THE THREE HUNDRED SIXTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
September 28, 2004
The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:30 p.m. in Room 9204/5 at the Graduate School and University Center. Voting members were present:
Baruch: Present – Hill, Pollard, and Smith. Absent – Freedman, Giannikos, Goldstein, Majete, and Myers. BMCC: Present – Agwu, Friedman, Martin, Price, and White. Absent – Belknap. Bronx CC: Present – Carney, and Fergenson. Absent - McManus, and Skinner. Brooklyn: Present – Antoniello, Bloomfield, Morawski, Tobey, and Wills. Absent – Bell, Cunningham, Jacobson, Romer, Shapiro, and Viscusi. CCNY: Present –Crain, and Sank. Absent – Benenson, Broderick, Buffenstein and Sohmer. Vacancies – 3. CSI: Present – Cooper, Klibaner, Levine, Petratos, and Schumann. Alternate Farkouh and Monte., Absent –Yousef. CUNY Law School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancy – 1. Graduate School: Present – Baumrin, Nolan, and Tobin. Absent – Khuri, Lerner, and Rachlin. Hostos CC: Present – August, Roe, Singh, and Alternate Czarnocha. Vacancies - 1. Hunter: Present –, Finder, Krishnamachari, and Matthews. Absent – Doyle, Friedman, Guzzetta, Kaye, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John Jay: Present – Brugnola, Kaplowitz, Kucharski, and Stevens. Absent – Kubic, Mandery, and Wylie-Marques. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart, Farrell, Galvin, O’Malley, and Ruoff. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Mettler, and Rushing. Absent - Davidson, and Lerman. Lehman: Present –Mineka, Wilder, and Alternate Kolb. Absent – Aronowitz, Hosay, Jervis, and Philipp. Medgar Evers: Present – Barker, Donohue, and Hastick. Absent -Patrwary. NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Dreyer, Horelick, Hounion and Alternate Mennella. Absent – Richardson and Walter. Queens: Present – Bird, Erickson, Moore, and Savage. Absent – Brody, Casco, Habib, Sukhu, and Tse. Vacancies – 1. Queensborough CC: Present – Barbanel, Pecorino, Weiss, and Alternate Ansani. Absent –Hest. Vacancies – 1. York: Present – Lewis and Wolosin. Vacancies - 2.
Attending as guests were Dina Dahbany-Miraglia, Vrunda Prabhu, and Shawn Williams.
Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCCT), Friedheim (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Krishnamachari (Hunter), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), Pecorino (QCC), Savage (Queens) and Tobey (Brooklyn). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were present.
I. Approval of the Agenda - The agenda was adopted as amended. Chancellor Goldstein would not be attending due to a schedule conflict.
II. Approval of the Minutes of May, 2004 - The minutes were adopted as proposed.
III. Reports : (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)
A. Chair
B. Dr. Selma Botman, Executive VC for Academic Affairs.
C. Representatives to Board Committees
IV. Approval of the UFS Standing Committee Slate: The Slate was approved as distributed. (appended to minute)
V. New Business:
There was a Resolution on Open Access presented by Senator Pecorino. The motion was withdrawn by a vote of the plenary. Full discussion can be read in the reports and deliberations section.
There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:00 P.M.
Respectfully submitted,
William Phipps
Executive Director
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THE THREE HUNDRED AND SIXTH PLENARY SESSION
OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE
OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
Tuesday, September 28, 2004
III. Reports:
B. Dr. Selma Botman, Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs:
Chair O’Malley The Chancellor called me this morning to say that he’s not going to be here. He has a meeting at Baruch; he tried to juggle it to be here, because he told me how much he loves to be with us (I think he means it). My response was that I thought it was good that he wasn’t coming because Vice Chancellor Selma Botman is here, and that if the Chancellor came he might hog the show, and I didn’t want that to happen. I put out on the back table a list of things about Vice Chancellor Botman. You should have that. She’s going to talk first but, then given this information sheet about her, you might have questions you want to ask. She comes to us from the University of Massachusetts. If you look at the things she was working on at U Mass, it is interesting how many of the same things we have also been working on at CUNY. She was Vice President for Academic Affairs at the University of Massachusetts from 1996 to 2003. The University of Massachusetts is a five-campus system with 4,000 faculty and 58,000 students, notice those numbers, and it has strong faculty governance and is unionized. I’m not going to go through all of this. Take a look at her education; she has many degrees: A B.Phil. from Oxford plus an AM and a PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard. And look at the titles of her many books. Lenore Beaky just interviewed her for the Senate Digest and they got carried away talking about recent Egyptian politics. And also she taught for nine years at Holy Cross in Political Science. So I give you Selma Botman.
Vice Chancellor Botman: Thank you, and I want to say I admire you all for coming out in this torrential downpour; you are hardy and brave souls. I’m delighted to be at CUNY. I have been welcomed by faculty and staff and administrators and I look forward to meeting students as I visit the campuses. I really feel fortunate to have the opportunity to work with you all at the University. And I thought, what’s the best way to get to know me and how can I talk to a group of faculty about things that interest me and how I perceive the world and what I think about? And I thought the best way might be to reflect upon my own journey through education, particularly higher education, and to think of myself with multiple identities. That is, I really identify myself as being an academic administrator, by which I mean that I face and try to help solve problems and issues and think strategically about organizations, particularly larger ones, but I’m also fundamentally an academic, and my own sense of self and my experiences lead me to think like a faculty member. So you’ll forgive the biographical nature of this, but I think it might be interesting just to talk about the kinds of work I’ve done intellectually to give you a sense of who I am. I was very fortunate to study at Oxford for two years with the doyen of Middle Eastern History, Albert Hourani, and I was fortunate in studying with him because he was a gifted teacher, a careful and balanced thinker, who really believed that there was justice on many sides of a political battle and was eager to help students think about how to manage through conflicting ideas and battles. So I spent two years with Albert Hourani and others at Oxford, where I was surrounded by an international population of students, and it was truly the best educational experience I had had to date; I had come to Oxford from Brandeis as an undergraduate. The question in my mind was, should I stay in England and pursue doctoral education or should I come back to the United States? For me, when I look back at those years and at that time I think, maybe it was a failure of imagination, but I could never imagine myself in a world other than higher education, and so from the time I was at Oxford I knew that doctoral education would be in my horizon, and I made the decision for professional and personal reasons to come back to the United States and study at Harvard. When I first got to Harvard I was told that what people really study when they come to the History Department at Harvard-- if there are any History Department folks here you will corroborate this I’m sure--is European history, and it’s very nice to understand the Middle East, but you need European history. So that’s what I began studying at Harvard, European history in some depth, but that was alongside the work I did in the Middle East. The best parts of studying at Harvard were the students around me who were gifted, bright, encouraging, fun and funny, and also the library. I was a kid in a candy store in the library, and I’ve maintained a library card ever since that time and still love to lose myself in the stacks. But the question became what to write a dissertation on, and I was reading a lot about Egypt because that was one of the first countries I started to study. I could read in western languages before I learned Arabic, and it was accessible to me as a young student and then, as I was thinking of where I could actually go and do primary research, Egypt was a country I felt I could go to on my own and conduct research. So I was looking for a topic in modern Egyptian history and I wanted to study the 20th century, and I was captured really by the classic work in the field that focused on the rise of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt. It was a contrast to the Egyptian canon of the time, which really looked at political movements that took power and political parties that succeeded in taking power, or military groups that had access to authority. And I realized that I was not interested in studying the mainstream but rather I wanted to study political movements that had important ideological, political, social contributions to the society but didn’t necessarily take power, so I decided to study the Communist movement and the Communist and Socialist parties as well. I went to Egypt in 1979 to begin research, and for those who’ve done research in developing societies you will know that going into archives and libraries is a different experience than what we find in the United States. It took me several months to get permission from the government first of all to use the archives and the national libraries, and then once I arrived at the archives I was greeted by the archivist, and I couldn’t tell him I was studying Communism because it was illegal in Egypt and I simply would not have gotten access to any of the materials. So I sat with the archivist literally day after day drinking coffee, drinking tea, back in those days even smoking cigarettes, and prevailing upon him to open the boxes; there were no indices, there were no catalogs, there was no way I could consult a body of knowledge and I had to rely on the archivist. So I said, "show me material on political movements in the first half of the 20th century and why you’re interested in this and who do you want to read about, what’s the purpose." This was 1979, and Anwar Sadat was in power and it was a delicate moment. He had made an overture to Menachem Begin in Jerusalem and he was working with the Americans on peace in the Middle East and everybody wanted to protect the reputation of Sadat. The archivist decided, "what you really must be interested in studying is the fascist origins or connection of Sadat during the Second World War." I said, "Trust me, this is not the case." And then he said, "OK, let me ask you a really serious question, what’s a little girl like you doing in Egypt by yourself studying these topics," so I always respond to that question "I’m really older than I look"; it’s true, by the way. After a while he did show me some materials and I was able to use the archives, but I realized that that wasn’t enough, so I interviewed quite a lot of people, read a lot of newspapers from the period of interest, and sought out and met the attorneys who actually covered the Communist trials, who defended the Communists in Egypt at the time, and prevailed upon them to give me the court cases, which they kept in private archives - and at this time they were handwritten and mimeographed, which was very hard to read I had to have some help reading them in fact - but I uncovered the court cases that no one else had used in Egypt Egyptians hadn’t had access to it for internecine battles and reasons, but I shared of course all the documents I got. The process of doing research was difficult, but I was able to write about a series of groups who were really dedicated to change in Egyptian society, and while did not take power and never had an infrastructure, which would have allowed them to take power, they did have an impact on the trade union movement, on the political movement, and on the intellectual movement amongst artists and literati, so it was a very fascinating study. Then I came back and finished my dissertation, got my job at Holy Cross, and began teaching in a small college, where I was teaching Middle Eastern politics and comparative politics and international development. And I became really interested in the field of international development and realized that there were no women in the literature that I was exposed to. This was a question to me, "Where were the women?" I knew from Egypt that women were farmers, women were street vendors, women were professionals, women participated in the informal economy and the formal economy. Where were the women in the rest of the world? And then I discovered the field of women in international development, which was a whole new world for me and opened up a whole new intellectual world. For those people who believe that there is no relationship between teaching and research, my experience demonstrated that in fact there’s an incredible connection because my teaching opened up to me a whole world of scholarship that I didn’t know about. And I began to shift the paradigm for Egypt and think about Egypt in different ways because of the work that I was doing in the classroom about women in international development. And I conceived a third book, which was citizenship and women in Egypt, and I was really intrigued by the difference in the status of women’s citizenship depending on the political context of the period. It was really a study in women’s relationship to politics and society during the first half of the 20th century where I really believe a nascent civil society was developing and upper class Egyptian women were becoming part of it, and how that shifted when Adbul Nasser took power and really needed women’s participation in the economy and in society, so women became citizens in the full sense, they were given the right to vote, they had more access to jobs; there were very progressive labor laws dealing with women, childcare, maternity leave, etc.; and how that shifted again after Nasser died and Mubarack took over and was trying to make an accommodation in the interest of the fundamentalists where on the one hand he was giving the message, and Anwar Sadat began this, that women should be part of the paid economy, and on the other side conflicting the message by saying women should be back at home taking care of the family. For me it was an interesting study because it emerged from my work in the classroom. Actually the second book I wrote was a slender volume on a period in Egyptian history during which I think civil society was really beginning to grow. And I wrote this book because there was nothing I could easily assign to students, and I really believe that the conventional interpretation of the period missed out on any grassroots political and social activity. So I come from the practice where teaching and research really inform one another. I continued when I did the research for my last book while I was still at home in Cross and I finished writing it when I was Vice President for Academic Affairs, and it was very hard to finish the book, but I finished it; just the demands on my time were such that it was very hard. But while I was Vice President for Academic Affairs at U Mass I continued to teach seminars in Middle Eastern politics. I would like to teach at CUNY. I will not teach this year because I can barely manage the day. I got a call when I was in the car yesterday going to a meeting from my daughter who’s in college; she said, "I sent you an e-mail," and I said, "I have not turned my computer on today." So I would like to continue working in the classroom and would like to continue not only thinking of myself as an academic administrator but practicing that, because I think it is critically important that we understand the work that faculty do empirically and practically understand the contributions that are made and the challenges that you all have. Clearly, an administrator teaching one course is out of the trenches, but I think it’s an important reality. I don’t know when I can make good on the pledge that I’ve made to myself, but I do hope that in my second year there will be some space to make that happen.
So I’ve come to CUNY with a faculty perspective. As Susan said, I came from an environment that’s not very different from the environment that you all are in and we are all in, where faculty governance and faculty unions are active. It is not Pollyanna to say that we had a very productive relationship, that is the governance folks, the union folks, and the administrators, and that’s because at the end of the day we all had the same goals and interests, and those were to ensure that our students were getting the best education possible, the most up-to-date, exciting, cutting edge education possible, to make sure our faculty were supported as well as we could support them. People are not going to be satisfied and happy 100% of the time, and that includes administrators as well, but at the end of the day the goals are the same. And we can choose to see life in that positive partnership way or we can choose to see one another as adversaries. My style is not to see people as adversaries but to work collaboratively. I start out with that principle and that assumption and hope that that can be turned into reality. And so I’ve come to CUNY, I’m learning, I’m in the embryonic stages of this; this is a very complex and complicated system. The good news is that there’s not a whole lot new under the sun in public higher education; we all suffer the same kinds of difficulties, we suffer constrained resources, bad budgets, buildings that need repair, space issues, although New York suffers more of that than probably any place in North America. We understand that there are challenges and there are decisions to be made, and I operate also on the assumption that budgets are not just about numbers, they are about peoples’ values and principles and what they care about. I spent a couple of days a week in the summer at CUNY talking to people and reading and learning and I was apprised of the Legislative Budget, which was very rich and positive, and I thought imagine coming as an administrator and there’ll be money to spend and we’ll get off to a good start, I’m so pleased. Then I went on vacation, and you all know the reality that the $33 million that the Legislature added to the CUNY budget was not vetoed by the Governor but the University does not have access to that $33 million; we expect to have access to $11 million of it but we don’t know what the situation is going to be definitively, and that means we have a $20 million hole that we’re trying to plug, and that really changes the way we will have to think about programming and new initiatives this year. I can take a new look at budget allocations because as a new person I don’t understand how things go, so we can start from scratch and look at what we should be allocating money to in Academic Affairs and maybe what we should not be allocating money to. But the assumption that we make is how can we create the finest university for students? For someone who was first generation to go to college, I had a world class education; I went to Harvard, Brandeis and Oxford and had access to the best libraries and finest students and professors, and I fundamentally believe that every student deserves a world class education, and that we have an obligation to provide students with the best education possible; more than the best education we can afford, the best education possible. And so I came to CUNY because everything I read and heard about CUNY is that faculty care deeply about the students and administrators care deeply about the institution that they work in. My question, and John Mogulescu can attest to this, to people in the Office of Academic Affairs at 80th Street is what’s the value added that we provide? How do we support the campuses so that they can do the work better? We have to be creative in this budget environment and I’m hopeful that the CUNY budget will be revisited after the November elections, both the Operating Budget and the Capital Budget, but we don’t know, so we’re kind of in a holding pattern until we actually see whether or not there is any redress. I’m interested in learning more about what goes on in the campuses in terms of research and graduate education I had a nice visit today with some folks at the Graduate School, and I’m interested in undergraduate education, especially in the first two years where we offer a liberal education to our students, and I’m interested in the connections between higher education and the K-12 sector. I believe that the students in the K-12 sector are our students in public higher education, we just see them at a different time (Tape turned)… math science, in languages, to choose teaching as a profession, even for the first few years of their professional lives, find a way to recruit students. I’d like CUNY to be a model of urban education so that we feel as though we are providing the City of New York with the best urban educators found any place in this country. I’m interested in the academic programs that are offered on the campuses, what exists, what’s missing, what we no longer need to do. And so there’s always lots of work to do in higher education. I have always found that the way to a faculty member’s heart is through the students and that faculty care the most about students, and when we think about what we do here, we focus on how we educate the next generation I think that we can create a very strong, lasting partnership, as we think of what students should be exposed to, what they learn and what they should be able to do, what they should know. And I’m interested in new forms of pedagogy that deliver education to students in different ways that take into account different learning styles, so for example we use technology in the classroom. I think it’s sometimes poopooed as a fad and a trend, but I honestly believe that students learn differently, and there’s literature to support that, and how we can think about pedagogies that are tailored to the needs of students is very important. So I look forward to working with faculty, with the administrators on your campuses. If I ever get to my computer I will even answer e-mails if you write to me. I would like to hear your views on things, and I hope that we will find common ground in the interest of faculty and of students, and I have every reason to believe that’s doable and possible and real. So I would like to start here and ask if you have any questions about Egypt or…(applause).
Professor Pecorino (Philosophy, Queensborough CC) – First let me welcome you to our University. Second, let me say that you’ve made a favorable impression on me - you don’t know me yet, there’s a punch line - in particular I have to say you’ve got a lot of spunk for somebody who’s only here about a month and already you have an aspiration to be promoted to the highest rank our University has, a member of our faculty; I admire that. To become a member of the faculty usually there’s a screening process. We ask questions. We won’t ask you the tricky one on the budget, it’s too soon yet, and I won’t ask you to fill that budget gap by taking on the ridiculously high teaching load of the community college instructors in our system. You’ve been a member of the faculty, a member of the administration; you call yourself an academic administrator. Do you think there’s an institutional responsibility for a place such as ours to give a very strong mention to the idea of academic freedom and all that it entails? / Vice Chancellor Botman – My understanding is that the University has such a policy. / Professor Pecorino – Oh really! Suppose it didn’t, do you think it should, and if it does have a sort of semi-policy do you think there should be a very clear policy? / Vice Chancellor Botman – What I would say is I’d like to see what we have and see if there’s something wrong with it. Do we have a policy? / Chair – From 1946.
Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I also want to welcome you. Let me indicate what I feel is the most important activity of an Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, and that is to be an advocate for academic affairs, especially in a university where you have people advocating for everything under the sun that is not academic. To start off with an easy question, I noticed that you came from U Mass, which has 58,000 students and 4,000 faculty. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Actually, to tell you the truth, those numbers are old. It’s more like 3,000 faculty. / Professor Levine – Still, we have 219,000 students and roughly 5,700 faculty. There are many people in this room old enough to remember when we had 15,000 faculty. Now I’m quite certain that at Holy Cross the ration was far…/ Vice Chancellor Botman – 175 faculty for about 2,500 students. / Professor Levine - As an advocate for academic affairs what we want to see is someone advocating to rebuild the ranks of the faculty. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I think you’re absolutely right. My understanding – remember, you all know much more than I – is that there has been an enormous commitment to new faculty and that the community colleges for example have received authorization to hire 300 new faculty lines. I think that is probably the largest infusion of faculty in one year maybe across the country. So that’s a very good sign and that commitment to rebuilding the faculty should continue. / Professor Levine – And we hope it’s extended to the senior colleges. / Vice Chancellor Botman – There have been lines to the senior colleges through the cluster hires. I don’t say that the numbers are comparable but that new hiring has gone on. You’re absolutely right, a university is only as great as its faculty, and a great faculty that has an unbearable workload is something of a challenge or contradiction even, so I’m not in disagreement.
Professor Sandi Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – Well, you had the one, two and here’s the punch. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Why am I not surprised? / Professor Cooper – I have to live up to the reputation, which has been disseminated to you apparently. I’m interested in the short Vitae that indicates here towards the bottom that you crafted and negotiated a post-tenure policy in Massachusetts and I was wondering if you could give us the details of this, and what made the Union accept it. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I’m actually glad that you mentioned this because I’m proud of having done this at U Mass. Let me give you the background. In Massachusetts there was something equivalent to the Regents (we don’t have a Regents), a Board of Higher Education that was lambasting faculty, that really saw the faculty as the enemy of higher education; they didn’t work enough, they didn’t publish, if they published it was nonsense, and there were actually people making the most outrageous statements in the press, which was very demoralizing for faculty, very bad for recruiting, and just wrong in every way. I was of the opinion that unless we took control of the situation the Board of Higher Education, or maybe even our Board of Trustees (our Board of Trustees were not making these comments but who knew what the future would bring), if we didn’t take hold of the situation a form of post-tenure review would have been imposed upon the University, and that worried me because it would have meant that we would not have had any ability to participate in its creation. And so I went to the campuses and had meetings with faculty, faculty governance, the faculty union, and you have to remember that union politics at U Mass is more complicated than at CUNY because there are five campuses, four unionized, three different faculty unions; you’re dealing with three independent groups. I made the pitch to faculty, who I absolutely believed at the University of Massachusetts were productive in a research sense, they were making important contributions in the classrooms, and we should sing it off the rooftops and not be afraid of accountability. We should show the naysayers that in fact U Mass faculty are doing fabulous work. And then I also said that it’s also a help as a management tool. What did I mean by that? I meant that increasingly, I don’t know if there’s any belief in this at CUNY, workload should be seen not so much as an individual entity but a departmental entity, and I wanted to give departments more strength in thinking collectively about teaching and committee work and how they approached external funding etc., and I thought post-tenure review could be a help to faculty and to management, administrators on the campus. Now I have to be honest and say I had one union faculty leader say to me "You will get post-tenure review over my dead body." I said, "I’m digging the grave because it’s happening and you’ve got to come with me because it’s going to happen." And then later he came back to me and he said, "I reacted too impulsively." We started dialogues with the union and faculty governance, but mostly with the union because we had to bargain this. I mean the Trustees could have mandated it but I pleaded with them not to do this and I said we should be upfront and do this at the bargaining table. The American Association for Higher Education had an interest in post-tenure review and was looking at states that were engaged in this, and they looked at Massachusetts and they realized that we were actually a model for other states because the administration worked so closely in collaboration with the faculty, and in fact the union said this was the most enlightened form of collective bargaining that they had ever experienced because they were part of the process. The union representatives and administrators, I and others, would go to national conferences and actually present together. No other system in the country had that happen. The union folks and the administrators were the same panel talking about the same thing. You know I’ve never had an opportunity to tell my colleagues what I’ve been doing after I got tenure, and through the post-tenure review process, which asked me to look back in time for five to seven years and look forward in time, I could tell my colleagues what I had accomplished and what I hoped to work on in the next few years. So it’s in place and there were people who said this is a way to cut faculty, do away with tenure. None of that was true. In fact, in my view, in the political environment of Massachusetts, post-tenure review saved tenure. And I am firmly of the belief that this was a way that we protected tenure at U Mass, and it still exists. / Professor Cooper – I’ll follow up. In the event of a negative review for somebody who’s tenured, what are the options? / Vice Chancellor Botman – There are a number of remediation steps. We did not put a termination component into post-tenure review, but we required that the faculty member work with the department chair on a way of remediating the condition, and that meant the faculty member wasn’t engaged in the classroom, and there would be an offer of the teaching and learning center helping that faculty member redesign courses. If the faculty member wanted to veer off in a different research area there was money and release time associated with this so that the faculty could shift disciplines or areas of research. What we found was not that anyone was terminated, because no one was ever terminated in this policy, was that faculty who were non-performers, who hardly showed up for class or really were egregious, or even people who kind of lost interest in it but were just hanging around, a disproportionately high number of people retired voluntarily.
Professor Stephan Baumrin (Philosophy, Graduate School and University Center) – The ratio, even given the drop from 4,000 to 3,000, on the order of the 20 students to 1 faculty member, the ratio here is about 35 to 1. And while 35 to 1 is not stunning for some things, for teaching it’s pretty bad. / Vice Chancellor Botman – There’s a point of clarity that we have to make and then you can continue, because I might forget it. Remember that at U Mass these are four-year comprehensive institutions, but there are no community colleges. If you look at the community colleges in Massachusetts you will see a more comparable statistic to the one that you’re describing. So it is not fair to conflate the senior colleges with the community colleges just for statistical purposes. / Professor Baumrin – We started at 21. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I’m not quibbling except to say it’s not quite the way you describe it. / Professor Baumrin – I understand, the figures might be slightly changed, but that isn’t the point. On many campuses throughout the country the Dean is the faculty’s messenger to the senior administration. Some places it’s the Chairs who are the messengers to the department’s Dean. We might think of our Presidents as messengers to the central administration, but that’s just not a fact of life at this University. They are rather the messengers of the senior administration to the faculty. Your position is unique in the University and I think about whether or not you are our messenger to the central administration or the central administration’s messenger to us is what we’re really interested in. You might reflect about that for a moment if you want. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I take seriously what you said, Stefan, and history is not often at comfort, as historian/political scientist, but I took that role very seriously at U Mass and I was for the longest time the only academic in the central office and I was known by faculty as an advocate for faculty. In an environment where we had not one single faculty member on the Board of Trustees, and we had not one single faculty member in the central administration, I do believe faculty need an advocate, so I am not in disagreement with you. Having said that, reasonable people can disagree and there will be times when we will disagree, but I like faculty-- I am one. There’s a natural tension between campuses and system offices, there’s a natural tension between faculty and administrators, I understand that, but faculty who become administrators should have that dual debt today, because you don’t have to have just a single identity, and I think that dual identity can satisfy the scenario that you were describing.
Professor Nkechi Agwu (Mathematics, BMCC)– First of all, welcome. When you were addressing us you mentioned that you were interested in undergraduate education, the first two years of college, and I was wondering what you see as the important issues in undergraduate education in the first two years. / Vice Chancellor Botman – I think it’s important for faculty at campuses to sit together and to talk about how we can broadly educate students, how we can teach them to write better. So I’m interested not in a set curriculum but in skills and knowledge, how we teach students to want to be lifelong learners, to think mathematically, think creatively, write well, understand the world, understand the intersections between disciplines and the creation of knowledge that takes place on the intersection of standard disciplines. We did general education when I was at U Mass too, I probably didn’t put that on the list, but I was a catalyst for change in general education. For me what that meant was not that every campus has to adopt a standard curriculum but rather an encouragement and support for faculty who come together and try to wrestle with what students, especially our students in public higher education, should be exposed to in literature, in history, in mathematics, in science, in social science, that would encourage them; for community college students, encourage them to think about baccalaureate work, for undergraduates to think about graduate school or the professions. What does it mean to be an educated human being, what does it mean to encourage people to want to read as they’re growing up and maturing? My interest in general education is really encouraging faculty to come together and work this out in decentralized ways. I don’t have a blueprint. I mean I could write a blueprint but that’s not the way I would approach it because I have confidence that faculty are going to do the right job. So the basic skills, an introduction to the world we live in …
Chair O’Malley – Any other questions? Thank you so much. So you’ll be meeting with the science faculty I think later this week, right? When is the meeting? Friday. We’ll see you then. Thanks. / Vice Chancellor Botman – Thank you.
A. Chair O’Malley: – Let me quickly do my report. First, we have found a lot of problems with our e-mail addresses, they bounce back. How about if I passed this around and you checked your e-mail and changed it if it is incorrect? On the table there was a notice of our conference on academic freedom on Friday, December 3. It’s called "Defining and Defending Academic Freedom." We have two very fine speakers. Robert O’Neil and Matthew Finken. Joan Scott has also asked to come, and Jordan Kurland, Assistant Secretary of the AAUP, is also attending. This conference arose because of the Mohammed Yousry case, that is the adjunct who was removed from his classroom at York for being the translator of Lynn Stewart. I don’t have to go in detail here. I could put it out on our listserv if you want more details. The AAUP has done an investigative report on this. Matthew Finken, who chaired the report, will come to the conference and speak. Anyone who comes to the conference will get a copy of that report which will be published in Academe. We had a meeting of the Academic Freedom Committee and the Conference Committee at 5:00 today, and some very good talk and good planning went on. Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Schaffer has written a response, which you will also get at the conference. However, VC Schaffer and the Chancellor are saying that there is no violation of academic freedom. The AAUP Report disagrees. That means we could be on the road to censure. At this conference it is going to be very important for us to talk about the issues and also see if possibly we can convince the University to change its ways in the treatment of adjuncts so that we are not censored. It’s a question of due process for adjunct and a question of expanding the definition of academic freedom to include the right to teach. The report says that you cannot take away someone’s right to teach if he or she has they have been proven a fine teacher, York College all very much wanted to keep Mohammed Yousry. It’s an interesting case.
A couple of other things. We had committee night last Tuesday. I thought that the committees have gotten off to a very fine start.
Privacy Policy. Is Professor Sullivan here? No, he is not. / Professor Baumrin - Professor Pecorino is here and he has a much better grasp of it than I do. / Chair - Just be quick. / Professor Baumrin - Just quick? Sullivan, Pecorino, and myself were the faculty, President Muyskens at Queens, President Williams at City for the presidents, an Assistant General Counsel for Rick Schaffer's office, Rick Schaffer, Allan Dobrin, and a Dean
for Research whose name is Gillian Small. After a considerable amount of vexatious discussion, I detected that things will turn out well in the end. / Chair O'Malley - Say what the issue is. / Professor Pecorino - I'm member of the Vice Chancellor's task force on computer use and privacy. The issue was that faculty think of academic freedom as encompassing privacy to conduct our affairs and as something that's obvious and well established, whereas the administration seems to be thinking of it as something of a
largesse on their part to extend it to us. We from the faculty said, "of course it's taken for granted that we can't conduct what we do if we have people looking over our shoulder, so privacy and confidentiality is essential to a lot of what we do." Others took it that we do not have the Fourth Amendment protection-- that's way too strong; we are in a typical
employer-employee relationship. But I attempted to introduce no, we're not, we're faculty at an academic institution that has something called academic freedom to allow us as faculty to do what we do. And it looks like they would probably play out the practical level. What people ordinarily do in any work setting is probably what's going to be established here, except on the very extreme and limited circumstances we can presume that no one in the administration is going to be looking into work, e-mail or phone
conversations, or mail, and most likely only if there's some external agency with a warrant that compels them to do so. One of the disturbing things to me as a philosopher is they introduced from the outset the idea that of course you can presume a certain amount of privacy except where wrongdoing may be taking place. That immediately raises up our hackles and we wanted a definition of "wrongdoing". Was it moral wrongdoing, civil wrongdoing, criminal wrongdoing, and apparently they were concerned about whatever they took wrongdoing to mean as "wrongdoing". And we thought we're going to have
to limit that pretty severely. So my colleague is more optimistic and also more experienced than I am in these matters, and it may turn out that what I hope to call reason will prevail, that anything other than a reasonable policy is unworkable anyway, but it is regretted if they think that academic freedom is not something that's involved here. / Chair O'Malley - In this case I think Dobrin is on our side. / Professor Pecorino - I think it's a matter of practicality, not so much because it's academic freedom. He doesn't want to read other people's mail; it would be a waste of time. And we gave him a few scenarios of potential fragments that some technical program might allow them to view I described a possible situation where someone says seize the President's office at 9 o'clock, kill President at 11 o'clock as a fragment. And then the other one was I'll have sex with you for a grade of A. In any event, they were really concerned about the president maybe being killed, even though it could have been a line from a humorous play written by somebody, and didn't care at all about the other potential wrongdoing, which illustrated that it's a matter of interpretation what wrongdoing is. / Chair O'Malley - Thank you. We will keep you posted on the Privacy Policy.
The Master Plan – Bill Crain reminded me about the hearing for the Master Plan. The Commissioner doesn’t like hearings, so I am writing a letter to all of the Regents, which should go out tomorrow, saying why there should be a hearing on the Master Plan and that the faculty should be able to present additions to the Master Plan.
Other things – Tenure. In a conversation with the Chancellor today he said he wanted to open up the tenure issue once again. Over the summer a Hunter faculty member who had just won the I Tatti award had been told that she could accept this wonderful award from Harvard University that provides for a year in Florence but that she had to start her tenure clock again when she returned. The Chancellor was very upset and called me at home to say, "This will never happen," He went on and on about how this was an unfair policy. This morning I pressed him to put this policy in writing so this never happens again, whereupon he said this morning, "I want to open up the whole tenure question again and this will be part of it." So I’m just informing you of this.
A CUNY-wide symposium on patents, will be held Friday, October 22 at the Graduate School. If any Senator here is a holder of a patent and would like to work on this, let me know. School of Professional Studies – they’re driving me crazy. My feeling is that SPS just wants the governing board to approve the courses. Academic decisions are being made and there’s no consultation. A faculty member arrived to teach on SPS course that he had been told was to be like an honors course, and he discovered that there were College Now (high school) students and CLIP students who hadn’t passed the reading and writing skills tests. The governing board was not consulted on this. We have a meeting tomorrow, and I’ve organized some members of the governing board to start to change this. But faculty in ESL who know that CLIP students are not allowed to take credit courses. Allowing CLIP students to take credit courses has not gone through any kind of governance.
Faculty Satisfaction Survey – The Chancellor this morning said, yes, he will get David Crook, who is the Dean for Institutional Research, to get it in shape, and it will be out sometime this semester. It was piloted at Queens by Dean Savage.
The SAT craziness – I don’t really want to get into this but I have never seen such craziness. I put out on the Senate Forum that CUNY students, I found, were bright, eager to learn, but not always well prepared. Immediately many administrators, Provosts, Deans joined from all different colleges the Senate Forum, and then suddenly messages were sent out to faculties, "If you can say that your students are well-prepared, would you please forward it to Susan O’Malley." Anyway, one faculty member even gave us the e-mail directive from her Chair. We have all kinds of interesting responses. I had no agenda when I made my comment. If students are better prepared that’s lovely; it just hasn’t been my experience. I think the responses differ mixed according to the colleges. On retrospect it’s probably a part of the soon-to-be-announced fundraising drive. The Chancellory is going to announce a billion dollar fundraising drive, and thinks it’s better for fundraising if it is believed that CUNY has been turned around. CUNY was a wreck, you know, and now and students are much better prepared this will helping raising. But it may be that students are better prepared. We don’t need to get into that, but it was a pretty crazy week. At the Board of Trustees yesterday there was a new person, hired to change CUNY’s image. In other words, the CUNY image is tired, the logo, and so we’re getting a new brand name, which will help us raise money. Now if this isn’t corporatization…, but that’s a whole other discussion. Maybe it will help, I don’t know, but anyway, enough of that. Eda, you would like to do an announcement.
Professor Hastick (Social and Behavioral Sciences, Medgar Evers College) – Thank you, Susan. Colleagues I will be brief. Everyone in this room is fully aware of what’s happening in the Caribbean, and Florida -- disaster by several hurricanes: Francis, Ivan, and now Jeanne. There is a flier in the back which outlines some of the activities that are taking place, particularly in the Caribbean community. Several organizing activities are taking place under the leadership of the Caribbean-American Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I’ve shared that information with you. But what I wanted was to just take 60 seconds to ask for your help in helping other people. As we are aware the United States has FEMA, Federal Emergency Management Agency. The Caribbean nations do not really have something comparable, and for those of us who’ve traveled there, we know that the economy is limited usually to agriculture, tourism, etc. I’m making a special appeal at this time for Granada, and let me tell you why. 90% of the island has been devastated, the economy has been wiped out, and a group of Prime Ministers, met about a week ago in an emergency session and they determined that Granada needed the most help at this time. Towards that end I’ve taken it upon myself to organize Social Workers for Caribbean Disaster Relief. I have a social work background and I’m in the process of developing a Bachelor’s in Social Work degree for Medgar Evers College in the department of Social and Behavioral Sciences. To date I have met with 19 social workers, several from within CUNY, some external to CUNY, the National Association of Social Workers, Association of Black Social Workers and so on, and this afternoon we had what we call an administrative team meeting. Six of those 19 have met to address the accountability issues, how we’re going to raise funds etc. We have determined that we want to focus on children, the most vulnerable as we see it in these islands, and essentially what I’m asking you to do is to help me identify from within CUNY faculty governance leaders; we know there’s a program at College of Staten Island, York, Lehman, but there are other social workers within CUNY and perhaps among your friends, colleagues, sponsors, relatives. My e-mail is on the master list. If you would just e-mail them, send me their names, I will send them the letter which the administrative team put together today, and it’s basically an appeal to asking for help at this time, because we are all going to get very busy and very shortly hurricane season will be over and we’ll be back to business as usual and we’ll forget; it’s human nature to forget. But as social workers we have decided that we have short-term goals to try to get some relief immediately, and we have some contacts within the Caribbean. Many of us have traveled in the Caribbean, have done research and so on there, and are working with our colleagues in those islands to get the emergency relief to them. So if you’d be kind enough just to help me identify social workers take a copy of the fact sheet if you haven’t or if you need one, and my e-mail is hastick@mec.cuny.edu. I would certainly appreciate all help that you can offer at this time. / Chair O’Malley– Thank you. Is Syd Lefkoe here? She wants me to announce that there’s a Disability Issues and Quality of Life Committee Monday, October 4, at Hunter College in room 922 East.
V. New Business:
Resolution on Open Access: Professor Pecorino (Queensborough CC) – It’s simplified now because the University in the Master Plan has already said it’s going to join the coalition and establish the archiving thing that we were recommending that they do, so the Council of Chief Librarians and the University signed on to it and now we the faculty were needed to make it work. The committee is asking for the UFS to endorse just two simple ideas. One is that we as the University become a member of any one of the international accords saying it supports this move to the new paradigm for open access, and the second is that the UFS supports efforts that will be undertaken by our own library to promote the idea amongst faculty that what we ought to do is, whenever possible, publish in an open access journal and otherwise publish wherever we need to and also self-archive. It’s that simple. I spoke yesterday with the new university librarian, Mr. Curtis Kendrick. He’s thoroughly in support of this and he will be working in his own way to help this effort, because he sees, as I do, it’s a sort of an independent ability. We’re in early stages of the progressive awareness of a dying institution, Elsevere, etc. that this is really something that’s not going to be stopped. The Internet is here and it gives the alternative publishing mode. So here this evening, once again, finally we can get maybe an action taken on this, where the Senate is asked to endorse those two resolves at the end of the single page. / Chair O’Malley – So people have copies of that? Yes, OK. Do I have a second? Any discussion? / Unidentified (Professor Baumrin) – I asked this question before. What are the arguments against it before we just unanimously pass it there have got to be some things in it for discussion. / Professor Pecorino – I think we’ve heard expressions of concern last time by our guest speaker who pointed out that where small societies are behind the publication journals, if people suddenly moved to the new paradigm then they’re sort of up the creek. However, it’s not going to be all of a sudden and even he said when he was here that he accepted self-archiving. The New England Journal of Medicine was holding out that it refused to accept any submission that was self-archived; now it will. So one by one the various forms of publication are moving over to accepting the new paradigm and I’m just asking for us to endorse this in the sense of we’ll support what all librarians are going to be doing in furthering the effort of education amongst us, the faculty, to consider this shift now.
Professor Bill Crain (Psychology, City College) – I’ll speak against it for the sake of an antiquated approach to life. I edit a journal, I try to get the journal in my library, and I had several faculty at the University publishing in the journal. I cannot get a subscription at my own college if it’s on the Internet in any form. That’s our college’s policy, and I see that as a cunning policy for financial reasons. I like to hold a journal in my hand, I like the feel of it, I like to look at the pages, I like to take it to bed with me, I like to sit with it, I like books in pages. When I read things on the Internet I start getting headaches, blurry eyes, I think my eyesight is gone, and I think there are real problems with the electronic media and I don’t encourage it. Those are my objections and I’m voting no.
Chair O’Malley– Anyone else want to speak? Al, do you want to speak at all on this issue? No, you don’t. Anyone else?
Professor Baumrin – This is so embarrassing. Rarely do I read. On one side I agree with Crain that books are good, journals are good, but Phil represents the storm surge of the future. He’s been at this now two years and we managed to stave it off by dint of our vocal administrative inefficiency. And here it is, coming out for vote finally, and now he has this magnificent argument that he didn’t have before, our own university librarian is on his side. So there’ll be two votes against this, but I think that we have to vote for it. Crain and I are voting no. He’s likely to go "don’t tip the natives, you’ll spoil them." He thinks that we’ll be able to stave off the destruction of the journal by City College, even along with the City University. That’s just not going to happen. This is not that little corner of the world that’s going to make sure that books and journals are preserved.
Professor Michael Barnhart (History, Philosophy and Political Science, Kingsborough Community College) – I’m not sure I understood exactly why you’re voting no, but I did go back and look at the record of our discussion with Martin Blume, I think was his name, and I looked particularly because I remembered that we had a colleague from York, I don’t see him here tonight, Professor Lewis, and he raised some rather alarming possibilities in his questioning of Martin Blume, including authors losing control over their work, the possibility that this would move us along the road towards the University looking at our work as "for hire" and no longer our own, and there were some weighty principles. And rather than this man disagreeing with you his testimony is all "I agree, I agree." And so I really feel I don’t understand this issue even after that presentation and perhaps tabling this would be the best thing, I think, because I really would like to understand the implications of this before I vote on it. / Chair O’Malley– Motion to table. All right, then it is tabled. Is there a vote to table? No vote to table. / Unidentified – It still withdraws it from the agenda. / Chair O’Malley – We may withdraw it for a future date. Why doesn’t our parliamentarian, Andrea McArdle, you come up here tell us what we have to do, then we could do it, and then go out into the rain. / Professor Pecorino – Remember we no longer need the University Faculty Senate. Whatever’s going to be is going to be. / Chair O’Malley – The librarians have already decided. Is that all right for us to just withdraw this? / How many people would like to table this motion, raise your hands? How many people do not want to table the motion? Motion tabled.
Any new business? OK, see you next month.