MINUTES OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

November 26, 1996

Chair Cooper called the session to order at 6:30 P.M. in the Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate School and University Center.

[will be filled in]

I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was approved.

II. Adoption of the Minutes of the 238th Plenary Session [November 1996]: The minutes were adopted as proposed.

III. Introduction of Trustee Guests

Chair Cooper -- The first of our new trustees who I am going to introduce is Nilda Soto Ruiz, who is a Bronx resident and City College graduate. She then went onto NYU where she is currently a candidate for the doctorate in administration and supervision. She could probably teach the courses by virtue of her career. She currently is Administering and Supervising Superintendent in the Office of Monitoring and School Improvement at the Board of Education. She is also qualified as a teacher of English as a Second Language, a subject dear to the hearts of many of this group, where in fact she developed and directed the program for a Bronx school district and then went on to work at the Board in bilingual education. She is therefore closely familiar with the lives and backgrounds of the majority of CUNY undergraduates. She was appointed to the Board by the Governor last summer and has been immensely gracious in her willingness to meet with faculty on campuses as well as centrally. She asks good searching questions. You can't put anything over on her even though she looks like an innocent school girl -- do not be mislead. There is mind like a steel trap behind that little girlish face. I did promise her that I would not tell you that tonight is a very special birthday, but how could you give her a special welcome if you didn't know that. I did promise her that you would not sing "happy birthday," however we will not do that. In any case we would invite you up here if you wish to say a few words.

Nilda Soto Ruiz (Trustee) -- Thank you. It is certainly worth fighting the traffic just for that introduction. Thank you, Sandi. I just want to say good evening to you all and thank you very much for inviting me. I am right now in the process of learning a lot about CUNY although I am a proud graduate of CCNY and certainly I work in a system very much parallel and very much intertwined with CUNY, since many of the students do come through our public schools; although I fast realize there are certain gaps and lapse. They don't necessarily come straight to CUNY. I have been invited to many of the campuses and I still on my calendar have many more to go to. And I have found and I am very, very impressed with the sharing both of the faculty and of the presidents and the honesty with which they share their concerns and all the professionalism with which they frame the issues. I am really here to learn to see how in fact you operate. Sandi was very gracious and one of the first ones really to sit with me and really frame some of the issues you are facing. So I am here to learn. I really do ask questions and I try to parallel and I guess in serving CUNY I am very, very interested making sure that the quality education that I was given and that the doors that were open for me as a City College graduate continue to be open for our students. So I thank you and I appreciate again the opportunity to learn from you.

Chair Cooper -- The next guest I would like to introduce is George Rios, who was appointed by Mayor Guiliani to the Board, another CUNY product. Twice blessed, he is a graduate of Hunter College and of John Jay. He managed to get himself through college after a rather untraditional childhood that he was very frank to describe at several meetings. At some point in his career he ended up in France in the military and learned the language fluently and you should all invite him to your classes to talk about Jules Verne. I am not going to say anymore. He has had an extraordinary career. If I listed all of the things your eyes would glaze over, so I won't. But he currently the commissioner in the City of New York for the Department of Records and Information Services, which for historians means archives and that is a very special place for us. This appointment is the very latest in a long string of public service which included appointments in Washington in the Education Department, appointments in the State of New York in Westchester County and in the City of New York in East Harlem working for the civilian complaint board in New York City for ESPIRA (Puerto Rican Educational Association). The list goes on. He recently graciously gave me a tour along with David Nasaw, the chair of the history department here at the Graduate School. The City archives in that wonderful building downtown was an extremely impressive experience. He too asks penetrating questions about us on his upward learning curve and serves on the board committees on Faculty, Staff and Administration and Academic Program Planning. May I ask you to come up?

George Rios (Trustee) -- I am a workaholic and I hope to be a an workaholic with and for you on behalf of all of these children we love. I worked with Secretaries Bell, Bennett, and Lamar Alexander. Started education seriously as a counselor back in 1965 and I sort of never stopped. Among my students are Freddie Feret , Bronx Borough President, President of Infomatic, Miguel Valez, consultant in technology and computers on Wall Street. I guess I have about a thousand young kids who I stay in touch with. They were young then, they are my colleagues today, they grew up in a hurry. Let me just share with you how I got here. Sandi said either I send you a letter or I send you a subpoena, so you knew I came enthusiastically and quite voluntarily. The school systems in New York were quite good to me in a strange way. When my mom passed away in the early 1940's -- we don't have the bilingual education until 1968. When my family of uncles came back from WWII and set up a factory in Westchester County, it was English-only period. I went to 13 grammar schools because after my mom died my father disappeared for fifteen years. I had to catch up to him in Florida when I got older. So my brother and I were kept together but it was three months here, six weeks there. Then my grandmother, who wasn't really my grandmother -- my grandfather married twice -- she decided, Gee, these two orphans are being bounced around like yo-yo's, let me stabilize them. So under a welfare check my grandmother and grandfather stabilized us in 1949-1950, through high school period. Then I went into the military, came back and used the G.I. Bill for ten years of night school in the City University system. So I have seen the schools of New York and I have seen the children. Once of my stints in Washington was in the Office of Bilingual Education as deputy director, and I introduced 13 states to new language techniques, expanded the program and worked with 140 different language groups. So I guess after doing this since 1965 to now, I guess I appreciate diversity more than most people. I also have a warm place in my heart for diverse opinions. In all of this time I have not locked myself in to become overly opinionated. As I look at some of the disputes going on now in the court rooms between the faculty senate and student senate, we the Board of Trustees and prior ones who were her, I wish we were out of the court rooms and just dialoging and just respect that we have serious differences of opinion from time to time. So as a new person I am very flexible, very open, and I will always try to evaluate the differing view points in my role as a trustee. So I am looking forward to working closely with all of you and your wonderful leader here, Sandi. Thank you.

Chair Cooper -- I would like to introduce the Reverend Michael Crimmins, who likes the fact that we are meeting here. We are a handfull of blocks away from St. Malachy's Church where he is the pastor and he lives, that's the actor's chapel, is it 49th Street? So he has the shortest trip home. He was also appointed by Governor Pataki and he has over his career developed a specialty in higher education. He is currently pastor at the actor's church and in addition he is in charge of the campus ministry for the New York archdiocese. He's worked as a campus chaplain in the past, including Mount St. Vincent, and I understand he had a church once near Columbia University. Father Crimmins graduated from Georgetown in the school of foreign service which will do him a lot of good in this institution -- diplomacy -- also from St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers. He was ordained in St. Patrick's in 1970; if I can remember from my youth, that was quite an honor for the young guys I knew years ago. He serves on the Board Committees on Faculty Staff and Administration as Vice Chair, and on the Committee on Student Affairs. Would you like to come up for a minute please?

Reverend Michael Crimmins (Trustee) -- Thank you, Sandi. As Nilda and George, I am very much in the process of learning as a trustee, as we have just started as you know in September. But I believe very strongly that the City University of New York is one of the great treasures of this City, and that there is no investment that the city or state could make that is better or more important for the future than the investments they make in the education of the future, really, which is the City University of New York. So I am very glad to be a trustee, and I hope to work together with all of you, with the faculty and with the staff and with the administration, and I just want you to know how strongly I believe in this institution. I think, as I said, it is one of the great treasures that I will certainly strive to help prevail, rather than simply survive. Thank you.

Chair Cooper -- Let me just say that this body, this group, exists as the overall faculty body for the whole University, and each college elects one delegate to this body for every 60 faculty. It comes to about a hundred odd numbers. We used to be able to elect one delegate for every 100 faculty, but we have shrunk in the number of full-time faculty rather drastically. And we changed the representation in the last few years in order to make a reasonable size group.
We are fortunate to have yet our final guest this evening, who has just arrived. I would have introduced him first because he agreed last summer, had he been here first. This is Mr. Price, Robert Price. He has distinguished himself since September on the Board as the biting comic relief. He has a sharp and witty tongue, and he is not at all shy about expressing controversial positions. I will regret having said this in ten minutes, if not less. I'm sure he's working on something that I am going to pay for a long time afterwards. Mr. Price is the founder and owner of PriCellular, a communications company which was created in 1991 after he spent a career in investment banking. He actually began public life as Deputy Mayor under Mayor Lindsay a long time ago, a post he left according to his quote in one newspaper "to earn money in the private sector to support his family." He also is very proud of the fact that after the Korean War he remained an unabashed, self-defined, flag waver. As a young man he attended the Bronx High School of Science; he graduated a little bit ahead of me and a little bit ahead of Bernie Sohmer, not too much. He then went to NYU and finally Columbia for a law degree. Most of the rest of his public life has been as an advisor to political candidates, mostly Republican as I can see, except for Lindsay who changed colors. And it was as I said Governor Pataki who appointed him to the board along with John Calandra, the first new appointments that were made last summer. He has been forced, baptized under fire, to chair the Board's Committee on Fiscal Affairs on more than one occasion because its chair is ill. He has, I think, learned that when you enter anything in CUNY, you walk into an electro-magnetic field which drowns you in paper. Could you be kind enough to come and say a few words?

Robert Price (Trustee) -- First of all, John Lindsay was a good friend of mine, whose campaign was all I managed. I left when he became a Democrat. I have always been a Republican with one exception -- I headed Rrepublicans for Dinkins,who was and still is a much nicer guy, who was a much better mayor for the City of New York. I was obviously not a Guiliani appointment to this Board. The only Democrat that I ever supported was David Dinkins, whom I believed had done a good job in a difficult town. I didn't blame him for Crown Heights, etc. But I am a Republican. I am pleased to serve on the Board. Nobody in this room is old enough to remember that at one point I swore in Gus Rosenberg, a chairman of the Board of Higher Education. So 80th Street was not a new place for me to visit. You made a lot of comments, some biting, some true. I will tell you that Sandi represents the interests of the faculty extremely well. We now have to move her to also represent the interests of the people of the City of New York, and that is going to be one of my personal tasks. She does represent you well. Did the other trustees take questions? / Chair Cooper - No. / Price - Is professor Allan Cooper here? I hope you will stay so I can say hello to you for a minute. You are not going to know what about, and he is not going to tell you. I grew up in the Bronx so I am not immune to development of the City University all these decades. The development, the underdevelopment, the redevelopment, the heights and particularly that it has always been known to have one of the finest faculties of any university or college in the world, that has never changed. The student body has had differences; locations have had differences. I actually went to NYU, which is now the Bronx Community College with a Hall of Fame of Great Americans. Are any of you from Bronx Community College? Well, in my day which was before you were born, the Hall of Fame of Great Americans, which was a congressional landmark, had tours every day of people coming to the Bronx to see the Hall of Fame of Great Americans. For those of you who have never seen it, you should go up and see it. It needs a cleaning but it is a stirring... / Chair Cooper -- It needs maintenance money. / Price -- It needs maintenance money. The federal government should do that because it is a federal government institution. In any event, I have had the pleasure of visiting some of your schools. I've had the unfortunate occurrence of having several appointments broken to visit your schools. Sometimes by me, often by the chief executive, school president, dean. But I intend on visiting them all. I have actually also visited several colleges on weekends because I figured I wouldn't have the president guard me around just to see, but I wasn't allowed in because there are gates. So I was turned away from Bronx Community College and others because I didn't have a pass that gave me permission to get in. So I have visited more schools than I have been allowed in. Do you want me to take questions, Sandi? / Chair Cooper -- If you wish. Is there anybody with a question? Would you please go to the microphone, identify yourself, if not hold your peace. They are holding their peace. / Price -- No questions, thank you. Thank you all for inviting me. Thank you, Sandi, everybody, for inviting me.

IV. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]
a. Professor Sohmer, Ad Hoc Committee on Karkhanis charges.
b. Chair (oral and written)
c. Vice Chancellor for Budget Richard Rothbard, substitution for the Chancellor (oral)
d. Reports of Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (enclosed)

V. Panel on Cross-Campus Collaboration: CUNY in the Year 2000
a. Panel Report
b. Panel Questions

VI. New Business

REPORTS & DELIBERATIONS
OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINTH PLENARY SESSION OF
THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

November 26, 1996

IV. Reports:
a. Professor Sohmer, Ad hoc Committee on Karkhanis charges: Prof. Sohmer/There is a document distributed at the table and it's headed October 31, 1996 Ad hoc Committee on the Karkhanis charges and having these findings. I really don't want to read to you. Iis there anyone here who doesn't have a copy? I took it upon myself to create this committee. The members of the committee had votes, I did not. The ad hoc committee to review the charges consisted of David Speidel of Queens, a member of the Executive Committee; Nancy Hager, Brooklyn, head of the faculty governance body at Brooklyn; and Jacob Edelman, Queensborough, neither a USF member nor a governance head, for occupational diversity. The findings of the committee are four-fold and are listed a, b, c, d. It is a report which came to the Executive Committee because the documents were forwarded to Vice Chancellor Malone to the Executive Committee. Vice Chancellor Malone has a copy, and since it is a matter of the Senate we are sending the report to you as well. I'll entertain any questions you may have. (No Questions.) I propose the report be received by the Senate.

b. Chair: Good evening. The Board of Trustees held its November meeting yesterday. Its agenda was presumably routine until the issue of a copy machine purchase contract for the College of Staten Island was pulled from a vote to satisfy one trustee's dissatisfaction with the contract and the college. Other trustees attempted to have it pass, based on information provided by the Chancellor's staff. The subject became a public tug of war, a nasty set of exchanges, and -- to my eye, an effort to humiliate the president of the college in public. The faculty at Staten Island are well aware of this trustee's consistent challenge to the management of the campus and do not support it. This is a story in progress, not yet concluded.

The new student trustee also amended the minutes of the October meeting to indicate that she had not voted to support the Asking Budget of the Chancellory on the grounds that it included items which students were reviewing at present. She also protested the statement by Trustee Anne A. Paolucci regarding remediation investments by CUNY.

During a presentation by Acting Vice Chancellor Anne Martin regarding the achievements of four years of Academic Program Planning, I took exception to her claim that the reduction of degree credit requirements, the changes in remediation and ESL education and admission standards were all a result of Academic Program Planning. I pointed out that these were in the 37 points of light from June, 1995, and were the very items which were in litigation now. They never passed through campus councils. The Chancellor disagreed and stated that the Declaration of Financial Exigency was passed months before these changes and that they represented Academic Program Planning. The faculty continues to insist that the academic changes made by the Board in June, 1995, largely were driven by an unnecessary financial exigency. Otherwise the Board meeting was routine last night.

The Senate office has been occupied also in producing the Newsletter which you should soon receive in your mail. I want to remind you, as well, that the Chairs of Senate committees should write up summaries of the results of their meetings last month so that we do not lose the threads of your labors. In case your committee has a recommendation for a policy issue, it needs to be forwarded to the Executive Committee.

As far as the Appeals Court review of the lawsuit formally known as Polishook et al vs. The Board of Trustees, I have no information to report. A resolution of this suit would be in everyone's interest.

This has been a sad week for CUNY faculty. Last week at Baruch, a memorial to David Valinsky took place which Matthew Goldstein, the CUNY Academy, and the Senate sponsored. While memorials are fitting, they also reawaken the pain of loss. Perhaps more devastating was the news, arrived last Friday, that our vibrant, energetic colleague Gerald Lieblich -- the chair of the Bronx Community College Senate -- lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. The crowds who attended his funeral on Sunday, spilling out of the funeral parlor, were as one in grief over the infuriating loss of someone only in his 53rd year who had so much left to give. I wonder if we might observe a moment of silence in his memory. [Professor Feinerman from the Math Discipline Council presented a eulogy for Professor Leiblich, attached to these minutes.]

c. Vice Chancellor for Budget Richard Rothbard: It is always a pleasure to appear and talk about the budget and related matters, and no appearance would be complete without some slides. I want to bring you up to date on a couple of budgetary matters, as I always do, even though there is not much going on, but there is always a little going on. By the way, I am a graduate of Baruch College, twice blessed by the City University. Let me bring you up to date where things stand with the budget. Currently there has been a lot of news recently particularly about goings-on in the City, so let me straighten out some information regarding that. At least what we know at the moment, what we know of the state budget at the moment. I will talk a little about the budget request. Sandi asked me particularly to address the issue of the CUNYCcard so I have a brief presentation on that as well. As always I will be happy to take questions any of you have.
You may have read in the papers over the last couple of weeks a proposal under consideration by the administration to require certain covered agencies -- that is a term describing non-mayoral agencies that includes City University, Health and Hospitals, and several others -- rather than take what's called a PEG (Program to Eliminate the Gap) cut, which is an annual process which the City engages in to balance the budge, rather than have those agencies take the cut, the proposal under consideration over the past couple of weeks was that those agencies be required to self-fund the costs of negotiated contract agreements. The estimates varied in terms of what the dollar implications of that would be for CUNY. Of course this is only covering the community colleges. Remember the City is only responsible for the community college budget, not the senior college budget. That was under serious consideration for some time.
There was another element in the plan as well to reduce the Police Department budget by $325,000, a portion of the funding of the police cadet program. As far as we know at the moment, that first item on the police cadet program remains part of the City's plan, however as of this point we believe, although it has not been officially announced, we believe that the proposal about collective bargaining is no longer on the table. Whether or not some alternative will take its place that will affect the University, we will have to wait and see.
The City has to issue a January financial plan shortly. At that point we will have some sense of what is being proposed for funding of the community colleges for 1997-1998. The cut to the police cadet program however is a current year cut that is not in our budget, it is in the Police Department budget. John Jay College of Criminal Justice, President Jerry Lynch, the Chancellor and others are trying to first understand what the implications of this program are and secondly to take whatever action is consistent with University policy on that.
Finally, one bit of very welcome news, I'm sure that you will agree, is that it appears to us again, and of course nothing is ever certain until June 30th about any particular fiscal year, but it appears that because of the time frame we are currently facing, we are going to December, we will talk about surpluses both at the State and the City level. It appears very unlikely that we will sustain any kind of mid-year cuts to the operating budget either for the senior colleges or for the community colleges. Now you could wake up tomorrow, pick up the newspaper, and find out that I am dead wrong and that a sudden hole has opened up in tax receipts or something else and a program is going forward. But based upon everything we know up until now and everything we have seen and heard from people in Albany and City Hall, it does not appear that we are going to have deal with the issue, as we did last year unfortunately, of mid-year reductions and that is good news for the stability of the University and for the colleges' ability to fully spend out their budget and carry out the plans that they made at the beginning of this year.
Let me talk about the budget request for 1997-1998, a request that was approved by the Trustees at their October meeting, and touch on some of the salient points about that document. The entire budget asks for a $60 million increase between the senior and the community colleges. In the context of previous requests that may seem modest, and it is indeed modest. Keep a couple of things in mind though: the last several budgets proposed by the Governor have sought to reduce the University's budget overall. The State University of New York has passed a budget that seeks zero increases from the current year's appropriation. We have attempted to focus on those things of the greatest need in the University so that the request will receive serious consideration when it reaches Albany. Of that $60 million about $33 million is for what we term mandatory increases, that is, the cost of inflation, the increased costs of goods and services, increased costs associated with annualization of salaries and so forth, the remainder being for programmatic enhancements, that is, those things that will either add new programs or expand existing programs at the University for the senior and the community colleges.
The revenue goal is unchanged, which means there is no proposal in this for any kind of tuition increases. Revenue doesn't always change up or down as a result of changes in rates, but sometimes changes up or down in relation to changes in enrollment. We don't anticipate any changes in enrollment up or down, and we are proposing the same level enrollment so revenue remains flat in the 1997-1998 request.
Total request, as you can see in the numbers up there, comes to about $1.3 billion. Within that request there is a $100 per student aid increase requested for the community colleges. For those of you who are not familiar with the way the community colleges are funded, although the City of New York determines the overall budget for the community colleges, a substantial portion of our revenue for the community colleges comes from State aid. And that is driven largely by a formula that is dependent upon enrollment, so right now we get a certain dollar amount per student. SUNY community colleges get that same dollar amount per student. We are asking for a $100 dollar increase which would generate about $7 million, which would pay for various mandatory and programmatic increases in the budget.
SUNY, when you start reading materials about the SUNY budget request and see some material on the SUNY budget request, you'll see something that may not square with what I said about them not asking for anything. They are asking for a $60 per FTE increase in aid for their community colleges; we are asking for $100. Well, how can they not be asking for anything? They have had such a decrease in community college enrollment that they can ask for $60 in FTE and end up with the same dollar amount from the State next year as they are receiving this year. So they are taking the decrease in enrollment in their community colleges and they are figuring out what it would take per student to keep them at the same level of funding that they are currently, and what that turns out to be $60 per FTE. Traditionally, we and SUNY try to stay roughly equivalent in what we are asking for, for the community colleges, because that places us on a firmer footing in terms of making the case to the State for State-wide support of community colleges. Because of certain issues in the SUNY universe this year, it was not possible to do that. We felt that it was important to fully articulate our needs for the community colleges so we moved ahead with $100 per FTE request.
Let me just say a little bit about enrollment because we have now got our final numbers in for the University. Our final Fall 1996 numbers, with the exception of Kingsborough and LaGuardia, which remain estimates at this point because of their unique calendars. We have a headcount this year of 204,402, in the fall, 150,568 FTE's -- I believe that should be 158,000, it might be a typo. Headcount is off a little bit from the Fall 1995, about 1,400. It turns out to be much less a decrease than many of us were anticipating as a consequence of several years' changes in funding, several years' changes in financial aid ability, several years' changes in tuition levels, as well as the impact of the new Work Fare requirements at the University. So this is a very modest, virtually a standstill enrollment situation, and FTE's are even a better picture. They are only off about 400 University-wide.
The biggest change in percentage terms is the graduate headcount, which is a little surprising to some of us who are going to have to peel the onion a bit to figure out why that is so. The numbers are small, but the percentages are large there. In the community colleges surprisingly, where you would expect much of this Work-Fare policy to have had a negative impact, at the moment it has not occurred. Community College FTE's are actually up 1% over last year and headcount is up a modest 0.5%. If you look at the bars on the right which describe the senior college and community college headcount and FTE enrollment comparing Fall 1996 to Fall 1995, the blue bars are Fall 1996 and the red bars are Fall 1995, just to show you that visually.
Let me talk a little bit about the actual programs we're requesting and the request. We are seeking first and foremost as our top priority, additional full-time faculty. You will recall in the Governor's executive budget as well as the adopted budget for this year there were a hundred new faculty put in the budget. We're seeking something close to 200 new full-time faculty all told between the senior and community colleges -- all programs including APP, doctoral program support, teacher education and so forth. There is a separate request in there for doctoral program support and, by the way, this is all contained in the University's budget request document. If you don't have them we will see to it that the office gets sufficient numbers to distribute. It is also available if you have Web access, through the CUNY home page.
Teacher education, Ph.D. in education, based upon the work of the deans of education in the University over the last year, is another element in the request that we are seeking support for. We are seeking continued support for the ongoing Language Immersion Program, which will receive first time funding in the current year's State budget. The funding that we are seeking is to support the current level of operations that we anticipate by the end of this year, those centers that will be in operation throughout the University. Support for assessment programs in the University, support for ICAM (Intra-CUNY Academic Mobility), to ease the ability of students to take courses at various campuses if they can't secure those courses on their home campuses.
We seek funding for library books for what we think is a unique approach that may capture the attention of the State, an approval plan which has been the subject of discussion with the chief librarians in which they will participate in and closely monitor should the program be funded so that we can assess whether or not as a pilot it is effective and, if so, seek additional funding in subsequent years.
COMP (Computer Ownership Matching Program). It has become more and more clear that while laboratories on campus do serve an important point of entry for our students to access important computing equipment and other facilities, they are at best a safety net. If you look at what is happening in higher education nationally, more and more institutions are requiring students to acquire their own equipment. Much the same way that they are required to purchase text books. In some places tuition is being increased by a few thousand dollars or separate fees are being levied on students so that they can secure desktop or laptop computers. Our students obviously don't have the economic resources to do that. So what we are proposing, so that our students are on a level playing field with students in other institutions and so that they can compete when they leave our institution, is a program that would combine State support, student support, and business support so that our students can easily acquire state of the art technology that will assist them in school and beyond.
There is also a program for assistive technology that we are proposing. We have more and more students in the University each year with various physical disabilities. We can look at the demographics in the public schools and know that those numbers are going to be increasing. It does little good for those students to have this wonderful technology available if that technology is not adapted to their particular disabilities. So we want to start an effort University-wide, acknowledging that there have been many very good efforts individually at the campuses, but we want to bring those efforts together and have everybody at the University benefit from that. We want to overlay a University-wide effort on assistive technology so that all students will benefit from the technology that we are able to acquire at the University.
We have some things you have seen in previous requests. We are seeking more support for child care. We adjusted the initial request at the request of the Student Senate to increase the request for child care, advising and counseling, and various forms of financial student aid.
That's my budget presentation. I am prepared to move on to a brief presentation about the CUNYCard or take questions, however you want to handle it. / Chair Cooper -- Why don't you go on and then we can take questions after that. / Rothbard -- There have been a lot of questions about the CUNYCard program, a lot of mis-information unfortunately about what this all about. I hope that in this brief presentation I can inform about what this program is, what we hope to accomplish with it. And again, I'll be happy to answer any questions.
Let me start with a little background. This has been a very extensive program starting in 1990 with the State University of New York when they decided that they felt that it would be beneficial for their institution to develop what's commonly called a one-card, sometimes called a smart-card, which would offer students ability to access a various suite of services with a single card rather than having to carry multiple cards. Especially on residential campuses you'll find students have an I.D. card, they have a separate library card, they have a separate food services card, and on and on for the various services they use. SUNY wanted to do away with that so in 1990 they launched an effort throughout the system to develop specifications for going out into the market place seeking vendors to provide this service. In 1993, my counterpart in SUNY, Bill Anslow, offered CUNY an opportunity to participate with them in the development of the request for a proposal. They made that same offer to Cornell. Cornell, as you know, is the land grant college, and there is a part of Cornell that is funded by SUNY.
So they offered both of us an opportunity to become what is called affiliates in their program. We gladly accepted that offer given that they had done extensive legal and other work over the previous three years in developing specifications. We had been considering a similar program but saw no need to do the work again that they had already done and, we felt, very well. So we accepted their invitation and in the ensuing months and years we worked very close with them on development of requests for proposal. That request for proposal was ultimately issued into the market place. We got twelve vendor consortia responding to that. What they were asked basically to respond to was an RFP that asked for not only I.D. services but various banking services, various point of sale and vending options, library card capacity, calling card features, and several other features that the card could incorporate at the option of the institution and the option of the individual holders.
In 1994-1995 after we received the twelve vendor consortia responses, five sub-committees with 60 members were set up. Membership drawn from SUNY, CUNY, and Cornell, to evaluate those responses, to see how closely they responded to the RFP and to see which vendor consortia offered the best set of goods and services and price. In 1995 the State Controller recognized and authorized negotiations with the vendor consortia that was judged to be the most responsive to the RFP. And that vendor consortia was Citibank, MCI, and Diebold Equipment. In January 1996 following negotiations with that vendor consortium, that contract was ultimately approved by the State Controller and essentially registered as a State contract. Under law CUNY is allowed to buy our State contracts, City contracts, Board of Education contracts, and GSA contracts. And finally in June of 1996, the Board of Trustees authorized the University's operation in the program and that has been dubbed the CUNYCard program. That's how we got to where we were at the beginning of the program.
Now the features of the card include high quality digital image I.D., and library card feature acceptable at any CUNY library. One of the beneficial aspects of this is that there is no longer the need for separate bar codes that are sometimes slapped on over the card that ultimately rip or wear off and so forth. Various banking services, cash, purchasing on and off campus, both in terms of vending and point of sale debit sales, and discount calling card features. This is why this vendor consortia was the one that was ultimately selected. The cards are free. The bank accounts are free with no minimum balance required. The ATM usage, that is, the ability of a student or a faculty member for that matter to go to an ATM and withdraw money that is on deposit in the account is one free per month, one additional per financial aid deposit up to four per semester. And then there is charge of $1 for each additional ATM usage. Direct deposit is free. No P.O.S. (point of sale) fee is added, that is, a vendor -- say a bookstore on campus or a local merchant that will accept debit cards -- there is no additional fee.
For a person making a purchase with a debit card, the fee is paid by the merchant to the bank as they do with credit cards. Vending is based on whatever items the college chooses to offer through the card. For example, a soda machine can be outfitted so that the card can be swiped through it rather than coins or dollar bills. The way that you get the value on these cards is through various ways, you can take it to a bursar's window and a bursar's clerk, pay $10 or $20, and the value iss then added to the magnetic strip on the back of the card. You can then go to a vending machine and you can swipe it. Or there are actually machines that you can insert the card into, put a ten dollar bill in, and the ten dollars gets added to the card and that's how that works.
The benefits from our perspective is that one card can do all. The student will not have to carry multiple cards to access these services. It speeds payment of financial aid. When a student elects that option, financial aid is directly deposited to the bank account. The student doesn't have to go to the check cashing service, paying an exorbitant fee, leaving that check cashing service with $2,000 in his or her pocket walking around as an easy mark with all of that money. That student can access those dollars instantly after the date of deposit, as often as necessary and can draw that account down to zero with no minimum requirement. This differs a little bit with the State University's deal with the vendor consortium.
Just let me explain that difference because it is important. SUNY is charging under their deal, $2.50-3.00 per month per bank account for their students. Our students are being charged nothing. The way that we are able to do that is that SUNY is receiving royalties from the bank in association with that charge. We could have had that same deal, but we decided that it was more important for our students to have an opportunity for no-fee banking so we forego the fees that we might otherwise receive from the bank and our students receive in exchange no fee services for the banking with no minimum required. Since we saw as one of the major attractions of the card, the direct deposit of the financial aid and all that means in terms of security of transaction, in terms of getting people off line, in terms of reducing administrative headaches, return checks and everything associated with that as more important than SUNY does in terms of the number of students at CUNY who receive financial aid, which of course is much higher as a percentage than those of SUNY. This reduces the cost of controlled access to facilities.
Right now if you have a special science lab or computer lab and you want to give someone access to it at midnight, you have to have various security arrangements or you have to issue keys and keep very close control over that system. With this card, depending upon what other ancillary equipment a college chooses to install in facilities, that facility can be programmed to allow access with the use of that card and it is much less expensive to do it in that fashion. Not all colleges will choose to do that; some might.
Finally, two more items. It is choice based with the exception of this being your I.D. card and library card. Everything else is at the option of the holder. The holder can decide whether or not he or she wants to participate in the banking service, whether or not to participate in the calling card service, whether or not to participate in the debit or vending services or any of the services that may in the future become available as part of this program. And it's scalable -- this program can be as small or as large as we need it to be. One of the other attractive features of the agreement with the vending consortium is that New York committed by contract to updating the technology associated with this program as new technologies come along. Should the day come, several years hence, where computer chips are implanted in these cards and contain additional capabilities that the card currently does not, we will be able to incorporate that technology into this program.
There is a lot that has been said about this program that is incorrect. I think that it is important to correct it. Just let me tell you where we are in terms of the implementation. Four colleges have implemented the program so far - Tech, Baruch, Queensborough, and LaGuardia. Four additional are scheduled to be carded in the spring. The rest of the University will be carded next year. The colleges have essentially self selected where they want to be in the queue in terms of when they think they are ready for implementation, and the colleges decide what options to offer on the card institutionally and individuals decide for themselves which ones to avail themselves of. Just to give you some statistics, we've carded 40,000 individuals so far; over 9,000 have elected the option of the bank account. We've generated about $53,000 worth of discount calls using the calling card feature. That's basically from one institution, New York Tech, since the rest have not yet entered the mainstream of that.
There are many institutions around the country that have been doing this for years. We are in a sense "Johnny-come-lately" in this regard. But these are just some of the institutions that are using similar technology and similar suites of services for their students and for their faculty, students, and alumni. So that's the CUNYCard. That completes my presentation, and I'd be happy to answer questions on this or anything else.
Dean Savage (Sociology, Queens College) -- About a week and a half ago, two weeks ago in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Illinois State came out with its annual ranking of changes in state support to higher education. It was a rather stark table in that the overall increase in state support to higher education nationally was 3%. When you divided it up by state by state basis, New York State came out fiftieth in ranking with a 10% decrease. Mississippi, Arkansas and Alabama, they were all way ahead of us. When we looked at the breakdown individually by system inside New York State, SUNY had a 14% decrease, 10% overall for New York. CUNY had an 18% decrease over that two year period. What is the reason we are ranked so low? That is one question, but the real question is what is it that leads to SUNY doing better in this process than CUNY has done? / Rothbard -- Well, SUNY has the health centers and that kind of mucks up the comparison. SUNY has not done better than CUNY as we have been virtually on par throughout the 1990's in terms of the budget cuts from the State. The fact is that we have been on par in terms of the cuts. Last year, or two years ago, whenever the Chronicle did this, New York was ranked forty-eighth, and we now have the dubious distinction of being fiftieth and we can't even say anymore, thank god for Mississippi as we once were able to. Now Mississippi says thank God for New York. It is something that obviously is an issue that the Chancellor and others of us intend to bring to the attention of the Governor and his staff and the Legislature as we did the last time the rankings were out. It is certainly...to anyone in the State interested in the things we heard here tonight in the role of the City University, the role of higher public education, the importance it has to economic development and social development of the State, this is not good news and should hopefully serve as something of an embarrassment. Now having said that, you have to look behind the statistics, too, and recognize while in percentage terms New York support has declined and placed us fiftieth nationally, New York still spends in absolute dollar terms a tremendous amount of money, much higher than other states in the nation -- probably with the exception of California, I would suspect without knowing precisely. But it has been going in the wrong direction, something that all of us 80th Street have spent a lot of time the last several years trying to do something about. We were very successful with the help of a lot of people in this room last year in staving off a budget cut both to the University's budget and to the TAP program. We remain concerned about what the future holds for 1997-1998 and beyond since circumstances that may have helped us stave things off this year may not be present in the coming year. But the Chancellor in fact will be having a meeting with the State budget director very shortly within the next couple of weeks and one of the things that I have already put in her package for the discussion is that Chronicle article and that chart that shows New York ranked fiftieth. / Chair Cooper -- Thank you. I am going to exercise the prerogative of the chair and request that the question be very brief and we skip the follow up because we have a panel tonight of guests. Two of the faculty have come from rather lengthy distances to be here and we need to hear them.

Paul Kurzman (President of the Faculty Senate, Hunter College) -- I understand that the Uuniversity has indicated that many of the faculty who are restored to their colleges by the New York State supreme court because of a decision by Chancellor Reynolds with the supreme court deemed illegal, are being told, that while they are to collect full pay and benefits, they are not permitted to come onto the campus and teach students in return. My question is, as the chief fiscal officer for the university and understanding that we have trustees in this room who legally have a fiduciary responsibility in their role with the tax payers money, how can it be that you as the chief financial officer would defend the decision to pay people to do no work with the money that the tax payer to support that? / Rothbard -- I am not going to comment on any matter that is under litigation, I'm sorry.
Cecelia McCall (English, Baruch College) -- You said early on that City agencies were expected to self-fund collective bargain.... / Rothbard -- Covered agencies not City agencies. Covered agencies is the term the City gives to non-mayoral agencies which includes the City University of New York Community Colleges, Health and Hospitals Corporation, a couple of others that escape me at the moment. / McCall -- But doesn't the City usually cover salaries? / Rothbard -- Yes. / McCall -- So why, I don't understand this, there will be a short fall if in fact we get a collective bargaining agreement, there may be a shortfall? / Rothbard -- Absolutely, if that were to happen then that's why I think you saw the kind of response from organized labor that you did and that's why I think the City has given second thoughts to that and that is apparently no longer under serious consideration. / McCall -- O.K.

Diane Sank (Anthropology, City College) -- I really wanted this question to go to the chancellor but I would like an answer tonight if possible so I will ask you this question. What is the purpose of the CUNY directive that was sent in March of 1996 to the New York City Police Department to report to the CUNY administration the name of all employees who are arrested for any reason? And since you are limiting retorts I will ask the second part, is the fear amongst some of us that this type of information could be used against employees including faculty and including students who work for the City University. At the time of appointments or tenure promotion and so that's my question. / Rothbard -- I can only give you a partial answer because I am not the chancellor. Security does not report to me so I only know what I have heard as others have heard. First of all it is my understanding that it is standard operating procedure and always has been for municipal sub-divisions which City University is considered one by the City of New York, although a covered agency, to receive information when someone has identified him or herself as a City employee in an arrest situation. You may disagree, but I am telling you what I'm telling you what I... / Sank -- I would like a correction on that, its the case of security or safety officers, that is a New York State law and that has now suddenly been expanded... / Rothbard -- Excuse me, I didn't say it was New York State law, I was going to get to that. It is New York State law that someone who is a security officer must be reported and must identify him or herself as such. What I said was that it was standard operating procedure that if an employee identifies him or herself as an employee of the City of New York, that the agency of employment is notified about that. Having said that, let me return to what I said initially. Security department does not report to me. I am unfamiliar with those memoranda other than what I and all of you have read on CUNY-talk and I can not speak on it anymore. What I can do is refer the question to the appropriate individual at 80th Street and try to get an answer to President Cooper for you. / Chair Cooper -- Thank you, I would say that the executive committee had Larry Mucciolo involved in a meeting about two weeks ago and some of the issues you just raised are being examined and we are getting a letter back, when it comes I will share it. It's not an issue we've forgotten.

Judy Connorton (Library, City College) -- I'm on the library faculty and I was asked to express the concern of the CUNY libraries about the impact of the CUNY card on the ability of those libraries to recognize the card holder as a currently enrolled or registered student. At this point the only way the libraries have of doing that is by looking at the validation sticker which will not be allowed on these cards. Was this a consideration in... / Rothbard -- Validation sticker for your information can't be put on the card like it used to be because if this card was put into an ATM machine than that sticker comes loose somehow and gums up the works and can foul up the operation of the card. We have identified a vendor in response to those concerns who has a process for imprinting cards without damage with a validation information, and we are close to contracting with that company to be able to provide those services. / Connorton -- And that will be done every semester then? / Rothbard -- Whatever the college decides and wants to do. There are some colleges that don't validate that don't feel that there is a need for that. There are some colleges who feel its important and we are making accommodations for that. / Connorton -- Thank you.

Susan O'Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) -- Another CUNY card question. You said that there were sixty people that made the decision about deciding on Citibank, where any of them faculty? / Rothbard -- No. / O'Malley -- I didn't think they were. / Rothbard -- These were administrative evaluations of banking services, calling card services and so forth. / O'Malley -- Did any of them realize that Citibank has a terrible record on labor and also did any of them recognize or remember that Citibank lobbied against government direct lending to students and was I think voted by the U.S. student association the "hog of the month" last spring. I mean did anyone realize these things? / Rothbard -- That wasn't part of their consideration, their consideration was, who was most responsive to the RFP and offered the best suite of services for the lowest price and that's the basis on which they made there decision. / O'Malley -- O.K. thank you.

Ruth Grossman (Elementary Education, City College) -- Vice Chancellor I have two questions, one related question. You speak of the colleges going on-line and selecting this. To my knowledge, this was never presented to the students and certainly never to the faculty as an option. Is this card going to be mandatory for all students? That is my first question. Secondly what about the faculty? / Chair Cooper -- One question please. / Grossman -- One question, is this mandatory for all students and all faculty? / Rothbard -- The board resolution clearly mandates the implementation of the CUNY card for the University. What is optional on the colleges part is when in the queue, they feel ready to enter the program and what optional services they are going to offer on the campus. / Grossman -- Does that mean as an option we could have just the library card and I.D. and none of the... / Rothbard -- Yes absolutely. / Grossman -- Glad to hear that. / Rothbard -- However, there are individual options that can't be denied the students the right to choose, but you don't have to use it for any of the other services institutionally if the institution decides it doesn't want to.

Jane Matthews (Mathematics, Hunter College) -- My question is not specifically about the budget. Your title includes information services and I am a new alternate on the CUNY-B.A. committee and CUNY-B.A. students take courses at different colleges. We were asked to consider that we are going to have to choose whether we go on the SIMS system for student information services which is an outdated system. Or a separate one that the Graduate Center wants to develop. We were also given some advice that since we were also given some extra funding for the CUNY-B.A. program, we should buy our computer equipment now which of course is what I'm hearing is that we shouldn't buy computer equipment now even if we have the money. Can't the University go to one system that is state of the art and can do things like check prerequisites, like I am in a math department and it would be so nice when students go into things like telephone registration that they know what prerequisites are and we can check them out and have a really good system. / Rothbard -- Well, we would like nothing better than to have all the money in the world and to be able to have everything throughout the University be state of the art. The fact of the matter is sometimes, good enough is good enough. While the SIMS system is not state of the art it has been a very effective system for the University and has served a very effective function. All of the senior colleges are now in the SIMS system or are in the process of being on the SIMS system. In addition to that many of the senior colleges and community colleges have or are in the process of getting out of the main frame business and migrating to our University computer center at 57th Street and what they are discovering is that suddenly they have hundreds of thousands of dollars in savings from eliminating maintenance costs, staffing costs, environmentals, space, security and so forth. It is the University's intention to move the entire University on to the SIMS system. At the same time, on a parallel track, there is a team of computing staff from the University and the colleges, looking at what SIMS needs to become to serve the emerging needs of the universities. So we are not making a decision that it is SIMS and that's it. What we have made a decision about is that SIMS is better than what the colleges have currently but it is not as good as it needs to be and development work is going to continue on that system to incorporate some of the concerns you have and a lot of concerns other people have about it. As with other programs we implement in the University, we do not coerce college participation. Colleges have decided to participate in SIMS [sp?] because they have weighed the benefits and costs and decided that when all is said and done, SIMS is more beneficial to them than what they already have. I expect that the Graduate School will ultimately make that decision as well.

Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay) -- Those of us on the faculty who were at the fiscal affairs committee were very pleased to see one of the items, I forget what college it was, but it was for a computers for the faculty and the explanation said this is part of CUNY's plan to have every faculty have a computer. This was the first, we applaud this, but could you tell us what the time table is for the plan and how, and where John Jay is in the queue, because most of us don't have any computers or access to computers or even type-writers. We are lucky to have pens. / Rothbard -- The first task of course is to secure the resources to make that possible. We have in the capital budget, you may not have noticed, but it is a fairly significant item, we have a capital budget request for 110 million dollars for computing infra-structure for the University. One of the top priorities with in that program will be wiring to the desktop every faculty office with the appropriate telecommunications connectivity and the appropriate devices to hang off of the network. Before we do that however, we have to develop a coherent plan for the University which takes in to consideration issues of intra-operability and issues beyond that. We also have, by mandate of the Board of Trustees, a library and educational technology task force which is now deliberating on this and many other issues and we hope to be able to use the recommendations of that task force which are due in the spring, to help spring board us into that issue and a lot of associated issues, but unlike the COMP program which is a program to get computers to students so that they can have them at home and bring them to school or whatever which is a very modest pilot program of only a couple million dollars. A significant bulk of the 110 million dollar capital program is to do just what you just described. I can't tell you where John Jay is in the queue, because we do not yet have a queue. / Kaplowitz -- That's what I was asking. / Rothbard -- By the way its a five year proposal, so obviously we are not looking to get 110 million dollars all at once because frankly we wouldn't be able to use it effectively if we got it all at once, these things take time. You have wire buildings, get rid of asbestos if there is asbestos there. You have to look at wireless solutions in some places where drawing wires doesn't make sense and you have to look at all of the emerging technologies and look at how they all fit together in some coherent fashion.

d. Reports of Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees: [will be added]

V. Panel on Cross-Campus Collaboration: CUNY in the Year 2000.

a. Panel Report:

Jane Coffee (Mathematics, CSI) -- When I was asked to serve on the subcommittee on common course numbering, I agreed to do it for actually two reasons. One, because I think it is a faculty consideration and when I looked at the original listing of committee members it consisted overwhelmingly of registrars and administrators. As it turned out, there was one faculty member on it, moi, and there was one who serves also as a staff person at 80th Street. The second reason I agreed to serve on it was because I had served as chair of the math department for twelve years and during that time it seemed to me that I had spent an inordinate amount of time saying that Math 03 at Kingsborough is the same thing as Math 30 at the College of Staten Island. I thought actually there are things that we do in common in this University that deserve to have a common course number so that in fact students who are taking these courses know that they are in fact the same course. And that the faculty who have to advise them also know it, and the registrars who have to deal with registration also have an easy system.
You have seen the third version of the report. For whatever you think of the final report, it's better than the first two. I will say that there are three items that I want you to think about that I think are very important. One is, with the whole idea of common course numbers, it seems to me that when it comes to the college it's extremely important who decides, who assigns a common course number. In the document, actually Eva may speak to this, there are two formats expressed. I think the one that actually should be the agreed-upon one is the governance structure in the college. I will say that I can't think of any college that was smart enough to put into their governance that they had to deal with this kind of problem. Hopefully there are wise governance officials, faculty on the campuses, and what I would urge them to do is in fact have the people who are the experts in the discipline decide this question.
Now we also have a problem that I don't think we can do this in isolation. Staten Island, we can't sit there and say "yes Kingsborough, these are your courses, Brooklyn these are your courses, Lehman these are your courses..." we have together in disciplines. I am a math professor and Bob Feinerman is here and there are others that know that we have a very active math council of chairs. But it seems to me that in each of these disciplines, they sit within some kind of structure where there is a chair or assigned designee with authority. It has got to be someone who knows what is going on in the disciplines who in fact make this decision. It seems to me that as a math professor I'd only want to make it about math courses. I don't want to deal with physics, I don't want to deal with biology, even if I know a little about it, and I don't want them to deal with math. That's one thing, we have to decide who is going to do it and then what will be the process to coordinate this evaluation process throughout the University.
The second thing is that when you read the document, there are some loaded words in there. The loaded words are "implied comparability." I will say that if you ever remember any of your old math courses at some point maybe someone mentioned transitive relations. This is not a transitive relation and they're trying to make it a transitive relation. Implied comparability, what does that mean? That means if College A agrees to take College B's course and say they are comparable, fine. College B agrees to take College C's course, comparable. Now they want to say that College A's course is comparable to College C's course. Now the problem with that if you ever think of it, math professors always have to have blackboards, College A, College B, the intersection may in fact..... Say in fact we agreed on 60% A and B, 60% B and C, we might only have 20% in the middle. We probably wouldn't want to have that have a common course number. We have to be very careful about that, that should not be an automatic. That should be something that needs to be signed off by College A and College C, that they agree.
Finally, there has been a real push, especially by 80th Street, to use as a basis for common course numbers this course equivalency guide. We've got to be real careful about that. Aside from the fact that there are errors in it, which we could each find I'm sure in our own discipline. It's not just a question of correcting those errors, it's a question in my mind that common course numbers is a very different idea than the idea that generated the course equivalency guide. That was an advisement vehicle; some people took it very seriously, some did not. I think that common course numbers have to be taken very seriously by everybody. There is apparently a push to get the corrections made. There may be a danger in that and the danger may in fact be that if we make the corrections now to the course equivalency guide, that may be in fact interpreted to mean that then we think that this is common course numbering. As I'm trying to make the point, it's a very different kind of issue.

Eva Richter (English, Kingsborough Community College) -- Many of the concerns I have are very much the same as the concerns that Jane has. But I do want to address something a little bit different as well. This report of the Task Force on Cross Registration and Schedule Coordination -- that's a really rather innocuous name for a document which will have very, very far reaching consequences in terms of control of courses and programs. As I see it the issue of control is really central to the whole debate about the document. I want to address some of the more important issues here. The first meeting of the Steering Committee opened with a statement reiterated several times after that we are all one University now. The decrees of the final report about common registration procedure, common calendars and most important for us, common course numbering, rest on that assumption.
As I see it the document looks forward to a University in which, a la Goldstein report, students will be free to take courses at other units if their own do not provide the necessary ones, or if they are closed out of basic courses, or if they prefer the electives offered at another unit in any given semester, or if it's convenient geographically for them to attend another unit for a semester. To this end colleges are being asked to provide information as to which classes are generally oversubscribed, which are under subscribed, etc... Obviously such questions may yield information that makes centralization more of a feasible reality than many of us want to contemplate. Given student demand for specific courses across the University, it may then be possible in the interests of budgetary efficiency to plan which campuses will offer specific courses, and students will be urged to travel to attend them.
Incidentally, the Task Force on Libraries and Technology will deal with the concepts of distance learning and the use of interactive TV and other technologies which may easily be used to implement such a vision without the students having to travel across the wide expanse of this City. The issue of control then is of paramount importance here. Are all students free to take courses elsewhere? What is the maximum number of such courses they can take? Who determines how many courses the students can take on other campuses? What kind of courses can be taken elsewhere? It is axiomatic that a common course numbering system is designed to facilitate such off-campus study. Clearly any course that shares a number on two or more campuses should be fully transferable among those campuses. The students should be free to take the course at any campus he or she wishes. The fundamental issue is who and what should determine whether and which courses receive common numbers and that is why I absolutely second the concerns Jane raised about who will have the control over this and about the use of the discipline councils and the use of governance structure.
Let me say also that implementing a common course numbering system does not mean that all courses will receive common numbers throughout the University. That idea was specifically repudiated in the Task Force Steering Committee. The Task Force did however take note that the equivalency guide is in existence and suggested that as a first step for assigning course numbers, the guide be consulted, revised, and used where appropriate, only after such revision. The question is again the question of revision. Who's doing the revision? How, in what structures? Faculty members on the Task Force pointed out glaring inaccuracies in the establishment of such equivalencies and the inadequacy of the whole process when it was originally undertaken. It was a haphazard process at best. Often determinations of equivalency were made by registrars and other members of the administration who didn't have a clear understanding or an idea of the educational goals of the course under consideration and were guided by sketchy catalog descriptions.
Equivalency was frequently guided not by consideration of course content but by questions of program articulation, transfer, and ultimately a perception of the standards maintained by certain colleges, a perception frequently based on questionable assumptions. For example, assumptions about the inadequacy of preparation in a two year college. The idea that the two year colleges were intrinsically institutions which demanded a lower level of competence and so on. This resulted, by the way, in incredible inequities in transfer throughout the University. There is a report by the Advisory Committee on Transfer from June of 1993 which says, of the community college courses reviewed, the number accepted by the senior colleges as equivalent without restrictions ranged from 13% to 96%. Now this is indeed of course a glaring inequity. In addition two senior colleges accepted at least one-third of these courses only as some form of elective credit.
The whole question then of transfer between the two year colleges and the four year colleges, the question of equity and so on, is very, very much a factor in all of this. Common course numbering then threatens to become a way of micro-managing articulation. Not through statements of general principles and development of specific agreements among colleges and programs, but by getting colleges to declare the courses in other units fulfill the same requirements as courses of their own. The relationship between general articulation set up in 1985 and transfer policies in common course numbering must thus be carefully scrutinized. One system should not be able to contravene the other.
Apart from that it seems to me that once again the questions of who considers these courses, how they are numbered, what the agreements are, should rest very squarely with people in the discipline. I really agree with what Jane had to say.

Kenneth Sherrill (Political Science, Hunter) -- The temptation is to say "me too," but let me try to provide a somewhat different take on this. I also feel kind of strange, I felt really good when I walked in and saw all of the trustees here. I gave similar remarks at a board open hearing and two of the three trustees that were there that night are here now so I apologize for the redundancy, and I wish the others still were here. In the abstract, cross-campus collaboration can seem like an unassailable goal. The ability of faculty and students at different colleges at the same great University to work together is a wonderful idea. We have complementary strengths and interests. Cross-campus collaboration should create a whole that enhances the cumulative value of the parts. Certainly in 1995 when the Board of Trustees passed Resolution 25, I don't think that there was any serious discussion of the down-side of collaboration. This seemed like a very desirable abstract idea. A year's service on the Steering Committee on the Task Force on cross-campus registration persuaded me, as implemented by the Task Force, a task force dominated by administrators, we're basically faced with the Goldstein Report's worst qualities and compared with that commission's leadership without the velvet glove that was exercised in the Goldstein Report. The bottom line, that as proposed, the results are anti-intellectual and place students at great risk. The plan undermines the academic standards of the University and could set off a race for the bottom rather than striving for academic excellence.
Let me try to indicate some of the ways the report does very undesirable things. I believe that the task force went far beyond the board's original mandate. In recent years the board encouraged the four year colleges to develop individual admissions profiles, for example, in relation to their unique missions and populations. For example, Baruch students must meet a higher level of math proficiency than entering students at Hunter. Different colleges expect their entering students to have taken different high school curricula with different college entrance requirements. A technical college or a business college might structure its introductory courses in a very different way than the way in which a comprehensive college or a liberal arts college does. Some colleges only allow one semester of remediation, other colleges allow two, and so on. There are increasingly dramatic differences in the criteria that are used within the University, by the colleges, to admit students and in the structure of their curricula.
Thus it is in accord with the board's recent policy innovations, we should expect the students at the colleges to be distinctively trained. This means that the colleges may or may not have comparable pre-requisites for elective courses. And their students may have differing proficiency levels at comparable points in their academic career. I am using the word "comparable" on purpose for obvious reasons. The Task Force's plan is to allow a student to enroll in a host college's course whether or not it has different prerequisites than those at a student's home college. This clearly has very negative consequences. First and most dramatically, it places students at risk. A student admitted to a course without meeting prerequisites is not likely to do as well as a student who has met the prerequisites. When that student is taking a course on permit from another college, the student is not as likely to take advantage of the support services at the host college. The student will have more difficulty in entering into study groups with other students and will have more difficulty meeting with faculty at regularly scheduled conference hours.
I believe that only students who have fulfilled a host college's prerequisites for a course, including proficiency levels, should be allowed to enroll in such a course on permit. This is an idea that was roundly rejected. I'm not aware of any votes being allowed by the person who ran the committee, but I can assure you that this was one on which it was faculty on one side and the vast majority on the other. Secondly, the current report creates a process in which it will be more difficult for a host college to fulfill its responsibilities to its own students. Under the proposal presented in the report, students throughout the University would register for courses simultaneously. Hunter students, for example, would receive no priority over students at other CUNY colleges when registering for courses at Hunter. Put bluntly, Hunter students might be closed out of courses offered at Hunter because large numbers of students at other colleges have registered for our courses. I believe that this will frustrate our ability to fulfill our responsibility to our own students, and it may impede our students to make normal progress toward the degree.
I believe that our first responsibility at each college is to our own students. They deserve no less. Every college should believe that its first priority is to its own students, not to students at some other college that are in the same University.
Third, this creates a situation in which CUNY's mission of excellence and access might be turned into conflicting goals. Most simply, the plan maximizes access by allowing students to enroll in courses whether or not they have met the host college's prerequisites. To the degree that permit students lack the academic preparation required for a particular course, they will lower the level of the course, debasing the quality of the education offered to those students who have fulfilled the prerequisites. This is a proposal that lowers academic standards, me a conservative. In fact, it is a proposal that threatens to make a mockery of the time honored academic tradition that students must have mastered certain material in order to be able to take certain courses.
Fourth, the proposal is an assault on the integrity and autonomy of the colleges. It changes the basis for accepting transfer credit for a course, from equivalency, to comparability. You've heard about this and I fully concur. I believe that CUNY should realize that individual colleges have desirable differences in academic quality and mission. Different colleges have different admissions profiles. Some departments are more research active and more demanding on their students. This proposal would homogenize the University in an undesirable way. It places administrative efficiency above academic quality. These are perverted priorities. I believe that we should base the priority of the quality of the education we offer our students at the very pinnacle of our priorities. As it is I think that our students are much too weakly integrated into their own colleges and academic communities. This is a proposal that would disperse them.
Making it easier for students to assemble courses at different colleges is a laudable goal. The method of implementation the report proposes would take control of the curriculum out of the hands of those most qualified to control it, the local college's faculty, and centralize it into the hands of bureaucrats who are likely to be guided by goals of efficiency and convenience as opposed to being guided by academic vision and academic standards. Allowing students to register through a central web site enables students to make choice that might on the surface seem rational, but are not by any stretch of the imagination academic standards.
I believe that neither registration officials nor students are as well qualified as faculty members to decide on the standards of college education. To the degree that funding of colleges is enrollment driven the proposal can set the colleges off into battles for enrollments. That is a competition that might, rather than enhancing academic standards, set off a race to the bottom. In an era of the Internet and the world wide web, it will be too easy for students to learn which courses on which campuses are the hardest and which are the easiest. The greatest fear of the administrators was that the students would use this to get away from the boring teachers. Whether it be the boring teachers or the tough teachers or the easy teachers, self interest comes into play. To the degree that the students gravitate to the easiest courses, there will be the greatest financial pressure on the colleges to lower academic standards and to pander to the lowest common denominator.
We fear that given current conditions at CUNY, bringing more market forces and more student consumer choices to bear would lead to mediocrity instead of excellence. Our mission is access and excellence and we deserve a plan that will enhance access and that will protect excellence. The plan we have been given fails to do that.
Carolyn Richmond (Modern Languages and Literatures, Brooklyn) --You have a very good summary of the LOTE report in the ADFL (Association of Departments of Foreign Languages) Bulletin [distributed at the back table]. This is the foreign language division of MLA. This report is taken very seriously nation- wide.
I think the first thing that I would like to comment briefly about is how LOTE would impact on language offerings as a sign of a new direction of academic planning or a sign of Goldsteiniana. After the Goldstein Report, I'll give a tiny bit of background. The CUNY Council on Foreign Language Study, which is our discipline council, which has been working since 1978 and is very active, meeting six times a year, decided that we would not get defensive about it and after correcting the statistics from the Goldstein Report, we decided to go to try to verbalize positive ways that we could improve language instruction in CUNY. Particularly in light of the fact that we are living in a multicultural, multilingual City and we are in this global village. We wrote a response to the Goldstein Report which was directed to the chancellor and 500 copies were sent out to local politicians and to the heads of professional organizations nation-wide. All of these people were invited to write the chancellor, and they did.
As a result of this we got a high profile at 80th Street because Vice Chancellor Freeland had to answer a lot of letters. Our attitude was, instead of complaining and even having worse things happen like having foreign languages going into language institutes, we decided to take the initiative. This was not to defend the status quo, but we wanted to do something we thought would be worthwhile. As a result of our CUNY council's attitude or response, the Task Force on languages other than English was named and this was about a year and a half ago. The project was a very long project, a very difficult project. We learned. I think there was as much learning that went on at 80th Street as went on among the faculty.
We finally at a certain point when it looked like it was going to be the same as ever, all of a sudden the Steering Committee said we're going to write this report so we wrote it. It's entirely a faculty generated report, five people wrote this report and they wrote many, many versions of this report and it was negotiated week after week after week. We are very proud that it is a faculty document, all the text is faculty. The report, which you can get from 80th Street if you haven't seen it, is pretty big. All of the charts came from 80th Street but we wrote the text and we stand behind that text. To me that is a new direction in academic program planning because we worked jointly with the administration and it was very difficult to enunciate a new vision for language learning at CUNY.
The first part - General Implications of the LOTE Recommendations, if at all applicable to work outside the major. I would start by saying that there is a part of the report called - Extending the Mission. The obvious thing is that we want to extend languages beyond the traditional literature, study of language to go to study literature and so forth. To increase without losing literature, increase the study of language to be used, language in the field for the professions, languages and add-on. Language is becoming an integral part of the curriculum of a college curriculum and the language department not being sort of separated as they usually have been, traditionally have been.
The encouraging of complementary use of languages, complementing other disciplines, languages across the curriculum, languages for special purposes. And number three, the consortia, how they might serve as a model for the future. Now I know this consortia idea is problematic. I want to start by saying this is a faculty idea. It is a very flexible thing but it came up, it evolved from the faculty in response to the idea that was floated and we were trying to be sold about centers of excellence. We didn't buy centers of excellence so we came up with the idea of consortia. Now the consortia for three reasons, now there are four consortia, four different geographical consortia. First of all to buy time, to allow departments to develop. Second of all, to save languages which would disappear through a kind of academic program planning which is called retirement and it's absolutely frightening what's happening in language departments at CUNY and that's not academic program planning. Third, to build stronger language programs for the future, this is a cooperative, collaborative idea. It will help us maximize our resources; we are going through downsizing at all universities, we know that. There is a possibility for cross-consortia cooperation in languages that are less commonly taught languages such as Asian languages. German, for example, is becoming a less commonly taught language and you cannot have CUNY without offering a full range of courses in German, that is absolutely unacceptable.
This is an experiment. We never thought of it as being a model. Every consortia is going to develop its own way of working, its own program. Each consortia will be very, very different. We didn't think of it as a model, it is up to you if it's a model. But I think we were thinking of the students, I know we thinking of the students, and I just want to read a couple of paragraphs from Dorothy Jameses' statement to the Board of Trustees in October. Dorothy James is chair of German at Hunter. She was also the first recipient of the first ADFL award for service to the profession. She is one of the best known authorities on second language acquisition and on German and all of these problems in the whole country. I'd like to share this with you because I think it speaks for many of us who served on that task force.
"As a faculty member who worked all last year on the Task Force for Languages other than English," she says. "I wish to speak strongly in favor of the Chancellor's budget request for more consortia instruction initiatives in foreign languages. The idea for consortia planning among groups of colleges as described in our task force report came from the faculty on the task force not from the CUNY administration. It was an idea born of the crying need for inter-college cooperation in languages that are facing extinction in this University as well as in cooperation with and in Spanish, the one language other than English whose enrollments are constantly growing and whose present resources are being taxed beyond endurance. We saw all too clearly that business as usual would spell a shrinking of this University's language offerings over the next decade to English and Spanish alone, betraying our students and bringing shame to this cosmopolitan University. We call the task force report a blueprint for short term survival and long term growth and are proud to stand by that title. Our proposal for four consortia groups of colleges working together voluntarily to strengthen the language programs is an integral part of the system wide plan we devised to make better use of the University's increasingly limited resources and to identify realistic steps for fulfilling a vision of language literature and culture learning worthy of a multicultural urban community. The proposed consortia arranges to help us in various ways to make it easier for us to use collaborative curricular planning and scheduling to enhance students' options and improve students' progress. They will facilitate smooth transfers between two and four year colleges. They will help maintain and raise the quality of majors of programs that now lack adequate on site staffing and enrollment. They will provide strength and organization context for collaboration with high schools, a crucial part of the task force recommendation for fully articulated foreign language curriculum in the City. They will facilitate contacts with New York's ethnic and business communities so that CUNY can fully utilize what we call in this report, a virtually inexhaustive pool of linguistic talents of our City. Our task force report has attracted national attention at a time when many University systems have allowed the status of their foreign language disciplines to dwindle to that of endangered species. A two page summary of our report has just appeared in the Fall 1996 Bulletin of the Association of the Department of Foreign Languages. What we are planning at CUNY is already visible; if we fail we shall do so with national coverage. If we succeed we shall provide an important model for an urban University.

b. Panel Questions:

David Speidel (Geology, Queens College) -- I thought that the laude report was one of the best written ones that have come through in a long time and you have explained why. My comment and question I guess is to Ken, when Sandi brought in the document that was going to the board for long range planning that included all of these things, we had a chance to go through and sort of look at the ones we thought that were red flags immediately. Those that we thought that were sort of innocuous, those that were mechanical and were good ideas and so on. Twenty-five was one that I recall that on both your list and on my list were the things that were mechanical and relative innocuous. At what point did you realize that this was the mechanism that they were using to completely disenfranchise the individual colleges and to move everything into this super vanilla flavor? / Sherrill -- Well, at the very first meeting of the Steering Committee that was signaled to us although I think the other two faculty members, I think that at least one of them was there, we kind of raised the question and they said, no-no-no, but we are one University. Then shortly after that there was a plenary of everybody and as we moved around the groaning board between sessions, I overheard an associate provost at one college say to another administrator, this is the Goldstein Report isn't it? At that point I realized that I wasn't paranoid on this one. That in fact they had simply under the guise of a simple administrative rationalization, moved to homogenize and undo the University. / Speidel -- How do you go about showing not just trustee Rios because he's here, but how do you go about showing the outside world that what the trustees authorized in number 25, has been so far exceeded to make mockery of what they asked the group to do. / Sherrill -- Well, I would ask anybody who was on the board in 1995, if he or she believed that they were voting to allow students to take courses for which they had not met the requirements.

Susan O'Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) -- This is a question for Caroline. I thought the report was excellent and I attended your conference and I'm just very impressed with the whole discipline council. However, I'm afraid that we all look at the consortia arrangements and all when there are so many other good ideas in the report. But it is my understanding that in the final draft, it was voluntary, the consortia arrangement. Am I right on that? / Richmond -- As I said, this was a learning process, I believe 80th Street learned as much we did, I believe there was give and take. There was a good deal of negotiation and indeed, we the faculty members and the Steering Committee said that we would not sign off on the report even though we'd written it, we would rather throw the whole thing down if the word voluntary was not put in. The Vice Chancellor agreed to that. / O'Malley -- Thank you so its a voluntary arrangement? / Richmand -- The word is in there and it was agreed to and it was not taken out.

Jane Matthews (Mathematics, Hunter College) -- Again in that CUNY-B.A. program, that's a small program, largely mature students who have a focus and I was just told by one of the students in that program, a very good student, she is a Smith Fellow, and she said she signed up for this course at a different college, thinking that it was going to be just the right thing for her and it didn't turn out that way at all. At colleges like Hunter, we just do not have enough advisors and counselors around to get students into the right courses on our own campuses. How is a student suppose to know how to evaluate the courses they might be interested in taking at other campuses too? Is there any provision for this? Isn't this going to be more expensive? Or are a lot of students dropping out of the University because they are not getting where they think they going to go? [Note: Richter, Sherrill response].

Edward Reitz (Civil Engineering, City College) -- This is a general comment from the school of engineering. School of Engineering requirements in basic math, chemistry, and physics includes specific requirements on grades. You have to maintain a "C" in all of your courses sequentially. We would be very alarmed with any system that would allow students to subvert this because a straight "D" student in calculus is going wreck our retention record. We are requiring them to get "C's" in calculus in order to improve our retention and to allow them to go to another school and register after having gotten a "D" in one of our courses. We are not questioning the quality of the other schools, it's just that in proceeding without the mastery required by the "C" grade we are only looking at a disaster waiting to happen so we are extremely concerned about that particular issue. (No response).

Alfred Levine (Applied Sciences, College of Staten Island) -- It appears that we have allowed unfortunate terminology to enter into the discussion. The course equivalency guide which is intended for purposes of articulation and advisement, should have been called course comparability. In the sense that two courses can be comparable if they both satisfy say a general education requirement say in history. On the other hand, common course numbering should be based on a strict equivalence where the equivalence requires both the same prerequisites and the same level of achievement at the end. Is there any way we can encourage a change in this wording? [Note: Coffee, Richter response].

Diane Sank (Anthropology, City College) -- I want to congratulate the panel for an excellent presentation and I especially want to congratulate Ken Sherrill because I think you've really crystallized what the problem really is. I think the problem is homogenization, to make all departments equal, to make all colleges equal, all programs equal, and the end result of that is downsizing. Because if they are all equal we don't need as many and that again is the Goldstein Report. But from the point of view of the students, the practicality, I had a student who did this, this semester. He couldn't take a course at City College because the dean canceled the course because the enrollment was too low, it had six students and the dean decided that that was too small a number to have the course go. So he went to Hunter and he found that traveling back and forth it took him three hours to take a one hour course and he was just being wiped out. I mean its impractical, its confusing, the whole system, the whole thing just sounds unworkable and for that reason I would hope that the University faculty senate executive committee or whatever would consider rejection of this entire cross-campus homogenization. (No response).

Inez Martinez (English, Kingsborough Community College) -- I'd like to raise two issues that are of particular concern to community colleges. The first one concerns the fact that the report says that students will register in order of their class standing which means that any juniors or seniors coming to Kingsborough will get to register first for any Kingsborough courses or for any community college courses which means that we are not going to be able to give adequate access to our own courses to our own students. The second concerns the way that the report discusses the triangulation that Professor Coffee condemned laterally between senior colleges. the way the report puts that out is that if one senior college accepts a course from a community college, and then another senior college accepts that same course from a community college, then the two senior college courses will be considered comparable and will work for transfer. The reverse is not true in the report. The report does not say that if one community college accepts a community college course and another senior accepts that senior college course then that the senior college must also accept the community college course. I think that if the triangulation is going to work at all, there must not be that kind of discrepancy. / Coffee -- I'd like to make one point about that. I really obviously fell very strongly that there shouldn't be any kind of automatic period. I think in fact each college has to look at each other colleges offerings and determine which in fact are the same. I think that they were keying off of the equivalence guide which I think were senior colleges accepting community college courses.