Staten Island high school, we are in every Staten Island middle school, and we are in a third of the Staten Island grade schools. You all are going to say, well, Staten Island is little to start with, that's not hard. I've got news -- it's bigger than Manhattan as far as geographic area. We don't have as many people yet, but we're getting there.
Governance. If you look at the bureaucracy of Livingston Street, if you ever tried to get them to pay you what they owe you. Just to get the money out of Livingston Street is a major problem. When you look at the bureaucracy, and I'll be very blunt, we found that the only way to work with the school system, is to work with the teachers. They are dedicated, wonderful people. You look at the conditions under which they have to work, and you ask how they have the nerve to go every day, and to continue with the tremendous enthusiasm that these people have. I don't think that it is going to help to make the school system harder. I think that we are going to have to make the school system compatible and amenable for having good teachers work in it. The question comes, why do the teachers drop out? We put our youngest teachers in the most difficult schools, the older teachers have paid their dues. I don't blame them not for wanting to get back to where they started out. I don't want to teach freshman composition. I'll be honest about that, I'd rather teach Thomas Hardy. It's very hard to teach freshman composition. It's also very hard to work in those inner city schools when you are only about four years older than the people sitting in front of you, and they seem all bigger than you are. That is also another interesting process.
Another thing about the Report. When I came to New York, I had a colleague down in North Carolina who used to work at SUNY. He said, "Marlene, if you think the bureaucracy is bad down here, wait until you get to New York." At that point I didn't think I'd ever get to New York, so I didn't think that was going to be a problem. Then I got to New York. I have never seen a system where you have so many hoops to jump through in order to get a new academic program approved. One of our master's degree programs sat on the Governor's desk because Cuomo got defeated and Pataki came in, and we had to go through the moving process. I ask you, there is no logic when you have that kind of bureaucracy. I've never seen a system, when you put a new course in, it goes through the Board of Trustees, and you have to have another entry to take the other one off. It seems to me that you could just call it a wash. I would contend that adding and dropping courses should be a campus prerogative. It should not have to go to the Board. The Board doesn't have time to look at all of these courses. They are the first to admit this. Anything spent over $20,000 goes back to the Board for approval. That means that if I really wanted to get things quickly, when I buy my microscopes, first I would get the lenses, then the bases, etc. Then finally I would get my $50,000 worth of microscopes in the process. Another thing that has to been done, and I think that it would be very helpful in this Report, is that we've got to do something about decentralizing the bureaucracy of CUNY so that the presidents can control the hiring, the faculty can control the curriculum, and the presidents, financial officers, and budget committees of the faculty can control the budgets.
This is what I said before I read the Report. I think there are many things in this Report that we really have to sit up and take notice about. There is no question that we have severe problems. There is no question that we have to do something about our retention rates, if for no other reason than to help our students. I think that there is no question that we have to do something about the way TAP is funded. We are putting our students in, and they can't finish because they don't have the money.
Secondly, we have to do something about the way budgeting is done in CUNY.
When you increase the standards, which we did at CSI, I lost 500 students. We upped the level of our teacher preparation program, so that they must have a higher GPA. Those students later got their GPA's up, and many of them came back in. But in the meantime, I didn't have them in my budget, and I paid the price. You can't have a system that penalizes you for raising your standards. That means that there is something that needs to be done about the way the budgeting happens. The other thing we also, quite frankly, have to change are the probation standards. When I say "we" I mean this went through every faculty committee which is responsible for reviewing those things, including the collegewide Council. Then of course, without exception, it goes to the Board of Trustees. We changed our retention rules and our academic probation regulations because we had students out there that continued having such weak GPA's that they could have gone to school for 100 years, and never had a grade point average high enough to graduate. They were digging a hole for themselves. Not only at CSI, but they were digging a hole for themselves at any school they tried to transfer to. You are doing the student no favor by keeping them in school. That costs us and will cost us another 500-600 students. I'll eat that one next year. That's the problem. I really have to commend our faculty at CSI for being willing to risk that in order to raise the standards. But it shouldn't be a risk.
The other thing that I think we need to look at is that a lot of the suggestions for reforms in this Report have already started. They really have. The presidents at long last, I'll be the first to say it, have started talking about how we can define each of our colleges, with the faculty, and mission differentiation. We have also started talking about how we are going to reform some of the budget processes that go on. We are going to try and work on how the faculty can gain control of the core curriculum. I think the faculty has to regain control of the curriculum in ways that this system does not allow it to.
The whole question of data. Talk about frustration. I just went though my fifth year review. The outside reviewers suggested that we are too busy comparing ourselves to each other. We are so busy accumulating data to compare ourselves with each other, Brooklyn, CSI, City, Hunter, that we have no data whatsoever to compare ourselves to Rutgers and Pennsylvania. We don't have time and we don't have the staff. It doesn't do us any good to continue to stare at our own navel, without trying to figure out what's going on around us. On Staten Island there are days when I am closer to Pennsylvania and Philadelphia than Lehman. I could never convince a lot of people of that at Staten Island, but it's true. With our wonderful transportation system, some of our students take three hours to get from the Bronx to Staten Island. That's only one hour short of Boston. We've got to take into consideration the geography of what we are doing.
Our teaching loads at CSI are inordinately high. I have complained about the short time in which people are given to obtain tenure. Our system is unique in the country as far as I can tell, I think it's unfair to our new faculty, if we are going to have a research faculty. I think we have got to fully fund our retirement incentives. There is no good in having wonderful retirement incentives if the college only gets 80% back and you are always losing and it’s a downward spiral.
One of the things that really has to be looked at is our funding. If that's not in this Report, I'm sure it's in one of the eleven volumes, which I plan to read, xerox, and circulate widely. When I came here, I had been at a school that had 16,000 students. At CSI I have 12,000. I was in a school that had more money for academic affairs alone than I have to run the entire campus with 19 buildings and only 4,000 fewer students. I have at least four fewer staff in almost every department. And to talk about the faculty is amazing. Because the number of full-time faculty that we have for 12,000 students is low, and I have a 54% adjunct rate. At North Carolina I would try my best to keep it at 10%. And I managed to do that. I will say one thing, I didn't have many Ph.D. chemists walking the streets down in North Carolina, and I do have them in New York. So I have a fine cadre of adjuncts. But that does not solve our adjunct problem.
I think that we do have a lot of national assessment. We are going through our Middle States evaluation right now. That's about as national or regional as you can get. We have national accreditation teams that come in and look not just at our curriculum, but at our faculty and at our students. Those are national evaluations, and we have those. We have done academic planning on individual campuses and we have done it centrally with the AAP. We started doing some budget planning with base level equity. I know that is a bad word at some colleges, but certainly not at mine. Nonetheless, I think that CUNY has done a lot of wonderful things. I think that we have started a lot of the reforms that are repeated in this Report. I think that one thing that we've got to realize is that we have to do two things. We have to work on our own house, and then we have to convince other people that we are doing the work, that we are making the changes, and that we are worthy of their support.
There is a tremendous dissonance between what we know we do, and what people think we do. If you think that it is not there, I ask you to read Bill Cosby's latest little book, which is a national best seller. Bill Cosby has given multi-million dollars to colleges, but in his book he totally lampoons college professors, college curriculum, and college students. People are buying that book and believing it. That's sad, and we need to do something about it. Thank you.
Professor Rina Yarmish (Chair, Mathematics/Computer Science Department, Kingsborough Community College) - As was the case for Marlene, my first opportunity to view this Report was late last night. I was glad that the Report spoke to some of the very wonderful assets and potential of CUNY. However, I do welcome the opportunity to provide some insight from a faculty perspective. My remarks are going to provide some perspective based on my experience as a member of the faculty from a community college, a Chair of the Department of Mathematics, and as a union chapter chair. As a member of the faculty, I was gratified to note the statement on page 12 of the Report that CUNY's faculty includes distinguished scholars and teachers. I was almost equally gratified to note the statement several lines later that the competitive position of CUNY's faculty salaries has eroded, and that CUNY faces a daunting challenge of faculty renewal. Certainly we agree that the faculty of CUNY deserve support, including financial support in the form of competitive salaries, decreased work load, and the need for additional full-time faculty to replace our diminishing ranks. This need has never been greater. We would certainly support all efforts towards improvement in those areas.
Some comments from the perspective of a community college faculty member. On page 21 of the Report, it is noted that the Task Force believes that remediation is still an appropriate and invaluable endeavor for the community colleges to undertake. We very much appreciate the sentiment that remediation is an important endeavor for the community colleges. However, it is very important not to lose sight of the many goals community colleges have for their students. Including and not limited to, our provision of appropriate career programs, and all sorts of related course offerings that enable our students to function successfully in a variety of very gainful careers and endeavors. I'd add to that, provision of quality academic programs in the liberal arts and sciences. We do not want to see community colleges relegated to institutions whose main function is the provision of remediation. That would be very painful for us and our students. It would represent a tremendous loss to the University if there were any attempt to do something like that.
Just as an aside, and I'm sure there are many examples of this, in the last self study report of Kingsborough Community College to the Middle States Association, we listed 15 goals that our college has for our students. Only one of them is a provision that states a sophisticated program of remediation. This is on pages six and seven of the report. I'm sure that the other community colleges have similar statements in their reports.
On page 21, the Report of the Task Force notes that the whole remediation enterprise seems slap-dash. I must say, as the Chair of Mathematics at my College, this statement really pains me. There exist within CUNY groups known as discipline councils, composed of chairs of departments of particular disciplines. The Mathematics Discipline Council -- we often call this the Council of Math Chairs -- is chaired by Dr. Robert Feinerman. He is Chair of Mathematics at Lehman College. These chairs meet approximately bi-monthly during the academic year. I must say that our meetings have virtually perfect attendance, meaning that you have bi-monthly meetings of every mathematics department chair throughout the University. I mention this because nearly every meeting includes discussion of remediation, including comparative efforts. There is sharing of syllabi. There are assessments of approaches that have been used and discussion of how mathematics assessment may be improved. A great deal of time and energy is spent evaluating and re-evaluating what is done in the area of remediation. That is not all we do, but it certainly is a substantial part of the body of our discussions at these meetings.
Several years ago, the CUNY Mathematics Assessment Test was expanded from a two-part examination to a five-part examination at the behest of this particular group. We not only talk, but we are an activist group as well. The questions themselves on the assessment test were designed by a subcommittee of the Council. They are subject to continual study, evaluation, and re-evaluation.
Of additional interest here is a statement on page 23 of the Report that research has shown the SAT to be a reliable objective indicator of student's academic readiness for college. Some of us may agree with that statement, and some of us may disagree. But I think that it is interesting in this regard to note that there was not only a discussion, but a vote at the most recent meeting of the Mathematics Discipline Council, validating the use of mathematics SAT scores as benchmarks for determining whether a student needs mathematics remediation. This is not a new idea. It is something we have considered and discussed.
Correct me, Mr. Schmidt, if I am wrong, but I am not aware of the RAND groups’ having met with the discipline councils. I do know that there was not a meeting with the Mathematics Council. I do believe that a good deal of insight into inter-campus cooperation in the areas of remediation might have been gained from such inquiry. I really feel that there was a great deal that was missing in terms of investigation in this area. I'd like to suggest that those charged with developing plans for any restructuring of remediation efforts consult with those councils. There is an English Council as well. As I say, there are councils that exist in the various disciplines across the University. I must say, in mathematics, our programs are anything but slap-dash. Perhaps I shouldn't speak for Dr. Feinerman, but I'm sure he would gladly invite interested parties to meet with us. We have met on various occasions with members of the Board of Trustees who have come to our meetings. Vice Chancellor Mirrer has been at a meeting of our group. It really behooves anyone making plans in this area to speak directly with the faculty who are involved in the designing, and watching this program.
I'd like to make a few comments from another perspective, my perspective as a union chapter chair. On page 84 of the Task Force Report there is a note that "many CUNY administrators believe that CUNY' s faculty union generally opposes efforts to measure and award faculty productivity." I suppose that my first comment should be that in order to assess what the faculty union supports or opposes, it might make sense to query the faculty union directly rather than CUNY administrators. But putting that aside, even a cursory review of the contract negotiated by our union would reveal the very extraordinary efforts to reward faculty research with an extensive system of PSC-CUNY Research Grants. The whole promotional process is a wonderful incentive for the faculty to strive for excellence in teaching, service to their respective departments, colleges, and University, and to strive for excellence in research. That's also what the whole promotional process is about. It is a process which is certainly addressed in extraordinary detail in our contract. Indeed so much of the thrust of what the union has done and continues to do for the faculty revolves about the pursuit of excellence, that I really find that statement to be rather fantastic.
Without going into all the detail, there are numerous statements in that particular section which really should be revisited. There is a statement that speaks to college presidents’ not having the ability to remove incompetent faculty in times of retrenchment. That completely misses the point of retrenchment. Retrenchment has nothing to do with evaluation of individual faculty. There should be additional study of that section. There is really a lack of understanding of what many of these processes are about. On that section I would say, Mr. Schmidt, let's just get rid of it, and we won't tell anyone it was there. We can forget that whole thing. It really should be looked at again. Here again, I would welcome future efforts to communicate directly with the union leadership and membership regarding those perspectives on faculty issues.
Those of us who are here tonight share many common goals. We would all like to see a strong University, one which serves the population of our City in ways which are unique, and which speaks to the diversity of our constituents. It's important to tread very carefully when planning change, so that we do not damage the very wonderful structures that have been so painstakingly built over so many decades. I hope that we have success.
Professor Dean Savage (Sociology, Queens College) - I am going to be relatively brief because the hour is late and we do need time to ask questions. I urge all of you to read the Report. It has a lot of very interesting sets of commentaries and some very interesting data in the eleven accompanying appendices. There are also two volumes that were not included on the Mayor's Web site. Those are the two volumes constructed by Mary Kim from the RAND. I would like to see those. I would like to see what data people chose not to use in writing the Report. I hope that people will reprint these and discuss them.
A lot of the issues raised are real, and we do have things we need to go ahead and address here. I think it would be a mistake to dismiss many of these issues out of hand. The RAND report takes a somewhat different point of view. PriceWaterhouse takes a different point of view. Remember that these reports and appendices were constructed by RAND on the one hand, and by Price- Waterhouse on the other, and then by the Mayor's staff.
Almost all of you will very much enjoy in the RAND Report on governance a very delicately-worded set of recommendations. It states that perhaps the Trustees in America should be independent of political interference. Perhaps the Mayor and the Governor might wish to consider going so far as to construct a committee which might have a real role in appointing the trustees, thereby interposing a buffer between them and direct political interference. There are passages like that in the Report. It's worth reading.
There are many different points of view. In the PriceWaterhouse report, they talk about how we got cut this way and that way They talk about how it got worse. They talk about how, when compared to a lot of peer institutions, we don’t have enough money. They don’t quite go on to make their way into the body of the Report in which the three-page statement says that we’ve got to refund the University. But the data are there and people can draw their conclusions. I thought that was an interesting thing. One of the things I liked very much in the main body of the Report was the very forceful statement that fixing public education in New York City is the most important problem that we face, and we all need to address it. And if we don’t solve it, New York City is going to be very much the poorer for it. That kind of optimism in posing the problem is one of the things I admired the most. At the same time, we have to remember what Christoph Kimmich said: if they do really try and fix the problem, rather than simply save money, then maybe there is a possibility that some of these problems can be resolved. That part of this can be turned around.
We have a major set of problems here. We have the biggest wave of immigration and all of the problems of urban difficulties. There are a lot of things there that are very serious. Half the time I was optimistic, and I agreed with some of the rhetoric in this Report. At the same time, to echo a comment made by others, there is this disconnect between trashing CUNY and saying, well, it is really not directly or entirely CUNY's fault. Then they talk about the public school system.
On the other hand, when you get to the data, the data are actually quite interesting. We can look at the data on remediation and see that there are a number of reports that remediation is carried out all over the country. You look at a number of the reports that talk about how much money we spent, well, it's too much. But it's 9% here at CUNY, its 2% in Virginia, Florida, and Maryland. Of our total expenditures – well, if we only had the money that they pump into Maryland, Virginia, and Florida!
This remediation question has started a really interesting experiment. David Lavin's report, which is posted on the University Faculty Senate Website, talks about where first time freshmen start their college careers in the United States. In the 1970's, it was 50-65% at four-year colleges. Now it's down hovering around 40-45% nationally. What we are going to have at CUNY in a year or two, if the various rules and regulations go through, is something slightly over 20%. I asked, what is happening in other systems around the country? I looked at the national data. The national data indicate around 45-50%. The national pattern is that they are not pushing all of the first-time freshmen into two-year campuses. We are doing something relatively unusual, and we are doing it in a situation where the people are probably going to pay the price. One of the things that I did not see in the Report was the discussion of the degree to which starting out at a two year college, controlling for everything -- ability, background, aspirations, means -- that you are much less likely to eventually obtain a four-year degree. That wasn't there, and I don't know why. There is a lot of discussion on the subject.
Another problem that we really do need to deal with is teacher education. I think that there were a few suggestions in the Report. But some of the suggestions that need to be put out there have to do with the fact that at many of our campuses it is the weaker students who gravitate to becoming teachers. What can one do to change that? In the Report it’s recommended that we get a grant from a foundation and offer stipends to undergraduates to encourage them to become teachers. This is somewhat less than systemic reform, I would imagine. This is a much more serious problem than that, and the literature is out. Really good teachers make a difference. They really can make a difference.
If you want to get the very best students, you are going to have to change some things that are really much broader than simply making changes at CUNY. Maybe that's some of the discussion that should be raised.
Finally, there is a discussion about outcomes assessment. I am fascinated by the idea of outcomes assessment. I love to look at data. Data is one of the things I asked for, which some of you may recall, when we launched the initial Faculty Senate meeting about this. When the Schmidt Commission issued its Report, I asked, would they pay attention to what we started with and what we turned out at the end? That is to say, would they look to value-added. Of course they couldn't, we don't have good data on value-added. We have not done much on that. But neither has almost everybody else. One of the very nice comments in there, and I think this is RAND as well, is that outcomes assessment as a way of driving your entire undergraduate educational process is a relatively untested idea in the United States. We are not really sure how well it’s going to work. We are not sure how massive teaching to the outcomes assessment test is actually going to turn out. I am very nervous about it, but at the same time the pressure is out there. I don't think it is going to go away. I don't think that we can just say no, thank you, we are not going to do this.
I think that in some sense we have to pay attention to some of the things that are being talked about. When you do that, we do have some very positive outcomes to show. Some of the data are not bad. They have some nice data in the Report on our scores on the nursing test, a little below the national average. But remember, even our best colleges don't get above the 30th percentile nationally speaking. So for a little below the national average, we must be doing a little better than people would suspect. We have some nice data on the MCAT's. I'm sorry that they only got five years of data. If we got all the way back to 1965, instead of just CUNY schools, we could have been compared with all of the other schools in the area. The accounting people, passing the four accounting exams, are doing better than the national average by a considerable percent.
Not in the data set was how we are doing in terms of producing Ph.D.'s. Just in the interest of promotion, I printed up 200 copies and handed them out today. These data are about what fraction of the class actually wind up getting Ph.D.'s. This information is available on the Web. Basically what it comes down to, if you read the handout, is that everybody is turning out fewer Ph.D.'s, because it's not that great a career move anymore.
If you aggregate all of the public institutions, the public institutions win. This happens even when the private institutions include Columbia, NYU, Cooper Union, and Polytechnical. Furthermore, you have a set of institutions that are extreme competitors, that seem not to be doing all that well. Why can't we compare CUNY with competing private institutions. There is a little of that in the Report, but not enough.
Two last points. If we don't have a serious discussion of funding, we are nowhere. We have been defunded until we are bled dry. The second thing we have got to do is build the full-time faculty. We cannot go on with the majority of classes taught by part-time faculty. And that is going to take money. There are a couple of delicate phrases in the Report that say CUNY is going to have to make the hard choice to renew its faculty. There is no mention of money. Is this about firing security guards? We need to talk about the money. I think there is a kind of mandate to talk about the money. Anybody who takes over this system and does not succeed in getting more money to make it work is going to grind themselves right down. It's just not going to work.
IV. Questions and Answer Session
Professor Greenbaum (History, Queensborough Community College) - "Given the composition of this Commission, we should be grateful that the Report did not call for the privatization of CUNY. There are even a few items in this Report that contain some validity. Remediated students should be reimbursed additional to TAP and PELL, but good luck in getting the money. College Now should be extended; unfortunately, Giuliani tried to remove it from CUNY’s budget. CUNY’s senior colleges are losing students, thanks to Boss Giuliani’s elimination of remediation, which is available to almost all the nation’s colleges. CUNY has an aging and diminishing full-time faculty – true. We have suffered repeated budget cuts in order to give tax breaks to wealthy persons in corporations. This Report is laced with some items that just are not valid. Students do not come to CUNY because it is the only place that they can be reimbursed for remediation. TAP covers remediation throughout the State and, unlike CUNY, credit for remediation is available elsewhere. There is an absence of standards at CUNY – not true. Except for the horrendous hundred, the NAS ideologues, faculty and students at CUNY know we have standards; class attrition attests to this. Comparative grade distribution attests to this. Employers who flock to hire our graduates attest to this. That CUNY produces more students who go on for the Ph.D. and become corporate CEO’s attests to this. Why then do you repeat this conservative mantra that so obviously is contrary to these facts? You repeat the conservative mantra that competition for public remediation dollars is necessary to produce experimentation. Remediation practices result in 30 years of experimentation in which CUNY has taken the lead. Is it necessary to steer public funds to the already wealthy? Why do the same conservatives accept corporate mergers and practices that restrict competition? When you enter a project with invalid assumptions, you exit that project with invalid conclusions. Aristotle knew the truth, that slavery was a natural relationship, with the master truly a master, and slave truly a slave. Medieval sages knew the truth – aristocrats were born with greater innate ability than servant peasants. Conservative ideologues know the truth. If students enter college ill-prepared, they cannot be held to high standards and exit from college with a good remediation. Why bother with the facts when we know the truth?" / Mr. Schmidt - Was that meant to be a serious question: "why bother with the facts?" I think that if there is one thing most fair people who review our work would say, it is that there are more facts that are put in a digestible form, in backup reports by RAND and PWC, than CUNY has ever had. We may not have reached the right conclusions. Believe me, it was extraordinarily difficult to get the facts. That is one of the biggest problems that CUNY has, its information systems. I’m not being critical. PWC and RAND both said that this is the toughest place to find data on what is actually going on, whether it is financial data or about academic programs, than they’d ever seen. I do think that we tried to get the facts.
Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) - "As someone who has taught remediation at CUNY for 22 years, and as someone who does it very well, I’m concerned about several things in your Report. I’m going to ask you a two-part question. One is, you say that the graduation data are influenced by the students’ having to drop out because they used their TAP money towards remediation. Well, in fact, up to four years ago, students didn’t use their TAP money for remediation, because there was something called STAP, which Governor Pataki ended four years ago. The graduation data is six-year and eight-year graduation data that you are citing in your Report. Perhaps that’s a jump that’s not quite a good one. Maybe you need to go back and look at STAP and how it connected and what you think of what STAP did in those days. l am concerned as to whether you understand the expertise of the faculty at the University that teach reading. There is a statement in there I think is rather gratuitous questioning whether a community college professor of remediation should be paid the same as a molecular biologist. As a CUNY family with a husband who chairs a mathematics department and myself teaching remediation, I think that the expertise of those of us who teach remediation and who have gone through the promotion and tenure processes on our campuses are equivalent. Have you studied and looked at the expertise of those of us who do teach remediation?" / Mr. Schmidt - The answer to your first question is, I’m sure you’re right. We should go back and look at the earlier program. As for your second question, the Report says, in several places, that there is no question that most of the remediation activity that goes on at CUNY is excellent and effective. Indeed, the Report says that CUNY undoubtedly has within it more knowledge about effective remediation approaches than probably any institution in the world. The problem that we had is that there are no institution-wide objective assessments that would permit anyone at CUNY to make a comparative judgment about the relative benefits of one approach to remediation over another. I’m sure at the programmatic level there is this. But at the institutional level, there is not. So it is impossible to say, we felt, what particular remediation programs, or which among the tremendous variety of approaches, actually work better than others. It’s a problem that seems to us a fundamental barrier to making an objective assessment of the relative merit or quality of different approaches. The Report says there is no evidence at this time that private approaches to remediation will work better. The Report, however, does recommend that different approaches ought to be available and ought to be tested by objective outcome data.
Professor Rodriguez (SEEK, Speech & Theater, John Jay College) - "As you were speaking, I was thinking from a variety of perspectives: one, as a graduate of Hunter College; two, as someone who has taught in the system for 26 years; and, three, as someone who is on the Chancellor’s Committee that dealt with the College Preparatory Initiative. However, I am going to speak as a kid who grew up in a New York City housing project. The statements you are making in terms of the symbiotic relationship between CUNY and the Board of Education -- you are talking about a backdrop that has remained consistent. So it is the system that has been shorted with a consistent backdrop. In 40 years, the projects have changed. We are talking about a different kind of – I hate "underprivileged" as a term but I am going to use it – underprivileged student. We are not just talking about someone who needs just one part to plug into the system. There is enormous decay, and not just in New York. We keep looking to the school system to solve a problem that I think is much more serious and endemic. I am concerned about this lack of affirmation or acknowledgment that we are dealing with students who have extraordinary circumstances. There are days when I think this has to be the best University system in the country because what we do is incredible. People who have lives in shreds -- to bring different parts together – we have to be the best. I am a little concerned about the sociological perspective in terms of what your viewpoint is in writing the Report." / Mr. Schmidt - I think this is a Report that calls for much more and earlier attention to what we call remediation. I agree, it is not a simple matter of plugging in this or that. The Report not only calls clearly for CUNY to continue at its level to offer remediation, it calls for the school system, in some cases working with CUNY, and in some cases working by itself, to provide much more attention to exactly the kinds of issues that you are taking about. So that children have these issues addressed as early and honestly as possible by the system, rather than waiting until students arrive at CUNY. Waiting until they arrive at CUNY doesn’t seem to us at all responsible. I think what we are trying to say is that these issues need more attention.
Professor Bridenthal (History, Brooklyn College) - "I have two questions. The first pertains to the issue of articulation. Does there not seem to you a contradiction between the notion of mission differentiation on the one hand, with an emphasis on remediation in the community colleges, and with articulation, on the other? It seems to me that there is ever greater separation between those two levels implied. The flooding of remedial needs into the community colleges, as said by Professor Yarmish, really damages their ability to provide other programs. I speak as someone who has been watching some of the articulation in History and seeing the problems in that. It can only be worse if the community colleges are compelled to do all of the remediating The second question pertains to graduation rates. I cannot understand at all the pressure for speedy graduation. I myself took seven years to get my B.A. at City College at night in the 1950’s. I don’t know who it is harming that students need more time. My students have to work. My students have to work full-time because there is tuition. When 1 went it was free. Now they can’t even get assistance unless they take at least four courses, which is too much to do well in. I never took more than two at a time. So I think the demand is unreasonable and the question is, why is it there?" / Mr. Schmidt – Certainly, the Report tried to make clear that the academic programs at the community colleges are absolutely vital for New York and for the students the community colleges serve. The Report tries to argue very strongly for policies with respect to admission and remediation that will strengthen those academic programs. The premise of this Report is not that the main or most important function of the community colleges is remediation, or that the community colleges should be remediation mills. We are trying to make recommendations that will actually enhance the consistency of the very important academic programs of the community colleges. The premise of this Report would be what we are calling for is more articulation, as part of what we termed the need for CUNY to look at system architecture as one of the neglected issues for many years. The second issue on graduation rates. We tried to lay out the facts as best we could understand them about how many CUNY students are full-time students, how many are working large amounts of time, how old are CUNY students, and a number of the other issues, and what the implications of that ought to be for graduation rates. I can only say… / Professor Bridenthal - "The question is, who cares? And why? Whom does it harm that it takes someone longer, that’s the question." / Mr. Schmidt - If you posit that there is an alternative that would lead to a more timely graduations, it harms the student. / Professor Bridenthal - "I’m sorry; the question wasn’t clearly answered to anyone here."
Professor Davenport (Library, John Jay College) - "Given the gross disparities and inequities in the per-student funding between the various CUNY colleges, how could the University move to performance based budgeting without that being preceded by a substantial period with a level playing held, so that the have-nots can catch up, rather than just becoming increasingly impoverished?" / Mr. Schmidt - I think that is a great question. I don’t have an answer for it. This Report says that you, the faculty, ought to address that question through your normal processes of governance. This Report argues that you haven’t addressed that question. Resources at CUNY are allocated in terms of a tight central allocation mechanism, which doesn’t operate according to rational planning and campus needs. Resources are allocated without any kind of strategy about what the various campuses need. We know that it is very difficult, but we can’t believe that there isn’t a better way to allocate resources than the way they are allocated now. We call upon the University. This is part of what we say the University needs to do to constitute itself as an effective system. It is not our view that this should be imposed from outside. It can’t be imposed from outside. You have to do it. We are not blaming you for not doing it; it just hasn’t been done. It is time to do it. This is just one of many potential benefits of having a system that functions according to some open and rational planning process.
Professor Gallagher (English, LaGuardia Community College) - "You have said personally, and the Report says, that you are trying to establish national norms for urban universities. Given that fact, I find some of the points in the Report quite frightening, of not terrifying. Let me just read one recommendation that you make. This is page 87, section two, last sentence: "Presidents and faculty who fail to enforce University policy such as those governing student transfers and program duplication should be subject to discipline up to, and including, dismissal." If that is a national norm, it seems to me that you are calling for the national abolition of tenure and academic freedom." / Mr. Schmidt - We found to our amazement that in recent decades at CUNY, there are lots of resolutions – maybe they were right, maybe they were wrong – that came out of the central administration or the Trustees that were simply ignored. Nobody quite knows whatever happened to them. Some campuses seemed to follow them and others didn’t. I’m not arguing whether or not the resolutions were right or wrong. This gets back to a very fundamental question for you which is, do you want to be a system or not? If you want to be a system, is there going to be any coherence in the system? That is really the issue. At CUNY, resolutions are not followed either at the campus level, and in some cases at the program level. We think they ought to be followed. That’s really what that argument is. With universities that I am familiar with, if things aren’t followed with respect to basic resolutions about how the system should function, something usually happens. / Professor Gallagher - "You are not answering my question though. Are you suggesting that tenure and academic freedom be abolished?" / Mr. Schmidt - No, not at all.
Professor O’Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) - "I was going to start on a lighter note. As a professor of English and as a professor at Kingsborough-by-the-Ocean, your Report is really laced with a lot of nautical terminology. We are "adrift," "rudderless," "uncharted," and "we are treading water." I just thought you might want to note that. Also, if all remediation comes to Kingsborough, at least in Brooklyn, I think we will be very much adrift. Because I don’t think we can handle it. You used the word "perverse" two times in a very nice way, I thought. What you say is "perverse" is the TAP regulations. I would go along with you in that. It seems to me that we are requiring people to take too many courses. I think you do a nice section on that. But then your recommendation gets me very worried It is to get rid of all TAP money for remediation. And that remediation should be funded by the high schools, and then a whole list of federal and City programs. The City hasn’t been too forthcoming with money for the community colleges. The City Employment Preparation Education Program, the federal programs, and Welfare to Work – where will all this money would come from to fund our current remediation. That is my question. What is the likelihood of the high schools and federal and City programs funding all the remediation in CUNY?" / Mr. Schmidt - Well, we’ll see. Our recommendation on that is meant to be clear. That is, remediation funding should be available with no cost to the student. We would obviously not recommend that TAP be eliminated as a source, unless there is some compensating source found. We recommend that remediation continue to take place. So it’s got to be funded from somewhere. We think TAP is a perverse way to fund it. There have got to be better ways to fund it. I am not an expert in what that is. I’ve said to the Mayor and the Governor, you people understand these budgets and the sources of potential funds. This needs separate funding. I’m not sure from what source or combination. We are not trying to take funds away from remediation. If they can’t figure out separate funding then it’s better it proceeds through TAP than that it be eliminated.
Professor Crain (Psychology, City College of New York) - "I have two questions. The main Report is the one that is in the media, and the one that’s getting thrown around. That is the political document. The supplemental reports are informative, but the main Report is the one being referred to. This is where the reputation of our University is going to be made or broken. It is surprising to me that the data we presented at hearings and is so familiar to us, has been left out of the Report. For example, the eight-year graduation rates surpass the national average. Yet the Report focuses on the six-year graduation rates. That we grade tougher than most colleges and universities around the nation. That remediation works in the sense that, those who complete remediation graduated at about the same rates as those who didn’t need remediation. That the amount of time spent in remediation is about a year for about 3/4 of senior college students. This kind of data that we are very familiar with are just omitted. How come the Report ignores the civil rights aspect of this whole mission here? Open admissions was forced on us and we accepted it in order to allow students of color an opportunity to get into the University. How can the Report support even taking remediation out of the community colleges and putting it in some remedial ghetto before the community colleges, without looking at the implications of what that would be? What does it mean to a student to not be in a college rather than be in a college where they can work on courses concurrently? We do have evidence that remediation works better when paired with other courses. It means so much to the students. How can the Task Force recommend a tiering system, which you know on the basis of the SAT’s, it is going to discriminate against students of color and women. The Berkeley system is notorious for excluding students of color at the top echelon. How can we hold that up as a model? We are better than the Berkeley system; we are doing more with open admissions. We are in the forefront here. This has to be acknowledged and our successes have to be acknowledged, including the number of Ph.D.’s that keep coming out of our colleges. Civil rights is at the heart of what we are doing here. Finally, to call this University, a University in decline, in decline from what? The implication is that it has been in decline since 1969 when we began open admissions. That’s the implication everybody is going to get. I don’t know where else a decline comes from. I don’t see what other point it would be at in the data in the main Report. When people read the Report they will think the decline has been since we began open admissions. That is a horrible thing to say." / Mr. Schmidt - This Report explicitly endorses open admissions. It does call for some tiering, without eliminating access at the system level. It’s not only Berkeley that has approached the provision of a broad range of educational opportunity that way. It is every other large public university system that we study. It’s Florida, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan; it’s every one you look at. You can certainly choose to continue to approach your opportunities as a system by saying no tiers, no standards. You’ve always had admission requirements for the four-year colleges. In recent years, as Dr. Springer was saying, one of the things that is happening that a number of the senior colleges have been raising those standards. This isn’t new. The question is, as a system, do you want to do that in a planned way, or just have Baruch out there raising its standards? Do you want to do that without any discussion of the system effects of that? Or of what the effects of that are in terms of the system’s provision of educational opportunity? The attack on this Report, that our recommendations are incompatible with your approach to open admissions, is not correct. We argue that you should look at it differently. It argues that you should go further than you have. From 1969 you’ve had an important sense of the difference between the senior and community colleges. Also a sense of difference among the senior colleges. This just isn’t new.
Professor Grossman (Elementary Education, City College) - "My question is about your conception of this tier program. City College was founded in 1847 to provide education to all those who needed it. Other colleges subsequently arose in the other boroughs to do the very same job, as my colleague, Professor Crain, pointed out. Because, you see, you cannot get from Brooklyn College to Queens College on public transportation on the same calendar day. These colleges did have their own mission, they are unique in some ways, but they all have the same mission, that is, to serve those in the City who need an education. To many of us, the concept of elite colleges sounds like ethnic cleansing of some of the other colleges. What I’m asking you to explain to us is, just how do you envision this tier? Please describe the curriculum and the student population that you see at the tier. We need that description. That is my question." / Mr. Schmidt - I can refer you to the other ten large public university systems in the country. / Professor Grossman - "I’m asking for your description." / Mr. Schmidt - No, sorry, that’s up to you. What we have said is that, at a strategic level, it seems to us, if you care to plan this system, you could always disaggregate it. I think it would be a terrible mistake, but you have that option. But if you want to plan this system, we are saying that as a strategic matter we would recommend, for the good of the entire system, that you should consider among the mix some more selective senior colleges, as every other public university system, of the kind of eminence you deserve, and rightly want to claim, has done. CUNY would have to carry out the strategy, and you would approach it in the way that other public systems have approached the issue of more selective institutions, while maintaining strong levels of diversity. It is not impossible. You certainly don’t use only the SAT. This Report doesn’t call for that. We are desperate for information of the kind that Dr. Springer discussed. We think you should include that. Class rank, recommendations, individual judgments about quality, energy, and commitment -- those are the kinds of things that I would suspect would come out of a planning process within CUNY. Those types of things have to be present to have this system to move in the direction that we are recommending, but that’s up to you. / Professor Grossman - "So you are positing class rank as a qualification in different colleges." / Mr. Schmidt - As one of the elements, absolutely.
Professor Bowen (English, Queens College and the Graduate Center) - "I am the elected Chapter Chair of the union at Queens College. I am also a graduate of Yale, and l am not bowled over by the mystique of that magic name. The only real question that I think 1 can ask you tonight is, how dare you present this as a bona fide document when it is completely disingenuous? I want to talk in more detail about why that is the only question I can ask tonight. I want to talk about the rhetorical strategy in the document and ask you, after hearing that, if you still feel if you can present it as a bona fide document? I also want to ask you to re-articulate the answer you gave before about the abolition of tenure. I think what this document does is use displacement and silence to disguise its political interestedness. It cynically invokes nostalgia for a model of education that doesn’t exist anymore, except for the elite few, and mobilizes that against the actuality of what education is for the many. By that I mean, it draws upon people’s deep allegiances to the idea of a residential all-white, four-year college, where everybody speeds through because they are all doing college full-time. And uses that to discredit a system that has already been savagely defunded. I want to ask whether you understand that the Report fetishizes graduation rates, and that’s why it cites the six-year rate rather than the eight-year. There is no magic in six years. 1 want to ask you why you naturalize the scandal of underfunding. That naturalization reveals the interestedness more than anything else in your Report. On page eight, you talk about "a time of budgetary stringency." Who made that time of budgetary stringency? And who is contributing to it, I ask you about this Report. I ask you about your decision coyly to remain silent on the systematic withdrawal of funds that many of the panelists spoke about tonight. Simply that lacuna in the Report vitiates everything else it has to say. I ask you about your selective redefinition of CUNY What CUNY is and isn’t. According to your Report, CUNY is remediation, and CUNY is not its faculty, its students with their complex intelligence, its production of new knowledge. You deliberately and systematically leave out the consideration of the measure of the standard of any university, the quality of its faculty. That is not discussed, and that’s a scandal. I also want to ask you what you don’t acknowledge the political interestedness in your definition of "greatness." You say, "if we want to be a great University." We are a great University. We define it differently from you and Yale. Finally, I ask you why you want to blame the institution for the political oppression of its students? When you use SAT’s and even evoke them at all as a reliable measure, you are evoking one thing The SAT’s measure one thing accurately, we know what that is, it’s income. I ask you why you displace the blame for the system away from the people who have caused the demise of the system. The ruling class who never wanted the system to survive. You blame us for the political oppression of students by focusing obsessively on their position when they enter, and not what we do for them as they progress through the college. How do you dare present this Report to a group of faculty, students, staff and who you claim to be fellow professors ? How dare you present this as a serious report? And above all, how dare you speak about our beloved students?" / Mr. Schmidt - It is not the intention of this Report to do away with tenure. And I don’t have any problems daring at all; it is easy. It never occurred to me that I was taking a dare.
Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) - "I intended to ask you a question on your section on value of the degree, but I changed my mind after listening to Bill Crain’s question about the rhetoric of the document. I think I can get at why the document is the way it is, and that is one word, and that word is "minority." I know what it means to go through a school system as a minority. I was truly a minority in an all-white school system in Boston, Massachusetts. The school started tipping as I went through. 1 was taught because as the students around me were being taught. When I got into high school, I was National Honor Society, and I graduated second in my class. I had the same advisor for four years. But there was never a time when that advisor advised me to go to college. What I found in this document is the word is never used, student of color, children of color, isn’t recognized in this document. The reason for that is you’re trying to be so objective, you’re overlooking the fact that you are writing a report a out a minority culture that is the majority culture in the school system here. You are trying to be color blind. But you can’t be color blind when you are writing a document like this. You have to think about the students you are writing about. The language would have been different, and I think some of your recommendations would have been different if you had thought about who you were writing about." / Mr. Schmidt - I apologize for the fact that you haven’t had enough time to read the document. But the documents do directly address those points in describing the student body, as do the backup information studies. / Professor McCall - "I’m sorry, I read this, I don’t see that language here. It struck me when you were at the microphone and used the word "minority." That was the first time I had any cognizance that you realized who you were writing about." / Mr. Schmidt - It is in the document.
Professor Romer (Brooklyn College) - "I want to thank my colleagues for being incredibly patient with this process. I think that we have really tried very hard to be relatively polite for a report that will end up being very destructive for our University and our life’s work. I would like you to address three questions. That has to do with the genuine or underlying motivation behind the Report. I’d like to know how you analyzed the funding. That is, how you looked at New York City’s Board of Education’s performance, without requesting the doubling of funding. Did you know, and did you note in the Report, that the funding for New York City school kids per capita is approximately 50% of what it is in Scarsdale or Great Neck? Did you note, and why didn’t you note, the need for an increase in the Board of Education funding? Did you notice, and why did you not comment upon, the need to dramatically increase the CUNY budget? Did you note how much greater our course load is compared to faculty at many other universities that you would like us to aspire to? Did you talk about the percentage of full-time versus part-time faculty? Did you attend to student support? My son is at the University of Michigan. I know that in many private colleges and in many of the major state colleges, they do all sorts of things, fun and games, to get the students involved and feel supported and loved. It is great, but we don’t have much money for it all, at CUNY. The first question is, how did you look at the funding? And why did you not come to those conclusions of major increases in funding, both for the Board of Education and CUNY? The second question is the right wing political agenda that I think underlies this Report altogether. Just as the IMF requires the restructuring of the debt in Third World countries and ending of public services, I feel that this Report does a similar kind of thing. The underlying motivation here is to downsize public services, and to privatize what there is left of public services. I’d like to know to what extent that right wing political agenda underscores this Report and your own thinking. The third part really comes from that, the question of vouchers. We all know that the Edison Project is certainly in favor of vouchers." / Mr. Schmidt - You happen to be wrong about that, but don’t let that stop you. / Professor Romer - "Thank you for correcting me. To what extent do you feel that opening the door to the possibility of vouchers at CUNY will begin to create a space for the vouchers in the public school system and vouchers for all public services. Are we the beginning of what will be a steady increase in the use of vouchers for all public services." / Mr. Schmidt - You might not be aware of it, but you live with vouchers. That is what TAP is, that is what the G.I. Bill is, that is the way higher education for the most part is funded. So in calling for extra funding for remediation, we do call for extra funding here. It is not extra funding, and then take it away from TAP. That is not what we are calling for. We are calling for more money for remediation, and therefore more money to support college work. To say that there is something new about the idea of providing students with the funding, and then they make educational choices on the basis of that -- that has been the way the United States has gone since at least the G.I. Bill, indeed even before. People who argue for vouchers in public schools point to the tremendous success of the G.I. Bill and other approaches to higher education funding. But it has never led to the migration of that idea for 50 years. It is not my view that it will lead to it here. You happen to be wrong if you think I personally, or the Edison Project, has any interest in vouchers. Actually on the contrary. You asked a lot of other things. We don’t say this in the Report, but I will say this to you. In many ways this Report represents at least one group’s ideas about how you might want to consider organizing yourself to make a persuasive case for more funding. You asked if I was aware of the different levels of funding between New York City and Scarsdale. That is something that I actually know a lot about because of the work that I do. I know that in excruciating detail. Do I think that the New York City school system as presently funded could be doing a better job? Yes. / Professor Romer - "But what about the funding? Why don’t you come out for dramatically increasing the funding for both the Board of Education and CUNY?" / Mr. Schmidt - I may be wrong, but it is my personal opinion that there are other steps the school system can take... / Professor Romer - "With 35 kids in a class, you are not going to get a lot of paper grading."/ Mr. Schmidt - Take a look at the school systems that have shown the most marked improvement. Take a look at the research on what extra funding does for public schools. If it causes programmatic changes, it is a very important matter. If it doesn’t cause programmatic changes, it doesn’t make any difference. I personally wish that New York City could pay its teachers much more. There are a lot of things that I think could be done with extra funding. From CUNY’s point of view, my own belief could be completely wrong. We’ll see we will have an empirical test. What happens to your funding, we’ll see. I think these are some steps that you should consider taking to make a more persuasive case.
Chair Sohmer – I thank you, and I thank the panelists, for being here tonight.
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