Draft: Subject to Senate Approval

MINUTES OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIRST PLENARY SESSION OF
THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 25, 1997

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: Bird, Otte, Pollard and Alternates Freedman and Hill. BMCC: Jaffe, Reid, and Alternate Friedman. Bronx CC: Cummins and Galub. Brooklyn: Bell, Fairey, Jacobson, London, Shapiro, and Tobey. City: Connorton, DeJongh, Grossman, Pearson, Sohmer and Weil. Graduate School: Baumrin, Berkowitz, and Alternate Kieser. Hunter: Matthews, Steinberg and Alternate Baxter. John Jay: Bohigian, Brugnola, and Kaplowitz. Kingsborough CC: Goldfarb, Martinez, O'Malley, Richter, and Alternate Staum. LaGuardia CC: Reitano and Alternates Beaky and Boris. Lehman: Mineka, Nathanson, Pohle, and Alternate Knobloch. Medgar Evers: Harris-Hastick, Johnson, and Umolu. NYCTech: Donoghue, Hernandez, Hounion, Norton and Alternate Cermele. Queens: Cooper, Frisz, Landazuri, Savage, and Speidel. Queensborough CC: Barbanel, Dahbany-Miraglia, Gellman, Greenbaum, Marti, Mullin and Alternate Specht. Staten Island: Levine, and Yousef. York: Cooper A., and Odenyo. Professors Jaffe Mo., Riley, and Rodriguez were excused. Faculty Governance Leaders present: Berkowitz (GS), Cooper (York), Davidson (LaG), DeJongh (City), Friedman (BMCC), Kaplowitz (JJ), Kurzman (Hunter), Levine (CSI), Pohle (Lehman), and Specht (QCC). Professor Boris represented the PSC. Chancellor Reynolds gave a report and was accompanied by Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Diaz and Dr. Pulliam. Professor Bérubé (U. of Illinois) was the guest speaker. Professors Wasser and Kittay attended. The Parlimentarian was Alternate Staum. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present.


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


II. Approval of the Minutes of the 240th Plenary, January 28, 1997: The minutes were adopted as proposed.


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


IV. Old Business
a. Resolution to Amend the Charter, Section 3A.


V. Invited Guest: Professor Michael Bérubé, Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.


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 FORTY-FIRST PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 25, 1997

III. Reports:
a. Chair: Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

This evening I shall deliver a telescoped report, shall invite the Chancellor to begin at 6:45 p.m., and request that the audience ask focused questions so that we can spend as much time as needed with our very special guest, Michael Bérubé.

Reports of the Board committees and of the chair's activities are on the back table. These include an important analysis prepared by David Speidel of the Budget Advisory Committee about the declining size of the CUNY professoriate. In addition, please find our annual appeal for your help in locating faculty to coordinate the UCRA panels in a number of fields listed on that document, from Art History to Sociology. This is one of the most important services that you can provide to the University and to your colleagues.

Elections of new senators and re-elections of senators to new terms have occurred on a number of campuses. I want to congratulate the senatorial contingents and welcome them to an organization which is functioning in real, interesting times. We have not yet had results from BMCC, Bronx CC, Grad School, Hostos, John Jay, LaGuardia, Medgar Evers, Queensborough CC.

Tomorrow night at Hunter College, a concert demonstrating how wonderful CUNY is will take place. It was organized by Nancy Hager of Brooklyn College, coordinator of the Music Council and a Senator. It is also sponsored by the PSC. It will be at the Lang Auditorium, Hunter, at 7 p.m., and all are welcome. In the warmer days ahead, the Music Council may do another outdoor concert.

On Friday, February 28 at Medgar Evers, there will be a memorial tribute to Charles Inniss. Faculty are particularly urged to come.

On March 14, Ed Sullivan will hold open hearings on CUNY at Hunter. If you want to testify, I can get the proper information to you about time, place, copies of testimony, etc.

It is my pleasure to introduce the new chair of the University Student Senate, Ms. Ifeachor Potts, a student from BMCC. Ms. Potts and I continued to sail past each other during the recent Albany visit as she wove her way around the marble halls. I suspect we'll see more of each other in the future. Would you like to say a few words?

Potts - Please forgive me for being late. I just redid my schedule, and I'm coming from class. I would like to say first, to Sandi Cooper, thank you for inviting me here, and I will look at this as an opportunity for the students and faculty to get acquainted, because we have a lot of issues that we are working on. The new Pataki appointment to the chair of the Board has got the students in an uproar, so I'm quite sure you will be hearing from the students in terms of the faculty viewpoint on this appointment.

Thank you for having me. This will not be my last meeting, and I definitely look forward to working with Prof. Cooper and with all of you.

As part of the Albany visit which I made recently during Black, Puerto Rican and Hispanic legislators weekend -- Cecilia McCall, Martha Bell, George Shapiro, little Isaac Shapiro (age 2) and Susan O'Malley also participated in our delegation -- I participated in the Higher Education workshop run by Nick Perry and Adrien Espillat of the Assembly. The workshop also included Ed Sullivan, a woman from the Brooklyn EOC center, James Black, chair of the Black Faculty caucus at BMCC, Isaura Santiago Santiago of Hostos, and Adelaide Sanford, a Regent from NYC. Sanford, who referred to her own nickname as the "raging Regent," took the opportunity to attack CUNY for very poor results in training teachers, who then went into the inner city with disastrous results for Afro-American children. She prefaced her remarks by stating she was only interested in Afro-American and Hispanic children. She announced that Regent hearings would occur in the near future in NYC on what amounts to productivity and outcomes for the CUNY degree. Among her proposals was a requirement that CUNY not give a B.A. to any student in education who fails the NYS certification exam. Because of her remarks, I went to locate the pass/fail statistics of CUNY students on these exams and our colleges are all over the place -- some with very high and some with very weak pass records. I shall try to find out when and where the NYC hearings will occur and inform those of you who ought to be interested. Her remarks and the new vitality that the Regents are beginning to exhibit about supervising higher education underscore the importance of our April guest, Commissioner Richard Mills.

Many of you heard that the February 10 meeting of the Trustees was a stormy affair with a number of activist trustees demanding a change in the system, in who shapes agendas for Board meetings; trustees wandered into issues not on the agenda -- such as Robert Price demanding that CUNY stop spending money fighting the Italian American law suit and settle it, once and for all. He forced an admission that in one year alone, the State spent over $600,000 to fight the Italian-American lawsuit; despite a court ruling for the plaintiffs, CUNY kept the litigation up. Other trustees wanted the Board to have its own lawyer and wanted an end to items presented "for information only." About 10 days after that meeting, the Governor appointed his own chair and vice-chair of the Board, ending the weeks of speculation about when -- not IF -- he would do this. James Murphy and Edith Everett will remain on the Board but the new chair is Prof. Anne Attura Paolucci, who is retiring from the English Department. at St. John's and is one of the trustees who is determined to reshape the role of the central administration vis à vis the Trustees. The new vice chair is Herman Badillo, who has not yet announced a clear direction but has in the past made a number of remarks indicating he had little faith in open admissions and in the respectability of our degrees. Dr. Paolucci has effectively delayed the pilot test of the ACE exam because she insists on knowing more before she votes for anything and will not simply ratify a previous Board policy.

Thus far, she has indicated an interest in hearing from presidents, faculty and students as well as administration on issues. I am assembling a group of faculty to be prepared to discuss the ACE or a certification methodology with the Board committee, when they are interested and ready. I will also say that she quietly defended my right to have a statement kept in the CAPPR minutes which the committee chair wished to remove.
In discussions with the Office of Academic Affairs over ICAM, I think I can report that a set of modifications has been introduced which go a long way to meeting faculty concerns. While several faculty have yet to consider the new draft, and several who have considered it wish further changes, my guess is that the current revision, which owes a lot to the labors of Eva Richter, addresses our major concerns about comparability, transitivity, courses in sequences, pre-requisites, grade transfers and the like. I shall continue to press for fine tuning but the guidelines of the new policy repeat over and again that no course has to be listed as comparable (ICAM) if the college curricula apparatus does not believe it to be.

b. Chancellor: Good to see you all this evening. We are handing out to you the current budget sheet. This will, as you know, go through many iterations as we work along with the Legislature and elected officials this year. It's terse and very much to the point. I would like to go through it with you so everyone is very clear about it. I think we spent a little time on it with the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate. We are giving you the white copies so if you want to copy it and send it around further you can do so. At the top of the page is the Executive Budget recommendations, the $57 million cut in state aid to senior colleges. There is a very important point here: this includes a $400 increase in tuition. Seventy-four million dollar cut in TAP for CUNY students. That is the cut that has so bothered us because it is disproportionately high. The recommended cuts in TAP for private institutions would be much less on a proportional basis. We are asking for the full $57 million back, meaning that we would not have to charge $400 in tuition and the base budget cut would be restored, and then of course asking for the TAP dollars back.

We are also asking over on the right (reference to handout) for budget items that were not honored. A very important item is that $21.3 million. If we were just to get the base budget cut back and the TAP back -- which we would be very happy to have both come back and those are really many millions, well over $100 million dollars -- we would still start the year $21 million down. That is because of various price increases in everything from printing to certain leases which have automatic escalator clauses, and maintenance contracts go up a certain percentage. We still have of course, and importantly should, people getting promotions, mandatory salary increases, things that are just entitlements if you will, that must happen across the university. Even if we got all the restorations on the left hand side (reference to hand out) we would have to cut on an average -- we wouldn't do it this way -- but we would have to cut almost a million dollars per campus. Some would have more than $1 million, the really big campuses; some would have less than $1 million, the really little campuses, as the year got started.

We are asking for mandatory increase money. We have not gotten cost of living or mandatory increase money in several years. That has become a really very serious budget cut to the university. Library services is in for $2.5 million, graduate school and campus doctoral faculty -- that's virtually all recruiting new positions. I think I talked to you about the COMP Program earlier on in which we would pay a part, the private sector would pay a part, and students would pay a part, so that literally thousands of our students could attain personal computer ownership. Our students aren't able to do that on their own easily. A teacher preparation issue -- which is mostly new faculty aimed at improving our preparation of teachers in inner city schools and having more supervisory ability for what used to be called the student-teaching part of the curriculum. This comes from our Colleges of Education. Alliance for Minority Participation, that's that big NSF grant we have and it now demands this kind of match. Child Care Disabled Services, you see the match, they are required for the Applied Science Coordinating Institute which we competitively got. The community college presidents have been out very strongly asking for $100, which is modest in my opinion, per FTE increase in base aid. On the back side (reference to handout) you see more details on the student financial aid issues. I think those are indeed clear. Very concerning most particularly is the fact that the Pell and TAP rewards would interdigitate. Basically students would no longer be able to obtain the full value of a TAP award and a Pell Grant award.

Yesterday I spoke to the Interns Program at the American Council on Education meeting in Washington, D.C. I went to Washington in time to hear President Clinton speak. He spoke on the items you are familiar with -- the tax cut for community colleges, and pushed the notion of college through years 13 and 14. I think that we are all supportive of this but, unfortunately as I have mentioned here, that won't particularly help CUNY students whose parents are not in the middle class. He also hit very hard and got wild applause and a standing ovation on increasing Pell Grants. But under the current Pell Grant program, an increase in federal Pell Grant money won't help our students. It will simply offset some of what the state has been spending in tuition assistance. Our students end up holding the short end of the stick. The rest of those (reference to handout) I think are pretty straight forward. You get some of the changes in millions of dollars.

One kind of interesting thing happened when I went to hear the President. I probably shouldn't tell you this, but it was interesting. I had gotten on the shuttle a little bit late and Geraldine Ferraro was in the front seat ready to go down and do "Crossfire." Have you seen her do "Crossfire?" She is very good -- she is on it with John Sununu. We know each other and she asked me to sit beside her on a crowded plane. They were going to do the program last night on cloning. Do you know about cloning and the sheep? It is a tremendous interest to me as a developmental biologist. She asked me about being a scientist although I worked not exactly in that area. I coached her for a full hour about in vitro fertilization, the difference between what miosis is and how you get an egg cell stimulated to divide, and the old frog experiments. It really was a lot of fun. I enjoyed going through all of that with her. She used some of the things last night on "Crossfire." I was also congratulating myself, because by coaching her I was able to sit in this front seat that they had kind of protected for her. Except, they couldn't get the jet-way out and we had to go off the plane backwards. We had to exit off the plane from the tail end so she and I were the last two people off the plane. I lost 15 minutes and raced to the hotel because I was very worried about getting through the Secret Service to the Clinton speech. When I got there the registration desk for ACE was totally empty. Everybody had left and they had all gone downstairs to hear the President speak. I had no name tag and there were signs everywhere saying "Admission is only with name badge." I hate to tell you what I did. I rifled the ACE name badges, found one for a woman, pinned it on, and went down stairs through security. The name I got was Hoard. Someone is an academic named Eileen Hoard. I hope to meet her some time. I went on in with my fake name badge, found a seat and heard the President talk on these various issues.

Tomorrow I'm up bright and early to go to Albany to meet with Speaker Silver, Governor Pataki, and Senate Majority Leader Bruno. I think I mentioned this to the Executive Committee. There is a group of us going - President Jackson (Rochester), President Kappner (Bank Street), President O'Hare (Fordham), President Jay Oliva (NYU), Hunter Rollings (Cornell) who's organized this effort, myself, George Rupp (Columbia), Chancellor John Ryan (SUNY), and Chancellor Shaw (Syracuse). We are going to be for the first time in my history in New York, all of us private and public, going in together to talk about the need for greater funding for higher education in this state. I certainly hope that it goes well. We tried to plan it to try to have it be a very harmonious meeting, but make our case as clearly and as happily as possible. I think when I was here before we had not gotten the CAT money back. The CAT money was restored in the 30-day period. It is still up in the air as to how it will be awarded and sorted out. We will be making that point again, that the institutions that have CATs are most deserving and would like to continue with them.

I think those are the main items on the plate right now. The push on budget will continue unabated and very strongly. One other item to add is that during the 30-day amendment, we were contacted because they had noticed our program for aiding our own students who were legal immigrants to attain citizenship. We were asked if we could set up a similar program if students would be paid to reach out in their communities to help citizens. They are mostly concerned about elderly women legal immigrants who are losing food stamps and other federal benefits. If they can become citizens they will qualify for welfare. We have been given about $2.5 million to create a student program, which I was glad to get because we can use it for student stipends for our students to help defray tuition and other things. In the process we will help register legal immigrants. We have this money for a year. Dr. Wernick from Hostos is helping us. He is the architect for this program. He has been extraordinarily insightful into immigrants issues. One issue, for example, that he brought to our attention is that there is a $95 fee to simply apply for citizenship. That is a real barrier for many of our students and for many of the elderly poor. That fee is waived a lot in California because of differences with the INS Director in California in comparison to the INS Director here. We are off on a variety of issues to try to work very vigorously this next year in attaining more citizenship, both for our students and people in nearby communities. I'll stop there and be glad to respond to any questions.

Professor Grossman (Elementary Education, City College) - "I'm happy to see that student teaching supervision is targeted. As a full-time faculty member I do get to do a little of it, but we are so strained with courses. I definitely can tell you that we do need to have this. Many of our adjuncts are in this, good people, but it would be so much better if we had the full-time. This is such a central part. How would that $1.8 million be allocated among the programs in education at City University?" / Provided that we can get it, I think the intention -- and this was sort of worked out fairly harmoniously by the education deans -- mostly on an enrollment basis. So it would be pretty much based on the enrollments in the different education programs. It is intended that every college of education would get somebody if we can get it back.

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "I'd like to know, Chancellor Reynolds, what is the update on CUNY's response to Governor Pataki's initial budget? In other words, what have you done with the figures that have come in from the presidents?" / Those are going out today in huge books; in fact they were stacked as I left along with an analysis to the trustees. We are having a joint meeting of CAPRR and Fiscal Affairs on Monday evening to review the presidential responses. The responses are excellent and heart rending. I think for the most part, I'd be interested in Dr. Cooper's reaction. They did involve collaborative efforts. There were talks and committees assembled on the campuses to assist the presidents in the preparation of these impact statements from the individual campuses. / Professor Sank - "My only concern is that this is the initial budget of the Governor, and it's not the final budget. Certainly from City College the figures were quite disastrous, especially in terms of full-time faculty who would be affected. I would just hope that the Board of Trustees would not act at this stage since the Governor's budget is not finalized." / Chancellor Reynolds - I have one other piece. You triggered me on something, Professor Sank, that was very troubling to me. We got the flash winter enrollment data and they are bad for this term. Our enrollment took a real drop, especially at City College -- again winter term over a year ago. We are down even further. So we have an even greater revenue shortfall this spring term than we had estimated in the presidential numbers. We haven't fully analyzed this yet. Two community colleges aren't going yet -- Kingsborough and LaGuardia I don't think have started up classes again -- so we don't know their enrollment figures. The senior colleges are down almost 3% over a year ago. The community colleges, the ones that are in session, and admittedly that's a smaller number, so I don't want to give those numbers out. I can't remember the number because I didn't really fasten on it. We have another revenue shortfall for this spring, because, as you know, our students are now paying about 45% of their instructional costs. When we do not make enrollment targets, those numbers were already calculated into our budget. We do not have a good enrollment situation right now as well.

Professor Steinberg (Health Sciences, Hunter College) - "Chancellor Reynolds, as the year 2000 is approaching with the advances in technology which the university is proposing, comes the need for a well-trained technical staff to work in partnership with faculty. CUNY has an underutilized resource in meeting its technical needs, the college laboratory technicians of CUNY. I would like to propose to you that CUNY foster this partnership with faculty by training its technical staff for the new technology, by allowing college laboratory technicians to have equity and status and rank with faculty and by providing incentives such as increased promotional opportunities for college laboratory technicians who upgrade their skills. I would be most appreciative of your response. Thank you." / Some of those issues have come up during the collective bargaining process. In fact, we have had some conversations about them. I noticed if you were reading that -- if you would like to share that with me I will be glad to forward that to Vice Chancellor Malone and add it to her thinking. She works in the negotiations with the professional staff.

Professor Matthews (Mathematics, Hunter College) - "I know it is nice to get grants. Of course, when they are matching grants we have to spend money that we don't really have. I'm a little concerned in terms of image to the outside world on this student computer ownership for two reasons. One, just owning a computer doesn't mean you know how to use it. You need somebody to train you, like college lab techs or faculty. Also, some of our students are even homeless. If they have a home sometimes their mail gets stolen; how about a computer? When I teach my math classes I try to use graphing calculators. Now with something like a TI-92, they can get a lot of the power they need for the course without the expense of the computer. It might look to the outside world, "hey, CUNY students are getting a special deal on computers." The middle class tax payer is sending their students into....." / I talked this proposal through with the Governor, who was quite sympathetic with it. They are trying so hard to get more computer access in the public schools. You will remember that some -- I believe actually some of the MAC money, I may be wrong about MAC money -- but some mayoral money is now going to the public schools to improve both the childrens' access to computers and computer education in K-12. Everybody agrees that nationwide this is desperately needed. Incidentally, this is where New York City lags terribly. It is really fascinating and heartwarming to see how much computer access has been provided in states like West Virginia, Georgia, and very poor Southern states that have really moved on K-12 computer literacy. Realize that New York City Schools really have quite a way to go. On the computer ownership program, no student will be forced into this. Students that want and aspire to computer ownership will have an opportunity. If they pay something, we will try to have some state dollars and then some privately donated dollars to help them. It is simply an option. / Professor Matthews - "This speaks to one of my concerns also. Those that can afford to do that will get that, and those who are short changed will..." / Chancellor Reynolds - You would need to ask Richard Rothbard and Bill Proto on this, but we do have provisions for the very poorest students who are on total support, to help the very poorest ones.

Professor Bell (Educational Services, Brooklyn College) - "When I was in Albany two weekends ago and trying to lobby, one of the questions I got from the legislators was what were we doing about voter registration? They were absolutely adamant that each student register at least two or three people in their community. Are we doing a specific drive and are we going to publicize it?" / Absolutely. If you remember, we did that very active voter registration drive. Don't all of you have the pins that I always thought were kind of unintelligible, but we did have the voter registration pins. We will be doing that again, absolutely. It is something we do now with every registration. As you know, we get some help from Barnes & Noble on the pencils and pens in the drive. It is an ingrained portion of our student activities and our student leadership has really taken to this. They have really embedded voter registration into their hearts. It was one of the reasons, Professor Bell, that we picked up on so many students who were on the verge of citizenship and didn't have it. As we were trying to get students to register to vote, we found we had more that were on the cusp of getting citizenship but could not yet register to vote. That really was one of the pushes on our efforts to try to facilitate quicker citizenship. Those of you from Kingsborough that say, "College Now," we should call this program "Citizenship Now" and "Vote Now." / Professor Bell - "I think it might be helpful to have a lobby sheet that follows this up as to what kind of features we have and to have an effort for the students to reach out to register their relatives and friends."

Professor Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) - "Good evening, Chancellor Reynolds. Two pressing questions, but in the interest of time I will only ask one. At Medgar, space is an issue for us. Please update us, where are we with acquisition of additional space for Medgar?" / I don't know if you were here the night I was so exultant about getting the sanitation garage vote through the City Council, that it is to be moved. So that space will become Medgar Evers' for expansion. They are currently working on planning and design. You know where the sanitation garage is? That, as I've said in this body before, was a struggle that took too long. It made me very angry and frustrated at times because that sanitation garage is in rented space. We were always told, "well, the Sanitation Department is very willing to move it, it's just that nobody wants them, they can't find a place to go." The old NIMBY problem. That has gone all the way now through the City Council. They are truly moving and we do have that property now. That will become a new building for Medgar Evers there.


IV. Old Business: Resolution to Amend the Charter, Article V, Section 3A

Chair Cooper -- About 20 years ago, Chancellor Kibbee agreed to line up University policy regarding reassigned time between the Union and the Senate. He agreed to grant the Executive Committee of the Senate a packet of reassigned time in exchange for their work, especially since most were assigned to Board committees and to attend a number of functions, often in lieu of the Chair of the Senate. The University was evidently granting reassigned time to Union officers, if I understood the arrangement.

Over the years, the Chair of the Senate has distributed the reassigned time to the Executive Committee and, on rare occasions, to senators who serve in special missions. In the past half dozen years, the total package of reassigned time has been reduced from about 85-86 credits for 10 people to about 62 credits. A special allocation of reassigned time, in the amount of one course off per semester, that was assigned to the Faculty Chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee (FAC) to the Research Foundation, has disappeared as a separate allocation.

Thus, in the past six years, reassigned time to non-senators has occurred twice. In the past two years, it was necessary for me to use some part of the allocation to help the chair of the FAC, who happened to be a community college faculty member with a five course teaching load. The FAC chair must fulfill certain requirements, not necessarily found in UFS senatorial members, and thus it is difficult to recruit such an individual. He or she must have certain kinds of grants, must have them recently, and must be willing to work with a very difficult organization -- the Research Foundation. He or she must have experience with that organization. To find someone who is an experienced researcher and is willing to take on the job of the RF -- it also involves sitting on the Board of Directors of the RF -- is not easy these days considering how our faculty has shrunk. We are very grateful to Prof. Davis of Bronx Community College for doing the careful and complex job that he has done.

In the past six years, on one occasion, the Executive Committee allocated reassigned time to one faculty member who had not yet been elected to the Senate but who was willing to produce our Newsletter. This mailing had fallen into disuse with the death of its previous editor, Gordon Lea, and we had had difficulty finding anyone willing to do the work. One professor was invited to serve, to attend all kinds of meetings in order to become knowledgeable, and to receive four credits for an entire year. This was also a two-year college colleague.

Finally, after organizing three panels and conferences, a Senator was accorded one course off to help facilitate the organizing. I can assure you that that individual worked over half of last summer to produce the Academic Affairs conferences.

The total number of credits which I have just discussed over a 6-7 year period is 19 credits. In the name of the Executive Committee, as chair, I ask your support in passing this amendment to our Charter to allow the Executive Committee of the Senate the ability to recruit able people where these have not emerged from the UFS itself.
PROGRAM OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND FORTY-FIRST PLENARY SESSION OF
THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

February 25, 1997

V. Invited Guest: Professor Michael Bérubé (Department of English, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

Chair Cooper - The fun part of this evening for me is to introduce our speaker who is Professor Michael Bérubé of the English Department of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He has already had a career which many of our colleagues achieve only by the time they retire. Some of you know that his recent book on raising an exceptional child, titled "Life as We Know It, a Father, a Family, and an Exceptional Child," in 1996 has hit the best seller list after wonderful reviews everywhere. I had no idea about that when we got in touch with him last summer. His intellectual interests and work are in theory and critical thinking and literary studies. It is the source of an extremely long vitae which I will not read to you. He has a forthcoming work on the employment of English theory jobs and the future of literary studies. I love these titles. I have hardly opened a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education without either seeing his face or something written about him staring at me. What first attracted me to him was an article on academia as well as an essay question which I thought I had in my office, but somebody has clearly stolen it. It is called, "Higher Education Under Fire, Politics, Economics, and The Crisis of The Humanities." It was edited with Carrie Wilson. It has wonderful essays in it. It was published two years ago by Routledge. Michael has a tenuous CUNY tie -- I will let him tell you about it. Tonight his subject is "Faculty Psychology for the 21st century." Would you welcome him please.

Professor Michael Bérubé - Thank you very much. First of all, I want to thank you all for inviting me here tonight. It is an honor in itself, but it's especially important to me in light of my own family associations with CUNY. My father, Maurice Bérubé, taught at Queens College for several years until 1975 when at the height of New York City's budgetary and municipal bond crisis, the City decided to prune its payrolls of non-essential personnel like college teachers. So I welcome the chance to haunt the halls, as it were. An institutional return of the repressed. Or more accurately, the return of the retrenched. I arrive tonight with a certain amount of trepidation, however, because I fear that in speaking about national trends affecting the role of college faculty, to the CUNY Faculty Senate, I run the risk of bringing coal to the University of Newcastle. I'm aware that some of you have no need or desire to hear yet another dire assessment of the future the professorate. More immediately, I am aware that CUNY is in some ways, unfortunately, itself on the leading edge of national trends affecting the role of faculty.

My own department and my own institution can give you only a dim idea of the big picture. In 1980 for example, we had over 75 faculty members to handle roughly 300-400 English majors, whereas in 1996 we had 60 faculty to handle over 800 majors. Our department has been relatively protected among departments in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. State aid as a percentage of our budget has fallen to 26%. I believe that at the University of Michigan it is now at 11% -- they are quoting themselves as a privately supported public university, something like that. And like everyone else, we have tried to make up the shortfall with tuition increases which do not materially affect our student body from well-to-do Chicago suburbs, but can be devastating to that portion of the lower middle class that rightly considers itself over-taxed and under-serviced. I could go on, but what is happening in Illinois really pales before what has happened at CUNY over the last couple of years. I note something or another of the struggle with 37 resolutions passed by the Board in 1995; a governor whose budget cuts to higher education now apparently come in two bite-size, convenient packages; $24 million to be offset by tuition increases, $33 million to be offset by nothing at all; and a drop, I hear, in full-time faculty from 15,000 to 5,500 in 20 years, if I've got that right. I also was sent a newsletter, one of whose headlines spoke of a new campus without a faculty. Some of you may know that Newt Gingrich's book, "To Renew America," does attack college faculty. But not on the grounds that we are pot smoking, draft dodging, queer theory disseminating, tenured radicals. On the contrary, the complaint is that we are resisting liberating new technologies of the Internet which will render the traditional classroom obsolete. For this he blames teachers' unions, which he charges are simply trying to keep their members employed. The ridiculousness of that goes without saying.

I decided that I couldn't come here tonight and inform you about conditions that you are already living with. What I want to do instead is to put recent developments into a kind of composite political portrait of the future. To ask where our various political and economic challenges will come from, and why. And to ask why faculty governance and faculty activism can best address those challenges. Because you are inevitably more expert than I am about the local terrain, despite my family history, I will not say a great deal about CUNY, but I do want to talk about Minnesota, about Yale, about Texas, about Cincinnati, about responsibility centered management, and about the National Alumni Forum, and the future of conservative activism in academia.

First though, I would like to say a word about the rising cost of college. You already know why it is important, even aside from the question of enrollments here. For 15 years, college costs have been rising almost three times the rate of inflation. Any opportunist or conservative politician worth his or her salt knows what to do about this, mainly mobilize class resentment in order to shrink the franchise of higher education's toll further. In other words, colleges have been able to get away with this precisely because the United States has developed a two-tiered workforce, which to a large degree represents for most of our fellow citizens the only chance to avoid a life of slowly declining wages. So far we have seen, in other words, a very high tolerance among the public for this rate of increase in tuition and fees. Therefore faculty themselves have not been terribly vocal in most cases, in opposition to those increases, especially when the rest of their budgets are subject to reduction, recision, and retrenchment, the three R's.

I myself am now in the uncomfortable position of being a progressive leftist who believes in the traditions of democratic socialism, but is also worried that his investment in mutual funds may not generate the $120,000 it will take to send my first born to college in 2004. If we do not start to speak out about this, we are doomed, and there are two very good reasons why. First, the greater the cost of college with respect to median family income as that has been declining since 1973, the greater the pressure on individual students and families to regard college simply in terms of vocational training, to regard a degree simply as a guarantor of a certain level of economic security that is not guaranteed elsewhere in the economy. Of course, this will not affect all faculty equally. Commerce and engineering may, for example, very well benefit from this development, while the humanities (with the exception of English, which I'll get back to) wither on the vine. However, though some faculty may think of themselves as exempt from this market logic or even as beneficiaries of that market logic, there remains the case for all of us, that when colleges are seen by students, parents, legislators, and trustees in purely economic terms, then the role of faculty becomes one of educating workers for employment. These are paying customers and future tax payers, you know that rhetoric. We can forget about that utopian ideal of educating informed citizenry for democracy. The larger issue at stake here has to do with whether we perceive education as being a private investment or a national resource.

Bill Clinton, being Bill Clinton and all, sometimes talks a good game on this front. He started AmeriCorp and proposed plans for making college more affordable for the so-called middle class. But he is Clinton, and we are not going to get from him what American higher education would really need if we were to fulfill the promise of making a meritocracy serve democracy -- mainly, a massive commitment to higher education on the federal level that would serve not only the children of the middle class, but the children of the poor. Now I should say something about those spiraling tuition costs, other than asking government to pick up the tab.

I know the economists will object: I ask for more subsidies and suddenly the tuition rates go up as well. These subsidies are just eaten by opportunists in the administrations. So I want to ask in the voice of a confused parent, "where is all that money going?" As you well know, much of it is going nowhere at all, precisely to make up the shortfall as federal and state government withdraws its support for higher education. But I don't think that we can safely assume, in the present climate, that if governmental support for colleges and universities tripled tomorrow that most schools would then begin cutting tuition and offering rebates. Again, in the larger picture, what's happening is that some areas of the campus are growing and some aren't. The ones that aren't growing are the ones that can provide some return on their investment. So what you get is a situation here where universities do more and more of the basic research and development for business and industry.

We have a couple of new buildings, one the Beckman Center for Advanced Science. There is a $50 million building which was donated by Arnold Beckman and his wife, but the continuing costs, the operating costs, are now to be picked up by the university every year. By the time I get back, I believe that the Illinois Farm Animal Cloning Institute will have been built with a new $75 million building. That end of the campus, as you know, involves enormous capital expenditures, and by the way of tuition increases, basically what is happening is the cost of those capital investments, which are seen either by business or by universities controlling the patents produced in those buildings, the costs are being privatized. They are passed off onto the consumers known as students. I'll get back to this in a second when I discuss responsibility centered management, which is the budgetary apparatus sweeping the Big Ten at the moment. Also, what that means, say, for the differences between agriculture and English.

At CUNY, even if you are not developing a cloning institute of your own in the next few years, and I recommend you do, you know what this privatization has meant. Look again at Pataki's budgets for CUNY and SUNY, and then take them as gauges of how far we have fallen from the utopian days of open admissions, a dream of a truly democratic system of higher education. If you go back to when I was but a lad in the early 1970's, then Vice President Spiro Agnew was famous, aside from the "nattering nabobs of negativism "line," for saying, "I have never believed it is the right of every American to go to college." A lot of people actually find that the soul of sense. My point is that the further you move away from thinking about college as a right, as in the dream of open admissions, or as a device for creating an informed, critically thinking citizenry, the more the system will be privatized; the more it will take on the brutally class-inflicted features of American health care, and the more you will be facing angry, bitter public perceptions of under worked and overpaid faculty who resist the Internet and so on. That is the sort of pragmatic self-interest argument about opposition to tuition increases. It is in that context that I want to talk next about the corporatization of the university and the adjunctification of the professorate. As you know, one of the major obstacles to the full corporatization of the university is the faculty, or more specifically, tenure. You have seen challenges to tenure on grounds of fiscal exigency before, and I believe we will see them again. In the meantime, there are two longer term trends to which I would like to call your attention. One is the economic challenge to tenure; the other is the political challenge, although I realize there is a great deal of overlap here. Under the first heading I am going to talk about Minnesota, under the second the National Alumni Forum.

From the standpoint of what I'll call robber baron capitalism, universities are horribly inefficient. With the market and Ph.D.'s we could fire faculty across the country and replace them with adjuncts tomorrow at one-quarter the salary, without benefits. The way this works in the Department of English at Illinois, I should digress here, fully two-thirds of our instruction is done by graduate teaching assistants. We have a faculty of 60 and a graduate program of about 120. My colleague, Carrie Nelson, with whom I edited "Higher Education Under Fire," calculated how much it would cost to pay those people the $36,000 assistant professor salary instead of the $11,000 T.A. salary we pay them now. That totals about $4 million. Across the entire campus it would run to $80 million. This is at three campuses whose total budget is about $700 million. The idea that we are going to go to Springfield and ask for $80 million to make sure that we can deliver the right kind of instruction...you don't want to see abused T.A.'s...the real cost will be $80 million. "That's not going to happen," to quote Clint Eastwood, whom I will get back to.

The challenge we face at Illinois is that as a number of our graduates go out on the market, the Ph.D. graduates, and do not obtain tenure track jobs, we have created sort of ad hoc post-doctorate for them, whereby they teach pretty much the same number of courses at the same wages as T.A.s, and sooner or later it is going to dawn on some of the administration, hopefully not mine, that there is no reason to hire research faculty anymore, because look at this wonderful labor pool we have right here at home. I say this, even though it is obvious, because the outgoing President of the MLA, Sandra Gilman, actually did propose creating two-year mentor post-doctorates throughout English, along the model of the sciences. As if we did not know that the sciences are actually dying from the over-abuse of post-doctorates. His proposal basically amounted to a 40% cut in pay, say from $36,000 to $21,000 and a limited benefit package. This he said would enhance the flexibility demanded by our administrations while demonstrating our commitment to teaching. I'll get back to that by way of Clint Eastwood.

The adjunctification I speak of is happening already. In the rest of the culture, this is one area in which we clearly are the vanguard -- only 17% of the rest of the workforce is part-time. We are up to, as you may know, 45% as the professorate as part-time, with 27% in 1970. Most of that increase has accelerated in the last ten years alone. My point is that if it weren't for tenure -- this is the good news -- it would be happening even faster. We would see IBM layoffs and out-sourcing of instructional services like you wouldn't believe. It is in that context that we have to understand what is going on in Minnesota. I assume this is all familiar news, but the Regents of the University of Minnesota drafted a plan which makes it infinitely easier to discipline and, more crucially, fire faculty by redefining departments; as you know, you can't get rid of tenure faculty. You can eliminate the department, but you have to reassign the tenured faculty in the department. This Regent's plan would make it possible to redefine a department to cover one faculty member and then fire him or her. It also gets rid of most processes of peer review and appeal. I'm afraid the world of criteria for disciplinary action is sort of a nebulous collegiality or good behavior standard that most neutral observers find reminiscent or at least exploitable by a kind of neo-McCarthyism.

A couple things about this. First of all, the Regents overreached even Minnesota's President, who was already no friend to faculty. In other words, the plan was so draconian that it was even an embarrassment to him. The plan came under fire because it undercut any possibility of faculty appeal or faculty governance, which is one of the things that embarrassed him politically. It even outraged the local press, which my friends in the Twin Cities tell me had not been particularly friendly to the university heretofore. I think it's fine to register outrage about the evisceration of the processes of peer review and faculty appeal, especially, when it comes to disciplinary action. The real concern, I don't want to dismiss that, of the Regents plan was simply to make the faculty more flexible, more fireable. The AAUP, as you may know, descended on the campus to their credit, and did an almost AFL-CIO quality union drive. Last week the union vote narrowly failed. I would like to say two things about that.

First of all, that was insane. Second, the rationale for people voting against the unionization of the faculty was that the Regents had acted in good faith by withdrawing some of the more controversial proposals in their plan, and we don't want to antagonize them in response by forming a union. The vote, by the way, was really a hair's breadth -- they lost by the hair of their chin. It was a ten or 20 margin vote. I also want to note faculty participation in the media, no participation, almost to speak of, from the law schools or the health professions. One of the reasons for that mainly is that those parts of the university will do just fine on the corporate model, in fact in some ways they are already on it. They have really nothing to gain from unionization and collective bargaining. What about the rest of the faculty? As far as the adjunctification of the rest of the faculty goes, I think we already know that story. The humanities and social sciences especially are particularly easy to replace. It is in this context that I want to talk about responsibility management.

It's like total quality management and theory Z and plan zero, etc... What it consists of at the universities that I've seen it work at has just now come to Illinois. It sort of gives block grants to various colleges. You get a block grant, and if you want to hire new faculty with it or replace your photocopying machine, that's your business. The amount of the block grant depends on four sources of income -- governmental support, private industry funding, franchising fees, and enrollments. Again, there is no reason for people in law or in the health professions to be too worried about this. Likewise, if you are in one of the fields that can come up with decent lucrative patents, and you have one of those new buildings and you are producing the kind of knowledge on campus that can be sold, responsibility centered is no cause for concern. English, by contrast, is in a different position, as are most of the humanities and most of the traditional liberal arts. One of the benefits of RCM so far -- I do have to admit that it does have benefits -- it is educed at my campus as sort of perestroika about the old budgetary process. This process was completely opaque.

We found out, for example, that state support as a percentage of LAS was something like 1% compared to state support of the budget of the Agriculture School. We were one of the few places that actually combined, in fact, so we don't have an Agriculture School down the road, we are it. Basically, a great deal of the state support money goes to subsidizing the Agriculture School, which has almost no enrollments, whereas an LAS is almost entirely driven by enrollments and is not getting its fair share of the state support. That in one sense is good, that we now know that. We could possibly make the case of an unfair distribution of state monies. But as a matter of fact, the same process that allows you to see this unfairness also disables you from contesting it. Because in order to get an increase in state support you have to demonstrate that you have an increase in enrollments, but you can't increase enrollments when you are already short-staffed. In other words, you have this Catch 22. If you can get more students in the classroom, we'll give you more faculty lines, but we don't take any more students in the classroom because we don't have enough faculty to teach them. We do have certain enrollment caps for student-faculty ratios.

In Cincinnati, where I visited recently, the provost apparently had just issued a memo to heads of humanities departments urging them, under their version of RCM, to become entrepreneurs. In most classes this means that you convert the English Department to writing instruction and nothing else. Certainly the composition requirement in Illinois, just after I got there in 1989, they actually instituted a second writing requirement. So students would only have to write in two courses in their four years. That comp requirement is basically what keeps our enrollments afloat in English. It thus creates an economic condition in which our department is literally dependent on its graduate student labor in intro courses to make it possible for faculty to teach anything but intro courses higher in the curriculum.

My solution to this, since we are so dependent on enrollments and absolutely nothing else with a short staff faculty, is to open a coffee house in the English building and to come up with an English building mascot which we are going to put on t-shirts and then get franchising fees from. But Cincinnati's solution I think is better. They decided to create a 900 number in which professors read passages from the world's great pornographic works of literature. The revenue from that operation will fund advanced courses in Shakespeare. Who is to say that there isn't entrepreneurial genius in English?

Now the question of course is how to preserve tenure in this environment. In my Academe essay, I argue that the best way to preserve tenure in this kind of climate is to create what I called "meaningful forms of post-tenure review." I realize these are dangerous waters, so I want to say a few more words on this front with reference to the State of Texas. Unlike Minnesota, where the salt come directly from the President and the Regents, in Texas you have a body of state legislators curious about whether in fact the faculty are really pulling their weight and "how come we've only fired two of them in 30 years." They have called for a sort of periodic three to five year post-tenure review. Again, the main issue here has to do ultimately with the fireability of faculty, but I think there is an aspect of this we have to take seriously.

What in fact are we to do about that small handful of faculty who are not living up to their professional obligations? Now, there is a possibility on both sides, both in university administration and in the Texas State Legislature, for this to degenerate into a cynical production of get tough rhetoric. Where legislators get to go back to their constituents and say, "O.K., we made them belly up and do post-tenure review." And administrators then go back to their campuses and say, "we stared down our legislators...." and the post-tenure review is meaningless and actually doesn't do anything about unequal work-loads in the faculty or people not fulfilling their obligations. The reason that's dangerous, and I'll say it in just a second, is that I foresee a Texas/Minnesota scenario. The danger of post-tenure review, and the danger of its abuses, I'm sure you are aware of. This is the Clint Eastwood part. I read the opening scene in "The Line of Fire" as sort of an academic allegory. If you recall, Clint Eastwood is working undercover in a smuggling operation, but his partner is too obviously a plant. So the smuggler is asking him to kill his partner or else he will not be trusted. That is what post-tenure review is going to look like -- "unless you eliminate this department we will not trust you." Illinois actually did face something like that where internal review was handed over to faculty bodies with the expectation that they would eliminate certain departments or they themselves would be eliminated. That is the "In the Line of Fire" scenario.
My nightmare version of this is what happens, as I say, when Texas and Minnesota meet. I figured, if the Regents' plan in Minnesota was implemented, any canny kind of Regents' strategy on this would start by firing a few indefensible. A few people who you do call abusers of tenure - sexual harassers with long documented history, folks with problems with alcohol, what have you. No one would leap to their defense in a post-tenure review scenario, and then you would all of a sudden find the door open to all kinds of abuses of post-tenure review. That's what I fear if faculties don't get out ahead of the post-tenure review rhetoric on that one. From there my advice is that it is crucial to demonstrate, even if it does involve the "In the Line of Fire" scenario. Faculty can indeed be self-governing, even with regard to unprofessional faculty, or I think we will see governance taken right out of our hands from Texas to Minnesota. In the meantime, I think what we should do, aside from worrying about de jure elimination of the protections of tenure, is to worry about the de facto eroding of tenure and adjunctification. In this context, for example, it is crucial when a book like, "Up the University" by Robert and John Soloman comes along. They are both actually at Texas, of all places. They advocate the abolition of tenure on the grounds that it will liberate junior faculty from unreasonable peer review. I think it's worth contesting, the naïveté of some of our colleagues.

As for Yale, my story has to do with my opposition to graduate student unions. Again, I want to put this in a larger context other than just vilifying individual faculty at Yale who opposed Graduate T.A. I think that opposition is not only very likely illegal -- and that will be decided by the NLRB in the month to come -- not only illegal, but wrong and short sighted. There is a pragmatic reason for this. Yale should very well admit how much instruction is done by graduate teaching assistants rather than trying to malaise the graduate teaching assistants who are involved in instruction. There is a fairly easily falsifiable claim. Therefore come up with a rationale, not necessarily to the extent of Graduate T.A. usage, but at least for its existence. I think you can certainly make the case that less than two-thirds of the instruction in the Illinois English Department could be done by Graduate T.A.s. I don't think you should make the case that teaching assistants should not be in the classroom, which is the way this rhetoric usually plays out in the public sphere. Where, for some reason, xenophobic fears of T.A.s who can't speak English are translators from the sciences or the humanities where they make no sense. The second thing about Yale, I believe that it is folly itself for any faculty to take any action that undercuts the autonomy and self-determination of teachers.

Graduate T.A.s are in fact delivering instruction. In other words, you have to admit that first. They are in fact delivering instruction. They are also producing research and they should be supported precisely as teachers. Instead, what happened at Yale, if you followed you should know, that the incipient strike, the grade, could not have been broken without the work of faculty. The administration alone could not have broken that strike. So the Yale faculty let the administration play them off against Graduate T.A.s in the belief, as any number of individual Yale faculty themselves voiced it, that the faculty wasn't in fact made up of administrators and the administrators were made up of faculty and vice-versa, which cast the faculty as middle managers. I think this was a disastrous rhetorical and political strategy, partly because Yale is so wealthy. We are talking a $4 billion dollar endowment that grew by $1 billion dollars in the last 18 months alone. Now the reason that Yale continues to say that it is operating on a budgetary deficit, things that should really sound hollow in this room, is that what they do is take endowment money and invest it and consider that a debit. I didn't figure this out; David Montgomery figured this out. So that is how you get a deficit when you are making $1 billion a year.

Obviously my worries about this in terms of the semeiotics of American higher education in general is that anyone worth his or her salt could look to Yale and say, "if a university of this size can't pay their graduate students a living wage, how the hell are we supposed to do it?" The other reason I think it was disastrous to take this line on GSO is that again in believing that the administrators were themselves faculty that there is no "them" here. They failed to see that what the administration wanted to do with GSO was what they wanted to do later part and parcel in the course of 1996 with Local 34 and 35 of the Federation of University Employees. Namely the Hotel and Restaurant Employees Union, which, surprise, they wanted to cut a grandfather clause so that everyone now in Local 34 and 35 were assured of their jobs, but everyone hired as a service employee of Yale from that point on would take about a 40% pay cut with a limited benefits package.

I assume many of us got into this business because that we felt that teaching was one of the least alienating forms of labor available to us in this world. And for that reason I think it is folly itself not to support instructors. That includes Graduate T.A.s and adjuncts whom we should not play off against each other, who deliver instruction in the classroom under any rubric. Finally after the National Alumni Forum and Shakespeare scares, you may know the NAF, the leaders of which are Jerry Morton and Lynn Cheyne. It is an off-shoot of the National Association of Scholars in this respect. If you think of the early to mid-1980's efforts of the Right to organize and combat the liberalization of higher education, Accuracy in Academia, the attempt to sort of recruit students to report on radical faculty, was one failed PR campaign.

The National Association of Scholars has learned, I think over the last ten years, that they can come up with a few good media scares about speech codes. I'm an opponent of speech codes myself so I have divided feelings on that one, but they actually can't do much to change the content of the curriculum. This is in part because there really are these tenured folks who have been there for the last 20 to 30 years dictating what the departmental curriculum will look like. The next attempt is to try to get universities where they live, in the pocketbook. It is the same technique as the NAS, it is the NAS that has produced "No One Teaches Shakespeare in the English Department Anymore" Report in the last couple of months.


Now it's not only by way of activist trustees, but through activist alumni organizations, that this sort of conservative influence on the curriculum is trying to be felt. The problem is not the NAF in itself, nor do I want to say that there is something with activist alumni, trustees, across the board, because I don't believe that. The difference though and the important thing is the credo under which they operate. It is basically William Simon's motto, you carry with them from the Department of the Treasury to the Olin Foundation. Mainly, "why should we pay money for the promulgation of information and knowledge we don't like." It's a compelling argument, is it not? It was in fact the Bush Administrations argument, or at least the amicus brief filed by the Bush Administration in the Russ vs. Sullivan case, which gave you the gag order in Planned Parenthood. Namely, if the government is federally funding Planned Parenthood, then it does get the right to dictate some of the content of what is said in some of those institutions. Back when he was Solicitor General, Kenneth Star was actually trying to extend that logic from Russ vs. Sullivan to cover federal funding of anything else. Again, same principle, in fact we are paying for it, why should we be paying money for the promulgation of things we don't like? The one answer to that we are going to come up with no matter what end of the political spectrum we are on, is that in fact one of the differences between societies that pay for the dissemination of information they don't like and the societies that don't. This is one of the working distinctions between free and totalitarian societies. That is why I say that the NAF itself is not the point. The point is, to get back to my first point about student enrollments and tuition, with the increasing privatization of the system, the logic behind the assumption that those with the money get to dictate the content of the curriculum becomes harder and harder to resist.

What to do. About privatization, as dangerous as it is, we do need to make the case for the economic function of the universities as stabilizers in communities and generators of future tax payers and things like that. It makes progressives uneasy because it sounds like they have given up their principles for positions on the Chamber of Commerce. I know; I feel that way all the time. It carries with it the dangers I've enumerated above, namely if you live by that kind of market logic, you also die by it, when your services are no longer necessary to the market. That's why over the long term I think we need to convince our various constituencies that critical education for democracy is a worthy goal in and of itself regardless of whether it swells the tax rolls and regardless of whether it generates new bio-technologies, new patents, new weapons, or other saleable commodities. Even I can't be too idealistic about this. If students come out of my department being able to write better business letters, well, then good, I'll be happy with that. We also need to make the case as a nation, we need to train students who can do more than that, who can make their way critically through the information overload of the 21st century and become that most valuable and increasingly rare of political commodities, the informed citizen.

With regard to post-tenure review, I think again, we need to demonstrate that faculty self-government is the only road to go, and not to give administrators or legislators excuses for micro-management of our affairs. In regard with adjunctification and administration, I read in your last Plenary Session as someone put it, "CUNY would be a university of adjuncts and administrators by the year 1998 instead of 2000." That's increasingly the case at community colleges across the country. And slowly but surely will it spread through the rest of the system as well, maybe not all the way to Yale but certainly to Albertus Magnus down the street, University of Bridgeport, and the University of Hartford. About adjunctification then, I only have an old and trite piece of advice: there is power in a union, don't waste time in mourning, organize. Thanks very much.

Professor Speidel (Geology, Queens College) - / If you do want to record it, the question and statement had to do with the fact that CUNY is also on the front wave of block grants, with the academic program planning / Thanks.

Professor Jaffee (Science, Borough of Manhattan Community College) - "I heard you use the term "enrollment caps" for individual courses at your university. Class size caps. How does that work and how can we do it here?" / Actually it works department by department. On the one hand, we have a number of forces in the state demanding smaller class sizes. On the other hand, we have the only Board of Higher Education evaluating units for productivity, this was the PQP Initiative, which is not to be confused with RSCM or TQM. The PQP Initiative in Illinois would evaluate departments by number of faculty, instructional units, otherwise known as students divided by FTE's. A higher ratio is better. This is in the same state where the Chicago Tribune just excoriated us, and I think on this one rightly, for having these courses with 1,100 and 800 students in these auditorium-like settings. Instructors really do have to come up with sort of almost Victorian theater quality to keep students entertained in these auditoriums. That's what's encouraged by the PQP system that measures productivity by the processing student bodies. The answer to your question is that in some departments it doesn't work at all. On the contrary you have forces suggesting that class size under 350 is really a waste of faculty resources. In English the enrollment was 32, and it went up to 36. The kinds of things that I say at least to parents, the administration, and I haven't got a chance to talk to too many legislators, is that if you do want the inclusion of a liberal arts-like curriculum, even in a university the size of Illinois, that if you look at the ranking of departments, not by productivity, but by student demand and student approval, the places that come out highest again and again are English, Art, and Music -- the places where the student faculty ratio is lowest. That is the only way that I can continue to make that case. There are one set of forces that want class sizes higher, and working at the same time are forces that want class sizes lower. / Jaffe - "Just a brief follow-up. How does your department deal with the administration when the administration says, "400 in your English Composition Class," and the department says what?" / Bérubé - That's yet to be worked out. We are just going to RCM now and at least one of the things that I would like to see is an agreement in writing that even though we are on a system that depends on a department budget that depends on enrollment, that we would invite an enrollment cap per class. We don't have one right now. We are willing to see departments, like I say, that actually does go more toward the traditional liberal arts model and away from the PQP model. But if you are going to give us all of these incentives to go by the PQP, then, fine, let's throw American Literature open to a class of 400. We may be pushed to that.

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "We are all pleased to have you share your thoughts with us today. I'm especially pleased because I'm an alumna of University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. I was intrigued by your discussion about how to preserve tenure by having post-tenure review. We have a different version of that. What is happening, if you heard the Chancellor talking about the budget, the CUNY version of that is to declare a financial exigency and then go into retrenchment and then ask the faculty to then serve on those retrenchment committees to essentially axe other faculty and departments and schools. What suggestion do you have regarding this?" / What kind of procedures do you have if fiscal exigency is declared? Can you contest? / Chair Cooper - The Supreme Court of the State of New York. / Sank - "We just went to court." / Bérubé - What about the sort of Minnesota clause? In other words, can you eliminate an entire school, department, whatever? / Sank - "We just did, at City College. The "retrenchment committee" eliminated the School of Nursing, Physical Education, and tried to eliminate departments. But what we did at City College just recently was that we passed a resolution saying that no faculty will participate in any further retrenchment committees. Where will that leave us?" / Bérubé - Clint Eastwood would have been shot if he refused to retrench his partner. I really don't know. I think it's worth going to court on this one, not necessarily personally. Asking for faculty to serve on their own retrenchment committees, at least in Illinois it is about the reassigning of tenured faculty in Comp. Lit and the elimination of the department. It is not for the elimination of the department and the elimination of the faculty. That is by far quite a different story. Which SUNY campus is it that just eliminated its German Department? No more German. If you want German you have go over to Genesee or something. It is sort of the Internet logic, "why should we have a medievalist in Nebraska if we have one over in Kansas? Isn't this an unnecessary faculty redundancy?" I think not only unified tenured faculty front on this one, but are really much more active, I don't know what the participation is here and the other relative faculty union, but I do know that tenured folks and unionized folks are that much harder to get rid of. That's why I was so dismayed by the Minnesota vote. The other part of my answer was, and best of luck.

Professor London (Political Science, Brooklyn College) - "I certainly enjoyed your talk, and I agree, I think, with most of your solutions. But I do have some concerns about the post-tenure review, in particular the illustrations you gave. For example, you talked about professors pulling their weight which is a very kind of nebulous category, very subjective. Somebody who's done well and taught and done research for 25 or 30 years and then all of a sudden maybe they are not. Are they then not pulling their weight? It is something that needs to be clearly be specified. But then you went on to talk about sexual harassment and someone who is an alcoholic. Clearly those circumstances would certainly, in CUNY and I'm sure most universities, most people can be fired. Tenure does not stand in the way of getting rid of people who have demonstrated behavior along those lines. So I feel like, when you talk about post-tenure review and then bring up those kinds of examples, it really begs the question." / Those are two very different kinds of post-tenure review. Let me clarify. The first time my attention was drawn to this was when Illinois had almost a complete turn-over in administration in the last five years, ranging from the Provost level right up through the Chancellor and the Presidency. The new President, came a few years ago and one of the things he decided to do to get acquainted with the faculty was to invite a number of advanced assistants and young associates. We went around this table, as I was one of the few people from the humanities, and almost every faculty member complained of unbalanced work load. People even in molecular biochemistry were complaining about colleagues who hadn't moved beyond Watson and Crick, who had not updated their curriculum in 20 years. The people in computer science complained about colleagues who couldn't really teach the field from 1987 on, and therefore were clueless when it came to things like Pentium chips and things like that. Smiling, the President asked, "And what do you think we should do about this?" And almost to a person, the other eleven around this table said, "I think the elimination of tenure. We are protecting incompetence." A colleague and I had just published a book, "Higher Education Under Fire," in which we did assess this. We actually had a situation at Illinois where, and this could have been malpractice if the student wanted to pursue it, a student completed a degree in art history and no one on the faculty considered themselves qualified to read the work and would not grant her a degree. I've never heard of behavior like that. I have behavior in my department where people absent themselves on peer review on the grounds that the field has changed so much, I can no longer review work in my own field. That kind of stuff I really consider unprofessional behavior. Now whether these folks need to be fired or just addressed as to not really pulling their weight and not fulfilling their professional obligations of the discipline, that's one set of post-tenure review. It is partly to head off the resentment of those younger faculty who are sitting around the President's table, that this has to be addressed. That a department should come up with the standards that they expect tenured faculty to meet. That means if you have a fallow period after 25 years of productivity, they don't fire you for not fulfilling your five year plan this time around. But if you have absented yourself from the review mechanisms of the profession in certain ways. There is one of my faculty who will no longer submit proposals for curricula courses that I plan never to teach. This is real misbehavior. Not necessarily that this merits firing, but this is also a kind of misbehavior that should not be tolerated. I just consider that obligations of professionalism. That is quite different from the moral turpitude clause in tenure. Even in practice it is very difficult to fire folks even where tenure allows it. My concern is simply that either at Minnesota or at Texas, what's eventually going to happen opportunistically is that a few notorious cases will be seized upon. Wasn't it also at Minnesota where one faculty member was holding down two jobs? At Minnesota or North Carolina was it? It provoked the question, "how come this went on for three months and nobody caught it?" Faculty sort of running into the Chronicle and saying, "I serve on six committees, and if I'm gone for three days of the week people actually know about it." I don't see how in fact someone had so much free time in his schedule that he managed to make this commute between two colleges. Aside from the ethics of actually working at two different universities, there is also the question of, in fact, was he pulling his department weight in service respects. I know it's too long an answer, but I acknowledge that what I did was confuse two different kinds of cases of post-tenure review. But I do think that there should be standards of professionalism. Not necessarily that they involve revocation of tenure. One colleague I know has advocated demotion for people who are no longer active, participating members in department affairs.

Professor Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay College) - "I would like to follow up on this issue. You have presented several provocative things. I think the one thing that you must be aware, we are all aware of, that we quite often overlook: tenure is not a guarantee of employment. Tenure means one thing, the right to presented with charges for dismissal. It is essentially a constitutional guarantee. It is not permanent employment. At CUNY there are four reasons for instituting proceedings against tenure. The argument is constantly made that it is difficult to get rid of a tenured faculty member. That is not true. The real problem is that administrators simply do not do their homework from the grade school level up to the college level in order to identify and root out these individuals. I'd like to propose, if individuals are found who are not deserving of tenure or who are eventually removed, the same charges should be filled against the administrators who allow these individuals in their institution over a period of time. You will find a radical change in the approach to how people are tenured, and how they are supervised through the ranks. I think it's a great mistake to assume or to even suggest that faculty should take this on. This is not their responsibility. It is the responsibility of administrators to see to it that the kind of egregious behavior of some faculty does not continue and that is where the real issue is." / I agree with that up to a point. Although I do also think that if I'm talking in response to your earlier question about people fulfilling their professional obligations as members of discipline, then those obligations should be spelled out by other members of the discipline rather than administratively. Otherwise I agree with your point, and I would like also to clarify some of my remarks about tenure. Not that it is a guarantee of employment. I don't believe that and I hope I didn't say it. What I wanted to point out is that it is such a glaring exception at the moment, with the possible exception of the federal judiciary and some form of unionized employment. The way that things work in the new global economy, that it stands out to some people like a sore thumb. We couldn't fire all of these faculty tomorrow the way we could at IBM. The reason for that, I think you touched on this, is that it's basically an exception to the at-will employment doctrine, where as a matter of fact in most places you can be terminated without cause. What tenure does is basically place the burden of proof on your employer. It's one of the few places in the economy where the employer has the burden of proof removing an employee. It's on those grounds that it needs to be defended. I left out the two magic words, academic freedom. This is also suppose to be guaranteed. I think it would be lost immediately if Robert and John Soloman's proposals found a sympathetic audience. The point is, because it is a general exception the general at-will stuff, it seems susceptible. I am increasingly fearful of the ways in which its exceptionality will be exploited.

Professor Berkowitz (Chemistry, The Graduate School) - "You mentioned a certain movement toward making colleges into vocational schools. Has there been either anecdotal or documentary evidence that shows that kids in high school and their parents are beginning to think of colleges as vocational schools? Secondly, has there been any overall movement of either private or public schools to move in that direction?" / Yes and yes. As to the former, I don't have the facts and figures on hand. But it has to do with those student surveys about the reasons for obtaining a college education. Increasingly the "contribute to society" or "become an expert in something," those rationales have fallen by the wayside in favor of economic security arguments. As for the move toward vocationalism, that varies so much by institutional location, where people are in the class hierarchy within higher education. I can tell you how it looks in my field. I had the benefit eight years ago of walking from an interview with Williams College. With a student body of 2,600, it had something like 400 English majors. There is no economic penalty for studying English at Williams. I walked into an interview at Auburn with a student body of 25,000, they have 120 English majors. Simply, an English degree out of Auburn is not, unless you can demonstrate it in business communications skills, is not going to place you very well economically. I don't have survey and documentary evidence of what that trend toward vocationalism looks like at the moment. I don't want to rely entirely on anecdotal evidence either. All I want to point out is structurally, especially in my field, you have two pressures. One, to define English in terms of its service to the public, in which case we almost always talk about simply writing instruction. Two, the pressures that are crystallized in responsibility centered management which structurally place even more weight on the circulation of warm bodies into writing classes. One final thing, a statistic that is crucial: Twenty-percent of people now working with a bachelor's degree are working in jobs that do not require one. One of the ways this was brought home to me was when I took a Greyhound Bus up to Chicago and found that even to be employed at Greyhound at the counter, they wanted 15 hours of college work from you. It wasn't clear whether that had to be in English or in Engineering or what. One of the dangers that I think you already know, of falling into education for employment trap, I think Sandi said this over the phone this morning, you wind up training a bunch of nurses who are then laid off. Although I can't answer your question directly about the trend toward vocationalism, I can say that we need to question the link between the sort of social semantics of a college degree and the place of the college degree in the actually existing economy. What William Henry did with that 20% statistic by the way, is to call for the cutting of enrollments by 20% since 20% of the people with B.A.s obviously don't need one. We can just send them to vocational high schools.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) - "First, let me say, I really genuinely enjoyed listening to you this last hour. I think that I want to criticize you on this point about tenure in the following way. You've become something of a mouth piece for griping about the present status of academic life and its future from what is perceivably a left wing point of view. You're being identified with post-tenure review is...I can't think of the right kind of analogy, the right kind of metaphor. You absolutely capture the kind of Judas goat role you would be playing. So I suggest that you do one of two things: either rethink your position, somewhat along the lines that Professor Bohigian suggested (although I have never been a friend of anything that Professor Bohigian has suggested), or just forget it. This might be something on which you won't have a position publicly." / I'll take it under advisement. Actually, I am capable of changing my mind on some issues. One of the things for which I have gotten a great deal of heat are precisely on these grounds. Not about post-tenure review, but about graduate programs and the size of graduate programs. I would not actually want to be working in a state where I was dealing with George Pataki, and call as I do for the downsizing of graduate programs. I think that kind of argument in the wrong hands can be extraordinarily dangerous. At the same time, the critiques that I have gotten lately, actually from my left, have insisted that I should not be talking about post-tenure review, down-sizing graduate programs. I should on the contrary be talking about the expansion of graduate programs and further ways of keeping all manner of faculty gainfully and fully employed as full-time tenure tracked faculty. I think there is some merit to the complaints I've heard on this accord. I was almost induced to change my position on graduate programs. My position is really more nuanced than my critics give it credit for. Mainly that, I don't have a problem with keeping enrollments at the M.A. level fairly high. I do believe that both the intellectual appeal of the humanities and the credentializing function of M.A. programs are things that need to be promulgated and defended, especially in regard to the way that English departments see the secondary schools. I don't see, however, that we need or want that many people in graduate programs going for the Ph.D. Because what happens then is that you have a 6-8 year scheme of economic exploitation. Or, if you want them to go on to the Ph.D. program fine, put your money where your mouth is, whether it is private or public funding and support them and don't make them teach as much as faculty do. Under those circumstances I have no problem with the expansion of graduate programs. I am wary of my name and my position being misused. Even a liberal left progressive like Bérubé comes down in favor of post-tenure review. Yes, but only with the following conditions. Likewise, downsizing of programs, yes, but only with the following conditions. Should it in fact be the case that I cannot control the political means of the dissemination of my work on this one, I will do my best to yell back. Thanks for the critique. I know what it was going to be, an article I jointly authored with Gerald Graff in the Chronicle of Higher Education. The title, "Dubious and Wasteful Academic Habits." I have felt increasingly uneasy about that. I like Gerald Graff, I've worked with Gerald Graff, Gerald Graff is a friend of mine. The problem with that essay is that there are points at which Gerald Graff's insistence with coordinating the curriculum and teaching, the conflicts also devolve into an insistence that there is there is too much faculty duplication. Normally when I work with someone I don't sign my name to things that I completely disagree with. That wound up in the final draft, that has still been a thing I have been increasingly pissed and uneasy about. I don't want my name associated with the position, I don't want to be associated with the position that there is too much faculty duplication out there.

Professor Mineka (Math & Computer Science, Lehman College) - "I just want to make two comments. First of all, it seems to me a little contradictory to suggest that we should move more in the direction of unionism and at the same time engage in what you call post-tenure review. Secondly, it seems to me that when you were talking about the function of the university, there is too much focus on how the faculty functions and not enough, almost never, any examination of how the administration functions. I think if you want to find a fruitful line of inquiry, what about promoting the idea of some meaningful review of university administrations." / I would like to say more about the functioning of university administrations. I was asked specifically to speak about the role of faculty. I come from the most over-administered university in the Big Ten, and that is an honor. We have administrators buried in faculty lines. You don't even know where they are We have one layer of Vice Chancellors and Vice Heads for Academic Affairs, for Student Affairs, and so forth for each campus. And then another whole layer of Vice Presidents for Academic Affairs, Student Affairs on top of the whole system. As well as a system of directional colleges, Northern, Western, Eastern, and Southern Illinois and Illinois State. The bureaucracy in the State of Illinois actually makes me feel home again. It is in fact as if I never left New York. If you want the statistics on that, I think your student enrollments have gone up 250,000 and then one less campus, 205,000. But nationwide student enrollments, as you know, have been going up and up. Numbers of faculty have increased as well but not at the same pace. The only real growth, 137-139% in the last fifteen years, has been in administration. One of the things about the National Alumni Forum that I forgot to say, the day that I see a consumer activist organization dedicated to getting rid of folks like Diamandopolouis. Or reducing executive pay, or clearing out redundancy in administration, that's the day I take that conservative organization seriously as a watch-dog group for academia. If I see the National Alumni Forum do that they will gain my respect, and I'll pay more attention to these Shakespeare scares. I don't think post-tenure review necessarily should be tied to the firing of faculty as to the making responsible of faculty. And in that way I don't see the contradiction between that and unionism. In other words, I don't want to fire these less responsible colleagues. I do want to create a context in which it is actually unacceptable for people to say, "I no longer participate in peer review." Either for journal things or third year tenure review. I actually don't believe in penalizing that in firing so much, but if you are a faculty member here and have these obligations we are going to expect you to meet them. Right now what happens is the classical dysfunctional family thing. Where some people are never given certain tasks. Just as teenagers are not asked to clean up their room because you know they won't do it anyway. Some people are not asked to do certain tasks. They don't want them anyway. All of this goes without saying. I don't think the recommendation of that is to fire people involved. That's why I don't see a contradiction between unionization and the promulgation standards of post-tenure review. / Mineka - "Well, maybe you should use some other phraseology. Because when you say post-tenure review it suggests the possible abolition of tenure. So maybe "performance review," that's different than talking about post-tenure review. It has different connotations.

Professor Sank (Anthropology, City College) - "I now am going to take up what the others have said. I am strongly against this post-tenure review. Because I think the purpose of tenure was to keep faculty against being fired for political and social views that they have. Views like yours which might cause you to be fired in a conservative institution. I think that's the critical purpose of tenure and the post-tenure review will be just be used as an excuse by administrators to get rid of faculty." / I will withdraw the phrase. I think some other language entirely is appropriate. / Sank - "I would like you to look at these figures passed out today which show that from 1984-1995 the number of undergraduates and graduates at CUNY increased from 97,000 to 112,000 undergraduates. But the number of faculty decreased. We've been having post-tenure review or pre-tenure review. That's our problem here. This is what we are suffering from. It's not a question of worrying about the bad apple." / Bérubé - I think that's a real distraction. I think that's right. Nevertheless, I do think the bad apple problem will be exploited. It is being exploited in Texas. I was afraid it was also going to be exploited in Minnesota, that the Regents were going to make the case for the elimination of tenure by going after a few indefensibles. That was just a pragmatic point. I think you are right. I will come up with something other than "post-tenure review." I do think I've been convinced that rhetoric isn't co-optable for my purposes. I asked whether it can be abused politically. If you pick up Martin Anderson's book, "Imposters in the Temple," where he complains that some campuses that have faculty where it is a one-party state. They are all registered Democrats. Where he asks, "what are all these liberals doing in academia?" For one thing, when I spoke to him about this, if you would like to do a transfer where we get a few senate seats and chairs on the stock exchange in exchange for a couple of chairs in academia for conservatives, that's fine. We'll do that. But first of all you have to get these conservative students to stop going where the money is and pursuing education in the humanities. The second problem, of course, look at the rest of the way American society works. You have in academia a place where people who still consider themselves progressives, can actually hope to have some influence on the intellectual life of the nation, hope to teach people and be insulated from political firings. Is it any surprise they ended up in academia?