THE TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SECOND PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK. September 26, 2000

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1 THE TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SECOND PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK September 26, 2000 Chair Sohmer called the session to order at 6:30 p.m. in Room 630 of John Jay College. Present were Senators from the following campuses: Baruch: Hill, McCall, Pollard, and Alternate Reusch; BMCC: Friedman, Herz, Neis, Price, Vozick, Young, and Alternate Martin; Bronx CC: Fuld, Read, Skinner, and Alternate Brennan; Brooklyn: Bell, Jacobson, Kahan, London, Shapiro, and Tobey; CCNY: Connorton, Crain, and Sohmer; CSI: Cooper, Levine, and Alternate Petratos; CUNY Law School: none; Graduate School: Baumrin and Philipp; Hostos CC: Canate; Hunter: Doss, Krishnamachari, Steinberg, Wallach, and Wonsek; John Jay: Bohigian, Clarke, Davenport, Kaplowitz, and Alternate Davenport; Kingsborough CC: Farrell, Galvin, Goodkin, O Malley, and Richter; LaGuardia CC: Beaky, Gallagher, Mettler, and Reitano; Lehman: Avani, Bullaro, Feinerman, and Alternate Mineka; Medgar Evers: Harris-Hastick, Umolu, and Alternate Leocal; NYC Technical: Cermele, Hounion, and Walter; Queens: Hemmes and Kulkarni; Queensborough CC: Barbanel, Greenbaum, Weiss, and Alternate Tully; York: Coleman, Cooper, and Kirkpatrick. Governance Leaders present: Cooper (York), Feinerman (Lehman), Hemmes (Queens), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), O Malley (Kingsborough), Perlstein (BMCC), and Tobey (Brooklyn). Excused were Davidson, Frisz, King, Richardson, Rodriguez, and Yousef. Executive Director Phipps and Administrative Assistant Pasela were present. I. Approval of the Agenda: The agenda was adopted as proposed. II. III. Approval of the Minutes of June 6, 2000: The Minutes were approved as distributed. Reports: [recorded in Reports & Deliberations]. a. Chair (oral and written). b. Chancellor (oral). c. Representatives of the Board Committees (written). d. Liaisons on Campus Conditions (oral and written). IV. Approval of UFS Standing Committee Slate V. Annual Committee Reports (written) VI. VII. Invited Guest Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer New Business 1

2 Subject to Senate Approval REPORTS & DELIBERATIONS OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND SEVENTY SECOND PLENARY SESSION OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK September 26, 2000 a. Chair: This is a plea. We will need the input of the various discipline councils. Some of them have functioned well, some have not functioned at all, and some have never been organized. We will be soliciting, through the chairs of the various departments, the organization and enhancement of the ongoing discipline councils. We will possibly make discipline councils that have not met. There are academic fields that are either not speaking, or speaking past each other to the point where they can t make reasonable input as to what the attitude of the faculty is toward a lot of questions. On the 24 th will be Committee night. This is taking place at Lehman College in the Bronx, across the street from the reservoir. There is much parking, a block from the train station, and it is a safe neighborhood. Are there any questions that have some immediacy about them? Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) I wish to comment on the report from the Doctoral Education Committee. It describes in the inequitable funding support for and financial aid to, doctoral students at CUNY, in contrast to SUNY. According to this report, they did not receive help from various administrators in obtaining information. At the last meeting of the Council of Faculty Governance Leaders, Chancellor Goldstein stated, if faculty wish to make suggestions for the Budget Request, they should make them directly to him, or to the Budget Committee of this group. I would suggest that this is a perfect example of where a faculty committee should come up with a proposal and present it to the Chancellor for inclusion in the Budget Request for next year. If you don t want to do it yourself, give it to me and I will hand it to the appropriate person. Professor S. Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) I served as the Executive Committee liaison to the Doctoral Education Committee. I will attest to the fact that we spent 18 months in an effort to collect this data. The faculty at SUNY are not exactly forthcoming. The truth is, the SUNY graduate student is almost entirely supported. The CUNY graduate student is almost entirely self-supported on the average. We could just not get the numbers for it. This inequity arises from the fact that once upon a time CUNY was free: the tuition was free. When it was free, the graduate students had a minimum set of fees they paid. Once tuition was introduced, however, no one seemed to have bothered to line up the different scales between CUNY and SUNY. This is the best that I could come up with. We had an enormous amount of difficulty trying to get data. I do know anecdotally that nearly every graduate student in the history departments at the four university centers of SUNY are totally supported. I think the science graduate students are as well. Anyone who has taught at our Graduate Center knows that our students are scrambling, they are working, and they have much higher rents to pay, than a student in a graduate student dormitory at Stony Brook. We really did wish very much to do something about this. But without data, you can t prove it. I don t know where else to go to get 2

3 it. / Chair Sohmer It is also the fact that the support at SUNY for the graduate students is categorized in the budget as financial aid. Somehow or other, that magic word gets money for SUNY students, which doesn t work for CUNY students. b. Chancellor: Good evening. I will stay with the tradition of making my remarks very brief. I announced at the Board meeting last night, that we are going to defer presenting a budget message to the Board until November. This is to give more time to get ideas from this body and other constituencies in the University. I look forward to working with the Committee on Budget for the Senate. When I worked with the Governance Leaders a couple of weeks back, I stated that I want to see ideas that you might have and incorporate them into the budget presentation for the Governor. We will meet with the Governor in mid-october. We have had preliminary meetings with the Secretary to the Governor and other staff members in the Governor s office to outline the parameters of what we think will be needed by the University. I reported to this body that I am optimistic that we are going to get consideration for some of the things that are so fundamental to the health of this institution. Of course the mantra that we are continuing to cite is full-time faculty. We are going to stay with the Master Plan, and see if we can get that done over the next 5-7 years. In addition to talking about full-time faculty, we are discussing academic support personnel. So many of you have brought to my attention that over the years you have lost considerable numbers of academic support personnel. All of us who work in classrooms know how vitally important this is to the daily life of the faculty, and also for complementing activities for students. We re going to incorporate that as well. The third area is expanding our use of technology on the campuses. The thing that I am most interested in, is not so much what people refer to as a distance learning paradigm for instruction, although I think we should do that and do it more aggressively than we do, but I want to bring technology into the life of the classroom for our students. This is something that brings greater depth and resources to the learning of students. I use the term asynchronous learning environment within a classroom, because variation is a way of life in all of our classrooms since students are learning at different speeds. Technology can be used in a very effective way to create a different kind of learning environment. That is expensive stuff. You don t just put a computer in a classroom, do some wiring, and it s done. The real challenge here is not so much the technology and architecture, but faculty development. Another area that needs attention is our legacy systems, our information systems that you ve heard me lament about for some time. It is appalling how difficult it is to get basic information that integrates other kinds of information. I am hearing this from several of our campuses, and I am seeing several of you nodding. We can t find people to replace those who are leaving, because the people we need to hire are not even trained in the languages that these platforms are built upon. They are languages that people no longer study or are interested in learning. We have to move much more aggressively in this arena. It is going to take a lot of money. 3

4 I heard Sandi as I walked in, and she is absolutely right -- we have to find a way to support graduate students to a much greater extent on our campuses than we have. This is probably the hardest problem for us to solve. We are talking with some developers now about opportunities for building subsidized housing for graduate students. This serves as a great impedance, in this system, to attract the best and most able graduate students. Because coming to this city and finding a good place to live becomes a heavy burden. These are kinds of things that we really need to be doing. I am going to stop at this point. I have a lot of other things to share with you. But I know that Borough President Ferrer is be coming in a little while. I want to give all of you an opportunity to query me any way that you want. With your permission, I will open up the microphones to questions. Rick Schaffer, our newly installed General Counsel and Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs, is here. We are lucky to have a man of this stature. Rick, it is good to see you, and thank you for coming. All of you know Executive Vice Chancellor Louise Mirrer, who is here with us as well. Professor O Malley (English, Kingsborough Community College) Could you discuss the budget reductions in the community colleges. What caused them? And how are the colleges sharing them? / Chancellor Goldstein I didn t know that we had budget reductions. / Professor O Malley The enrollment is down / Chancellor Goldstein Enrollment is up overall in the University, and way up, even more so than I reported a couple of weeks ago. The budget for the community colleges is all about enrollment. That is not the case in the senior colleges, as all of you know. / Professor O Malley But for this year there was a $5.6 million reduction in the budget for the community colleges. That is from the enrollment last year. In my college what they are doing is cutting the travel for faculty to conferences. / Chancellor Goldstein From last year to this year there was a big drop in enrollment, which affects the base budget. What this is really showing us is that, with all due respect, many of us were asleep at the switch. There is absolutely no reason why, from last year to the current year, we lost enrollment in our community colleges. We showed a capacity this summer with a brief amount of activity, in really two months, to turn around an enrollment deficit that was projected by some to be as high as 20%. I even heard numbers of 30%, but of course they were poorly defined estimates. What they were based on, I don t know, but people were making those judgments. At the end of the day our enrollment for first-time freshmen at least at the community colleges is up by close to 10%. If you don t enroll the students you are going to lose dollars. If you enroll the students, you are going to get the dollars. / Professor O Malley I was just talking about the reduction this year, the $5.6 million. / Chancellor Goldstein - If you didn t enroll the students, there is going to be a budget reduction. Each president is going to be responsible for managing his or her budget. / Professor O Malley Is it shared evenly, or how is it done? / Chancellor Goldstein It is based upon the revenue that is brought in by that particular college. Professor Wallach (Political Science, Hunter College) I just want to respond to the comments you made about the various planks that you are stepping on and promoting, in respect to the Governor and everywhere else. My concern is the way in which there may be tensions between various aspects of fronts that you are promoting: on the one hand, the desire for more full-time faculty, and on the other hand, the exponential expansion of the use of very expensive technology. Couldn t it be the case that in many instances we could be trading full-time faculty lines for more technology? This is a concern of mine, because the impact of technology on the classroom is different depending on the classroom. Some classrooms, like the ones in which I 4

5 function, really don t need technology. / Chancellor Goldstein What field are you in? / Professor Wallach Political theory. Socrates wasn t really interested in technology and thought that dialog was really the way to learn. In any event, the expansion of technology in the classroom may be good for asynchronous learning, but it will have an asymmetrical effect on the various kinds of education that proceed in the University. It may be the case that certainly many people do benefit more from certain kinds of technology than from others. I wonder to what extent you are aware of this? I hope you are. / Chancellor Goldstein I do agree that it is an asymmetrical system -- that it doesn t apply equally to all kinds of disciplines. There may be some disciplines, where you are absolutely right, where it shouldn t apply at all. I don t see, in any way, the use of technology impacting on the reduction of full-time faculty. What I would predict is that we would have a greater need for academic support services for our faculty who use the technology. If you were going to build a university where you were beaming one professor s lectures to a multiple of students that typically would be taught by a full-time member of the faculty, then I would say there is a legitimate issue here. But that is not what I m interested in doing. What I do worry about is having the faculty develop those tools which they will need in order to do this effectively. And secondly, having the capacity to support the faculty with sufficient academic support services. Those are the kinds of things I worry about. Does that answer your question? / Professor Wallach It answers part of it. I think there is, to my mind at least, a little too much enthusiasm for technology as a naturally helpful element in an educational environment. In many cases it is not. / Chancellor Goldstein I would agree. That s why I think this is a very asymmetrical kind of process. It will go where it is appropriate. Professor Pollard (Library, Baruch College) I m happy to hear that you are going to be recruiting more full-time faculty. My question is what kind of incentives are you going to use to recruit and retain a more diverse faculty, particularly underrepresented groups on the faculty? / Chancellor Goldstein I think all of us have to work very hard -- department chairs, faculty who are recruiting, deans, and provosts. We have to understand that we live in a very rich and diverse environment here at City University. That is really our great strength. The degree to which we can associate that great diversity with a more diverse faculty is something that we need to work very hard on. It is a matter of recruiting and making the kinds of environments that people will feel very welcomed in. I m sure that most of you saw the story about Harvard Law School trying to recruit their African American alumni. Very many of the alumni didn t want to do it because they found the environment at Harvard to be unwelcoming. Unless we can create a welcoming environment for all people, regardless of race, ethnicity, and gender, we are not going to have the kind of rich faculty that we really need to put in front of the classroom. I think we all have to have our consciousness raised about it, and we have to work hard to do it. Professor Kulkarni (Mathematics, Queens College) My question is about the faculty diversity. I am requesting that you make a more detailed profile of faculty diversity at CUNY, available to the faculty at CUNY. In today s distributed material, there is a summary of a recent Board of Trustees Committee on Faculty, Staff, and Administration. Trustee Curtis chairs this committee, and he announced that the Master Plan requires diversity in the workforce. He also sent letters to several colleges that lack diversity, from what I understand. I wish to bring to your attention that the Graduate School had a Middle States review last March, and in the Middle States report released in June 2000 it says, It was clear from the site visit, that there is 5

6 work to increase diversity still to be done. Students of color still find the Graduate Center more daunting than their majority counterparts. Faculty are far from representing the model of diversity. This comment refers to the fact that there are very few minority doctoral faculty, and that for those who are there, their participation is severely restricted for many systemic reasons. The issue is not only about insuring access, but also about ensuring and maintaining excellence. Let me give you one example from last week. It does not affect me personally so I can discuss it more freely. Our good friend Dr. Stefan Baumrin, from the Ph.D. program in philosophy, informed me that there is no one in that program who works in Indian philosophy. There is someone there who works in Chinese philosophy, but he hardly teaches in the program. I do believe Chancellor Goldstein, with my experiences, if that is true, CUNY has closed its doors to about half the philosophical wisdom of the world. / Chancellor Goldstein Just a point of clarification. No letter was sent by Trustee Curtis. A letter was sent at my direction by Vice Chancellor Malone on the issue that some of our campuses have, within their executive ranks, not enough diversity to my liking and certainly to the liking of some members of the Board. This was really a letter to raise the consciousness, and to do more than has been demonstrated in the past. That is just a correction to the statement that you made. With respect to your citing the Middle States report, as you so aptly read. I agree that we have to do more, as I said before. It is something that we just have to be vigilant about, hopefully we will succeed to a better degree than we have at some of our campuses. / Professor Kulkarni I wish to know what your office has done so far by way of data collection. I am aware that the university publishes the number of minorities and women in CUNY s workforce. I feel that that is not sufficient. As the Middle States team report suggests, we need more sensitive indices, indicating actual utilization of minorities and women, according to their disciplines. My question is, has your office considered and calculated such indices? / Chancellor Goldstein What we could use is a consultant like yourself. If you want to come in with your strong mathematical talents, we will be happy to try to learn from you. / Professor Kulkarni Thank you. I shall try to contact you. Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) I want to ask you again about these placement tests and the SAT. I put out on the table for people the RAND Corporation s report on the correlation between the current placement test, the SAT, and freshman grades. They are really abysmal. They range from.04 to.25. These would not be acceptable. In other words, the SAT and the placement test that we currently use are not predicting freshman grades. Now we are going to have a remediation exit exam commissioned by ACT. But ACT traditionally gets the same results as the SAT, and it produces poor results among students of color and among women. It has real problems. It is coming in, as I understand, at the end of this term. We haven t seen any data on the reliability or the validity of it. Shouldn t we be assessing this as a faculty, going over the appropriateness of this test before it comes in? / Chancellor Goldstein You have asked me that question in various ways. Let me just respond again. The amount of variance that is explained by just using the SAT in performance in the first year at a baccalaureate institution, we all know, is very low. But the amount of variance is explained, when the SAT is conjointly related with other variables, like high school average, placement, class, and all the other things that we use in the index. It really does show a strong association. / Professor Crain / Chancellor Goldstein With respect to the ACT, the ACT is a nationally normed test. Why CUNY is different than anyone else in the world, I don t know. It 6

7 is normed against other large urban systems. We are going to use it and see how it works. If it doesn t work well than we will look to do something else. Professor Kaplowitz (English, John Jay College) I d like to ask you to speak about something you mentioned about ten days ago in this room to the Council of Faculty Governance Leaders that encouraged me and my colleagues. It was your sense of the need to change the proficiency exam from a barrier to a diagnostic test. Your acknowledged that certain Board policies might need to be revised, amended, or revoked. That was one of them, and the ESL policy was another. / Chancellor Goldstein I have always believed that any policy at this Board is basically a living statement of actions that the Board feels need to be taken for a certain purpose. If over time the purposes that led to that policy are very different than what was intended, then I think that policy needs to be looked at and either thrown out or amended and changed in some way. I think that universities have to work like that. If they don t, they are static in time, and ultimately aren t going to help students, which I think everyone in this room believes. With respect to the ESL policy that was promulgated in 1995, my sense is that that is an example of a policy that we ought to look at a little more carefully, now that we have had five years worth of experience implementing that particular policy. What I indicated, I guess it was ten days ago, and I ll indicate today, is that Louise Mirrer is working with the ESL discipline council. I don t know if they have reported out on their recommendations. But if they have, these are recommendations that we are going to consider very carefully. If it leads us to a conclusion that that 1995 policy ought to be changed in some fashion then we will bring it to the Board for their consideration. As far as I know, unless Louise can give me more information than I have right now, I don t know if those discussions have finished with ESL. / Professor Kaplowitz Although I am interested in the ESL policy, I am more specifically in any thinking about bringing to the Board any revisions about the proficiency. / Chancellor Goldstein Let me indicate what I ve always believed about the proficiency exam as it is. It is the replacement for the CWAT that we all know, right? / Audience No! / Chancellor Goldstein The CWAT was used in that same kind of capacity as a graduation requirement. First of all, the test itself as I understand it, is a test largely developed by the faculty of this University. Most people believe that, as a test, it is a fairly good test. There may be some nay-sayers. But generally, as tests go, this is a test people feel good about. We should use that test largely as a diagnostic test for our faculty to intervene in the life of a student. It can show problems in their ability to read a complex paragraph and write something about that. If that is a deficiency the student has, we ought to use that test to create a curriculum from that point on, be it a course, 2-3 courses, whatever it is, to remedy the problem. That s the way that we really ought to focus the attention on the proficiency exam. Professor Philipp (Biology and Chemistry, The Graduate Center) Before you came in there was some discussion about graduate student support and the structural differences between SUNY and CUNY. I wondered if you could comment on that and the possibility that we could somehow attract more minority doctoral students, which is an expensive thing to do, as you know, because of the competition involved. / Chancellor Goldstein I think that one of the major problems that the Graduate School and University Center has, is to develop a sufficient pot of money for graduate students. I think this 7

8 is well known. I believe that the comparisons between SUNY and CUNY are correct. The university centers within the SUNY system are funded more richly than we are funded at CUNY. I think there is a disparity in the base level of funding because they are designated as research institutions. We must try to get the funding formula for our doctoral programs in particular funded at a very different level. It is something that we are going to have to work on. If you factor in the minimal level of support the student gets, the cost of housing, the factor that parents feel compelled to send their children to private schools, and the fact that the salaries in many of our disciplines are well below market (and they certainly are in the business disciplines), there is a great disparity there. I think that we have to work on all components of this. The advantage that we have is that a lot of people want to come to New York City, and they are willing to sacrifice to come and study in this town. I don t know how long that is going to last, that kind of view. I am concerned about that. I am concerned about our ability to maintain a competitive façade with respect to other competing institutions. / Professor Philipp Hopefully, it is more than a façade. / Chancellor Goldstein In certain areas we are OK. But there are certain areas in the sciences in particular where we are way out of the box. Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate Center) Last week, I read in the New York Times that the University of California was going to admit the top 12% of all graduates of California high schools to the University of California. Then the shocking next line really took my breath away. It said that this would become a rule, if it was passed by the faculty and the Board of Trustees. I ve been feeling somewhat disenfranchised over the past ten years. I thought maybe under your leadership we could reverse the tendency for a policy to be made and imposed. We few who are still here, feel it is really not our place. / Chancellor Goldstein You know that I have talked about this for some time over the years with great intensity. Empowerment of faculty in policy is an important factor. To relinquish that is wrong and not healthy for a University that prides itself on this kind of governance. Shared governance is a unique system in higher education, and it doesn t exist in corporate America. I think it is up to the faculty to be more vocal. I would welcome that. What I am saying to you is, come in and talk to us about developing a budget message. I think that is very important. / Professor Baumrin That s really original. No one has every attacked me for being a shrinking violet. I will take your suggestion. / Chancellor Goldstein I think you should. I would like to see the faculty as a partner in the development of policy for this University. It may not work to your satisfaction, but that doesn t mean we have to stop. I think we have to continue moving in the right direction. Professor Doss (English, Hunter College) I think we have a miasma of tests going on and I m not sure that they are all sorted out. Bill Crain asked you about the ACT version of the test as an exit exam, and you gave him an answer regarding it as an entrance exam. Later you responded about the proficiency exam which makes it a much kinder and gentler test than the ACT exit exam that will proceed it. Is there a purpose for the ACT test as an exit exam, though we could perhaps agree to one as an entrance exam. / Chancellor Goldstein The ACT is used at other universities as an exit exam. As it is, it is a diagnostic. It has been used in that capacity. / Professor Doss But we have the proficiency exams to serve that exit purpose. Is there a need for this test? / Chancellor Goldstein There is a need because in many ways, after many years of data analysis, it was fairly clear that the Freshman Skills Assessment Tests were used for a multiplicity of purposes. For those of you who are in test and measurements, that is a very 8

9 blatant violation of how something like that can be used. It really lacked all sorts of reliability measurements. / Professor Doss What about the ACT? / Chancellor Goldstein No, it is normed in a different way to do just that. It is going to be adapted as an exit test in a different way than when used as an entrance test. Professor Richter (English, Kingsborough Community College) I also have a question about testing. You mentioned that the proficiency exam was going to be used more or less as a diagnostic test, so that courses could be adapted and changed to suit the needs of the student. It seems to me that that is perfectly fine for a four-year college. I am really pleased with the flexibility of your approach. The problem comes when the test is used as a graduation requirement for the community colleges. There the test is given between 45 and 60 credits. Once the student has taken it, it is too late for adaptations of course work. / Chancellor Goldstein This is an existing Board policy, and we are going to have to see how this policy affects this University and affects the life of our students in ways that perhaps were unintended. My reflection was really on the senior colleges. If you want to say kinder and softer, I ll accept that characterization of my comments. What I want to do is have students succeed at the University. I don t want to have a test that says, if you don t pass this test you are out. What I would like to see is this: if the student doesn t achieve a certain level of proficiency, as evinced by that examination, then the faculty get involved early to get a sense of where those deficiencies are, and work with the student in counseling or developing a set of courses that would remedy the problem. That s really what I would like to see the proficiency test used for. We should provide the kind of academic judgments for that student that lead to success. Professor McCall (English, Baruch College) With all due respect, Chancellor, the proficiency exam was never designed as a diagnostic exam. I was one of the designers of this exam. If we had been charged with the responsibility of designing a diagnostic exam, it would have been quite different from the proficiency exam. The proficiency exam is a determiner of going from the lower division to the upper division. It is also a determiner of going from the community to the senior college. It is clear from the data on the pilot exams that the senior college students are going to be fine. If we get a student in the first year at a senior college and work with that student, and that student goes to the regular course work, that student will be fine on the proficiency exam. There isn t enough time for that at the community college. The problem with the exam is that there is no way of gaining equity and parity for the community college student, because there simply isn t enough time for that student to get all of the help he needs. / Chancellor Goldstein You and Eva are making an interesting and important point. These are the kinds of things that we have to look at. If indeed your remarks about the effect on community colleges are correct, and there isn t enough time for faculty to intervene, so that the student can indeed have a higher likelihood of success, then I think we need to take a look at this and see what we can do to make that interdiction a meaningful interdiction. / Professor McCall I ve warned you before on other policies. I d like you to take a look at this one before it happens, rather than after fact. Because the clock is ticking on these students, and irreparable damage is going to be done to some of these students. I think we need to look at it before the fact. / Chancellor Goldstein Let s see. Professor Young (English, Borough of Manhattan Community College) I want to talk a little bit with you, and ask about the ACT writing, reading, and editing test. I and many of my 9

10 colleagues spent last weekend, and others spent the previous weekend being certified, or not being certified in the new ACT test which replaces our CWAT. There is wide spread consternation, confusion, and troubledness about this new test and its rubrics for evaluating papers. We are concerned, many of us, that because of the way it is set up, the standards, instead of being raised, may in fact be lowered. This will be in some way justified by saying that we now somehow have fewer remedial students in the University because everything is better now, we have better students, and there are Regents. There are all these wonderful reasons why we now have these exceptional students who require any assistance in the remedial area. This exam was not designed for our population. The conduct of the sessions made that very clear to many of us. I am concerned. I want to know what you expect and hope what will be the result, number wise, of this new kind of test. We have so many students coming into our community colleges who do require remediation in three areas, as you know. Many of them require writing remediation, including those who come from private four year colleges into our system, and who really can t write. I want to know what you hope statistically will be the result of this new test. Will we suddenly find ourselves with half as many students who require remediation? Then we must celebrate this as a sudden, wonderful, miraculous transformation. Then they will be put into mainstream freshman English classes, as is already happening at the four year colleges with the other measures, SAT, 75 on Reagents, 45 credits from another college, or even perhaps a B in English, whatever loop holes have now been invented to prevent people from having to take these placement tests in the first place. We are concerned about what is going to happen to our experience of teaching students, and our ability to help them write well, and to take the proficiency test and to function in a bachelor s program eventually. Do you care to comment on what your expectations and hopes are for this new test? / Chancellor Goldstein Let me just say one thing that is a bad rap. We are not looking for loopholes. The reason the surrogates were created was to give students an opportunity to progress at our University. The ACT was brought into this University for strong and legitimate reason to replace the homegrown Freshman Skills Assessment Test. They lasted for 30 years, they went through lots of revisions, they were used for a multiplicity of purposes, and people lost confidence in these tests. When you lose confidence in the test, you really have to find other kinds of measuring devices. Is the ACT the optimal replacement for the Freshman Skills Assessment Test? I don t know the answer to that. But I do know that it is a test that is used ubiquitously throughout these United States at colleges and universities. I do know that it is a nationally normed test with lots of historical data about how it performs. I can t predict what the results are going to be. I hope at the end of the day that it will give us the opportunities to understand what our students need. I can t predict numbers because I don t have the capacity to do that. Executive Vice Chancellor Mirrer I don t know if any of you participated, but there was a two-day standard setting exercise in the middle of August. It was participated in by faculty from English, Reading, and ESL areas. The way in which the standard setting for the new exam was done was on the basis of making an assumption that the same students in the first round would need remediation as had been the case with the last exam, the CWAT, and the old reading test. Several pilots have been introduced into the first round of administering this exam. So there isn t going to be anything punitive for students, but we will have the opportunity to follow students who score at two different levels. Some of whom will be in a regular college 10

11 composition class and some of whom will be in specially designated college composition classes to see how they perform. There is no question that the new exam was introduced or the standards set in any way that creates a loophole. On the question of setting equivalencies between the various exams, this again was done on the basis of data that we had. In fact when the Chancellor came last September, he asked that we engage the College Board to help us establish equivalencies between the SAT, the ACT, the new placement exam, and the new Regent exams. We have been as careful and as responsible as possible. And as I said, we ve introduced all along the way this year, a series of pilots to see how students perform at various levels. I think that the data that we gather will be very helpful as we go forward. Chancellor Goldstein Any data that you want, you will get. Professor Gallagher (English, LaGuardia Community College) I just have a quick factual question, but before that, let me underline what Cecelia, Jane, and Eva said. There are problems large and looming with these tests at community colleges in particular, and I think we need to watch for those. My question is, how many faculty have been hired through the flagship environment program, and how many are at community colleges? / Chancellor Goldstein There were 150 positions allocated across the University this academic year. I believe 120 of those position went for the 70/30 positions, 30 of the other positions went for complemental hiring around the flagship environment. With respect to how many of those positions went to the community colleges, I don t have the data. Louise Mirrer said about 25% of those positions designated as cluster hiring went to the community colleges. This is a matter of record. If you like, we can get those data to you. Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) Despite the fact that I m a City College graduate from the good ol days, I ve never yet developed a talent of being able to consult something that I haven t seen. Maybe you can consult in virtual reality, but I need material reality. If you are quite serious in responding to Stefan Baumrin before about the fact that this faculty wasn t energetic enough, I assume you are referring to the Master Plan. I would point out to you that we received it about 48 hours before the Board hearing occurred on it. This is to my personal experience, a little bit like June of 1995 when I was invited into Ann Reynolds office, five hours before the Long Range Planning Committee met to consult on the 37 points that reconfigured the University. There I was given a speed reading test and expected to come up with a faculty position. Given this history, my skepticism is well founded. I d like to move on to the next area in which the Board has appropriated faculty authority, and that is the creation of general education and core curriculum. I have two parts of a question for that. I assume we will not have much to say about what comes out, even though it will sound like we are going to say something. The final decisions on what constitutes acceptable courses will not be made in the places where they ought to be made, if history is any guide. My question is as follows: will somebody, either you or Louise Mirrer, define for us the difference between core curriculum and general education? And secondly, can you tell us who in Louise Mirrer s office is qualified to decide what constitutes courses in those areas? If there is nobody there, then who is going to be selected to make the recommendations? / Chancellor Goldstein I think that was sort of a nasty second question, but you are a friend. / Professor Cooper It wasn t nasty, it is factual. / Chancellor Goldstein Without being put 11

12 on the spot of how one differentiates core from general education requirements, I would pass the microphone to Louise, who I think is more knowledgeable than I to give you a good discriminant function. Let me say the thing that I have said over and over again. There is a delicate balance in respect to anything that happens in this University between the legitimate rights of faculty and the legitimate rights of the governing Board. As it relates to the establishment of core curricula, general education requirements, whatever you want to reflect on. The oversight, the governing Board of this University, has every right and obligation, I would say, along with the Chancellor, to set conditions and parameters under which certain discussions take place. We discussed this earlier. A condition would be: American history is a good thing for students to learn. From my standpoint, scientific literacy, mathematical literacy, is a good thing for students to know. That is what I would consider a parameter that defines the discussion. After that, Sandi, and I will say it to each and every one of you, it is about faculty. Faculty need to be the responsible party for developing what goes on in a course. Do you expect the Board of Trustees to devise a course on plasma physics? And then come up with the experiments, the readings, and the articles? Of course not. You remand that to physicists. That is the way that it has to happen here. I don t know why there is such great skepticism. I suppose, in part, it is a result of the SUNY experience. People believe that core curricula were rammed down the throats of the faculty. Whether that is true or not, I don t know. But here, at CUNY, that is not going to happen. The faculty are the responsible party for developing what goes on in courses. You have to be, you are the professionals. You know your field, who else is going to do it? Whether it is a core curriculum, or general education requirements, however that is defined, the faculty have to be the responsible party. I don t know how to say it any more directly than that. I ve said it over and over and over again. Louise, I would be interested in knowing what the difference between a core and general education requirements. Do you want to say something about it? Executive Vice Chancellor Mirrer I think Sandi is pointing out that some of our colleges have a core curriculum. They have a core set of courses, they are fixed courses, every student has to take them. Some of our colleges have distribution requirements. Some of our colleges have general education requirements. I m sure that you are talking about the language in the Master Plan. If you look there, you will see that the Master Plan talks both about liberal education, which is kind of catch basin for all of the above. It talks about core curricula. I think that we all know that all of our colleges have one of those three. Either a core curriculum, distribution requirements, or general education requirements. We know because we have looked at it for the last three years. There is a high degree of overlap for the most part at all of the colleges. I don t think that anyone has any particular expectation that there will be a great disturbance in this University across the colleges. There is some unevenness; Sandi knows it, probably many of you know it. Where there is unevenness, it creates a problem in articulation. It puts students at a disadvantage who want to transfer from community colleges to senior colleges. And it is a disadvantage for students who transfer from senior colleges to senior colleges. Those gaps, that unevenness, needs to be addressed by the faculty. I think that is certainly the Chancellor s intention. Professor Bohigian (Mathematics, John Jay College) It s a pleasure to have a Chancellor who has a vision to the University, and wants to bring the University back to the 12

13 stature that it had before. That is really a great start. You don t have to be told, that in order to do that, you can t do it by yourself. You do have to work with the faculty in order to achieve your goals. I want to ask specifically, how you propose to do that. Up to now, I think the feeling is that you ve been out on a limb, on your own, along with the Board, totally ignoring faculty concerns and interests. In order to achieve the greatness you want for this University, you are going to have to work with us. I ve been here, and many others have also seen every Chancellor since Bowker. The average life expectancy in terms of them being a Chancellor is about eight years. The average life expectancy of a faculty member at CUNY is 30 years. We re going to be around a lot longer. Please be specific. You have said to us over and over again that you want the participation. How are you specifically going to get that from us? / Chancellor Goldstein The Borough President is here, certainly you want to here from him. We want to give him the opportunity to engage with you. Sandi Cooper talks about an experience with a prior Chancellor that was wrong. If that is an accurate depiction, and I have no reason to believe it isn t, it is wrong. We re starting to really say that you are a partner in developing policy at this University. We are starting with defining this budget message. We will give your faculty, through your governing board, an opportunity to inform what happens in the budget message. I think that is a very positive sign. In the past three years, Louise has had numerous meetings on a regular, ongoing, cyclical basis with faculty, to develop ideas that ultimately become policy. I think that that effort has gone through the right process, and it will continue. I will pledge to you that your member of the Board, Bernie Sohmer, is an equal member with anybody else on that Board with respect to getting information. He is getting information many times faster than the Board. We know that it is a little more difficult for the faculty to be assembled, to get the information, and digest it. I think the difficulty is that you are a large faculty. It is a technical problem, not a problem by design, by any means. The last thing I would say is, any information that any of you want, that is given in respect to informing policy, you will have. You can have any data that you want. That has always been a sine qua non in the way that we conduct affairs in my administration. / Professor Bohigian That s generous, but what we want is a better participation in the decision making policy that relates to faculty issues. / Chancellor Goldstein Again, I think that is something that you have to grasp. c. Representatives to Board Committees d. Liaisons on Campus Conditions IV. Approval of UFS Standing Committee Slate Chair Sohmer Most of the appointments that we have made have been at the request of the individuals. That s where this list was generated from. Send an to the Executive Committee. Any mode of communication is fine. The list is before you for confirmation. If it is to be altered, we will eventually alter it. It is before you. All those acceding to this list? Against? It is approved. 13

14 There are several vacancies in the Senate, and we are only so strong as our membership. The Graduate School, Queens, City, and Medgar Evers are lacking members. If you are from one of those institutions, please do something and encourage others to run. V. Annual Committee Reports VI. Invited Guest Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer Chair Sohmer We would like to welcome the Borough President of the Bronx, who has kindly volunteered to speak about his attitude towards CUNY. Borough President Fernando Ferrer I am glad to be here tonight. CUNY has been much on my mind, since well before the formulation and promulgation of the Master Plan, since well before the current composition of the Board of Trustees. It began when I expressed some serious and heart-felt reservations about what I regarded as serious limitations to access to the University. I remember early conversations in my office, with Sandi, among others, talking about remedial programs and how long they should take. I think that most people agreed that they shouldn t be forever, but between two poles, what is the reasonable thing to do? Thoughtful people were grappling with that. Thoughtful people were trying to come to grips with a solution that would not only steer a course that made sense for the University and for the City that it serves, but also for the students that both the University and the City serve. I was unhappy with the result of that discourse. As you might recall, there were proposals to completely outsource it; privatizing, I think, was the term being used. There was even a proposal in the City Budget, advanced by the administration, to hold hostage some funding for City University, if you recall. I think I am cursed with a long and fairly accurate memory. The Board would be bludgeoned, and so would the City Council, into accepting a proposal, which I deemed educationally deficient. A lot of that did not come to pass, but the most injurious part did for me in those early days. That was the agreement among those who were in power to limit access. Then the argument was made, you won t get into one of our senior colleges, but you can get into one of our community colleges. But for those of us who knew better -- who knew the intense overcrowding of BMCC, BCC, and the chronic space issues, and program issues of Hostos -- knew that that was phony at best. That was too bad. But what happened subsequent to that, in my view, was even worse. This was well before the Master Plan. Some of you might recall that I expressed that point of view a couple of years ago in front of the Board of Trustees. (No, I did not get myself arrested. I picked the year after to get myself arrested in front of One Police Plaza. Going to school in the 1960 s, and being carried out of buildings, but never being arrested, I was in need of beginning an arrest record. I satisfied that inner need in me, and there were still issues. Some of you know what I am talking about in regard to the Diallo protests.) I have some concerns about the way the Board was structured, the political nature of the Board, and I haven t been shy about expressing that. But I also have some other concerns that I want to lay out on the record tonight. For those who have known me for a long time, and have been watching me for the course of my 14