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

Tuesday, December 17, 1996
6:30 p.m., Graduate School and University Center Auditorium
Basement Level, 33 West 42nd Street

Tentative Agenda

I. Approval of the Agenda


II. Approval of the Minutes


III. Reports
a. Chair (oral and written)
b. The Chancellor (oral) - 6:30 p.m.
c. Reports of Faculty Members of Board of Trustees Committees (written)
IV. Program: Provost's Panel on Future of Liberal Arts/General Education at CUNY
(Mirella Affron, CSI; Sadie Bragg, BMCC; Christophe Kimmich, Brooklyn; Basil Wilson, John Jay)

V. Proposed Resolution to Amend the Charter, Section 3A (Prof. Sohmer)

VI. New Business



Documents Enclosed:
- Minutes of November 26, 1996
- Resolution to Amend the Charter, Section 3A




Social with cash bar/sandwiches in lobby of auditorium at 6 p.m.
Draft: Subject to Senate Approval

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

December 17, 1996


Chair Cooper called the session to order at 6:35 P.M. in the Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium of the Graduate School and University Center. Present were Senators from the following campuses: Baruch: McCall, and Pollard, and Alternate Hill. BMCC: Resnick, and Alternate Friedman. Bronx CC: Galub and Alternate Skinner. Brooklyn: Bell, Jacobson, London, and Tobey. City: DeJongh, Grossman, Reitz, Sank, Sohmer, and Weil. GSUC: Baumrin, Berkowitz, Rothman, and Alternate Kieser. Hostos CC: Vasillov. Hunter: Matthews, Steinberg and Alternate Baxter. John Jay: Bohigian, Brugnola, Kaplowitz and Rodriguez. Kingsborough CC: Goldfarb, Martinez, O'Malley, Richter, and Alternate Staum. LaGuardia CC: Gallagher, Mettler, Reitano, and Alternates Beaky. Lehman: Feinerman, and Pohle. Medgar Evers: Harris-Hastick. Mt. Sinai: Levitan. NYCTC: Donoghue, Hernandez, Hounion, Norton, Walter and Alternate Cermele. Queens: Frisz, Kulkarni, Landazuri, Seley, and Speidel. Queensborough CC: Dahbany-Miraglia, Gellman, Osvaldo, and Mullin. CSI: Levine. York: Cooper, and Odenyo. Professors Barsoum, Riley, Rodriguez, and Yousef were excused. Faculty Governance Leaders present were Cooper (York), DeJongh (City), Friedman (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Kurzman (Hunter), Levine (CSI), Mandelbaum (Queens), and Mettler (LaGuardia). Chancellor Reynolds gave a report to the Senate and was accompanied by Deputy General Counsel Moskowitz and Dr. Pulliam. Provosts Affron (CSI), Bragg (BMCC), Kimmich (Brooklyn), and Wilson (John Jay) were guest panelists of the Senate. Acting Vice Chancellor Martin, Acting Dean Hotzler and Provost Thorpe (Queens) attended the panel discussion. The Parliamentarian was Richard Staum. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present.


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


II. Approval of the Minutes the 238th Plenary, November 26, 1996: The Minutes were adopted with corrections. Professors Rodriguez (John Jay) and Yousef (CSI) attended. Comments by Professor Martinez on page 14 of the Program, item V., Panel on Cross-Campus Collaboration, concerning triangulation in the ICAM report should read, "that if a senior college accepts a community college course, given a common number, and then another senior college takes the senior college's course as a common number, the ICAM report does not suggest that the second senior college would also then be accepting the community college course."


III. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations.]
a. Chair (oral & written).
b. The Chancellor (oral).


IV. Program -- Provost's Panel on the Future of Liberal Arts & General Education at CUNY: The UFS Academic Policy Committee organized a four-member panel. Provosts Affron (CSI), Bragg (BMCC), Kimmich (Brooklyn), and Wilson (John Jay) presented remarks and engaged in questions and answers with the audience. [recorded in the Program.]


V. Proposed Resolution to Amend the Charter, Section Article V., Section 3a: Professor Sohmer presented the resolution on behalf of the Executive Committee. No action was taken in the absence of a quorum.


There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 9:05 P.M.


Respectfully submitted,



William Phipps
Executive Director

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

III. Reports:
a. Chair: I have a very brief report, explained by the fact that it has been about two weeks (including Thanksgiving) since our last plenary, that the Governor has not issued his proposed budget for next year, and I have also spent the last week in London at a conference, blissfully unaware of any CUNY issues.

In my absence, the UFS Newsletter was sent to your mailrooms and you ought to be receiving a copy immediately. This newsletter will be the only one you will receive this semester. We have had to reduce its frequency as a result of cuts in our budget and released time allocation. Please read it and let us have your reaction.

Many of you attended the conference at John Jay on December 6 which was supported by the Office of Academic Affairs and the Senate, in an effort to examine the implications of the Task Force report on Resolution 25, cross campus calendars, registration, permit policy changes, etc. The conference was adjudged by all present, I believe, to be a great success -- the issues were focused very well for everyone in the morning panel where two administrators from the Task Force, Lois Cronholm and James Murtha, spoke and two faculty, Ken Lord of Queens and Eva Richter of Kingsborough, presented their views. Following the conference, an animated discussion on CUNYTALK occurred, which shall be included in the record. The official proceedings will be mailed to the Senate and participants by mid-January. Again, I want to thank the members of our office staff, particularly Lavonne Hunter and Bill Phipps, for oiling the machinery so unobstrusively behind the scenes that the meeting looked as if it was running itself. In addition, the John Jay staff and president contributed mightily to our reasonably trouble-free day.

For my New Year's project, I am making an effort to reach every faculty governance leader, every discipline council coordinator and every faculty coordinator or chair of a college curriculum committee. The object of this effort is to focus attention on the new University Course Guide, a renaming of the former Course Equivalency Guide. Faculty across CUNY are awakening to the fact that on too many campuses, an administrative appointee went about establishing course equivalencies between two and four year college courses without consulting affected faculty. Yesterday, for instance, a very annoyed political science chair in a very specialized program informed me that one of his 400 level courses had been equated by a registrar's assistant to a 200 level course in a two-year college. Students with access to on-line registration would not be able to determine that this is a serious error.

Thus, my message to you for this holiday season is -- besides watching your caloric intake -- watch your old course equivalency guide.

b. Chancellor: Thank you, Chair Cooper. Good to see you all this evening. Things are starting to move in Albany. As you are probably aware, they were in special session today looking at K-12 reform. We had a brief report in the midday from somebody on Speaker Silver's staff and nothing had happened. Have any of you heard anything? Did any of you hear anything on the radio on the way over? This is suppose to be a one-day session to resolve community board issues and so forth. I have no further news on that. However on very short notice I was summoned to Albany on Thursday of last week to meet with Governor Pataki.

Prior to that meeting I did have a very good and detailed meeting with Budget Director Woodworth. Basically I went through our budget request to make sure that all aspects of it were clear. I did share with Budget Director Woodworth the color picture of higher education's funding across the nation that appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in November I think you're familiar with it. We've made up many documents to point out that there has been actually over the last several years, funding decreases for four states -- Alaska, New York, I think Alabama and maybe Hawaii. We're in there with three kind of esoteric states. So we did make that point.

We found Budget Director Woodworth to be generally receptive. The comment she did make, which I have been repeating in this body, is that they still view the state budget to be out of kilter, to not be in balance. This is the third year of personal income tax cuts; it is the last year. She indicated there would be much more money for higher education in the subsequent year which corresponds of course with an election year for Governor Pataki. So I think the issue is pretty well set out for us. Then that afternoon I did go to meet with Governor Pataki. It was an extraordinarily give and take meeting. I was very happy about it in that we had quite a detailed discussion about higher education. We were suppose to have had about twenty-five minutes, but it went the better part of an hour.

I talked especially about our need for new faculty positions and what good pools of applicants there were out there and how very critical this was to the University's future. I talked about the Graduate Center request that's in the budget and that's again mostly for new positions. I talked about the success of the Language Immersion Centers. He was interested in our ability to work with K-12 on fast language skill acquisition and we're planning to have more conversations about that. He was quite interested in the computer acquisition proposal, whereby our own students would pay a certain amount because our students are poor and can't afford to buy personal computers. In the budget request is a proposal that would enable 5,000 students a year to get their own computers with some state help. He wondered if we could play a role again in K-12, achieving computer literacy and in this way our students could tutor and pay-off their share of computer purchase which I thought was kind of a good idea -- that would work well over summer. You could have students tutor high school students for a certain amount of time and get forgiveness of even their share of the computer purchase. That idea he liked very much.

I talked with Budget Director Woodworth. I talked with her in great detail on our welfare issues because she is the person deciding welfare appropriations. Their policy has been to turn over the details of the regulations to the City. I endeavored to make the point that since most of our funding comes from the state -- the general federal welfare guideline allows a year of educational experience --that it would be enormously helpful to CUNY if the state guidelines defined CUNY as an acceptable venue for that year. She was kind of interested in that. I pointed out to her the problem we are having in the City with the intense work requirements. She indicated that she was a staunch advocate of work for welfare recipients so I went off into very specific cases of our students, family college, AFDC recipients, and so forth, and the ability to gain college-level skills and experience to really move into the work force in such a way that they and their small children would never again be on welfare. We had a very detailed and I think in some respects illuminating discussion. I had the same discussion in a more brief fashion with the Governor.

The Governor also instructed staff to assist us probing our eligibility for more Department of Labor funding. The State of New York is getting a great amount of Department of Labor funding, federal pass-through money that we have not had access to before. We are following up on that as well. The budget release date keeps getting pushed back. I don't think we're going to have a budget now until the middle of January. Every time I talk to someone up there or go through a couple of budget items, it's always pushed back a little bit further. Eileen Goldmann, our very capable Albany lobbyist, thinks that it will be a very long drawn out budget. It will probably be at least July before we get resolution of the budget again. She thinks that the school reform issues, the tax issues, rent control -- you've all followed that I'm sure, that's a very contentious issue -- and other issues that are going to be on the table during this budget year are just going to hold back any meaningful negotiations on K-12. To summarize, there is a very real mood of trying to do something for K-12 in New York City and really help move reform initiatives.

The Governor continues to be very enthusiastic on environmental issues. I did remind Budget Director Woodworth of course that the Environmental Bond Act passed because of New York City's vote. If you followed that Bond Act, upstate New York, if they had voted alone, would have resoundingly voted against it. We're combing through it right now to see if there are any funding opportunities for CUNY scientists or others because that Bond Act was rather hastily put together, in some respects. We hope we can find some funding sources for us there. To move onto a couple of other issues, Jay Hershenson and I have embarked on what amounts to a national work-fare campaign. We are enlisting presidents and chancellors of systems nationwide on the issue of welfare recipients being able to use the one year of educational training for college level experience. We are urging colleges around the nation to lobby their legislatures and their own state welfare offices. I can't stress how important this is, that the welfare training be allowed in higher education. If we don't get it in the next few months, it will evermore be cut off, for years and years and years. Congress is just simply, with the construct of the federal Congress now, not going to revisit that Welfare Act for years and years and years. So we are trying very hard as the guidelines are interpreted to make sure that the twelve months of training allows welfare recipients to do so in a community college or other higher education setting.

The other thing I fear is that entrepreneurs and opportunists rise to any occasion. There are still millions and millions of dollars there and if those training opportunities aren't seized, if you will, by higher education, many of these for-profit corporations that are developing fly-by-night training schools will grab onto that opportunity and start to use it. So I think that it is very important we have a united front and we are on a very active campaign to do so. We're hampered a bit by the fact that, if some of you saw The New York Times over the weekend, there is still a big question mark about the Secretary of Education. The Department of Education has been very, very quiet. We have asked our Washington lobbyist to try and find out a little more, but we don't have any intelligence right now. Not much is happening, I have been consistently under the impression that Secretary Riley [Richard W.] who has some very major physical problems, did plan on going back to South Carolina. I have colleagues to whom he has said this, but there is no indication of the Secretary of Education appointment being up or being of concern, but Education is not playing a leadership role at all right now on this welfare education issue, which we of course wish they would be.

While I'm on federal issues, President Clinton is pushing very hard politically for this nationwide college student tutoring act and I've forgotten the exact name of it. Gussy Kappner [Augusta Kappner, President of Bank Street, former President of BMCC], who still of course does have good ties to education, contacted us about becoming involved. We're looking at it. I'm a little bit leery of it. Our students are so busy and have to work at income producing jobs. This does provide modest stipends for students to tutor children in literacy. It's another push at literacy and we are analyzing it and trying to see if there would be real fiscal rewards to our students. Dr. Cooper, I will send some of the materials to you. Some of you that are involved in literacy training may have some familiarity with or want to acquaint yourselves with it. We would appreciate input and ideas on how this might fit with your campuses. I've always been a little leery of these. Do you remember the AmeriCorp efforts by the federal government? Some of those, didn't particularly benefit us. We always had a few people participating, but they don't particularly fit our student profile [demographics] of limited time availability and being in an urban setting. We will look at that federal program as well for the benefits it would have for us.

There are two major task forces working along. Larry Mucciolo has served on the Differential Tuition Task Force that has been the linchpin of SUNY's efforts. In fact Larry, who kind of was the CUNY representative and was supposed to be an observer, has ended up chairing two of the meetings because of lack of attendance on other people's part. They are finally coming forth with a recommendation but without a vote that SUNY be permitted to have differential tuition. The votes were not there for the task force to support the recommendation so it's kind of a verbal recommendation. I don't know where that will go during this legislative session. You will remember that both Republican legislators in the Senate and Assembly leadership were quite opposed to it. Assemblyman Sullivan is very opposed to it, so we will see what happens.

On the TAP Task Force [Chaired by Dr. Matthew Schure (New York Institute of Technology and staffed Dr. Robert J. Maurer (President, NY Higher Education Services Corporation)] about which we have been very leery, Bill Proto has done his usual good solid job and the basic recommendations which the task force has produced are pretty much straightforward and include recommendations that TAP meet the needs of our poorest and neediest students. I will share that final report with your chair as well as one letter of protest that Bill Proto launched which I think is important. The chair of that task force is a president of a private institution and in the discussion of the Tuition Assistance Task Force, there is some tilting towards private institutions. There are complicated issues. I won't take the time with them tonight. Bill Proto has done a very fine letter, and there are letters coming in from three other state education representatives, indicating their view on this subject. So I think that we have handled ourselves well on the two task forces, both of which have finished their efforts and will sit there now waiting for the legislative session.

I'll end by indicating that there was no mention in any of my conversations, and I certainly didn't bring it up, of any tuition increase. That does not mean that there won't be one in the Governor's budget, but it was not on the table in any of my conversations with the Budget Director or with the Governor and I was pleased that the issue did not come up in that setting. Finally, I also had a very good meeting, a very positive meeting, with Speaker Silver, to brief him on the budget. As you know, no one could be a more staunch advocate of CUNY and CUNY's budget needs. He is always a very quick study. We went through the various aspects of the budget request. I reminded him of some of the overall fiscal patterns, shared with him what we call the "place mat," all the states in living color, and where our funding situation is. We will of course keep him abreast of the lobbying effort that we think we need, but also that we are counting on him. He was, as he always is, very positive and very helpful and we will continue to move along. That concludes my report and I will take questions if there are any.

Professor Alfred Levine (Applied Sciences, College of Staten Island) -- "We agree with you that most of our students need to work at income producing jobs. What many of us are concerned about is the attempt to coerce our students into taking a six-hour exam whose main purpose is to be the validation of the ACE Test against standard commercial tests. This seems to many of us, to be an impossible burden to place on our students. Is there any way to make the participation voluntary?" / Is Dr. George Otte here tonight? That issue has been thoroughly discussed in this body and in front of this body for a long time. There were eighty-four people who worked with Dr. Otte over a year. The exam has been tested and validated. It is one that I think has very strong reasons to validate the critical thinking skills and what our students have gained. It is an issue that I think has very, very strong faculty underpinnings. I didn't design the test, I didn't create, I'm not a testing expert. It comes from testing experts and people who know much more about this than I do. I've been persuaded by Dr. Otte, and his report, and his group, and then ultimately by the testing instrument that has been designed. It is a very, very solid one and a far more effective one than is in use in higher education, so I respond in that fashion. / Professor Levine -- "I believe that Professor Otte has some current reservations about the reliability of the test and you should check with him." / -- Well, he's never been a shy man with me and I enjoy him very much. Furthermore he kind of talks like I do. I think he's from Oklahoma or somewhere.

Professor Martha Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) -- "Chancellor Reynolds, last year we had centralized CUNY testing. We now hear that the centralized testing will move back to the campuses and that each campus will be giving its own test and they will be centrally administered --if I understand correctly-- and centrally graded. Could you talk to us a bit about how this is going to work and how this is going to happen?" / -- I can happily and joyfully tell you, Dr. Bell that I don't have the faintest idea. That particular issue, and you know how it came about, it was an effort to see if we could save some money, if we could do something more efficiently. Larry Mucciolo kind of was the architect of that, and they've gone back and forth, and they've been very receptive. If it works, great; if it doesn't work, let's try and fix it. It sounds like you're more up to date than I am. / Professor Bell -- "Chancellor Reynolds, could you please inform us what the current plan for the spring is?" / Honestly, I don't know what it is... / Professor Bell -- "I understand, we'll soon be receiving the allocations for the spring semester. I think we're all anxious to know how its all going to work." / -- I'll try to ask. Larry's been out of town on a much needed vacation for a week. As soon as his jet lag is a little better I'll try to ask him. /"Thank you."

Professor Arthur Galub (Social Sciences, Bronx Community College) -- "Chancellor, we understand that preliminary plans are going forward for a community college in the northern part of Manhattan. Since this affects the potential area from which we draw students, we wonder what the impact of that would be on the existing institutions. How do you see that fitting into the general vision of the University?" / -- As you know, I've talked about that issue a lot. In spite of what I would call one of the worst funding situations in higher education for community colleges, when all was said and done this fall, our community colleges came in with a slight increase in FTE. The demography of this City is unchanged. If anything it has been fortified. There is slightly more growth in K-12 each year, than the predictions of even as recently as two or three years ago. So we continue to have a growth in K-12 of 20,000-25,000 students each year. Sixty percent of all students who graduate from New York City's high schools march right on to CUNY. When you translate that into enrollment for CUNY, we've been hit by the welfare changes, we've been hit by the TAP changes. SUNY had a tremendous enrollment decrease this year, but not CUNY. If it weren't for a couple of senior college campuses, we had campuses that grew a lot this year and John Jay was up significantly, New York City Tech was up significantly. There is tremendous enrollment demand in this City [which we can serve]; we may be able to get some better rules on TAP in the years ahead not this budget cycle, but the next budget cycle. The enrollment is out there so I don't think there is anything that any existing community college needs to be worried about. The community college FTE enrollment, as I indicated, was actually up this year, and that pattern will continue. There is not going to be any change in this culture, in this economy, or in this nation with the pressures on young people to get an education beyond high school -- that's the one thing we can count on. Our ability to get the funding sources we need, really taxes [is our burden], but we've got to find them. We owe it to our young people in this City or else it, in my opinion, is moderately doomed. If we don't have the same level of educational attainment for our 18-30 year olds as the rest of the nation, the picture is very clear. We'll just have educated people coming in from other places to make their way in New York City and our residents will become a permanent underclass. So we have to fight for both facilities and the funding and provide support for these young people that must have an educational experience beyond high school. The northern Manhattan area is the least served. There is the equivalent of two community colleges in all boroughs except Manhattan. Professor Galub -- "One of the reasons we are concerned is that we have had some enrollment problems which, of course, we're giving high priority, and are working very hard on, so we see this as a possible difficulty in the future." / You've got a good new president. You drifted some on enrollment Bill Proto has been working with a lot of the people at your campus. You also have a kind of double-edged sword, amongst the community colleges. You have an extraordinarily high amount of grant activity from the City and State. Grants for literacy training, work fare training, and so forth, but they are not for college students. That dissipates an awful lot of faculty effort. You can argue both sides of this. I'm very supportive of literacy training and work fare training. On the other hand, those grants actually cost your campus money. I think that President Williams and I think many of the campus leaders, really at Bronx, think that the campus focus needs to move back more to the traditional 18-30 year old who wants to get a community college education. I think that's probably a trend at Bronx that I certainly support. "Yes, I have been privy to that. Thank you."

Professor Robert Feinerman (Math & Computer Science, Lehman) -- "Various CUNY groups including discipline councils, faculty executive committees, this body, and from what I gather, some provosts and presidents, have objected to the concept of common course numbering as well as specific details of the proposal. Could you tell us the current status of that proposal?" / Well, the current status, I think you know quite well. You had a Senate-sponsored meeting on it last week, if I understand right. We're waiting for comments and so forth to come in from that, and we're very receptive and very interested in those. One thing that you said is incorrect. We had a long session with presidents on some other issues both yesterday and today, and presidents are in support of this -- most particularly the community college presidents. The senior college presidents recognize the need for it. It doesn't mean that they support every single solitary element the way it's stated. No one ever will. Nobody in this room can write a report or recommendation about some academic event at CUNY and find everybody else in the room in automatic agreement. It's just not the way universities or academics work. The issue of trying to facilitate transfer, I think it was the spring of 1991 or 1992 that the Senate had a conference on transfer at CUNY making recommendations that we need to facilitate transfer and it had common course numbering, and so forth I am told how much easier it is for a community college student to transfer to NYU than it is from Kingsborough to Brooklyn College or from Queensborough to Queens. I'm told that all the time I'm told that by faculty who I admire and respect. I think that we need to work on these issues and that's what this is, a work in progress. / Professor Feinerman -- "Just to simplify the kinds of comments that were made, I think that people are all in favor of articulation agreements, all in favor of greater publicity for permits, where students who want to take a course at some other college get faculty approval. I think the objections are to this kind of thing where students go willy-nilly from one college to another where their courses might, or might not, be the same, and they are taking courses way out of sequence that they should not be taking. I think that..." / Well, I think those are hypothetical issues. I sure wish that at City College we had held onto continuing students and gotten more transfer students in there last fall. City College enrollment lurched downward 1,000. I sure wish that the College of Staten Island was doing better at picking up transfer students. They've the room, they've the faculty. We need to work harder on being user friendly for transfer students in this University. The campuses that are maximizing enrollment are doing this. If we could do some things to facilitate community college -- that's where we get picked off. We are not that friendly at our senior colleges. You can have transfer agreements, but that doesn't do it. I'm a real defender of the faculty of the community colleges on this one who have many anecdotes of why they have lost students they cared about that could not transfer into another CUNY campus without losing lots of credits and the student was taken easily at NYU or Pace or somewhere else. Now if you are telling me that all of the community college faculty aren't telling me the truth, I have trouble with that. I just think that we need to work harder to make sure that we really are transfer-friendly to our own students. I may sound possessive about CUNY students, but I think that once we lay a hand on them, we should do everything we can to keep them in the CUNY bosom until they have graduated or done whatever it is they want to do with their lives. / Professor Feinerman -- "I am currently the Chair of the Mathematics Discipline Council. We just sent you and various other people a statement that was unanimously passed by our group including all six community college chairmen, all of whom were protesting this policy and the various harm that it was going to be causing to the CUNY students. So there are lots of people who are objecting to this policy as opposed to helping students to transfer, which is in everyone's interest." / -- I'm always happy to respond to good ideas about how to hold onto CUNY students I'd love to see some. I don't get many positive ideas, I just get complaints. Try me with a few positive innovative ideas. You would be surprised how enthusiastically I would adopt them.

Professor Karen Kaplowitz (English, John Jay) -- "This is about the capital budget, whether you have any news and actually it is related to what you were saying. As you mentioned, John Jay for example, has had a tremendous enrollment increase, and to be user friendly to the students we need to provide them with classrooms, toilets, lounges, which now there are none. We have 11,000 students and we were built for 5,000. I know you know all of this I know you've been fighting for our students too. I was wondering if you could report..."/ -- Professor Kaplowitz, I totally agree with you. Next to Medgar Evers you're the most over enrolled, under-facilitated campus of the senior colleges. Borough of Manhattan is the most over enrolled, under-facilitated of the community colleges. You are so over enrolled and so under-facilitated that we are trying to move up and move faster on total acquisition of that property and to speed up the total property acquisition and the building of new facilities for you. President Lynch and I just met on this on Monday. President Lynch was in Albany last week. We're on a very active campaign to get that total lot instead of just the first part. / Professor Kaplowitz -- "I want to thank you on behalf of the faculty. In fact at our Senate meeting at John Jay on Friday, we had Assemblyman Denny Farrell and Scott Stringer. We made the presentation, but of course it is the Governor's Executive Budget that is so crucial. So many of our students come in from putting their lives on the line everyday and to not provide them with facilities that make teaching and learning possible is -- so I just wanted to say that the faculty support this." / Absolutely, we want it to happen.

Professor Haig Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay) -- "Happy Holidays, Chancellor." / Thank you. / Professor Bohigian -- "I just want to remind you of something that I'm sure you're not aware of. Otherwise it would have been cleared up sooner. Back in February you had written me a memo about a question I had asked and I had responded with a letter to Vice Chancellor Rothbard on March 26th. I still haven't got a response to it I'm going to give you a copy of it. I've added here that we should also get the 1996-1997 snap-shot which should have come out in November." / Sure, we'll do our best, Professor Bohigian.

I'd like to just end by saying it's going to be a difficult and arduous budget struggle over the winter and the spring. We need your help. I hope that all of you have a very warm and happy holiday. I urge you all to take naps, eat right, be with your loved ones and get rested and ready to go because we are going to hit it right after the first of the year. Thank you and happy holidays.
PROGRAM OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND THIRTY-NINTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

December 17, 1996


IV. Program: Provost's Panel on Future of Liberal Arts/General Education at CUNY: Professor Leslie Jacobson, Chair the Academic Policy Committee of the Senate and moderator of this discussion, was introduced by Chair Cooper.

Professor Jacobson -- Good evening. The theme of our discussion tonight is the role of the liberal arts and sciences and the general education of our students as we approach the opening of the new century. To this end, we have invited four chief academic officers from CUNY institutions. Each of whom represents an institution with a slightly different approach and even mission. We have asked them to share with us their views on the ways in which their colleges will meet the new challenges in providing quality education in the liberal arts and sciences given their particular mission. In keeping with this theme, we have asked them to focus their remarks in 10-15 minutes around such questions as: What role do you foresee for the new technologies? How will new programs and measures relate to your curriculum and how will these meet the needs of our diverse communities? How will faculty be brought into the planning process?

After their presentations, they have agreed to discuss and to respond to the issues they have raised. Before I introduce the speakers I would like to take this opportunity on behalf of the members of the Senate to thank the provosts for taking time out of their already overburdened schedules to speak with us this evening. So thank you, one and all.

I will call on Sadie Bragg who holds the position of Vice President of Academic Affairs at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Provost Bragg has a degree in Mathematics Teaching at Teachers College-Columbia University, and she is a Professor of Mathematics. She will speak to the community college education issue and how it revolves around liberal education.

Provost Bragg (Vice President of Academic Affairs, Borough of Manhattan Community College) -- "This evening we've been asked to focus our remarks on ways in which our college integrates the liberal arts given our particular mission. At a recent meeting of the college board, I had the opportunity to listen to Dr. Douglas Bennett of the American Council of Learned Societies. He was speaking on the shape of the curriculum innovation in liberal arts and the sciences. He gave a very brief but comprehensive historical perspective on a liberal arts education from the early sixteenth century to the present day. What was most provocative about his presentation was the list of questions which he proposed to the audience. As I speak to you this evening I would like for you to consider his questions: What is the purpose of the liberal arts education? How does knowledge improve people -- is it additive or is it transformative? What are the effects of college on students?
At BMCC we provide academic programs to students in three general areas: Liberal Arts, Business, and Health Sciences. Consistent with the mission of CUNY "to preserve academic excellence and to extend higher education opportunities to a diversified urban population," BMCC deems its mission as providing general liberal arts and career education, including transfer programs, relevant to the needs, interests and aspirations of our students. In addition we provide continuing education to all students of all ages. We integrate the liberal arts into our twenty academic programs which require students to take English, Mathematics, Science, Music or Art, and Social Science. The majority of our programs require Modern Languages, Speech and Health Education in addition. Our core curriculum is designed to provide our students with a general education which fosters personal development, intellectual curiosity, and critical thinking to enhance, and inform an effective participation in society.

If it sounds as if this were taken from the catalog, you are absolutely right. I would suggest that each of you read the material in front of your catalog when you return to your campus if you have not done that lately. When you read the front matter, then read the course descriptions and your curricula offerings. I want you to see how closely they match. If they do match one could possibly conclude that you are fulfilling your mission. If they do not match then you should probably ask yourself why not?

The second question we are asked to ponder is: What role do we foresee for the new technologies? At BMCC faculty are integrating many of the new technologies into their classroom instruction. These include the use of multi-media in Mathematics, History, Science, and Corporate Cable Communications. The use of distance learning network in critical thinking, the use of computers in Mathematics, Science, Accounting, English, English as a Second Language, Business, Nursing, and Respiratory Therapy to name a few. My faculty put a lot of pressure on me to provide computers in all kinds of areas and I think that we do a pretty good job of that at BMCC. We have currently for every department three computers that are centrally located that will look at the student data base, allow the faculty to surf the World Wide Web, in addition to word processing. We have already put computers on the desks of faculty in all of the Business, and Computer Science related areas. We've just ordered 110 computers to put on the desks of half of our faculty and the goal is to have the other half with computers on their desks. Maybe you are already there, but we are proud that that's the way we are headed at BMCC.

We also use the Internet in English, English as a second language, and Social Sciences. The use of e-mail and the World Wide Web in English, computer information systems, and History. Today I sat with one of the English professors who's working on the use of the World Wide Web and e-mail for a project she's involved in. It sounds very exciting and we are trying to wire the room to make sure that she has the access. Faculty are also using the Web in Computer Information Systems and in History. The students make use of the World Wide Web to access information in the library, and they also use computers and the technology center to produce their papers and homework assignments.

We recently acquired a building, Fiterman Hall, as the Chancellor said a few minutes ago. We have outgrown BMCC. We have over 17,000 students and our building was actually built for 8,000. We are proud we can stretch our wings and in Fiterman Hall we have a technology center. I was there the other day only to watch over 50-60 students coming in and out, doing their papers. This has been a problem at BMCC -- no place for students to really go to access computers for their use, because clearly our students don't have computers at home. Many of them are counting on the college to do that for them. They are there to produce their papers and to do their homework. In addition students use computers in our learning resource center, in the Mathematics, Business, and Science Labs to practice their skills and content that they were taught in class.

Currently we are using the computer for centralized tutoring. All labs have the same software as the departments that they serve. That is our goal, that the student will get to use the software in the classroom and in the lab. We also use distance learning network to reach high school students and their parents. We do a program entitled "So you want to go to college," and we do this across the network with several high schools. I see these technologies as a means of delivery for faculty to enhance instruction and as a new way of learning for our students. Regardless of what field a student will enter, he or she must be knowledgeable in new technologies, some of which have not even been defined.

We must think of these new technologies not as a panacea. They are certainly not going to solve all of our academic problems. They were not meant to solve our problems. We think of them as a way of life in a world in which we are preparing our students. I recently read an article that said, "regardless of one's profession, that by the year 2000, 80% of all careers and professions will require some level of technological skills."

So this leads me to the next question that I was asked. What about the new programs and majors in our very diverse community? At BMCC, as I said, we have approximately 17,000 students. The majority of them are African-American, about 45%, about 35% Hispanic, about 9% Asian, and the rest [11%] are others. So we have a very diverse community, but we also have people who speak many, many different languages. The last count, we had 107 different countries represented in BMCC. We are located, just south of Silicon Alley: the up-and-coming multi-media and graphic arts area. We are also located in the middle of the downtown business district and Wall Street. We recognize the need to provide our students with the knowledge and skills to participate in these arenas.

We are currently developing programs in Multi-media and Computer Graphics Arts. But we also recognize the need to expand our offerings to include other areas: theater management, writing and literature, science, technology, and society. We continue to be strong in the areas of the liberal arts, particularly Mathematics, Science, Engineering Science, and Computer Science, which provide our students with the options of transferring to four year institutions. I know that many of us do not think of college as preparing students for jobs. Instead we think of college as preparing students for life, because that's really what we are doing, we are trying to prepare them for a life. Most of our current students, unlike us, will probably have 3-4 jobs in their lifetime. Therefore it is life long learning that really counts. It has been said by many that that's really the goal of the liberal education. The question is what is a liberal education? Having said that, we were asked to look at or to talk about where were the future careers. In the October 28, 1996 U.S. News and World Report ,there is a list of the twenty top careers. I am just going to name a few: accountant, chemical engineer, business systems analyst, Web master, interactive specialist, information systems representative, and computer technician. It's a very interesting list. One of the things that they all have in common is, they all require computer savvy. You may say that why would we want to train or have students to do these particular kinds of fields. I maintain that they can do that at the same time; our existing curricula could also do that. There are students who don't necessarily major in a field to be a Web master. They could do that outside of being just in Mathematics or Science or other liberal arts areas.

We were also asked the question about looking at our existing curricula and how we evaluate our curricula. At BMCC we evaluate in many ways, but currently we're under Academic Program Review. So all of our programs are reviewed by outside evaluators via the Academic Program Process. In addition, all of our Health Science Programs are fully accredited by outside agencies and we are preparing for a Middle States Evaluation. Faculty are fully involved in both of these processes, Academic Program Planning and in Middle States. Faculty members wrote the Guidelines for Academic Program Review and each department is conducting their own self-evaluation and writing a report. The department will choose -- some of them have already done this -- an outside evaluator, someone who's in their field to conduct the site evaluation. Once the evaluation is done, the department writes an action plan and an implementation plan.

I will meet with the chairpersons and the faculty from the different departments to discuss the plan. The question was, how do we involve faculty? This is a faculty process. They are actually conducting this process. I have two faculty here: I hope they agree with me. This process gives the faculty the opportunity to look at their departmental offerings and to make changes if necessary. Academic Program Planning is an opportunity to make a good program better and a better program exceptional and outstanding. It is also an opportunity to consider whether or not a program should be dropped or modified. I think that all of us would agree that self-evaluation is necessary in order to continue to offer our students the best education. Or as it says in the college catalog, "to offer quality education in a pluralistic urban environment, to foster excellence in teaching, to facilitate the enhancement of learning, and to sustain full access to education for those who seek fulfillment of personal career or socio-economic goals."

This sounds great, but to return to the opening, I want to leave you with these three questions. I don't have answers, but I think they make for excellent discussion. What is the purpose of a liberal arts education? How does knowledge improve you? And what effect does college have on students? Thank you."

Leslie Jacobson -- Our next speaker is Provost Christophe Kimmich, Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at Brooklyn College since 1989. Professor Kimmich has a Ph.D. from Oxford and he has been in the History Department at Brooklyn College since 1973. We have invited Professor Kimmich to discuss the core curriculum as it is evident at Brooklyn College and how that relates to liberal arts and sciences as we move forward.

Provost Christophe Kimmich (Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs at Brooklyn College) -- "Thank you, Leslie, it's a pleasure to be here. Leslie said, 10-15 minutes and it must be symptomatic of something that for the first time that I can remember, I left my watch on top of the dresser when I left home this morning. The Brooklyn College core curriculum for those of you who don't know it, consists of ten courses, totaling 34 credits, about 1/4 of the 128 credits which were required for graduation when it was originally devised. The curriculum is required and mandatory for all students. The courses range from the Classics of the Ancient World, hands-on computer study, an introduction to the four Natural Sciences, to the Arts, History, Literature, and Philosophy. Not least, it features a team-taught course on non-western cultures: African, Asian, Latin American, and Pacific.

The courses were designed to complement each other and to represent different modes of inquiry. Some courses are disciplinary, some are cross or inter-disciplinary. Some are modular, and one just mentioned is team taught by two or three faculty specialists. So the core, narrowly defined, consists of ten courses. More broadly defined as our general education requirement, it also includes a foreign language, and less formally the structured sequence in English composition. Students are expected to have completed their remedial or ESL instruction before they embark upon the core. That's the background.

In 1980 when Brooklyn devised and then implemented its core curriculum, the faculty posited two principles. First, that the core should provide Brooklyn College students, undergraduates, with a common intellectual and educational experience in the seminal liberal arts and sciences. That would be achieved by a mandated curriculum with internal coherence. As you could imagine there was something of a backlash against the distribution requirements that had grown out of the open admissions policy in the early 1970's when Brooklyn College had divided itself into seven different schools to accommodate some 35,000 students. Each school prescribed its own curriculum and requirements -- some schools more, some schools less. This separate school structure led to a fragmentation of the curriculum and a dilution of the colleges liberal arts commitment. A set of distribution requirements, cafeteria style, left students to make their own, unguided, sometimes misguided decisions from the offerings of the different schools. Departments came to focus more and more on their own narrow offerings without reaching across the fence, reaching across the barriers to kindred or to other departments.

As Brooklyn College abolished this school structure in 1980, the common core experience was chosen quite consciously to provide students with a starting point for a distinctive college education. That's the first principle. The second principle adopted by faculty at the time, was that the core should expose all students to the different areas that might have an influence on the majors which would build on the core, which would expect certain competencies, a certain acquaintance with basic information, with a range of basic disciplines, before you got to the major, before you got to the advanced courses. It was designed to offer students a sense both of the heritage which they were heir to as well as a sense of the contemporary world in which they lived, covering a very broad range therefore. In other words, it was more than just a general introduction to the disciplines. We were quite specific that one History course is not just like any other History course, which is at the heart of many distribution requirements, but [that the core be] a very specific cluster of ideas and themes, prepared by the faculty to fulfill a particular core theme.

The curriculum that emerged in 1980-1981 and that has been with us ever since, reflected these goals and principles. The commitment to that educational philosophy -- and I want to stress that -- the commitment to that educational philosophy has remained very strong ever since. The impact from where I sit is not to be underestimated. It led to a contagious revitalization of faculty throughout much of the 1980's. It led to a renaissance of teaching and learning on the campus. It led to a greater interest in curriculum development than we had seen for quite some time. It really was a powerful mechanism for change when it first started. Some of the consequences and some of the momentum are still with us. In fact there is almost a passionate commitment and I hope that my colleagues in the audience from Brooklyn will bear that out. There is a passionate commitment among the faculty to the core and it's a defining element of a Brooklyn College education, for better or for worse.

For all that Brooklyn College still considers the core curriculum as a work in progress. We have made significant changes within individual courses. We have changed the overall structure, we have experimented here and there, we have made mistakes, we have also had some successes. Some things have worked well, some things have not. As we look to the future, I would point to two areas where we are actively looking to change and adjust.

The first, and here I will echo something Sadie Bragg said earlier, of course is technology. In recent years some members of the faculty have begun experimenting with multi-media approaches in their core courses, providing students with supplementary instruction, with opportunities for reworking assigned material interactively through computers. Even more enterprising, there have been some faculty members who use the Internet, and the Web, as a way of enhancing classroom experience. Some change assignments nightly in response to what is happening in the classroom that day, expecting students in fact to pick up, which they seem to do. This has happened with particular success in the sciences, especially Biology, but also in other departments so it's not only in the sciences where there are some innovations.

Out of these isolated incidents here and there, dotted across the core curriculum, has grown a project for developing what we have come to call a virtual core. A virtual core is really saying let's see if we can't find ways of making this self-contained general education independent of time and place, opening core courses to opportunities presented by the new modes of distance learning, marrying as it were what we have now, with the future. A task force of faculty members and administrators are working towards defining what a virtual core might mean to classroom teaching, how it might advance learning, how it can be done technically.

The second area that we are looking to for change, relates to some broader academic priorities that the college has identified. Brooklyn College is currently exploring several very broad themes that we believe reflect very much our faculty strength, programmatic strength in the liberal arts, and which we believe can link a number of our departments, and a number of our programs together synergistically into new and much stronger forms. Among these are Science and Science Education. We have our strengths there, and we would like to promote them even further. Communications and media, again building on existing strengths and trying to link them into better efforts. Community studies is yet another. I would expect that as we explore the full range of these themes that we have identified this fall and as we explore the range of their implications and ramifications, they may also have an impact on the core curriculum. Put differently, given the importance of the core for Brooklyn College, it's not likely that the core is in some way exempt -- that the core curriculum and those who teach the core curriculum will in some way be exempt from this broader rethinking of our majors and of our general academic program. Areas that we now identify much more broadly might in fact give a new slant to what is being taught there. There may be new approaches that are being taken in the science core courses, in other words, that the core is not separate from, but part of the larger thrust of a Brooklyn College education. So summarily, we see the core as really a defining and integral part of a Brooklyn College experience, and as such, is not immune from the changes we consider more broadly whether on educational technology or in other issues. How exactly all this will work out is in the hands of our very talented and committed faculty. Of course we are looking forward to seeing that core curriculum stays with us in adapted advanced form for the 21st Century. At that point I'll close. Thank you."

Leslie Jacobson -- Thank you, Christophe. Our next speaker is Dr. Basil Wilson who is the Provost at John Jay since 1991. He has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the CUNY Graduate School. He is a Professor in the Department of African Studies where he served as Chair for a number of years. Dr. Wilson will address the issue of professional education and the liberal arts.

Provost Basil Wilson (John Jay College) -- "Good evening. Not only am I a graduate of this institution, but I think I spent three quarters of my life in this place and it's always good to come back to the Graduate Center. What I have done is to look at some thoughts regarding not so much the connection between professional education and general education, but to try to look at general education in some sort of philosophical sense and to raise perhaps some kind of provocative issues surrounding general education. My presentation will be in three parts: I want to give you a sense of the overview of the general requirements at John Jay College of Criminal Justice; the philosophical and pedagogical assumptions about the general educational requirements; and the impact of race and ethnic studies, gender studies, and class studies on general education requirements as a whole.

John Jay College has a broad encompassing general education requirement that has been institutionalized with a modicum of changes in the last twenty-five years. The general education requirement is more about breadth than it is about depth. I've thought about a great deal and I'm not certain how much depth can be embedded in an educational requirement that is really trying to touch on some of the critical areas to develop the knowledge base for students. It includes two full-credit courses in Science, two three-credit courses in a Foreign Language, two three-credit courses in Mathematics, a three-credit course in Art or Science, six credits in the following three-credit courses to fulfill requirements in the Social Sciences, which will include Anthropology, Sociology, Government, Economics, and Psychology. A three-credit course in Speech, a three-credit course in Race and Ethnic Studies, one-credit course in Physical Education, two three-credit courses in English and two three-credit courses in World History and a three-credit course in Philosophy. Then you add it up and it comes roughly to a general education that runs about sixty credits. Students can be exempted from certain aspects of the requirements. For example, a student can take the clep examination and be exempted from the foreign languages, so some students will not have to take all the courses that have been specified.

In essence, the core of the general education requirements include the writing component, the literature component, the history component, and the philosophy component. In the late 1980's when there was some modification of the core, there was a design to establish linkages between the literature Course, the history course, and the philosophy courses to see if they could be fused and enriched. That grand design proved difficult to operationalize and has recently been abandoned.

The philosophical assumptions behind the general education requirements are that an undergraduate student, irrespective of one's major, should be exposed to a broad knowledge base that leads to an appreciation of the scientific method, esthetics, reasoning, the world of fiction, and an understanding of the historical formation of the modern world. Despite the absence of great depth, students completing the approximately sixty credits should be able to write coherently, think lucidly, reason intelligently, speak persuasively, compute graphically, and critically analyze social phenomena. To achieve this objective would require not just the completion of courses, but a pedagogy that is rooted in the Socratic method. One aspires to develop a student who is not prone to dogma, one who can transcend race and nationalism, one who can dissect strengths and weaknesses of the previous and contemporary civilizations, and one who can identify and renounce barbarism. One who understands the dynamic and changing nature of post-industrial society. Am I asking too much of the general education requirement? Are these objectives achieved only by graduate students? Whether these objectives are achieved or not, one can come away with a satisfaction that the foundation has been laid for a great intellectual leap forward.

Let me conclude with more provocative themes of race, class, gender and cultural studies. In recent years John Jay College has tackled with some courage the issues of race, and less so the issue of gender. Cultural and class studies have not been institutionalized within the broad framework of the college's general education requirements. Work is done by individual faculty members. The race and ethnic question was tackled in the late 1980's in a way that enriches the curriculum but nonetheless may not lead to a civil society that can transcend pigmentation. The John Jay College student is given a choice of three courses, one in the Hispanic experience, one in the African-American Experience, and the third which is the much more all encompassing course called Race and Ethnicity in Contemporary American Society.

Gender Studies functions outside of the general requirements. A Gender Studies minor is in the making and a dynamic cluster of gender scholars have brought in a new richness to the traditional curriculum. The contribution that race, gender, class, and cultural studies can make to general educational requirements, is to thwart the tendency to romanticize the past and the modern world. These non-conventional perspectives challenge the conventional world and remind us that in the academy, nothing should be sacrosanct for the pure pursuit of knowledge. One way of testing the efficacy of constitutive general requirement is whether it has aided that student with a textualized and sophisticated understanding of the modern world. For there is another means test, that is, to what extent does the core and the general educational requirements sensitize us to our humanity. In assessing the later, I suspect that we have not really been that successful.

We live in an age where we have the omnipresence of computers, the ubiquitousness of information, the hegemony of capital accumulation, and this has led to the numbing of civil society. America enters the 21st century technologically poised but with no sense of its own humanity. That is a larger problem that the general education requirement must face. I think that in the coming years we must address those critical issues. Thank you."

Professor Jacobson -- Thank you, Dr. Wilson. Our last speaker this evening is Mirella Affron. I want to say at the outset, Mirella, you were not late, you were early because we had scheduled for 7:30. Dr. Affron is the Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost at the College of Staten Island. Dr. Affron holds a Ph.D. from Yale in Romance Languages and Literature. While she began teaching in the French and Italian Department, she has been since 1985 a Professor of Cinema Studies. She will address us this evening on issues surrounding general education.

Provost Mirella Affron (Vice President for Academic Affairs, College of Staten Island) -- "I put this together, actually it may have more meaning for me in devising the text and for those of us here who are from the College of Staten Island, than for you and you'll let me know at the end whether that's the case. I'm very grateful to have been asked to speak about general education. I myself feel that this is a discussion that should be very wide spread and very intense throughout the University. To me it seems in fact the crucial discussion of the University and the one around which many issues actually revolve though we are not always either aware of it or recognize it, so let me begin.

I'm going to be speaking to you about general education at the College of Staten Island. I thought it would be of most interest if I presented to you CSI's experience with general education in the last couple of decades. Not for the purpose of evoking the past, but with the object of drawing the connections between tonight's topic and some of the other pressing academic issues circulating throughout the University at this moment.

While not necessarily explicitly identified as general education issues, their relationship to general education is important in my view to a clearer understanding of where we all stand on these other issues. For the most part the College of Staten Island as a whole missed any sort of really intense engagement in the debates on the canon that surrounded general education, particularly core curricula, from the late 1970's to the early 1990's. We pretty much missed engagement in the culture wars as these could easily have been fought over our own distribution requirements. We were in fact, particularly in the earlier decade, distracted from the larger curricular controversies by the consuming project of merging the colleges. This meant, in large part, merging the curricula and defining a general education from the very disparate traditions and inventory of courses of the former Staten Island Community College and the former Richmond College.

We did manage a number of partial revisions of our distribution requirements, some sifting, the dropping of some courses, the addition of others and more recently the introduction of a pluralism and diversity requirement. Efforts at a process of substantial reform undertaken three or four times in twenty years, and sometimes each of them lasting for years and years, failed. The initial fusion of the community college and senior college curricula to create a general education, provides if not a model to be emulated, certainly an example for the articulation of offerings between and among colleges.

At the time of the merger of SICC and Richmond College, there was no question that articulation had to occur up and down and across the curriculum at all levels and that it had to occur quickly. Occur it did with consequences sometimes felicitous and sometimes not. But following these initial agreements, and perhaps because these agreements were difficult to reap, it has been a daunting challenge to alter the arrangements reached at the cost of so much struggle. I should add, thanks to the good will and the willingness to compromise way back then. The success of the present process of reform of general education, assuming it succeeds, will in my view complete the merger, at least by replacing the accommodation that has been in place since the late 1970's. We will have a new general education devised and approved by the faculty, not as a concession to the imperatives of the merger, essentially articulation like it or not, but as a general education curriculum for an institution that remembers the merger only as the determining event of its past not as a function of the present.

In rethinking its general education requirements, the College of Staten Island serves as a useful example for recent University debates in a second direction. Since at the undergraduate level, CSI offers the B.A., the B.S., the A.S., and the A.A.S. degrees, the new general education will need to accommodate at least four patterns. One for the B.A., one for the B.S. degree specifically in scientific subjects, one for most A.S. degrees and one for A.A.S. degrees -- the last three, further constrained by the decrease from 64 to 60 credits and from 128 to 120, will need to be incrementally reduced versions of the A.A., B.A., or the real general education pattern.

We cannot avoid within this single college, as crucial as it is, to continue the pursuit of a common institutional culture begun years and years ago. We cannot avoid this fact that the study of the liberal arts and sciences, central to most of the degrees we grant, is peripheral at least in number of credits to other degrees consistent with the college's mission. Again in this sense we reflect the University as a whole and engage and must resolve within the walls of our own campus, what are almost everywhere else at CUNY intramural campus tensions. How we do it under the best of conditions, that is within the same institution, among the same faculty, may tell us something about what we can hope for the University as a whole.

We are well along in the current process of revising our general education. The schedule, assuming we keep to it, calls for a recommendation to come before the responsible curricular bodies including the College Council by May of this year. The framework for this proposal is fairly simple which is one of its strengths in my view. For the A.A. and B.A. and some B.S. degrees, it consists of a year of college English, the requirement of a 100 level course or higher in Mathematics, a required course titled, at least for now, "United States, Issues, Ideas, and Institutions," and a one credit course in Physical Fitness. Building on these foundations a second series of courses provides for the mastery of a foreign language to the first semester into intermediate level of the analytical skills of literature and the arts, two courses from among several, the Social Sciences, two courses again among several, and the laboratory sciences, one year.

Finally students are expected to demonstrate an understanding of the relationship of the West to the non-Western cultures under a rubric entitled for now, "The West and the World." Of course we chose it among several that meet designated criteria in their syllabi and biographies. And a last course in which the diversity of cultures in the United States figures centrally. The General Education Committee, a governance committee I chair as Vice President for Academic Affairs and Provost, expanded in its membership -- and this was crucial, by a number of chair persons chosen by the general chairpersons -- met for more than a year to design this framework now widely distributed.

Legitimate questions most energetically debated were the ones that can be neither ignored nor resolved to everyone's satisfaction. Should general education courses be introductions to disciplines or examinations of broad issues that may cross disciplinary boundaries? What emphasis should be put on methodology in general education courses? Should sections of the same course follow a common syllabus? Or are divergent even widely divergent, syllabi welcome as long as certain central propositions are satisfied? How can computer literacy be assured for all students? To what extent is the faculty of a given department obliged to adhere to a majority decision that goes counter to its best judgment on how its subjects should be taught within the scheme of general education? Is more variety, more choice, necessarily good, necessarily bad?

At present faculty subcommittees are meeting to design the course or select the courses under each of the rubrics I specified earlier. These subcommittees are requesting comments from members of the community, in many cases they are holding open session. Faculty participation is I think substantial in the Humanities, in the Social Sciences more than in the Sciences. I close by noting some byproducts of the process of curricula revision as these have emerged in the course of discussion and debate -- byproducts that it seems to me are as important or very important if not as important as the new schema.

One, proposals for the revitalization of the pedagogic general education emerge from the discussion of the design of the curriculum. Two, proposals for designs that include possibilities of large sections, and smaller sessions. Three, through smaller sessions, the greater collaboration of part-time and full-time faculty in a common curricula project. Four, strategies for the application of media technology and to the pedagogy of general education. Five, strategies for the sheltering and retention of students, particularly students not yet matriculated in a major and therefore unsheltered by a departmental structure who may be sheltered under the structure of a general education. Six, proposals for the establishment of permanent faculty committees to monitor individual courses of the general education curriculum and the curriculum as a whole.

So this is the lesson, the example, or the cautionary tale, of the College of Staten Island, and I offer it to you for your questions and your comments. Thank you."


Professor Jacobson -- Again I would like to express our thanks to the Provosts for sharing their views with us. I now open the floor for discussion, comments and questions. Please introduce yourself before you speak.

Professor Stefan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate Center & Lehman College) -- "All of what you said was very surprising because I thought you were going to talk about the future of liberal arts education at the City University of New York and what you told us is about the present state of the curricula at your institutions. Admirable though it is, I don't think that it has much relationship to what is likely to happen. I remind you that we have one-third of the faculty that we had twenty years ago and we are teaching about 10%-15% fewer students. We all know that most of the students that are being educated at our colleges are being taught by adjuncts. I don't think the four institutions represented here are any exception.

Since you can predict the number of students who will be taking general education courses or the liberal arts core, you ought to be able to predict how many full-time teachers you can keep on faculty, with some small degree of flexibility. Fifty-percent of the courses being taught by adjuncts is not flexibility, it's a scandal. In addition I don't understand if you have a very high reliance on adjunct personnel who are teaching your courses, why you would particularly be very interested in general education or liberal arts education taught by adjuncts. They can't fulfill the advising task, the thesis direction task, paper direction task, and advising tasks that full-time faculty make. So I'm really shy of the enthusiasm which you all seem to have for the liberal arts.

I myself do teach in a department which is a liberal arts department and I'm not sanguine about the future of my discipline at this University. I wouldn't suppose that it had much of a future. It is Philosophy." / Jacobson -- His question basically directs itself to the direction of the future and liberal arts at the college. Anyone want to take that? Or take it just as a comment?

Professor William Berkowitz (Chemistry, Graduate Center & Queens College) -- "We've heard essentially two models for choosing the courses for a liberal arts core idea in which, more or less, the courses are specified and every student takes the same set of courses, and the menu of courses within selected areas and each student chooses one or more courses from selected areas until they fulfill the requirements. I'd like to hear some reasons as to why you chose the one model or the other model assuming those models fit one or more of you. Second, since we do have a reduced faculty and a reduced student body and there has been a major commitment, at least by the Chancellor, to streamlining the University, why don't we have one set of core courses or one set of menu choices for the whole University?"

Provost Affron -- I would just like to say, if I may, the model is not chosen by me. The model is the model that evolves from faculty committees that are curriculum committees and I suppose that's true everywhere in the University. If you ask me what my preferred model is, it is not the one that is emerging from the College of Staten Island at the moment, and why would it be? So I'm surprised at the question since we're talking about curriculum which is in the hands of the faculty I imagine everywhere. Your other question, would you just repeat you other question? / Professor Berkowitz -- "Why don't you have one set of curriculum for the whole University. In other words if you are committed to the liberal arts education on each campus, why is one model better for Campus A and another model better for Campus B and not all get together and make one unified model for the whole University?"

Provost Wilson -- What I recall when I was a student at Queens College, you had these four credits which were called "Contemporary Civilization" and in fact it was borrowed from the Columbia University model. I think that if you look at the John Jay College general education requirements, we have a combination of both. They are distributional requirements, but there is also a core which everybody has to take, certain specified courses. I think that the Columbia model has influenced John Jay College. A lot of older faculty and even some of the younger faculty came out of that experience. If you look at the History courses, the Literature courses, the writing courses, and the Philosophy courses, there is a cluster there, which one is actually arguing, that that knowledge base is critical for an undergraduate to be exposed to and to develop some competency and some understanding of. Whether you should have an all sweeping core, I've always been weary of centralization. I think that's one of the reasons why the Soviet Union no longer exists. I think that if you look at many of these schools there are certain similarities, but I think it is also critical to take into consideration the particularities of colleges. I think that's a University's strength in that regard rather than a total, adhering to uniformity. /

Provost Kimmich -- This sort of ties into the point also that Professor Baumrin was making earlier. When Brooklyn College developed a core in 1980 we had a full-time faculty of 950 and 13,000 students. We now have a faculty of 550 and 16,000 students. But still, the majority of our core courses are taught by full-time faculty and I think that explains the commitment that Brooklyn College faculty has to their particular curriculum. As I tried to suggest earlier, I think the reason why we chose that particular model, if that's the word I want to hear, is that it grew out of the historic moment. For us, for Brooklyn College, surviving the bankruptcy of the City of New York, which we all tried to survive, understanding that we had severely dropped in the number of students from what we had had five years earlier. That we had become enormously fragmented during that period. We had lost the coherence that we wanted our students to have and that we wanted to build something that would off-set that fragmentation, that would provide a common basis that we thought our students liked. So hence, a commitment to a mandate, which was somewhat unusual. When we first opened our doors in 1981 to the first section, we were wondering whether we would get any students. And they came, in droves, so we grew from there, and that was really kind of a confirmation for us. As to the question, I think that I would share the answer to the second with the answer that Basil had given. We do have different missions, in our institutions, and we are proud of them. I'm not sure that adopting commonalties in general education is necessarily the answer to maintaining those particularities.

Provost Bragg-- Thank you, and as the only representative of a community college on this panel, I have to support what Chris just said, that we do have different missions and clearly at the community college our mission is that of open admissions. So when we look at our curriculum we do try very hard in all of our curricula, be it careers or business, or those which are transfer degrees, to ensure that our students have a core of information, that they will be able to have what is considered currently, liberal education. And I still pose that question that in all of the debate that I have heard in the academy in the last year and there is a lot of it going on, liberal arts education is still being worked on and defined. Because there are certain things that were not liberal arts education or not in the liberal education years ago in the very beginning of what we think of as liberal arts that are currently there. Since we are talking about the future, the question would be, what will that look like in the next couple of decades. I don't know that we know the answer, but speaking of the future, that could be a good question.

Professor Susan O'Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) -- "I just want to add to what Professor Berkowitz was saying. Yes, colleges have different missions, but at this point, faculty don't want the same core throughout the University and its important to say that. Faculty don't want it at this point, 80th Street might, but we don't want it because of our differing missions. My question is to Provost Kimmich. Why isn't Psychology part of your core? If it is an introduction to all the disciplines? That's question number one. I have to ask something about this virtual core and what is the implication for faculty that you see for the virtual core, because of course you know that scares us or scares me greatly?" / Provost Kimmich -- To answer the first question is very quick. They chose not to be part of it. They were asked to and they said we have so many students now that we couldn't possibly take on additional students. They have had cause to regret it I think since, but that was a decision they made way back when. In company I might add, with Economics. The virtual core, well, I'm not sure that we have the answers to that yet, and that is why a faculty committee is sitting down to think and to discuss this particular issue. What does it mean when you do not see your students, when you are not in the same room, when you can't be heard or seen, or have discussion with a class from different times from different places? I take the testimony from some of my colleagues, especially in the sciences, who find the supplementary section that they gain from the outlines of the core, very useful to the learning process. They do not, and I don't think any of us have taken the position, they do not replace the classroom. They cannot substitute for a live interaction in the classroom, yet there are ways in which they have found by testing and by keeping track records over time, that the learning process has become both more interesting and has improved.

Professor Steve London (Political Science, Brooklyn College) -- "I guess I can comment on the core at Brooklyn College since I teach it. When I began teaching, we had 25 students in a classroom, and I'm lucky to have a minimum of 50 now. So I think that in this context when we talk about the general education or the core, we have to realize that it is very different today, than it was then. That the reduction in resources has made it extremely difficult to do the kinds of writing courses, the kinds of instruction that were envisioned ten or fifteen years ago. Of course, my big fear is that we will no longer even talk about student-teacher ratio, we will talk about student-computer ratio, since virtual core means no faculty. My question really goes along these lines. With the initiatives that have come from the Chancellor and the Board of Trustees to create greater specialization within the various colleges, I believe it's called FLAGS. My concern is that even here where the discussion of liberal arts has really devolved down to a discussion of general education or core, that our colleges are called comprehensive liberal arts colleges. That has always been a term that has been linked with liberal arts. It's much more than simply the core or general education. That a liberal arts and sciences education has to do not with simply giving the minimum or basic education to students, but also has to do with having diverse faculty interests that go across the University, across colleges. I'd like for you, if you will, go back to the question earlier about the future and to think about and perhaps share with us your views on the future of comprehensive liberal arts education in CUNY and at your colleges given the initiatives and reduction of resources." /

Provost Wilson -- If one focuses on the future, we had reference to the virtual core, and it seems to me that we must find ways to assimilate the most advanced technology and use the it enrich what goes on in the classroom. It seems to me that there are certain give-ins, whether it's the early part of the training for a century. I think that we are really trying to produce the educated person who can certainly critically analyze and think clearly and reason in the most effective way possible. I think that there is a concern that we don't want students who are extremely specialized. We would like students that have a certain level of versatility and who can think clearly, write clearly. I think that one of the examples of what a general education or liberal arts education is actually doing is in fact bringing about that kind of development and I think that's what administrates the general education requirement that John Jay personifies. /

Provost Affron -- The sort of broad scope of the question sort of demands a broad and very general answer. From my own view I think we need to consider very seriously increasing the number of credits that we allow to general education. I think that if the classic distribution was one-third general education, one-third the major, and one-third electives, I think we should reconsider that as a beginning and think about much more than one-third for general education. I think we need to rethink vocational programs, pre-professional programs in which there is almost no allotment, precisely for the reason that Sadie said, and that is that people will be expected to change jobs often and that means that all the basic values of flexibility of mind, ability to synthesize knowledge, the ability to write and to read, and all of those things are all that more urgent and not that much less urgent. Speaking for myself and my institution, I think associate degree programs that leave too little room [for the liberal arts] may not be as useful for the future as they may have been in the more narrow sense in the past. Among the dangers of the computerization is that information will be taken for knowledge and information is not knowledge, and I don't think that we have begun to deal with what we do with this information that we all learn to access. I cannot imagine that that will suffice for life as you said, let alone for work. Not to have a common general education for all of CUNY, but to have a general education for the future that both preserves the past and is free of the past in more fundamental ways than introducing the computer -- to which I happen to be devoted, as I know many of you are, but that's not the point. With respect then to throwing out, how can we possibly do this with so few resources and so many adjuncts, well I'm not in sanguine that all will be rosy, but I do think that there are possible paradigms, models, other ways of doing it with small sections that we have at least have not tried. So that it is not one professor and fifty students always in the same relationship whatever the course, whatever the style of the teacher, whatever the talents of the teacher, it does not have to be as it is, at least too often at the College of Staten Island, that model for the classroom. There are other models and maybe they will fail as well, but we have a chance at least to engage the issue of adjuncts through a different arrangement and I think we should try it and we are proposing to try it.

Professor Alan Cooper (English, York College) -- "The long standing, decades old statement of the Board, more honored in the breach than in the observance, is that students holding CUNY A.A. or A.S. degrees who transfer to senior colleges shall be deemed to have satisfied the core at the senior colleges whether or not the core of that degree matches the core of that senior college. One of the frustrations of senior college faculty who work very hard on trying to devise the best core for their students, is that core is likely to be given to fewer and fewer students that will ultimately graduate, because students will come in from elsewhere having satisfied the core requirement. We have heard now statements about cores ranging from 34 credits to 60 credits, and we heard Provost Wilson say that perhaps the emphasis ought to be on the skills of reasoning inherent to the courses rather than the subject matter itself, which sounds pretty much like the aim of the rising junior exam or the ACE exam. So here is my question: what policy do you enforce on your own campus about transfer of credit for associate degree students? And how can we, without having an imposed common core, come closer to having our various cores satisfy our mutually understood needs means for students?" /

Provost Bragg -- First of all, I want to say that sometimes disciplines actually get in the way of this whole discussion of what is liberal arts education or general education because disciplines or programmatic structures, people want to set aside that amount of programs that they would like to have in their curricula. To give you a particular example, on our campus where we have A.A. degrees and A.S. degrees and A.A.S. degrees, it is really our hope that our students when they do transfer within CUNY or outside of CUNY that they can transfer the credits which they have acquired at BMCC in the A.A. and the A.S. degree. Our faculty take very seriously, when they set up curricula, to make that point. Our faculty are very much aware of the need for the student to have a certain number of liberal arts credits. We can prove that point over our battle against the reduction to sixty credits in our institution. There is actually the need for the student to be able to have so many credits in the liberal arts area when they transfer to a four year institution. In terms of an associate degree program, for us a student is guaranteed in every program that we offer, to have English, Mathematics, Science, Modern Language, Speech, Social Science; they are all guaranteed. Now where we differ is when we have to have A.A.S. degrees. I think that is why that's somewhat excluded from that Board resolution because that is very difficult to do with all the other problems that are imported in the A.A.S. degree where they have outside certification and they just can't fit in, and if they were to fit all these things in they would graduate with 90 credits from a two year college.

Provost Wilson -- I wanted to mention something, but I wasn't going to answer that particular question, if I may. We are a highly specialized college. We are a college of criminal justice, in fact the only college of criminal justice in the country. One of the things that the John Jay College faculty felt very strongly about is that as much as we were graduating students who would be working in the public sector, in fire science, in security management, etc., we felt that it was critical that those students had a very strong liberal arts education. We felt that somebody working for example in the criminal justice field, in some capacity in law enforcement, that they needed not just training or education in specialized fields, but that a broad knowledge base had to be developed so the individual then would have a sense not just of being prepared for the work, but I think as Sadie used, being prepared for life -- somebody who could function as a citizen of an advanced democracy. So that is one of the reasons that the core is so sizable. If I may return to the question, I think that with transfer students coming to John Jay, the core, at least the general requirements, are sufficiently broad enough, and students transferring from community colleges can be easily accommodated since there is some flexibility within the core. Remember now we have both general education and there is a core. I think that we tend to fit them within the distribution requirements.

Provost Kimmich -- The question really cuts to a very central dilemma. On the one hand you want your students to have a common experience that gives them all a kind of common basis for advanced study. On the other hand you want to accommodate transfer students that enter in our case, Brooklyn College, in their second or third year of study. That's the dilemma. Our solution, not perfect perhaps, was to establish equivalencies or a policy of equivalence. For each of the ten courses that we have, we have devised general equivalents that exempt students from core courses. We have worked it out with individual community colleges. Now it is usually a one on one relationship with a community college rather than a generic relationship. The dilemma remains as long as the faculty at the college itself and all its components feel that it has a particular mission and that its education and its pedagogical mission is exemplified by that.

Professor Jacobson and Chair Cooper thanked the panel of Provosts on behalf of the Senate.