Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York 9781400888337

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Pathways to Reform ■■■■■

Pathways to Reform CREDITS AND CONFLICT AT THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

■■■■■ Alexandra W. Logue

P R INC ETON U NIVER S ITY P R E S S P R INC ETON A ND OX FORD

Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra W. Logue Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press​.princeton​.edu Jacket image courtesy of Alamy Jacket design by Faceout Studio, Derek Thornton All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Logue, A. W. (Alexandra W.), author. Title: Pathways to reform : credits and conflict at the City University of New York / Alexandra W. Logue. Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017019498 | ISBN 9780691169941 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: City University of New York—Curricula. | General education—New York (State)—New York. | Education, Higher—New York (State)—New York. Classification: LCC LD3835 .L64 2017 | DDC 378.747/1—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019498 British Library Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Minion Pro text with Helvetica Neue Condensed Display Printed on acid-­free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To the memory of William G. Bowen, who inspired this work, and To CUNY students, past, present, and future

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All net royalties received by the author from sales of this book will be donated to The City University of New York to support undergraduate student financial aid

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Contents ■■■■■ List of Illustrations Publisher’s Note Acknowledgments Abbreviations Chronology

xi xiii xv xix xxi

Introduction Starting the Journey

1

Chapter 1

Passing the Pathways Resolution: June 27, 2011

9

Chapter 2

Antecedents: 1961 to Summer 2010

31

Chapter 3

Formulating the Resolution: October 2010 through January 2011

55

The True Colors of Spring 2011: Shaping the Final Resolution

83

Chapter 4 Chapter 5

Models of Governance in June 2011: Rwanda, a CAPPR Meeting, and a Public Hearing

115

Chapter 6

A Core Foundation: July 2011 through December 2011

151

Chapter 7

The Devil Is in the Details: January 2012 through August 2012

179

English Studies: September 2012 through December 2012

217

Sprinting and Stretching for the Finish Line: January 2013 through June 2013

246

Chapter 8 Chapter 9

Chapter 10 Transitions: July 2013 through December 2013

275

Chapter 11 Legal Matters: June 2011 through June 2015

295

Chapter 12 What Does It All Mean? Changing Course with Pathways

318

Epilogue

356

Reaching the End of the Path

Notes Names Index Subject Index

377 415 421

Illustrations ■■■■■ 3.1. 10/15/10 Chronicle of Higher Education chart of transferability of a CUNY course 7.1. Graph of number of negative emails I received about Pathways during each week of spring 2012

57 198

Publisher’s Note ■■■■■ The late William G. Bowen, commemorated in the dedication to this book, served for many years as an invaluable informal adviser to Princeton University Press in the area of higher education. This volume inaugurates a new series in his honor, in recognition of his signal contributions to the Press and to the field. We are grateful to Dr. Bowen for bringing this work, whose author he admired, to our attention. We offer our sincere thanks for his assistance in this and countless other matters. Peter Dougherty Director Princeton University Press

Acknowledgments ■■■■■ There is no way to express adequately the gratitude that I feel to the hundreds of people who helped Pathways and this book about it come to be. In terms of the establishment of Pathways itself, I must acknowledge here the stupendous support that it received from former City University of New York Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt and former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. Other than these two exceptional leaders, I will let the book itself serve as testimony to the great many contributions, small and large, humdrum and courageous, that a great many people directly made to the project. As you read about each of them, know that what they did was sometimes very hard, that doing it was a choice that they made, and send them your heartfelt thanks to accompany mine. Here I will just give my thanks to those people who directly contributed to the existence of this book, and to a few people whose place in my past guided me in my actions concerning Pathways. However, I do want to emphasize that, although all of these people taught me and helped me, all opinions and errors expressed in this book are entirely my own. First—­in every way—­I must thank William Bowen, former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as founding chair of Ithaka Harbors, Inc. This book was his idea and he helped me obtain a grant from the Spencer Foundation that was essential in its preparation, for which I am exceedingly grateful. As I was completing the Pathways project, Bill was working on a book with Eugene Tobin (senior program officer for higher education and scholarship in the humanities at Mellon and former president of Hamilton College), published by Princeton University Press, titled Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. Bill had been a huge supporter of Pathways from the beginning, and he saw what happened during the establishment of Pathways as an excellent example of why change is very difficult in higher education. I was so involved in the project itself, and so exhausted from it, that I could not see its implications for higher education as a whole. But Bill and Gene first had the idea to include a chapter about CUNY with a section on Pathways in Locus of Authority—­a fascinating chapter about the history and governance of CUNY written by Martin Kurzweil, director of

xvi  ■ Acknowledgments

the educational transformation program at Ithaka. Then, in fall 2013, just as I was starting my study leave from my position as the CUNY system executive vice chancellor and university provost, Bill had the vision that an entire book should be devoted to CUNY’s Pathways initiative, a vision that he transmitted to me and that I began to work on actively as I began my new position as a research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Advanced Study in Education. Through Bill, I was also able to have wonderful discussions about Pathways with Gene, as well as with Earl Lewis, president of the Mellon Foundation. In addition, Bill helped smooth the way for Ithaka to assist me in obtaining and organizing materials for the project. These tasks were all conducted under the protective wing of Ithaka S+R, the part of Ithaka that conducts research and provides guidance to institutions of higher education and other academic entities with regard to technological and economic transitions. As an organization that has JSTOR at its core, Ithaka is chock-­full of people who know a great deal about storing and organizing information, and I was extremely fortunate to have their assistance. Deanna Marcum, and now Catharine Bond Hill, have served as managing director of Ithaka S+R since I began work on this book. Deanna, the Ithaka S+R managing director when this book project began, in particular ensured that I received the help that I needed from many Ithaka members concerning information retrieval, organization, and storage, including help from Johanna Brownell, Dermont Bruce, Malgorzata Chrzanowska, Daniel Eads, Dale Hermann, Nancy Kopans, Deborah Longino, Heidi McGregor, Marlon Palha, Clara Samayoa, Liam Sweeney, Kate Wulfson, and Martin Zapata. And, of course, providing overall support, was always Ithaka’s dynamic President, Kevin Guthrie. Conversations with him and with Martin and Deanna about Pathways were always helpful. Bill also made the initial contact for me with Princeton University Press, resulting in my meeting the incomparable Peter Dougherty, director of PUP. Peter believed in this book and trusted in my approach to it from the very beginning and through to its publication. At the same time, he did not hesitate to share with me what about the manuscript he thought could be improved, and I believe that the book has benefited a great deal as a result. Many others associated with PUP have contributed significant effort to bringing this book into existence, including Mark Bellis, Shaquona Crews, Ashima Dayal, Adam Fortgang, Julia Haav, Lauren Lepow, Debra Liese, Theresa Liu, Stephanie Rojas, Laurie Schlesinger, and Jessica Yao.

Acknowledgments  ■ xvii

Bill passed away just as this book’s manuscript was being completed, in the fall of 2016. His contributions to this book, and to higher education as a whole, are immeasurable. It is to my great sorrow that he was never able to see this book in finished form, but I am extremely proud that Pathways to Reform is a member of PUP’s William G. Bowen Memorial Series in Higher Education. And I think Bill would have heartily approved my decision to donate my net revenues from sales of this book to CUNY undergraduate student financial aid. I also wish to thank some very special CUNY technology staff who, supervised by Vice Chancellor Brian Cohen, kept my equipment operating well throughout the years of preparation of the book: Roberto Appolon, Daniel Volpe, and Abdool Yacub. They saved me from panic at some critical times. Additional technical help that I have received has come from Eyes and Ears Design, a design agency headed by Kate Okeson and Erica Borkowski that has modified my website (awlogue​.com) so that it can now contain significant information and resources relevant to this book and to college student transfer more generally. They have been extremely responsive to my requests and technological stumbles, and have suggested many website improvements. I am likewise grateful to the very talented photographer Karen Obrist for the photograph she took of me that is on the book’s jacket. Support of a nontechnical sort has come from multiple places. The New York University’s Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives provided wonderful assistance in my gaining access to and reviewing their archived papers of Professor Emerita Sandi Cooper. Labor Attorney Douglas Catalano taught me well about labor relations when I worked at New York Institute of Technology, knowledge that was very useful during the establishment of Pathways. Much additional legal information and assistance relevant to Pathways came from Ian Shrank. I have been motivated in the writing of this book by the many excellent writers whom I have known, in particular Keith Raffel, one of my oldest friends, who turned to writing later in life, and Elizabeth Nunez, who steered me to what is my favorite book on writing: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I also must thank those friends and colleagues who read parts or all of the book, taking their time to give me comments, including several anonymous reviewers, Steven Bassin, Camille Logue Orman, Liam Sweeney, and in particular Ian Shrank and Samuel Logue Shrank, who each read every draft word, sometimes multiple times. Countless other friends and colleagues (such as Teagle Foundation President and former Barnard College President Judith Shapiro, and former Under Secretary of Education Martha

xviii  ■ Acknowledgments

Kanter) listened to my never-­ending stories about what was happening, or had happened, with Pathways, and I tried to learn from their reactions what about the events was most perplexing and intriguing. And I will always be grateful to Tina for sharing with me her personal experience with Pathways, and to her mother Ann, whose pride in her daughter’s CUNY community college graduation first led me to Tina. There is no question that I was not easy to live with while Pathways was being established. I was working endless hours and was extremely tense. I had to keep my emotions totally under control at work and so they frequently spilled over at home, and I had little time for recreation or simply enjoying life. My husband, Ian Shrank, put up with a great deal (not for the first time), and he wasn’t always happy about it. But at the same time, he valued enormously what I was doing, and I knew that. I couldn’t have continued without being confident that we both shared the value of working hard in order to enable opportunities for others, a value that he personifies more than anyone else I know. He inspires and sustains me. Equal opportunity for all is a value that has been well represented in the history of my family. My father was the first physician in Philadelphia (other than at Woman’s Hospital) to have female residents working with him, and my maternal grandfather, a Marine Corps Colonel, after whom I was named, commanded Montford Point during World War II, the first training camp for black Marines, established following an order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (against the wishes of many in the Marine Corps). With Pathways, I hope to have honored their legacy.

Abbreviations ■■■■■ AAC&U AAUP CAPPR CCCRC CCNY CCSD FOIL LEAP LOTE MLA PSC STEM TIPPS UFS USS

Association of American Colleges & Universities American Association of University Professors Committee on Academic Policy, Programs and Research Common Core Course Review Committee City College of New York CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities Freedom of Information Law Liberal Education and America’s Promise languages other than English Modern Language Association Professional Staff Congress science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Transfer Information and Program Planning System University Faculty Senate University Student Senate

Chronology ■■■■■ Year

Event

1961

CUNY founded from seven preexisting colleges

1967

Middle States Commission on Higher Education identifies credit transfer as a problem at CUNY

1969

CUNY Board of Trustees passes a resolution designed to facilitate credit transfer

1973

CUNY Board of Trustees passes another resolution designed to facilitate credit transfer

1985

CUNY Board of Trustees passes another resolution designed to facilitate credit transfer

1994

Professor Sandi Cooper begins first term as University Faculty Senate (UFS) chair

1995

Polishook lawsuit is filed against CUNY by Professional Staff Congress (PSC; Cooper is a cocomplainant)

1998

Cooper finishes two contiguous two-year terms as UFS chair Cooper is a cocomplainant in a lawsuit against CUNY concerning remediation policies

1999

Matthew Goldstein begins term as chancellor of CUNY, which by then has seventeen colleges CUNY presidents begin reporting to chancellor instead of to Board of Trustees RAND and Mayor’s Advisory Task Force identify credit transfer as a problem at CUNY CUNY Board of Trustees passes another resolution designed to facilitate credit transfer

2000

2000-2004 CUNY Master Plan includes modification of core curricula to ease transfer within CUNY Professor Barbara Bowen becomes president of the PSC

2003

Benno Schmidt becomes chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees

2006

Alexandra Logue joins CUNY central office as special advisor to the chancellor Spellings Report calls for facilitation of credit transfer across the United States

2008

New York State Commission on Higher Education recommends CUNY strengthen course and program articulation and transfer by 2011–2012 2008-2012 CUNY Master Plan includes priority of removing transfer barriers within CUNY Logue becomes CUNY executive vice chancellor and university provost

xxii  ■ Chronology Year

Event

2010

June: Cooper begins third term as UFS chair October: Distribution begins of Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley’s report on transfer December: Chair of New York State Assembly Higher Education Committee Deborah Glick states that CUNY needs to address credit transfer issue December: Transfer report is criticized at UFS Plenary

2011

January: Pathways website created February: Draft Pathways resolution made public April: Letter arrives from Phi Beta Kappa questioning Pathways May: Central office conducts webinar on credit transfer and proposed Pathways policies June: Five of nine members of the UFS Executive Committee vote to have UFS Plenary consider a vote of no confidence in Logue; Cooper tells outside media that UFS Executive Committee has voted no confidence in Logue, which then appears in print; UFS Executive Committee promises to prevent Plenary vote if CUNY administration agrees to its demands; CUNY administration does not agree June: CUNY Board of Trustees committee meeting at which final Pathways resolution approved June: Public hearing concerning Pathways resolution June: CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at which Pathways resolution unanimously approved August: Common Core Task Force begins work October: Faculty committees begin work on transfer of major courses October: Task force releases draft of Common Core November: CUNY Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Frederick Schaffer distributes memo concerning legal foundations of Pathways December: Modern Language Association first communication questioning Pathways December: Task force makes final Common Core recommendation to chancellor, who accepts recommendation

2012

January: Logue requires all Common Core courses to be 3 contact hours and 3 credits (except for certain STEM courses); faculty opposition escalates January: American Association of University Professors (AAUP) first letter March: First lawsuit about Pathways filed by PSC and UFS March: PSC and UFS hold town hall meeting about Pathways March: First meeting of the Common Core Course Review Committee May: PSC files first grievance about Pathways June: UFS chair passes from Cooper to Saxe Distinguished Professor of Finance Terrence Martell August: Second lawsuit about Pathways filed by PSC and UFS

Chronology  ■ xxiii Year

Event

2012

September: Email from a college provost to the provost’s English Department chair stating there will be significant cuts to department if it does not comply with Pathways September: UFS chair and PSC president send a memo to all faculty stating that faculty have right to refuse to participate in Pathways October: Hurricane Sandy hits New York City November: Grievance hearing

2013

January: PSC files second grievance about Pathways January: PERB charge filed about Pathways February: CUNY Board of Trustees approves courses for each college for each of eight categories of Common Core, and each college has sufficient approved courses for fall 2013 registration March–May: Advertisements pro and con Pathways in New York Times and on websites April: Two grievances consolidated June: Completion of PSC’s no confidence vote in Pathways June: Chancellor Goldstein retires; William Kelly becomes interim chancellor June: Approximately two thousand courses now approved by colleges and Board of Trustees for Pathways Common Core, and entry-level transfer courses for ten majors identified August: PERB charge withdrawn September: Pathways in effect with a smooth start November: Oral arguments heard for both lawsuits December: Grievance ruled arbitrable

2014

January: Logue begins study leave and Wrigley becomes interim executive vice chancellor and university provost February: Interim Chancellor Kelly changes some Pathways policies February: Both lawsuits dismissed April: Appeals begun for both lawsuits

2015

June: CUNY wins both appeals

INTRODUCTION

Starting the Journey ■■■■■

This book is about the journey to establish Pathways, a set of policies designed to facilitate students’ transfer of credits among the colleges of The City University of New York (CUNY), a complex university consisting of many different colleges. This journey was filled with controversy and conflict, frequently played out in the media, with struggles primarily between administrators and faculty. The size and complexity of CUNY provided a large landscape within which the conflict and controversy occurred. CUNY, a public university with relatively low-­cost programs, is the third-­largest university, and the largest urban university, in the United States. It encompasses 24 colleges and freestanding professional schools (19 of them serving undergraduates), which together enroll over 270,000 students in credit-­bearing courses (over 240,000 of these students are undergraduates), along with about 250,000 more students in non-­credit-­bearing courses. There are over 7,500 full-­time faculty, over 11,000 part-­time faculty, and over 13,000 staff.1 In sum, well over half a million people are formally associated with CUNY at any one time. There are close to 1.3 million CUNY alumni/ae.2 Speak with anyone living in the New York metropolitan area and either that person or a relative or a friend of that person is or has been associated with CUNY. CUNY has always provided a route to the American dream for many thousands of New Yorkers, New Yorkers seeking to step up through education. Currently, the CUNY undergraduate student population consists of 58 percent students from underrepresented groups (black and Hispanic), 45 percent students for whom English is not their first language, 42 percent students who are the first in their families to attend college, and 58 percent students who are recipients of the federal financial aid known as Pell Grants3 (i.e., these students’ families have significantly limited financial resources). CUNY is a critical piece of the foundation of New York City, providing education, research, and service to New Yorkers. Yet the story of CUNY is not all positive. Although they are rising, current undergraduate graduation rates are low. Currently, a total of 54 percent

2  ■ Introduction

of students who enter CUNY’s bachelor’s-­degree programs receive a CUNY bachelor’s degree within six years, and for associate’s-­degree programs, which are intended to take two years, only 18 percent of students graduate within three years. The low associate’s-­degree rate is partly due to students transferring to CUNY’s bachelor’s-­degree programs before earning their associate’s degrees. But even six years after entry, only 32 percent of CUNY students who started in associate’s-­degree programs have earned either an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree.4 These graduation rates are similar to those of other urban public colleges and universities around the United States. But that doesn’t make them acceptable. In the words of William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin in their insightful book Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, “If we are going to increase the fraction of the population with college degrees to as much as 60 or 70 percent . . . and provide meaningful opportunities for upward mobility, the heaviest lifting will have to be done by the less privileged and less well-­resourced institutions that serve so many of our students.”5 Therefore, similar to the great majority of institutions of higher education in this country, CUNY is continuously trying to find ways to increase graduation rates while simultaneously maintaining or raising standards. For decades CUNY has targeted what happens to CUNY students’ credits when they transfer within the system as an important factor in CUNY’s graduation rates. Chapter 2 of this book describes the history of the attempts to facilitate credit transfer at CUNY, and the particular events leading up to our (the CUNY central administration’s) 2010 decision that a new attempt was needed. Chapter 1 describes a pivotal moment in the project—­the June 2011 approval by the CUNY Board of Trustees of the resolution establishing the Pathways policies, the formal start of the project. That chapter introduces most of the people who played significant roles in the Pathways Project, and in the associated controversy, as well as introducing the content of the Pathways policies. Chapters 3–­10 describe how that resolution was formulated and then how it was carried out. These chapters also recount how, along the way to full implementation, and even afterward, there was significant faculty resistance, in addition to some significant support from faculty, students, administrators/staff, and members of the higher education community outside CUNY. Chapter 11 describes the legal actions taken against the Pathways initiative and their outcomes, and chapter 12 gives my views regarding what can be learned from the Pathways Project. ­Finally, the epilogue describes some of what has happened in the higher

Starting the Journey  ■ 3

education community, at CUNY, and among the main people involved in the origins of Pathways since the full implementation of Pathways in fall 2013. In telling what happened during the establishment of Pathways (e.g., in chapter 1), I have chosen to present the material as a narrative, told from my point of view. At other times, in providing background for and interpretation of the initiative (e.g., in chapter 2), I have chosen to present the material in a more formal way, similar to the approach that would be taken in an academic journal. This use of different styles in the book arises from my wish to present as full as possible an accounting of what happened and why it happened. Events are not separable from the people who create and witness them, and thus understanding the interactions of people with their environments and with each other is key to understanding the events in which these people are involved. Such information can often best be conveyed as a nonfictional narrative that attempts to convey the experiences of the story’s participants. This information then becomes the source material—­the raw data—­for the book’s, and readers’, more academic analyses and interpretations of the lessons learned and policy implications of the events. Two early chapters—­2 and 3—­contain much information about why we formulated the Pathways resolution as we did—­the history and events at CUNY that helped to shape the resolution. Here in this introduction it may be useful to give a brief description of the national context for our work, as well as how little we, and others, actually knew about transfer at the time that we started formulating the Pathways resolution in the fall of 2010. At that time, as well as before and since, looming over public higher education in the United States was the urgent need to find ways to compensate for the continuing decline of state funding. At least since 1990, across the United States, state funding per college student had decreased, particularly following the start of the recession in 2008. Public institutions of higher education were compensating for these decreases with increasing tuition6 and by becoming more efficient. Awareness of the low graduation rates of these institutions was also increasing,7 putting state funding of these institutions in further jeopardy. Tying funding to target graduation rates—­performance-­based funding—­was therefore being instituted in many states.8 Putting some courses online was seen by some as one way, under some conditions, to deliver effective higher education at lower cost. However, many faculty were questioning the ability of these courses to deliver a learning experience as effective as that provided by face-­to-­face courses.9 Adding further pressure to this situation, research was predicting an increasing need for college degrees in the workforce.10

4  ■ Introduction

Awareness was just beginning to dawn in higher education that more effective credit transfer could offer another way to increase degree production without increasing funding per student. As of June 2011, when the CUNY Board of Trustees passed the Pathways resolution, transfer had certainly been discussed nationally, although it was not a top-­five subject on almost anyone’s list. National surveys of transfer policies had been conducted.11 Researchers had observed that students who began in an associate’s-­degree program at a community college were less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree than comparable students who started in a bachelor’s-­degree program, but it was not yet entirely clear why.12 Other researchers were examining what sorts of students transferred and under what conditions.13 There was some publicity about a few states, such as California, instituting transfer policies,14 and researchers were starting to look at the effect of articulation agreements on credit transfer.15 One timely publication presented best practices for facilitating credit transfer. These best practices included making the transfer credit rules simpler and more transparent and standardizing the curriculum, both for general education courses and for a major’s initial courses at different colleges.16 All of this information was useful. However, it was not absolutely convincing that reviewing and overhauling their transfer policies needed to be near the top of every college’s and university’s priority list. As a result of the increasing funding constraints and the pressures on degree production, at the time of Pathways’ inception some leaders were calling for significant change in higher education. Yet there was concern about the ability of higher education to make the changes needed.17 Supervision of higher education faculty has long been described as “herding cats,” and there is that old joke: “Question: How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Change?”18 Shared governance, a foundational concept for most nonprofit colleges and universities in the United States (see chapter 12), has meant that at least some faculty, as well as some of their administrators, have seen the faculty as having a say, or even a final say, in all academic decisions. Such decisions include those about how to make degree delivery more efficient and/or effective. Similar to most people, in some situations, some (and that some can be a big number) faculty resist change. But whereas in other employment sectors an employee can be overruled by his or her supervisor, higher education faculty—­ who are frontline in the classrooms and who, because of tenure, outlast most administrators—­are in an unusual situation: if they really don’t want something to happen, sometimes it doesn’t. Thus there were concerns that the changes higher education needed to make would not, and perhaps could not, be made.

Starting the Journey  ■ 5

At CUNY in the fall of 2010, when we first started formulating the Pathways resolution, we were aware of, and influenced by, all of these pressures for change in higher education. We certainly expressed the need to provide better education for more students at the same or a lower cost. And we certainly had some awareness of how difficult making such changes could be. However, when it came to Pathways, the primary driving force for us was a much more specific one—­a concern for the welfare of our students who were being harmed by an often nonfunctional credit-­transfer system—­and we were determined to remove that harm no matter how difficult that might be. Nevertheless, comparable to the extent of knowledge about transfer across the United States, our specific knowledge about transfer at CUNY at that time was rather limited. For example, we knew that, at CUNY, approximately ten thousand students were transferring among our colleges each fall alone,19 and we knew that many of their credits were not transferring as they were supposed to transfer (as general education or major credits), or they were not transferring at all (students were not receiving any credit for many courses taken prior to their transferring). However, we had no idea how big “many” was. We also knew that everyone said that lack of credit transfer was the biggest student complaint and had been for decades. But “everyone said” does not constitute evidence. Further, we knew that there had been many attempts to institute policies to fix the alleged problems. But just because some people have been trying to fix something doesn’t mean that it needs fixing. We knew that New York State Education Law required that CUNY “maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units . . . [and] maintain the university as an integrated system and . . . facilitate articulation between units,”20 and that our major accreditor and the Chair of the New York State Assembly Higher Education Committee Deborah Glick had said that we had a problem that needed fixing, but none of that constituted evidence that there was a problem. In fall 2010 the Chronicle of Higher Education had published a diagram showing what many people would call breathtaking inconsistencies in how a single course would transfer among the different CUNY colleges.21 But that was one course at one college, and no one knew how many people had tried to transfer that course to each of the eighteen other colleges and what had been the actual result. All we knew about CUNY’s situation when we started working on Pathways was pretty much contained in the report that Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley had written22 (discussed further in chapter 3). That report showed that

6  ■ Introduction

when transfer students were awarded bachelor’s degrees, they tended to have more excess credits than so-­called native students, but the difference was small and there were a number of possible explanations for that difference. The report also gave many examples of courses whose credits, according to specifics listed in CUNY’s transfer software system, would transfer inconsistently among the different CUNY colleges. However, as with our limited knowledge about the course in the Chronicle diagram, we didn’t actually know how often those course transfers occurred, nor did we know the actual result (we were looking at what the software said should happen, not what actually happened). Julia’s report also discussed the existing policies’ inconsistent treatment of students in different degree programs, the fact that the entire credit-­transfer system was built on a principle of subjective judgments as to whether courses from different colleges matched, and the delays students experienced in trying to get their credits evaluated when they transferred to a new college. Much of this information came from focus groups that Julia convened, as well as from some discussions with faculty. The report also emphasized that articulation agreements were too piecemeal to deal with the problems, which needed a comprehensive solution. In summary, at the beginning of the project, there was an overwhelming amount of smoke, but little in the way of visible, quantifiable fire. Little quantitative evidence. And no rigorous quantitative evidence. We talked many times about how to obtain such evidence. We thought we needed to have someone study hundreds of students’ transcripts one by one to see what sort of credits the students did or did not retain when they transferred. But this would have taken months of work by a highly trained and dedicated person, working only on that task, and we didn’t have such a person to spare for that amount of time. In February of 2011, CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, headed by University Dean David Crook, released critical data (obtained by Director of Policy Analysis Colin Chellman using linear probability models and logistic regression) demonstrating that, all else being equal (i.e., taking into account all measurable demographic and performance characteristics), CUNY’s transfer students were at a disadvantage in terms of graduation compared to native students. Transfer students’ credits weren’t propelling them to graduation as much as was the case for native students. More specifically, a one standard deviation increase in credits accumulated led to a 38 percent greater chance of graduating for native students compared to only 20 percent for transfer students.23 These data strongly suggested that transfer students’

Starting the Journey  ■ 7

credits weren’t counting as effectively toward graduation requirements as were those of native students. But there were other possible explanations (e.g., transfer students might have been more likely to change their major, so that credits they had taken in their first major wouldn’t help them to graduate), and in any case we didn’t yet have these data when we wrote the first draft of the Pathways Board of Trustees resolution. Not only were we lacking extensive data supporting our beginning work on Pathways, we also had little idea of how we were going to carry out what we were planning. From the first draft of the resolution in the winter of 2010–­2011, we planned to establish extremely large faculty committees, drawn from all the undergraduate colleges, to approve CUNY-­wide general education courses. We also planned to support many other faculty in their recommending CUNY-­ wide eligible general education courses, and in their changing some general education and major programs. Though we did consult with people who had taken similar actions at other universities, none of us had ever done anything quite like this before, and no one had ever done anything like this at CUNY. We knew where we had to go, but not exactly how we were going to get there. We had to trust in ourselves that we would figure it out as we went along, taking one step at a time. As it turned out, there were many surprises along the way for which no one could have been prepared. In many ways, what we did and why we did it entailed a leap of faith, faith that was certainly not shared by everyone. In retrospect, the amount that we knew about transfer at CUNY was barely sufficient to have justified our embarking on the Pathways journey that resulted in such a huge conflagration. However, in truth, though we realized that there would be significant resistance to what we were doing, none of us realized how much. By the time the project was over, the national situation had changed significantly. Funding for public colleges and universities was still decreasing,24 and there was still deep concern over low graduation rates.25 None of that had changed. However, as described in the epilogue, credit transfer has become a much-­discussed and much-­investigated national topic in the drive to increase graduation rates while maintaining or decreasing the cost of higher education for students, institutions, and taxpayers. Further, most people at CUNY now accept that, pre-­Pathways at least, CUNY had a transfer credit problem that needed fixing. We in the CUNY central administration certainly did not set out to provide an example of why change is needed in higher education, and how such changes might or might not be made, but in the end that is what we did.

8  ■ Introduction

Pathways to Reform focuses on what happened from 2010 through 2013 when we were establishing the Pathways policies. My account of these events is based on my memories, backed up by documentation as much as possible (in addition to this book, please see my website, http://​awlogue​.com/, for many examples of this documentation and for additional resources concerning Pathways and transfer). And not only is much of what I report here from my own memory, but I have far too many memories to include in one book. Therefore I have had to be selective in what I have reported here and what I have not. As an experimental psychologist I am only too aware that memories can be distorted in myriad ways, and that my selections of what to report can be unconsciously, as well as consciously, biased. For all of these reasons, along with the fact that I wrote this book after I left the CUNY administration and became a CUNY research professor—­with no interactions with anyone at CUNY regarding the book until after it was completed—­any errors or misinterpretations or distortions in the book, as well as all views expressed, are entirely my own. I do not speak on behalf of CUNY in this book. But to the best of my ability, my report here is accurate. In some cases I have withheld people’s names in order to help protect their confidentiality, but I have not changed any names. In cases in which I have used quotation marks, I have reliable documentation (not just my own memory) regarding what was actually written or said. When I have had access to a recording of an event or meeting, as well as a written transcript, I have relied on the former. Any grammatical or other errors in the quotations accurately represent errors in the originals. In cases in which I lack a recording or reliable written documentation, I have chosen not to use quotation marks and instead to paraphrase what I believe someone said. I have used endnotes only for publicly available documentation, not for my own memories, email content, or other informal documents. I also try to distinguish clearly between events and my opinions. This book can be useful in helping readers to understand the issue of credit transfer—­why it is important and what facilitates and hinders it, along with the sensitivities surrounding general education requirements. This book also provides considerable information about CUNY, an institution that has both similarities to and differences from other institutions of higher education. But it can also be helpful in elucidating why change is difficult to effect in higher education, the struggles over the authority to make change, and the ways in which change can be hindered or facilitated at our colleges and universities. I hope that this recounting of the Pathways journey will be useful to you.

CHAPTER 1

Passing the Pathways Resolution ■■■■■

JUNE 27, 2011

NOTICE OF THE JUNE 27, 2011 BOARD MEETING A regular meeting of the Board of Trustees shall take place on MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011 AT 4:30 P.M., IN ROOM 14-­220, BARUCH COLLEGE VERTICAL CAMPUS, at 55 Lexington Avenue (corner of 24th Street), New York, New York. . . . The proceedings will be telecast live on CUNY-­TV, cable Channel 75, and online at www​.cuny​.edu​/trustees.

Room 14-­220 at Baruch College is one of the largest rooms for meetings at The City University of New York. When you sit at one end of the room, as I always did, the faces of the people at the other end are smudges. This room was chosen for meetings of CUNY’s Board of Trustees because it was so big—­not in order to hold large audiences, but to make sure there was a large gap between the people in the audience at one end of the room and the people participating in the meeting at the other end: no-­man’s-­land. Some time in the memories of veterans of the CUNY central office, when the board meetings were held at what was then CUNY headquarters on East Eightieth Street, someone in the audience had leapt up and stood on the meeting table until a trustee grabbed the leaper’s leg and pulled him down. And on another occasion, when the board was meeting at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College, an audience member had thrown a stink bomb, hitting a vice chancellor. Thus the necessity of no-­man’s-­land. Now, for every board meeting, the official participants—­CUNY board members, chancellor, vice chancellors, and college presidents—­sat at a huge square made of tables. Given that CUNY has twenty-­four college presidents and deans of freestanding professional schools, as well as a couple dozen board members and vice chancellors, the square needed to be very big indeed. As executive vice chancellor and university provost, I sat on the farthest edge of that square,

10  ■  Chapter 1

along what might be called the top of the room, to the right of the chancellor, Matthew Goldstein. The chancellor is the CEO of the CUNY system of colleges, and I was its chief academic officer. The room’s layout meant that people sitting on the side of the square opposite me and Matt had their backs to no-­man’s-­land and the audience. These seats were always occupied by college presidents. On one side of the room was a low platform for the technicians doing the recording and broadcasting of the meeting, and there were also multiple technicians around the room operating large standing video cameras. By law, CUNY board meetings are public—­they are broadcast live on CUNY TV and the web, and a video recording is available online afterward, in addition to the fact that members of the public may attend in person. On June 27, 2011, the audience consisted of the usual staff members from the CUNY central office and colleges, and a few interested faculty members. But on this day there were also a lot of additional staff from my section of the CUNY central office (the Office of Academic Affairs), plus around twenty students. All these people were there because a vote on Pathways—­CUNY’s controversial proposed new policy for fixing CUNY students’ decades-­long problems in transferring credits—­was on the board agenda. I couldn’t see the students well from where I was sitting, but I knew they were there because many were wearing the blue sports shirts of the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities (CCSD), a group that had been strongly supporting Pathways due to the particular challenges facing disabled students when their credits didn’t transfer. I also couldn’t see well the plainclothes peace officers who were always scattered through the audience in case of trouble (to prevent a dash through no-­man’s-­ land or the throwing of noxious substances). On this day, given the controversy about Pathways, there was a greater-­than-­zero probability that someone would do something that would interfere with the meeting’s proceedings. One person whom I could see well was sitting directly behind me and the chancellor, in the small space between us and the shaded windows at the top of the room. This person was Dave Fields, senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor. Dave’s job at board meetings was to watch the whole room while staying close to the chancellor. For these meetings he put on a jacket and tie, rare for him, and his long gray hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail. Dave and Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations, had been student protest leaders at Queens College in their distant youth, and both had a long history of supporting students. In fact, Dave, who is a few years

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 11

older than Jay, had once been Jay’s instructor for a college course. As part of that course, Dave, a lawyer, gave Jay the assignment to change a law. Through some hard work in Albany, Jay managed to change the law specifying the composition of the CUNY board so that, ever since, the board had included a voting student representative (Jay, at the time), but a nonvoting faculty representative, in addition to the many voting members appointed by the governor and the mayor.1 For the several decades leading up to June 2011, Jay, consistent with his substantial physique, had been a formidable, unstoppable force in the CUNY central administration, and with Dave and others he had worked tirelessly to preserve and enhance CUNY’s reputation, some might say at no matter what the cost. At board meetings Jay sat at the top of the room, where he no longer had a vote but could survey everything going on and give directions to staff around the room as needed. A protest leader of a different sort was seated on the edge of the square to my right: Professor Sandi Cooper, chair of the University Faculty Senate (UFS) and the sole faculty member participant in board meetings. The UFS consists of faculty representatives elected from each CUNY college. This was Sandi’s third stint as the chair of this group. Her previous two chairships, which lasted from 1994 to 1998, were marked by greater-­than-­usual acrimony between the UFS and the CUNY central administration, including multiple lawsuits filed by Sandi and the UFS.2 On June 27, 2011, I knew this about her, and I also knew that she was a historian (though I had little awareness of her scholarship). Consistent with her academic specialty, I knew that she frequently made references to CUNY events that she had witnessed many decades in the past, including when she was emitting her frequent critiques of current administrative efforts. Most notably on this day, I knew her as the leader of the faculty opposition to Pathways. Had I also known at that time that her scholarly specialty involved the history of peace movements (or one might say protest movements)—­and that, prior to the Pathways controversy, she had published close to twenty letters/op-­eds in the New York Times and engaged in anti-­CUNY-­administration activities for many decades—­I might have thought a little longer about opposing her on Pathways. Her New York University doctoral dissertation, which she conceived in a 1958–­1959 NYU class following her undergraduate work at CUNY’s City College, contained a section on modern European peace movements. Her New York Times pieces were on topics ranging from the deteriorating New York subways (1977) to reform in Russia (1987) to the particular difficulties that

12  ■  Chapter 1

women have in reaching career heights (2000) to the Nobel Peace Prize (2006).3 I also didn’t know that just two years before this board meeting she had won the Peace History Society Lifetime Achievement Award.4 Nor that she had been the subject of more than one news article describing allegations that she was racist and a Communist.5 She was a public, controversial figure. Instead, at that time, what I saw was a professor near the end of a long career at CUNY. With gray hair gathered loosely in back of her head, she had a habit of pursing her lips, downturned at the corners, when she finished a statement. I had been told that she had recently lost her husband.6 I believed that she cared deeply about her family and junior colleagues. In fact, it was just half an hour before the meeting started that Sandi told us she would attend—­she had originally said she had to care for a sick relative at the time of the meeting, but then she had found someone else to provide that care in her stead. Though many of my interactions with Sandi had been difficult, some had not. For example, a few months earlier, when she and I and others were being instructed on how to use iPads to access board committee meeting materials, she asked our instructor whether she would get cancer of the fingers from using the iPad. I thought that comment clever and laughed. Then I realized that no one else in the room was laughing. But on this day amusing incidents involving Sandi were far from my mind. As usual, I entered room 14-­220 the back way, escorted by peace officers, thus avoiding having to pass through the metal detectors required for anyone seeking to sit in the audience. As soon as I entered the room, I scanned it for any possible trouble. My colleagues and I had tried to anticipate everything that could interfere with passing the Pathways resolution, but I had learned only too well in the past few months that I could not predict what form trouble might take. Just a few weeks earlier Sandi had advised faculty to protest Pathways by attending a public meeting in their academic regalia and passing out leaflets. What had she told them to do at this board meeting? I couldn’t see many faculty in the audience, but maybe that was just because the audience was so far away. Soon after we entered the room, Benno Schmidt—­board chair and former president of Yale and dean of Columbia’s Law School—­sitting between Matt and Jay, called the meeting to order. With his wire-­rim glasses, round face, dark suit, light shirt, and striped tie, he had a scholarly as well as authoritative appearance. As at every board meeting, on this day he first read aloud the rules of conduct:7 “The Board must carry out the functions assigned to it by law and

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 13

therefore cannot tolerate conduct that disrupts its meetings. In the event of disruptions, including noise, which interferes with Board discussion, after appropriate warning I will ask the security staff to remove persons engaging in disruptive conduct. The University may seek disciplinary and/or criminal sanctions against persons who engage in conduct that violates the University’s rules or State laws, which prohibit interference with the work of public bodies.” I sat in my place, trying not to move, and especially not to activate any of my facial muscles in ways that would indicate any emotions. Seated next to Matt, I could be on camera at any time, and I had had much experience with people telling me that they could see exactly how I felt. I couldn’t show how anxious I was about the Pathways resolution, and there would be close to an hour before we got to that part of the agenda. I was wearing a new yellow suit, bought for the occasion. I knew it would be visible in the sea of dark jackets all around me (including the one Sandi wore), and yellow had special significance for me. It had been my mother’s favorite color; she said it was associated with intelligence, and—­without consulting me or my soon-­to-­be husband—­she had announced it as the color theme for my wedding almost forty years previously. To me yellow heralded the beginning of summer, a special time for academics, who use that season for scholarly productivity and rejuvenation. Then, too, the suit and the white shell I was wearing underneath it provided coverage for the heart rate monitor I was wearing for a week to check on my occasional heart arrhythmia (atrial fibrillation), which had been flaring up in recent months. Large patches of my skin underneath the suit were raw from repeatedly using tape to hold the many pieces of the monitor close to my body so that no one could detect that I was wearing it. Benno then made his opening remarks. Much of what he said concerned CUNY’s now having a “rational tuition policy.” After years of effort by CUNY, New York State had finally approved CUNY’s raising full-­time annual tuition for New York State residents by up to three hundred dollars in each of the next five years, and there was a commitment that CUNY could keep the additional funds. Benno thanked Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature for this, and pointed out that this new policy would allow CUNY to have long-­term financial stability and the ability to do long-­term planning, rare in American public higher education. Given the research I had done since graduate school on the maximization of long-­term rewards, I agreed with Benno that this new policy would be highly instrumental in enabling a better future for CUNY. Later in the meeting, Benno said that the rational tuition policy “deserves to

14  ■  Chapter 1

be seen . . . as the Chancellor’s greatest achievement to date.” Nowhere in his remarks did Benno mention Pathways. Matt’s report followed Benno’s. On this day, as usual, he wore an expensive dark suit and an expensive watch. To me his suits, wire-­rim glasses, fascination with watches, and large, pale, oval head, with a little bit of gray hair remaining on the sides, projected wisdom. Other people did not react so positively. Matt’s report, also as usual, lasted about thirty minutes. He read from his notes slowly, covering many topics. As chancellor since 1999, widely credited with reversing CUNY’s decline, he always presented reports that contained much good news. Similar to Benno, Matt talked about the rational tuition ­policy. Students would know how much money they would have to pay years in advance, and CUNY would know how much money it had to spend years in advance. It took ten years to establish this policy, with CUNY “working so hard on something, not giving up, and finally seeing the light of day.” He praised Governor Cuomo for “taking on something that others either never thought about doing or dismissed from doing, but he really made it happen.” This sounded to me like what we (the CUNY administration) had been doing with the Pathways Project, but Matt never mentioned Pathways. In addition to the rational tuition policy, Matt reported on two nascent CUNY entities: the new CUNY School of Public Health (a complex, collaborative SPH involving four CUNY colleges, which had recently been granted full, five-­year accreditation), and Guttman Community College (CUNY’s first new college in over forty years, which had just been approved by the Higher Education Committee of the New York State Board of Regents). I had been the central office lead person for the School of Public Health initiative since its inception in 2008, and had also played a critical role in the establishment of Guttman, so Matt’s report on these two entities was very gratifying to hear. Many chancellors would never have taken on even one of these projects—­ the rational tuition policy, the collaborative School of Public Health, and Guttman Community College—­each of which involved huge amounts of work and also huge amounts of political controversy. Toward the end of his report Matt always mentioned honors won by people participating in the meeting, and on that day, for the first time, I was one of them. I had been given the Distinguished Alumna Award by Springside School in Philadelphia, the independent school for girls that I attended from kindergarten through twelfth grade.8 The award recognized my successful academic career, which had relied heavily on collecting and analyzing data, both in the

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 15

context of basic research and, more recently, as an administrator. But as he spoke about the award, I was unable to think about my past accomplishments. All I could think about was what would or would not be accomplished during this board meeting—­would the Pathways resolution pass or would there be some sort of debacle resulting in tragic defeat? Though board meetings were completely scripted because of their public nature, and though all of us in the CUNY central administration had done everything we could think of to prepare for this vote on the Pathways resolution, all it took was one person going off script in order for unpredictable things to happen. Such was the case when, just a month earlier, with no apparent warning, a trustee criticized the Pulitzer Prize–­winning playwright Tony Kushner during a board meeting, and the board then voted to deny Kushner an honorary degree (a decision that was reversed one week later). Given that recent incident, for this meeting’s Pathways vote we had taken the precaution of warning some trustees not to even second any amendments that Sandi might propose for the Pathways resolution. We told them that, were they to second an amendment, they could then be drawn into the litigation that we thought would surely follow passage of the Pathways resolution. Matt finished his report and, as expected and planned, the next speaker was the board’s student representative at that time, University Student Senate (USS) Chair Cory Provost, a polished Brooklyn College graduate student, African American with close-­cropped head and facial hair. Cory, sitting on the side of the square opposite Sandi, objected to the tuition increase. Then Sandi asked to speak for the first time, posing a question to Matt about the university’s finances. Matt responded to both Cory and Sandi in his measured way, with detailed views and facts, and that completed his part of the meeting. He had never mentioned Pathways. We then sat through several other reports until, finally, it was time for the CAPPR section of the meeting, the section that would contain the vote on the Pathways resolution. CAPPR (Committee on Academic Policy, Programs and Research), chaired by Trustee Wellington Chen, is the board committee that is responsible for the university’s academic matters, and I was the CUNY central office liaison to this committee. Wellington started his report concerning the June 6, 2011, CAPPR meeting. We had put the Pathways resolution last in his report, so he had many items to get through first. Wellington, a no-­nonsense, bespectacled individual with a

16  ■  Chapter 1

ready laugh, is the executive director of the Chinatown Partnership. His voice that day was quiet but determined as he gave his lengthy report. Wellington listed, and then the board approved, a bevy of new CUNY programs: an online MS in information systems at the School of Professional Studies, an MA in dance education and an MFA in dance at Hunter College, a BS in radiological science at the New York City College of Technology, an AAS in game design at Hostos Community College, an AS in theater at La Guardia Community College, BAs in law and society and in philosophy at John Jay College, and a BA in Middle Eastern studies at Queens College. Every one of those new programs had been examined in detail in my office before being placed on the CAPPR agenda. Because of CUNY’s continuing financial constraints and goal of increasing quality, new programs had to be excellent in every way in order to make it to a board vote. Assuming the board voted in favor, these programs would then be sent by my office for approval to the New York State Education Department, which has final say over the higher education programs that can be offered in New York State, and for which students can receive federal and state financial aid. Next Wellington reported on some changes that CAPPR had approved in CUNY’s Academic Integrity Policy, the policy regarding treatment of students who, for example, were accused of cheating on exams or plagiarizing papers. Making these changes was the responsibility of Frederick Schaffer, CUNY’s general counsel and senior vice chancellor for legal affairs, a Harvard-­educated attorney with renowned analytical and communication skills. After Wellington had presented the Academic Integrity item, Sandi asked to speak again. She praised Rick for working with the UFS in making the changes in the policy. In her words, he “went the extra mile in a busy day” and was a “model of collegial behavior.” I wondered whether she would say anything about me concerning the Pathways resolution and, if so, what it would be. At long last, almost one hour after the board meeting started, Wellington introduced CAPPR item 5M, the Pathways resolution.9 This resolution would establish a new CUNY policy to help CUNY transfer students accumulate credits and graduate. It would set up a common general education framework for all nineteen CUNY undergraduate colleges (which enroll approximately 240,000 students in credit-­bearing courses), so that students taking any part of general education at any CUNY college could get the same credit at any other CUNY college; it would ensure that the first three to five courses of the most popular transfer majors had equivalent courses at every college that offered

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 17

those majors; and it would ensure that all transferred courses received credit of some sort. The resolution also stated when and how all of this was to be done. The trickiest part would be establishing the general education framework, the specifics of which were to be recommended to the chancellor by a committee made up mostly of faculty by December 1, 2011. Colleges spend years deciding to change one course in their general education curricula; we were proposing to set up a whole framework in less than six months. However, it would be just a framework, specifying only the minimum learning outcomes that the general education courses would have to satisfy. The specific courses for the framework would subsequently need to be chosen or developed by the colleges, and they could add their own learning outcomes, designed particularly for each college. These courses would then need to go through a multistep approval process. In addition, the approved courses would have to be put into our online registration system and students would need time to register for them. All of which meant that we had to get the framework done by the end of fall 2011 in order to have everything in place and functioning for my and my colleagues’ goal: the start of the fall 2013 semester, more than two years away—­years in which CUNY transfer students would continue to be disadvantaged and possibly not finish college because of our current credit-­transfer (or, one might say, credit-­ nontransfer-­) systems. We had set deadlines for every intermediate step based on our ultimate goal of fall 2013. But there was no hope of meeting any sort of deadline for effecting Pathways unless we first passed the resolution. And, according to the schedule we had set, we needed to pass it that day, June 27, 2011. The board would not meet again until September. The students, those in the audience that day as well as the many thousands of CUNY students who transferred each year, deserved our help as soon as possible. Too many years—­too many decades—­had already passed without that help. For at least forty years, CUNY students had transferred among the many colleges of our single university and, all too often, either not received any credit for their courses or received only credits that counted toward their degrees, but not toward their general education or major requirements. Colleges had each set up their own general education requirements; when a student transferred from one college to another, that student too often had to take the new college’s general education requirements even if she or he had already satisfied the former’s. Generally speaking, a student was given credit for a course taken at

18  ■  Chapter 1

a former college if that course matched a course at the new college. However, because no two courses are ever identical, there were plenty of opportunities for students to be denied credit. Credit-­transfer problems were contributing to CUNY’s less-­than-­ideal graduation rates, with 2010–­2011 data showing only 28 percent of new associate’s-­degree students receiving an associate’s or bachelor’s degree within six years of starting college, and only 44 percent of new bachelor’s-­degree students receiving a bachelor’s within six years.10 Because CUNY students, when they transferred, were often denied general education and/or major credit, and were sometimes granted no credit at all, the colleges receiving these students could be guaranteed many additional course enrollments. At CUNY colleges, as at many colleges and universities around the United States, revenue is linked to enrollment. In the specific case of the general education (or core) curriculum, having a guaranteed part of that curriculum means guaranteed enrollment for a department, both from students who start in that department’s college and from students who transfer into it. Departments don’t get tuition revenue directly. But a department that is teaching more students can expect its college administration to allocate the department a larger adjunct (part-­time) faculty budget (meaning more such jobs for the department chair to bestow), a larger supplies budget, and, most important of all, the ability to hire more full-­time faculty members. Having more full-­time faculty members usually means that a department can exert more influence on campus through campus-­wide votes and other campus-­wide activities. Further, having guaranteed enrollments in certain courses means that the faculty who teach those courses can rely on not having to prepare new courses. Teaching new courses can entail substantial extra work, and the faculty may have less interest in teaching the particular content of those new courses. Thus faculty, departments, and even colleges have significant incentives for denying students credits when they transfer. In addition, many faculty truly believe that their discipline is the most important one and/or that their own courses are the best structured and taught—­perhaps the only ones properly taught—­and so will do what they can to ensure that all students take their courses. It is wonderful for students to have confident faculty who love their disciplines, but all of this creates a perfect storm for transferring students. After introducing item 5M, Wellington said that I would provide details. I then began reading a statement on which I had worked many hours, in consultation with Jay. I pitched my voice lower than usual, hoping that would make it sound more authoritative, and I made a point of speaking loudly and clearly

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 19

enough to ensure that those sitting in the square, those sitting in the audience, and those watching online would be able to hear every single word that I said. I talked about the problems that CUNY transfer students have, CUNY’s past attempts to solve those problems, and how we were now going to solve them. It is time for CUNY to take comprehensive action to break down these barriers for our students, to respect our students’ right to transfer seamlessly among the different campuses of our single university according to their needs and interests, though subject to the admissions standards of the different colleges. It is also time to recognize, indeed celebrate, the many thousands of wonderful CUNY faculty who have done outstanding work on the curriculum of individual courses, of programs, and of degrees. . . . The specifics of this resolution have been significantly shaped and refined by unprecedented discussion and consultation among members of the CUNY community, involving some 70 meetings between representatives of the central administration and of the campuses since last October, including a great many with the University Faculty Senate, also posting of all types of information on a public website, newsletter articles, a webinar open to all, and an opportunity for CUNY community members to submit their comments electronically, an opportunity taken by about 550 people. As a result of all of the feedback received, the final resolution before you now went through several iterations and incorporates many changes from the original draft resolution distributed in January. . . . With this resolution, the special role of the faculty in determining curriculum will be preserved, and colleges will have considerable flexibility and individuality. At the same time, the rights of students to transfer and have their course credits transfer with them will be protected . . . CUNY students will attend a single, integrated university. . . . It is time for CUNY to break with its long history of putting barriers in front of transfer students’ graduation goals. It is time for CUNY to respect all of its faculty, and to ask them to work together, across campuses, for the betterment of all CUNY students. It is time for there to be clear, faculty-­defined, high-­standard, efficient educational pathways for the CUNY undergraduate body. It is time to vote in favor of this resolution.

I stopped and looked up. Now came the most critical part of the meeting, when participants could ask questions and make statements prior to the actual vote on the resolution. As planned, Trustee Freida Foster went first. She asked about the financial aid implications of Pathways, a subject I had not included in my statement so that she could ask about it. I responded that Pathways would help ensure that all courses students took were eligible for financial aid;

20  ■  Chapter 1

financial aid won’t cover courses that have to be repeated because of a student transferring. Next Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, an appointee to the board by Republican Governor Pataki, called the transfer matter the “most seminal issue since 1999.” In 1999 CUNY had eliminated remedial (precollege) courses at the colleges that only have bachelor’s, and not associate’s, degrees. As a result, claiming the board’s action had harmed CUNY’s mission of access to higher education, the UFS (including Sandi as its chair) and the faculty union (the Professional Staff Congress, known as the PSC) had sued CUNY. Then in 2000, as part of these reforms, CUNY had (unsuccessfully) proposed establishing a core curriculum for the entire university. Sandi had subsequently written in one of her New York Times pieces: “Trustees simply lack the competence to shape curriculums. . . . The faculty cannot buy into peace at any price.”11 In retrospect, this statement was a good predictor of her later behavior concerning Pathways. Jeff subsequently asked Cory whether credit transfer was the most important issue to the students after tuition, and Cory said, “I believe you’re right.” So far, so good. Everything was going according to plan. Then Sandi made her statement. It lasted five minutes but to me it felt like five hours. She spoke at a measured pace, looking down at the table in front of her after every few words—­apparently reading from a prepared written statement. Although I have no doubt that you will endorse this proposal unanimously and that vote will be followed by noisy, even raucous, approval from its supporters, many of whom are thrilled to see the CUNY faculty spanked and rebuffed in public, I am obliged to point out the following. I am a historian. You are voting for a veritable coup in public higher education. You have moved to an administrative office in the Chancellery, not staffed by teaching faculty, the 1,000-­year-­old authority of University faculty to determine curricula in higher education. This is step one towards the creation of high school systems. Were we medical doctors I doubt if the Trustees of the hospital would tell us what steps to take before a surgical procedure.

There are many similarities between medicine and higher education—­for example, issues regarding the independence of individuals to practice their craft in the ways that they choose versus standardization in accordance with evidence-­based best practices. What is not similar are the consequences for inadequate performance. Doctors are sometimes sued for malpractice, fired from hospital staffs, and barred from further practice via license removal. No such

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 21

consequences exist for faculty. Other than occasional “early retirements,” the removal of faculty from tenured positions is rare and worthy of national media attention.12 With US law specifying that there can be no mandatory retirement age, a tenured faculty position is almost always a position to be held until the occupant decides to relinquish it or dies. Sandi continued: “This process and this resolution implies huge disrespect for the professionals you have hired and tenured. . . . Some members of this Chancellery have turned this into a circus by organizing student groups to applaud policies that they think will put faculty in their place and make life easier” (an apparent reference to the previous week’s public hearing concerning the board meeting’s agenda, a hearing consisting of both impassioned pro-­, and impassioned anti-­, Pathways testimony, and an emotional roller coaster for every­one concerned). I point out, yes, there is a transfer problem. . . . This transfer problem is not to be solved by eliminating the kind of education that prepares people to cope with the world where they are likely to be fired in two to four years from the first job they trained for. . . . Nor is the outcome of a slippery transfer policy likely to help any student who does poorly after transfer for lack of preparation. This is a major issue for us. . . . The faculty did not object to essentially coordinated policy to improve transfer but it vigorously rejects a methodology that is cumbersome, unworkable, and essentially insulting. . . . To those who think that we have avoided this problem in the UFS, I suggest you check the historic records. The University Faculty Senate has worked on this issue since the mid-­90s, with very little support, and produced a general ed statement a decade ago. . . . This was a vote taken by the Faculty Senate representing every college, undergraduate and graduate, about what constitutes general education.

As far as I could tell, nothing substantive had happened concerning this general education statement, despite its having been written by the UFS many years previously. During another part of her statement Sandi referred to the CUNY Discipline Councils, each of which consists of all of the colleges’ department chairs in a particular discipline. Over the years, the Mathematics Discipline Council has probably been the most active, but there have also been councils for disciplines such as English, science, and world languages. Sandi wanted these Discipline Councils, and people elected from each college, to do the work in establishing the Pathways general education framework. But my colleagues and I

22  ■  Chapter 1

didn’t see how that would be effective. We wanted to establish a relatively small, nimble committee of highly respected faculty, supported by a much larger committee, with balanced representation from all CUNY sectors and disciplines. If committee members were elected instead of appointed, the committees would be more likely to overrepresent the largest departments, such as English. Our intention was to solicit nominations from everyone and then appoint the best overall committee, as had always been our practice for CUNY-­wide committees that included faculty. This was the “cumbersome” “methodology” to which Sandi had referred. Sandi had finished her statement. And it was just a statement. Though she had said some unpleasant things, she hadn’t tried to move any amendments nor had she said anything ad hominem. The discussion of the Pathways resolution was still on track. Trustee Valerie Lancaster Beal then spoke briefly. She stated that the number one concern she hears from students has to do with problems transferring ­credits and the consequences of not being able to graduate on time and running out of money. She also stated that “quite contrary to some of the language that has been used, I view this as an affirmation of the faculty and their willingness . . . [to make] this work for the students.” What had clinched Valerie’s support of the resolution was that she had recently learned that her niece, who had been a student at one of the CUNY community colleges, had found it easier to transfer her credits to Cornell than to one of the CUNY senior colleges. Valerie and Freida were the only two African American female members of the board. There were other members of underrepresented groups on the board as well. Looking around the square that day, I could see that the CUNY board, the vice chancellors, and the presidents were quite diverse groups. The CUNY students in the audience, similar to CUNY undergraduates generally, were also diverse; the majority of CUNY undergraduates are members of underrepresented groups and come from disadvantaged backgrounds.13 The (elected) UFS leadership, some of whom were in the audience that day, uniformly reflected the white majority CUNY faculty. The longest comment on the resolution came next, from Trustee Peter Pantaleo. Peter is a respected labor and employment lawyer (management, not union, side), a partner in the firm DLA Piper. He made multiple points, beginning with “our [CUNY’s] mandate to operate as an integrated [i.e., single] university.” After stating that he had read “virtually everything” given to him, and thanking the administration as well as the UFS for all this information, he said,

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 23

“I understand the issues that therefore we’re asked to consider today, but I must confess I don’t understand the heat and the rhetoric that surround these issues.” Peter then disagreed that academic quality would decrease as a result of Pathways, stating that “an articulated fear, no matter how well-­articulated, does not become a fact,” and he disagreed that the faculty had been “disrespected.” He said that consultation is what is called for in our Bylaws and in the State Education Law. Consultation is not permission and it is not a veto, it is the ability to provide meaningful, appropriate, and well thought out ideas on a problem. I would also congratulate the faculty because I believe they have done that. Contrary to spanking the faculty, the element of being an adult in a discussion, quite frankly, is understanding when your point of view is not accepted by the majority, but respecting the fact that you were indeed consulted pursuant to longstanding academic practices and policies. . . . Shared governance is exactly that. However, this Board is charged with the responsibility to make the final decision. Some don’t want to accept that, that is the fact, and that is what we are going to have to do today, whether we agree with the proposal or not.

After going through a number of objections to the resolution and rejecting each, he said: So, the final argument [by some faculty] is, let’s just take our time and talk about it. Well, if any topic has been talked about over a period of time, it is certainly this one, talking about and asking for more time is quite candidly a very good technique when someone is trying to resist or a group is trying to resist change, because by continued discussion you absolutely guarantee the maintenance of the status quo, and we are going to be disrupting the status quo with this resolution. . . . So what are we agreeing about basically? What do the stakeholders, in this case the faculty perhaps, some elements of the faculty, because I’ve heard from faculty who are in favor of this resolution. . . . I’m glad to see that everyone seems to agree that the current transfer system is flawed and that we are going to fix it.

He then discussed the purpose and function of general education, including the differences in the UFS’s and central administration’s positions on what should constitute general education. Depending on the field of the speaker, a mathematician will complain about the numeracy ability or students being innumerate. Historians . . . comment upon

24  ■  Chapter 1 the lack of historical knowledge of some of our students. Literature professors talk about cultural literacy. . . . And the foreign language faculty worries about the linguistic ability of our graduates. The role of basic education is to ensure that those basic building blocks are part of the foundation of a student’s education. I don’t believe that the proposal we are being asked to approve today in any way diminishes that. The disagreement comes from the basic question of how much and who gets to decide, and that’s really . . . it seems to me the major dispute. . . . Those of us who are privileged to serve on this Board have . . . a varying number of reasons why we are proud and pleased to be on the Board, but one reason that is absolutely overwhelming is the belief in the CUNY mission and the belief of access to education for all New Yorkers. Contrary to what has been asserted. . . . We have respect for the opinion of the faculty. I considered the opinion of the faculty over and above virtually any other opinions and facts that I’ve been given in this issue. The arguments, however, for the resolution are compelling.

Peter then pointed out that the resolution would set in place a general education framework that, though requiring fewer credits than what many CUNY colleges required at that time for bachelor’s-degree students, would still require more such credits than the national average for large, public universities. Peter ended by making the point that, if a student has to repeat courses or take extra courses because of problems transferring credits, the amount of money the student needs to pay for this is more than the forthcoming tuition increases discussed earlier in the meeting and about which so many students were upset. “This is not just an education issue, this is an economic issue. Making students retake courses that they don’t need to retake and meet requirements to graduate that are artificially imposed and, yes, in some cases have strong institutional bias on the part of some faculty, is simply not appropriate, and because of that I will vote and urge . . . my fellow Trustees to vote yes on resolution 5M.” When Peter finished, for the first time there was a reaction from the audience: applause. In one speech, Peter had summarized the rationale for Pathways, the authority of the board to effect it, and the motivations of some faculty who opposed it. But, truthfully, at the time, I wasn’t able to focus on any of what he said. I was glad there was applause for his pro-­Pathways statement by the audience, but mostly I was worried about what might happen next. “Thank you,” said Benno. “Trustee Provost.”

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 25

Cory then said: “I just want to second everything Trustee Pantaleo said,” and there was laughter from the audience. Next Trustee Phil Berry, vice chair of the board, known for his genial wisdom, also said that he agreed with Trustee Pantaleo. He related that he had himself transferred from CUNY’s Borough of Manhattan Community College to Queens College, “and I wish that this policy had been in place at that time.” “This decision was made based upon consultation with all of the parties. . . . Even the way that it’s going to be executed will include all of those views.” He paraphrased a quote from Martin Luther King Jr. that “wait means never.” There was again applause when Phil finished. Now, as planned, there were statements from presidents. The president of CUNY’s first college, City College of New York (CCNY), Lisa Coico, spoke first. Petite, with short dark hair, small rectangular dark-­rimmed glasses, and an off-­ white suit, she spoke clearly, with much inflection and hand gestures, describing her own experiences related to the resolution. She and her husband of many decades had both graduated from CUNY’s Brooklyn College, but one of them attended CUNY’s Kingsborough Community College first. Both of them ended up having highly successful careers as scientists and administrators. Lisa challenged the audience to identify which of them had started at Kingsborough. The example of her and her husband belied the assumption by some CUNY faculty that students who come to the senior colleges from the community colleges are inferior. Lisa made the additional point that CUNY students don’t want things to be easy; they want their classes to be challenging so that when they graduate they will be able to compete successfully against the graduates of the country’s most selective colleges. When she finished speaking, there was once again applause. President Felix V. Matos Rodriguez, former cabinet secretary of the Department of Family Services in Puerto Rico, and perhaps CUNY’s most diplomatic president, was the first community college president to speak. He stated that his college, Hostos, was much in favor of the resolution and that “we’ve seen our faculty participate . . . in many of the [discussion] mechanisms . . . that were described by Vice Chancellor Logue,” and “we have many good models within CUNY of the many good things that we do when we put our heads together and we work as a system.” He added that he was also pleased that, at least at Hostos, the staff had participated in the Pathways discussions. “The staff in student life and student support are very supportive, because they are the ones that in many cases deal with many of the issues that the students face when they are trying to either transfer or figure out how to transfer.”

26  ■  Chapter 1

Another community college president who spoke was Antonio Pérez, president of Borough of Manhattan Community College, who used his college’s motto (“Start here, go anywhere”) as an example of what Pathways would help CUNY students to do. Another Trustee, Kathleen M. Pesile, joined in with her support. One of the last to speak about the resolution was Bill Kelly, an English faculty member and president of the CUNY Graduate Center. Bill is a close friend of the chancellor’s (they have been in a book club together), and is tall with dark hair and a graying, neatly trimmed beard. At this meeting he stated that the faculty working together to carry out the tasks required by this resolution would do great things “across the Community Colleges and the Senior Colleges.” Bill has been at CUNY for many decades, beginning at Queens College, and he related how, in 1976 as a new faculty member at Queens, he was assigned to the “Transfer Committee” and told to help make transferring from CUNY’s Queensborough Community College to Queens College difficult. The time has come, he said, to fix this. He too got applause. He was to play critical roles in the continuing story of Pathways in the years to come as head of the Pathways major committees, and subsequently as interim chancellor. Except for Sandi’s remarks, the discussion so far had been completely supportive of Pathways. I started to breathe a little more regularly. But now Sandi wanted to speak again, and Benno recognized her. “I want to thank Mr. Pantaleo for his serious consideration and I would just like to add some facts.” She stated that CUNY’s existing general education requirements only seem to involve more credits than the requirements of other universities—­ that other universities have graduation requirements on top of their general education requirements, and students at those other universities must satisfy all of these requirements. Then she went on: “The heat, yes, there is heat, because for the most part, on more than one occasion off the record, a number of people leading this campaign kept telling me that the senior colleges were going to have to, quote, stuff it, unquote. Them’s fightin’ words. I’m not very polite since I don’t usually, unless I’m forced back to the Bronx, speak that way.” I had heard of one incident similar to what Sandi had described. “Finally,” she said, “yes, you have the authority. I would point out, as I have before, the textbooks used to say that the papacy built the Vatican and Louis the XIV built Versailles. The construction was done by masons, painters, unskilled laborers, people who carried buckets of water, and a variety of folks who made bricks and marble. I would like to see the members of the Board of ­Trustees teach these . . . courses.”

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 27

She finished and there was silence. I asked to speak, making the point that my office had calculated the general education requirements of all colleges—­ CUNY and non-­CUNY alike—­in the same way, and had in all cases included any existing graduation requirements, as well as requirements labeled as general education. Benno was ready to call the question, but first he said, Let me just express my strong support for this momentous resolution . . . in 1999, I said this was . . . one of the most important policy changes that CUNY needed to do to become a coherent unified university in which students could navigate across campuses. . . . I think this will raise academic standards. . . . I also think that this sends a very strong message that there are no second-­class students at CUNY and there are no second-­class campuses. We are one university and our students deserve to be students who are attending one university. It connotes no disrespect for the faculty to say that the faculty needs to exercise its powers over the curriculum, its control over academic standards, the content of the curriculum, in ways that create a coherent university experience for our students.

Finally, it was time for the vote. No one but Sandi had said anything at all critical about resolution 5M, and thanks to Jay’s and Dave’s actions long ago, though she had a voice at the meeting she had no vote.14 But Wellington started speaking again. Inwardly I groaned. Might what he was going to say cause some sort of reaction that would thwart our progress toward a positive vote? We were so close. Wellington said that when he was an architecture student at CCNY, he decided to get ahead of the game by taking one summer course at Queens, but, “guess what, those credits are still sitting at Queens.” There was laughter, and I gave an inward sigh of relief. Benno said: “All right. All in favor please say aye.” There was a chorus of ayes. “Any opposed?” Silence. “Abstentions?” Silence. “The resolution carries unanimously.” There was huge applause, as well as some cheers. I wanted to stand up and dance, but the cameras were still on and the meeting was not yet done. Wellington reported on two CAPPR information items; then, in accordance with plan, I made another statement. First, I want to thank the great many faculty and staff who productively shared their experiences and knowledge with us, helping to modify and shape a resolution that would best help students and the university. . . . The staff in the central

28  ■  Chapter 1 Office of Academic Affairs were particularly dedicated to the project, and a great, great many people there worked tirelessly, beginning with Associate University Provost Dr. Julia Wrigley. . . . Members of the Chancellor’s cabinet also provided their expertise and leadership, with virtually every one of them being involved at some point, because major CUNY-­wide academic issues such as those related to this resolution touch on virtually every area of the university. . . . If there is one matter that unites our Trustees it is their deep caring for our students. . . . [Matt’s] leadership has always been legendary, and that legend continues with the passage of this resolution. . . . He has led and shaped this resolution all along the way, and his conviction and determination have been an inspiration to us all.

At this point the camera showed Matt and me together. Matt looked down, shuffling his papers, as I spoke, a typical reaction for him when he was praised. Last I wanted to thank the students—­the students who had attended so many meetings and testified at public hearings so many times, and who, as a result, had sometimes been attacked in public by some faculty, but who had always conducted themselves with the utmost intelligence and professionalism. “You have, in many cases, sacrificed huge amounts of your time to help make a difference that will benefit, not you yourself, but will benefit the many tens of thousands of CUNY students who will come after you. You are a shining example of what this university is all about. We are all so proud that you are our students, and that someday you will represent CUNY as CUNY alumni.” The rest of the board meeting, consisting mainly of the business of other board committees, went by in a blur. When the meeting was over, I crossed no-­man’s-­land and walked to the far end of room 14-­220 to see and share congratulations with the many Pathways supporters still in the audience. People all over the room were high-­fiving, hugging, and kissing. The Pathways resolution had passed despite many months of opposition from Sandi and other faculty. Before we left the room, Jay had sent out a news item announcing that Pathways had passed. By morning both the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed had online reports (for a full list of Pathways media coverage see http://​www​.awlogue​.com). We were jubilant. Our hard work of the past year had paid off. The attacks we had endured had not stopped Pathways. We still had much work to do, beginning with the difficult task of constructing a general education framework for the entire university. But given what we had already accomplished, this didn’t sound

Passing the Resolution (6/27/11)  ■ 29

impossibly hard. And we already knew who would chair the committee. We had wanted someone very intelligent, very strong, and with no vested interest in any discipline or college. Perfect for this role was the dean of CUNY’s freestanding law school, Michelle Anderson, and she had agreed to undertake the task. But that night, at almost 11:00 p.m., as all of us from the central office tried to get to sleep after the excitement of the day, Sandi sent out an email to a huge list of faculty maintained by the UFS. “The transfer policy . . . passed, of course, with the expected contingent of students cheering on the trustees who spoke in its favor and roaring their approval of Executive Vice Chancellor Alexandra Logue who, in her speech, effusively thanked them for their support and help. She also thanks her staff, the chancellor and a variety of college administrators. Faculty—­apart from those few who apparently have written private memos to her and the trustees—­were ignored.” Seeing this statement the next morning, I was mystified. I had thanked the faculty in my main speech and had mentioned them first in the list of thanks that constituted my final statement. One of the other vice chancellors wrote me in an email that day: “She is veracity challenged.” But, as had been our practice regarding Sandi’s previous incorrect public statements, we in the central administration decided to keep our comments to ourselves. That night, though, Sandi emailed the UFS faculty list again. It seemed that someone, among the likely dozens of faculty, staff, and administrators who had both read her email and heard my speech, had pointed out her email’s inaccuracies to her. She now wrote: It appears as if there is a complaint about my quick, shorthand summary of the LONG Trustees meeting. I failed to credit Alexandra Logue sufficiently when she thanked all those who shaped the transfer resolution. I heard an effusive thanks to the activist students (you can check the podcast) but she evidently thanked faculty as well. My personal but not official take on all this was that the latter was a polite formality based on what I heard. . . . My greatest disappointment, not unexpected, is the unanimity with which trustees dismissed the 45 plus statements from faculty . . . because they requested more time to figure out how to deal with ­ roject. the resolution. This was dismissed as an old ploy to gain time and kill a p There was no recognition of the petition and its near 1000 signatures. Nor of the student rejection of the resolution in the Baruch, Brooklyn, and Lehman cases. . . . The resolution was celebrated as a major culmination of the Schmidt report—­the creation of a “Cuniversity.”

30  ■  Chapter 1

This was the first time I had ever heard the term “Cuniversity.” Sandi’s ­follow-­up email went on: For faculty who do not know what the latter refers to . . . it means that the State statute authorizing the trustees to set policy trumps all else except perhaps the PSC contract (which does not deal with college governance and curricula ­matters).  .  .  . As one trustee said, after rejecting all criticisms of the proposed resolution, the faculty are invited to comment and give advice but their advice is not binding. It is advice, period. And since the advice was not taken, we should accept that and agree to move on.

Although the term “Cuniversity” was new to me, what Sandi wrote about CUNY governance structure and about what one trustee said was correct. However, nowhere in her email did she mention the central administration’s many and long-­term efforts to try to work with the faculty on Pathways, nor the changes that we had made in the original draft resolution as a result of faculty feedback. As promised in her original email to the faculty after the board meeting, Sandi posted on the UFS website what she said was her board meeting statement about resolution 5M. At least one-­third of the posted document differed from what she had verbalized at the meeting. Most of the differences between her oral and posted statements were not substantive. The posted statement did leave out her oral statement that the faculty considered the administration’s plan for constructing the general education framework to be “insulting,” as well as leaving out her final oral statements such as “I have trouble wasting time reinventing the wheel” and “Them’s fightin’ words.” It was now June 28, into the summer, faculty’s period of annual leave. The crucial board meeting was over. Months of hard work and challenge were behind us in the central Office of Academic Affairs. Our immediate task was to set up the committees, composed mostly of faculty, to work on the CUNY-­wide general education framework. While Sandi was sending her emails, and perhaps already planning her next steps, we weren’t thinking about what she had done or might yet do. We were thinking about our next required tasks. We had many deadlines to meet.

CHAPTER 2

Antecedents ■■■■■

1961 TO SUMMER 2010

It is interesting to watch how a faculty intent on few rules for itself can fashion such a plethora of them for the students. (Kerr, 2001;1 Clark Kerr was president of the University of California system from 1958 to 19672)

Sometimes the study of the past can help us understand the present, and even predict the future. This is a statement on which former UFS Chair Sandi Cooper and I can agree: she as a professor of history, and I as a specialist in the area of learning known as operant conditioning, in which past experiences shape future behavior—­not unlike Isaac Asimov’s concept of psychohistory,3 which I read about and loved at an early age. In the case of Pathways, how, over time, did transfer of student credits at CUNY become such a problem and so controversial? What led up to the disagreements between Sandi and everyone else speaking at the June 27, 2011, CUNY Board of Trustees meeting? What were the fundamental dynamics within the CUNY system that caused students to have difficulties transferring those credits, and what was the nature of those difficulties? The answers to these questions are anchored in 1961, when CUNY was first formed. In this chapter I’ll summarize events starting from that year, 1961, up to the summer of 2010, when my office (the CUNY central Office of Academic Affairs) decided to work on formulating a new CUNY credit-­transfer policy. In the following three chapters I’ll describe how we constructed, revised, and shepherded the resulting policy through to the June 27, 2011, CUNY board meeting, amid rising furor.

32  ■  Chapter 2

Federation Origins CUNY was founded in 1961, combining seven preexisting colleges: four bachelor’s-­degree-­granting colleges (Brooklyn, City, Hunter, and Queens) and three associate’s-­degree-­granting community colleges (Bronx, Queensborough, and Staten Island; Staten Island now also gives bachelor’s degrees).4 City was the oldest. Its precursor, The Free Academy, was founded in 1847. Brooklyn, Hunter, and Queens were founded in 1830, 1870, and 1937, respectively, and the three community colleges were all founded between 1955 and 1958. Thus, before they became CUNY, each of these colleges had a long history of functioning on its own without any official regard for the others. The New York State law that established CUNY laid out a number of principles by which CUNY was to function. For example, since its founding, CUNY has had a single governing board; individual colleges have fund-­raising/advisory boards, but these boards have had no governing authority. Despite this unifying governance structure, CUNY began its life more as a loose federation than as an integrated university. At first, the position of chancellor had limited authority over the colleges. The board’s bylaws used to state, “The authority, functions, and appellate powers of the presidents with regard to the educational administration and disciplinary affairs in their several colleges will not be abridged,” and another board principle was that “the focus of major decision-­making is properly at the college level.”5 Perhaps the clearest example of the originally limited authority of the chancellor is the fact that, when CUNY was first established and for most of its history, the college presidents reported directly to the board, not to the chancellor. In practice, this meant that each president reported to the board member or board members who were particularly interested in that president’s college. Given that board members, most of whom were appointed by the governor or the mayor, were not usually experts in the field of higher education, such a reporting system often did not result in as strong oversight of the presidents as might have occurred with supervision by a chancellor, or in a traditional structure in which a single college is overseen by a single board of trustees. This aspect of CUNY’s structure did not change until 1999. Matthew Goldstein became chancellor that year, and, realizing that the existing structure created many inefficiencies, he set as one of his conditions for accepting the position that the presidents would report directly to him. A

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 33

hallmark of Matt’s administration was facilitating a truly integrated university, one in which different colleges played different, though complementary, roles. However, there were certainly some efforts made in this direction during the chancellorship of Ann Reynolds from 1990 to 1997. She tried to coordinate the academic offerings of the various colleges, eliminating duplication. Nevertheless, without authority over the presidents, Chancellor Reynolds was limited in what she could accomplish. Supporting Matt’s integrative efforts was New York State Education Law: “The control of the educational work of the city university shall rest solely in the board of trustees which shall govern and administer all educational units of the city university,”6 and revisions to the CUNY Bylaws so that they stated, “The Chancellor shall be appointed by and report to the board. He/she shall be the chief executive, educational and administrative officer of the city university of New York and the chief educational and administrative officer of the senior and community colleges.”7 Also, by far the greatest portion of college operating funds flows first through the central office and then is distributed from the central office to the colleges. Further, because New York State recognizes CUNY as a single university, requests to New York State for approval of new academic programs must come from the central office, not individual colleges, giving the central office some critical control over the colleges. Another example of the federation heritage of the CUNY colleges, and undoubtedly contributing to many colleges’ ongoing perception of themselves as independent entities, is the fact that, for a great many decades, each of them has been independently accredited. The most important accreditation for each CUNY college comes from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (hereafter Middle States). Accreditation by this body allows a college to provide its students with federal financial aid. Between 1961 and 1970, ten more CUNY undergraduate colleges were established. The only undergraduate colleges to be established between 1970 and 2017 are the School of Professional Studies (2003) and Guttman Community College (2011), each of which has fewer than three thousand students. Thus, with the exception of those two small units, all of the current CUNY undergraduate colleges predate, by many years, the 1999 change in CUNY structure from more of a federation to more of an integrated university. It was during the early federation years, in 1967, that Sandi first began teaching at what became the College of Staten Island.8

34  ■  Chapter 2

Federated Colleges vs. Integrated University Based on my own conversations with them, there have been multiple CUNY presidents who have felt that their colleges would be better off without the supervision of the CUNY central office. Having served as dean of arts and sciences from 1995 to 2001 at Baruch, one of the more selective bachelor’s-­ degree-­granting CUNY colleges, I know from firsthand experience the widespread sentiment of loyalty first to one’s college, and a distant second to CUNY, if there is any loyalty to CUNY at all. When Chancellor Reynolds’ curriculum initiatives seemed to indicate that Baruch could not teach Mandarin Chinese because nearby Hunter College already did, we in the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch bristled, and eventually we scheduled Chinese anyway—­the central office could not stop us. A notable exception to the pro-­federation sentiments at that time was Matt’s view. He was president of Baruch College from 1991 to 1998. He hired me as dean of arts and sciences at Baruch in 1995, and I worked with him for three years before he left to become president of Adelphi. In his latter years at Baruch, though he strongly supported Baruch’s becoming the strongest college it could be, he also saw the CUNY system as an orchestra filled with many different important instruments that, if they played their different parts together harmoniously, would result in a wonderful piece of music, maximizing student benefits and scholarly discovery. This always made a lot of sense to me. However I also thought it useful to take the metaphor one step further, noting that the conductor (the central office) should stick to conducting—­helping the musicians with what they could not do on their own, and not try to go into the orchestra and play the instruments.9 Contributing to the sense of independence that is present at many CUNY colleges is the existence of some (apocryphal) CUNY lore concerning who has authority to do what. Two prime examples: (1) the mistaken belief on the part of faculty, and sometimes administrators as well, that the faculty have the authority to choose their own department chairs, and (2) the also-­mistaken belief that the faculty at each college have final say over their college’s curriculum. In the first case, although faculty in a department are authorized to hold elections for a new department chair, according to the CUNY Bylaws (Section 9.1[c]), the college’s president can choose to forward a different name to the board for its final approval:

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 35 In any case where the president does not approve the election of a department chairperson, or at such other time as the interests of the college may require the removal of a chairperson and the appointment of a new one, he/she shall confer with the department and thereafter shall report to the board, through the chancellor any subsequent action by the department with respect thereto, together with his/her own recommendation for a chairperson. The recommendation by the president to the board, through the chancellor, for the designation of the department chairperson should take place only after careful consideration by the president of the qualifications of those selected by the respective departments. The president shall base his/her recommendation on the capacity of the individual selected to act effectively as the departmental administrator and spokesperson and as a participant in the formation, development, and interpretation of college-­wide interest and policy.10

This means that the departmental election is actually advisory to the president’s recommendation to the board, though in truth it is rare for a president to recommend anyone other than the winner of a department’s election. However, I’m not aware of any cases in which the board has overruled the recommendation of a president. The second case, the faculty’s authority over the curriculum, is particularly relevant for an understanding of the Pathways controversy. Many CUNY faculty have believed that they have final authority over the curriculum, independent of any administrators, as a result of a lawsuit, originally filed in 1995, known to many faculty as Polishook. It is known by that name because the lead complainant was Irwin Polishook, who was president of the faculty union, the PSC, from 1976 to 2000.11 Not as widely known is the fact that one of his cocomplainants was Sandi (at that time in her first of two contiguous, two-­year, terms—­spanning 1994 to 1998—­as UFS chair).12 The complaint, filed against the CUNY board, protested, among other matters, the board’s right to decrease the number of credits required for a degree. However, after all the dust had settled, the PSC and CUNY reached a settlement that reaffirmed Article 8.5 of the CUNY Board Bylaws, which states that “the faculty shall be responsible, subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students . . . curriculum, awarding of college credit, granting of degrees” (italics added).13 The italicized phrase meant that the board could take any actions it wished, including delegating authority to the chancellor, independent of the faculty.14

36  ■  Chapter 2

In the fall of 1998, Sandi, along with some New York City high school students, filed another lawsuit against the CUNY board, this time protesting changes the board wanted to make in remediation policies.15 The new policies involved barring students who needed remediation from attending the CUNY senior colleges. There was a great deal of controversy about the new remediation policies at the time, and Sandi was deeply involved. As part of this involvement, she wrote multiple letters to organizations, including Bell Atlantic, JCPenney, Lord & Taylor, and Nissan, asking them to reconsider their financial support, via advertising, of the New York Daily News which, she said, had an editorial policy that denigrated CUNY. She also wrote to individuals and organizations such as the CUNY Board of Trustees, CUNY distinguished professors, New York State and New York City government officials, the New York State Regents, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, and the NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund, asking them to help oppose the new policies. Further, she sent a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights of the US Department of Education.16 Sandi even wrote to the Village Voice in the summer of 2000 asking for an appointment with the author of a Village Voice essay entitled “Misguided Multi­ culturalism.” She asserted that the article had incorrectly characterized faculty disagreements concerning the teaching of history at CUNY (these disagreements had become apparent as part of a public hearing related to the new remediation policies).17 An earlier Village Voice piece (whose primary author was Alisa Solomon, then a Baruch College English Department faculty member), published in the spring of 1998, had apparently been more supportive of Sandi’s views about remediation. That piece, entitled “Enemies of Public Education,” began, “In just a couple of weeks, one of the boldest experiments in American public education may come to an abrupt end.” In its concluding paragraph, the piece quoted Sandi as saying that Mayor Rudy Giuliani was “data-­proof,” and went on to say that “the majority of successful CUNY graduates have taken some remedial classes. Many of CUNY’s most successful alumni—­even those accepted, with fellowships, into PhD programs at Harvard and Yale—­started out with remedial courses.”18 Sandi passionately advocated for retaining remediation at CUNY’s most selective colleges, including City College, where she had attended. She and others argued that the new policies would cut off access to the senior colleges for many deserving students. There were multiple stories in the media about the controversy.19 However, the new remediation policies, designed to further divide the work within an integrated university and raise the quality of the most selective

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 37

CUNY colleges, were again held to be within the authority of the Board of Trustees, and so proceeded as planned. By the fall of 2000, after Sandi had completed her second term as chair of the UFS and Barbara Bowen had taken over from Polishook as PSC president, a relatively quiet period of faculty-­administrator relations at CUNY had begun, with little in the way of university-­wide legal battles between faculty representatives and the administration. Matt Goldstein was occupied in constructing and enhancing a truly integrated university, and in many cases, he and the faculty cooperated in these efforts, or at least were not at war. (Of course, as will be described later, things changed again with Pathways, one of the best exemplars of the integrated university concept. The Pathways controversy included a variety of legal actions, most notably the filing of two Pathways-­related lawsuits by Sandi and the PSC in 2012,20 the year that Sandi completed her third term as UFS chair.) Finally, recall the incentives described in the previous chapter. Both faculty and colleges have incentives to increase enrollments, including by denying transfer credit to new transfer students, because colleges and departments receive revenue and other resources dependent on their enrollments. Combine these incentives with the factors promoting a sense of independence by faculty and colleges described in the preceding paragraphs, and it is no surprise that students would have difficulty transferring their credits within CUNY. Consistent with these points, some faculty, as well as some administrators, see the students in their college as their college’s students, not as CUNY students, and feel that their students must have their college’s curriculum in order to receive their college’s degree.

Recognition of Transfer Problems Concerns about credit transfer at CUNY were expressed early on. For several decades New York State Education Law has stated that “[CUNY] must remain responsive to the needs of its urban setting and maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units. Where possible, governance and operation of senior and community colleges should be jointly conducted or conducted by similar procedures to maintain the university as an integrated system and to facilitate articulation between units.”21 In 1967, forty-­four years before Pathways was effected, Middle States issued a report including this

38  ■  Chapter 2

comment about CUNY: “Articulation between the two-­year and four-­year colleges is a pressing problem. . . . The goal should be acceptance by the four-­year colleges of the entire block of transfer work taken in a university two-­year college.”22 In April 1969 the board passed a resolution stating that “all community college Associate Arts degree recipients upon transfer to the senior college of their choice be granted a minimum of 64 credits toward a baccalaureate degree.”23 In 1973 the board passed a resolution stating that on transfer to a bachelor’s-­degree program, all CUNY AA and AS (two kinds of associate’s degrees) graduates would be “granted a minimum of [half the] credits toward a baccalaureate degree and be required to complete only the difference in credits between [that half] and the total credits required in the baccalaureate program in which the student enrolls.”24 However, eighteen years later, in 1985—­when I was just seven years post-­ PhD and had recently received tenure in the Psychology Department at Stony Brook University of the State University of New York—­the transfer problems identified by Middle States still existed. So the CUNY Board of Trustees tried to address these problems by passing a resolution stating that “all Science courses taken in one City University college [will] be considered transferable, with full credit, to each college of The City University; and . . . full credit [will] be granted for these courses in all departments and programs and be recognized for the fulfillment of degree requirements. . . . That when transferring from a community college to a senior college, credit [will] be granted for course work taken in the Liberal Arts and Sciences in the community college irrespective of whether the student has fulfilled the requirements for the Associate degree.”25 Nevertheless, credit-­transfer problems continued to plague students. The resolutions all had loopholes. For example, only liberal arts and sciences courses were included in the 1985 policy, and which courses were members of that category was subject to individual interpretation. In addition, the resolution didn’t say what kind of credit a student would get. Courses taken to satisfy general education or major requirements at one college could be (and sometimes were) given only general (elective) credit toward students’ degrees after transfer. A May 1999 RAND report for New York City’s Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on the City University of New York had this to say about transfer at CUNY: One example of the culture of collegiate independence can be found in the University’s long-­standing struggles to establish University-­wide articulation agreements. Despite frequent attempts by the Board and the central administration

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 39 to streamline transfer between CUNY’s community and senior colleges . . . the system is far from seamless. Transfer agreements must be reached one by one between individual departments, because faculties fiercely protect their right to grant credit for courses taken in other colleges. In some cases it is easier for a CUNY community college graduate to transfer to a 4-­year college outside of CUNY than to another CUNY college.26

A subsequent June 1999 report by New York Mayor Rudolf Giuliani’s Advisory Task Force on The City University of New York (chaired by Benno Schmidt, former president of Yale, former dean of Columbia’s Law School, and future CUNY board chair) reported that senior colleges questioned students’ grades, classified many transfer credits as electives [credits not counting toward general education or major requirements], and required students to take extensive core, general education, prerequisite, or major courses, on the basis that particular CUNY community college courses were not equivalent to senior college courses. . . . CUNY senior colleges still tend to be “elitist,” questioning grades and classifying credits as electives. In fact, the Task Force staff were repeatedly informed that CUNY community college students are better off transferring outside the CUNY System. Some interviewees believe that attempting to define course-­by-­course equivalency is “pointless” and “unfair”; they recommend matching competencies and transferring courses in bundles. They believe that such an approach would honor inter-­college relationships, avoid unnecessary delays, and better serve students—­particularly those who have followed an academic program that is at all unconventional. Despite more than 25 years of discussion, CUNY has not yet fully implemented the ­Trustees’ testing and transfer policies.27

So in November 1999 the board passed still another resolution: [The Board] reaffirms its commitment to all established University transfer policies and further directs that . . . students who have earned a[n] . . . Associate in Arts . . . or an Associate in Science . . . Degree will be deemed to have automatically fulfilled the lower division liberal arts and science distribution requirements for a baccalaureate degree, however, students may be asked to complete a course in a discipline required by a college’s baccalaureate distribution requirements that was not part of the student’s Associate Degree program. . . . [and] when students transfer after completing a[n] . . . Associate in Applied Science Degree, or prior to the completion of an AA, AS, or Baccalaureate Degree, the liberal arts and

40  ■  Chapter 2 science courses they have completed will be deemed to have fulfilled discipline-­ specific distribution requirements for all baccalaureate programs on a discipline specific basis.28

Yet whatever the board’s intent in guaranteeing credit transfer, the 1999 resolution allowed, or was perceived to allow, exceptions to the guarantee for students in AAS (another kind of associate’s degree) programs, students who had not yet completed their AA or AS degrees, students in some bachelor’s-degree programs, non-­liberal-­arts courses, upper-­division courses, and courses in some specific disciplines. In other words, there were still a great many ways for course credit not to transfer at CUNY. Still later, in the five years leading up to Pathways, there were increasing calls from outside CUNY for CUNY, as well as other universities, to address their transfer problems. In 2006, just when I was returning to CUNY as special advisor to the chancellor (Matt Goldstein) after serving for five years as provost of the New York Institute of Technology, what is known as the Spellings Commission report was issued by the US Department of Education. Dr. Margaret Spellings was US secretary of education at the time, and she set up a commission to advise her on higher education policies. Several parts of the commission’s final report referred to transfer students, for example: “national and state policies have  .  .  . [ failed] to craft flexible credit-­transfer systems that allow students to move easily between different kinds of institutions. . . . Underlying the information confusion are institutional policies and practice on student transfers that are too often inconsistently applied, even within the same institution. . . . States and institutions should review and revise standards for transfer of credit among higher education institutions, subject to rigorous standards designed to ensure educational quality, to improve access and reduce time-­to-­completion.”29 There was another aspect of the Spellings report that played a role in the Pathways controversy: the report’s critique of accreditors such as Middle States.30 Accreditors take criticism from the US Department of Education seriously, because the accreditors must be approved by the USDOE if their accreditation is to authorize the colleges to give federal financial aid to students. According to the Spellings report, the standards of the accreditors had been excessively focused on the process of learning and insufficiently focused on its outcomes; accreditation was too often being bestowed because a college seemed to be doing the right things to encourage learning, rather than demonstrating

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 41

that its students actually learned. As a result of this criticism, Middle States began to increase its emphasis on its fourteenth standard for accreditation (that colleges specify the desired learning outcomes for their courses and degrees, and then measure the attainment of those learning outcomes).31 Thus, increasingly since 2006, specifying and measuring learning outcomes has been a foundational component of colleges’ activity. We would keep this required activity in mind when constructing Pathways. Then in 2008, just as I was becoming interim executive vice chancellor of CUNY, the New York State Commission on Higher Education, established by Governor Spitzer and counting Matt among its members, issued a series of recommendations relating to increasing access to and graduation from higher education in New York State. Among these recommendations was this: “Require the SUNY [State University of New York] and CUNY Boards to take steps to strengthen course and program articulation and transfer by 2011–­2012.”32 By this time New York State’s other huge public university system, SUNY, had already adopted a set of policies to ease transfer among its more than sixty colleges and universities.33 First established in 1998 by a resolution enacted by the SUNY Board of Trustees,34 SUNY’s transfer policy is similar to what a number of other states’ university systems have also adopted. Generally speaking, these transfer policies involve a more or less standardized core curriculum (the courses that every undergraduate has to take for general education purposes), plus policies regarding how those courses, as well as other courses, transfer from one college in the system to another.35

General Education (the Core Curriculum) and Transfer A core curriculum is a typical feature of these state policies for several reasons. It is almost universal practice in US higher education that a portion of every undergraduate degree consists of what are called general education courses—­ the faculty at the college decide what they think every graduate of the college should know and be able to do, list the courses needed to achieve these ends, and then require all the students to take those courses. I have heard from academic administrators across the country that the norm for this part of the curriculum is about one-­third of the total credits for a degree. Derek Bok, a former president of Harvard University and renowned for his writings on higher education, specifies 30 percent.36 But the percentage is not legislated anywhere,

42  ■  Chapter 2

and there is considerable variation. Students also use approximately one-­third of their total credits to fulfill the requirements of their major (although there is again a lot of variation), and they use the last third for elective courses (students’ opportunity to explore college-­level courses of their own choosing, independent of any requirements, which might include taking the courses needed for the student to have a second major or a minor). When a student transfers from one college to another and the two colleges’ core curricula don’t match up in terms of the number of credits or the particular courses they require, or both, the new college may require the transfer student to take additional general education courses. This means that the student must either take fewer electives and thus be limited in how much exploring she or he can do, or take more credits than what is required for the degree, a potential cost in terms of both time and money. Therefore, state university system transfer policies usually involve establishing a similar or the same general education curriculum for all of that system’s colleges, so that when students transfer, they will have satisfied the same general education requirements at their new college as they had satisfied at their old college.37 What a college requires in terms of general education for its students is a sensitive subject, one that was at the crux of many of the objections to Pathways. Faculty speak passionately about what they feel all students should know and be able to do. Perhaps not surprisingly, individual faculty often feel it to be important that every student be exposed to the faculty member’s particular discipline. In my own case, it is hard for me to imagine anyone being able to survive in this world without some knowledge of psychology—­psychology helps us to understand the interface between human beings and their environment, and concerns everything that we do. It is a good thing that I value psychology so much, that mathematicians value mathematics, that English professors value literature, and that historians value history. It is that love for our disciplines that drives our scholarship and helps us to be good teachers. However, even if all faculty could agree on the complete set of individual disciplines to which undergraduates should be exposed (Should linguistics be considered separately? What about the growing field of neuroscience? Computer science?), just a bit of arithmetic reveals that a bachelor’s-­degree student would need to use virtually all of her or his credits for general education if that student were to be exposed to one course from each of a likely list of disciplines. So choices must be made—­difficult choices. In addition to the love that faculty have for their own subjects, any department that has a required piece of

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 43

the general education curriculum can be guaranteed substantial enrollments, as well as the resources that flow from those enrollments. Matt used to refer to faculty negotiations about general education curricula as a “trading floor.” Bok has said, “The typical college curriculum may lack a convincing rationale, but it succeeds brilliantly in satisfying the concerns of all the principal interested groups.”38 Hunter Rawlings, former president of the Association of American Universities, has been reported as feeling that general education curricula reflect “reluctance on the part of professors to risk offending colleagues by standing up at a faculty meeting and declaring what they think is, and is not, vital for an educated person to know.”39 Certainly in my own experience such characterizations seem justified. In the two institutions in which I participated in general education reform prior to Pathways (CUNY’s Baruch College and New York Institute of Technology), it seemed that the agreements made among the faculty about the general education requirements were essentially more political than educational. As a specific example, prior to Pathways, Baruch’s general education curriculum required each student to take one course in psychology and one in either anthropology or sociology. Why did students have a choice between anthropology and sociology but no choice with psychology? The reason was not some intellectual decision that psychology was more essential for students to have than anthropology or sociology. Rather, because psychology had more faculty than either of the other two disciplines, it constituted its own department, whereas anthropology and sociology were combined into one. Thus the old Baruch general education requirements ensured that each department had a share of the general education pie. In 2001 I went to New York Institute of Technology as provost, and it was more of the same. The general education curriculum there also basically comprised a piece of this department and a piece of that department. Rather than creating intellectual coherence, the general education curriculum just seemed to provide an assurance that the politically strong departments got their enrollments, and no one seemed to have any appetite for change. Years after I left to return to CUNY, NYIT did make significant changes in its core curriculum so that it included much interdisciplinary work, a big improvement. Until Pathways, CUNY had no system-­wide policies or rules concerning general education whatsoever. Each college set its general education curriculum as it wished. However, this didn’t mean that each college was satisfied with its general education requirements. At the time that we started the Pathways Project in 2010, many CUNY undergraduate colleges were actively involved in

44  ■  Chapter 2

revising their general education curricula. This is not unusual. A 2009 survey of its members conducted by the Association of American Colleges & Universities (AAC&U) found that 89 percent of respondents were reviewing or modifying their general education requirements.40 One of the reasons that a large number of the colleges were involved in revisions was that such revisions can take a great many years. An email I received in December 2010 from a professor at one of CUNY’s selective senior colleges complained that the professor’s college had been working on reforming its general education requirements for over seven years. In his intriguing book Checklist for Change, Robert Zemsky describes what he apparently believes was a successful general education reform at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, a reform that took some fifteen years.41 Because of the complexity of the decisions involved as well as perhaps self-­interest, faculty are often not completely satisfied with the general education status quo. In 1996 Sandi and another faculty member, Dean Savage, published a piece in the New York Times asserting the need for a greater focus at CUNY on liberal arts (as opposed to professional or preprofessional) courses. They were convinced that the liberal arts at CUNY had declined in quality over the several decades since they had themselves been college students.42 Then in 2000 Sandi authored a piece that describes general education as ordinarily consisting of 12 to 16 courses, which would be 36 to 48 credits given typical 3-­credit courses. She then goes on to say that “at City College . . . there were 64 credits [of general education] during the 1950’s, including four speech courses of 1 credit each (but many hours per week), to teach us how to communicate properly (the faculty was determined to eliminate ‘ng clicks’ and Noo Yawk accents). Were all these courses necessary? Certainly that set of distribution requirements was crucial to guarantee departmental viability and defend turf. In fact, the value of any one of the parts of those presumably indispensable course requirements was entirely tied to the excellence of the teacher and not necessarily the nature of the content.”43 At the time that the Pathways Project started, the existing general education curricula for the bachelor’s-­degree programs ranged from 33 to 63 credits with a median of 52 (out of a total of 120—­ 43 percent of total credits).44 So you might think in 2011 that Sandi would be in favor of the general education reform we proposed that decreased the number of general education credits required at most of the CUNY colleges to a maximum of 42 for bachelor’s-­degree students. But if you thought that, you would be wrong.

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 45

CUNY’s Unsuccessful Curriculum-­Related Attempts to Fix Transfer in the Fifteen Years prior to Pathways In 1996 the provost at Baruch, Lois Cronholm, my first immediate supervisor when I was a dean at Baruch, was leading yet another valiant attempt to solve CUNY’s transfer problems. Executive vice chancellor Louise Mirrer had put Lois in charge of a working group that was tasked with helping CUNY students coordinate taking courses at more than one CUNY college. For example, one part of this working group explored having all the CUNY colleges use the same course-­numbering system, such as Psychology 101 for introductory psychology and Psychology 201 for a middle-­level psychology course that had Psychology 101 as a prerequisite. However, you can’t just give two courses at two different colleges the same name and declare them equivalent. They may have differing numbers of credits and different learning objectives, and those issues have to be resolved before any common numbering system can be effective. Ultimately, Lois’s working group did not result in any significant changes in credit transfer at CUNY. The idea of having CUNY-­wide core requirements was also being discussed around this time. The 2000–­2004 CUNY Master Plan, the first after Matt became chancellor, stated that there is an “opportunity for modeling core curricula that can ensure, without sacrificing the distinctiveness of individual campus programs, that all CUNY colleges confer upon their graduates a set of competencies appropriate to a quality institution. It also represents an opportunity to ensure that there is sufficient parity throughout the system for students to be able to transfer easily among CUNY campuses and for the liberal arts component of their degrees to be comparable.”45 However, to the best of my knowledge, nothing ever came of this part of this Master Plan. As another attempt to address its transfer problems, beginning about ten years before Pathways, CUNY had established TIPPS (software whose acronym stands for Transfer Information and Program Planning System). Colleges put into TIPPS the equivalencies of their courses with courses at other colleges. As part of Matt Goldstein’s accountability and evaluation system for the colleges, during the years leading up to Pathways CUNY tracked what percentage of CUNY’s courses each college had put into TIPPS, including what percentage each college had said were not equivalent to its own courses. Just prior to the passing of the Pathways resolution, an average of 23 percent of courses had

46  ■  Chapter 2

been judged as nontransferable,46 meaning that a student who had passed one of these courses would lose those credits if she or he transferred to another CUNY college. In addition, on its own, TIPPS only describes what is supposed to happen if a student tries to transfer a particular course from college A to college B. It does not provide information on how often students actually try to transfer a particular course, or on what actually does happen as a result of that transfer. TIPPS is a descriptive policy tool, not a descriptive data tool, and it cannot by itself guarantee that credit transfer occurs as TIPPS specifies it should. Thus, from its inception, TIPPS’s usefulness in addressing the credit transfer problems was limited. In addition, during these years, CUNY increasingly emphasized articulation agreements between the colleges as well as joint-­admissions agreements. The former are most commonly between a single community college and a single senior (bachelor’s-­degree) college (usually a particular major at each), and specify that if a student takes certain courses at the former, that student is guaranteed certain credits if she or he transfers to the latter. In a joint-­admissions agreement a student is admitted simultaneously to programs offered jointly by a community and a senior college. The student completes the first program at the community college and then, assuming the student maintains a certain grade point average, transfers seamlessly to the senior college for the second program. An excellent example of such an agreement is the Justice Academy, in which students wishing to major in, say, criminal justice, can start that major and their other curricular requirements at one of six CUNY community colleges, and then, after receiving their associate’s degrees, can transfer seamlessly to CUNY’s John Jay College to obtain their bachelor’s degrees.47 Programs such as John Jay’s work well—­the students in the Justice Academy transfer with few problems. The difficulty with all of these types of solutions is that they work for only a small proportion of students. CUNY has 19 undergraduate colleges with students transferring in all possible directions among them. Each fall alone, about ten thousand CUNY students transfer from one CUNY college to another. Only a little over 50 percent of these transfers are from community to senior colleges. Some students even transfer from senior to community colleges.48 Faculty and administrators at senior colleges tend to think of certain community colleges as being their feeder colleges, and set up articulation agreements accordingly, but in reality, students transfer into every CUNY college from every other CUNY college. In addition, there are 700 different undergraduate-­degree programs at CUNY and more than 23,000

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 47

different courses.49 Even to just evaluate which of these courses are equivalent so that there is a possibility of their credits transferring is an astronomical task. Further, if just one of the 19 colleges changes just one of its courses, all the articulation and joint-­admissions programs that include that course may need to be redone and reapproved, and curriculum change is often a slow process. Different colleges have different structures, but substituting a single course for another in an articulation or joint-­admissions agreement can often require a faculty member in the relevant department recognizing the need for formal approval of a curriculum change and writing up the necessary documents, a vote by that department’s curriculum committee, a vote by the curriculum committee of the relevant division (e.g., arts and sciences), a vote by the college-­wide curriculum committee, and, at CUNY, approval by the central office and then a vote by the board at its next meeting. Each of these votes can occur only at an official meeting of the relevant body, which may be scheduled only a couple of times during each fall and spring semester. Thus, even if a curricular change is relatively minor and goes smoothly, proceeding to a vote at the next level as soon as possible, it can easily take close to a calendar year. And not infrequently there are delays: for example, if someone forgets to put an item on a voting body’s agenda with sufficient notice, or if a voting body decides that there is a problem with a proposed change and some further work on it is needed. Curricular change can seem glacial. And, pre-­Pathways, there was yet another problem for students trying to transfer at CUNY. In addition to the fact that colleges had different general education requirements, some colleges had different general education requirements for different majors. This was primarily, but not entirely, an issue at the community colleges. It meant that if a student decided to change from one major to another, even early in her or his career, and even staying at the same college, that student might need to take some extra general education courses or have fewer elective courses. But more important for this book’s subject, credit transfer, this made it even more difficult for students to figure out what they should take at their first college if they intended to transfer to a second. They had to decide, virtually from day one of college, what they were going to major in and to stick with that major, and they had to choose courses that would count at their intended, as well as their current, college as general education or major courses (assuming there even were courses that TIPPS judged equivalent). Try to imagine a professional college adviser, whose job it is to advise students on which courses they should take, keeping track of all of this. Even were CUNY to have sufficient advisers (the industry minimum is considered to be

48  ■  Chapter 2

one adviser for every three hundred students; in reality, at CUNY, one adviser can serve six hundred or more students), and even were their training and knowledge at ideal levels, keeping up with all the information needed to ensure that students don’t lose any credits when transferring would be virtually impossible. Students choosing without the full attention of a great adviser have an even harder task. And only about half of CUNY students can even think of asking their relatives for any advice; 45 percent of CUNY students are the first in their families to go to college.50 The problems caused by transferring aren’t limited to making good choices about what to take before you transfer; there are also problems after you transfer. When many decisions regarding what credits will transfer—­including what sort of credit (general education, major, or elective)—­are made on a case-­by-­ case basis and involve subjective judgments, as was the case at CUNY pre-­ Pathways, evaluation of a transfer student’s transcript by her or his new college to see which credits will transfer and how isn’t instantaneous. In fact, as I learned from my own experience as a dean at CUNY, it can take close to a year. During that time, the student has to either stop out of college or pick courses based on her or his best guesses regarding the results of the transfer credit evaluation. Unfortunately, sometimes those guesses are wrong, and the student has to take extra, different courses, which again can mean a loss of time and/or money—­additional challenges for students who already have too many. For example, over half of CUNY students receive Pell Grants (federal financial aid for families with limited financial resources), and 42 percent have a first language other than English.51 Further adding to these problems, because CUNY colleges have, over the years, differentiated, becoming the metaphorical orchestra described earlier, each college does not have every major. So if a student starts at a college thinking that she or he will major in a particular discipline, but then decides to major in something else, such a change may require transfer to a college other than the one to which the student originally intended to transfer (e.g., if a student who starts at Borough of Manhattan Community College decides that she or he wants a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice, which is offered only by John Jay College, instead of in real estate, which is offered only by Baruch College), or may require transfer when a student didn’t originally intend to transfer at all (e.g., when a student who starts at Brooklyn College decides to become a nurse, which is possible at Hunter College but not Brooklyn, instead of working as a laboratory technician after college).

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 49

It is not unusual these days for students to be advised to start at a community college because it is cheaper (full-­time tuition at a CUNY community college currently is $4,800 per year) and then transfer to a bachelor’s-­degree college (full-­time tuition at such a CUNY college is currently $6,330). But that strategy saves you money only if you don’t end up needing to take any extra courses because you lost credits when transferring. And how many students know from day one in which subject they are going to major? Should we even expect them to? Students’ interests continue to change in the years just following high school as they continue to mature and experience the world. Further, high schools teach many science and humanities subjects, but students usually aren’t exposed in high school to the social sciences such as anthropology, economics, and psychology. So how could a student know from the first moment of college that she or he wanted to major in one of those disciplines? One of the hallmarks of American college education is the ability of students to explore in college, to find out what they are most interested in and then pursue it with a passion. There is also a practical problem with having few electives, a problem that can increase time to graduation. When most of a student’s credits have to be taken as specific general education courses and specific courses for the major, with the major courses often having to be taken in a certain sequence, a student needs specific courses to be available each semester. If the needed courses aren’t available, or they’re available but they conflict with other courses a student has to take that semester, or with the student’s work schedule, a student may have to wait until a later semester in order to fulfill those requirements, and graduation can be delayed. Having around a third of the credits for a degree consist of electives gives a student some flexibility in what she or he takes each semester, because there are usually numerous electives available and a student can take any of them. In addition, having sufficient elective courses available as part of a student’s under­graduate degree can give the student the available credits needed to pursue a double major, which can mean more income for the student after graduation.52 In the pre-­Pathways years, I often heard faculty say one or more of the following: • the transfer problems could be fixed if students would just not change their majors; • students should know from the time that they enter their first college to which other college they want to transfer, and just choose their courses at their first college accordingly;

50  ■  Chapter 2 • and if students change majors it is their fault if they have to take more credits than what is required for their degree.

You can surely imagine my reaction. I didn’t verbalize it outside my office, not once, but what I thought was: Could you have done this? Would it even have been a good idea for you to do this? Yet you expect this of CUNY students, who probably on average come from families with far less knowledge of college and its rules and disciplines than you did, and who probably have less access to advisers than you did? The bottom line of all of this is that TIPPS, articulation agreements, and joint-­admissions agreements were not a solution to CUNY’s transfer problems.

Examples of Transfer Problems and Their Effects Here are just two specific examples of how transfer was working, or rather not working, prior to Pathways: • Pre-­Pathways, at one senior college the evaluation of all science courses in a particular discipline was done by a single faculty member who almost never gave incoming transfer students credit for the courses they had taken in that discipline at other colleges—­CUNY or non-­CUNY. So students who wanted to major in that discipline had to retake their science courses at this faculty member’s college. The administrators at that college knew about this behavior, and thought it was wrong, but felt that they could do nothing to stop it. • At another senior college, a language department refused to give credit toward the college’s language requirement to incoming transfer students who had taken language courses elsewhere, at any college, CUNY or non-­CUNY. The new transfer student would have to take either the next level of the language she or he had already started, or a new language.

In both these cases the students involved would have to sacrifice taking elective courses, or take courses beyond what was required for their degree, in order to graduate from the colleges to which they transferred. Though these cases resulted in additional course enrollments on the part of transfer students at the colleges to which they transferred, it is possible that in the long run such an approach by a college would actually hurt enrollment. For years before Pathways I had been hearing from the central CUNY admissions

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 51

people and from other CUNY members that students would choose not to attend CUNY as freshmen, or would transfer out of the CUNY system, because it was so hard for them to get their credits transferred from one CUNY college to another. I had even heard, from someone who used to work there, that a local private university used as part of its admissions pitch the assertion that that university was more generous in granting transfer credit than was CUNY. Another New York–­based private college (Excelsior) has proclaimed in the center of the first page of its website, “Transfer More Credits,”53 and I have seen several TV ads for DeVry University, a for-­profit institution, that focused on the transfer credits it gives students, clearly trying to tempt students to transfer there.

Spring 2008 to Summer 2010: The Inception of Pathways In the spring of 2008, my predecessor as the Chief Academic Officer of CUNY, Selma Botman, asked a group of the college chief academic officers (provosts) to prepare a report on the transfer situation at CUNY. They produced a brief report that indicated the scope of the problems but offered only general suggested solutions, such as appointing a leader of transfer and articulation activities at each college. The CUNY 2008–­2012 Master Plan, whose preparation was also supervised by Selma, indicated that a priority for CUNY during the upcoming four years was to “focus on transfer and articulation among [CUNY’s] constituent colleges. The goal is to remove the barriers that too often interfere with students transferring from one CUNY program to another and frequently slow their progress toward their degrees.”54 In June 2008, just after the chief academic officers had submitted their report and the 2008–­2012 Master Plan had been completed, Selma departed to become president of the University of Southern Maine. I was appointed her replacement, though on an interim basis. This meant that a search for a permanent chief academic officer (more precisely, executive vice chancellor and university provost) still needed to be conducted, and that I would have to be a candidate in such a search with its many public aspects, being considered for the position by a search committee including some faculty as well as administrators, if I wanted the job on what is called a permanent basis (though in reality, all CUNY vice chancellors can be removed from their positions with no notice and for no stated reason by the chancellor at any time).

52  ■  Chapter 2

The search proceeded slowly despite my constant prodding and complaints, but in April 2009 I was appointed to the “permanent” position. Now I could feel a bit more confident about working on projects that had a long time horizon. But even before I obtained the permanent position, my office and I were talking about how to solve the transfer problems at CUNY. In the spring of 2008, as I prepared to become the interim chief academic officer, I met with many different people in the central office and beyond to learn what they thought the priorities should be for my new position. From that and other information I gathered, I constructed a list of possible projects and met with Matt in April to ask which ones he thought were worth pursuing. When I got to the item on the list that concerned what I at that time referred to as “articulation,” he said it was important. In the summer of 2008, right after I was appointed interim chief academic officer, I established the first of an annual series of charts listing the goals for the central Office of Academic Affairs. The first chart, in 2008, included a goal concerning collecting data on credit transfer. In 2009 this goal changed to “Assess the nature and scope of transfer problems in CUNY . . . consider policy options for reducing transfer problems,” and then in 2010 to “Develop systemwide policy options for improving CUNY’s transfer process, with the aim of reducing the number of credits not accepted for transfer or not accepted toward general education or major requirements.” The teams working on these goals were all led by Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley who, by virtue of her analytical mind and concern for students, was to prove invaluable to the Pathways Project in the years ahead. Consistent with these goals, from the summer of 2008 to the summer of 2010, our office was conducting intensive research on transfer issues at CUNY, including examining what other universities had done to fix their own transfer problems. For the relevant data analyses, CUNY’s central Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, led by University Dean David Crook and his wonderful staff, was indispensable. For obtaining more qualitative information, we relied on Julia and her staff, most notably Erin Croke, university academic affairs director. From the first goals chart in 2008, I established a policy of making our office’s work completely public. Therefore, as soon as we had finalized a goals chart for the coming year, I posted it on our public website (communications was a big part of our work, managed by Erika Dreifus, whom I promoted to the position of director of communications soon after I became executive vice chancellor). We posted progress reports on each goal on each chart in the middle of each

Antecedents 1961 to Summer 2010  ■ 53

year, in addition to posting end-­of-­year-­reports. Further, I met with the leadership of the UFS to answer any questions and receive any comments that they might have about each year’s new chart. All of our major Office of Academic Affairs work projects were listed on the chart so that everyone would know what we were working on and how. In November 2009, our office held the annual retreat for the college chief academic officers. At this retreat, the College of Staten Island Provost (Chief Academic Officer) Bill Fritz gave a presentation as part of a panel titled “Retention and Graduation Rates: Best Practices.” His presentation was titled “Core Curriculum and Transferability, Including Examples from Other Systems.” He described how the public University System of Georgia had instituted a transfer policy for the entire system in 1998. Similar to CUNY’s structure, the Georgia system comprises both community and senior colleges, and is governed by a single Board of Regents.55 Bill had been a faculty member there when the policy was first proposed, and helped implement it when he became an administrator there. We subsequently learned, in summer 2011, that Georgia’s graduation rates increased over 10 percent between 1999 and 2006,56 which the Georgia system provost at the time, as well as Bill, have attributed to the changed transfer policies. As Bill spoke in November 2009 at the retreat, I realized for the first time that something comparable to what Georgia had done could also work for CUNY. I was impressed with how Georgia had accomplished this in a system with a wide spread in student preparation for college, similar to CUNY. And according to Bill, although there were tough moments, instituting the new transfer policies had gone relatively smoothly and had been finished relatively quickly. After listening to him, I felt an increased urgency for CUNY to develop its own system-­wide solution to the transfer problems. By the summer of 2010, my office had sufficient information for all of us to understand and agree that credit transfer at CUNY could not be improved without addressing the three main parts of all college degree requirements: credits for general education courses, credits for courses taken in the major, and elective credits. This meant that CUNY, similar to other public university systems, would need to have a single general education framework for the whole system.57 This framework would need to be designed so as to ensure that if students satisfied any part of the framework at one CUNY college, they would have satisfied that part at any other CUNY college to which they might transfer. In one of our summer senior staff meetings I tried to explain to the fifteen or so staff who were present what putting in place a CUNY-­wide general education

54  ■  Chapter 2

framework would mean. We already knew we had the chancellor’s support, but doing anything that involved changing, or putting any constraints on, general education was, as I was to say frequently in the next few years, not just like touching the third rail, but like lying down and wrapping your arms around it. A less painful description of such a process is this: “Changing a college curriculum is like moving a graveyard—­you never know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them” (usually attributed to Calvin Coolidge or Woodrow Wilson).58 At the same time I was also thinking, as would any good operant conditioner, that in the end what is important is how you behave. As so aptly stated by Booker T. Washington, years before the term “operant conditioning” existed: “In the last analysis the world cares very little what you or I know, but it does care a great deal about what you and I do.”59 Despite these principles, I made sure to tell the staff that there would be a great deal, a very great deal, of upset if we went forward, and asked whether they were nevertheless willing to proceed. I was thinking about my failures to change the general education requirements at Baruch when I was a dean, and at NYIT when I was a provost. Why should this time be different? I knew the central office staff and many of the college administrators and faculty were wonderful, and that we would have plenty of support from Matt, who had a long history of effecting controversial reforms, but I also knew that none of my staff had been involved before with trying to change general education curricula, or in any kind of a controversy of this potential magnitude. They had no direct experience of what Bok describes: “Of all the changes I might propose for the contemporary university, reforming the undergraduate curriculum in more than cosmetic ways is surely among the most difficult.”60 But my staff ’s optimism and enthusiasm buoyed me, and with their unanimous agreement that they wished to do this, we decided to proceed. And so we took the first steps, only dimly aware that the summer of 2010 was also the start of Sandi’s new (third) term as chair of the UFS after a twelve-­year hiatus. We were also only dimly aware of her previous extensive actions against the CUNY central administration when she was UFS chair between 1994 and 1998, and her huge and indefatigable work capacity. We had heard from the College of Staten Island administrators that she had been repeatedly challenging them, and we could not understand why, if she was so difficult to work with, they did not just ignore her. We thought that was all that was needed.

CHAPTER 3

Formulating the Resolution ■■■■■

OCTOBER 2010 THROUGH JANUARY 2011

October 2010 started out as a typical month for me:1 Meetings with each college about their enrollments (some were growing too quickly, a consequence of the recession). Meetings to prepare for another orchestrated display of knowledge and power in the form of a New York City Council hearing, this one on how to improve CUNY’s retention and graduation rates. Interviews with candidates for a new vice chancellor for student affairs. Meetings on special initiatives that I was leading for the central office, such as my proposed phased retirement option for faculty. Regular meetings of the Council of Presidents, the Academic Affairs Committee of the Council of Presidents, the Academic Council (colleges’ chief academic officers and my senior staff), the Chancellor’s Cabinet, and the Chancellor’s Senior Staff. And, of course, multiple work-­related social events—­a reception for CUNY distinguished professors (hosted by me), a gala at the New York Historical Society, a celebration of the founding of CUNY’s new community college, a fund-­raising dinner for the Feminist Press, and cocktails in the Trustees Room at the New York Public Library in honor of the three newest CUNY presidents and the new vice chancellor for community colleges. A pretty typical fall month—­varied, demanding, exhausting, and sometimes fun. And a constant of every day now was my office’s (the Office of Academic Affairs) pursuit of Goal 7.1 from our 2010–­2011 goals chart: “Develop systemwide policy options for improving CUNY’s transfer process, with the aim of reducing the number of credits not accepted for transfer or not accepted toward general education or major requirements.” I had expected some faculty to be upset because of what we were doing to try to solve the transfer problems. But so far there had been little reaction. During the third week of October, the usual steady stream of academic activities was disrupted. It was during that week that my colleagues and I discovered that the entire higher education community—­throughout the United

56  ■  Chapter 3

States and beyond—­now had access to a visual representation of the transfer problems at CUNY. The Chronicle of Higher Education, the most widely read higher education news publication in the United States, had published a spiderweb-­like diagram showing what would happen were a student to transfer with a course called Mathematics 10 (Technical Mathematics I) from Bronx Community College to each of the CUNY colleges that offers bachelor’s degrees (what are known as CUNY’s senior colleges). The number of credits the course would receive at each new college varied from 0 to 4. But the Chronicle diagram went further. It showed how the John Jay College of Criminal Justice course, Mathematics 105 (College Algebra), assessed by John Jay as equivalent to Mathematics 10, would transfer to all of those same senior colleges. Now the outcomes ranged from 2 to 4 credits, and in every case was different from what Mathematics 10 would have received at those same colleges, even though Mathematics 10 (at Bronx Community College) and Mathematics 105 (at John Jay College) had been judged equivalent.2 You may remember the transitive property of equality from Algebra 1 in which, if a = b and b = c, then a = c. Well, apparently, pre-­Pathways, this basic algebraic property didn’t hold for courses at CUNY. “The lack of consistency and transparency . . . is remarkable,” wrote Associate Professor Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia about this diagram in her 2012 publication on credit portability.3 In my office we had no idea how the Chronicle had obtained that information. Julia Wrigley, my associate university provost, had been interviewed for a Chronicle article related to the difficulties of students transferring among CUNY’s colleges, an article that appeared around the same time.4 But somehow, independent of Julia, Chronicle reporters had gone into CUNY’s TIPPS software and discovered the details regarding the transfer status of Mathe­ matics 10 and Mathematics 105. It was embarrassing, but also exhilarating, to see the problems we were focusing on laid out so that they would be apparent to anyone. True, Bronx Community College’s Mathematics 10 course was intended as a course for students in a specific technical major, but that course wouldn’t even get elective credit if a student who had taken it transferred to five of CUNY’s senior colleges, and there was no rhyme or reason as to how it fit in with the whole pattern of course transfer at CUNY. How was this diagram in the Chronicle consistent with New York Education Law’s statement that CUNY “must . . . maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units . . . . [maintaining] the university as an integrated system and [facilitating] articulation between units”?5 It wasn’t.

Formulating Resolution (10/10–1/11)  ■ 57 Figure 3.1. 10/15/10 Chronicle of Higher Education chart of transferability of a CUNY course

One Math Course, Variously Valued Within a Single University System A student who completed Technical Mathematics I at Bronx Community College and tried to transfer its credits would get markedly different results at the City University of New York system’s 11 senior colleges. And an attempt to transfer one “equivalent” course would reflect even more discrepancies. Bronx Community College MTH10 Technical Mathematics I

4

Baruch College

CREDITS

DESIGNATION

CREDITS

DESIGNATION

0 NONE*

Brooklyn College

City College

College of Staten Island

Hunter College

0

4

4

0

NONE

ELECTIVE

COURSE

NONE

MTH123 College Algebra and rigonometry T

John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Lehman College

3

4

0

COURSE**

ELECTIVE

NONE

MAT105 Modern Mathematics

Medgar Evers New York City College College of Technology

Queens College

York College

4

4

0

COURSE

ELECTIVE

NONE*

MAT1315 Technical Math with Application II

3

2

3

3

3

3

2

3

3

3

ELECTIVE

COURSE**

ELECTIVE

COURSE***

COURSE

COURSE

COURSE**

ELECTIVE

COURSE

ELECTIVE

MATH1021 Precalculus Mathematics A

*A student who transfers having completed an associate degree may receive elective credits.

MTH123 College Algebra and Trigonometry

MATH101 Algebra for College Students

**The remaining credit from the original course may transfer as an elective credit.

MAT104 College Algebra

MTH130 College Algebra and Trigonometry

MATH113 Ideas in Mathematics

***The equivalent course is worth four credits, but only the three from the original course will transfer.

* A student who transfers having completed an associate’s degree may receive elective credits. ** The remaining credit from the original course may transfer as an elective credit. *** The equivalent course is worth four credits, but only the three from the original course will transfer. Source: Lipka, S. (2010, October 15). Academic credit: Colleges’ common currency has no set value. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/One​-Math​ -Course​-Variously​/125002​?cid​=​rclink. Used with permission of the Chronicle of Higher Education Copyright © 2016. All rights reserved.

Julia’s Report Despite the Chronicle’s exposé, the UFS and the faculty remained fairly quiet on the subject of student transfer at CUNY. But then we released an excellent report authored by Julia (with support from many other members of our office). I had been pressuring Julia to finish this report on transfer at CUNY that she had been working on for many months. The report was part of the long-­ standing work on Goal 7.1 that she headed. Around the middle of October she completed a revision of that report6 and I thought it was outstanding. In addition to detailing the many challenges facing transfer students and suggesting ways to surmount those challenges, Julia’s report helped me to understand, as I never had before, that when it came to evaluating credits for transfer, CUNY

58  ■  Chapter 3

operated on a matching principle. A course at one college got credit at a second college only if the second had a course that “matched” the first. Because no two courses are ever a 100 percent match, the matching principle made for plenty of opportunities for course credit to be denied. The employment of this matching principle had resulted in some absurd consequences for transfer students. For example, we learned about a student who had transferred from one of CUNY’s selective senior colleges to one of CUNY’s open-­access community colleges. This student had taken a geology course to satisfy the general education science requirement at the senior college, receiving a B-­. However, the community college didn’t offer geology, and so there was no course at the community college that could match the geology course taken at the senior college. Therefore, after transferring, the student was required to take an additional general education science course at the community college in order to satisfy that college’s general education science requirement and in order to get an associate’s degree. In general, pre-­Pathways, if the second college didn’t have courses in a discipline taught at the first college, a student couldn’t get credit for those courses after transferring. Julia’s report also discussed the excess-­credit issue. Using data obtained by CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research, headed by University Dean David Crook, her report showed that transfer students of all types tended to graduate with more credits than what their degrees required, and to graduate with more credits than students who never transferred (students whom we refer to as natives). Those excess credits (those resulting from transfer as well as from many other factors)7 were expensive for the students, for their families, and for whatever government sources were paying for their education (through financial aid and/or basic college support). A third point made in Julia’s report was that, owing to current board policy giving transfer-­credit protection to some associate’s-­degree holders, such a student could lose zero credits in transferring, while a student with an identical record minus one course could lose many credits. This did not seem fair to students. Additional points made in this report were that evaluation of transfer students’ credits can be delayed, transfer credits granted can vary depending on which faculty member evaluates a transfer student’s prior courses, and articulation agreements (in which one college agrees to honor certain credits of students transferring in from a particular other college) can solve only limited portions of the transfer-­credit problems. Further, holders of a particular type

Formulating Resolution (10/10–1/11)  ■ 59

of associate’s degree—­AAS degrees, increasingly held by students wishing to transfer and continue in bachelor’s-­degree programs—­were not covered by existing CUNY policies designed to protect transfer credits. We quickly began to distribute Julia’s now-­completed report to many groups for discussion. In the next few weeks we discussed transfer issues in a meeting with Professor Sandi Cooper, UFS chair, and two other members of the UFS Executive Committee, and then sent them Julia’s report. On Halloween, they heard about these issues again from us at the meeting of the Board of Trustees’ academic committee (CAPPR). We also discussed Julia’s report and transfer issues at meetings of the Council of Presidents Academic Affairs Committee meeting, a full Council of Presidents meeting, a meeting of the Academic Council, a meeting of the Chancellor’s Cabinet, CUNY’s Financial Management Conference, the Administrative Council (which includes the chief operating officers of all the colleges), and the Lehman College Senate. In addition, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein spoke about the excess-­credit issue and the need for a common general education framework at a (public) meeting of the full Board of Trustees. And I sent a copy of Julia’s report to the USS chair at that time, Cory Provost. There was widespread enthusiasm for Julia’s report among CUNY central and college administrators, including for the report’s recommendations. However, that enthusiasm was not uniform. One prominent president repeatedly told me that the transfer problems could be solved solely through the implementation of a CUNY-­wide common course-­numbering system. But I didn’t see how that would accomplish anything without our doing the more difficult work of structuring CUNY-­wide curricular paths for students. One senior administrator in the central office wrote me in an email that a “CUNY-­wide core curriculum . . . strikes me as [a] politically charged topic that will bog us down. We don’t need to create a CUNY-­wide core, but rather to see that existing credits are accepted upon transfer.” Given everything that we had learned about the experience of other states and about what happens when a student transfers, I disagreed, as did most central office administrators. So we pushed on. At least at first, the only faculty responses I received regarding Julia’s report were some anonymous written negative comments forwarded by Sandi right before Thanksgiving. These comments • disagreed that transfer students’ excess credits were much more than those of natives;

60  ■  Chapter 3 • disagreed that excess credits were even a problem (a biology major might want to take a course in poetry, according to one comment, as if students majoring in biology can’t ordinarily take elective courses); • stated that the number of credits accumulated doesn’t indicate that someone has obtained an education anyway; • stated the belief that the root of the problem was that community college students who transfer to senior colleges aren’t as well prepared as the senior college students; and • stated that transfer students should be given more standardized tests to see whether they really know the material.

One commenter stated that “the report appears to have been written largely from the perspective of academic advisors and does not seem to consider academic issues (e.g., what is a liberal arts education or how can one maintain a physics department when few majors exist).” Did that last comment mean that students should be required to take physics as one of their general education courses so that physics professors would have enough to teach? Nowhere in any of these comments were there any specific ideas about how to help students transfer more credits, nor were there any expressions of interest in working together with the administration to solve these problems. And as far as I could see, none of these comments contained any significant criticisms regarding what we were doing to improve transfer at CUNY.

Pathways Principles There were two major principles guiding our work in developing Pathways: (1) What we were proposing should help ensure equal opportunities for all students to obtain a high-­quality degree, consistent with CUNY’s historic mission, as expressed by founder Townsend Harris: “Open the doors to all . . . Let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect.”8 And (2) Faculty and colleges should have as much flexibility with and control over the curriculum as possible. However, these two principles were not equal. When in conflict, principle 1 took precedence over principle 2. If we had to make a choice between helping students and having faculty do as they wished, we would help students. The difficulty with this apparently simple logic was of course that many faculty

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felt that only they knew what was needed for a high-­quality degree, and therefore whatever they wanted was ipso facto best for students. Though generally we deferred to faculty on curricular matters, we did not agree that everything the faculty wanted was good for students, or that only faculty could make decisions regarding what was good for students. As chief academic officer of CUNY I saw myself as the principal advocate for faculty. After all, that was why I had gotten involved with academic administration in the first place. In my seventeen years as a faculty member at Stony Brook, all I had wanted to do was my research and teaching, and all I had wanted the administration to do was to help me in those endeavors. Over and over I felt that the administration let me down, hindering me from being the best researcher and teacher that I could be. When I became chair of the Psychology Department at Stony Brook, just prior to becoming dean of arts and sciences at CUNY’s Baruch College, my main goal was to do for my department’s faculty what I felt had not been done for me. I was naive in many ways and did not accomplish half of what I had hoped, but fifteen years later I still held dear my commitment to facilitate the work of faculty. Nevertheless, consistent with CUNY’s mission, which I had grown to cherish, the students came first. As the fall 2010 semester progressed, our ideas about what to do to help students transfer became more specific. We started to draft a list of policies to facilitate transfer. Having decided that one aspect of this framework had to be CUNY-­wide general education requirements, we in my office thought long and hard about how those requirements should be set up, debating every aspect. Our investigation of what had been done in other states suggested that requirements based on learning outcomes, rather than a set of required courses, seemed the best approach (see chapter 2 for additional discussion of learning outcomes). That way, as long as colleges satisfied the learning outcomes, each college could determine its own particular kinds of general education courses, maintaining some college individuality and flexibility. However, if a student passed a course that satisfied the CUNY-­wide learning outcomes at one college, that student would be deemed to have satisfied those learning outcomes at every CUNY college. There would be the added benefit of these courses all having to specify learning outcomes, which is required by our major accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (Middle States). There was another big question for the CUNY-­wide general education requirements, and it was a very big one: Of how many credits should those requirements consist? At that time the senior (bachelor’s-­degree) colleges’ general

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education requirements varied from 33 to 63 credits, with an average of 52,9 and there was a lot of variation at the community colleges as well. Our intensive study of what had been done in other states and of national norms had led us to believe that all the CUNY colleges should have the same required number of general education credits, and that the current senior college average number was too high. The large number of most of the senior colleges’ current general education requirements allowed students few credits for electives and virtually eliminated the ability to do a double major or a minor, in addition to decreasing students’ flexibility in finding courses to complete their degrees, problems that were exacerbated for transfer students. Cheryl Littman, assistant dean in ­CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, informed me that only 6 percent of students graduating with a CUNY bachelor’s degree completed a double major. In contrast to what was in effect at CUNY colleges at that time, Middle States required a minimum of only 15 general education credits for associate’s degrees and 30 for bachelor’s degrees.10 New York State Education Department officials told us that they expected about 30 (one-­fourth) of the credits for a bachelor’s degree to consist of general education courses. There is also a widely accepted standard of general education as one-­third of total credits (see chapter 2), which would be 40 credits for a bachelor’s degree. All of these numbers are lower than the totals required by most CUNY senior colleges pre-­Pathways. Another factor to keep in mind in setting the total number of required general education credits was that it should be divisible by 3 because by far the greatest number of CUNY courses consisted of 3 credits each. We also had to be mindful of how many general education credits a student could reasonably take at a community college—­we had learned that there were a great many community college majors that left few credits available for general education courses, and everything had to fit into the maximum of 60 credits for most associate’s degrees. Still another consideration was that the 1999 CUNY board resolution on transfer stipulated that a student who had already earned an AA or AS degree could be required to take at most one general education course after transferring to a senior college. Setting a requirement specifying that such students take more than one course after transferring would make transfer harder for students instead of easier, as we intended. But the number of general education credits that would fit into an associate’s degree and the number of general education credits currently required at the senior colleges just seemed too far apart.

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At the senior colleges, students completed most of the courses for their majors during their junior and senior years, and so had a large number of opportunities in their freshmen and sophomore years to take general education courses. But the situation was different for community college students, who took many major courses during their two-­year programs. How to bridge the gap? By the end of that fall semester, we had decided that the solution lay in requiring different numbers of general education credits for community and senior college students. We thought that every student at every college should complete a 36-­credit general education core, and that senior college students should complete an additional 6 credits of general education, for a total of 42. Both numbers were divisible by 3 so that they would accommodate 3-­credit courses, and the number 36 was also divisible by 4 and by 12, so that 4-­credit courses were also possible, as was a mixture of 3-­and 4-­credit courses. On the theory that a single course could earn a student up to 6 credits, requiring students who completed an AA or AS degree, and who then transferred to a senior college, to earn 6 more credits of general education would be consistent with the 1999 board policy that such students could be required to take no more than one more general education course after transferring. On the question of how those 36 and 6 credits should be divided up into courses, and what those courses and the learning outcomes should be, we had no opinion. Such decisions, we thought, should be made by the faculty. We did think that the total general education credits should be divided into categories, and that if a student satisfied the requirements of a category at one college, then she or he would have satisfied that category at every college. In devising our draft plan, we relied heavily on what the Georgia state system had done to facilitate transfer. We were fortunate to have two CUNY administrators who had worked on those policies: Queens College President Jim Muyskens and College of Staten Island Provost Bill Fritz. We communicated with each of them multiple times to find out how Georgia had handled various issues. For example, we wanted to know how they handled transfer of general education courses that carried differing numbers of credits (individual colleges developed 1-­credit courses to fill in gaps, which seemed to us an awkward, and perhaps educationally nonoptimal, solution; we thought it would be better to require all general education courses to have the same number of credits), and how they obtained university-­wide approval for general education courses (the Georgia central office ultimately did this; we thought it would be better to assign this role to a university-­wide faculty committee).

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We followed a similar strategy concerning SUNY (the State University of New York). In October Julia and I met with a former SUNY university provost to learn the details about what SUNY had done concerning general education and transfer. As with our views about Georgia, we thought that we could improve on what SUNY had done. Though SUNY was a relatively early adopter of a uniform, system-­wide, general education curriculum, the SUNY Board of Trustees decided what topics students must cover in this curriculum; we thought the faculty should have this authority. Then, too, there were complaints that the SUNY policies contained loopholes and were confusing.11 By the end of that semester we had also constructed a draft time line for putting our proposals into effect. Included were tentative dates for board approval, finalization of the general education framework, and when students would actually be subject to the new requirements. We spent much time figuring out how the timing could work for all this, and we started worrying about all kinds of other details as well: • What if a student isn’t a new freshman when these policies go into effect? (We decided that such students would have the option either to be subject to the new policies or to remain with the old policies.) • Who should determine whether a college’s general education courses fit the CUNY-­wide learning outcomes for such courses? The central office or a faculty committee? (Despite pressure from one president who was convinced that the central office should do it, we decided it should be a faculty committee, consistent with our goal of giving faculty as much control over the curriculum as possible.) • How would Advanced Placement credit—­a form of transfer credit—­be handled, so that a student who was awarded AP credit at one college would not lose it after transferring to a second? (Ultimately we instituted a CUNY-­wide policy that a student had to get a score of at least 4 for AP credit, whereas previously some colleges had accepted a score of 3.) • Should there be a minimum grade for a course to transfer? (We decided that a course grade that was considered passing and credit-­worthy at one college would be considered to be passing and credit-­worthy at every college—­ consistent with the concept of an integrated university.) • Should students majoring in science, technology, engineering, or mathe­matics (STEM) have different general education requirements from other students? (We decided that, if a college approved, basic science major courses could satisfy the general education science requirements.)

Formulating Resolution (10/10–1/11)  ■ 65 • What about other majors? (We decided no other majors would have special arrangements or requirements for general education, helping to ensure that a student wouldn’t have to retake one or more general education courses if she or he changed majors.) • What would we do to help students transfer courses in their major? (We decided that faculty committees would determine, CUNY-­wide, the first few courses leading into each major that had many transfer students, so that students could start such a major at any college that offered that major and finish it, seamlessly, at any other college offering that major.) • Would there be a way for students to appeal transfer credit decisions, and, if so, what would that appeals process be? (We decided that each college would set up its own appeals process and, if a student was not satisfied with the results of such a process, the student could then appeal to the central office.)

These are just a few of the issues that we considered as we worked on Pathways from 2010 through 2013. I have presented them briefly and in simplified form, but each required a great deal of discussion, and we based that discussion on data and expert information wherever possible. To enable this work, several people in my office were now working virtually full-­time on Pathways planning, and dozens of others across the central office were also involved. Our needs for data and information, and our determination to consider all angles, grew ever greater. We also tried to involve people outside the central office in these discussions, most commonly the colleges’ chief academic officers and the leadership of the UFS. We knew from extensive study of the board policies and New York State law that, as long as the board approved, we had complete authority to establish new policies. But we wanted to set any new policies in collaboration with the colleges and the faculty.

Learning Outcomes Here is one example that demonstrates why such collaboration was difficult. As I have explained, for many reasons we felt strongly that the new general education curriculum should be defined in terms of learning outcomes. However, early on in the development of the new transfer policies, Sandi had expressed to me her view that learning outcomes were not useful. So when, at the end of November, the Chronicle of Higher Education published a piece on how the use

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of learning outcomes was winning over history faculty,12 I seized the opportunity and sent Sandi (a historian) a copy of the article on November 30. This article begins: “Christopher A. Conte can hardly stand to utter the word ‘rubric.’ He finds the grading grid, which has recently captivated many of his faculty colleagues in the history department here at Utah State University, entirely too rigid.” “Rubric” is education terminology for a set of procedures by which you assess how much someone has learned. Sandi immediately emailed me back: “Thanks but I am not someone who will ever sit inside a rubric cube.” I smiled. Maybe she wasn’t engaging in the topic at hand, but she wasn’t making any real trouble and could actually be incredibly witty and fun. I emailed her back at 10:30 that evening: “Not much can make me laugh this time of night after the day I’ve had but this does!” Sandi is not the only faculty member to have devalued learning outcomes and the process of what is called outcomes assessment. Johns Hopkins University political science Professor Benjamin Ginsberg, in his 2011 book The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-­Administrative University and Why It Matters, states that outcomes assessment is an “effort to transfer control over course content, curriculum planning, and the evaluation of what students have learned from the faculty to committees of deanlets [i.e., low-­ranking deans] on which the faculty might be represented.” He subsequently states that when administrators warn that accreditors require outcomes assessment, “the faculty should not be fooled by these warnings and should vigorously resist administrators’ demands” because such statements are an attempt to take control away from the faculty. He appears concerned about assessments of students’ learning done by anyone other than the particular faculty member who is teaching the students, and particularly about any assessment in which administrators are involved.13 Ginsberg spoke at a conference organized by the UFS in December 2011, when Sandi was the UFS chair.14 Nevertheless, although I do not have specific data to support this, it is my strong impression that the vast majority of faculty and administrators understand and support the use of learning outcomes and outcomes assessment. Virtually every accreditor does focus on them (see chapter 2 for some of the reasons why), and so college personnel, including faculty, are quite accustomed to working within an outcomes framework. Middle States’ current Standard 14 for accreditation states, “Assessment of student learning demonstrates that, at graduation, or other appropriate points, the institution’s students have knowledge, skills, and competencies consistent with institutional and appropriate

Formulating Resolution (10/10–1/11)  ■ 67

higher education goals.”15 In other words, what students are expected to know and to be able to do must fall within an overall institutional framework and be clearly stated, assessed, and achieved. A perusal of accreditation actions by Middle States shows that more institutions have difficulty meeting Standard 14 than is the case for any other standard, demonstrating the importance of outcomes assessment for accreditation. Not surprisingly, given accreditors’ requirements, a recent survey showed that the percentage of colleges with a common set of expected outcomes for all of their students had increased from 78 percent in 2008 to 85 percent in 2015.16 My own belief is that, as members of the academic community, we all have an obligation to that community and beyond to specify what we expect our students to learn and then to demonstrate whether we have achieved that goal. From the perspective of those of us working on Pathways, defining the planned CUNY-­wide general education framework in terms of learning outcomes not only would structure that framework so as to resonate positively with accreditors, but would have many other advantages.17 First, as stated previously, given that there is more than one way to achieve a learning outcome, if the framework were to specify intended learning outcomes, rather than particular courses, colleges and faculty could choose the methods and content that they thought best to achieve those outcomes. This process for determining the content of the general education curriculum would help preserve the colleges’ and faculty’s flexibility and individuality with regard to general education. In addition, if the new general education framework were specified in terms of categories defined according to learning outcomes, rather than specifying general education as consisting of required courses from specific disciplines, it might be possible for a department to have courses in more than one category, thus enhancing that department’s participation in the general education curriculum. This might be particularly useful for departments such as history whose courses don’t fall neatly into one traditional category or another (although some people classify history as one of the humanities disciplines, others consider it a social science). Further, learning outcomes are an essential piece of the AAC&U’s LEAP (Liberal Education and America’s Promise) initiative, a national initiative promoting liberal education,18 in which many CUNY colleges were already participating at that time. An example of a LEAP learning outcome for the quantitative literacy skill of communication is “Uses quantitative information in connection

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with the argument or purpose of the work, presents it in an effective format, and explicates it with consistent high quality.”19 Finally, I was personally drawn to using learning outcomes for the general education framework because of their focus on measurable endpoints (what students have learned and are able to do). My background in behavioral psychology has taught me that, just as there is more than one way for someone to teach an excellent class, there is more than one way to acquire certain pieces of knowledge and certain behaviors. Thus, rather than specifying particular ways of getting to a goal, we should focus on the attainment of the goal itself.

Initial Reactions There was a meeting of the Board of Trustees toward the end of November, and on November 22 Sandi sent a summary of that meeting to the huge UFS list of faculty email addresses: “The Chancellor spoke vehemently about moving towards a major overhaul of general education so that the transfer process did not demand that students take many more credits than needed to graduate. He indicated that we do great harm in the system by the differences among colleges in what was required as general education.” She gave no indication that she thought Matt was wrong. In her email she also described student protests at the meeting concerning tuition increases. She said little about the abolishment of the CUNY Proficiency Examination (CPE) at the same meeting, although the meeting’s minutes indicate that she made this public statement at the meeting: “I am just gloating because back ten years ago the University Faculty Senate warned you that the CPE would correlate with grades. Why did it take ten years for the Trustees to learn what we knew to begin with?”20 The CPE was a CUNY-­developed exam that all students had to pass at the end of their second year in order to receive their degrees. There were huge costs associated with administering it at each college, it had long outlived any usefulness demonstrating that CUNY had standards, and, with significant faculty support, I had led the movement resulting in its removal. In December the pace regarding consultation about and development of Pathways picked up. On December 9 Julia attended a meeting of transfer advisers. These are the college staff who work with students to help them transfer. According to Julia, one transfer adviser said that the transfer system could be fixed only if the central office took strong action, and other advisers seemed to

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agree. They said that CUNY students frequently leave CUNY to attend private universities that accept all their transfer credits, rather than transferring to another CUNY college. Around the same time as Julia’s meeting with the transfer advisers, Cory discussed Julia’s report with his Executive Committee and subsequently with the USS plenary (the full set of college USS representatives). Both bodies agreed that this is an important issue for students and supported approving a resolution in favor of better transfer and articulation. However, there wasn’t a quorum at the plenary, so a vote on a resolution would have to wait for a later meeting. It was now mid-­December, and so far negative faculty comments about our work on transfer had been fairly limited. But that was about to change. Julia and I had been invited to make a presentation concerning her report on December 14 at a meeting of the UFS Plenary. This would not involve simply our presenting and then answering questions. As Sandi stated in an email to me: “Following your presentation or you and Julia, however you wish to arrange it, Terrence Martell, Vice Chair of the UFS, will do a professional and probably somewhat critical assessment in the form of a response. The Executive Committee of the Senate has agreed to this and we hope you find it helpful.” The date of that Plenary unfortunately coincided with my being required to testify at a hearing in Albany in front of the New York State Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education, a hearing on the topic “From Access to Success: Closing the College Achievement Gap.” The hearing was scheduled for the morning, and the UFS Plenary for the evening. On December 12 I wrote to Sandi that I would do my best to get back to New York City in time to attend the UFS Plenary. Sandi’s December 13 response included some rare written statements about what we were trying to do to fix the transfer problems: I DO hope that the Albany round trip works out. . . . I am anxious to have this issue resolved in a reasonable way and not become the opportunity for a renewed source of annoyance, if not worse, between the levels of CUNY administration and faculty. One reason why the chancellor believes that the transfer process devised after the Board 1998 (?) resolution is because the faculty—­apart from people in community colleges—­were corralled unwillingly into a set of constraints that often undermined the 4 year degrees. The issue was not so bad when students had a 128 degree [credit] baccalaureate but the Board cut it to 120 and 60 [for associate’s degrees], again on the basis of some presumed national model without

70  ■  Chapter 3 faculty buy-­in or any discussion of academic quality.21 . . . The subject is not an easy one. My experience with it, about a decade plus ago, as well as earlier discussions (beginning, I believe in 1969) indicates that conceptions of general education are not fungible.

I couldn’t tell from her comments what it was specifically about our plan that she disagreed with. All I could tell was that she wanted the administration and the faculty to avoid disagreeing, that she did not think that the administration should initiate changes that the faculty did not want, and that there are different views of what should constitute general education.

December 14, 2010: The New York State Legislature and the University Faculty Senate Just as the sun was coming up on December 14, College Security Specialist José (Freddie) Torres picked up Senior Vice Chancellor Jay Hershenson and me and drove the two-­plus hours from Manhattan to Albany. Both Jay and I tended to emails the entire way, and I also reviewed what I was going to say at the hearing. Joining us in Albany were Vice Chancellors Eduardo Marti and Peter Jordan (both of whom would also testify), Associate Vice Chancellor Matthew Sapienza, Associate University Dean Cheryl Williams, and David. The testimony took place in a large room with stadium-­style seating. I testified from a seat down near the front row, with most of the other CUNY central office members in the row directly behind me. The only assembly committee member in attendance was its Chair, Deborah Glick, whom I had never met before. Deborah is a respected New York State Assembly member with short gray hair and a frequent smile. She did her undergraduate work at CUNY’s Queens College. During my testimony Deborah sat on a chair on the stage. I had to crane my neck to look at her. The State Education Department testified first, and then SUNY representatives. Next it was CUNY’s turn. I spoke about CUNY’s record enrollments, increasing graduation rates, rising SAT scores at the senior colleges, the extensive remedial needs of the students at the community colleges, and the programs designed to help address those needs. After this lengthy presentation, which we had spent much time preparing, Deborah asked me about a variety of CUNY-­ related topics.

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Throughout my testimony and the following question-­and-­answer period, I could hear the rustlings of the CUNY central people right behind me. At one point Deborah asked me for the percentage of female students in our SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) program, which provides financial and other support for a small percentage of CUNY undergraduates who would otherwise not be able to attend one of CUNY’s selective colleges. She did not expect me to answer this question on the spot. Nevertheless, it pained me not to be immediately able to answer that (or any) question. Right after she completed her question, I heard the sound of ripping paper behind me. A hand then appeared next to my head, attached to the arm of someone in back of me. The hand was bearing a jagged-­edged piece of paper with the answer to Deborah’s question, an answer that I immediately reported to her in a strong voice. With this team around me I could answer any question! But Deborah also asked about transfer among the CUNY colleges. She wanted to know whether the problems that she had heard about for many years had been fixed. I told her the truth: no. She then stated: “I would urge the University Systems, both CUNY and SUNY, to address this [the transfer credit issue]. Florida dealt with it legislatively. I am not anxious for us to interfere to that extent. I don’t view that as an appropriate role unless I happen to be sitting here five years from now and asking the same questions and getting the same answers. That’s not going to happen.”22 I assured her that we were addressing the problems. Deborah had underplayed the actions of other states. A report issued that very month by the Education Commission of the States showed that, as of 2010, a majority of states had both statewide policies on transfer and articulation and statewide general education (common core) curricula.23 These policies were set by statewide governance entities. Perhaps New York (including Deborah) had not taken action because SUNY had already developed its own common core and transfer system, and SUNY is even larger than CUNY. But CUNY was a member of a diminishing minority, and it was indeed better if we ourselves, rather than the legislature, solved our transfer problems. As soon as the testimony was over and I had eaten a quick lunch, I got back in the car with Freddie, and we drove the two-­plus hours back to New York City for the 6:30 p.m. Plenary meeting of the UFS, at the Graduate Center in Manhattan. The UFS Plenary meetings are held in a couple of conjoined classrooms that together constitute a large space, which nevertheless strains to hold the dozens of attendees. Each college elects multiple representatives (senators),

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a total of about 150. When I got to the Plenary I could see that a projector had been set up, in addition to the usual microphones; there was a table at which the meeting’s organizers sat; and there was a lectern for whomever was speaking. Matt, Julia, David, and I were all there. Matt spoke first, stating near the beginning of his remarks: “Lexa Logue got up at the crack of dawn this morning and drove to Albany. I got a report that she was fabulously successful in her testimony today in front of the Assembly higher education committee, drove back, and now she is ready for a presentation. So giving her a little time to breathe, I’ll just take some questions so that you can relieve her of that responsibility and she could just do her report.”24 Then he addressed mostly budget-­ related questions, including his high priority for hiring more full-­time faculty. Toward the end of his remarks, he stated: “I want people to think about coming and studying at this university. I want them to complete their studies. . . . Lexa [Logue] is going to talk about this later in the evening. We have too many students that start and never finish and there is a whole variety of reasons and we want to attack that. . . . I want the degree to be a valued degree. I want it to have importance and respect in the community and however you define the community, whether it’s locally or on a more broad basis.” I was very grateful for his supportive words. He concluded with: “Okay, thank you very much. I’ve got to run.” And, as he always did right after speaking at the UFS Plenary, he left. Discussion of Julia’s report was next on the agenda. In a relatively brief presentation, Julia and I summarized points made in the report, as well as the elements of what the new transfer policies might look like. According to the UFS’s minutes of the meeting, I stressed that we would not, absolutely not, create a defined core curriculum for the whole ­system. . . . We don’t think we should require any specific courses. We think the campuses should decide and faculties should decide what courses should be part of a general education framework. We are thinking that such a framework should have a limit on the total numbers of credits, that it might be divided up into big categories, like humanities, social sciences. Then within those categories the campuses could figure out which courses they found would fit in those categories . . . . a system-­wide faculty committee [would review] the materials about that course to see that, yes, this does satisfy the learning outcomes specified for the category and whether it qualifies as an appropriate college-­level course. So in this way the faculty maintains control over the curriculum, over the standards, and also then you can access against those learning outcomes. And faculty would also maintain control over that. I should say, though, this general education framework, the

Formulating Resolution (10/10–1/11)  ■ 73 total number of credits, to be right out there, would probably be smaller than is presently the case at many of our campuses. I don’t want to leave that out. Because the idea would be that students at the community colleges should be able to do all or most of it, plus their major, at the community college.

Julia and I finished our presentation. Then (as we had been alerted to by Sandi the previous day), Terry, who was the Saxe Distinguished Professor of Finance at Baruch College, in addition to being vice chair of the UFS, began his comments on Julia’s report, and it became apparent what the projector was for. Terry introduced his response by saying: “I did this, right, for the [UFS] Executive Committee. No one has reviewed it yet. I know it’s going too hard for you to believe, but I could be wrong! I had to recreate all the data, I had to look at a lot of stuff, and I want some of my colleagues to look at this. It’s seven pages, with about 12 Power Point slides, and I’ll be happy to distribute it as soon as somebody says, Terry, you didn’t make any really stupid mistakes. All right? That’s why it’s not out there now.” Terry’s subsequent complicated slides and many oral points passed by too quickly for me to follow it all. But whether I could follow everything or not, I had to respond. A large audience had just heard Terry say that he had disproved the basic assumptions of Julia’s paper. Responding orally to public critiques of papers was not unfamiliar to me. When someone is an active professor and scholar as I was at Stony Brook for many years, this sort of response is required fairly frequently at department colloquia and at conferences. Yet you usually have the opportunity to study an existing detailed written critique (as opposed to responding to an isolated oral question) prior to having to reply to it. On this night I did the best I could, stating where I thought Terry’s critique had overemphasized minor issues and made invalid assumptions. For example, one point that Terry made was that the graduation rates of transfer students were just as high as those of students who entered as freshmen and never transferred, thus indicating no disadvantage to being a transfer student. In my response I explained that, on average, students who have been in college a certain amount of time are more likely to graduate than students who have been in college a shorter amount of time. Therefore the comparison should be between the graduation rates of students who have transferred and students who have never transferred but who have already achieved a similar number of credits, not all students who entered as freshmen and didn’t transfer. (As it turns out, when such a comparison is made, CUNY transfer students are less likely to graduate than students who never transfer. One of several possible

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explanations of this difference in graduation rates is the problems transfer students have in transferring their credits, an explanation supported by research.)25 As another example, Terry also questioned the paper’s estimate of the cost of excess credits (students graduating with more credits than they needed for their degrees). However, in making his own estimates he took into account only the amount of tuition required for those credits. The paper had estimated the total cost to the colleges to offer those credits, with at most half of the needed funds coming from tuition, and the remainder coming primarily from government sources. The presentations and subsequent comments and questions from the audience continued for two hours. During that period, I believe that many observers would have described the audience’s mood as hostile. Yet as challenging as that meeting was, I knew that it was only one small action of the many available to faculty if they truly wanted to stop an initiative of the central administration. I also wondered whether this body of people was representative of the views of the some five thousand other full-­time CUNY faculty. In January we placed both Terry’s written version of his comments and our response to him on the Pathways website, next to Julia’s original paper, so that everyone could read all of the documents and make their own judgments.26 If Terry had written a response to our response, we would have posted that too, but he did not.

The Views of Others On December 15, Sandi had the UFS’s 2001 “Statement on General Education/ Core Curricula” delivered to me, and I emailed to thank her. This document included the following statements: “Distribution requirements, core courses, or a combination of both could all easily achieve the goals of a sound general education”; “Articulation among college general education programs can and should be achieved without a uniform curriculum across the system”; “Faculty alone should ultimately decide course content, pedagogical methods, and learning materials”; and “Each college should be allowed to define its own curriculum based on its mission, institutional history, and the needs of its students.” Though this document was more an overview of general education than a specific plan, I didn’t see anything in it that was incompatible with our Pathways plans. For example, I didn’t see our plans to limit the general education credits and define them in terms of learning outcomes as setting

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a “curriculum.” In my view, setting a curriculum involves picking particular learning outcomes and courses and determining syllabus content, none of which we were going to do. Sandi immediately replied to my email: “I think I shall send this out to selected groups in two and four year colleges and in January—­we need a break, people are grading papers now also—­begin to discuss its validity as a basis for transfer policy.” Although I certainly understood about faculty work schedules, I was disappointed and concerned when I read Sandi’s description of what seemed to me to be likely lengthy delays in our discussions with the faculty. On December 16, I made a list summarizing the concerns that I had heard up to that point about our plans to (a) develop a common general education framework for CUNY, (b) identify some courses in each of the popular transfer majors that students could take at any college offering that major and transfer seamlessly to any other college offering that major, and (c) allow all transferred courses to receive at least credit as an elective. The concerns on this list had been expressed at the UFS Plenary two days previously and in other communications that I had had from faculty. Here is that list: • The students who come to CUNY know very little. Therefore: o A relatively large, required core curriculum is a good thing; our students don’t even know which courses to take. o Excess credits are not such a bad thing. • Excess credits are sometimes due to our students being intellectually curious and exploring, which is a good thing. • 6 or even 9 credits of, for example, social science is not enough to expose students to all of the important individual social science disciplines. • The central office does not have the authority to mandate anything to do with a general education framework, not even the total number of credits. Only the faculty at each individual college—­separately—­can do that. • We get tuition and [other revenue] for the extra credits so it does not matter that students go over the minimum number of credits required for their degrees. • Our relatively wealthy students can afford excess credits, so what we should be doing [instead of Pathways] is seeking dollars from the state or elsewhere to pay for these excess credits for our less wealthy students. • We can’t have a single general education framework for the whole system that allows students to transfer seamlessly because the rigor of the community college courses is not as high as that of the senior colleges.

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We also heard multiple comments to the effect that the greater number of excess credits for transfer students (greater by as little as a single credit for students who transferred with AA and AS degrees to bachelor’s programs) wasn’t enough to disrupt the whole CUNY system. But our concern was not just about the number of excess credits. Yes, they represented an unnecessary cost. However, students who lost credits on transfer could minimize having to take ­credits beyond what was required for their degrees by sacrificing opportunities for elective courses, and that was a cost too. After 10:00 p.m. that evening, I emailed Sandi a copy of the minutes that I had recently received from the New York State Board of Regents December meeting (the regents set all education policy in New York State). One aspect of the minutes covered the content for the 2012–­2020 “Statewide Plan for Higher Education” on which the regents were working. I pointed out to her that one item they wanted to include in the plan was “Improving student transfer mechanisms and articulation of programs.” “Maybe this is why Deborah Glick brought this up at Tuesday’s hearing,” I wrote. “You were absolutely right when, some weeks ago, you pointed out that the legislature might go in this direction.” In another email even later that evening, Sandi said: Terry and I had a useful meeting with Deborah Glick who happily remembered me and so no time was lost establishing my creds, as the kids say Her view about transfer boiled down to —­If a student takes Acct 101 at Orange [County Community College, part of SUNY] with an adjunct and then takes it again at SUNY Albany, often with the same adjunct, he should not be required to do it over She MEANS if the syllabus is the same —­college students in both two and four year colleges need strong core gen ed requirements and she praised her Queens College experience to the sky . . . from the 60s This was heartening. She said in five years from now if she is still doing the job she is in, she will move on the repetition of Acct 101 (as an example) but did not say she would take on the issue of credits.

I never learned any more about this meeting of Sandi with Deborah, including when it had happened in relation to the Albany hearing at which Deborah asked me about transfer at CUNY, and have wondered about all that since. The next afternoon, commenting on our recent emails, Sandi wrote: “Yes—­ but there are many ways to skin a cat—­prefereably it ought to be dead first.

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Have a great holiday I am leaving the country for a week and wont be back in saddle until about the 28th.” On December 20 I sent Sandi a transcript of what Deborah had said about transfer at the December 14 hearing in Albany. Sandi did not respond. Worried that we were not communicating, I emailed Sandi, who was in Mexico, again on December 24, asking if we could meet in the near future: “Hope you have been having a great holiday! You had emailed me that you would be back around the 28th. Is there any chance that we could meet on the 28th, 29th, or 30th? We have been progressing with the transfer/general education issue and I would very much like to update you and get your feedback before we go much further.” I was still hoping to get some specific comments from her about our plans, and to hear her own ideas about how to fix the transfer problems. Sandi replied the same day: “I hope that this issue does not become an 80th St bugle call with faculty marching in columns   Off to the beach” Sandi and I were able to meet for almost two hours on December 30. Terry was there too. At this meeting we had a wide-­ranging discussion about general education, and I provided many details concerning what we were thinking of doing. This was now my third in-­person conversation with Sandi about general education and transfer students, and my second with Terry (not including the UFS Plenary meeting a couple of weeks earlier). Sandi said we should take longer to develop the new policies, but when I asked why, she had no answer. She expressed a preference for general education requiring many credits (about half of the total credits) and said that she wanted general education to result in graduates who can speak or write in a very learned way about many kinds of subjects. She did not seem to understand that the CUNY senior colleges already have a lot of transfer students and that, when they come from CUNY community colleges, they are likely to have had fewer general education credits than what we were now proposing. Sandi and Terry both said that some faculty would be upset about what we were proposing. Although Terry was familiar with learning outcomes owing to his accreditation work at Baruch, he said it would be “easier not better” if we were to propose just so many credits in social sciences, humanities, etc., as opposed to proposing broad categories that were defined by learning outcomes. Sandi was worried about how we would pick the faculty who would decide how to divide up the 36 credits, and also who would decide the learning outcomes for the categories. Terry said that he had a simple way to solve the transfer problems that would not cause any disruption, but neither Sandi nor I could follow what he was saying. I repeatedly asked for

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suggestions about how to solve our systemic transfer problems, the existence of which they did not deny. However, neither Sandi nor Terry had any specific suggestions. On January 5 Sandi sent a summary of our transfer plans to the huge UFS email distribution list, along with the written version of Terry’s response to Julia’s report, and asked the faculty for their input. Based on all of the feedback that we were receiving, we continued to modify the draft document that we would propose as a resolution for a vote by the Board of Trustees. As we moved into January 2011, whenever a specific question arose, I followed a similar pattern: I consulted with multiple college presidents and chief academic officers by making individual phone calls. This was more time-­consuming than having a group meeting or sending group or even individual emails, but it made sure that I got people’s individual opinions. Such calls were to continue throughout the effecting of Pathways. But a point came in January 2011 at which I needed feedback on what would be the written version of the draft board resolution on Pathways that would go out to the whole community. And so, on January 5, as I sat in a chair at John F. Kennedy International Airport waiting for an American Airlines flight to Puerto Rico and the start of my own one-­week winter vacation, I touched “send” on my smartphone to deliver the proposed draft to a subset of chief academic officers and other administrators for comment. I repeatedly checked my email each day that I was away to see whether there were any replies. The reactions were generally positive, with comments directed mostly at specific aspects of the wording of the document. Julia and I continued to make changes in the draft as we received comments. I wanted the draft to be in as good shape as possible before any faculty saw it, to minimize the criticisms that would certainly be forthcoming. In January there were still more consultative meetings, even though classes were not in session. I had yet another extensive discussion with the Academic Affairs Committee of the Council of Presidents about what we had learned so far and what we were planning. The committee’s chair was Russell Hotzler, president of CUNY’s New York City College of Technology and one of the most experienced of the CUNY presidents—­he had overseen several CUNY colleges and had worked in the central office as well. He was always available by email, by phone, or in person to advise me on what to do next with Pathways, and I took considerable advantage of his wise counsel. And, of course, I was also constantly consulting with our Chancellor, Matt, making sure that he was fully informed about what we were doing, and obtaining his excellent advice on how to proceed.

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On January 14, Sandi, Terry, Matt, and I all met together to discuss Pathways. At this meeting, Sandi agreed with the part of our plan specifying that all associate’s-­degree students should take only general education courses that could be applied to bachelor’s-­degree programs. She also agreed that the TIPPS software was much work for too little payoff. But she was unhappy with the proposal of a common core of 36 credits (plus 6 more credits for bachelor’s-­degree students). Terry expressed an interest in our working together to achieve our goals. However, neither Sandi nor Terry had any concrete suggestions about how we should go about this. Matt committed to ensuring that Pathways would result in no dilution of the level of academic student experience. Sandi gave me a copy of a document—­apparently from 1968—­in which a then-­new UFS Committee on Undergraduate Affairs had declared its mandate to include addressing matters concerning intercollege relationships such as transfer. The document referred to the “need [because of transferring students] for integrating the basic curricula and establishing standards” (which sounded great to me). In giving me this document, Sandi seemed to imply that transfer was the UFS’s business, and not the central office’s. Immediately after the meeting I sent Sandi and Terry the CUNY general education analysis chart that my office had put together.27 In retrospect, I believe that Sandi and I were good at sending each other documents, and not in having more than a surface-­level conversation with each other about the relevant issues. January 24 was the first Board of Trustees meeting of 2011. At that meeting the trustees voted to ban all tobacco use on all CUNY property beginning in September 2012.28 This was another initiative that I had conceived of and led, again with a great deal of faculty support. The UFS had been squarely behind this policy change, which made CUNY the largest university in the United States to ban tobacco use. My reading of the research literature had convinced me that not only would this new policy decrease secondhand smoke exposure, but it would make it easier for smokers to quit by removing all nicotine-­associated stimuli from the environment and thus decreasing conditioned craving. In addition, it would decrease litter and establish CUNY as a model of public health policy, as befitted a university with a new School of Public Health (another initiative that I had managed for the central office). Although the UFS had been a strong supporter of this policy change, the faculty union (the PSC) had kept its distance. When I had asked Barbara Bowen, the PSC president, to nominate someone for the CUNY-­wide committee I was establishing to consider this policy, she had said that she would do so only

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if CUNY provided health insurance for all of the adjunct (part-­time) faculty. Given that CUNY at that time had over ten thousand adjuncts and no budget for their health insurance, this contingency was a nonstarter, and so the committee proceeded without a PSC representative. Despite that, the committee’s work went smoothly. Our CUNY-­wide consultation was extensive and effective, and the committee members agreed on recommendations fairly quickly. At the time, despite the lack of participation on the part of the PSC, the success of the tobacco use ban initiative had seemed to me to bode well for cooperative engagement with the faculty on other major, system-­wide, potentially controversial, change projects. I thought that our successful experience with the tobacco initiative would be useful, and would serve as a model, as we worked on establishing CUNY-­wide general education requirements. As I listened to the trustees unanimously pass the tobacco use ban, I only wished that my father could have known about CUNY’s new policy. He was a physician who ceased his four-­pack-­a-­day habit after the surgeon general in 1964 declared tobacco damaging to health. In 2001, at the age of eighty-­five, he lay in an emergency room with multiple organ failure and severe, chronic, obstructive pulmonary disease caused by smoking, repeatedly saying, “I wish I had never smoked. You can fix other organs but not lungs.” He died a few days later. Now maybe some members of my CUNY family would not have to go through what he did. However, there was no time to take satisfaction in the passing of the tobacco use ban resolution. The next day my meetings included Julia’s and my regular meeting with the UFS representatives to prepare for the upcoming meeting of the academic committee of the board (CAPPR). We called this the pre-­CAPPR meeting. In addition to Julia and me, the attendees were Sandi, Karen Kaplo­ witz (a professor of English at John Jay College and the usual UFS representative to CAPPR, as well as an effective and enthusiastic member of the tobacco committee), and Emily Tai (a professor of history at Queensborough Community College and the UFS’s alternate representative to CAPPR). The meeting lasted two hours—­there were twelve new programs on which CAPPR members would vote in February, and we needed to see whether the UFS had any questions or concerns about any of them. Also on the agenda for CAPPR was the restructuring of a department and the official establishment of CUNY’s new Guttman Community College. (The board had already approved the founding president for this college, Scott Evenbeck, the previous July, following a search that Senior University Dean John Mogulescu and I had cochaired.)

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The UFS representatives expressed some concerns about several of these items. Regarding a new doctor of nursing practice degree to be housed at Hunter College, they thought that all doctoral degrees had to be based at the Graduate Center. I explained that we were now allowing professional doctorates such as the doctor of nursing practice (as opposed to research doctorates, i.e., PhDs) to be located at colleges as well as at the Graduate Center, another policy change initiative that I had led (and that the UFS had actually endorsed at a previous CAPPR meeting). Over the ensuing week I addressed continuing CAPPR agenda concerns from the UFS, receiving at least five emails from Sandi about these matters. When CAPPR met, all of the agenda items were approved. I had hoped that this pre-­CAPPR meeting would also include some substantive discussion of Pathways-­related issues. However, Sandi’s major concern that day, in addition to the items on the CAPPR agenda, was her granddaughter, who had been having difficulty leaving Egypt because of the events precipitated by the Arab Spring. All of us at the meeting had enormous sympathy for Sandi and concern for her granddaughter’s situation, and I repeatedly asked Sandi about further developments over the ensuing days. On January 29, after Sandi had written me that it had not yet been possible to evacuate her granddaughter, I wrote her: “I can’t imagine how upset you must feel. I heard on the news this morning that all phone and internet had been cut off and thought of her and you. It is truly horrible to not be able to do anything but just wait. I hope that the situation resolves itself soon, and positively, for her sake but also for yours and your family’s.” Finally, after some days, Sandi’s granddaughter was able to leave Egypt and was safe. During January, in addition to the multiple emails that I received from Sandi about CAPPR issues, and a couple about her granddaughter, she also wrote to me repeatedly about some policy changes we were thinking of making for the least prepared students, about some academic freedom concerns she had related to a particular professor, and about an upcoming graduate student poster session in Albany. About transfer issues she wrote me almost nothing. However, on January 19 she asked me for all the department chair names: “I am trying to write to discrete groups to discuss the issues of transfer and it would save a LOT of time if I did not have to scour each campus web site.” Unfortunately, I didn’t have these names. And then on January 20, she wrote that “Julia presented the transfer report [at a recent enrollment management meeting] with no indication that a serious study of it by Martell and others indicated flaws of a basic nature. . . . An issue which the report entirely ignores—­the shortage of

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staff to evaluate transcrips. That, plus poor advising of AAS students, needs to be privileged as an explanation for the overcredit requirements for BA graduation.” Although more staff would certainly be beneficial, I didn’t think that adding ongoing huge expenditures was the solution to CUNY’s transfer maze (ten more staff at each college—­a drop in the bucket given CUNY’s some 240,000 undergraduates, would cost, including fringe benefits, at least an additional $13 million per year). Moreover, I didn’t think that even the best transfer adviser could ensure students a way through the maze.

Releasing the Draft for Discussion Contrary to what I had wished, we had not had the resolution ready for a vote at the January board meeting. I was still hoping that the vote would occur at the April meeting, but other—­perhaps wiser—­members of the central office (particularly Matt) preferred June. June would give us time to release a public draft at the end of January and have a whole semester to receive comments on it. However, the longer we took to have a vote, the longer it would be until the students were helped, and the more opportunity there was for something to stop the whole project. Would the public consultation process reveal a flaw in what we had been planning that would cause our efforts to be stopped, instead of simply modified? Also, in the years it would take to get the project completed after the resolution was passed, would anything happen to Matt, on whose strong support the whole project depended? He had already had a long career and association with CUNY, having earned his bachelor’s degree at CUNY’s City College in 1963, and having been chancellor since 1999.29 He might move to another job or retire. In addition, I had witnessed the cessation, owing to faculty upset, of plenty of programs that would have benefited students. Would this be one of them? Not voting on the resolution until June would mean that there would likely be many months of upset during which administrators could have second thoughts. Could the central and college administrations hold firm in the face of prolonged faculty opposition? On the other hand, negative reactions from the faculty had so far been limited to a few from Sandi, Terry’s critique, comments at one UFS meeting, and a few anonymous written statements. We should be able to withstand anything of that sort. On February 1, 2011, we began making the draft resolution public to all CUNY members.

CHAPTER 4

The True Colors of Spring 2011 ■■■■■

SHAPING THE FINAL RESOLUTION

Peace is one priority item, progress another. (Kerr, 2001;1 Clark Kerr was president of the University of California system from 1958 to 1967)2

A Visit to Baruch, and the Aftermath On February 3, 2011, at 12:45 p.m., Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley and I walked into the room where the Baruch College Faculty Senate meeting was about to begin. We had been invited to attend by Professor Terrence Martell, who was chair of the Baruch Senate as well as vice chair of the UFS. Even before that meeting, we knew from multiple people at Baruch that the draft resolution I had sent out about Pathways3 was incompatible with Baruch’s current general education requirements. I got a lot more information about that incompatibility at this Baruch Senate meeting. As I walked in, I knew that my galvanic skin response (psychologese for the amount of sweat on my palms) was greater than usual. Having served as the arts and sciences dean at Baruch for the six years prior to my departure for New York Institute of Technology as provost in 2001, I still knew many of the faculty at Baruch, remembered that some of them could be quite forthright in stating their disagreements with the administration, and believed that some of them would be less constrained in stating their concerns at this meeting because they had known me well. But as I entered the room, what startled and concerned me most was the behavior of the Baruch provost (chief academic officer). As was the case for virtually all of the CUNY college provosts, I thought I knew him quite well, and that we had a productive working relationship. But as I stood in the front of the room, which contained dozens of people, greeting those whom I knew and getting ready to speak, he stayed in the back of the room and did

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not acknowledge my presence. The Baruch president (who had taken office six months earlier, with a political science background and experience spanning academia, a foundation, and the Department of Defense) was not present. Julia and I were to observe huge differences in how college leaders behaved when we attended meetings with faculty to discuss Pathways, and what happened at Baruch was to prove an extreme on one end of the supportiveness spectrum. Whatever was to happen at the Baruch Senate meeting, I was determined to maintain a light, positive, respectful tone. I made some opening remarks; then Terry invited the audience to ask questions or make statements using a standing microphone placed in the middle of the audience. After the first faculty member finished, I started to respond, but Terry then told me that I was not to respond until all of the faculty had spoken. This could have meant literally an hour of my standing at the front of the room listening to the faculty say whatever they wanted—­some of which might be, probably would be, negative and/or incorrect—­without my saying a word. I had never seen anything like this anywhere; meetings between the faculty and administration always had a question-­ and-­answer format. So I objected to this instruction from Terry, but I purposely kept my tone light—­it was amusing that I wasn’t allowed to respond, wasn’t it? As it turned out, I did end up speaking in response to what some faculty said, but my opportunities to do so were limited. And some of the faculty’s comments and demeanor indicated deep anger about Pathways. At that time Baruch had the highest admissions standards—­for both freshmen and transfers—­of all the CUNY colleges. However, the admissions standards for transfer students were (probably correctly) perceived as lower than those for freshmen. Some faculty were therefore convinced that the Baruch transfer students needed to repeat many courses when they came to Baruch because of the poor preparation of these students and because of the poor quality of the courses they had taken at other CUNY colleges. One faculty member insisted that he could tell which CUNY community college the students in his class had transferred from by seeing how much they knew. I also learned from the faculty’s statements that there was one Baruch lower-­ level general education course that virtually every transfer student was required to take, and the Baruch faculty judged that course to have few matches in the CUNY system. Though it met 4 hours per week, the course gave students only 3 credits. (At CUNY, many colleges try to avoid offering such courses because they are expensive to offer—­faculty are typically compensated according to the number of hours the course meets, whereas tuition is paid according to the

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number of credits. These sorts of courses were to become a major issue in later stages of effecting Pathways.) Another major concern for the faculty was the minor required for all their students. In addition to extremely extensive standard general education credit requirements, every Baruch student (including students who transferred with a completed AA or AS degree) was required to complete a minor consisting of three upper-­level courses, courses unlikely to be taught at a community college, with each course carrying 3 or 4 credits, and with the last of them serving as a capstone course. The current Pathways resolution draft would enable Baruch to require only two 3-­credit upper-­level courses for transfer students who had completed an AA or AS. Multiple faculty at the meeting stated their belief in the value of this minor for all students. I had no doubt that students gained much from this minor, but I could also see that requiring it would make graduation difficult for transfer students. Close to 90 percent of Baruch students major in business, a major that requires many credits. In addition, all Baruch students were being required to complete a minor, plus many other general education courses (Baruch had the highest total number of required general education credits of any CUNY college, at least 50 percent of the total credits needed for a degree).4 The end result was that even students who did all of their undergraduate work at Baruch—­ students who never transferred—­would likely have few electives (a significant loss given that, as I had observed when I was a dean there, Baruch faculty offered excellent elective courses). It was thus no surprise that Baruch had few of its very bright students completing double majors—­only 1 percent—­there was no room in their schedules to satisfy the requirements of two majors. For transfer students the situation was even more constrained owing to their having to repeat at Baruch courses that they had taken at their previous colleges. Having served as Baruch’s arts and sciences dean for six years, I suspected that the faculty’s attachment to the minor (and to a large general education requirement) was not always based on a commitment to students’ welfare. With few students majoring in arts and sciences at Baruch, the Baruch arts and sciences faculty have relatively few opportunities to teach undergraduate courses, particularly the advanced undergraduate courses that many faculty prefer to teach. By requiring every Baruch student to take many general education courses, including an upper-­level minor, in a discipline other than a student’s major, the arts and sciences faculty were assured of being able to teach many courses, including upper-­level courses.

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From what I learned at the meeting that day, Baruch was requiring each transfer student to take at least four general education courses, even if that student already had a CUNY AA or AS degree. This was contrary to the still-­ in-­effect 1999 board resolution stipulating that students with an AA or AS degree who transferred to a bachelor’s-­degree program could be required to take at most one additional general education course after transfer.5 Baruch’s violation of this resolution had apparently slipped by CUNY’s central Office of Academic Affairs when Baruch’s new minor was approved about nine years earlier. The Baruch administration’s own defense of this violation of board policy was that the minor was not general education; it was a “graduation requirement.” Curiously, though, my office found multiple past statements from ­Baruch in formal documents, submitted to the central office and to CUNY’s major accreditor (the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, known as Middle States), to the effect that the minor was part of Baruch’s general education program. Regardless of what terms had been or were being used, it seemed to me that anything required of all students was a general education requirement. People at Baruch had another justification for their high general education (including minor) requirements: the requirements couldn’t be overly onerous for students given that Baruch had the highest graduation rates of any CUNY college. Yes, I thought, Baruch’s graduation rates were the highest, but couldn’t they be higher? As just one example, the six-­year graduation rate for full-­time first-­time Baruch freshmen was only 63 percent at that time.6 All this was running through my head as I listened during the Baruch Senate meeting to the faculty’s (sometimes angry) concerns about what we were proposing. After Julia and I returned to the central office, I told the Chancellor, Matthew Goldstein, what had happened. Matt had been president of Baruch from 1991 to 1998,7 and he also knew many of the Baruch people who had spoken at the meeting (a good example of how faculty can outlast many college administrators). Because he had been president there, and because Baruch was one of CUNY’s most selective colleges, Matt always seemed particularly sensitive to whatever went on there. He was not happy when I told him that my reception there had been less than warm and supportive, and that the Baruch administration had appeared to let the meeting take its own course. He expected all of the presidents and provosts to do whatever they could to support his initiatives, of which Pathways was one—­a major one.

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As part of our continuing discussions with the Baruch administration about Pathways, the Baruch president sent me a long email on February 15 asking that we meet to discuss ideas that he and his provost had for modifying the draft Pathways resolution; they hoped to make it better for Baruch students and still good for all transfer students. When his, my, Julia’s, and his provost’s schedulers tried but couldn’t find a time for us all to meet together right away, he wrote me a February 21 email that stated, in part: “You are not really serious about trying to find a mutually acceptable solution to this problem . . . we have indicated that we were willing to explore a compromise. . . . You assured me when last we spoke that you were eager to work with us to find a satisfactory outcome and that you would make yourself available. . . . I find it extremely difficult to believe that your calendar is so jam-­packed that you cannot find an hour to meet with us in the next week. I urge you to try harder.” The four of us met on February 24 in my office, a significant portion of whose space seemed taken up by the Baruch president’s and provost’s bodies and voices. I said to the president that I would advise him not to write emails like that, that we don’t do that at CUNY. His comments included these: “I don’t work for you.” “The chancellor wanted to know why I’d let you be treated so badly at Baruch.” “I’ve worked in government and seen a slowdown and this was it.” “There was nothing wrong with the tone of that email.”

I explained to him that in CUNY’s structure Matt was his boss, and that Matt considered his vice chancellors to be extensions of himself. At that same meeting, the president and his provost informed me that ­Baruch (the administration and the faculty) would support the general education part of Pathways if it were changed to allow Baruch to keep offering its minor. What they wanted was for the 36 + 6 structure (36 credits of general education for everyone, and an additional 6 credits for bachelor’s-­degree students) to be changed to 30 + 12. This would mean that any student transferring from a community college to Baruch, even if that student had an AA or an AS degree, would be required to do an additional 12 credits of general education, enough to enable Baruch to require every such student to do its existing minor (which consisted of between 9 and 12 credits). I did not give him an answer but put their suggestion high on my list for consideration. It would be months until the board voted, and there were many more opinions to hear. Baruch was only one of nineteen CUNY undergraduate colleges.

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An email that I received on March 21 helped confirm to me that I was considering Baruch with the correct perspective: Hi Dr. Logue. . . . I am a student at Baruch College. I recently read an article in the School’s paper and was very pleased with the attempt [by] CUNY to remedy the credit transfer situation. I . . . transferred from [a CUNY] Community College, where I got my Associates Degree in Computer Information Systems. At Baruch I [am] trying to get my BBA in Computer Information Systems. I did not even change my major . . . but Baruch took 20 of my credits away. Those credits are now useless electives. Now they are saying I have to complete 96 credits at Baruch. This is just not fair. . . . I have to take [out] student loans and work long hours, while studying. I am constantly worried thinking about losing those 20 credits. Please Dr. [Logue] something needs to be done. Is there anyone I can talk to about my situation? Thank you.

The Baruch Senate meeting and its aftermath set the pattern for many Pathways-­related interactions with Baruch that were to come over the ensuing years. In fact, it was during that spring of 2011 that all sorts of behavior patterns, not just those involving Baruch, began to emerge with regard to the establishing of Pathways, behavior patterns that would endure until Pathways was fully in effect (and beyond). These patterns differed from what we had seen up until then and in many cases seriously challenged the completion of this project.

Collecting Information to Inform the Revisions At the beginning of February we had widely distributed the draft resolution8 to be submitted for a board vote, as well as widely publicizing the creation of a website dedicated to this project.9 Our goal was to be as transparent as possible. Therefore anything that could exist as a document or as a table was so constituted and placed on the website, including information about our plans and an online form by which anyone could send us comments on anything. Spring classes began around this time, so the faculty were all back in full swing just as they started receiving multiple communications about Pathways. From the beginning, Erika Dreifus, the central Office of Academic Affairs’ director of communications, ably managed the establishment and maintenance of the website. To those of us in the central Office of Academic Affairs, the draft resolution was a draft; it was not a final document. We wanted to collect as much

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additional information as we could to improve it prior to the board’s vote on it, most likely in June. This involved collecting comments from as many people as possible, and it involved continuing to conduct research on transfer issues within and outside CUNY. For example, it was around this time that the central Office of Institutional Research and Assessment completed the rigorous new analyses (described in the introduction) showing that, all else being equal, CUNY transfer students were less likely to graduate than were students who never transferred (so-­called native students). Further, although for both types of students, as had been found before, the probability of eventually graduating increased in proportion to the number of credits accumulated, the rate of that increase was almost twice as much for native as for transfer students.10 This was evidence that CUNY transfer students were, on average, at a disadvantage in terms of how their accumulated credits contributed to their graduation rate. Another analysis that we completed around this time was of the percentages of general education sections at each college that were taught by full-­time faculty. The UFS leadership and other full-­time faculty were stating that the existing general education curricula were wonderful and important. Were such views evidenced by choices on the part of the full-­time faculty to teach those general education courses as opposed to their colleges’ upper-­level, more specialized (and usually lower-­enrollment) courses? As it turned out, our analysis showed that, at the CUNY senior colleges (colleges offering bachelor’s degrees), 38 percent of general education courses were being taught by full-­time faculty, but 53 percent of all other courses were being taught by full-­time faculty. The college with the lowest percentage of general education courses taught by full-­ time faculty was that of Professor Sandi Cooper (chair of the UFS), the College of Staten Island, where the values were 25 percent for general education courses and 61 percent for all other courses.11

Sandi’s Views and Communications Though a major Pathways focus in February had to do with concerns being expressed by members of Baruch College, this didn’t mean that the UFS Chair, Sandi, was out of the Pathways picture. To the contrary, in February alone she and I discussed Pathways at four separate meetings (one of these meetings included each college’s faculty governance leader). Among her comments during these meetings and in emails, she stated that the transfer problems were

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caused by (a) inadequate advising, including inadequacies in the information available on college websites and in college bulletins (I agreed that advising was inadequate, but thought that significant advising improvement would be prohibitively expensive and wouldn’t solve all the transfer problems); (b) AAS students trying to transfer to bachelor’s-­degree programs (the AAS is a professionally oriented degree that at that time typically included few general education courses that senior colleges would recognize as such, but abolishing AAS degrees was not possible and also would not solve the transfer problems of the AS-­and AA-­degree students); (c) the community colleges not having good-­quality general education courses (her February 17 email to me stated that “there are faculty in the senior colleges . . . with disdain for [community college courses]”; on hearing this argument, I always wondered whether the senior colleges’ general education courses had uniformly good quality, particularly given that many of these courses were taught by a rotating group of part-­ time faculty); and (d) insufficient numbers of articulation agreements. Fixing those things, Sandi thought, would take care of most transfer problems without our having to take such actions as changing general education requirements. Regarding specific aspects of the draft resolution, she thought that a requirement of 42 credits of general education for bachelor’s-­degree students was too low, and that basing general education requirements on learning outcomes was problematic—­general education requirements should be based on inputs instead (e.g., numbers of hours of particular courses taken). In the March 15 UFS Plenary minutes she explained this latter view, stating: Tax payers want to know what they are spending their money on, and whether it’s useful. Tax payers don’t seem to be impressed by our grading policies, and our GPAs, and the usual things that we consider important in assessing student learning. Then there is just a movement in the US at the moment to measure everything by some kind of numerical outcome. . . . Middle States [CUNY’s major accreditor] has taken up this mantra, and everybody has some experience of the trickle down effect of having to put little boxes on their syllabi with outcomes and so forth. It’s a national disorder. The central administration seems to think they have got to demonstrate that our graduates are literate, and capable, and critical.12

Sandi finally seemed to be taking some specific steps to find solutions to the transfer problem, albeit insufficient ones. That February she met with CUNY’s Chief Information Officer, Brian Cohen, and CUNY’s Chief Operating Officer, Allan Dobrin. All of them told me that she spoke with them about developing

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a computer program that would allow undergraduates to check the course requirements at each senior college and thereby acquire the information necessary to determine what they needed to take in order to transfer successfully to another college. CUNY’s TIPPS software was already supposed to do something like this, but Sandi again expressed her view that TIPPS didn’t function well enough, and she wanted a new method. That month there was also a panel discussion of Pathways at the senate Plenary, chaired by Sandi, but members of the central office were not invited to participate. On March 14 she emailed all the department chairs across CUNY: “On March 18 I have pulled together a meeting of representatives from each undergraduate college, requesting that these faculty be people interested in general education. The purpose is to create a launching pad for a rational response to the proposal from the Office of Academic Affairs—­which essentially cuts or raises general education to 36 credits (a bit of leeway to 42 cr) and avoids choosing which disciplines fall away but talks about critical outcomes.” This email amazed me. It had been six weeks since we had released the draft resolution, we had been telling Sandi what was going to be in that resolution for the past three months, and we had been talking more generally about doing something to improve transfer for years before that—­and Sandi was now talking about having an initial meeting of faculty “to create a launching pad” for the purpose of generating a “response.” Time and again, as we took a step, or reached out, and the UFS responded many weeks or months later, I was reminded of the definition of the word “hysteresis” that I first learned in graduate school. The definition comes from physics, where it is used to mean “the lag in response exhibited by a body in reacting to changes in the forces . . . affecting it,”13 and I was taught to use it to describe behavior that lagged behind changes in the environment. Describing Sandi’s behavior by a technical term helped temper my frustration with that behavior. During that semester, as I read Sandi’s many very negative written comments on Pathways, I continued to think that parts of them were clever. I was also amused when I saw at the bottom of each email (placed there by her college’s email system): “Change is in the Air,” a reference to the coming tobacco-­ free status of all colleges, thanks to the board’s approving the recommendations of the committee I had spearheaded at the beginning of that year. But her written comments also included content that I would not have believed that a faculty leader would write had I not seen it for myself, content that sent my emotions in all directions. Some examples:

92  ■  Chapter 4 • February 28 Sandi email to UFS Faculty Governance Leaders listserv: “You will see either 1) we are going to lose this battle no matter how reasonable we are 2) YOU have a tough job ahead on your campus 3) I make one last ditch effort to reach the two top folks (who are now invoking the Board’s right to set academic policies) before we declare non compliance of some sort 4) We cave” (The part on possible noncompliance particularly concerned me; there would be little we could do in such a situation.) • February 28 email from Sandi to me and Matt: “By referring to the right of the Trustees to make academic policy, you essentially invite faculty to lose all self respect and our last shred of authority—­that of deciding curriculum. Honestly, it reads like a threat, the kind of thing that Rick Schaffer [Frederick Schaffer, general counsel and senior vice chancellor for legal affairs] does to intimiate us. . . . What is the point of us doing anything. In 6 weeks of discussion, the faculty have not made a dent in your pre determined thinking. . . . Why am I wasting my time? If it is your desire that I resign, believe me it is bloody close to mine.” (Would she really resign? What would be the consequences of that?) • March 4 Sandi email to me and Matt: “A task force [to decide the general education learning outcomes] where [the UFS’s] participation will have next to no impact because it will be picked by agreeable administrators. I do NOT consider this shared governance. . . . It is not clear to me why we are having any conversations.” (Her implication seemed to be that shared governance does not exist if the faculty do not get what they want.) • April 15 Sandi email to me, Matt, Julia, and the UFS Executive Committee: “YOU PERSIST in repeating your original proposals and ignore the suggestions which we have come up with. . . . What is the point of our continuing to come up with suggestions? . . . I take this seriously and do not plan to be toyed with—­and listen to you or Matt tell the Board, in June, how we were ‘consulted’ So far we are ignored. . . . To quote someone else, I was not born yesterday.” (The onset of Sandi’s use of all capitals for some words seemed to evidence an increasingly antagonistic tone.) • April 16 Sandi email to me, Julia, and the UFS Executive Committee: “IT IS CLEAR TO ME THAT YOU AND 80th STREET DO NOT REALIZE THE DEPTH OF ANGER THAT IS BREWING AMONG THE FACULTY I AM BEING ASKED TO PRESENT VOTES OF NO CONFIDENCE.  .  .  . HOW MUCH MORE INPUT TO YOU NEED. . . . I AM AFRAID THAT THE REPORT ON TRANSFER AND GEN ED, DESPITE YOUR INSISTENCE ON ITS VALIDITY, HAS CONVINCED ONLY THOSE ALREADY IN CHURCH.”

The True Colors of Spring 2011  ■ 93 (As a behavioral psychologist, I could not help but think of “extinction effects” when I read this email. If, in the past, an animal’s responding has been regularly followed by a reward, but then the rewards cease, the animal’s behavior can become more intense and varied (extinction effects).14 It is thought that these behavioral changes are adaptive, in that they make it more likely that one of the animal’s behaviors will again result in the reward’s delivery. If the reward recurs, then the more variable and intense behavior will increase in the future. I was determined not to have that happen with Sandi and Pathways.) • April 20 Sandi quote in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “If we’re talking about a student population that has poor preparation in high school, what’s the advantage of speed? They’re going to graduate and compete with kids who have real degrees that are highly regarded, and what’s going to happen to them in an economy where job opportunities are shriveling? I consider it fraud.”15 (From what I knew of the data, new CUNY students weren’t any more poorly prepared than the students at any other urban public university, there were poorly prepared students at every university, and I felt that four years of 120 credits, including 36–­42 general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree students, should be plenty to provide a college education—­if the courses were done well.) • May 18 Sandi email to me and Matt: “It turns out to be very clever to put this off till the end of June when faculty are on annual leave . . . whether intentional or not.” (I wondered myself whether that was part of the reason that Matt had wanted to wait until June to have the board vote on Pathways, but we never discussed it.) • May 19 Sandi email to me and Matt: “Sorry I have been manipulated and misled (street talk, LIED TO) We were promised the resolution would change from the early version. It is substantially the same. . . . I have wasted endless hours of my time and that of colleagues.” (I thought it had changed a lot and I strongly believed that I had never lied to Sandi.) • May 20 Sandi email to UFS News listserv: “As you can see, the time many of us invested in making a reasonable counter offer could have been better spent in a tanning parlor.”

Communications with Others In addition to our interactions with Sandi and Baruch people, Julia and I were having much communication with college members who were at best concerned, and sometimes quite upset, about Pathways. We made many trips

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to colleges to speak with whatever faculty group had invited us—­groups at Borough of Manhattan Community College, Brooklyn College, City College, College of Staten Island, Hunter College, John Jay College, Lehman College, Queens College, Queensborough Community College, and York College. Most of these meetings involved long drives—­long in time, if not in mileage. The CUNY colleges may all be in the same city, but getting from one to another can take hours. Julia and I also spoke with CUNY-­wide faculty groups, which rarely involved any travel, except perhaps to the centrally located Graduate Center. These groups included the Mathematics Discipline Council (all of the mathematics department chairs), the Science Discipline Council, the World Languages Council, the Community College Caucus of the UFS, and Sandi’s new General Education Committee, which first met that March. During the City College visit we met with a couple of faculty groups. The last meeting occurred in a large room with many faculty and City College administrators present. As I already knew, some of these faculty had negative views about the project. However, at the start of the meeting, the President, Lisa Coico (see chapter 1 for some information about her background), stood up and told the entire audience, with no qualifications, that Pathways would be good for students, and students should come first. I believe that her statement helped temper subsequent negative faculty statements at the meeting. Each of these meetings was different. At the meeting with the World Languages Council, the faculty could not have been more welcoming, though they all realized that their traditional courses were likely to lose a guaranteed place in the general education requirements if the total number of general education credits were decreased. Generally speaking, language courses, as judged by faculty other than the language faculty themselves, are a lower priority than the courses of many other disciplines. This is particularly true at CUNY because the first language of 45 percent of the students is not English16—­many people believe that non-­English language courses are less of a necessity at CUNY than at other colleges where more students’ first language is English. The language faculty, Julia, and I had a good discussion. We suggested to these faculty that they think about devising courses other than standard language instruction courses, courses that included aspects of language study as well as other humanities and social science topics, and that would fit into various categories in the new general education framework. Toward the end of the meeting, I tried to explain why we had picked 42 credits as the maximum

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number of general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree students (see chapter 3). We also talked about how some language and other courses carry 4 credits. One faculty member then said that another positive attribute of picking 42 credits was that it was divisible by 4. I decided it was best just to agree with him, and no comments about his statement were made. The meeting with the Community College Caucus of the UFS had its own awkward moments. This group consisted of community college UFS representatives. The group’s Chair, Katherine Conway, a Borough of Manhattan Community College faculty member and a UFS Executive Committee member, had invited Julia and me to attend this meeting, held on May 10, 2011, late in the afternoon, in a room at the Graduate Center. I thought we had a good, productive discussion, and I felt there was some support for the Pathways Project in the room. After the meeting was already in process, Sandi came in. She sat in the back of the room facing me, without speaking, listening to everything with a frown on her face.

The Board of Trustees–­UFS Leadership Dinner The nadir of our interactions that spring with faculty concerning Pathways issues came on the night of March 24 at John Jay College. According to what I had heard in the central office, Sandi had learned that the Board of Trustees had an annual dinner with student governance leaders and had asked for the same sort of dinner for the faculty governance leaders. Matt and Benno Schmidt, CUNY Board of Trustees chair, had agreed. Similar to the dinners with the student leaders, this dinner’s invitees included, in addition to Sandi and members of the UFS Executive Committee, a few trustees, the chancellor (Matt), and all the vice chancellors. The chair of the USS, a voting member of the board, was unable to attend that evening. In his place he sent another student leader, the USS vice chair for senior colleges, an African American student from Medgar Evers College (a CUNY college in Brooklyn that is named after the murdered civil rights leader, and that falls under the federal classification of “Minority Institution”).17 As was standard at these events, everyone was seated at tables placed in one big square so that everyone could see everyone else. Attendees obtained their food from a buffet in the back of the room and took it to their seats. After people finished eating, the formal part of the meeting began.

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The central office had decided that the student representative would be allowed to make a statement—­he was technically serving as a board member at the event and so was entitled to say whatever he wished. As we had expected, the student’s statement was entirely about transfer and Pathways. He explained that he himself had transferred from a CUNY community college to Medgar Evers, and he spoke about the delays and costs that he had experienced with that transfer: These delays consumed my [New York State financial aid] funding, forced me to take [out] student loans to persist towards completion of my BA and ultimately, will cause me to graduate with an excess of unneeded credits, which I can’t really afford. While I believe deeply in the concept of the ‘CUNY Express’—­where a New Yorker can begin at a community college, transfer seamlessly to a senior college, and then move on to graduate school or a career—­because of all the stops and starts I experienced due to struggles with my transfer credits, I feel like I missed the ‘CUNY Express,’ and was forced to catch the local, which cost me time and money.

Then he described how his experience was not at all unusual: I’ve realized that I’m not alone in my experiences, and that the current system of transfer and articulation doesn’t seem to work well for any CUNY students. The students we represent tell us that the existing system of transfer and articulation is extraordinarily complicated, confusing, unpredictable and inconsistent. . . . the present transfer process is particularly unfair to students in the [AAS] programs, since Board policy offers more guarantees to transfer students with AA or AS degrees than to students with AAS degrees.

He also described some of the reasons for the transfer problems: We hear that progress in students’ major may be slowed because of faculty members’ individual—­and sometimes arbitrary—­assessments of the quality of other colleges’ courses. . . . students often report that the results of their transfer credit evaluations seem inconsistent with the articulation agreements expressed through the TIPPS system.

And he concluded with describing the USS’s efforts to address the transfer problems, and the USS’s wish to work together with others in this process: USS’ Steering Committee unanimously adopted a resolution comprised of recommendations that would make the transfer credit process more rational,

The True Colors of Spring 2011  ■ 97 seamless and certainly less painful for students. . . . we expect our USS Plenary to overwhelmingly adopt this resolution at its next meeting. . . . at CUNY . . . our greatness is rooted in the fact that [the] University as a whole is much greater than the sum of its parts. We understand that a truly integrated University provides much greater opportunities for its more than 260,000 students. It’s with this principle in mind that we ask you to partner with us to establish seamless transfer and articulation of courses as an elemental feature of a truly integrated CUNY.

I thought this statement was beautiful. It contained so many important points, told by someone who had experienced the transfer problems himself. And he had spoken so well. But some of the UFS leaders present had quite a different reaction. Three of them started asking the student questions that were extremely pointed or patronizing, speaking to him as if he could not possibly know what he was talking about. I heard a faculty member, whose words were slurred and loud, who did not usually speak that way, accuse the student of lying, saying that the USS had not voted to support Pathways. At least two people sitting near that faculty member later told me that they had directly observed the faculty member put an unopened bottle of wine under the faculty member’s jacket, and then take that bottle out of the room after the event was over. My immediate reaction was that the faculty had a right to disagree with the student, but not to speak to him in that manner—­they had no right to speak to anyone in that manner, at least not in their roles as CUNY faculty and UFS leaders. As they persisted with their unpleasant questioning, I worried that the student, whom I did not know well, would lash out at one of them, or give an answer that could be misinterpreted, behaviors that I was sure I would have exhibited if I had been treated as those faculty were treating that student. However, my worries were unfounded. The student stayed totally calm, cool, and collected. He refused to be baited, and he replied with excellent answers to every question. When the dinner finally ended, a lot of people—­faculty as well as trustees and vice chancellors—­looked shaken about what had happened. I went over to the student and told him what a fantastic job he had done. My emotions were brimming over, and among them was enormous anger at the faculty who had treated the student so badly. But I knew that they were only three faculty members out of many thousands at CUNY, and that the huge majority of the faculty would not have done what they had done. We just had to live with those

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particular faculty leaders. We would do the best we could. Certainly I was more determined than ever to implement Pathways. Two weeks later, on April 7, Sandi sent an email to Matt, me, and Jay Hershen­son, senior vice chancellor for media relations: “I have learned that the resolution which the student presented at the dinner which we had with the Trustees and Chancellor’s staff was a resolution BY THE UNIV STUDENT SENATE STEERING COMMITTEE. Their plenary does not meet until the coming Sunday . . . and were I not out of town, I might attend. The impression that this was a full blown statement from their whole group was misleading, to put it diplomatically. . . . I am planning to call the chair of the USS for a small meeting with him.” That the resolution had been passed by the USS Steering Committee, and had yet to be passed by the plenary, was exactly, precisely, what the student had said at the dinner.

Negative Communications from Outside CUNY That spring semester of 2011 saw a number of other concerning trends develop. For example, it was that semester that Pathways started getting (mostly) negative attention from outside CUNY. The first letter to arrive from an outside organization was from Phi Beta Kappa. We in the central office had had no contact with this organization about Pathways. With no warning, a letter dated April 22 arrived: We support the request of our . . . chapter leadership at Brooklyn College, City College, and Hunter College that these proposed changes be dropped. This centralization of control would substantially diminish the capacity of the constituent colleges in the CUNY system to define their students’ appropriate educational opportunities in the liberal arts and sciences. . . . we urge you to desist from such intrusions into [the faculty’s] professional prerogative and responsibility. . . . We are proud of our historic association with [CUNY colleges that have chapters of Phi Beta Kappa]. . . . Reluctantly, our governing body has moved toward acknowledging the necessity of periodically reviewing the offerings and emphases of sheltering institutions, in light of their consonance with Phi Beta Kappa’s advocacy of the liberal arts and sciences. Phi Beta Kappa is concerned that the proposals under consideration would weaken the City University of New York’s effectiveness in standing with Phi Beta Kappa as a champion of these studies.18

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Was the letter saying that if we didn’t stop Pathways, Phi Beta Kappa might stop having chapters at our colleges? Without even first finding out what we had to say about Pathways? As became our usual pattern, I prepared a response, which was reviewed by Jay and others as appropriate. In my response, I explained that, under Pathways, the faculty would have complete control over the curriculum (with the exception of the total number of credits), and that the university as a whole was extremely dedicated to the liberal arts and sciences. The text was positive and respectful of the faculty. We never received a reply, which was the typical outcome when we responded to these sorts of letters. We had unanswered questions: How was it that Phi Beta Kappa was contacted about Pathways in the first place? What had Phi Beta Kappa been told about the project? Over the next two years we were to receive similar letters from the Modern Language Association (MLA), the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, and the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), a faculty professional organization and the largest faculty labor union in the United States. The last of these, the AAUP, was particularly concerning. I will describe some of our subsequent interactions with the AAUP in later chapters.

Alternative Models Yes, all of the negative reactions were discouraging. We constantly worried about whether we were doing the right thing, and we argued about what the right thing was. That spring, Julia made a case to me for increasing the number of general education credits by just a few more. Her sole reason was that she thought it would quiet the faculty and thus facilitate our establishment of Pathways. I listened carefully to what she said, and I appreciated her concern for the faculty and for Pathways, but I asked myself, and her, would such a change be bad, neutral, or good for students? The answer (for me) was clear: it was bad—­42 credits was already above national norms, and more than one-­third of the credits for a bachelor’s degree. I believed strongly, as did Matt, that students should have ample room in their programs for their majors and for electives. In addition, I didn’t believe that making any concessions to the faculty would quiet them regarding future steps we were going to have to take to effect Pathways. Quite the opposite. I believed that all we would be teaching them was that if they complained, we would give in. So I maintained my support for 42 credits, and Matt agreed.

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Given Julia’s and my interactions on the total credits issue, it verged on amusing when, after Terry and Sandi kept arguing in an April 21 meeting with me and Julia, Terry turned to me and said, “Don’t you two ever argue?” “Yes,” I said, “but not in public.” Terry, similar to his college’s president and provost, wanted us to change the resolution to a 30 + 12 model (which would allow Baruch to keep its minor as is), but Sandi wanted the total credits to be changed from 42 to 46 (consistent with her view that the students needed a great deal of general education, and allowing more 4-­credit courses, which were typical—­ only—­at her college). Almost three months after the release of the draft resolution, and only about six weeks before a board committee would vote on a revised resolution, the two most prominent leaders of the faculty, the chair and the vice chair of the UFS, could not agree on what they wanted changed in the draft resolution. Our primary job in the central Office of Academic Affairs that spring was to collect as much information as possible, and to consider as many Pathways variations as possible, in order to generate the best possible revised resolution for the board to vote on in June. Toward that end, at the beginning of March, we started formal consultation on three different general education structures: (1) 36 + 6 credits (as in the original draft resolution), (2) 30 + 6 + 6 credits (30 general education credits for all colleges, 6 college-­specific general education credits for associate’s-­degree programs, and 12 college-­specific general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree programs, and (3) 30 + 12 (this was the model that Baruch supported). In a meeting to consider these three models, the chief academic officers of the community colleges told us that any more than 30 general education credits for associate’s-­degree programs would be excessive—­it would be too difficult to fit the credits for the associate’s-­degree majors and the general education requirements into the total of 60 credits allowed for an associate’s degree. That seemed to eliminate models 1 and 2, leaving us with model 3, the one that Baruch preferred. But there was a major problem with model 3 in that we believed strongly that it was harmful to students to have to earn 12 credits of general education after transferring from a completed associate’s degree to a bachelor’s-­degree program. It was then that Matt came up with the “step function.” Matt’s background is in applied mathematics and statistics, and so terms such as “step function” are second nature to him. In college I had chosen to take several advanced math courses, and as a faculty member I had taught statistics, so the term “step function” wasn’t alien to me either. Matt proposed that we adopt a basic 30 + 12

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model, but that the more credits a student had accumulated before transferring, the fewer general education credits that student would need to complete at the new college. So students who transferred to a bachelor’s program after having earned just a few credits, or who started in a bachelor’s program and never transferred, would have to earn the full 30 + 12 general education credits. In contrast, students who transferred to a bachelor’s program after having earned an AA or AS degree would need only 6 more general education credits (30 + 6). Students who were between these two extremes would have to complete 9 more general education credits in the bachelor’s-­degree program (30 + 9). The idea was that if students started in a bachelor’s-­degree program, they could earn many of their first 60 credits (out of 120 total) taking general education credits, and thus could reasonably fit more total general education credits into their programs. However, students who started in an associate’s (60-­credit) degree program, which required them to complete a major, and not just general education courses, by the end of that program, had much less opportunity to get general education courses under their belts during those initial 60 credits. We wanted bachelor’s-­degree students who began in associate’s-­degree programs, as well as native bachelor’s-­degree students, to have opportunities to focus on their major and electives with their last 60 credits. In addition, by implementing the step function, we enabled the senior colleges to require a total of 42 credits for many students, as they preferred. They could do so by admitting only new freshmen or transfer students with few college credits. Further, if a college, such as Baruch, wanted all of its bachelor’s-­ degree students to take at least 30 + 9 general education credits (so that the college could then require all of its students to do a 3-­course, 9-­credit, upper-­ level minor), it could do so by not accepting transfer students who had already earned an AA or AS degree. From the beginning we had said that Pathways would not constrain colleges setting their own admissions requirements. Finally, the step function gave community college students some incentive not to transfer until after they had received their associate’s degrees, something the community college presidents seemed to prefer and about which the other presidents seemed to be indifferent. From what we had heard, pre-­Pathways some community college students had transferred as early as possible in order to avoid earning credits that might not transfer. With Pathways they shouldn’t have to worry about that. The step function wasn’t a perfect solution. It complicated the general education requirements, making them different for different students, and we knew

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that any complications would make advising more inaccurate and would result in more incorrect choices by students. In addition, once we understood that the community college majors were often the reason that associate’s-­degree students had less room in their programs for general education credits as compared to bachelor’s-­degree students, we had to wonder about the wisdom of our community colleges having majors in the first place, at least for students intending to transfer to a bachelor’s-­degree program. Maybe, similar to Tom Hanks’s experience, community college students should spend their time primarily taking general education courses, and focus on a major once they transferred to a bachelor’s-­degree program: In 1974, I graduated from Skyline High School in Oakland, Calif., an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores. Allowed to send my results to three colleges, I chose M.I.T. and Villanova, knowing such fine schools would never accept a student like me. . . . I sent my final set of stats to Chabot, a community college in nearby Hayward, Calif., which, because it accepted everyone and was free, would be my alma mater. . . . We could get our general education requirements out of the way at Chabot—­credits we could transfer to a university—­which made those two years an invaluable head start. I was able to go on to the State University in Sacramento (at $95 a semester, just barely affordable) and study no other subject but my major, theater arts.19

But taking on the entire major structure of the CUNY community colleges seemed like too much of a battle on top of instituting Pathways. Overall, the step function, although not ideal, seemed to solve more problems than it created. While we considered the different possible structures that spring, some members of the UFS were making their own proposals about what should be done to improve transfer. As indicated before, Sandi thought that better use of technology and advising would solve the problems. But where the money would be found for sufficient advisers to improve advising for CUNY’s 240,000 undergraduates, or why this new software would succeed when TIPPS, though specifically designed for this purpose, had failed, she did not say. After Matt had lunch with a member of the UFS Executive Committee, that faculty member sent Matt the faculty member’s own proposal for how to fix the transfer problems. First, Discipline Councils (committees of department chairs in a particular discipline) would recommend which community college arts and sciences courses should be considered as worthy of transfer for senior college credit. Then a committee would be established with one faculty member

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from each college, and that committee would review all the courses recommended by the Discipline Councils, with the committee’s recommendations then being certified by the central Office of Academic Affairs. Ad hoc committees would be created for any courses not falling into the areas covered by any of the Discipline Councils. There were many problems with this proposal. To begin with, it covered only community-­to-­senior-­college transfer, but close to half of the transfer students didn’t follow this pattern; students transferred in all possible directions among the CUNY colleges. Second, this proposal covered only arts and sciences courses—­no courses in popular disciplines such as business, nursing, or engineering. Third, only a few Discipline Councils were actively functioning, and one could argue that there were dozens of arts and sciences disciplines. To make matters even more complicated, some courses would be difficult to classify as belonging to one discipline or another. Further, setting up and maintaining all the needed committees would be a bureaucratic horror. Fourth, there are thousands of arts and sciences courses at the community colleges. Reviewing even those would be extremely time-­consuming and would involve yet more bureaucracy. Fifth and perhaps most problematic, this plan specified only whether credit would be given. But what kind of credit? General education, major, or elective? And in replacement of what courses or in satisfaction of what requirements at the new college? Just to be given elective credit didn’t do transfer students a whole lot of good. This plan didn’t seem workable at all. Later in March, another member of the UFS Executive Committee sent us yet another alternative proposal. This proposal had many elements in common with the one from the other faculty member, and thus many of the same problems, but it further specified that the Discipline Councils would determine which courses at which colleges were equivalent. With that provision, we were back to the matching principle identified in Julia’s transfer paper of the ­previous fall—­course credit would transfer only if there was an equivalent course at the new college. Although what this second professor proposed might result in fairer matching judgments than the current procedure, in which sometimes a single professor made those judgments, this proposal could not deal with cases in which, say, a student took geology to satisfy a natural sciences general education requirement at one college and then transferred to another college that didn’t offer geology. Julia and I met with the second professor to discuss the professor’s proposal, along with the chief academic officer of the professor’s college. Julia and

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I thought that we all had a cordial and productive conversation. The professor subsequently emailed all the faculty at that professor’s college saying, in part, that Pathways “should be [seen] for what [it is]: a package of changes intended to remove the faculty from being obstacles to the reformulation of the curricula and removal of ‘killer courses’ and whatever else the Chancellry perceives as being ‘obstacles’ of student progress to graduation.” The professor went on to say that the Pathways proposals would result in a “diminishment of General Education” (in terms of the number of credits, that was true), “an ending to the importance of Mathematics and Science,” “a reduction in the size of the concentrations and majors,” “expansion of electives (lower level courses) acceding to student desire for less academically challenging and demanding courses,” “support for indiscriminant and incoherent selection of courses by students,” “a decrease in multi cultural awareness through a diminishment in the importance of Foreign Language Study,” and “the ending of academic rigor as established by academicians, the faculty.” We hadn’t said anything (and wouldn’t) about what level electives should be or which disciplines would or would not be part of general education (faculty would choose). Moreover, the resolution didn’t (and wouldn’t) address anything about the sizes of concentrations or majors (again, faculty would choose), and we were proposing to add an extra level of CUNY-­wide faculty scrutiny of the general education courses (without subtracting any college-­level faculty scrutiny and without adding any nonfaculty scrutiny). For all these reasons, I didn’t see how the professor’s criticisms made contact with the actual content of the draft resolution. A summary comment that this professor made in the email sent after our meeting was this: “CUNY to become CSHNY: City Super High School of New York.”

Resolutions, a Petition, and the Outside Media It did not seem that the UFS was going to put forth any viable alternatives to our draft resolution. In the meantime, beginning in early March, there was another development: faculty (and sometimes student) negative resolutions began. And they continued right up to the June board meeting (and beyond). That spring, leading up to the board meeting, negative resolutions were passed by the UFS, individual college senates (ultimately, by eleven of the nineteen undergraduate colleges), about half of the active Discipline Councils, and a few departments and a few small student groups.20

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There were no consistent views or demands in these resolutions except that none of them liked the draft resolution. Of the college faculty senate resolutions, the majority said that there should be more study of the transfer situation before any policy changes were made. (What I thought such statements were actually saying was this: Why should there be any urgency to solve something that, though a horrific problem, has been a problem since before anyone at CUNY could remember? If over a million CUNY students had graduated despite such problems, so could many thousands more while the university studied the problem and its solutions ad infinitum.) A couple of the faculty resolutions supported changing the general education requirements to 30 + (at least) 16 credits (without any step function). Some stated that if any university-­wide faculty committees were to be set up, the faculty should not be appointed by the central administration, but should be elected or nominated by the faculty. Several supported the improvement of transfer by better advising and use of technology. Several stated that each college should have total control over its own curriculum. Several wanted all comments submitted to the Pathways website to be made public. (We couldn’t do that because we had promised people who had submitted comments that their comments would be confidential.) One resolution (by the Queensborough Community College faculty) stated only that it opposed any link being made between transfer and general education. As more evidence of lack of unanimity among the faculty, Hunter College’s faculty resolution included the statement that “an effective CUNY transfer policy can and should  .  .  . be cognizant of national initiatives such as the AAC&U’s LEAP.”21 In contrast, on May 19 Sandi wrote to me and Matt that “every effort we made to negotiate a settlement that RESPECTED faculty has been ridiculed by the language of the proposal For your next step, I assume you will hand pick the faculty who agree with the educational gobblygook about ‘outcomes’ (or whatever the LEAP folks chant at their summer camp meetings) and vitiate the education of our weakly prepared students even further.” Also particularly interesting was the part of John Jay College’s resolution stating that “for externally accredited programs (e.g., Nursing, Engineering) and other high-­credit majors, clear cut University-­wide course requirements be developed to ensure student success in the transfer process.” To me, that sounded like the part of our proposal regarding transfer of major credits. Among all the senior colleges, John Jay had the best reputation for accepting

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transfer students’ credits, and, under the leadership of President Jeremy Travis, they had recently done an excellent job of establishing the Justice Academy, a program in which students interested in majors such as criminal justice were admitted both to a community college and to John Jay, completing the first two years of their coursework at the community college. This program required close collaboration between the John Jay and the community college faculty, and both sets of faculty had done an outstanding job with this. Each resolution that passed was an opportunity for Sandi to communicate with the faculty concerning the latest negative statement about Pathways, and she sent out negative email after negative email. By midspring she was also writing regularly to the trustees. Procedure required that she send her letters first to Jay, who would then send them on to the trustees. By the beginning of April she had already sent four such letters. Each time she did so, Jay would ask me to prepare a letter to go with hers to the trustees, and because he couldn’t wait long to transmit Sandi’s letters, I had to write quickly. From the beginning of the Pathways Project, we adopted the strategy of not directly addressing what Sandi had said—­not attacking her—­but simply stating the facts about Pathways. As it turned out, because Sandi, as chair of the UFS, was a member of the board, on these occasions she received a copy of her own letter, and of mine, from Jay. Sandi was not the only faculty member to write directly to the trustees about Pathways, but she was by many orders of magnitude the one to do so most frequently. On April 13 Sandi emailed me that the UFS had passed two resolutions that were concerned with different aspects of the Pathways Project. One of the resolutions recommended that the number of general education credits be changed to 30 + (at least) 16 (with no step function), and the other was similar to the resolution that John Jay College had passed. The latter UFS resolution contained eight general recommendations such as that “curricular counseling for students be extensively improved,” and also recommended “funding to support periodic meetings of Discipline Councils which would work to create a mutual understanding of course content and outcomes in their areas to facilitate the transfer process.”22 As I have mentioned, I thought that all these recommendations had major flaws as credit-­transfer solutions. Also, it seemed to me that the first resolution accepted our basic proposal for transfer policies with a change in the number of general education credits, but the second resolution advocated facilitating transfer in alternative ways. The two resolutions thus seemed inconsistent with each other. So I wasn’t

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sure what all of this meant except that the UFS was not happy with the current draft Pathways resolution—­the one the central office was working on in preparation for a board vote. A few days later I learned that an anti-­Pathways petition (the first of several, as it turned out) was under way. It was posted online and anyone could “sign.” Since it was not required that names be made public, it was possible for people to “sign” more than once, and it was difficult to tell which of the “signatures” were from current CUNY members. Some were apparently not current members of CUNY—­signers were listed as living in, for example, Michigan or California. In addition, this petition combined concerns about Pathways with concerns about the CUNY Bylaws changes that Frederick Schaffer, senior vice chancellor and general counsel, was working on (related to, e.g., “Academic Due Process” and “Organization and Duties of the Faculty”),23 so it was not possible to determine whether someone’s objections were to the proposed bylaws changes, our draft Pathways resolution, or both. By the time of the June board meeting, this petition had just over a thousand “signatures.” Despite the lack of verification of these “signatures,” a Brooklyn College faculty member emailed information about the petition to Jay to send to the trustees, stating that “the attached petition . . . has been signed by over 1,000 concerned students, faculty, alumni, and other members of CUNY’s community.” One day after I heard about the petition, I learned that Sandi was speaking with an Inside Higher Ed reporter about the UFS resolutions, that several faculty had contacted the Chronicle of Higher Education about the same subject, and that reporters from both news organizations now wanted to speak with the CUNY central administration to get their views on these matters. On April 20 and 21, stories appeared in both the Chronicle of Higher Education24 and Inside Higher Ed25 about CUNY’s Pathways controversy. The Chronicle of Higher Education’s was titled “CUNY Faculty Fear Course-­Transfer Proposal Could Jeopardize Its Say on Curricula,” and Inside Higher Ed’s was titled “Who Decides on Transfer Credit?” The last paragraph of the Chronicle article stated: “ ‘We are one university,’ Ms. Logue said, ‘We want students to be able to transfer seamlessly and without loss of credit. At the same time, we very much want faculty to set the standards and maintain the standards and increase the standards of all of our coursework. So we’re trying to set a balance.’ ” These two stories were to be the first of dozens to appear in various news outlets over the next few years as Pathways was being effected.

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Revisions and Last-­Minute Concerns All the negative comments made us examine and reexamine and reexamine again every aspect of the draft Pathways resolution26 for the CUNY Board of Trustees. And we revised it in many ways. After a great many drafts, the major changes from the original draft were these: (1) The common core was set at 30 credits instead of 36, as the community colleges wanted, and bachelor’s-­degree programs could have up to 12 extra general education credits (as some senior colleges wanted), but fewer if a student entered a bachelor’s-­degree program with many prior credits—­the step function (as some senior colleges did not want); (2) Given our new knowledge of what had been going on at Baruch (and perhaps at some other senior colleges that had instituted “graduation requirements” on top of their general education requirements), we inserted a statement that any course required of all students constituted general education, no matter what it was called, and that all general education had to fall within the Pathways framework; (3) To help protect students who transferred to a CUNY college from outside CUNY, we added a statement that the courses they had taken at their original college were to be judged for transfer according to learning outcomes, not strict equivalency; (4) We modified the schedule for effecting Pathways; (5) We added a central appeals mechanism for students who weren’t satisfied with the results of their appeals at their home colleges; (6) We added a statement that “all possible technological assistance be brought to bear” on effecting Pathways to ensure that technical assistance for the project from the central office would have high priority; and (7) We added a provision for regular review of all Pathways policies and processes.27

It may be that some members of the central office took these resolutions, and the petition, and the media coverage, in stride, as par for the course, but I agonized at each new negative revelation. I did not understand how the faculty could not understand that what we were doing was needed for the students, and I did not understand how the faculty could feel that we were attacking them. Or, to be more accurate, I could understand how the faculty would feel

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that we were attacking them, especially given some of the inaccurate information that was being spread about Pathways, but I did not understand how they could fail to see that we were trying to accommodate their needs and desires as much as possible. I had continued that spring to do whatever I could to help faculty, such as instituting multiple new five-­thousand-­dollar prizes for faculty excellence in teaching undergraduate mathematics, and I knew that the UFS approved of at least some of these actions. For example, Sandi had attended a ceremony I arranged with the law school to give an honorary degree to antiapartheid South African musician Johnny Clegg, and she had also reported to the faculty the change that I had effected in getting all CUNY performance data made public, giving faculty access to these data for the first time. Clark Kerr, quoting F. M. Cornford, describes the state of mind of many university administrators who are promoting change in their institutions, a description that captures well the extent of my own self-­awareness at this time, and of its consequences: “You think (do you not?) that you have only to state a reasonable case, and people must listen to reason and act upon it at once. It is just this conviction that makes you so unpleasant.”28 Despite my conviction that our cause was just and right, I worried, and worried, and worried that as the resolutions piled up, the political will to do what was best for the students would evaporate. Perhaps there would be more senior administrators who, similar to Julia, would want to assuage faculty feelings. Perhaps the project would even be stopped. We continued to communicate accurate information about the project at every opportunity, particularly information that contradicted the false, negative statements that were being made. We distributed the facts in every possible way. We even held a webinar for all CUNY members on May 6, something we had never done before and a technical challenge for my office. The webinar included some speakers from other states, and the dean of the CUNY-­wide Macaulay Honors College (Ann Kirschner) did a beautiful job of moderating both the webinar itself and the question-­and-­answer period for participants.

Support Given the content of this chapter so far, it may sound as if all the feedback on the Pathways resolution was negative. Far from it. The Inside Higher Ed story reported that the opposition came more from the senior college faculty than

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from the community college faculty. In March Jay and I started meeting with trustees individually to explain to them what was going on, and they were 100 percent supportive. As described in chapter 1, some of them, CUNY alumni, had had their own negative experiences with credit transfer at CUNY, and all were particularly attuned to the needs of CUNY students. Further, the more difficult things got, the more determined the Chancellery (as the chancellor and vice chancellors were known), the university deans, and my office seemed to become. The huge majority of the presidents, college chief academic officers, and college vice presidents were also extremely enthusiastic. As were the transfer advisers, as mentioned in an earlier chapter. But it was still deeply upsetting to think that a lot of faculty were opposed. The faculty was the group to which I felt closest; I considered myself to be one of them. In thinking about the resolutions, I tried to keep in mind that there were many colleges that had not passed resolutions against Pathways. The only problem was, that number seemed to be shrinking every day. There were also messages of support from outside CUNY, most notably from administrators at SUNY and the University of Massachusetts. They had heard about the controversy from the media, and they wanted me to know that they had been through similar trouble and that we were doing the right thing. A philosophy professor involved in credit transfer at the University System of Georgia, after whose transfer policies much of Pathways was modeled, praised the Georgia transfer policies in a May 20 New York Times story about Pathways. According to this article, the professor felt that “most striking . . . is the fact that the changes have helped close a wide gap in the graduation rates of black and white students. A convoluted system is trickier for low-­income students, who may not have friends and relatives to advise them on the best sequence of courses. ‘I think the current lack of a unified system at CUNY really does have a differential impact on students from disadvantaged backgrounds,’ he said.”29 Such comments helped me to preserve a professional demeanor when I saw one of Sandi’s letters to the trustees sent at the exact same time. It began: “I am enclosing a copy of a piece, partly humorous and mainly tragic, which is self-­ explanatory and is one of the main reasons why faculty in CUNY are passionate about preserving general education and not dumbing down the curriculum. Our students are not prepared for Harvard or the public Ivies. They have a lot of catch-­up to do.” Attached was a 1983 article titled “College Kids say the Darnedest Things: Mrs. Malaprop is alive and well in today’s history classes.” I failed to see the humor or the relevance. In my view, her sending this article insulted our students.

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I also tried to take some comfort in the results of the analysis we did of the comments submitted about Pathways to the Pathways website.30 We received comments from a total of 543 people. Faculty (196) and students (252) were the most frequent respondents. Overall, approximately 60 percent of respondents were positive about the draft resolution for the board, 34 percent were specifically concerned about what would happen concerning the requirements for languages other than English, 4 percent provided “other” comments, and 3 percent were negative about the draft resolution. However, these different types of responses were not randomly distributed among the categories of respondents. Of the 196 faculty, 167 (85 percent) wrote in about the language requirements, 16 (8 percent) had other concerns or were negative about the draft resolution, and 10 (5 percent) were supportive of the draft resolution. A senior college education faculty member wrote: “I’m delighted to see this happening. For too long our graduation rates have been abysmal, especially at the undergraduate level, and getting the transfer polices and alignments in order will be a large structural change moving us in the right direction.” A retired faculty member sent in the following: I, like all CUNY faculty, have been a beneficiary of Professor Cooper’s guardianship of academic freedom and integrity. Nevertheless, her perspective on Gen Ed reform and the draft resolution on the transfer question as proposed by the university saddens me. . . . I have been hearing the same arguments against change in university/college transfer policy and Gen Ed crediting for 37 years. . . . The general practice in colleges at this university has been to protect the course offerings of local departments in General Education programs by refusing to cooperate in the spirit, and sometimes in defiance of the letter, of articulation agreements between senior and community colleges and of university policies . . . [the] old, existing system so willfully ignores the inherent, structural problems that system presents to students in order to serve not an intellectual purpose but an economic one. . . . We do not fool anyone by denying the economic basis of the opposition to this change. Jobs, it is assumed, depend upon being able to count on x numbers of bodies in x numbers of sections. That may well be the case, but resistance to change is not the answer.

It was very reassuring to me to see that there were a few faculty, at least, who seemed to understand the issues, who prioritized students first, and who had taken the time to submit their comments on the Pathways website. This same retired faculty member also related how he had once given a tour of CUNY to the chancellor of the University of Arkansas, including in the tour

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an explanation of how transfer worked (or didn’t) at CUNY. According to this retired faculty member, the Arkansas chancellor then asked: “What do you do about the lawsuits? . . . Even in Arkansas we couldn’t get away with a transfer policy that forces students to redo course work simply because they changed colleges within the university. We’re hicks but we ain’t stupid.” The retired faculty member’s comment on this incident was: “And that, of course, is what has been missing all these years. A lawsuit might have settled this matter long ago. Before one emerges, we ought to go forward with reform.” These comments made me smile, which not much did around that time, and reminded me that, when you stepped out from the middle of the CUNY pre-­Pathways transfer practices, you could see that they were exceedingly problematic. Nevertheless, despite all of these supportive comments, I was frankly shocked that, with the exception of faculty concerned about the teaching of language, only 26 faculty members had taken the time to submit comments (though they obviously had plenty of time to write and pass resolutions). Among the student respondents, 230 (91.3 percent) were supportive of the draft resolution, and only 1 (0.004 percent) was negative. That brings us to the students: the group for which we were doing all of this. How were they reacting to what was going on? I could not have been more impressed by them, and in the end, that was what kept me going. In addition to the student who spoke at the dinner of the trustees with the UFS leadership, during that semester I had gotten to know many of CUNY’s student leaders. One of the unfortunate aspects of working in the CUNY central office is that there are almost never any students there, and I missed interacting with them. However, in addition to more informal encounters with students, that spring I had two scheduled meetings with the student leadership of the different colleges to discuss Pathways, one meeting for student leaders from the senior colleges and one meeting for student leaders from the community colleges. From these meetings and from comments submitted to the Pathways website, I was able to get a pretty good idea, I thought, of the students’ views about transfer. A Hostos Community College student submitted a comment on the website that, for me, crystallized the overarching principle for Pathways: “Education should have no borders.” The student leaders were, almost without exception, supportive of Pathways, although their reasons differed. For many, such as the student at the trustees-­ UFS leadership dinner, it was simply the prospect of being able to undertake a typical transfer from one college to another without losing credits. The support

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of the CCSD was beautifully characterized by a website comment submitted by a CCSD leader: The transfer resolution . . . addresses a concern that has been affecting students with disabilities negatively for a while. . . . the New York State Commission for the Blind and . . . VESID [Vocational and Educational Services for Individuals with Disabilities]  .  .  . do not pay for classes that were already taking in a two year school. Once students transfer to a four year school . . . this is a big problem because they do not have the money to pay for these classes and their only choice is to drop out of school. If this resolution is approved it will benefit students with disabilities that have the dream of pursuing an education and want to be the leaders of tomorrow. All they need is an opportunity, and this resolution will do it.

I believe that CCSD was the first student group to pass a resolution in favor of Pathways, and CCSD was to remain a stalwart supporter of Pathways throughout the entire implementation period, even working with other students to produce a video that promoted Pathways.31 I also communicated with several leaders from the CUNY student LGBT community, who I learned were also strong supporters of Pathways. I did not understand why until the president of one of the LGBT organizations explained it to me. CUNY is primarily a commuter university and many students live at home. LGBT students often first tell their families about their sexual orientation while in college. When such disclosures result in discord between students and their families, commuter students sometimes have to leave home and find a new place to live. And that often necessitates transfer. This student leader told me that about 95 percent of the members of her organization had transferred from one CUNY college to another. Add to all this the following facts: 58 percent of CUNY students receive federal financial aid in the form of Pell grants (meaning that their families have very limited financial resources); 58 percent are members of underrepresented groups; 42 percent are members of the first generation in their families to attend college; and 45 percent have a first language other than English.32 Clearly CUNY transfer students had many challenges to overcome even without transfer itself being difficult. As I listened to these students, I became even more determined to do whatever I could for them. Anything we could do to smooth their paths would be well worth any difficulties that we would experience. Their lives were far more

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challenging than anything most of us—­the CUNY administrators, faculty, and staff—­had ever faced. On Sunday, May 1, after close to twenty smaller student groups had passed resolutions supportive of Pathways, the USS plenary passed a resolution strongly in favor. Freddie and one of the remarkable staff members from the central Office of Student Affairs, Charmaine Worthy, who were both present at that Sunday meeting, immediately emailed me to let me know. I had just finished the New York City five-­borough bike ride, and I rejoiced at what Pathways was going to do for the people of this most wonderful of cities. On May 20, I departed from JFK airport for a long-­awaited trip to see the mountain gorillas of Rwanda. I was scheduled to return a few days before the Board of Trustees CAPPR meeting, the meeting at which the first formal vote on the Pathways resolution would take place.

CHAPTER 5

Models of Governance in June 2011 ■■■■■

RWANDA, A CAPPR MEETING, AND A PUBLIC HEARING

Not everything is improved by making it more democratic.1 (Henry Rosovsky, former dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University)2

Rwanda Green grasses. Green bushes. Green leaves. The color sparkled with the morning dew. No matter where I looked as I took step after step up the steep, slippery mountainside, all was green. There was no path. The lead porter made only a narrow dent in the dense undergrowth with his machete. One porter had insisted on carrying everything for me, even my jacket. Despite the chill air, I was sweating and didn’t need the jacket. And every time we came to a particularly difficult incline, a firm brown hand reached back to my very pale one and gave me a pull, just enough to get me up and over the latest tough spot. In addition to my husband, Ian Shrank, and several other tourists, our group consisted of many porters, two expert guides, and a short, stocky, grim-­faced woman in army fatigues carrying an AK-­47. The younger, female guide was doing an internship as part of obtaining her bachelor’s degree in hospitality management at the local college, and the older, male guide had recently gone back to school for his bachelor’s. Both guides were happy to practice their English because Rwanda had recently made English the official language for schools and colleges. Both guides asked me repeatedly to encourage other people to visit Rwanda. I had asked the senior guide why we needed someone with us carrying an AK-­47. For the water buffalo, he said. I may be a New York City resident, but I knew that water buffalo don’t live on the sides of the vegetation-­covered

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mountains of Rwanda’s Volcanoes National Park. Later I found out that she was supposed to protect us from criminals who might cross the border from the nearby Democratic Republic of the Congo. All the porters were ex-­poachers. They made more money now taking tourists to see gorillas than they had as poachers. I wondered whether any of our porters had known Dian Fossey, who began the study of mountain gorillas in 1966. I had read her autobiography, Gorillas in the Mist, when I was an assistant professor. Soon we would see the descendants of the gorillas she had studied. We kept climbing and were now at about ten thousand feet. In addition to the difficulty of the terrain under my feet, I wasn’t used to the altitude, and though I breathed rapidly, my legs didn’t have enough oxygen for what they had to do. All I was thinking about was that I couldn’t go any further. “Just a little more,” I heard one of the guides say for at least the fifth time. The guides were talking to trackers on a radio. The trackers said that the gorilla group we were seeking was continuing to move, and so we had to keep climbing. Now the vegetation began to consist mostly of bamboo, one of the gorillas’ favorite foods. We pulled apart and then stepped through more branches, and there they were, eating the bamboo leaves and other vegetation, a silverback and five adult females, as well as many juveniles. One female carried two infants—­a rare set of twins. No one spoke. The only sounds were those of rustling leaves and camera clicks. The gorillas did not look at us. They sought only more choice leaves to eat. They passed within a few feet of us several times. Tourists visited this gorilla group every day, and to them we were just an inedible part of the forest—­ completely uninteresting. Our group was jubilant. All of us—­tourists, guides, porters, trackers, and the woman with the AK-­47—­had worked together to climb the mountain and see these magnificent animals. We came from the most varied backgrounds possible, but we were one team. This was the symbol of post-­genocide Rwanda: all sorts of people, even people with troubled pasts, working together to build an educated, financially strong Rwanda of today. That evening of May 31 was supposed to be a celebration of our seeing the gorillas, but I had a telephone call scheduled with Karen Kaplowitz, associate professor of English at John Jay College and a member of the Executive Committee of the UFS (UFS Exec). I knew Karen better than anyone else on the UFS Exec because she was the UFS’s representative to CAPPR, which is the Board of Trustees committee that I managed for the committee’s Chair, Trustee Wellington Chen. Karen had always been honest with me and was a caring person

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who put the needs of students first. I admired how she kept up with her many responsibilities. Karen had asked to speak with me about the information that I had first received in an email from my Associate University Provost, Julia Wrigley, six days earlier. Julia had learned from Chancellor Matthew Goldstein that, three days after I left New York, the UFS Exec had passed a resolution of no confidence in me and in my whole Office of Academic Affairs. Matt, she said, was furious, as were many trustees. The essence of the resolution was as follows: Resolution of No Confidence in Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Alexandra Logue and the Office of Academic Affairs of the City University of New York WHEREAS, the proposals by the Office of Academic Affairs of the City University of New York (CUNY) beginning in December 2010, which were embodied in successive versions of a Draft Resolution on Creating an Efficient Transfer System (which are collectively referred to as the Pathways Proposal), would have undermined educational quality and threatened the accreditation of many CUNY programs; WHEREAS, the University Faculty Senate (UFS) passed two resolutions on April 12, 2011, offering alternatives to improve the quality of general education and facilitate avenues of student transfer; WHEREAS, as of May 24, 2011, the Pathways Proposal has been challenged in statements passed by 46 CUNY faculty and student bodies, and in a letter by the national Phi Beta Kappa Society. . . . WHEREAS . . . the May Pathways Proposal . . . still does not adequately provide for student transfer in a way that safeguards the quality of general education at CUNY: THEREFORE, IT IS RESOLVED, that the University Faculty Senate votes no confidence in Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost Alexandra Logue and the Office of Academic Affairs of CUNY. Adopted by the University Faculty Senate Executive Committee, May 24, 20113

Votes of no confidence—­votes in which faculty declare that they have no confidence in the work of one or more administrators or trustees—­are feared by many senior administrators in higher education. Faculty technically report to the administrators and the trustees. However, because faculty are usually the longest-­lasting people at a college or university, have tenure, have academic

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freedom, are virtually never fired (only for the most egregious actions and only when there is ample documentation), and are frequently members of president and provost search committees, a faculty vote of no confidence can be a career death knell for an administrator. In the words of William G. Bowen (former president of Princeton University) and Eugene M. Tobin (former president of Hamilton College) in their 2015 book Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, Presidents remain dependent in almost all instances on faculty support. As our experienced colleague Lawrence Bacow [former president of Tufts University] likes to say, “No president ever truly wins a ‘no confidence’ vote.” Once doubts in the president’s leadership surface, his or her authority diminishes. The latent power of the faculty over even very strong presidents has long been recognized by astute leaders. . . . the opposition of even a few key faculty can be paralyzing. . . . More generally, we have been told of situations in which fear of antagonizing the faculty, especially on the part of administrators who may hope to be considered for other leadership positions, has led to weak responses to faculty demands for more teaching credit or reduced teaching loads.4

Further, because faculty are directly responsible for carrying out the education and research missions of a college or university, advancing these missions is impossible without the faculty’s cooperation. Thus an administrator who has lost the confidence of the faculty can be perceived by his or her supervisors as no longer able to be effective. For these reasons an administrator who has received such a vote often (but not always) loses his or her job and/or cannot get a new one. Perhaps the most famous case is that of Lawrence Summers, who ceased being president of Harvard University after a no-­confidence vote there.5 According to Derek Bok (former Harvard University president), in Higher Education in America (2013), “We [presidents] are frightened of the faculty and with good reason, because they can discharge us [by votes of no confidence] more readily than our boards.”6 These votes are rare enough that they are usually covered in the higher education press. A vote of no confidence is the ultimate weapon that faculty hold over the people who are technically their bosses—­the administration. This particular vote of no confidence was running the expected course. What I knew before I spoke with Karen was that Sandi had written to an editor of one of the higher education papers, Inside Higher Ed, saying that a “resolution of no confidence” had been

Models of Governance in June 2011  ■ 119 passed by the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Senate–­CUNY by a majority vote. . . . This is occasioned by the grave disappointment that faculty feel in having their considered judgment ignored repeatedly for 5 months during the time when the Central Administration was purportedly collecting opinions on its proposal to improve transfer of students in CUNY by cutting down on General Education credits. . . . I want to reiterate that the University Faculty Senate tried repeatedly to work with the Office of Academic Affairs to propose alternatives that would include cross campus faculty disciplinary groups but these proposals . . . have been rejected. The Central Administration insists on picking its own people.

The next day, May 27, Inside Higher Ed printed a paragraph headed “Vote of No Confidence in CUNY Provost” stating, in part, that the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Senate of the City University of New York passed a resolution of no confidence Thursday in the system’s provost, Alexandra Logue, and its Office of Academic Affairs for not seeking its advice in a comprehensive reform of student transfer between the system’s two-­ and four-­year institutions. . . . In response, Jay Hershenson, system spokesperson, wrote in an e-­mail to Inside Higher Ed: “Allowing transfer students greater access to quality course choices is a big change from a highly prescriptive out-­of-­the-­ mainstream system installed in the last century. But the students deserve our support and commitment to academic quality.”7

Although I had had perfect cell phone coverage everywhere in Rwanda, even right next to the gorillas, I had not always been able to read attachments or browse the Internet effectively. So by the time I spoke with Karen, I still did not have complete information about what had happened. It was only later that I (as well as Jay) learned that what the UFS Exec had approved was actually to have the full UFS Plenary consider conducting a vote of no confidence, and that of the nine members of the UFS Exec, only five had voted affirmatively for that action, none of which information was contained in Sandi’s email to the editor at Inside Higher Ed. And only later was I able to see the entire resolution and so understand that Matt, although he had made countless speeches in favor of Pathways and had sent out countless written statements of his support, was mentioned nowhere in the no-­confidence resolution—­mine was the only name mentioned. On May 25, within twenty-­four hours of the UFS Exec vote, Sandi had written to CUNY trustees, saying, “I write to inform you of the decision of the Executive Committee of the University Faculty Senate to convene a special

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plenary on June 7, 2011 [which would be the day after CAPPR] wherein the following resolution is to be presented. . . .” She then quoted the resolution of no confidence in full. I knew that Karen wanted to help me. But what could she do? I knew she would never oppose Sandi or an action taken by the UFS Exec, even speaking to me on the phone. “I never spoke to anyone in Rwanda before,” Karen said when we first got on the phone together that evening. Several previously unconnected neurons started firing together in my brain. My skin prickled. I hadn’t told Karen about my Rwanda trip. I wondered now whether it was a coincidence that the UFS Exec took their vote when I was so far away. I had made my trip widely known to administrators—­but only administrators—­to maximize our ability to work around my absence effectively, and had thought that I had prepared well with them for every contingency. Karen said she had an offer for the CUNY central administration on behalf of the UFS Exec. If we took at least one of two actions, she would vote yes on the Pathways resolution at the upcoming CAPPR meeting, and the UFS Exec would rescind its vote of no confidence in me and the Office of Academic Affairs. The first action the UFS Exec wanted us to take was to increase the number of general education credits in the resolution from 42 to 46. I again explained to Karen all of the reasons that we disagreed with that. The second action was that we would pick all the faculty for the upcoming resolution-­specified Pathways committees from lists provided by the UFS Exec. Presidents and everyone else would be able to recommend faculty for these lists only by sending the names to the UFS Exec, which might, or might not, put those names on the lists the UFS Exec gave to us. I reminded Karen that in the past we had always composed university-­wide committees that included faculty by giving the UFS Exec the opportunity to nominate one or two members of each committee. She said that this committee was different because it was working on curriculum. But we had had many previous university-­wide committees working on curricular issues for which we appointed one or two members from among the UFS’s nominations. I asked what would happen if, under her proposal, we found no one on the UFS Exec’s list for a particular committee to be suitable, and Karen said we could ask for another list. When I objected that this could all take too long, she said we could set a deadline, and if the UFS Exec hadn’t supplied suitable people for a committee by the deadline, we could pick the members without having to take them from the UFS’s list.

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On hearing all this I was worried about five things: (1) the time line that we had for each part of the Pathways Project and the need to move quickly with all the steps required for our goal of effecting Pathways in September 2013; (2) the precedent we would be setting with the UFS Exec, who would probably then want involvement in picking all university-­wide committees’ faculty members forevermore; (3) the fact that picking committees of well-­respected faculty, committees that needed to balance college type, discipline, gender, and race/ethnicity, was already difficult enough without the added complication that all the names had to come from the UFS Exec’s list; (4) that too many of the faculty on the UFS Exec’s list would be faculty who, though acceptable, were not among the most accomplished and respected faculty, and/or who were opposed to the project (and there were plenty of those), as was the majority of the UFS Exec itself; and (5) that we would be reinforcing the UFS’s engaging in threatening behavior whenever it wanted something, encouraging more such behavior in the future. But I didn’t express any of this to Karen. I told her that we would think about the offer, thanked her profusely for trying to help, and hung up. Immediately I sent an email to Matt, his senior staff, and Julia. I described the content of my conversation with Karen and concluded, “As is probably already clear, I find both alternatives problematic.” One member of the senior staff immediately wrote back calling Karen’s offer “extortion pure and simple.” It was. The UFS was going to try to destroy my career unless we did what they wanted. But I didn’t believe that Karen saw it that way. I have always believed that she thought she was doing whatever could be done to help the situation and to help me. A few days later I returned to New York and engaged in many discussions with Matt, his senior staff, and Julia about what had happened. We all agreed that to implement either of the two actions Karen had proposed was unacceptable, even if it meant that Karen voted no on the Pathways resolution at CAPPR, and even if it meant that a vote of no confidence about me and the Office of Academic Affairs was taken at the UFS Plenary and passed. The most important goals were to have majority positive votes on the Pathways resolution at CAPPR (scheduled to meet just four days after my return to New York), and at the full board meeting several weeks later. To have things go as smoothly as possible, we all also agreed not to tell Karen or anyone else on the UFS Exec that we were rejecting their proposals. We would just say that we were thinking about them. And we did.

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In the meantime I was receiving many messages of support, particularly from members of the CUNY central administration. One that I particularly liked read, “May evidence prevail over fear.” Another, from a member of Matt’s senior staff, called Sandi’s communication to the trustees “ad hominem,” “infantile,” and “inappropriate.” It also said, “We are all outraged here and consider it to be aimed at all of us, though you received the brunt of it. . . . we are talking with trustees . . . to share our collective outrage,” and it ended, “In solidarity.” We were also receiving messages of support from outside CUNY—­for example, from Terry Hartle, senior vice president of the American Council on Education, and from David Lavallee, who held a position similar to mine at the State University of New York (SUNY). The media were playing an increasing role in the issues surrounding Pathways. Just after the no-­confidence vote by the UFS Exec, in addition to the Inside Higher Ed piece, a pro-­Pathways editorial appeared in the New York Daily News, followed by several letters to the editor.8 One of these letters was from a student supporting Pathways. On June 9 Sandi wrote about this letter to some members of the Chancellor’s Cabinet and the chair of the USS: “The student’s writing skills make me wonder how he ever exited any English 101 class. . . . What faculty fear is that this semi coherent language will become the coin of the realm.” Also around this time an anti-­Pathways letter to the editor of the New York Times appeared from Herman Badillo, former congressman, former Bronx borough president, and former CUNY Board of Trustees chair, asserting that Pathways “is nothing more than a disguised way of going back to the discredited program known as open admissions.”9 Given that the resolution specifically stated “a commitment to providing colleges with the flexibility to maintain their distinctive identities and traditions,”10 and that colleges could still set their own admissions standards, this criticism of Pathways seemed entirely off-­base to me. Internally, we had to decide when, and how, to communicate with the CUNY community about what was going on. As I’ve described previously, we ended up using every avenue possible—­newsletters, emails, websites, public speeches, and more. We also persisted in our policy of making our communications factual, positive, and not confrontational or ad hominem. We followed this policy even when Sandi wrote to the trustees about the vote of no confidence. So, in response to the UFS Exec vote of no confidence, on May 27 Benno Schmidt (chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees and former president of Yale University), Philip Berry (vice chair of the board), and Matt

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sent a message to the trustees, presidents, and others, again articulating the importance of Pathways, the huge amount of consultation we had engaged in about it, the changes that had subsequently been made in the draft resolution, and the following: This is a complex undertaking, and it has been led with extraordinary skill, intelligence, diplomacy, and patience by Executive Vice Chancellor Logue.  .  .  . Throughout this process, Executive Vice Chancellor Logue’s leadership has been exemplary. In engaging the CUNY community in this critical exercise, she has been creative, thorough, respectful, open-­minded, transparent, and, most of all, attentive to students’ needs. Chancellor Goldstein has made clear that the Pathways initiative he launched is among his highest priorities, and, as the chief academic officer of the University, Executive Vice Chancellor Logue has carried out this priority with expertise, conviction, and integrity. She has been clear in upholding the principle that it is the faculty who develop curriculum; it is faculty who establish learning outcomes and determine the courses that will fulfill those outcomes. . . . We commend Executive Vice Chancellor Logue’s exceptional efforts and extend our deepest appreciation to her for leading an initiative so critical to the future of the City University of New York.

With these words, Benno, Phil, and Matt made it clear that the CUNY trustees and administration were 100 percent unified in supporting Pathways, and that there was no risk to my position as executive vice chancellor. Although I had known all this before, seeing it written in this way was most gratifying. In addition, I was told that Benno had sent a note to all the trustees (including, of course, Sandi, ex officio as chair of the UFS) asserting that Sandi should be ashamed of herself. Sandi then wrote to the trustees twice—­a response to each communication—­saying in one, “Not ashamed of anything.” Up until now, we had allowed Sandi to transmit through us whatever emails she wanted sent out to the entire CUNY faculty, and Brian Cohen, CUNY’s chief information officer and associate vice chancellor of computing and information services, had sent those emails out on her behalf using the email databases that his office maintained. However, when Sandi wanted to do this again soon after the vote of no confidence incident, somehow delays arose in our sending out her message, and from that time forward, no emails were sent by us to the faculty on her behalf. I later learned from administrators who had been at other universities that it was not common for any faculty member, even the head of the institution’s senate, to have access to all faculty email addresses.

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Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the board, was working nonstop (though that wasn’t unusual for him) coordinating all of the central office’s public communications concerning Pathways and media interactions, and providing advice about how to handle private communications as well. He was always available, and his advice was always spot-­on. Whether he was inherently creative or just had an enormous wealth of experience, he was always coming up with great ideas about how to deal with the latest crisis. For example, Jay knew that what made us most vulnerable in the court of public opinion regarding Pathways was the possibility that it would decrease the quality of a CUNY education. I believed deeply that wasn’t true, that Pathways would actually increase quality, and so tended to forget to mention that conviction unless someone directly raised the issue. But Jay was always there to remind me. It was around this time, in one of our frequent meetings about Pathways, that Julia, who seemed quite disturbed by the level of dissension that we were experiencing from a good number of faculty, told me that she was worried about my future. I told her not to worry, that it would not be a problem. What I didn’t say to her was that I wasn’t sure I wanted another administrative job. In any case I had always resolved as an administrator to do the best I could for the people whom I was serving, independent of what was best for me.

CAPPR Any significant academic change at CUNY, such as the institution of a new program, has to be approved at a CAPPR meeting and then at a full Board of Trustees meeting. Pathways was no exception. Huge amounts of time went into making sure that all trustees meetings ran smoothly. We combed over every detail of every action item on every agenda to ensure that there were no surprises at the meetings, which were all videotaped and shown live as webcasts. No agenda item was supposed to reach one of these meetings unless we had already addressed every concern that might arise, and unless we were sure that the vote would be positive. The CAPPR members were mostly trustees but also included a UFS representative (Karen, who had a vote), a USS representative (who also had a vote), and a representative of the presidents (in this case, Russell Hotzler, president of New York City College of Technology and chair of the Academic Affairs

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Committee of the Council of Presidents, another vote). I supplied most of the information for the meeting and usually did most of the speaking there, but did not have a vote. In addition to the UFS and USS voting representatives, their chairs could also attend and speak (but could not vote). What this meant was that Sandi, as UFS chair, and Cory Provost, as USS chair (and a big supporter of Pathways), were likely to be participants at the CAPPR meeting at which Pathways would be considered, though neither of them could vote. In contrast to the full board meetings, where everything was scripted and almost no one ever went off script, the CAPPR members often asked questions. As prepared as we usually were for CAPPR, we had to be even more prepared for the June 2011 CAPPR, whose agenda included the Pathways resolution. There were usually two board committee meetings going on at the same time in different rooms in what was then the CUNY central office building at Eightieth Street and East End Avenue. The meeting that was usually at the same time as CAPPR was the Committee on Fiscal Affairs. Matt ordinarily sat in on that meeting, coming to CAPPR only if there was a controversial agenda item, and then only at the point at which that item was discussed and voted on. Never­theless, he attended the entire June 2011 CAPPR meeting, as did Benno and others who didn’t routinely attend (several extra trustees, Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Frederick Schaffer, Vice Chancellor for Research Gillian Small, Vice Chancellor for Community Colleges Eduardo Marti, Jay, Sandi, and Cory). All these people had the right to sit at the table and speak, but not to vote. In addition to a greater than usual number of participants, a big audience was expected, so this one time CAPPR, and not Fiscal, got the large meeting room. It was packed. There were many agenda items for many different colleges, and their representatives were in the audience. The audience also contained many members of the central Office of Academic Affairs (my office), some faculty, and some students. I saw several students who were strong Pathways supporters (e.g., Liliete Lopez and Washieka Torres), and sitting right in the middle of the front row of the audience was Julia, with Erika Dreifus, director of communications for the central Office of Academic Affairs, right next to her, a most reassuring sight. Security people were discreetly placed around the room in plain clothes. The oval meeting table was enormous, with the audience in back of one side of it. I sat in the middle of the other side, facing the audience, directly to Wellington’s right. He had Matt on his left, and Benno was on Matt’s other side.

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In contrast to our usual practice for CAPPR, but similar to the practice at full board meetings, Dave Fields (senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor, as well as the most expert person at CUNY in the rules governing formal meetings), sat behind Wellington and Matt, ready to help deal with any kind of trouble. Sandi was wearing a dark brown suit with an ivory blouse. I had chosen to wear my light-­blue suit, double-­strand pearl necklace, and pearl earrings—­ attire that I felt bespoke calmness and coolness, which I was going to need for this meeting. I was determined, despite everything that had happened in the past few weeks, to keep a nonaggressive, nonthreatening, nondefiant, nonconfrontational demeanor during the meeting, speaking only when absolutely necessary. Not rising to any bait put out by Sandi (or, probably unwittingly, Karen). Letting the situation run itself. The resolution had made it to CAPPR and, given all our preparation, would likely receive the majority positive vote it needed. My job was to do the best I could for CUNY, not to win a tussle with Sandi. But I needed to stay on my toes. There were a lot of moving parts in this meeting. Anything could happen. We went through the great many regular CAPPR items one by one with minimal issues arising. There was noticeable tension in the room only when we considered the motion to revise the Academic Integrity Policy for students. Rick had been working long and hard on this, having first asked the UFS for their feedback on his revisions months earlier. But at this meeting Karen raised objections to some of the revised language, finally saying that the whole agenda item should be tabled until the next CAPPR meeting, which wasn’t until September. Rick was clearly annoyed—­the UFS had already had ample opportunity to express any concerns prior to this meeting. Rick and Karen disagreed about whether she had had the opportunity to see the changes previously. Finally, after much back and forth and Matt’s intervention, it was agreed that Rick would work with representatives of the UFS to try to deal with the UFS’s concerns prior to a vote on the revision at the full board meeting in just a couple of weeks. Some forty-­five minutes had passed before we got to the Pathways item on the agenda. I made my opening statement, outlining the extent of the problem and its history; the relevant parts of New York State’s Education Law; why articulation agreements and great advising would never be enough to fix the problems; the major components of the resolution; the huge amount of consultation that had been done; the fact that Pathways would raise standards; and the

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importance of preserving the special role of the faculty, college individuality, and the rights of students. I complimented the faculty multiple times. Benno moved the resolution and then there was a second. Immediately Karen asked to circulate two documents to the people sitting at the table. The first was a copy of almost all the anti-­Pathways resolutions, as well as the negative letters received from Phi Beta Kappa and other national organizations. The resolutions, which expressed a variety of concerns and complaints, numbered in the dozens. They were from eleven of the nineteen undergraduate colleges and were often from individual departments (the great majority of these were from Brooklyn College). The second document described three proposed amendments to the resolution that the UFS was requesting. Two of them were basically the same as what we’d been hearing from the UFS for many weeks (including what I’d heard when I was in Rwanda): a change from a total of 42 to 46 credits for general education and the requirement that all faculty on the upcoming Pathways committees be drawn from a list provided by the UFS. In explaining the latter, Karen said that the CUNY college presidents would need to submit their nominations to the UFS, and then the UFS might, or might not, include those names as part of the list submitted to the chancellor (I could only imagine the reaction to this of the several presidents in the audience). The third proposed amendment was brand-­new to me: students would need to earn at least a C in their Common Core courses (the 30 credits of general education that Pathways was to require of all CUNY undergraduates) in order to have such a course count as satisfying a general education requirement when a student transferred. This meant that, under Karen’s proposal, students earning a D for a general education course might (if the college’s policies allowed it, and not all did) receive general education credit for a course taken at their first college, but if they transferred, they would have to take a replacement, additional, general education course. A barrier specifically directed at transfer students—­exactly what we were trying to prevent. But before I could even tell whether that amendment was going to gain any traction, Benno interrupted the discussion that was already under way about nominating people for the Pathways committees, and said, “In order for the discussion of these amendments to be legitimate the motion to make the amendments needs to be seconded.”11 “Surely there will be a second,” said Karen. “Well, it won’t be me,” said Benno. Then one of the other trustees, probably thinking that committee members were supposed to do things like this in order to get through the agenda, seconded Karen’s proposed amendments.

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The discussion about the faculty names for the Pathways committees continued. Sandi declared that, according to the UFS’s charter, the UFS “shall have primary responsibility for University-­level educational and instructional matters and research and scholarly activities of University-­wide import.” (I later checked the charter,12 and discovered that Sandi had left out that the “primary responsibility” of the UFS was “under the Board of Trustees.”) Sandi then said, “And if we’re dealing now with a University-­wide curriculum, I personally don’t have a problem with that idea at all, contrary to what might be the vision around here.” Her feelings on this were indeed a surprise to me. Next Sandi presented her reasons for stipulating that all the faculty names come from a list put together by the UFS. Primary was the UFS charter. She also said that she had put together a fifty-­person committee of people from all the colleges who were expert in general education, and that that committee could be one source of names for the list. She said that the committee had held about twelve hours of meetings, of which I’d come to one, and that she wished “to state categorically there was no friction between the community and senior [bachelor’s-­degree-­granting] college faculty contrary to the miserable publicity which has been put out.” Before I could stop myself, I said: “I’d like to disagree with that statement. The meeting I was at, a faculty member said I hear that the senior colleges are not interested in honoring the courses from the community colleges, and then everybody said no, but the issue was raised and I did feel tension in the room.” I knew I should have just kept my mouth shut. Sandi was probably going to say a lot of things that weren’t true, but if we just stayed out of crazy arguments, the resolution would pass. Sandi replied, “I really don’t believe it is right to exploit this as a faculty split, and that is what has happened. I spent a year trying to avoid that and I thought I was fairly successful. . . . The purpose of attempting to modify this is to make the faculty feel less jittery that something is going to be imposed on them that violates their sense of professional responsibility. We are not a high school. The curriculum does not come from the central office.” I again disagreed with much of what Sandi had said, but this time I managed to restrain myself. There didn’t seem any point in voicing my disagreements; it was clear that that amendment was going nowhere. Trustee Charlie Shorter then started speaking, asking whether there was a problem with requiring a minimum grade of C. I began to respond, but Matt interrupted me. He said that he supported the requirement of a minimum grade of C for transferring general education courses. Then Benno said that this would be what is known as a friendly amendment of the original resolution.

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I was sure that Matt and Benno thought that this requirement would simply be another way to demonstrate CUNY’s current commitment to high standards, that they didn’t understand the implications for transfer. And by accepting one of the proposed amendments, they could show that they were reasonable people, really listening to what Karen and the UFS had to say, not just rejecting everything. A few minutes later someone passed me a note (unfortunately I don’t remember who) saying that the minimum-­of-­C amendment could have negative implications for financial aid. But what could I do? My boss, my very special boss, had just said that he supported the amendment. I couldn’t contradict him. Matt then started talking about the number of general education credits. He said that even 42 was too high, so he certainly wasn’t in support of raising it to 46. The amendment to require a minimum grade of C to transfer general education credit was going to get approved, and the moment to do anything about that was gone. There was more discussion about all the proposed amendments. Karen tried to amend the one about faculty members on Pathways committees, now asking that the UFS appoint 50 percent of the members of those committees. Benno stated this was not a friendly amendment, and no one seconded it. Benno then said that the UFS should not have “a lock” on who could be considered for the committees because there were other good sources of names. Concerning the inclusion of UFS nominees on the Pathways committees, Matt promised that the central office would try to do better than in the past (previous university-­ wide committees had had one or two UFS nominees). Next, Sandi said: “Besides the Senate, which may strike some of you as an irrelevant body, we have 12 Discipline Councils that function [a Discipline Council consists of a single discipline’s department chairs from the different campuses]. . . . I have not seen war between the community and senior college faculty. I have not seen a disrespect for courses which has been published in the Daily News editorial and somebody is feeding all this junk out.” Several community college faculty had told me that the community college chairs felt that the senior college chairs dominated the Discipline Councils, but I kept quiet. Matt was trying to move the group on, past all these discussions, but Karen asked whether she could say something else. However, Benno interjected that Cory had been trying to speak, and Karen graciously yielded the floor to Cory, who said: “There was an earlier motion that was made to include the, with a

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grade of C or better. Was there a second to that?” Several people (including Wellington) responded that that motion was accepted as a friendly amendment. I was holding my breath. Cory continued. “I do find issue with that exception. I don’t think students actively seek to get lower than a C in their class. . . . I understand the need to try and create a culture to have high standards. But I don’t think that that’s necessary. I think the proposal as it is is fine without that inclusion or any of the other inclusions that were proposed.” Benno explained why he had supported that amendment, saying, “The student gets credit even if he doesn’t have a C, he just only doesn’t get credit for having satisfied the Common Core, which makes sense because the Common Core sometimes acts in effect as a prerequisite or foundation course.” This was the opening I needed. Stumbling over my words, I said, “Couple of things. One is I’ve been informed that there may be financial aid issues with not transferring C or D courses. A second issue is I think that the intent behind this resolution is that if something counts at one college, it counts at another college, and so . . .” I paused and looked over at Wellington, Matt, and Benno. A number of people at the table were talking in low voices, saying that these courses already didn’t transfer. I gave a pointed look toward the audience, leafed through the pages of my copy of the Pathways resolution, and now said, in a stronger voice, “There is already in the resolution a statement ‘to an extent consistent with grade requirements and residency rules at the transfer colleges.’ That’s already in there.” Matt said, “Oh, OK.” Karen said, “It’s the fifth ‘Resolved’ from the end.” There was more murmuring by committee members. “So it’s not clear that something else is needed,” I said. More murmuring. Then Benno said, “We’ll stay with the original.” There was too much going on in the room for me to even recognize that something wonderful had just happened, and that it was made possible by Cory, the USS president. Karen then asked for a friendly amendment to the effect that the annual evaluations of Pathways would be brought to CAPPR, and Matt said he would make that happen. Wellington called the question, and after some confusion about what was actually being voted on (the original resolution or the amendments), the original Pathways resolution, with no amendments, passed with positive votes from everyone but Karen, who—­as she had promised during our conversation when

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I was in Rwanda—­voted no because none of her initial proposed amendments had been approved. There was not a single reaction anywhere in the room indicating that anything special had just happened. Immediately we moved on to several final items on the CAPPR agenda, with my making my statement about each in my most serious mode. Finally I reached the end of the last item, the nomination of Dr. Parameswaran Nair, a physicist at the City College of New York, as a CUNY distinguished professor. After noting that Dr. Nair was studying the Casimir effect, I ad-­libbed, “I’m sure everybody knows what that is,” and I smiled, looking over at Wellington, Matt, and Benno. I was beginning to realize that Pathways—­all of it—­had just passed CAPPR, and I was more than ready to get up from that table. But Matt said he wanted to make a statement. First he congratulated everyone on having taken this important step that would help students. And then he said some nice, some very nice, things about me, and this went on for a while. If I’d had any doubt as to the security of my position as a result of the no-­confidence vote, that doubt flew away as Matt made his statement. No one is better at praise than Matt when he gets going. He lauded me for my professionalism, intellect, academic record, and dignity. He complimented me on the way that I had handled Pathways “even with a threat levied in her direction.” He went on to say: “I was deeply, deeply offended by what was transmitted to some members of the CAPPR committee with respect to this [he was referring to Sandi’s letter to the trustees about the vote of no confidence], and I will tell you Mr. Chairman and members of the board that not even a threat of extortion will [prevent] this professional from doing the right thing for our students. I think we owe a debt of great gratitude.” Benno said he’d like to make that a resolution. Several people seconded it. Then Benno added: “I thought that the statement that she deserves a vote of no confidence was not just wildly inaccurate but was actually shameful, a shameful way to treat an academic colleague who is simply doing her job. And I found it deeply offensive as did the Chancellor.” Wellington added his words of praise, as did Phil, ending with: “[Pathways] is something that later, in the annals of our university, you know will will be remembered, is that we did this. That we moved forward with this. And that’s, that is what is important.” Wellington related how he still had four credits at Queens College that he couldn’t transfer, and there was laughter in the room.

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Then Dave, still behind Wellington and Matt, whispered something. It must have been that they needed to take a vote on the resolution of Matt’s praise for me. Wellington got it done quickly and no nays were heard, so he announced that it was unanimous. People started applauding and cheering, Matt stood up, and then a lot of people stood up, still applauding. It was strange to be sitting while everyone around me was standing and applauding, so I stood up too. I kept thanking everyone and was doing my best not to cry. I hugged Matt and then Dave (who with a big smile gave a fist pump toward the audience), was congratulated by Eduardo, and then hugged Jay. At that point the video ends and I have no memory of what happened next, but I’m sure that much more congratulating went on among the many pro-­Pathways people in the room. I wasn’t even thinking about the special UFS Plenary that was supposed to take place the next day, the Plenary at which the UFS would consider the no-­ confidence resolution against me and the Office of Academic Affairs if the central office hadn’t acceded to the UFS’s demands. Instead I was thinking about the fact that there were only two weeks until the public hearing, and there was much to do. Among my upcoming commitments was an appointment to see my cardiologist on June 16. Despite the many benefits of my regular intensive exercise program, I was having more frequent incidents of atrial fibrillation that needed addressing. And decreasing my stress was not a viable solution. As it turned out—­owing, I believe, to behind-­the-­scenes work by Karen and others—­the Plenary never voted on the resolution of no confidence. However, in the meantime, the media battles continued. Jay tried repeatedly, and unsuccessfully, to get Inside Higher Ed to change what it had mistakenly said about the supposed vote of no confidence. The New York Post published an editorial praising Matt and Pathways the same day as the public hearing, and KC Johnson, a Brooklyn College faculty member, lauded that editorial in Minding the Campus.13 About the faculty the editorial said: “The chancellor will need to keep a close watch on how his plan is executed, making sure faculty truly lift the general-­ed bar and don’t dilute quality elsewhere. . . . His critics, by contrast, include many of the same faculty who stood foursquare against the hike in standards [when he became chancellor]. This time around they seek to protect pay and perks: The more pointless low-­level courses that are required, the more jobs for them.” My office kept doing whatever needed to be done on Pathways. On June 14 I met with Sandi and Karen to discuss the next steps on Pathways. Unfortunately, Sandi subsequently wrote to UFS representatives including what I thought were

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some mischaracterizations of what I had said in our meeting. On Jay’s good suggestion, I wrote to the UFS myself, not saying Sandi was wrong, but simply presenting my version of what I had said at the meeting. And I resolved never to meet alone with Sandi. One of the members of Matt’s cabinet emailed me: “Don’t let old dead wood get in your way. Instead use them as good kindling to keep your fire burning.”

Public Hearing There is a public hearing before every Board of Trustees meeting in order to give everyone a chance to comment on the items that have passed the board committees and so are now going to be on the full board meeting agenda (the audience is not allowed to speak at the full board meetings). CUNY also holds one public hearing in each of New York City’s five boroughs each year. For efficiency, CUNY combines these two types of public hearings, and so the June 2011 public hearing was to be held in the Bronx, in the third-­floor cafeteria of Hostos Community College. On May 18 Sandi had sent an email to me and Matt about this hearing saying, “The fact that the Board hearing will be at Hostos on June 20 adds . . . to the obvious conclusion—­this is being managed to minimize the protests which are coming in daily from all over CUNY.” But we usually held the June hearing at Hostos (which not only is located in the Bronx but has excellent public transportation). The hearing was to start at 5:00; I left the office at 3:30. It wasn’t far to Hostos, but I wanted to get there early so that I could speak with and thank people gathering for the hearing, especially the students who were going to testify. The central office had been working for weeks to arrange for pro-­Pathways speakers at the hearing. We knew that the UFS was recruiting anti-­Pathways speakers, and we wanted to have at least as many people speaking in support of Pathways. However, speaking out in favor of something that the administration wants to do, and that some faculty don’t want to do, is not usually a popular faculty activity. Further, many faculty don’t feel free to say what they really think until they not only have tenure but have attained their final promotion.14 We struggled to identify faculty who were willing to get up in front of their colleagues and say that they supported Pathways. One president who professed to be a supporter of Pathways, but whom the central office had, in the past, criticized for being loose with facts, strongly suggested as a speaker a

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faculty member from that president’s college, but as it turned out, that faculty member testified against Pathways. Finding students who would speak in favor of Pathways was much less difficult. The procedure was that anyone who wanted to speak would contact the office of the Secretary of the Board (Jay) and ask to be put on the official list of speakers. As the days until the public hearing dwindled to a handful, the central office’s senior staff started receiving lists of those who had signed up so far. We breathed a sigh of relief when a supporter signed up, and worried when a Pathways detractor did. The weather was good on the day of the hearing, June 20, with a high of 77 degrees and no rain. As usual when I visited Hostos, College Security Specialist José (Freddie) Torres and I drove to the back of the building where we could park; I went in the back door and from there to the room where the students had gathered. A flier had gone around to the students asking them to come to the “Dinner and Dialogue Series” from 3:00 to 4:30 p.m. to “Support the General Education Resolution to create a more efficient Transfer System.” The flier added: “Free Food!!” The flier was sponsored by the USS, the CCSD, and the Hostos Student Government. The president of the Hostos Student Government at that time, Allen Castañeda, had a lot to do with all of these arrangements. When I got to the room, I spoke with him and met many other students. Allen’s intent was to provide an incentive to get students to go to the hearing, and free food is of course one of the best ways to get students to go anywhere. And because they were attracted early to the location, the students could be among the first to sign in to speak at the hearing. In addition to initially signing up prior to the hearing, speakers had to sign in the afternoon of the hearing, with their speaking order determined by their signing-­in order. Given that we were expecting many dozens of speakers, anyone who didn’t want to be at Hostos late into the evening was well advised to sign in early, and many students did. The Hostos cafeteria, the location of the hearing, is a long, rectangular room with windows down one side. This shape makes it good for hearings because the board members and members of the Chancellery (i.e., the chancellor and vice chancellors) can sit at a table in a long line next to the windows and can easily see all of the audience arrayed in front of them (the audience area is wide but not deep). The person testifying speaks at a lectern placed between the row of board and Chancellery members and the rows of audience members, facing the board and Chancellery members. Hourig Messerlian, deputy executive to

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the secretary of the board, keeps track of testifiers’ speaking time, and woe to the speaker who exceeds the allotted three minutes—­all kinds of lights start flashing. Every testifier finishes up pretty quickly when that happens. These are hearings, so except for the person chairing the meeting, those sitting at the table almost never speak. The job of the people sitting at the table is solely to listen carefully. Phil chaired this hearing, a good choice because he is an affable, unflappable, and respectful person (and a big Pathways supporter). Also sitting at the long table were two other trustees and, ex officio, Cory and Sandi. Other seats at the table were occupied by the Bronx college presidents, many vice chancellors, Matt, and Dave. Whoever determined the seating arrangements for the table had ensured that I was placed far away from Sandi, for which I was grateful. Once again, Julia was in the audience, sitting opposite me, a reassuring sight. Her dedication to Pathways was always a great support to me and to the project. After the hearing was over, one of the pro-­Pathways faculty speakers told me, “My opinion on Pathways was formed because of Dr. Wrigley’s hard work at disseminating the university’s findings on the transfer situation.” The audience side of the room was packed with speakers and observers. Close to a hundred people had put their names on the speakers list ahead of time, though we knew from past experience that some might not show up. I did the math in my head—­if there were a hundred speakers and three minutes for each speaker, and adding half a minute of transition between each pair of speakers, that would mean close to six hours of testimony! I had made sure to have a snack and use the restroom right before we started. I didn’t want to have to get up and leave the room during the hearing; my doing so might be interpreted as something other than my simply taking care of physiological necessities. For this hearing I had made and brought with me a piece of paper with a grid divided into three sections going down the page (faculty, staff, and students) and three sections going across the page (pro, mixed, and con), for a total of nine cells. I would write each speaker’s name in the appropriate cell, which would give me an easy visual tool to assess how the testimony was going. The first person to speak was Hostos’s President, Félix Matos Rodriguez, known as an excellent speaker.15 “I am convinced that at the end of the process . . . we will all be pleased to have this . . . rigorous system that promotes learning, guided by our faculty, a process that is good and centered and that facilitates transfers within our system. . . . At Hostos I have seen the many positive

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outcomes that are achieved when faculty from different CUNY campuses work together to connect their curricula.” When Russ spoke, he made the point that the removal of remediation from the CUNY senior colleges some years ago had compelled many students (who needed remediation) to start their college educations at a community college, instead of starting at a senior college, and that we therefore needed to facilitate these students’ path to a senior college. He also said that “efforts to resolve the difficulties that our students experience when transferring . . . have been pursued for more than the forty years that I have been associated with the university,” and he stressed the strong support of Pathways on the part of the Academic Affairs Committee of the Council of Presidents. Several more speakers were presidents. President Lisa Coico of City College said, “I have heard too many stories of students that have come to me, students that are dejected, depressed because they don’t even know what transfer credits they are going to receive from the colleges that they’ve come to.” President Scott Evenbeck of Guttman Community College could not attend because he had to be in Albany on CUNY business. A statement read on his behalf included that “a common core as defined by learning outcomes [is] the right approach to creating an efficient transfer system in the best interests of our students.” Among the students who spoke were many who were to be stalwart supporters of Pathways throughout its entire implementation. First up was Washieka, who had just graduated from the College of Staten Island, who later became a master’s student at Brooklyn College, and who was active in CCSD. “I am . . . here representing my family who have come to CUNY for over four generations to seek higher education opportunities. My mother transferred to Baruch College after receiving her associate’s degree from Bronx Community College. As a result of Baruch not accepting many of her credits she earned at BCC, it took her an extra two years to earn her bachelor’s degree, which resulted in a considerable waste of time and a huge waste of money.” Greg Bradford, a student at Brooklyn College, also spoke about transfer delaying graduation, in this case his own: “This is my third CUNY school. . . . The process by which I transferred from school to school within CUNY was filled with fear and trepidation, simply because there was no way for me to know which of my credits would be accepted by my receiving CUNY college.  .  .  . ­ultimately it has forced me to spend an extra semester in order to graduate.” Luis Gutierrez, Hunter College student and chair of CCSD, said: “Students with disabilities who receive financial assistance for tuition for special programs

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such as VESID [a New York State program that provides education and other support for people with disabilities], will not be sponsored to retake courses even if it fulfills a transfer requirement.” As Luis spoke, I was reminded of the many challenges that CUNY students with disabilities face, and our obligation to remove as many of those challenges as possible. Liliete, a transfer from Hostos to Queens College, vice chair of disabled student affairs of the USS and treasurer of CCSD, and who is blind and speaks without notes, said: “I come to you tonight to request your support for a concern that has affected students with disabilities for years, the loss of credits when transferring. . . . I turned down an [offer] at Columbia University to attend there because I believed that CUNY was the place for leaders of tomorrow. Efforts like this transfer policy only reassure me that the choice that I made to stay in CUNY is the best choice I made, and I’m very proud to belong to this family.” I found Liliete’s expressed love for CUNY and dedication to its improvement to be extremely moving. Not surprisingly, the testimony of Steven Rodriguez, a transfer to City College from Kingsborough Community College, a member of City College’s Skadden, Arps Honors Program in Legal Studies, vice chair for legal affairs for the USS, and also an active member of CCSD, took a legal bent: When filing for transfer earlier this year I was notified that some of my credits were not transferred and as a consequence I would have to retake those classes. This is both a time drain and a financial burden. When I inquired further as [to] the nature of this denial of credits the response was simply they would not transfer it. That was it. There was no system in place to appeal for a reconsideration. I believe it is a basic student right to have the ability to appeal. If we can appeal . . . parking permits on our campuses and grades, then we should certainly be able to appeal for the rights to have our transfer credits reevaluated. . . . I value higher education and will go on to acquire a bachelor’s degree, but it comes at a steep price. My taking those credits will not only take me a few extra semesters to graduate, but it also pushes me back from being employed and limits my opportunities to advance my career.

This was the first time that I had heard someone make the excellent point that, if grades and parking tickets could be appealed, why not loss of transfer credits? Steven’s comments confirmed to me that we had acted correctly in making the establishment of appeals mechanisms part of the Pathways resolution on which the full board would soon be voting.

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Other great points made by the students included these: with Pathways, counselors’ and advisers’ time could be used more efficiently; the current system is too complicated; articulation agreements are too individualistic and a global solution is needed; upon transfer, credit evaluation takes too long because of the process’s reliance on too many subjective judgments; and recent tuition increases make transfer of credits even more valuable (including for, among others, international students, who pay higher tuition rates). Similar to Steven, the testimony of James (Jamie) Robinson, a student at Queens College and chair of the USS LGBT Task Force, and who has been well known to the CUNY administration for speaking his mind, also related to his area of academic expertise. As a former Wall Street executive who has worked for [a] Fortune 50 firm, I have been formally trained in currencies. Credits within the City University are the students’ currency. It would be ridiculous for you to go to your bank tomorrow and deposit $100 in Queens to find out that it is only worth $80 in Manhattan. We are students of one university, not a hodgepodge of private colleges and silos. I have been personally affected by this inefficient and often confusing transfer system within our university. I have personally lost credits from Queensborough Community College and the School for Professional Studies. An inefficient and often confusing transfer system has disproportionately affected members of my community. Many LGBT are often forced to leave school in the process of coming out and are displaced as a result of uncaring friends, community and family. Many of our members, in fact most of our members are transfer students from another school.

Jamie’s testimony also included these words: “I would also like to thank Executive Vice Chancellor Lexa Logue, our provost, and publicly state that the LGBT task force is on team Lexa. She has spent many hours explaining this proposal to students and faculty alike. The time, dedication and caring that our university’s provost has provided is absolutely unprecedented, and I just wanted to say, we love you Lexa.” As he said this he turned and smiled at me, and I could see that another student in the audience was holding up a poster with rainbows and hearts on it that said something like we love Lexa. I wanted to smile back—­this was a compliment and Jamie was lightening up the serious mood of the speakers—­but I thought there were probably many faculty in the audience, the anti-­Pathways faculty, who were finding Jamie’s testimony and the sign annoying and even distasteful, and were I to smile, it would only upset them more. So I tried not to show any emotion or react in any way.

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The testimony of every student was clear and respectful. They made many useful and insightful points and said not one word against the faculty. In addition to the students, Clare Norton, CUNY’s director of recruitment, in her testimony, made many useful observations from the perspective of someone working in the area of student admissions. “The physical proximity of our colleges is a selling point for students because when enrolled at one CUNY college they can access and utilize resources at various campuses. When marketing the university to prospective students the general education framework will allow us to clearly articulate pathways to achieve both associate’s and bachelor’s degrees.” She also pointed out that graduation rates are increasingly in the public eye, and CUNY’s graduation rates need to be high enough to enable the admissions staff “to convince the brightest New Yorkers to study at CUNY.” She reminded the audience that the CUNY senior colleges have become more selective, and the senior colleges are more expensive; for both reasons students who want to attend the senior colleges must often begin at a community college and transfer. She said further that the admissions staff regularly hears from community college students who want to transfer to senior colleges as soon as possible because they are afraid that the credits they obtain at the community colleges won’t transfer. Also, CUNY’s competitors regularly tell prospective students that because it will take them longer to finish at CUNY because of credits not transferring within CUNY, an extra year at CUNY will cost them $35,000 to $50,000 in lost wages. Finally, “our colleagues from the New York City Department of Education [K–­12 New York City public schools] regularly suggest that it is difficult for them to understand the academic skills their students need to succeed at CUNY. They have said that SUNY’s general education model [which involves the same general education framework for all SUNY campuses, similar to what was being proposed for Pathways] makes it much easier for them to understand.” About one hour into the hearing it was the turn to speak of Distinguished Professor Elizabeth Nunez, who had formerly taught at and was the provost at Medgar Evers College and who now teaches at Hunter College. She went to the heart of the matter, where other speakers may have feared to tread: It astounds me really that . . . anyone would oppose a resolution that would facilitate even greater access for students with the colleges in CUNY. I have tried to figure out why. Is it that there are faculty who believe that their colleagues at other colleges are less credentialed than they are? Is it that there are faculty who believe

140  ■  Chapter 5 that the curriculum for similar courses at other CUNY colleges is less rigorous than theirs? If the answer to both these questions is yes, then surely it seems to me that this matter can be fixed through a system of standards and review. . . . These concerns . . . vibrate like a powerful electric current through every discussion on this topic. Too many of these concerns, and I will put it bluntly, have to do with turf wars. The unspoken questions are these, will I lose my course if transferred students are not required to take my course? Could my entire department be negatively affected if there is not sufficient student enrollment in courses to justify the number of teaching faculty? . . . I am confident . . . that the foundation for [a certain well defined body of] knowledge can be laid well within forty-­two credits of a core curriculum and built upon in courses for the major. . . . My niece . . . is now required to spend another semester at senior college though she has already accumulated 130 credits. You see my niece was a transfer student from another CUNY college and though I thought [I] had carefully advised her to take courses that I was convinced would accrue to her core requirement, it turned out I was wrong.

If someone with Elizabeth’s experience couldn’t help her niece take courses that would transfer, who could? After almost thirty speakers in favor of Pathways, it was time for the first anti-­Pathways speaker: William Crain, professor of psychology at City College. He began: “I would say that a lot of the faculty were here very early waiting in the hot sun and finally we are getting a chance to speak. And a lot of people spoke in front of us.” Bill continued: This resolution undermines the traditional role of the faculty in determining curriculum. The resolution will require and limit . . . the number of general education courses that faculty and local campuses might think that students need. . . . The Board of Trustees, the central administration repeatedly say this college, this university is only as good as its faculty. Then why do you take the power and authority for doing what we do best away from us and take it into your own hands. . . . this is really just a power grab away from the faculty and undermines our authority. . . . outcomes based education sounds good, but it . . . misdirects our focus as a faculty. I believe that when we as faculty are teaching the best, we do not have our eyes fixed on measurable student outcomes. Instead we invite students to address questions we consider [important]. We engage students in the kinds of inquiry that absorb us. . . . and I think this is what makes education exciting and invigorating.

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The next person to speak about Pathways was Jennifer Sparrow, a faculty member and administrator at the School of Professional Studies and (previously) at Medgar Evers College, and a Pathways supporter: “A community college administrator once told me that his students had an easier time transferring to elite private colleges than they did to CUNY senior colleges,” she said. Jennifer also spoke in favor of using learning outcomes that “require students to demonstrate what they know and what they can do and they require faculty to facilitate and assess learning.” And she pointed out that decreasing the number of general education required credits would “free up space in the upper division for larger majors, minors and even double majors.” Then we heard from more faculty opposed to Pathways. Their statements included these points: • the real reason for the transfer problems was an insufficient number of advisers, • colleges should have the ability to determine their own core curricula, • the reduction in general education credits would lower standards and decrease CUNY students’ exposure to different fields, • the problem can be solved by improving the TIPPS software, • Pathways will decrease the study of languages other than English that is essential for students becoming educated twenty-­first-­century global citizens, • the senior colleges should have more than 12 general education credits in addition to the 30-­credit Common Core, • the senior colleges should not be required to have 12 general education credits in addition to the Common Core, • AAS degree courses shouldn’t all be accepted for transfer credit, • giving CUNY students more electives will just result in their taking more of the easy courses, and • any group working on a CUNY-­wide general education framework should include representatives chosen by faculty governance instead of being appointed by the Chancellery.

These were all arguments that I had heard before and dismissed for inadequate evidence or logic. Martin Burke, associate professor of history at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, representing the CUNY Association of Scholars and the New York Association of Scholars (affiliates of the National Association of Scholars), testified that

142  ■  Chapter 5 rather than propose solutions to the serious operational issues involved in student transfer, retention and graduation, the chancellery has chosen instead to solve them with the reform of general education policies on the respective campuses, instead of pursuing the expensive but effective path of hiring more counselors and proving often woefully inadequate academic support services and providing necessary IT resources, the chancellery is going to change the curriculum and in our opinion change it for the worst. . . . Both the New York Association and the CUNY Association of Scholars are extremely concerned. The reductions in required general education and graduation requirements will severely undermine academic standards and rigor at the senior colleges. We are concerned as well that shifting the general education burden on to the community colleges will overwhelm strained resources. We ask the Board of Trustees to at least defer if not vote down these radical dramatic proposals.

I wondered—­if the community colleges shouldn’t teach general education courses, or the major courses that I knew the senior college faculty wanted to teach the students after they transferred, then what should the community colleges teach? Electives that didn’t count towards students’ general education or lower-­level major requirements? How then were community college students to be prepared for upper-­level work when they got to the senior colleges? Sandra Clarkson, Hunter College professor of mathematics and statistics, and chair of the Hunter College Senate, spoke mostly about the concern that the Pathways general education framework would disadvantage the teaching of languages other than English, but she also echoed many previous faculty members’ comments that I had heard when she said, “We are concerned that the Board’s rush to vote in June and the totally unrealistic timetable of the reform will lead to many unintended and possibly negative consequences.” John Brenkman, distinguished professor of English at Baruch College and the Graduate Center, and chair of Baruch’s English Department, stated that changing the general education requirements to fix the transfer problems is a mismatch of a solution to a problem. In his view, because Baruch has the highest general education requirements at CUNY as well as the highest graduation rate, obviously the former doesn’t harm the latter. But, I would say again, are Baruch’s graduation rates—­then 63 percent after six years16—­as high as they could be? Baruch is the most selective of all CUNY colleges and so should have high graduation rates on that basis alone. The stream of anti-­Pathways speakers was interrupted by a note­worthy Pathways proponent: Lisa Beatha, director of CUNY course and transfer

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information, and the manager of TIPPS. She said that the problem with TIPPS is that it involves faculty judging courses to be nonequivalent. She also said that, during her career, she had reviewed over seven thousand transfer transcripts, and most of these students have encountered issues of academic inequity and issues where their course [work had] been totally disregarded. I am also here to speak to you about the national consensus about transfer evaluations. I have been to . . . the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers [AACRAO] and [they] do push for seamless pathways, publishing and promoting credible pathways, best practices for transfer and this particular pathway for CUNY endorses the national model. . . . We can also in the summers [if Pathways is approved] have more collaboration with the Board of Ed raising standards and creating academic pathways from high schools.

The testimony of Laird Bergad (read for him because he was out of the country), a distinguished professor of Latin American and Puerto Rican studies at Lehman College and the Graduate Center, and another Pathways supporter, stated: In an environment of shrinking resources and recurring crises change can often be perceived as threatening. . . . There is a very clear fear that by reducing the number of credits in Gen Ed courses some departmental course offerings may be threatened and this implies a danger to both the viability of departments themselves and untenured faculty lines as well. These are real issues and should not be ignored. Yet many of those who vehemently oppose the initiative are simply defending turf rather than considering what is in the best interest of the CUNY students across the university. . . . The attack on Vice Chancellor Logue by the Executive Committee of the Faculty Senate and its [vote] of no confidence is unfortunate. I question whether this genuinely reflects the general faculty sentiment or simply the views of a small number of faculty members on the executive committee who voted for this uncalled for censure. It [seems] to me that Vice Chancellor Logue initiated and led a very transparent all inclusive process of great complexity which has taken into account the views of the many CUNY constituent campuses and a diversity of faculty opinions. Leadership often means making difficult decisions in the face of strident opposition by some who are reluctant to embrace change.

Rosalind Carey, associate professor of philosophy at Lehman College, sought to counter some of the earlier pro-­Pathways testimony when she said: “I want to

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make an off the cuff comment about the frequent references I have heard about faculty caring about turf and worrying about things of that sort. I think you are misjudging the faculty when you make that sort of pronouncement. It is not that there aren’t concerns of that nature but the reason why faculty are sitting here and the reason why they’ve dragged themselves here and have been taking time away from their other work to sit here is because all of us care about teaching and we care about our students. That is the bottom line.” Now it was time for Distinguished Professor Paul Attewell’s testimony. He is a sociology and urban education faculty member at the Graduate Center. Much of Paul’s research concerns access and opportunity for students such as CUNY’s. He said: It haunts me that some of my colleagues in the faculty feel that this should have been left to faculty governance. Where the hell were they? [The hearing transcript doesn’t show it, perhaps because the microphone didn’t pick it up, but my memory is that at this point, Paul turned away from the lectern and the line of board members and members of the Chancellery sitting at the table in the front of the room, and instead faced the audience—­which consisted largely at that point of anti-­Pathways faculty—­and said, “Where have you been? Where have you been for forty years?”] It took an administration effort to bring this about. . . . I do not need to talk about how much effort has gone into creating a logical policy. This happens to be an area that I do research in. The new policy is totally consistent with best practices around the country. It is . . . similar to a policy recently ­adopted by the State University of New York. It is very similar to practices of many other states. This is not a revolutionary act that will destroy the quality of CUNY’s education. It is actually a very straight forward system to try and make sure that students do not suffer when they move from community colleges to four year colleges. It addresses the quality control of courses, which obviously is an important issue. It is going to make the transfer process clear and dependable for students. I expect that we will see improvements in transfer rates and in degree completion across our university when this has had a chance to function for a while.

Immediately following Paul was the testimony of Carl Grindley, an associate professor of English at Hostos Community College and the School of Professional Studies. His testimony included the following: “CUNY students exist in a state of vulnerability.  .  .  . To some of our students every extra credit hour represents a choice they would rather not have to make, a utility bill, clothing for a child, rent. . . . Our students have the right to be able to navigate higher

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education in as expedient a manner as possible. Let those who want to meander do so, but for the majority of our hundreds of thousands of students time is of the essence.” In contrast, Professor Duane Tananbaum of the History Department at Lehman College discussed, as part of his testimony, an anti-­Pathways resolution that had unanimously passed the Lehman College Senate at the beginning of April. He pointed out that, insofar as the Lehman Senate includes some student representatives, this demonstrates that not all students support Pathways. Then why, I wondered, were there no students at this hearing testifying against Pathways? A different angle on support for Pathways was provided by Demond Mullins, recipient of a CUNY undergraduate degree, a CUNY instructor and researcher, and a doctoral candidate in sociology at the Graduate Center (now a PhD recipient and an assistant professor of sociology at Indiana University of Pennsylvania), as well as being a former infantryman in Iraq:17 “CUNY student veterans . . . encounter significant disruptions and stresses both internal and external to CUNY. That makes these students particularly at risk of attrition. . . . CUNY student veterans who seek to transfer between colleges at CUNY have their progress further hindered by the university’s irrational approach to credit transfer and articulation.” Near the end of the sequence of speakers was Professor Michael Fabricant, treasurer of the PSC,18 Hunter College faculty member, and executive officer of the social welfare PhD program at the Graduate Center. Referring to an anti-­ Pathways resolution that had recently been passed by the PSC, he stated: “The [CAPPR] resolution on creating an efficient transfer system violates both the spirit and letter of Bylaw 8.13 and the principle of shared governance. And the [PSC] delegate assembly . . . calls on the Chancellor to enter into good faith discussions therefore with the University Faculty Senate leadership to reformulate the CAPPR resolution so that the University Faculty Senate’s governance role is properly structured into the university’s general education and transfer policy.” He meant what is known as Bylaw 8.10: “There shall be a university faculty senate, responsible, subject to the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights, and freedoms of the faculty, university level educational and instructional matters, and research and scholarly activities of university-­wide import”19 (italics added). After three and a half long hours, all of the speakers were done! There had been a total of 64, with 55 of them explicitly addressing Pathways (13 faculty

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against, including 1 distinguished professor; 8 faculty, including 4 distinguished professors, 6 administrators/staff, and 25 students in favor; and 3 faculty whose testimony was, in my opinion, a mixture of pro and con). The majority of the hearing’s speakers supported Pathways. There were 2 faculty and 5 students in favor who left written testimony without speaking, and 7 faculty opposed who left written testimony without speaking, all presumably because the hearing went on so long.

Aftermath Although the hearing itself was over, its consequences were not. Late that night Sandi sent an email out to all the faculty for whom she had addresses: People lined up outside for several hours in the hot sun awaiting the opportunity to sign in to speak but discovered that well over a dozen students had preceded them . . . . students . . . evidently were given priority to sign up—­which annoyed a number of faculty since they were informed that sign up began at 4 pm. . . . . As expected the students representing the University Student Senate, groups of disabled students, the LGBT student organization and a few individuals found nothing but merit in the CAPPR resolution. They recounted tales of funds unavailable from NYS VESED [she meant VESID], for instance, for disabled students, if they were expected to retake the same course.  .  .  . Moreover, the resolution asserts that there will be NO graduation requirements allowed and asserts that the large majors will have a common set of three entry courses. Faculty viewed this as an unwarranted intrusion into their professional training and responsibility. Resources for better advisement and improved IT were what faculty saw as crucial to smooth transfer. Several faculty addressed the likely cuts to adjunct employees resulting from the impending budget cuts, protesting that the services of long time, devoted part time faculty were being targeted.

Sandi was apparently under the impression that only two distinguished professors had spoken at the hearing in favor of Pathways (she seemed to have missed not only Robert E. (Buzz) Paaswell, whose statement was read for him, but also Elizabeth Nunez, who is a prominent fiction writer originally from Trinidad and founder of the National Black Writers Conference). Writing to both Laird Bergad and Paul Attewell on June 22, five days before the board meeting, Sandi said:

Models of Governance in June 2011  ■ 147 I wish you had bothered to get in touch before testifying as you did on June 7. You clearly have accepted the line from the Chancellery, particularly from Lexa Logue.  .  .  . You seem to believe that the faculty, represented by the University Faculty Senate, is an obdurate group of stand patters who care little about students and largely about their own comfortable life styles. The Executive Comm of the UFS is not a collection of hair brained, self deluding elitists but a representation of your 6500 colleagues whom you have insulted. We are elected—­not appointed. If you do not like what we represent, there is a simple, democratic way of changing things. . . . check the over 45 resolutions, protests, letters and statements from faculty and national organizations (Phi Beta Kappa, eg) that find the Lexa proposal dangerous to academic standards AND faculty authority over ­curriculum. . . . The UFS action came after SIX MONTHS of attempting to persuade her and the chancellor that there were BETTER WAYS to fix the problem of transfer. We were NOT trying, as you alleged, to protect turf which is the famous insult of the know nothing editorial boards of the [New York Daily] News and [New York] Post. You might want to check the company you are keeping. I am really insulted and disappointed in the position of two people who have distinguished careers and contributions.

Sandi addressed this email just to Laird and Paul. But she also blind-­copied the entire UFS Exec. One of them then wrote to Laird and Paul stating that they should have the right to express their points of view, declaring: “I applaud your willingness to speak out. . . . the Executive Committee . . . has rarely been unanimous about anything and we are only 8 people—­to think that all 6500 faculty are unanimous in their view is nothing short of ridiculous.” When Laird and Paul discovered not only that they had been castigated by Sandi for expressing their own views at the public hearing, but that that castigation had been blind-­ copied to others at the UFS, they were furious. “Don’t tell me off for speaking without notice, and do not twist what I said into unrecognizable gibberish,” said one. The other described her email as “ranting and raving. . . . I thought Stalinism died in the 1950s in most places. Absolutely disgraceful would be a mild description of her diatribe.” (Note that, just eight days earlier, six days before the public hearing, Sandi had emailed dozens of UFS representatives saying that the public hearing “makes a mockery of public hearings. It also makes it clear that no dissent is to be tolerated from ANY quarter.”) This wasn’t Sandi’s only communication on June 22. She also wrote a memo to the trustees, Matt, me, and two other vice chancellors entitled “Disgraceful

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Conduct of the Open Hearing at Hostos, June 7, 2011” (in her communications she repeatedly referred to the hearing as having occurred on June 7, but it was on June 20). This memo, which described the hearing as a “visible sham,” was two single-­spaced pages in length and stated, in part: Your own rules claim that witnesses who have signed up in advance are listed on the speaker’s roster in order of their position on line at 4:30 pm at the time of the hearing. These are a result of a successful law suit brought by faculty and others in the 1990s when Board hearings were held in a space so small that no one could enter and hear discussions. You violated the system deliberately on June 7, 2011 by having students who were present at an invited luncheon or reception which you organized at Hostos to sign up ahead of all those outside on line. This is shameful. It demonstrates the political game you have orchestrated—­playing off students against the faculty who try to teach them and editorializing in your house organs, the Daily Noise [New York Daily News] and the N. Y. Pest [New York Post] as my colleagues call them, about the selfish, self interested faculty. . . . June 7 was a day of broiling hot sun. . . . Faculty who stood in line from 3:15 on and were at the head of the line were placed on the list well after they should have been. The students were given priority (no surprise to any of us who are becoming accustomed to the slings and arrows of your insults) but your security features that day were unnecessary and cruel. Why did faculty have to stand in the street when there was a cool lobby inside? You privilege students with disabilities. How about the faculty with canes? Senior citizens? People with medical problems? . . . That this disrespect was deliberate is also sustained by the fact that, for the first time, I was forced through security, interrogated by guards, while a CUNY 80th St security person smiled and shrugged as this obvious insult was conducted.

A member of Matt’s senior staff responded to Sandi, and, after correcting her repeated references to June 7, stated that her email was “vituperative” and “based on false premises.” The reception for students just before the public hearing was organized by Allen Castañeda, with assistance from the USS, and everyone who wanted to speak got to do so. “I am very much concerned to hear that any faculty member—­or student or staff member—­was obliged to stand outside of the college to wait for the hearing, I will follow up on this information and take appropriate corrective action for the future, if warranted. Thank you for alerting us to this allegation and the concerns expressed to you.”  That same day one of the faculty who had spoken in favor of Pathways at the hearing wrote me in an email: “I could feel the cold stares of some members of

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the Faculty Senate pointed at my back, but I said what I believed and I hope it was helpful. I think the job of those of us who have reached a certain age is to speak the truth no matter the consequences. In the end, I believe it is the truth that will sustain us through difficult times.” On the 22nd, I met with Karen and another member of the UFS Exec, Emily Tai, an associate professor of history at Queensborough Community College, at their request, to talk about next steps on Pathways. There seemed to be recognition on the part of the UFS that Sandi and I could not work together productively on this matter. I appreciated the UFS Exec’s asking Karen and Emily to work with me. On the 24th, Sandi sent out another email about the hearing to her faculty list: Besides the systematic disrespect for faculty lined up in the sun and then marched through security at the Hostos public hearing of the Board, while students were feted first and then given priority on the speaker’s list, I am told that the USS resolution . . . supporting the transfer policy was handed out to students as they entered. The language as you will see by the attachment essentially mimics the wording of the official transfer resolution. Efforts to distribute the over 40 protests and proposals from faculty groups which have developed over the last few months—­in an attempt to mould a workable resolution—­seem to have disappeared into the files of the University Faculty Senate. We have reached a curious moment in higher education—­the voice of the students is to shape the curriculum (or at least the excuse of their mistreatment at our hands). The demonization of the faculty by some of our colleagues at the hearing as well as by student speakers is what Gramsci would have called “the dominant discourse.”

As far as I knew, the administration had nothing to do with the student reception or with distributing the student resolution; as far as I knew, the students did all that themselves. And the student speakers never criticized the faculty. Moreover, what had prevented the UFS from handing out to hearing attendees copies of the “40 protests and proposals”? That same day, by means of yet another email to her faculty list—­this one titled “AH HA!”—­Sandi forwarded an email from Chris Rosa, university assistant dean for student affairs, that he had written to the Division of Student Affairs staff. Chris’s email stated that Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Frank Sanchez was requesting that the staff attend the upcoming board meeting to show their support for Pathways. “For those who think the UFS is paranoic about who is now in control of curriculum, please read below,” said Sandi’s

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cover note. I did not understand how one staff member’s asking other staff to simply attend a hearing constituted evidence regarding who was in control of curriculum. The board meeting at which the full board passed the complete Pathways resolution was set for only seven days after the public hearing. We remained on a strict schedule to effect Pathways by September 2013 and therefore had to focus on all the many tasks to be done by then: establishing many committees—­ predominantly composed of faculty—­to work on various aspects of the general education and majors curricula, supporting faculty developing any new courses that were needed, facilitating the approval of those courses by university-­wide faculty committees, making changes in software to be consistent with Pathways, ensuring the availability of all information that the CUNY community would need about Pathways, etc. Questions we were not focusing on, though probably we should have been, were these: What will Sandi do next? What will the PSC do next? Is the goal worth the war?

CHAPTER 6

A Core Foundation ■■■■■

JULY 2011 THROUGH DECEMBER 2011

The Common Core, Part 1 The Common Core: the 30 Pathways general education credits that every new CUNY AA-­, AS-­, and bachelor’s-­degree student would need to take starting in September 2013 (bachelor’s-­degree students were to have an additional 6–­12 required general education credits). The June 2011 CUNY Board of Trustees resolution gave specific directions regarding how we were to construct the Common Core: Resolved, that the Chancellor, in consultation with the Council of Presidents, the University Faculty Senate, and the University Student Senate, will convene a Task Force of faculty, students, and academic administrators, with faculty members predominant, and charge it with recommending to the Chancellor a structure for the Common Core by December 1, 2011. The Task Force will develop the broad disciplinary or interdisciplinary areas constituting the Common Core for the University, as defined by learning outcomes. It will also identify the number of credits to be allocated to each such area. Within these guidelines, the Task Force may make more specific recommendations regarding individual associate-­and baccalaureate-­degree programs, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs. The Task Force will consist of a steering committee, including balanced representation from the college sectors, as well as a working committee, including representatives from all undergraduate colleges and all large-­enrollment disciplines. The steering committee will have the authority to establish subcommittees consisting of Task Force members and others in various fields and areas of expertise as needed.1

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Now that the June 2011 board meeting was over, we had just five months (including only three academic-­year months) to construct the Common Core general education curriculum, the sort of task that would usually take a college many years. This curriculum was to be devised not by the CUNY administration, but by a committee consisting largely of faculty. We in the central Office of Academic Affairs were going to need everything that any of us had ever learned about facilitating effective committees in order to get this task done well and on time. This was to be our main focus over the next five months. The first step in having an effective committee is having an effective committee chair. And there we struck gold: Michelle Anderson, dean of the CUNY School of Law. Tall, trim, and with long blond hair, she is a visual standout in any group of CUNY administrators. But what was important for the Pathways task was that she is enormously hardworking, brilliant, brave, and tough. A graduate of Yale Law School where she was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, she is renowned at CUNY for her dedication to public service law and for having raised the law school’s bar pass rate by several orders of magnitude despite a reputedly fractious faculty. Michelle also had an academic advantage as chair of the Common Core Task Force. Because she was associated with a unit of CUNY that has no undergraduates, and her discipline is one that is generally taught only at the graduate level, she brought to the committee no attachments to any particular undergraduate academic area, and thus would not be perceived as having any bias for one area or another. Her academic background was also a challenge, because it meant that she knew little about general education. But that was not a problem for Michelle. Once she agreed in spring 2011 to chair the task force, she embarked on learning everything anyone would need to know about general education to lead that committee. She even took the time to meet with Carol Geary Schneider, president of the AAC&U. Michelle particularly wanted to learn about the AAC&U’s many activities concerning general education, including their LEAP initiative. LEAP is “a national advocacy, campus action, and research initiative that champions the importance of a twenty-­first century liberal education,” and it includes a description of “Essential Learning Outcomes . . . a guiding vision and national benchmarks for college learning and liberal education in the 21st century.”2 Knowing her many talents as well as I did, Matt was quick to agree when I suggested that Michelle chair the task force. A more difficult assignment was choosing the committee members. Setting up a predominantly faculty committee that balances disciplines, college sectors

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(community and senior—­i.e., bachelor’s-­degree—­colleges), gender, and race/ ethnicity, and that includes only knowledgeable, well-­respected faculty who have tenure (so the committee’s actions can’t cost its members their jobs)—­is a task more difficult than any jigsaw puzzle. Further, we needed people who, though they might not be super supporters of Pathways, understood that the board had made its decision and that their job was to implement that decision as efficiently as possible. Forming the committee using an election process, as the UFS desired, seemed out of the question. There was no way that such a process could result in a committee that satisfied all of the essential criteria. Instead, we were determined to select the members as much as possible from among nominations originating outside the central office, and so we solicited these nominations widely. We began with the UFS, even though, just the previous month, they had said that they would proceed with a vote of no confidence in me unless we agreed to let them provide all the names for the Pathways committees. The primary purpose of my meeting with Sandi on June 14 was to make a formal request for nominations for the Common Core Steering Committee. But that night she wrote to the UFS Executive Committee (UFS Exec), in bold font: “My question to you is: Should we propose names of faculty for this Steering Committee? Should we ‘collaborate?’ ” So I wrote to the UFS Exec myself, without referring to Sandi’s email, simply explaining that we were asking the UFS, before anyone else, for “a list of about 12 names of faculty.” In a June 28 meeting with two UFS Executive Committee members, and in a July 7 email to the entire UFS Exec, I reiterated that, were we to get a list of nominations from them, we would do our best to include more than one or two of the nominees on the Steering Committee (the usual past practice when we formed university-­wide committees). I also said that we would be willing to consult with the UFS about everyone whom we wanted to appoint, prior to the finalizing of any appointments. We also solicited nominations from all the presidents, all the chief academic officers (provosts), and all the functioning Discipline Councils (committees composed of all of the colleges’ department chairs in a particular discipline). Further, Matt sent an email to every member of the CUNY community asking them for nominations, including self-­nominations. I never received even one nomination from the UFS. In her public communications Sandi sometimes said that the UFS would never give us any nominations (for a long list of reasons), and then at other times she implied that we

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had not chosen any of the UFS nominations. For example, in the September 20, 2011, minutes of the UFS Plenary meeting, Sandi first said, “A couple of faculty did not quite understand the position that the UFS had taken, especially the Executive Committee apparently not participating in the invitation from the Office of Academic Affairs to submit names for the various Pathways committees.” Then somewhat later in the meeting she said: “The Vice Chancellor [Logue] did precisely what several of us said in public she would do, she was not going to listen to recommendations from us, our Gen Ed Committee, but she picked 10 faculty from CUNY who came recommended by Provosts or Presidents, and several of whom had testified at a raucous public hearing in favor of her proposal. They were the only faculty that did that.”3 (There were actually 11 faculty on the Steering Committee, 4 of whom had testified in favor of Pathways at the public hearing; 4 additional faculty who had testified in favor were not members of the Steering Committee.) The nomination process was not always a smooth one. By far the greatest number of nominations we received was from the provosts. We suspected that in cases in which the provost was not enthusiastic about Pathways, and there were a couple such cases, the people nominated by those provosts would be likely to be disruptive, rather than productive, members of the committees. However, for the overall task force we needed faculty from every college, and often the only nominations we got were from the provost of that college, so we had no choice but to choose from among that provost’s nominations. In addition, as we were to discover later in the many months of work still ahead of us to effect Pathways, a few people deliberately sought membership on the Pathways committees because they thought it would give them an opportunity to undo, or reshape, or publicly criticize, Pathways. The Steering Committee was designed to be relatively small to facilitate the scheduling of its meetings and the attainment of consensus. However, it had to be large enough to allow for diversity among the members, including of their opinions. Yet we didn’t want the Steering Committee to have one faculty member from each college because then the faculty could feel that they were representing their colleges rather than the entire university. The final composition of the Steering Committee consisted of 16 total members including the 11 faculty (with three of the faculty being distinguished professors and a fourth the executive officer of a doctoral program). The committee also included 2 undergraduates (Elizabeth Beck and Steven Rodriguez, both of whom had testified in favor of Pathways) and 3 administrators (Michelle,

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plus a provost and a dean who were both particularly experienced in the area of general education). Of the 19 undergraduate colleges, 12 had one of their faculty, students, or administrators on the committee. We also appointed three special advisors to the Steering Committee in order to take advantage of their particular skills: AnnaMarie Bianco, university registrar; Evangelos Gizis, former interim president of three very different CUNY colleges and former provost of a fourth; and Robert (Bob) Ptachik, senior university dean for the executive office and enrollment (in charge of all university enrollment management including admissions, and AnnaMarie’s supervisor). The other part of the task force (the “Working Committee”) consisted of 36 additional faculty with every college represented except the new community college (which had no tenured faculty at that time), for a total of 47 faculty in the whole task force; plus another provost (from the new community college), for a total of 4 administrators on the whole task force; and 2 more undergraduate students, for a total of 4.4 One of the responsibilities of all these committee members was to serve as additional channels of communication between the task force and the colleges. All of the faculty (but none of the staff) who served on these, and future, Pathways committees received stipends. This was necessary because at least some of their work, which was both time-­consuming and difficult, had to be done during the summer, or above and beyond their usual duties during the academic year. According to the faculty collective bargaining agreement (the faculty contract), the summer is the period of annual leave (i.e., vacation time) for the faculty.5 During that period faculty cannot be required (some would say cannot even be asked) to do work without extra payment. For example, UFS leaders who do UFS-­related work in the summer receive stipends for that work, and they also receive reassigned time (teaching-­load decreases) for the UFS-­related work that they do during the academic year (we chose to pay the Pathways committee members for their additional academic year work, rather than giving them reassigned time, because we had a CUNY-­wide initiative to try to increase teaching by full-­time faculty). To have not paid the faculty working on Pathways would have been in violation of the contract, if anyone had even been willing to do the work without pay. Identifying, vetting, inviting, informing, scheduling, and paying all these people was a huge logistical challenge. But we had both the Steering and Working Committees set by the end of that summer (2011).6 We had also decided which central office staff would provide primary support to these groups.

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Attending each meeting of the Steering Committee were Erin Croke (university academic affairs director), David Crook (university dean of institutional research and assessment), and Erika Dreifus (the central Office of Academic Affairs’ director of communications). Julia Wrigley, associate university provost, was of course also closely involved. Erika’s job was to keep minutes, David’s to provide any data that the committee needed, and Erin and Julia were to take care of everything else. Very conscious of the importance of having the committee, not the central administration, determine the Common Core curriculum, I sternly warned the central office people sitting in on the meetings not to voice their opinions or interfere in any way. This instruction backfired when, after the first meeting of the Steering Committee, Michelle (rightly) complained that the staff in the meeting hadn’t spoken up to say that they would take care of various matters or inquiries that arose during the meeting; the staff had sat totally silent throughout the meeting. I spoke with the staff again, explaining the problem I had caused, and all functioned well after that. The central office staff were diligent and efficient in obtaining all of the pieces of information that the committees wanted, preparing handouts, constructing PowerPoints for Michelle’s use, etc. And they were supported by additional, equally effective, office staff: my Executive Assistant, Andrea Baker; my Executive Secretary, Dominique DiTommaso; my Secretary, Jeanette Rodriguez; and many others who worked in my office. And I cannot fail to mention Dave Fields, senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor. Dave had worked closely with Michelle since she began as law school dean in 2006, and he continued to work with her in her role as chair of the task force. His support was indispensable. Using his parliamentary procedure expertise, Dave was able to help construct operating principles for the committees and to help shape actionable resolutions on which the committees could vote. He and Michelle strategized about what needed to be done in each meeting in order to reach the goal of having complete recommendations for Matt by December 1, as the Board of Trustees resolution required. And Dave was always calm with a twinkle in his eye, which helped the rest of us not to panic when we worried that the job would not be done in time. Sandi learned in July that Associate Professor Katherine (Kay) Conway, a business faculty member at Borough of Manhattan Community College and a member of the UFS Exec, was to be on the Steering Committee. Sandi then stated that Kay’s background in business did not qualify her to serve on the Steering Committee. In our opinion, given that business is the largest major at CUNY, it

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was important for the task force’s work to have someone on the task force’s Steering Committee whose discipline’s courses would most frequently enroll students with the skills and knowledge acquired in the Pathways Common Core. And appointing Kay had additional advantages. First, we put a premium on people who seemed likely to take the right actions for students even if that incurred the anger of someone like Sandi, and Kay is such a person. In addition, Kay was a duly elected representative of the faculty to the UFS and a member of its Executive Committee. So was, it turned out, another member of the Steering Committee: Kingsborough Community College Philosophy Professor Michael Barnhart. Thus we were able to place two people with strong UFS connections on the Steering Committee. Though neither Sandi nor the UFS as a whole had nominated these two people (nor had they nominated anyone else), we could truthfully say that there were two UFS representatives on the Steering Committee. We did not think that we were doing Kay or Michael any favors by asking them to serve on the Steering Committee. Such service was certainly not a reward. It was going to be an enormous amount of extra work, and there would undoubtedly be many people unhappy with the committee’s recommendations, no matter what they were. Knowing how Sandi had behaved regarding the pro-­Pathways faculty speakers at the public hearing, and regarding Kay’s selection for the Steering Committee, and how other anti-­Pathways people might behave toward faculty publicly identified as supporting, or at least participating in, Pathways, we decided to not release the names of the people on the task force until the last possible minute, which was the first date that the two parts of the task force (the Steering Committee and the Working Committee) met: August 19 for the Steering Committee and August 26 for the Working Committee. On those dates we announced the composition of the respective committees, continuing to fulfill our promise to be transparent about the entire Pathways process.

Other Pathways Business Although our main focus was on doing everything needed to develop a Common Core framework, there was plenty of activity concerning other aspects of establishing Pathways. Early on I realized that we needed to make sure that the various regulatory bodies that have authority over CUNY were informed about what was going on

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with Pathways. Toward that end, I made sure to brief Elizabeth Sibolski, president of the Middle States Commission on Higher Education (CUNY’s major accreditor) and John King (New York State’s education commissioner, and later the US acting secretary of education) about Pathways in the summer and fall of 2011. Both seemed understanding about what we were doing and why. Perhaps as a result of these briefings, we never at any point heard concerns expressed by either of them about the Pathways Project, no matter how much negative publicity the project received. Years later I was still discovering the huge amount of misinformation that had been widely spread by some faculty leaders concerning Pathways. Useful examples involve more of what was said at the UFS Plenary session of September 20, 2011.7 We were busy doing what needed to be done for Pathways and other university business and so did not seek out these minutes at the time. In fact, I am not sure that we were even aware of their existence and the large amount of information that they contained (the UFS minutes were really transcripts of what was said, rather than being traditional summary minutes). But that was perhaps a good thing. If I had known some of the things that were said, my emotional reactions might have interfered with my ability to do the best I could for Pathways and CUNY. September 20, 2011, was the first full meeting of the UFS for the academic year of 2011–­2012, and the first since the board had approved the Pathways resolution. In attendance were 86 UFS faculty representatives as well as at least 9 other faculty (of whom 3 were leaders of the CUNY faculty collective bargaining unit, the PSC). It was a full house. Not everything in the minutes was problematic. It was good to see that multiple people referred to the Pathways website—­remarking on its wealth of information, and encouraging everyone to read that information. The Plenary attendees were told that the Common Core committee meeting agendas and minutes were posted there. They were also told that there would be a two-­week window to respond to the draft Common Core, and so they should schedule their college meetings in coordination with that window, in order to be prepared to provide feedback on the draft. This was all good information for the faculty to have, but it occupied only a small part of the nineteen single-­spaced pages of minutes. The minutes begin: “In case you are new here, I am Sandi Cooper, the Chair of the Faculty Senate. I have one more year to my term. At any point if there is a candidate to oust me, I shall welcome his or her overture!” Without hearing the

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tone of Sandi’s words, it is hard to know exactly what she meant by them. But whatever the meaning, they seem inappropriate for a leader who is opening a large meeting at which serious subjects are to be discussed. Sandi’s subsequent statements at the meeting contained much distorted or incorrect information, and sometimes seemed deliberately designed to pit various constituencies of the university against others. For example, with regard to the central administration she said: It appears that [the administration’s] definition [of shared governance] is to draw up documents [about Pathways], largely made up by people on their staff and a handful of appointed faculty they pick, and then give them to us for comment. My experience in the past was that we were invited in from the beginning to help write those documents, and to provide input that would make those documents usable on the campuses, and not merely efforts at power plays. . . . We did expect that we would have an immediate involvement in shaping of language, not merely . . . heard and then trivialized and discarded.

Our view was that we had written the Pathways resolution ourselves after multiple invitations to the UFS to participate in solving the problems with us, but their responses were to deny the problems, to say that the problems were due to students’ own behaviors, to say that we should study the problem for many more months or years, or to suggest vague and/or completely unworkable solutions. Sandi also stated, regarding the central administration: “It’s important that the faculty, particularly in the community colleges, stop believing that the Senate is out to pillory them. That really enraged me because it was a position that was forced deliberately by two vice chancellors. I heard them. I thought it was the most unprofessional behavior I could imagine.” Other than this statement in the Plenary minutes, I never heard of anyone in the central administration telling anyone that the UFS had negative intentions toward them. With regard to the presidents, Sandi expressed this view: “Presidents [have been made] into deans in a number of cases. They have lost a huge amount of their independence and are evaluated on the basis of a chart, which is like an annual report card your fourth grader used to bring home. The only thing that’s not there that the fourth grader had was ‘works and plays well with others.’ ” Picking up on Sandi’s theme, the vice chair of the UFS, Professor Terrence Martell, said: “The presidents are under inordinate pressure to produce this [Pathways]. It is truly inordinate and extraordinary. I’ve never witnessed anything like this in my life.” No president wants to be treated by his/her supervisor as a

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dean, or to be perceived as being treated as such. Did we have a chart for evaluating the presidents? In a sense, yes, though it concerned college, not president, performance. The presidents also underwent an annual qualitative evaluation including a meeting with the chancellor. I had supervised all of these evaluations since 2006. The chart did include an item for working and playing well with others, but it was phrased, “Colleges will achieve and maintain high l­evels of program cooperation with other CUNY colleges,” an important criterion in our continuous efforts to establish a well-­functioning, integrated university, such as by means of Pathways. Regarding LEAP, the national initiative that had been inspiring general education reform at many CUNY colleges and around the country, Sandi said that LEAP “doesn’t require that you have to know anything in particular as long as you can prove an ‘outcome’ of some kind.” LEAP is explicitly concerned with learning outcomes, and in order to demonstrate that a student has achieved a LEAP outcome, you have to demonstrate that the student has learned (i.e., knows) something. Sandi also talked at the Plenary about the Bologna Process, a European project to align higher education across various European countries: “Never was the Bologna Process concerned with learning outcomes.” In fact, the Bologna Process was founded on the use of outcomes. An excellent paper about it by Clifford Adelman makes this point: “Dozens of conferences [concerning the Bologna Process] have included  .  .  . most notably, learning outcomes in the context of the disciplines.”8 And she was even wrong about CUNY’s structure: “CUNY is the only university in the country that includes both senior and community colleges.” As Sandi certainly knew, our sibling New York State public system, the State University of New York (SUNY), also comprises both community and senior colleges. What hope did we ever have of getting everyone to work together on Pathways under a common framework of understanding when Sandi, as the leader of the entire faculty, was conducting meetings of close to one hundred college faculty leaders, making statements of this sort? Curiously, however, in these same minutes, both Sandi and the PSC President, Professor Barbara Bowen, correctly stated that the CUNY Bylaws give the faculty authority over the curriculum and other academic matters “subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the Board.” But both of them also said that the administration’s forming the Pathways committees was a violation of a past legal settlement, a statement that was incorrect (see chapter 11 on Pathways

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legal matters). It is hard for me to understand how one person, never mind two, could make both of those statements. The minutes show that two Plenary attendees had the same difficulty and spoke up about it, saying that perhaps the administration was within its rights to do what it was doing. In response, Barbara informed the meeting attendees that the PSC had decided to file a lawsuit because of the alleged legal violation. A faculty member pointed out: “It seems like we are going to be spending a lot of money doing that, and it’s possible we might not win. Then we wind up worse off than we are now.” Barbara said that the PSC had discussed filing the lawsuit for a long time before they made the decision, and “It’s your dues money at work.” As an explanation of the PSC’s involvement in the Pathways dispute, she said: “If we had a full complement of full-­time faculty it would be a lot harder to make these inroads against faculty governance. I think it’s worth bearing in mind that there is a connection between the erosion of the workforce, which some of us might think that’s a labor issue and doesn’t belong here, and the governance issue. They are directly connected so when we fight for one we are fighting for the other.” Barbara was justifying the involvement of the PSC in this curricular matter by conflating Pathways issues with issues regarding the increased percentage of teaching by part-­time, as opposed to full-­time, faculty, a connection that my brain was unable to make. I have been told that, for much of CUNY history, the UFS and the PSC were at odds with each other. Their spheres of influence and responsibility differed, and they also did not seem to respect each other. However, Pathways had brought them together, with both stating that the Pathways process had not respected the principles of shared governance. Professor Michael (Mike) Fabricant, one of the PSC officers who accompanied Barbara to the Plenary, stated that the administration cares about the faculty only in the administration’s desire to avoid the “public embarrassment that a united faculty could produce.” Perhaps most astonishing to me when I first read these minutes, years after the meeting had occurred, was what Sandi said about the attempted vote of no confidence in me. She told attendees that available in the rear of the room were copies of the no-­confidence resolution, which was “passed by the Executive Committee of the UFS on May 24.” We chose to do this . . . after we became exhausted in efforts to modify the proposal so that it would conform with faculty governance. Normally a resolution

162  ■  Chapter 6 that passes the Executive Committee is presented to the plenary for a vote. I am presenting it at the moment for information. I ask you to read it, and think about it, and we’ll come back if there is any interest next meeting and discuss it. Why this individual and not the whole Board and the Chancellor? Bluntly, this proposal is entirely the work of one person and her office. The Chancellor authorized it to be done, and . . . this is a Board of Trustees that has entirely handed over its responsibility to the Chancellor. They don’t do anything but vote what is proposed to them. . . . But from our point of view, the most important individual in 80th Street is the Academic Affairs Vice Chancellor and her office. . . . I have yet to meet anyone in that office who has ever taught English I or Math I or History anything or any intro course.

(At the very least, Julia and I, as well as one of the university deans, Karrin Wilks, had all taught such courses.) It seems that, according to Sandi, despite the presidents having been turned into deans who report to the chancellor, and despite the presidents being under pressure that could originate only with Matt, and despite Matt’s countless speeches and emails to the entire faculty, Pathways was all my doing. It was soon after this Plenary, on October 2, that Sandi, in one of her many messages to the faculty about Pathways, said, “We have moved into Alice in Wonderland in CUNY.” For once I agreed with her.

The Common Core, Part 2 The bits that I was hearing from the staff sitting in on the Steering Committee meetings indicated that the committee was making progress, but it wasn’t clear to me where it was going. From what I could tell, the committee members were discussing (arguing?) at length about what students should be required to do. One issue had to do with mathematics. There was a mathematics professor on the committee (Edward Grossman from City College), someone who was well known to, and respected by, many of the members of the Mathematics Discipline Council. Ed had first come to my attention when he turned in a superb proposal for a research grant on the learning of mathematics that I had funded in my early years as the CUNY system’s chief academic officer. He under­ stood perfectly how to collect and use evidence to improve student success. I knew that Ed was under pressure from some members of the Mathematics

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Discipline Council to allow only traditional mathematics courses (such as college algebra, precalculus, and calculus), and not quantitative reasoning or statistics courses, in the Common Core. I wasn’t sure where Ed, or the rest of the committee, stood on this issue. Up until the last possible minute, the committee didn’t seem to be in agreement about all kinds of matters. However, it was important for me to stay out of the committee’s business; the committee needed to do its work without administrator influence. So I tried not even to ask what was going on in the meetings, waiting for the committee’s public statements just like everyone else. Michelle and the rest of the committee were conscious of some faculty members’ complaints that the CUNY community was going to have only a two-­week window to comment on the draft Common Core structure before the task force revised it and recommended a final version to the chancellor. So she and the committee did whatever they could to speed up their part of the process and thus to lengthen the two-­week comment period. One action they took was to release the draft Common Core structure, without the draft learning outcomes, on which they were still working, on October 19, four weeks before comments were due back from the community. Then they released the accompanying draft learning outcomes on October 31, sixteen days before comments were due.9 The draft Common Core structure included 7 credits of English composition (presumably one 4-­credit and one 3-­credit course), 4 credits of mathematical and quantitative reasoning, 4 credits of life and physical sciences, and 5 3-­credit liberal arts courses. Many responses to various parts of these drafts started to come in from individual faculty, faculty groups, and administrators. Mostly the comments concerned what was disliked, and not what was liked, which may have been evidence of a flaw in the feedback procedure—­colleges may have only felt obligated to say what they didn’t like, resulting in the particular criticisms of a few colleges outweighing the satisfaction of more colleges concerning the same aspects of the draft. Surprisingly, more than one college predicted that they would have difficulty with the 4-­credit science requirement. Similar to many non-­CUNY colleges and universities, these CUNY colleges did not currently require their students to take a traditional wet-­lab-­with-­lecture science course, and they were concerned that, if the new Common Core required their doing so, their laboratory facilities would be overloaded and inadequate to the task. The committee debated this information long and hard, as well as information about the other 4-­credit courses in the draft (English and mathematics).

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To facilitate these debates, my office obtained information on all existing introductory courses in these disciplines, as well as on similar courses at other universities. The information showed that English and mathematics courses were mostly 3-­credit offerings at other universities. At CUNY there was a lot of variation regarding whether introductory-­level, general education courses in English and mathematics carried 3 or 4 credits. In the case of English, a slight majority were 3-­credit courses. Many of the courses at CUNY’s College of Staten Island carried 4 credits. But the other 18 undergraduate colleges were not structured this way. The Steering Committee wanted to create a Common Core structure that minimally disrupted what the colleges were already offering. But no matter what they did, multiple colleges and departments would have to change their courses in order to construct a truly common core. Everyone in my office, as well as the Steering Committee members, realized that the number of credits had to be the same for every college for each category of the Common Core. The credits could vary between categories (as was the case for the draft Common Core), but not across colleges for a particular category. One reason was the requirement that all the credits add up to 30—­no more and no less. A college could have had 1 more credit in a category than did other colleges, but then such a college would need to have had 1 credit fewer somewhere else, and every other college would need to have accepted that lower-­credit course for complete category credit. This would have been problematic given the extensive learning outcomes being developed by the task force, and given the suspicion—­repeatedly expressed to me by some faculty—­regarding the quality of other colleges’ courses. To transfer easily and fit together into one overall structure, the pieces of the Common Core had to not vary across colleges, though individual pieces of the Common Core could be relatively large or small.

Other Pathways Business We were focused on the construction of a Common Core, but another extremely important part of the curriculum, for both transfer and nontransfer students, is the major. The board’s Pathways resolution called on the central administration to establish additional faculty committees that would identify the first three to six courses for each of the majors in which the most students transferred. These courses could be actual courses for those majors, or courses that were

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prerequisites for courses in those majors. Every college that had that major was then supposed to offer those courses, which were to be aligned across CUNY in terms of learning outcomes, so that students would be able to transfer those courses seamlessly between any two colleges that offered that major. Only the beginning parts of a major had to be aligned. The idea was that a student should be able to begin a major at one college and finish it at another college without losing any major credits. This plan would allow colleges to diverge significantly in terms of the latter part of a major, a point at which fewer students transfer, and would give colleges more independence. According to the board resolution, courses for the first majors to enter this process did not have to be identified until May 1, 2012, so we had more time for this task than we did for constructing a Common Core structure. But working on the majors was still a complicated process. We would be dealing with multiple groups of faculty, each of which was likely to include faculty representing departments that did not want to change anything that they were doing. Once again we were fortunate to have an excellent identified leader for this part of effecting Pathways: William Kelly, president of the Graduate Center. As president of the Graduate Center, which focuses on PhD programs, Bill, similar to Michelle, had the advantage of being unlikely to be perceived as favoring one undergraduate college’s department over another’s. From Matt’s perspective, adding to Bill’s attractiveness for this role was the fact that, for many years, Matt had been extremely impressed by Bill’s research expertise (eighteenth-­and nineteenth-­century American literature), and had enjoyed his commentary in the book club of which they were both members. Matt saw Bill as an outstanding academic and scholar. Then, too, Bill had helped Matt effect many of the changes Matt wanted in CUNY’s structure as it pertained to the Graduate Center. Julia also knew Bill well and admired him, having worked as his interim provost prior to her beginning work as the associate university provost. For all these reasons Bill was the obvious choice to lead the majors part of Pathways. Next we had to decide which majors would first undergo this process. For relevant data I turned, as usual, to David and his office of dedicated analysts. They were able to give me lists showing precisely how many students had transferred from each college in each major, and how many students had transferred to each college in a particular major. I then identified the majors that had the most transfer students. We would form a committee of faculty to work on each of those majors.

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Next we had to identify members for each committee. To do that I set another cutoff—­colleges that had more than the specified number of transfers in or transfers out in a certain major would each get one faculty member on the committee for that major. (Of course, all colleges would have the opportunity to comment on any draft recommendations made by any of these committees.) As with the two committees making up the Common Core Task Force (the Steering and Working Committees), each member of these committees had to be tenured and highly respected. And we again cast a wide net for nominations, including specifically asking the UFS Exec and also the Discipline Councils for nominations, as well as sending a message to every member of the CUNY community. Once again, the UFS gave us no nominations. But, fortunately, other sources were forthcoming with sufficient names to enable us to form the committees. The first committees that we set up were for the majors in biology, business (a combination of three business majors), criminal justice, English, nursing, teacher education, and psychology. Depending on the number of colleges involved, the number of faculty members constituting each committee varied from a handful to a couple dozen. We picked the members and the chair for each committee from among the nominations that we received. The committees consisted exclusively of faculty, but my staff provided significant support, ranging from scheduling meeting rooms to creating elaborate data tables in response to committee requests. Bill and I held a kickoff meeting on October 28th for all of these committees combined, and then they were pretty much left to do their work on their own. Bill and I interacted with the committees when there were deadlines or when particular problems arose (such as an apparent inability to agree about a particular part of a major), but the attention of those of us in my office was primarily on the Common Core and the swirling Pathways controversy, and Bill’s was on the Graduate Center. Fortunately, our focus elsewhere did not seem to prevent these committees from getting their jobs done, though the committees took longer than they were supposed to. As the 2011 fall semester progressed, the negative letters, emails, resolutions, and petitions about Pathways continued. Three letters from outside CUNY that stood out were those from the Spanish consul for cultural affairs in New York, the consul general of Italy in New York, and the American Association of Teachers of German. All three letters stated that Pathways would harm the teaching of languages other than English (particularly Spanish, Italian, and German) in the United States.

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What was behind all this was that, up until Pathways, some colleges had been requiring all their students to study a language other than English (LOTE) as part of their general education curriculum, or as an additional “graduation requirement.” The board’s Pathways resolution said that anything required of all students was general education and had to fit within the general education credit limits specified in the resolution (42 credits maximum for bachelor’s-­degree students). Given that most of the bachelor’s-­degree colleges were, pre-­Pathways, requiring more than 42 credits of general education, and that some of these colleges had additional “graduation requirements,” then, as Sandi had said at the September 2011 UFS Plenary, “When you’re pushed into 42, somebody will have to go.”10 And the LOTE faculty were certain that requirements to study LOTEs were hugely at risk. I had explained over and over that Pathways did not prevent a college from requiring a LOTE; a senior college could make LOTE courses a required part of general education, and any college could require all its students to take a LOTE by putting only language courses into one of the categories of the Common Core. However, the LOTE and other faculty all knew, as did I, that the LOTE departments were not powerful ones. It would be hard to obtain non-­ LOTE faculty support for requiring the study of LOTEs over other disciplines in the Common Core, particularly given that English is not the first language of 45 percent of CUNY undergraduates11 (see also the discussion of Julia’s and my visit to the World Languages Discipline Council in chapter 3). The November 15 letter from the consul general of Italy in New York, for example, which was addressed to Matt and Benno Schmidt, chair of the board, and copied to Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, stated that “the new ‘Pathways to Degree Completion’ eliminates most of the strong course requirements for degrees in the humanities and, primarily, all foreign-­ language requirements.” As usual, I prepared a response, explaining that the board resolution specified only the total number of credits of the Core Curriculum, that college faculty would be deciding all of the content of that curriculum, and that the central office strongly valued the teaching of languages other than English. Again, as usual, there was no response to my letter. By now multiple negative articles about Pathways were appearing in the Clarion (the PSC’s newspaper) and the Senate Digest (the UFS’s newsletter).12 We were trying to counter the anti-­Pathways media coverage with our own positive messages. We had a positive piece on Pathways in CUNY’s newsletter called CUNY Matters (for a full list of Pathways media coverage, see http://​www​.awlogue​.com13), and Matt sent out multiple CUNY Newswire emails to the entire community.

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The anti-­Pathways petitions also continued. One was started by some Hunter College students in October who had heard (incorrectly) that Pathways would decrease the quality of their education. The petition contained confusing, unclear, misinformation such as this: “Why would you invest so much money to study math if you’re not good at it or because math teachers are in high demand? This change of curriculum [Pathways] practically forces students to study within one of these fields.” Sandi sent a copy of this petition to her faculty email list. In November a national petition against Pathways was started on change​.org titled “New York Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Michael Bloomberg: Stand against the dumbing-­down of CUNY’s liberal arts colleges.”14 Ultimately this petition collected 980 names. But the point it was trying to make was incomprehensible to me. If students were still taking the same 120 credits (for a bachelor’s degree) taught by the same faculty as pre-­Pathways; and the courses were all created and graded by the same faculty as pre-­Pathways; and the general education courses were now reviewed, not only by the same faculty as before but by an additional set of university-­wide faculty chosen specifically for that purpose; and if all those courses now had explicit learning outcomes, something required or recommended by all major accreditors and higher education regulators; and if all the Common Core courses were now required to involve communication skills and critical thinking (not the case previously)—­ then how exactly was this a dumbing down? Because students would have more choice in which courses they took? Because one course might have 3 credits instead of 4, even though the 1-­credit difference would be made up somewhere else? It didn’t make any sense to me at all. It sounded as if, at least in some faculty’s eyes, the best curriculum was simply exactly what was already in existence. But given that each of the nineteen colleges had a somewhat different general education curriculum, how could each one be the best? Some of the pro-­Pathways students started their own petition. However, without using inflammatory language such as was used in the anti-­Pathways petition, and given that the Pathways project had been approved by the trustees and seemed to be progressing, plus the fact that all names were verified students and all signature-­pressuring techniques were forbidden, the petition obtained only about five hundred signatures. A particularly concerning letter was one from the Executive Director of the MLA, Rosemary Feal. The MLA has over twenty-­six thousand members who are primarily faculty in the areas of English, LOTEs, and comparative literature.

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It is one of the largest professional associations for faculty in the world, and its gargantuan annual national convention is legendary, with attendance numbering over seven thousand people. Rosemary wrote to Sandi, noting that she was responding to a letter from Sandi, and then on December 3 Sandi sent Rosemary’s letter to Sandi’s faculty list. Rosemary’s letter began: “We have just learned to our great dismay that the City University of New York is proposing a common core curriculum that would make it optional for students to study a language other than English and that would allow them, under that option, to do so for one semester only. . . . The study of a nonnative language is a cumulative process of learning. One semester is thus woefully inadequate.” In this case I decided to take a direct approach and so arranged a call with Rosemary. I explained to her that the colleges varied in their language requirements pre-­Pathways (some had none), and that there would be several ways in which the colleges could still require LOTEs after Pathways was established. She seemed to listen and understand, and she told me that if I would write to her, she would post my letter on the MLA website for everyone to see. I wrote the letter she had suggested, saying, “It is a pleasure to . . . explain how the City University of New York . . . will be supporting the teaching of languages other than English as part of our new general education requirements.” However, in the months following, despite my best efforts, I was unable to find my letter on the MLA website. Possibly most concerning of all the negative communications and information that we received that semester was the item described in the UFS Plenary minutes for December 2011: “The Chair and PSC President Barbara Bowen had written to the AAUP asking it to investigate the legitimacy of how the University conducted the whole Pathways Process.”15 The AAUP is one of the largest faculty unions (collective bargaining agents) and professional associations. An essential part of their mission is to “advance academic freedom and shared governance,”16 and the higher education press regularly carries stories reporting on the AAUP’s decisions to investigate a college or university for alleged violations of academic freedom and shared governance, and then to put the investigated institution on the AAUP’s list of censured institutions. Many, probably most, administrators do not put any stock in this list, but being on it can raise questions about an institution, and rarely does an institution push back strongly against the AAUP censuring process.17 When we heard that Sandi and Barbara had written to the AAUP, we assumed that it was only a matter of time before we would be investigated by that organization.

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Those of us in the central Office of Academic Affairs had thought that when the trustees passed the Pathways resolution, the negative comments would die down. This belief was a symptom of our overall difficulty in understanding or predicting the full scope of the negative faculty reactions. I believe that this difficulty was due to our deep conviction that we were doing something truly beneficial for students and CUNY. That conviction may have blinded us to what was going on, or at least impaired our vision. We weren’t fully aware of the degree to which some faculty were calling for continued forms of protest. At the September 20, 2011, Plenary meeting of the UFS, one of the PSC officers who was there, Mike, had said to the attendees, “Let’s start with . . . letters, petitions, speaking with a voice about this question of Pathways, Gen Ed, and how a cross section of faculty are opposed to it and why.”18 Then too, all of us in my office were insufficiently skilled in the art of major academic warfare. We never would have predicted that Phi Beta Kappa, the Italian consul general’s office, the MLA, and the AAUP would be brought into our family fight. Yet I still believed in every cell of my body that what we were doing was essential for the students. It was all quite dismaying and disheartening. There seemed no end to the negative reactions that we were receiving. We always seemed to be reacting, and to be on the defensive, instead of leading and being proactive. Erika’s constant updating of the Pathways website and our continual presentations, meetings, and email blasts about the project’s progress seemed woefully inadequate to ensure that the community had correct information. Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the board, and I were always talking about how to counteract the negative media attacks. At one such meeting in the fall of 2011, I voiced all kinds of ideas, each of which Jay rejected. Finally, I proposed a brochure explaining and promoting Pathways. That idea Jay liked. He immediately started thinking about how to make it effective, and we worked on it whenever we could. But it would take months to complete.

Interactions with Sandi about Facts You would think that the large amounts of non-­Pathways work would have taken our attention off of Pathways and Sandi. For example, that fall I helped facilitate a book reading by the acclaimed author Margaret Atwood at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, revised a grant proposal for an experiment

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concerning mathematics remediation, and helped shepherd through board approval several new degrees including a BS in mathematics education at New York City College of Technology, an AS in police science at Hostos Community College, and an AA in communication studies at Borough of Manhattan Community College. There was a great deal of excitement and upset at the November 21 Board of Trustees public hearing when a large student demonstration in opposition to tuition increases got out of control and about fifteen people (mostly or all students) were arrested.19 But that was a matter for Allan Dobrin (executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer) to deal with and so did not require much of my office’s time. However, the thousands of emails sent by students protesting the tuition increases certainly got my attention during Thanksgiving dinner at my sister’s house in Philadelphia. As I tried to focus on the conversation, my sister’s perfect turkey, and the biscuits I had made using our revered Southern grandmother’s recipe, my Blackberry buzzed and vibrated in its holster each time a new message arrived. Yet even multiple student arrests did little to draw my office away from our Pathways work. Much of this work that fall had to do with Sandi’s many communications. Though we didn’t see that semester’s UFS Plenary minutes until years later, we did witness plenty of other cases in which we felt that Sandi mischaracterized the truth, and our interactions with her about these communications resulted in further deterioration in our relationship with her, if that were possible. As an example of her activity level, just in the first few weeks of November, Sandi sent at least twelve emails to large numbers of people (usually to her entire UFS list). During November, she also wrote to the AAUP, twice to Michelle, and she gave a talk at an AAUP conference in the middle of November.20 From what I understood, as UFS chair she received 100 percent course reassignment time (i.e., she did not have to do any teaching), so that her UFS work would not be interrupted by her having to conduct a class or grade papers. On October 14 she emailed the faculty with her description of the “Perez decision”—­her description of the legal justification for the faculty objections to how the administration was handling Pathways. Sandi stated that Chief Justice Judith Kaye avers that the Trustees, under the Education law, in authorizing college senates and councils to debate and devise policies, has clearly shared out and delegated its authority to FACULTY senates, and similar ­bodies. The decision  .  .  . ALSO states clearly that college senates and faculty, under

172  ■  Chapter 6 charters approved by the Board, are in charge of the issues on their campus, especially regarding curriculum Thus when the majority of the UFS Executive Committee found that the academic administration of CUNY in the Central Office assumed the right to appoint people to committees to remake the entire curriculum of all the colleges and appoint faculty NOT chosen by peers to a committee not created by peers = = was contemptuous of faculty responsibility.

Sandi’s interpretation of the Perez decision and her description of what the central office had done were simply wrong (e.g., we did not appoint a committee “to remake the entire curriculum of all the colleges”). Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Frederick Schaffer set immediately to preparing a response regarding the legal aspects of her comments. By the beginning of November Rick had prepared a lengthy scholarly document entitled “The Pathways Project and Faculty Authority Regarding Academic Policy.”21 His document began: Questions have been raised as to whether the resolution adopted by the CUNY Board of Trustees at its meeting on June 27, 2011 regarding the establishment of an efficient transfer system and the subsequent implementation of that policy by the Chancellor are inconsistent with certain authority granted to faculty councils and the University Faculty Senate (‘UFS’) by the Board’s Bylaws as interpreted by case law. . . . The Board has clear and final authority to adopt academic policy as set forth in that resolution and to direct the Chancellor to implement it in accordance with the procedures established by the Board.

He then spent eight and a half single-­spaced pages supporting these points, including giving the history and structure of the Pathways resolution. Critical to Rick’s document was that the Perez decision had reaffirmed the portion of New York State Education Law which states, concerning the CUNY board’s authority: “ ‘The board of trustees shall govern and administer the city university. The control of the education work of the city university shall rest solely in the board of trustees which shall govern and administer all educational units of the city university.’ ” Regarding the chancellor’s, the faculty’s, and the senate’s authority, Rick pointed to the portions of the board bylaws stating that The chancellor . . . shall be the chief executive, educational and administrative officer of the city university of New York and the chief educational and administrative officer of the senior and community colleges and other educational units and divisions for which the board acts as trustees. . . . The faculty shall be responsible,

A Core Foundation (7/11–12/11)  ■ 173 subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, [italics added] for the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including health and scholarship standards therefore, student attendance including leaves of absence, curriculum, awarding of college credit, granting of degrees. . . . There shall be a university faculty senate, responsible, subject to the board, [italics added] for the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights, and freedom of the faculty, university level educational and instructional matters, and research and scholarly activities of university-­wide import.

We sent Rick’s document to every member of the CUNY community whom we could reach. It was soon after Rick completed his document that Sandi gave her talk at the AAUP conference on shared governance in Washington, DC, in mid-­ November 2011.22 Her talk was entitled “On the Crash of the Faculty,” and the written version is thirteen pages long. The talk illustrates how Sandi was in­ accurately describing Pathways not only to people inside CUNY, but to people outside as well. I don’t know what kind of an audience she had at this presentation, but I think that anyone who heard that presentation and who was not familiar with Pathways would likely have come away with many misperceptions. What follows are some annotated examples of Sandi’s many misstatements in her presentation, particularly of those misstatements that aren’t quite similar to others that I’ve covered previously in this book: • “Those selected [for the committee] were handed a pair of choices about ways to distribute only THIRTY credits of general education in this common core.” This implied that the total general education curriculum was to be 30 credits, when that was true only for the community colleges; the bachelor’s-­degree colleges have up to 42 credits. • “So far, comments sent . . . have been dismissed or ignored or ridiculed as self serving.” The task force seriously considered all comments, and the original draft Common Core was being modified throughout the fall as a result of comments received. • “The University Faculty Senate . . . produced an alternative model to aid transfer.” The only “alternative model” involved simply adding some more credits. • “This alternate model did not constrain the total general education credits so rigidly that nearly all the current senior college curricula have to be trashed. All recommendations were rejected.” Multiple changes were made in the draft resolution as a result of comments from faculty and administrators.

174  ■  Chapter 6 • “The Board also ignored its own public hearing . . . . nearly all the testimony from faculty opposed the resolution, offering substitutes.” Eight faculty testified in favor of Pathways at the hearing, and no specific substitutes were offered by those testifying against Pathways. • “The hearing, packed by the Vice Chancellors . . . with a rowdy group of self selected students chanted the praises of Lexa (“we love you Lexa”) and sometimes drowned out opposing voices.” I never heard the students drown out anyone; they respectfully applauded after each person spoke, whether that person was in favor of Pathways or not. • “Two faculty supported the resolution [the correct number is eight]—­both on the Graduate Faculty who do not teach undergraduates.” Assuming she was referring to Distinguished Professors Paul Attewell and Laird Bergad, to whom she wrote after the hearing, Laird regularly teaches undergraduates and Paul conducts research specifically on undergraduate student success. • “Considering the fact tht over two thirds of students entering community colleges require remediation . . . the new core makes their introductory college experience little more than an extension of remediation.” Even though a university-­wide faculty committee, in addition to the usual college faculty committees, would vet the courses? • “they have established a racist curriculum to manufacture a large, semi educated underclass or make those in that urban underclass stuck there for good” We saw Pathways as helping underrepresented students retain their hard-­ earned credits so they could more easily obtain the degrees that would help them and their families economically. • “the result of this . . . is the curtailment of faculty authority by the transparent device of appointing and paying amenable faculty to carry out policies that have been universally criticized.” Committees with balanced representation could not have been constructed by election, the collective bargaining agreement required all faculty to be paid for their extra work, and the policies had not been universally criticized.

That fall we also had many negative email interactions with Sandi concerning a Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) request that she made. In New York this law states that anyone can ask to see the records of any New York State public entity, in this case, CUNY. Requests must be made to the records access officer of the organization that has the records, which for CUNY is Dave. FOIL requests are used both to obtain information and, some people believe, to cause

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work for the entity to whom the request is made. On November 16 Sandi wrote to Dave asking him for the Pathways Steering and Working Committees’ minutes, presented resolutions, and votes (with individual voters identified). Dave told Sandi that the minutes were on the website, and that the other requested material (precise votes on each resolution) did not exist, and was not required to exist because these committees did not qualify as subject to the Open Meetings Law.23 Sandi then wrote to the faculty on December 14: “FOIL rejected to see minutes and votes of Pathways committee—­we are told it was a task force appointed to advise the chancellor and not required to produce documents under the open meetings law.” Dave objected strongly to this, saying that he gave Sandi the link to the minutes and that he did not refuse to give her the voting records—­they just don’t exist. Dave was concerned because Sandi’s questioning his compliance with FOIL was equivalent to her questioning his integrity as an attorney. A records access officer who does not comply with FOIL and who is an attorney can be disbarred. So he wanted Sandi to make a public correction. “Facts matter,” he wrote to her the same day. Sandi wrote to the faculty again on December 15: “Evidently someone receiving my shorthand notes from the Tuesday night UFS meeting decided to report me to the chancellery for misleading you on the FOIL report which was a condensed version of a complex story. I am fascinated to discover that my e mails to this faculty are going to the Legal Affairs people at [the central office] and I am fairly sure I know how and by whom. So much for respect for a senior faculty person.” In fact, Sandi herself sent these sorts of emails to at least hundreds of people, some of whom were administrators, and her emails were not marked as intended only for the recipients. Moreover, each time she wrote something particularly provocative, several people would decide to send it to me and I’m sure to others at the central office as well. Sandi continued, “I was told by the Records Access officer that there were no minutes and votes to report. Thus the FOIL could not be answered positively but my right to FOIL was not in question nor the process.” This statement was also wrong. What followed were additional bitter exchanges involving various people in Matt’s cabinet and Sandi. Dave wrote Sandi on December 19 that “Facts still matter” and that, though she had a First Amendment right to lie, it was indeed a lie if she told an untruth and then refused to correct it when the facts were pointed out to her. Two months later, in February, she finally sent out a full correction of her statements to the faculty concerning her FOIL request.

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The Common Core, Part 3 The Steering Committee had been carefully reading all the comments it had received on the draft Common Core, and had been debating intensely what changes to make, if any. Shortly before the recommendation was due to Matt, the Steering Committee decided to change its recommendation from a mix of 3-­and 4-­credit courses totaling nine courses, to ten 3-­credit courses. From what I learned later, there were several reasons for this change. A major one was that they wanted students to have ten, not nine, courses as their core—­ the committee wanted more breadth. They also believed that, though it was important for students to have experience with the elements of the scientific method, such as hypothesis testing, it was unnecessary for every student to have 4 (or more) credits in the form of an intensive wet-­lab-­with-­lecture science course, and some colleges would not have the facilities to provide this in any case. However, because they believed that science education was important, and because they were concerned that the Common Core’s science course was decreasing from 4 to 3 credits, when the committee members added a tenth course, what they added was a second science course, so that every student would now have to take at least two 3-­credit science courses, for a total of at least 6 credits in science. The committee also added a provision that students could take 4-­credit mathematics and science courses to satisfy the Common Core if 3-­credit courses were available for students who preferred 3-­credit courses. This ensured that students in majors with extensive mathematics and science requirements wouldn’t have to take science courses in the Common Core as well, and could instead take some courses in other areas. The committee also added another special provision: all of the Common Core courses would have to qualify as New York State official liberal arts courses (i.e., they could not be courses in computer science, health, performing arts, journalism, etc.), in order to ensure that all students graduated with at least the minimum number of liberal arts courses required by New York State. All of this made sense to me. It also made sense to Matt. Therefore he accepted the Steering Committee’s recommendations. The final recommendations consisted of 6 credits (two 3-­credit courses) of “English Composition,” 3 credits of “Mathematical and Quantitative Reasoning,” 3 credits of “Life and Physical Sciences,” and “six three-­credit liberal arts and sciences courses, with at least one course from each of the following five areas and no more than two courses in any

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discipline or interdisciplinary field. . . . [the five areas were] World Cultures and Global Issues. . . . U.S. Experience in its Diversity. . . . Creative Expression. . . . Individual and Society. . . . Scientific World.” The recommendations included a list of required learning outcomes for each Common Core category.24 However, one Steering Committee member dissented. After the committee’s deliberations had been completed, this individual wrote to the other members and then to Matt saying that he disagreed with the recommendation. The other committee members, having worked together for many dozens of hours during the fall, had felt that they had become a close-­knit group, and some of them had hoped for a unanimous recommendation. Although they respected the dissenter’s right to dissent, they were disappointed and sad that he had not chosen to speak with them about his views while they were discussing the final form of the recommendation, and they expressed these feelings to him.

Conclusion The fall 2011 semester ended as it began—­with complaints about Pathways. In the waning days of December, Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars, published two blog pieces in the Chronicle of Higher Education entitled “How Central Is the Core?” and “CUNY’s Pathway to Whatever.”25 In the first, Wood stated that the Pathways controversy represented “a collision between academic standards and the university’s emphasis on increasing graduation rates.” To the contrary, we believed that Pathways would increase both graduation rates and standards. The title of the second piece speaks for itself. Bill and Michelle quickly wrote a brief statement for the Chronicle expressing our own views of the situation entitled “Pathways to Higher Standards.”26 Despite the flow of negative communications, we pushed on. On December 13, I wrote a long memorandum to the presidents with detailed Pathways implementation information. I asked that each president give us the name of someone at his or her college who would serve as the contact person for Pathways at that college, as well as nominations for the university-­wide faculty committees that would be reviewing the courses to be submitted for the Common Core (nominations for those committees were again sought from the entire CUNY community). Further, I informed the presidents that in January a group led by Bob, and including representatives from each college as well as from the central office, would begin meeting to work on all sorts of implementation

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issues associated with Pathways. For example, this group would ensure that appropriate changes were made in all of our electronic records systems. Bob was to play a huge role in ensuring that the extensive number of administrative changes necessary to effect Pathways actually got made. In addition, in this memo I informed the presidents that each college was to submit its own plan regarding how it would implement Pathways, and those plans were due the following spring, by April 1. On December 16 I hosted a thank-­you dinner for the Steering Committee members at the Harvard Club, where I had a membership. I had thought it was too busy a time of year to schedule the dinner, particularly on such short notice, but the committee members wanted to have the dinner right away. They were justifiably proud of the work that they had done, work that would likely directly affect the education of CUNY students for a very long time, and they wanted a chance to bring closure to their efforts, sharing their joy with each other. The event sparkled with the club’s holiday decorations, the hopeful remarks of the committee members, and the smiles on everyone’s faces. It was a privilege to honor these faculty, students, and administrators who had given so much for future CUNY students. The winter break was about to start and we were all exhausted. The past year of working on Pathways had been draining for everyone. Except for communications from Sandi, there had been little in the way of immediate negative reactions to the final version of the Common Core. It didn’t occur to me that this might be because the faculty were grading exams and papers and starting their intersession. I assumed that the worst of the upset concerning the Common Core was over. Now, Julia and I both thought, the work on Pathways would shift mostly to the colleges as they identified and, if necessary, developed courses for the Common Core. Once again, we were wrong.

CHAPTER 7

The Devil Is in the Details ■■■■■

JANUARY 2012 THROUGH AUGUST 2012

The faculty really “prefer anarchy.” (Kerr, 2001)1

The university is so many things to so many different people that it must, of necessity, be partially at war with itself. (Kerr, 2001)2

In my office we had thought that, with the Common Core framework set, things would calm down and the work would shift mostly to the colleges. The main task for us now in the central office was to provide support—­in all ways—­for faculty identification and approval of, and, if needed, development of, courses for the Common Core, the 30 credits of general education courses that every CUNY undergraduate would now have to take. (Setting the 6–­12 additional general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree students was solely up to the individual senior colleges.) We also had to facilitate the work of the majors committees. These committees were working on identifying three to six entry-­ level courses for each of the most popular transfer majors, courses that would be available at every college that offered that major. But another huge firestorm awaited us, and this time it was pretty much entirely my doing.

Course Credits, Contact Hours, and Workload Hours When the Common Core framework was first announced, there seemed to be little negative reaction coming from the faculty. I was surprised, because the framework specified all 3-­credit courses, and I knew that some colleges were offering some 4-­credit general education courses, and that many faculty preferred

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teaching 4-­rather than 3-­credit courses. To explain why there wasn’t a negative reaction at first, and why there was a huge negative reaction later, I must outline some of the—­sometimes tedious—­technical aspects of what are known as course credits, contact hours, and faculty workload hours. First, let me explain some of the reasons why some faculty prefer 4-­credit to 3-­credit courses. One reason has to do with the fact that, theoretically at least, a 4-­credit course is supposed to have more material in it, and to require more work from the students (and thus also from the faculty members) than does a 3-­credit course. Most typically, a 3-­credit course would have 3 hours of class time per week, whereas a 4-­credit course would have 4 hours. So a faculty member might prefer a 4-­credit course because he or she thinks it would be difficult to cover all of the necessary material in a 3-­credit course. Add to this the fact that some English faculty think that only they can teach writing well, some philosophy faculty think that only they can teach critical thinking well, some natural science faculty think that only they can teach hypothesis testing well, etc. So if teaching these skills is important, all students should have as much time learning these disciplines as possible (e.g., a 4-­credit instead of a 3-­credit required general education course). This sort of approach to general education is not universal, however. Indeed, the AAC&U contends that general education of essential learning outcomes should take place across the entire curriculum.3 A second reason that some faculty (from among those who have been teaching 4-­credit courses) may not want to change to 3-­credit courses is that they would have to reorganize the course material, redo the syllabus, and possibly revise their lectures, a substantial amount of work. A third reason requires a longer explanation. When I attended college at Harvard, each professor was supposed to teach one or two courses per term, and that number was the same no matter how many hours per week a given course met. But this is not how it works at CUNY and many other institutions of higher education. At CUNY, unlike at Harvard, the faculty are unionized, and the collective bargaining agreement (i.e., the union contract) specifies a workload for each type of faculty member. Tenured and tenure-­track faculty at colleges that have bachelor’s-­degree programs (what are known at CUNY as senior colleges) are supposed to have a 21-­hour workload per year, and tenured and tenure-­track faculty at colleges that have only associate’s-­degree programs (i.e., CUNY’s community colleges) are supposed to have a 27-­hour workload per year. These “hours” generally correspond to the number of “contact hours”

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that a faculty member teaches. According to the contract, a contact hour is “an organized class which meets at a regularly scheduled time during the semester, quarter or session for one fifty-­minute period or its approved equivalent period.”4 Thus, over the course of an academic year, senior college faculty must theoretically teach classes that meet for a total of 21 hours per week, and at the community colleges it is 27 hours per week. This means that if a typical course meets four hours per week, then a senior college faculty member would have to teach five such courses per academic year (plus a sixth course every fourth year). On the other hand, if a typical course meets three hours per week, then a senior college faculty member would have to teach seven such courses per academic year. This translates into what faculty call five versus seven “preparations” (the number of courses for which a faculty member has to prepare), and five versus seven sets of students for whom the faculty member is responsible (grading, advising, writing letters of recommendation, etc.). Most CUNY faculty never teach a full 21 or 27 hours because most faculty have a little or a lot of what is called “reassigned time” (more commonly known as “release time,” but I prefer the term “reassigned time” because I don’t think teaching less should be described as a “release,” as occurs when you get out of prison). Reassigned time is given for all sorts of activities, such as serving as a department chair, having a research grant, developing a new curriculum, or taking on a leadership position in the UFS. However, even if a faculty member has substantial reassigned time, teaching 4-­credit courses as opposed to 3-­credit courses can offer advantages in terms of the amount of work that the faculty member needs to do. Now let us consider what might be the advantages for students of 3-­versus 4-­credit (or contact-­hour) courses. First it is important to remember that (with a few exceptions) bachelor’s degrees require a total of 120 credits and associate’s degrees 60 credits. Therefore, whether students take 4-­or 3-­credit courses, they will get the same total exposure to the faculty and the same total classroom time. The issue is the relative value to students of taking more courses taught in 3-­credit blocks or fewer courses taught in 4-­credit blocks. The Common Core Task Force originally recommended a mix of 3-­and 4-­credit courses for the Common Core framework (which totals 30 credits), but after receiving college feedback on this model, the task force instead recommended that all of the courses be 3-­credit courses; the task force felt it was better for students to have ten different courses in the Common Core rather than nine (see chapter 6).

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As far as I was aware, there was no research that clearly supported 3-­over 4-­credit (or contact-­hour) courses or vice versa. So, as part of Pathways, we tried to obtain some relevant data. Until 2010 CUNY had an internal exam (the CUNY Proficiency Examination, or CPE) that all rising juniors had to pass (see chapter 3). The exam had a writing component and a quantitative reasoning component. Given that, pre-­Pathways, slightly more than half of the CUNY English composition courses had 3 contact hours, and the others had 4 contact hours, we were able to examine which type of course resulted in students doing better on the writing portion of the CPE. Using rigorous analytical techniques that held all other student characteristics constant, our analyses showed that students who had taken the 3-­contact-­hour English composition courses actually did better on the writing portion of the CPE than did students who had taken the 4-­contact-­hour composition courses. We never publicized these results, because one interpretation of them would have been that students did worse on the CPE when they had more exposure to our faculty, and such a conclusion would have caused more problems with the faculty than it solved. Further, such a conclusion just made no sense. Something else must have been going on with these data, something that we didn’t understand. Perhaps there was a problem with the methodology. But no matter which way you looked at it, there was no evidence that students were advantaged by 4-­contact-­hour English composition courses. Consistent with our conclusion that there was no advantage for students if they took writing courses with more than 3 contact hours, several years later a large study found that it was quality of writing instruction, not amount, that was significant in improving students’ perceived learning.5 And at Delta College in Michigan there has also been reported a lack of evidence supporting 4-­over 3-­contact-­hour writing courses.6 The relationship between course credits and contact hours is not always simple. The number of course credits that a student receives for passing a course is rarely more than the number of contact hours, but it is sometimes less than the number of contact hours. For example, most CUNY laboratory courses carry fewer course credits than the number of contact hours. Complicating things further is that, although CUNY faculty are most often compensated according to the number of contact hours, it is not that unusual for faculty to be compensated more than the number of contact hours. For example, a faculty member may receive more workload hours than the number of contact hours because the class has an unusually large number of students, or because it has an unusually large amount of grading.

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The last strand in this web of bureaucratic policies is that tuition is paid according to the number of credits that a course has, but faculty are paid according to the number of contact hours (or more). Perhaps now you can see where all this is going. Faculty have multiple reasons to prefer courses that have more, rather than fewer, contact hours (and thus more workload hours). However, the benefits of such courses for students are not clear. These courses require more of students’ time without commensurately more credits, and perhaps without more educational benefit. And courses with more workload hours than credits for students are more expensive for colleges than courses for which the course credits and the workload hours are the same. I didn’t understand all of this in January 2012, but I understood enough of it to be surprised that there weren’t more faculty upset when the final version of the Common Core turned out to consist of only 3-­credit courses. Perhaps it was due to the impending winter break? Or perhaps the faculty weren’t as concerned as I had thought they would be? But there was another explanation. Everything that we had been doing with Pathways had been done publicly, and as a result the faculty from different colleges had met together more frequently than usual, to discuss what we were doing. For example, there was an increased number of meetings of what are known as the Discipline Councils—­ groups of faculty in a given discipline (e.g., mathematics) consisting of one representative per college (usually the appropriate department chair). There are English, mathematics, science, world languages, and some other occasionally meeting Discipline Councils. As the faculty in these Discipline Councils met and talked about Pathways, they learned that some courses in their disciplines at some colleges carried 4 workload hours for faculty (and 3 or 4 contact hours and course credits for students). Such situations were the case for some courses in English, mathematics, and languages other than English (natural science courses had unique characteristics that I discuss later in this chapter). No college had 4 hours of faculty workload for the relevant courses in all of these disciplines. As the faculty compared notes, those from colleges that had standard 3-­credit, 3-­contact hour, 3-­faculty-­workload-­hour courses wanted what they now knew some of the other colleges’ faculty had—­courses that had 4 hours of faculty workload (whether the course actually had 3 or 4 contact hours per week). In many cases the faculty in these disciplines were to justify their 4-­workload-­hour preferences by making moving arguments about the great

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value of students being directly exposed to these faculty for 4 hours per week instead of 3. Our CPE and others’ data notwithstanding, I didn’t doubt that a student would learn more given more time with a particular faculty member. The question was how much more would be learned and at what cost. If we were to add an hour to a particular course, either we would have to take away time spent with another faculty member, or we would have to require students to spend more time in class than was appropriate for the degrees that they were earning. In any case, from what I was able to discern, the faculty weren’t complaining too much about the 3-­credit requirement for Common Core courses because they figured that they would just have these courses meet for 4 hours per week and then the faculty would get 4 hours of workload (but students would get only 3 credits, and the college would get only 3 credits’ worth of tuition). So we were looking at a situation in which potentially all of the English, mathematics, and language courses in the Common Core would require students to sit in class for 4 hours per week, but the students would receive no extra credits toward their degrees for those hours. And there was no evidence that the extra hour was a significant benefit to students. From what I knew, this wasn’t what the task force had intended at all. Although they didn’t say so explicitly, had they wanted the students sitting for 4 hours per week in multiple Common Core classes, they would have made them 4-­rather than 3-­credit courses. As I began to realize all of this, I returned again and again in my mind to an overriding principle that was guiding all of our Pathways work: the faculty and the colleges could do whatever they wanted as long as there wasn’t evidence that students would be disadvantaged; ensuring that students could move through a curriculum that was both excellent and efficient was paramount. But as I saw it, having to sit an extra hour in class every week for a given course for no additional credit did constitute a disadvantage to students. If there was one thing I had learned about CUNY students, it was how difficult many of their lives were. Given that 58 percent receive Pell Grants, the typical CUNY student is one who has limited financial resources. Further, 42 percent are in the first generation in their families to go to college,7 which means that other forms of support for them are often limited. Sitting in multiple classes for extra hours, week after week—­extra hours that didn’t get a student any closer to a degree—­ seemed, to me, not only not an advantage for students, but a distinct disadvantage. Perhaps I was influenced by my past decades of experience as a research

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psychologist studying the effects of the passage of time on choice behavior, but I thought—­and still think—­that we would get the best student performance by offering the most efficient education possible, as long as quality was in no way compromised. So, beginning around the middle of January 2012, I started writing emails and memos clarifying that the Common Core courses had to be, not only 3 credits, but 3 contact hours. At first I just said “3 hours,” but, thanks to some education from a City College faculty member, I later realized that the phrase “3 hours” was ambiguous, and clarified that what I meant was “3 contact hours.” Not everyone in the central office was in agreement with this added policy—­ some people didn’t want to risk inflaming the faculty further even though, without the policy, there might be some harm to students. We had repeated long discussions about this. But in the end everyone agreed to support the additional policy. However, the Common Core’s course-­credit, contact-­hour, workload-­hour policies did have some flexibility. For example, the 3-­credit, 3-­contact hour constraint applied only to regular Common Core courses. It did not apply to the following: (a) science, technology, engineering, and mathematics major courses that students could also use to satisfy the Common Core (the STEM variant courses); this was an exception originally designed for the Life and Physical Sciences category of the Common Core, but which I later extended to the Scientific World category of the Common Core after a caring and dedicated faculty member at Hunter College convinced me that not doing so would disadvantage STEM major students); (b) the additional 6–­12 credits of general education that bachelor’s-­degree students had to take; (c) meetings that a faculty member might have with subsets of the class (only regularly scheduled meetings of the whole class counted as contact hours); and (d) the workload hours a faculty member received: a faculty member could, at the college’s discretion (i.e., with his or her president’s approval), be paid more than 3 workload hours for one or more Common Core 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour courses.

Nevertheless, it is safe to say that the 3-­contact-­hour constraint caused more upset among the faculty than any other aspect of Pathways except the total number of general education credits. There were many days when I wished that the

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task force, in making its recommendations to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, had stuck with its original model, which included 3 4-­credit courses (one each in English, mathematics, and science). But I respected their reasoning—­their wanting breadth in the form of ten courses in the Common Core, and I felt that we had to abide by their recommendations, which had been accepted by Matt. In retrospect, perhaps, assuming Matt agreed, I could have called together the Steering Committee and discussed the issues with them, to see whether they might wish to return to their original model. But the truth is that at the time I didn’t realize how much furor the 3-­contact-­hour policy would cause, and we had publicly announced the adoption of the task force’s final recommendations. Instead I focused on explaining—­repeatedly—­to the faculty how there was flexibility in the Pathways framework.

Natural Sciences It was among the natural sciences faculty that the 3-­contact-­hour policy, combined with the 3-­credit courses in the new Common Core, resulted in the greatest amount of combustion. Up until then, at fourteen of the nineteen CUNY undergraduate colleges, all students were required to take at least one natural science course that included several hours of lecture and several hours of laboratory each week. Such courses typically carried credits for students equal to the number of hours of lecture and half the hours of laboratory, but faculty usually got workload hours for all of the lecture and laboratory meeting time. I received dozens of emails from natural sciences faculty, as did other central office members, expressing extreme concern that students would no longer be taking such courses as part of their general education experience. I understood these faculty’s feelings, and their dedication to their disciplines, particularly their concern that some students would never be exposed to a traditional laboratory science. However, I also knew that not all CUNY colleges had such requirements, and not all could afford the expense of a traditional laboratory course for every student. I also knew that most colleges and universities these days did not require such a course for students who were not intending to major in STEM. Further—­perhaps again due to my experience as a research psychologist, a scientist whose data consist of behavior, and due to the fact that psychology experiments are often conducted outside of a laboratory—­I agreed with the

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faculty on the Common Core Task Force that a student did not have to sit in a traditional chemistry, biology, or physics laboratory for several hours each week in order to learn to understand and value the scientific method. Finally, we provided multiple ways in which the colleges could structure their versions of the Common Core (and the additional 6–­12 credits of general education for the senior colleges—­what is known as the College Option) in order to encourage, or ensure, that students were exposed to traditional laboratory science. For example, there were ways that the colleges could choose to combine the two Common Core required science courses into one 6-­credit, 6-­contact-­hour course; could require an additional Common Core or College Option science course; could add credits to a required Common Core course; could teach traditional laboratory techniques within a 3-­credit Common Core course; etc.8 Again, whatever the colleges wanted to do was fine with us as long as there was no negative impact on the students earning and transferring credits, so we tried to build in significant flexibility to the policies. But it was true that many colleges would not be able to continue requiring all of their students to take a natural science laboratory course in the precise form in which it had previously been taught. Here are some typical examples of the great many messages that I received from faculty about natural sciences issues, and a few comments of my own: • From a department chair at a senior college: “The Pathways Initiative, reduces general education science credits . . . to 3 and reduces contact hours . . . to 3.” A very common misstatement. Pathways requires all students to take at least two science courses that each have at least 3 credits and 3 contact hours. “Science faculty members at [our college] teach approximately 65% of their required workload in general education courses, and we value our key role in preparing students to be informed and active citizens. In a worst-­case scenario, 4 faculty members could lecture to large groups of students, and the rest of the department would be laid off.” This would not happen given the minimum of 6 required science credits in the Common Core. This faculty member ultimately decided to develop a 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour laboratory course for the Life and Physical Sciences category of the required Common Core. • When informed about the previous faculty member’s planned course, a professor at a community college said: “This is all well and good for senior colleges but it is a disaster for the community colleges. Our students come to us with the intent to transfer and like those who attend community colleges

188  ■  Chapter 7 throughout the state do not necessarily intend to transfer to CUNY. For our students this 3 hour lab for 3 credits will not transfer.” This faculty member was referring to two related points, both of which we heard multiple times from science faculty. The first was that non-­CUNY colleges wouldn’t transfer 1 credit for each hour of laboratory work because laboratory courses are supposed to carry fewer credits than contact hours. However, we checked with the senior leadership of the New York State Education Department, and they said that there was no rule such as this. It was up to CUNY to decide how much credit each course was worth, and that should depend on the total amount of work for a course, not just the number of hours that it met. The second, related, point was that students needed to take a traditional lecture plus laboratory course in order to get general education science credit upon transferring to a college outside of CUNY. Despite some CUNY colleges not requiring such courses pre-­Pathways, my office was never able to turn up a single example of a student having trouble transferring general education science credit outside CUNY. To the contrary, the transfer advisers told us that students had more trouble transferring their credits within CUNY than outside CUNY. This was not surprising given that, as I stated earlier, we had learned that most colleges, colleges as diverse as Penn State and Harvard, no longer required a traditional laboratory course of all their students. • Another natural sciences professor from yet another senior college wrote to over 150 faculty: “If you agree that the 3 hour contact for general education Life and Physical laboratory sciences is a very bad idea for CUNY (Please see correspondences below, including vice chancellor Alexandra Logue’s 3 contact hour proposal), then please say something to the chancellor, vice chancellor, board of trustees . . . and all those you know who see this administrative action as a serious down grading of general education laboratory science at CUNY. Perhaps we can change things but we must speak up!” This message included the trustees’ email addresses. • Still another science professor at yet another senior college wrote: “Dear People Who Matter, [he was addressing Matt, vice chancellor for research Gillian Small, and me].  .  .  . Pedagogically, the minimum should be a 4 CR 6 hour course. I assume that you know this, but are pushing 3 CR for political expedience. . . . The proposal flies in the face of all our knowledge of the efficacy of experiencing science, as a counterpoint to memorizing lecture material. The plan seems to me to be a quantum dumb-­down of the value of a CUNY degree, and poor pedagogy at least.” Students generally learn more in courses

Devil in the Details (1/12–8/12)  ■ 189 using active, as opposed to passive, learning techniques, but the former can be present in all sorts of courses, not just 4-­credit 6-­contact-­hour lecture-­ laboratory courses.9 • In mid-­February, apparently in response to information we had been sending out regarding all the different ways that colleges could emphasize natural science in their Common Core curricula, I received a communication from the chemistry, biology, biochemistry, and physics chairs at CUNY. It began: “The proposed CUNY Pathways general education curriculum dramatically decreases the amount of science taught [emphasis in original] to non-­ STEM majors in the senior colleges and diminishes the quality of education and value of a CUNY degree. While the Scientific World category in the . . . core may be a science course it is not required to be and therefore is not a science requirement.” Despite my efforts to convey the fact that it was totally a college’s choice whether to put only natural sciences courses in that category, the information was definitely not getting across. “Many CUNY senior and community colleges currently require two 4-­credit laboratory science courses of all arts and sciences students.” In fact, only about 20 percent of all of the CUNY undergraduate colleges had been requiring two lab courses for all their students, and four of the twelve senior colleges had been requiring no lab science for any of their non-STEM majors. • Finally, a senior college humanities professor (and a member of the UFS Executive Committee) wrote a single line to the CUNY college presidents as well as to the members of the UFS Executive Committee: “What are EVC Logue’s credentials for deciding what counts as adequate physical and biological ­science education??”

These examples demonstrate well how misunderstanding of (admittedly complex) policies, along with insufficient knowledge of the available relevant evidence, plus perhaps some self-­interest, all combined to inflame faculty opposition to Pathways policies that would greatly benefit students in many ways. In mid-­February Professor Sandi Cooper, chair of the UFS, wrote to Matt, the Board of Trustees, all the CUNY presidents, and all the CUNY chief academic officers (the provosts). Her message included a statement from the individual colleges’ senate chairs which said, in part: “That common core courses must all be 3 hours, 3 credits, [goes] beyond the Board resolution creating Pathways in June, 2011, and [goes] beyond the Common Core structure recommendations of the appointed faculty Task Force to the Chancellor accepted on December 1,

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2011; Moreover this ‘Guideline’ ignores common practice in CUNY and across the nation particularly in general education courses in Science and English Composition where at least 4 hours for 3 credits is common.” In addition to indicating that most non-­CUNY colleges had not been requiring all non-­STEM majors to take a traditional laboratory course, our research also indicated that most non-­CUNY colleges had been offering 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour, English composition courses, just as we were going to do in Pathways. Further, despite this challenge to my authority to set the 3-­contact-­hour policy, I knew that every­thing we were doing arose from a CUNY Board of Trustees resolution, that the chancellor was charged with carrying out board policies, and that he had delegated responsibility for effecting Pathways to me, and so I was on firm legal, if not popular, ground. I responded to each communication that I received factually and in detail and, I thought, respectfully. Sometimes the faculty member replied to my response, and we engaged in multiple communications, and sometimes there was no response at all. But I couldn’t see that my communications were making more than the tiniest dent in the large amount of misinformation among the faculty. At the end of January, I learned that a reporter for Science, one of the most, if not the most, respected general science publications, wanted to do a story about Pathways. During my phone interview with the reporter, Michael Arena, university director of communications and marketing, sat at my side. I tried to explain carefully all the many options available to colleges for ensuring that their students were all required to take natural science courses. I thought that the reporter was intelligent and understanding. However, the title of his piece, which appeared online a few days later, clearly signaled the story he was to tell: “New CUNY Curriculum Squeezes Science.” The first paragraph of the piece concluded: “A new core curriculum at CUNY takes a big step in the wrong direction, say some science faculty members, by making it less likely that its graduates will be exposed to hands-­on laboratory coursework.” In the piece, the reporter (a) characterized the Common Core as having only 3 credits in real science (not true), (b) said that “most senior colleges now [pre-­Pathways] require students to take two, 4-­hour credit courses in science” (not true; only four colleges out of a total of nineteen had such a requirement pre-­Pathways), and (c) said that “Logue has decreed that each three-­credit course can meet for only 3 hours [i.e., have 3 contact hours] a week” (true, but colleges had the option of increasing those hours in a variety of ways). He also quoted from multiple

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natural science faculty members who described Pathways in negative terminology such as calling it “absurd” and saying that “the best outcome for us . . . would be for Pathways to go away.”10 Two days later, a related Science website published its own piece on Pathways titled “CUNY Relaxes Science Standards,” stating that CUNY was “cutting the traditional science course requirement to a single 3-­credit-­hour-­course. What’s more, the new regulations require that 3-­credit-­hour courses take up no more than 3 hours over the course of the week, making lab work in science classes almost impossible.”11 As we had tried so many times to communicate, the Pathways Common Core in fact included a requirement of at least 6 credits of science, distributed among lecture, traditional laboratory, and other formats as the faculty preferred. It was depressing to read all of this. These articles were more evidence that our attempts at providing the colleges with flexibility and at explaining the nature of Pathways’ general education requirements were being misunderstood and/or misrepresented. And it was especially painful to me that the articles appeared on websites related to Science, a publication that I personally highly admire and to which I have had a subscription for around forty years. About one year later, Science published an article titled “Physical and Virtual Laboratories in Science and Engineering Education,” which described the many benefits of new virtual laboratories,12 the sorts of lab experiences that could be added to science lecture courses (e.g., to the 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour Pathways courses), as a form of homework, to provide active experience with scientific principles. Traditional labs in biology, chemistry, and physics provide certain kinds of positive experiences that cannot be obtained with virtual labs, but virtual labs also provide positive experiences that cannot be obtained with traditional labs. I pointed the article out to various people at the colleges, but it didn’t seem to make any difference. It seemed that no information I distributed about science and Pathways made any difference. The senior college that developed the 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour laboratory course ended up making that course corequisite with a natural science lecture course in the Scientific World category of Pathways’ Common Core. This strategy of combining two Common Core science courses to yield a 6-­contact-­hour combined lecture-­laboratory course was one of the many science general education options that we had suggested to colleges.13 Thus students at that senior college are now required to take at least 6 credits (and 6 contact hours) of combined laboratory and lecture in science, whereas pre-­Pathways, students at that college were required to take either 4 or 8 credits of combined laboratory and

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lecture in science (the number of credits depended on the student’s major; most of that college’s students had a pre-­Pathways requirement of 4 science credits). The science requirements at that college do not exactly match what the college had prior to Pathways, but they seem a good alternative given that the college’s science requirements now also ensure that what a student takes in science at that college will completely satisfy the general education science requirement for any non-­STEM major at any CUNY college, and will thus transfer seamlessly. To this day I believe that I did the right thing for the students concerning the 3-­contact-­hour policy. But throughout the contentious and agonizing discussions of this policy I did repeatedly think about what Shirley Strum Kenny (president of SUNY Stony Brook, 1994–­2009) had asked me the first time I spoke with her, in 1994: “How thick is your skin?” Robert Sternberg, former president of the University of Wyoming, has voiced a similar view: “During my years as a dean, provost, and president, I came to the conclusion that the No. 1 trait needed to be in administration was an extremely thick skin.”14

Additional Opposition and Our Responses Not all Pathways objections during the spring and summer of 2012 related specifically to the 3 course credits and 3 contact hours. A variety of negative letters, emails, resolutions, petitions, media pieces, and FOIL requests continued to appear with great frequency. Speakers pro-­and con-­Pathways continued to participate in our regularly scheduled public hearings. We were very grateful to former Hostos Community College President Dolores Fernandez who, at one such hearing, spoke movingly about her own past experiences when she was a young, Latina mother and transfer student. Despite our continual efforts, the number of people who were upset about some (often misunderstood) aspect of Pathways seemed to increase continuously, and never to decrease. I dealt with all of this on a daily basis, including weekends, even when I was away for six days in February in Yellowstone to track wolves. In late January the Faculty Senate of the State University of New York (SUNY), our sibling system in New York State and the largest public university in the country, passed a resolution opposing Pathways. By later in the semester, opposition to Pathways was being conflated with the Occupy Wall Street

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movement, the scheduled CUNY tuition increases, decreased government funding for education, and the recently revealed government monitoring of (many said spying on) Muslim CUNY students. An extract from an April 30, 2012, email forwarded by Sandi to her CUNY faculty list exemplifies these conflations: On May 2nd, the Free University [see http://​www​.freeuniversitynyc​.org] will be collaborating with CUNY activists and hosting an event Brooklyn College at noon on May 2nd [emphasis in original]. This event is protest against all of the ways that public education is being gutted by the current administration, it is a protest against tuition hikes and their effects of disproportionately disenfranchising poor communities of color, it is a protest against spying on Muslim Students, and against the Pathways program which is striping the equality of university education. Organizers from The Free University, the Brooklyn College Student Union, Brooklyn College New York Public Interest Research Group, Students United for a Free CUNY, New York Students Rising, the Graduate Center General Assembly, and the Brooklyn College Professional Staff Congress [PSC, the CUNY faculty union] have called for a city-­wide convergence for educational justice, a day of action, and a manifestation of student and educator power to resist these repressive trends at CUNY.

We had a new complication when, in early March 2012, New York State Assemblywoman Deborah Glick, who chairs the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee, contacted CUNY staff asking for information about Pathways. I had not spoken with her since the December 2011 hearing in Albany when she had said that CUNY had to fix its transfer problems (see chapter 3, which also discusses Sandi and Terry Martell’s meeting with her around the same time). In response to Deborah’s inquiry, instead of just sending her written materials, I asked to meet with her in person to explain as much as I could about Pathways. We met for a late breakfast in lower Manhattan in April, and she listened attentively and asked excellent questions. I thought it had gone well. But then, in June, she wrote to Matt, repeating many of the incorrect statements about Pathways that we had been hearing from some faculty. As usual, I prepared a detailed, and what I thought was respectful, response. We did not know who had been giving her the incorrect information; there were plenty of possibilities. Also concerning was the arrival, on January 12, of the expected (see chapter 6) letter from the AAUP (the largest faculty labor union in the United States), sent to Matt and Benno Schmidt, chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees.15 The

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letter, five single-­spaced pages, notified them that the AAUP had been contacted for advice and assistance by the UFS and the PSC (which pays for a thousand memberships in AAUP and sends delegates to the annual AAUP meeting),16 as well as by other members of the CUNY faculty, concerning problems with both the process and the content of Pathways. The AAUP’s letter further stated that their overriding concern was with ensuring that appropriate academic governance was occurring. The letter quoted from the AAUP’s “Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities”: “The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. On these matters the power of review or final decision lodged in the governing board or delegated by it to the president should be exercised adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated to the faculty.” It went on to state, “Faculty members argue that the proposed implementation of the curricular changes mandated under the Pathways Initiative threatens to impinge upon their academic freedom as teachers by effectively limiting their autonomy in the classroom.” The letter concluded by inviting a response. Matt sent an initial short response on January 23, focusing on the point that, according to New York State Education Law, CUNY is supposed to function as one integrated university with one governing board. The letter stressed that faculty governance had been involved in Pathways, and promised a more detailed response. Frederick Schaffer, CUNY’s senior vice chancellor for legal affairs and general counsel, prepared the subsequent detailed response. Rick had recently completed a scholarly, yet very readable, paper on academic freedom,17 and had much relevant information at his fingertips. After Rick prepared the response, we did not rush to send it out, thinking that speed would only work against us if we were trying to avoid being investigated (and censured) by the AAUP. On March 20 Matt and Benno received another letter from the AAUP, thanking them for their January 23 letter, but also asking for the promised more detailed response. We sent it the next day. This second response, signed by Matt, went into significant detail regarding academic governance, stating that the AAUP’s views on this matter are not universal, and that even the AAUP believes that boards can make final decisions regarding academic matters in situations of great need. The letter then went on to say that the credit-­transfer situation at CUNY was indeed such a situation, one that could not be solved by traditional mechanisms of faculty governance at CUNY. The letter described

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the huge amount of student transfer at CUNY and the requirement of New York State Education Law that CUNY must “maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units. Where possible, governance and operation of senior and community colleges should be jointly conducted or conducted by similar procedures to maintain the university as an integrated system and to facilitate articulation between units.”18 Further, the letter described how credits had been transferring only when the new college judged that the old college’s course was equivalent to one at the new college; that the lack of credit transfer was costing students time and money, as well as delaying, or even preventing, graduation; that the disparities among the general education requirements at the different colleges and the relatively large sizes of those requirements were contributing to the credit-­ transfer problems; and that addressing the credit-­transfer problem meant addressing the transfer of general education, major, and elective credits. The letter included details about the huge amount of consultation that had been involved in constructing Pathways, and the years it was necessarily taking to actually put it into effect (hence the inappropriateness of the faculty’s comments that Pathways was being put into practice too quickly). The letter also described our usual practices regarding the involvement of faculty in such matters, noting that those practices had continued to be followed, as well as the significant flexibility that individual colleges and faculty had in designing Pathways courses and requirements. The letter stressed that the Pathways courses would be of high quality precisely because of the intensive involvement of the faculty in the Pathways curriculum. Finally, the letter suggested that any investigation by the AAUP be deferred until the resolution of a lawsuit recently filed by the UFS and the PSC (more on this lawsuit below). I thought the letter was outstanding in its clarity and comprehensiveness. We were not to hear from the AAUP again for many months. People often ask me why so many faculty were unhappy with Pathways, and my response is that there were many reasons. All of these reasons were apparent by spring 2012. The upset faculty clustered within a number of categories: • Those who had been teaching courses with more than 3 credits and/or more than 3 contact hours, as explained earlier in this chapter. (This included faculty teaching many of the courses at the College of Staten Island, and those teaching some courses at some colleges in the disciplines of natural sciences, mathematics, languages other than English, and English.)

196  ■  Chapter 7 • Those who were in disciplines that were not considered central to undergraduate student education or whose departments had less political power, and who therefore thought their disciplines were likely to lose enrollment if they were no longer required after the number of general education credits was reduced (disciplines such as languages other than English and philosophy; pre-­Pathways some colleges had required courses in these disciplines, but post-­Pathways these disciplines might be one of several choices offered to students to satisfy one or more categories of the Common Core). • Those whose colleges’ pre-­Pathways general education structures would be difficult to replicate in Pathways (e.g., Baruch’s required minor, which they felt was educationally beneficial for students, and which consisted of at least 9 credits of upper-­division courses; pre-­Pathways, in addition to doing their majors and any other general education courses they were missing, most of the many Baruch transfer students from community colleges had to fulfill this requirement completely at Baruch because the community colleges don’t have comparable upper-­division courses; post-­Pathways many Baruch transfer students would be required to take only 6 credits of general education at Baruch, potentially decreasing enrollments in the upper-­division courses that some Baruch faculty preferred to teach over the large introductory courses). • Those in disciplines that are not on New York State’s list of liberal arts disciplines (e.g., health sciences, computer science, and performing arts), because the task force’s recommendation, accepted by Matt, had stipulated that all Common Core courses had to be from disciplines on that list, to ensure that each student took at least the minimum number of credits from those disciplines that is required for their degrees by New York State. So these disciplines also faced potential enrollment decreases, particularly at the community colleges (at a senior college’s preference, their students could take courses in these disciplines to satisfy general education requirements in the 6–­12 additional general education credits required of senior college students). • Those who thought that CUNY students should have a large general education requirement because CUNY students (as a result of deficiencies in their pre-­CUNY education) need to be exposed to a large variety of disciplines (this assumes that each general education course contains material from only a single discipline) and/or because, in general, CUNY students should have little choice as to what courses they take (because they will make inappropriate choices on their own) and/or because they believe that students should learn about each individual discipline (not acknowledging that there

Devil in the Details (1/12–8/12)  ■ 197 are easily dozens of bona fide disciplines), and only later be exposed to interdisciplinary courses. • Those who believed that the administration should never have anything to do with curriculum, including deciding the total number of credits for general education and including appointing faculty committees to work on curriculum.

This added up to a lot of faculty, and there were many dozens who found the time to share their concerns with me. I tried to keep reminding myself that CUNY had some seven thousand full-­time faculty, and the ones I was hearing from directly were a small proportion. And though the petitions garnered many endorsing names, I knew from my own experience that numbers by themselves were not conclusive. Some names might have been added by third parties, or might not be those of people at CUNY; some people will sign any petition presented to them; many faculty are predisposed to think that anything the administration is doing does not have the faculty’s best interests at heart; and, as occurs with any contentious college issue, there were many faculty in favor of what the administration was doing who weren’t going to admit that to other faculty. While one petition was in process, we learned that the PSC had sent a Pathways detractor at one college a list of all of the faculty there who had not yet signed. What the Pathways detractor was supposed to do with this list we did not find out, but we suspected that the intent was for the recipient to impose some sort of pressure on nonsigners, particularly nontenured nonsigners. Nevertheless, I was certain that there were many faculty who were opposed to Pathways whom we were not hearing from. I grieved because of the upset that I was causing individual faculty members, whether they had the facts right or wrong about Pathways. I kept hearing the phrase “Do no harm” in my head, over and over. But then I would speak with some students, and think about the long-­ term huge goal of helping them by facilitating a more integrated CUNY, consistent with the mandate of New York State Education Law, and I would go on. Throughout my life I have turned to data to help me deal with difficult situations, and Pathways was no exception. I started keeping a graph of the number of negative emails and letters that we received each day. I used different colored lines for the different sources of these communications: blue for Sandi, red for the PSC, green for others, and purple for total. The graph helped me focus on what was happening, rather than on my emotional reactions to what was happening. My idea was that I would watch the lines trend down over the period of

198  ■  Chapter 7 Figure 7.1. Graph of the number of negative emails I received about Pathways during each week of spring 2012 25 Emails written by PSC Emails written by Sandi Emails written by others Total number of emails

Number of emails

20 15 10 5

1/

18

1/ –1/ 25 24 –1 2/ /31 1 2/ –2/ 8– 7 2/ 2/ 15 14 2/ –2/ 22 21 – 2/ 2/2 29 8 3/ –3/ 7 6 3/ –3/ 14 13 3/ –3/ 21 20 – 3/ 3/2 28 7 4/ –4/ 4 3 4/ –4/ 11 10 4/ –4/ 18 17 – 4/ 4/2 25 4 – 5/ 5/1 2– 5/ 5/ 9 8 5/ –5/ 16 15 5/ –5/ 23 22 – 5/ 5/2 30 9 6/ –6/ 6 5 6/ –6/ 13 12 6/ –6/ 20 19 – 6/ 6/2 27 6 –7 /3

0

Weeks

the spring semester. The only problem was that, week after week after week, that didn’t happen. The lines didn’t really go down until after CUNY’s commencements were over. That spring we engaged in many activities specifically to counter the negative, often incorrect, information that was being distributed about Pathways. In this we were always grateful for the experienced guidance of Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the Board of Trustees. With Jay’s assistance, in addition to our responding to all negative emails and letters that we received, we wrote all sorts of communications to the CUNY community and spoke about Pathways at every CUNY official business gathering at which Matt or I were present. We were also aided in our efforts by other proponents of Pathways. The president of the USS (by then Kafui Kouakou) wrote a letter to Matt supporting Pathways, and students demonstrated in favor of Pathways at the April Board of Trustees meeting. Positive editorials appeared in both the New York Post and the New York Daily News. William Kelly (president of the Graduate Center, who was in charge of the faculty committees working on the transfer majors for Pathways), and Brooklyn College history Professor KC Johnson published supportive pieces online in the New York Post and in Johnson’s blog, respectively. However, the centerpiece of our communication strategy that spring was the Pathways brochure, finally finished.19 Consisting of six double-­sided 8½ × 11

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glossy pages (including the covers), this brochure summarized the case for Pathways. In addition to unattributed text, it contained supportive quotes from Benno, Bill Kelly, three CUNY Distinguished Professors (Attewell, Bergad, and Nunez, all of whom had testified at the June 2011 public hearing and had subsequently served on the Common Core Steering Committee), and eminent academics from around the country (Robert Berdahl, William Bowen, Molly Corbett Broad, Jonathan Cole, Michael Crow, Vartan Gregorian, and Hunter Rawlings). For example, the quote from Bill Bowen, president emeritus of Princeton University and of the Mellon Foundation, and founding chairman of Ithaka/JSTOR, read, “CUNY is the nation’s largest urban public university system; if the Pathways initiative had merely organized and clarified requirements among its colleges, it would have achieved something substantial. But the system-­wide emphasis on both fundamentals and flexible areas defined by rigorous learning outcomes marks Pathways as a truly momentous step forward for CUNY’s dual missions of access and excellence.” Later that semester, in May, Bill also published an opinion piece supporting Pathways in the Wall Street Journal.20 In addition to putting the brochure online, in mid-­March we sent a copy of it to every full-­time faculty member. We didn’t hear many positive comments as a result, though. And we certainly did not hear any comments suggesting that the statements of these leaders in American higher education lauding Pathways had at all convinced faculty of the project’s worth. It seemed that the negative comments about Pathways continued just as they had before. One brochure cover letter sent to a community college faculty member was returned to me with the following comment handwritten on it: “Wow. this is what CUNY chooses to spend $ on. Shame, shame, shame, peddling propaganda on the taxpayers dime. Your decisions will leave no one but [the central administration] happy. Students will still take too many credits because of the complexity, not to mention the confusion once exception after exception after exception is made. The Emperor has no clothes! An untenured, but concerned professor.” Sandi wrote to at least some of the people quoted in the brochure, transmitting information about the negative opinions of Pathways. From what we learned, their reactions to her letters were not positive. A series of emails sent during one month that spring by the chair of a humanities department at a senior college contained content that was at times quite disturbing. Some of these emails were sent to many people and some just to me. I have no memory of having ever met this chair. Here are his emails in the order in which they were sent:

200  ■  Chapter 7 • “What planet is Lexa living on now? Is it even in this galaxy? I just looked on the PSC petition webpage and found 3027 names of faculty who want Pathways repealed. Her letter to the trustees is the stuff of Lewis Carroll. Maybe there are parallel universes. That must be the only answer.” • “Dear Provost Logue: I am most curious as to how the Pathways debacle will affect your career. Either you will be viewed as the shill for a curricular program that is both illegal and disastrous to the academic welfare of the university and its students, or you will use this entire epispde to get yourself a chancellorship at some other institution. In either case I wish you good health and good luck.” • “Having been chair of the [XX department] for ten years, almost to a man, every graduate of a community college who comes to my office asking to become a [XX] major does not have sufficient preparation to do so. Usually they have taken the appropriate introductory . . . classes but when I ask them questions that any . . . graduate of those classes [at my college] can answer I am usually met with blank stares. Yes, they have taken the courses but they present themselves here with no usable skills or working knowledge. It is then that I tell them that it is time to get serious if they want to study at this institution—­that education is about personal growth and development, not the accumulation of credits. Getting serious means taking those courses over and passing with at least a grade of B so they have a fighting chance of making it all the way to commencement. In most cases the student understands what it is I am telling them and appreciates that my insisting that they repeat courses is for their own good. . . . At that point I contact the Admissions Office and have the transfer credits in question converted to blanket [i.e., elective, not major] credits so the courses may be taken again here. . . . Students go to community college because they are, for one reason or another, not prepared to do [senior] college work. . . . The courses they took in community college are not usually the equivalent of courses at a senior college—­they are preparatory. They make up for deficiencies that stem from substandard high school educations. . . . The students who come to me from the community colleges are ready to begin studying at [my college] as freshmen, not as sophomores or juniors. . . . Community college students who want to attend a senior college should enter as freshman just like the people who qualify out of high school. . . . There should be no transfer of credits because it is a charade to believe that a student who spent a year or two at a community college is at the same level as someone who spent the same period of time at a senior

Devil in the Details (1/12–8/12)  ■ 201 college. . . . I tell [transfer students] . . . they . . . have to begin at the beginning. I am here to tell you that no one who did so ever complained to me after spending a semester with us in the relentless pursuit of truth and beauty.” • “Dear VC Logue, Yesterday I had a transfer student in my office who wanted me to grant her credit for the Introduction to [XX] course she took at [a non-­ CUNY] University three years ago so she could exempt our [course]. I asked her [a factual question] and she said they didn’t cover [that] in that class. I then asked her [another factual question] and that brought another embarrassed smile. A third question confirmed that either she learned nothing or remembered nothing from that academic experience. For many of our students taking classes is like going to a tanning parlor, only years later the tan is gone and the class is a distant memory. . . . The scenario with this lovely young lady is another classic case of granting transfer credits for coursework, not for knowledge. I have participated in scores of these in my [XX] years as chair. It turns out this young lady also did 39 credits at one of CUNY’s junior colleges and said it was a terribly disappointing experience. She is more evidence of my contention that we should be very careful about this whole transfer business.” • Regarding a letter that I wrote to the Board of Trustees, this chair wrote: “Makes me want to throw up. On what planet is this joyous experience taking place? At [my college] we just decided to bow out of the Pathways farce until it is properly designed to meet senior college needs. Why does the EVC continue to lie to the Board? The Emperor has no clothes.”

In my opinion, these emails were filled with unfounded accusations and inappropriate language, lack of understanding of and respect for undergraduate students, and descriptions of attempts to intimidate new students by a senior faculty member, one who thoroughly enjoyed his total power to require students to spend multiple extra semesters in order to obtain a bachelor’s degree. The description of the “lovely young lady” whose academic experience so far had been like going to a “tanning parlor” and who had an “embarrassed smile” was particularly disturbing, describing this student in terms of her physical characteristics and not in terms of her role as a student. These emails made me even more determined to proceed. Every once in a while there were communications that brought a smile to my and others’ faces. One of these was a March email sent out by the PSC and forwarded by Sandi to many faculty: “There is a fraudulent e-­mail being circulated today, purporting to come from PSC President Barbara Bowen and University

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Faculty Senate Chair Sandi Cooper asking for support for Pathways—­this is a SCAM. The legitimate PSC petition [emphasis in the original] calls for the repeal of Pathways.” I have never had the slightest hint of who wrote that fraudulent email, though I admit to being curious. There also continued to be times when faculty said things that gave me great faith in them, such as this message that I received in January 2012 from a former Common Core Steering Committee member: “Pathways Steering Committee has been one of the most intense experiences I’ve had in a work setting. I have learned a lot about commitment, involvement, endurance, collegiality and values. . . . [I] would like to continue to . . . share insights and perspectives with anyone who would like to improve education at CUNY. Thank you for the opportunity.”

The Main Work Concerning Common Core Courses and Ancillary Policies What about the main work that we were supposed to be doing that spring and summer—­facilitating the development and approval of courses for the Common Core and for the first few courses of the most popular transfer majors, as well as putting in place the policies needed to complement the board’s Pathways resolution? This work needed our constant, ongoing attention, and we made sure to find the time for it despite everything else that was going on. We could not let the schedule slip. Probably the most vulnerable aspect of our whole plan was having the appropriate courses for the Common Core. The Pathways Common Core has eight categories of courses, and each of the nineteen colleges needed to have one or more courses approved for each of those categories by spring 2013, when students would start registering for fall 2013 classes, the first actual semester of Pathways. That meant that we had to fill 19 × 8 = 152 cells. The usual practice was for college faculty to develop and approve all courses, and we were determined to follow the usual practice. Having someone from outside a department develop courses for that department would not only have been academically inappropriate; it would have caused ten times more upset than had already been caused. But the difficulty was that, at any time, a particular department could put its foot down and refuse to participate, or simply slow down its work, and there would be little that we could do about it.

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We therefore decided to try to avoid this sort of problem by ensuring that colleges had sufficient funds to compensate faculty well for the extra work they would have to do in developing any new Common Core courses. Allan Dobrin, the other CUNY executive vice chancellor, and the chief operating officer, someone who supported Pathways every step of the way, provided these funds, as well as whatever funds were needed for every other aspect of Pathways. Another action that we took to help ensure that sufficient coursework for Pathways was identified and developed was our requirement that each college submit its plans for effecting Pathways to us by April 1. These plans had to include information about how and when a college was going to provide the appropriate Pathways courses. By and large the plans were fine, and their existence enabled us to determine whether each college was proceeding on schedule, cuing us if an intervention was needed. Nevertheless, we in the central office were quite anxious about finalizing all the needed courses. I stayed in close touch with each college’s chief academic officer (provost) to find out whether there were any particular problems and to offer my office’s help if there were. Through the summer of 2012, everything seemed to be going reasonably well. However, during this period, the spring and summer of 2012, things were not going as smoothly with the Common Core Course Review Committee (CCCRC). It had seemed to me that the only way we could deal with some faculty’s contentions that other CUNY colleges didn’t have sufficiently high standards was to have a university-­wide committee that, in addition to the colleges themselves, approved all courses for the Common Core. (The University System of Georgia used such a committee when they implemented transfer policies similar to Pathways.) It also seemed to me that, in order to accomplish this purpose, we needed to have every single one of the nineteen colleges represented on the committee. Further, we needed to have the voting done by people whose disciplines had at least something to do with the course being voted on. So I decided that we would set up a CCCRC subcommittee for each of the eight categories of the Common Core, with a representative from each college on each subcommittee. That would be a total of 152 faculty members on the CCCRC, the largest faculty committee of which I, or anyone else involved, had ever heard. Some CUNY administrators were skeptical about this strategy for approving the Common Core courses. It was an enormous undertaking to set up and maintain such a committee. However, I was convinced that in the end we would benefit from a fully representative, faculty-­populated, CCCRC

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because no college would be able to say that it had not been consulted on the transferability of a particular Common Core course. So for the first few months of spring 2012 we solicited and vetted hundreds of CCCRC member nominations, using all the same communication channels that we had used previously for Pathways faculty committees. All CCCRC members had to be tenured, full-­ time faculty. Once again, despite our specific request to the UFS, they gave us no nominations. As we expected, there were a couple of colleges, particularly ones whose chief academic officers did not seem fully dedicated to the Pathways work, that had a lot of difficulty providing faculty for one or a couple of the subcommittees. In addition, as we were to discover, some of the faculty who were appointed to the CCCRC agreed to participate because they thought that this would be an opportunity to reform Pathways. That was not correct. The job of the CCCRC members was only to review the courses submitted to it by the colleges and to determine whether the courses would or would not satisfy all the learning outcomes specified for that part of the Common Core. A few faculty tried to use committee meetings or their CCCRC membership status as a platform for attacking Pathways. Others, after agreeing to serve, quickly resigned. Some of the faculty who resigned did so publicly. Sandi sent their resignation letters around to all the CUNY faculty. There were a couple of CCCRC committee slots that we had to fill many times, and a couple of slots that never got filled. But those were exceptions. Much effort was expended just in finding appropriate meeting spaces and meeting times for all of these subcommittees, providing food for the meetings, and, most difficult of all, providing all committee members with all of the submitted course materials online, so that the committee members could review the materials at their convenience. The people in Computing and Information Services, headed by Associate Vice Chancellor Brian Cohen, another major supporter of Pathways, found significant amounts of time from within their already-­packed schedules to set up a working system for this purpose. Then there were the associated committee policies that had to be decided and put in place. Could meetings and votes take place virtually? Did a positive vote require a majority of all those voting or all those on the committee? Dave Fields, senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor, and CUNY’s parliamentary procedure expert, helped the CCCRC figure this all out. Perhaps most importantly, we needed a truly great faculty member to chair the entire CCCRC: someone who was highly respected, who could interact well

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with all the faculty on the CCCRC, and who could help manage the details of operating the committee. We were most fortunate in being able to recruit a sterling person, Presidential Professor Philip Kasinitz of the Graduate Center, a sociologist. Julia Wrigley, the associate university provost and also a sociologist, was primarily responsible for recruiting him for this task. We also needed chairs for each of the CCCRC subcommittees, and there we were not always so fortunate. Though the chairs were all vetted by their respective colleges’ provosts, the CCCRC subcommittee chairs’ performance varied widely. Some seemed to carry off all needed reviews and votes with ease, meeting all deadlines, and with few complaints from the colleges. Others never seemed to make any progress, or do any work at all. Particularly given that the CCCRC chairs were being paid for their extra work even more than were the CCCRC members, the couple of inactive chairs were a constant source of frustration. Ultimately, after multiple warnings, we replaced them. It was all a bureaucratic nightmare. But I felt it was a necessary bureaucratic nightmare. The staff in the central Office of Academic Affairs—­including Andrea Baker, my executive assistant; Dominique DiTommaso, my executive secretary; and Jeanette Rodriguez, my secretary—­demonstrated their usual consummate skill at handling a myriad of details. The first CCCRC meeting took place on March 2. Our work was also continuing on the entry courses for the most popular transfer majors. On March 19 we were able to release for comment the recommended courses for seven majors. The faculty had agreed on learning outcomes for each of these courses. The idea was that a course would be accepted for a given major by all colleges offering that major if it met the specified learning outcomes. This was a big step forward. However, there was a significant problem with the recommendations of the faculty committee working on the biology major. The introductory course that a biology major usually takes is a one-­year, lecture-­ and-­laboratory, course. As I was to learn, at most of our colleges this course started with cellular biology and ended with organismic biology, consistent with the way that most textbooks are structured. But a couple of CUNY colleges taught the course in the reverse order. All the colleges wanted to continue teaching the course in the order in which they usually taught it. This presented a problem for a biology major who transferred from a cellular-­biology-­first college to an organismic-­biology-­first college in the middle of the academic year, or vice versa. Such a student would have to wait until the following fall semester

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to take the second half of Introductory Biology, possibly delaying his or her graduation by a semester. Nationally, close to 10 percent of postsecondary students transfer during each academic year21 (in addition to many more transferring between academic years), so the issue of how to deal with midyear transfer is not unique to CUNY. The Biology Committee had identified this problem for Introductory Biology at CUNY, and they had devised a solution.22 The first part of their solution was that students should be advised not to transfer in the middle of the academic year. But if, despite advice, they transferred anyway, then such a student should take the second semester of biology at the new college (despite its probably significant overlap with the first half of Introductory Biology that the student took at his or her original college). Then the student should meet with one or more advisers for an assessment of what topics the student had missed out of the whole year-­long course by taking two semesters of the first half of Introductory Biology, and in a subsequent semester the student should attend lectures and do tutorials on those topics. Only after that entire process had been completed would the student receive transfer credit for the first semester of Introductory Biology taken at the original college. The committee stated that “to mandate a sequence of material is to force more insidious encumbrances on the instructor’s presentation and integration of that material. We find this unacceptable at the College level.” Though there are certainly advantages to teaching a year-­long sequence of material as an integrated whole, as far as I knew there was no rigorous evidence that teaching the material in one order or the other was better. So it came down to faculty personal preference. And given that CUNY students sometimes transfer not on a whim but because of family or financial circumstances beyond their control, it seemed to me that faculty personal preferences were being put ahead of student needs. And that, to me, was not acceptable. After much discussion in the central office and with the Biology Committee members’ provosts, I thanked the committee for its work and then disbanded it. I asked the provosts for new faculty members for a new Biology Committee, this time faculty who themselves taught Introductory Biology, and ones whom the provosts believed would be more flexible and creative than the original group. When I charged the new committee, I told them that they could recommend whatever they wanted as long as their recommendations did not penalize students for transferring. Using examples from the work of other major committees that had devised student-­supportive solutions to similar problems, I was

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able to suggest alternative outcomes for the new Biology Committee to consider. For example, they could decide on a single, CUNY-­wide topic sequence for Introductory Biology. Or they could decide on what should be taught in two individual, semester-­long, pieces (modules) of Introductory Biology, with each college offering each module each semester. Or they could come up with something else. But a student who transferred in the middle of the year had to be able to continue the first year of Introductory Biology seamlessly. As it turned out, the new Biology Committee, whose members were dedicated to helping students, recommended the modules approach. We were able to release the final biology recommendations in the spring of 2013, approximately a year and a half after work on the biology major had begun. By then we were also working on an additional set of majors. Ultimately we were able to obtain faculty agreement on the entry courses for ten of the most popular transfer ­majors. Although the numbers would have justified it, we never even attempted this with the history major. Sandi, a history professor, had pretty much ignored the majors part of Pathways, and I decided to try to keep it that way. Other Pathways-­related work during the spring and summer of 2012 concerned policy waivers. We had told the colleges that they could request waivers from Pathways policies, particularly if those policies would cause any conflict with accreditation requirements. Each area of professional education—­for example business, nursing, and engineering—­has its own national accrediting organization, and each of those organizations requires certain courses for a program to be accredited. A handful of colleges submitted waiver requests to us. Julia and her staff reviewed the requests and recommended to me that most of them be granted. However, when I reviewed them, with one possible exception, I did not see that it was impossible for the requesting colleges to comply with the Pathways policies, and complying with those policies would benefit any student who ended up transferring. Therefore I denied all but one of the waiver requests. It was also during this period that Julia, who was spending huge amounts of her time delving into the details of the implications of Pathways for the colleges, explained to me some of the special challenges posed by Pathways for the community colleges. As we had learned, many, perhaps most, of the majors at the community colleges were packaged together with specific general education courses. So a community college student who, for example, wanted to major in business, would be told to take a certain set of general education courses. To graduate as a business major, the student had to pass, not only the major’s

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business courses, but the major’s general education courses. This was good in that it gave students clear, comprehensive, course paths to graduation, but it was not good in that when a student transferred, the general education courses that the student had taken often didn’t match those at the new college, and so the student lost general education credits. Even if a student didn’t transfer but simply changed majors, she or he sometimes had to take a new set of general education courses. Now, with Pathways, all of these students’ general education requirements would fall within the Pathways framework, eliminating the previous problems. But it meant revising each of the majors, a sometimes complicated task, involving many levels of faculty and administration approval. Each of the community colleges set to the work, supported however possible by Julia and her staff. Finally, Pathways could not smooth transfer for students on its own. It needed the support of other policies and procedures. In my monthly meetings with the colleges’ provosts and in our discussions among ourselves in the central office, we identified several such problems. To try to come up with solutions we decided to appoint a committee consisting of provosts and some central office staff, headed by Vita Rabinowitz, long-­term provost of Hunter College, and extremely well respected by the other provosts. Vita’s committee did an outstanding job, reviewing each policy issue and recommending an excellent policy change for each. For example, in the case of Advanced Placement (AP) credit, her committee recommended that all of CUNY have the same standard for AP credit, and that it be the highest of the standards currently in place at the various colleges. The entire group of provosts unanimously endorsed this recommendation. I also informed the UFS of this recommendation and they did not object. After all, we were raising curricular standards, something that the UFS had said they strongly favored. Therefore, with Matt’s agreement, the new AP policy was instituted (see also chapter 3). I continued to inform the UFS of everything that we were doing, and I always asked for their input. But they provided no feedback.

Departures and Arrivals Sandi was in the last semester of her two-­year term as UFS chair. We didn’t know whether she would seek another term; there was no sign that she was slowing down. In March alone, in addition to writing to people who were quoted in the

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Pathways brochure, she sent out at least twenty-­one emails to the faculty and wrote to the trustees at least twice. In April she wrote to the faculty at least nineteen times and to the trustees at least six. It was hard for me to understand why she kept writing to the trustees—­why she thought that the trustees would listen to anything she had to say given her previous negative interactions with them. An example of such negative interactions had occurred as a result of her February 29, 2012, memo/email to the board, administration, and faculty. This communication concerned two resolutions that had just been passed by the UFS.23 The first, less problematic, resolution said simply, “The University Faculty Senate, mindful of the need to improve transfer policies equally with preserving academic excellence and the reputation of the University, strongly opposes the Pathways resolution.” It was an acknowledgment of the transfer problem and an expression of opposition to Pathways, without any alternative solution, or even a strategy to achieve an alternative solution. The second, more problematic, resolution supported pending New York State legislation that would change the way that CUNY trustees were appointed. Instead of most trustees being appointed directly by the governor and the mayor, the governor and mayor would nominate trustees who would then have to be approved by both the New York State Senate and a new eleven-­member CUNY Commission (which would include one member appointed by the UFS). The rationale given for this change was that, under the current system, trustees were often appointed for political reasons, rather than for their educational expertise. However, a trustee might have seen the proposed change as making his or her views subject to those of a great many people, including the UFS. One of the trustees wrote back to Sandi on March 5, copying dozens of faculty, administrators, and trustees, starting with “It would also not hurt to mention that one of the motivations of said resolution is to deny trustees the same freedom of speech that the faculty reserves for themselves.” Sandi wrote back the same day: “Free speech is not in question. Academic freedom, if it exists any more, seems to be confined to letting faculty decide what is in their syllabus but NOT what is in their college curriculum.” The trustee responded, in part: “Why is intellectual honesty such a rare commodity in academia?” The concept of free speech was a repeated theme in Sandi’s communications. One of them, on March 9, to dozens of faculty and trustees, ended with “It has always been my credo to speak truth to power.” Free speech was important to me too. My credo had always been, “Truth, justice, and the American way.” Whose truth was correct? Both? Neither?

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On March 22, there was an eventful Faculty Senate meeting at the College of Staten Island. This is Sandi’s college and she was present at this meeting. The Provost, William Fritz, gave a report on Staten Island’s proposed college-­ specific structure for the Common Core, a structure that had already been approved by their faculty general education committee. However, their senate voted to delay Pathways by a year and to do nothing during that time. At the end of the meeting, with no prior notification, a resolution of no confidence in both the College of Staten Island’s President, Tomás Morales, and Provost, Bill (both significant Pathways supporters), was introduced and voted on. There were sealed ballots and they were taken away unopened from the meeting, presumably for later counting. The timing of all this was perhaps not surprising. First, Staten Island’s plan for how it would effect Pathways was due to the CUNY central office just nine days later, by April 1. At the senate meeting, Bill had told the faculty that, independent of any senate votes, he would send the committee-­approved general education structure to the central office by April 1 as he was required to do as an officer of the university. Second, there was long-­term antagonism between Sandi and her president and provost, and the College of Staten Island was scheduled for a critical site visit by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education starting eight days after the senate meeting, part of the procedure for renewing the college’s principal accreditation. On March 26 Sandi sent a letter with attached information about the resolution of no confidence to the chair of the Middle States external review committee that would be reviewing the College of Staten Island for accreditation renewal (the chair of this committee was a provost at a university in Pennsylvania). The last line of the attachment stated, “The resolution passed (31 yes/ 18 no/ 2 abstain).” However, four days later, on March 30, the chair of Staten Island’s Faculty Senate sent an email to dozens of faculty, including Sandi, saying that the vote of no confidence had been “flawed. The lateness of the hour, the fact that people were entering and exiting the room, and the voices that were raised created a chaotic atmosphere. Consequently a misstep occurred after someone called the question. Such a motion requires a 2/3 vote, but that was not obtained. . . . In actuality, the vote is still on the floor and discussion should continue at the next meeting of Faculty Senate.” Commenting on the vote, a member of Matt’s senior staff wrote in a March 23 email: “This makes clear the Bolshevik tactics used by Sandi. Imagine how she would howl if at the end of a board of trustees meeting and without prior notice, one of the trustees made a motion of no confidence in the faculty trustee” (i.e., in Sandi).

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Matt supported Tomás in every way possible, including publicly praising him at the next board meeting on April 30. Sandi emailed the faculty within a few hours of that meeting’s end, saying: Events at the Board of Trustees meeting . . . moved me to walk out of the meeting. First, the Chancellor tongue lashed the [Staten Island] Faculty Senate for its vote of no confidence in Tomas Morales (for Goldstein’s exact words and facial expressions go to the CUNY website podcast of the meeting . . .); he then praised the president in fulsome terms promising they would have a long relationship with each other; various trustees then took the floor also echoing the praise and there was a standing ovation. One of the trustees went so far as to remark on how far Tomas Morales had come from his humble beginnings and made allusions to the necessity for diversity. . . . The trustees found a vote of no confidence something beyond the bounds of propriety, apparently. I emailed the Chancellor indicating he had jumped the gun since the vote was not final and might be redone. No answer yet. He seems to have not bothered learning about the whole picture, the confusion of the parliamentary process.

So Sandi, in communicating with the faculty as their leader, had criticized the chancellor for speaking as if Tomás—­someone associated with “diversity”—­ had received a vote of no confidence, when he really hadn’t. Yet five weeks earlier she had herself written to the Middle States review chair stating that the no-­confidence vote had passed. Her statements about the no-­confidence vote to Middle States had the potential of far larger consequences than did the chancellor’s at the board meeting, yet she did not mention her communication with Middle States, at least not in this email. Middle States was not unfamiliar with actions such as these occurring at colleges around the time of a site visit. The result of their review of the College of Staten Island was as follows: “To reaffirm accreditation and to request a monitoring report, due December 1, 2013, documenting (1) the alignment of new general education goals and assessments with course, program, institutional, and system goals  .  .  .  ; and (2) evidence that results of student learning outcomes assessment in all programs are used to improve teaching, learning, and institutional effectiveness, and that assessment results are linked to resource allocation.”24 To my reading, this statement told the college: you are doing fine, but continue with Pathways, and make sure to use student learning outcomes (something to which Sandi had been publicly opposed). Ultimately, neither Tomás nor Bill received a proper vote of no confidence. However, at the beginning of May, Tomás announced that he would be leaving

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the College of Staten Island to become president of California State University, San Bernardino. We in the central office were sorry to see him go. His overriding concern for students had been a model for all. Within two weeks, Matt announced that Bill would become Staten Island’s interim president, would be allowed to serve as interim president for longer than was usually the case, and, unusually, might be permitted to be a candidate for the permanent position. I knew Bill well as a smart, dedicated, rational, professional, knowledgeable, and caring provost, and as a strong supporter of Pathways. So I had suggested him to Matt as the ideal interim president multiple times and was delighted when he was appointed. Despite Tomás’s departure, the College of Staten Island was going to continue to have a strong leader who supported Pathways. In the meantime, anti-­Pathways activity by the PSC was picking up. On March 8 the PSC held a much publicized “Town Hall meeting” in a church on East Thirty-­Fifth Street to speak about Pathways. The PSC’s announcement of the meeting read as follows: “PSC will hold a Town Hall meeting on Thursday, March 8 from 6:00–­8:30pm on Pathways, CUNY’s controversial overhaul of general education and transfer requirements, which circumvents elected faculty input and dilutes academic standards. Hear from faculty throughout the university on the fight to defend faculty governance, academic freedom and quality education.” According to our count, there were just over 200 people in attendance (the PSC reported “nearly 350”),25 including about 35 speakers. One speaker suggested that people opposed to Pathways who were members of the colleges’ curriculum committees should not show up to meetings so that there wouldn’t be a quorum. As another example of the anti-­Pathways views at the meeting, located at the meeting room’s entrance was someone from the CUNY Revolutionary Communist Labor Party who was handing out a red piece of paper headed “Pathway to Ignorance or Road to Revolution.” When Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC, spoke at the town hall meeting,26 she said, “One good thing that’s come out of Pathways is a wider recognition of the need to address the facilitation of transfer of credits.” She also said that the much-­anticipated PSC/UFS lawsuit against Pathways would be filed within ten days. “We’ve invested considerably in the lawsuit. . . . I can’t think of a better use of [union] resources than standing up for the academic integrity of a CUNY education.” She went on to say that a second lawsuit against Pathways would be filed by students at a later date. And that Pathways, because it “substitutes learning outcomes for disciplinary knowledge, is a second class curriculum.” Pathways “is an austerity education, preparing our students for

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low expectations.” In my view, learning outcomes include disciplinary knowledge, and having explicit learning outcomes raises, not lowers, expectations. However, Barbara’s statement that the CUNY administrators “constantly claim that this curriculum has our full support” was the most surprising part of her speech. I didn’t know of any administrator who had said anything approaching that; we all knew there was considerable opposition. Opposition was apparent to everyone, everywhere, every day. When Terrence Martell, vice chair of the UFS, spoke27 he said: I did it [put my name as a plaintiff on the lawsuit] not because . . . CUNY has substituted the judgment of one person, Lexa Logue, for the collective judgment of the faculty. I did it not because the Common Core, the premajor courses, and the majors themselves will be uprooted by decisions made for us by bureaucrats miles away from the students that will be impacted.

This despite the fact that we had set up Pathways in such a way as to ensure that all choices of learning outcomes, courses, and course content would be made by faculty, not administrators. Terry went on: Why am I signing on to this suit? I want to quote Bill Cosby and I want you to think about the quote. The quote is: “the subtle racism of low expectations.” That, ladies and gentlemen, is exactly what we’re facing. For our least prepared students, the proposed curriculum changes are, in my opinion, a Pathway to oblivion.

Terry was not the only speaker to associate Pathways with racism, as Sandi had also done in her November 2011 talk at the AAUP conference in Washington, DC28 (see chapter 6). At first these implications that Pathways was somehow associated with racism made no sense to me. But I came to understand that the faculty making these assertions—­virtually all of whom appeared to be white, as were virtually all of the faculty leaders opposing Pathways—­were apparently asserting that because, they said, the Pathways curriculum would be substandard; it would hurt CUNY students. And because CUNY students are predominantly black and Hispanic, predominantly black and Hispanic students would be hurt. I saw things differently. The strongest Pathways objections had to do with students transferring courses from the community to the senior colleges (which is also the largest group of transfer students), and the community colleges enroll a higher proportion of black and Hispanic students than do the senior colleges. Therefore helping CUNY students transfer their credits would differentially

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benefit black and Hispanic students. And, of course, I always believed that the Pathways courses would be of high quality, because they would be subject to, not only the usual campus-­based reviews, but reviews by university-­wide committees of highly respected faculty. The PSC/UFS lawsuit that Barbara and Terry had spoken about was filed on March 20, with the assistance of two law firms, and with much publicity by the UFS and the PSC. The plaintiffs were Barbara, Sandi, and Terry. A central part of the lawsuit claimed that the CUNY administration had circumvented the role of the faculty in establishing Pathways, that faculty are responsible for curriculum. However, in some critical places this complaint omitted the following phrase in quoting official policy documents regarding the faculty’s responsibilities: “subject to guidelines, if any, established by the Board.” In subsequent months, the PSC filed a grievance related to Pathways, and the UFS and the PSC (not students, as Barbara had promised at the March town hall meeting) filed a second lawsuit, this time stating that some CUNY colleges had not followed appropriate procedures in effecting Pathways. The plaintiffs were Barbara and Terry (Sandi’s term as UFS chair had ended). (Pathways legal matters are discussed in chapter 11.) From what we were hearing in the central office, PSC anti-­Pathways activities at the colleges were also increasing. We were to hear of many PSC chapter meetings at colleges and of PSC representatives, people who were not members of a given college, walking the halls near faculty offices at that college trying to obtain signatures on anti-­Pathways petitions or to get faculty to attend meetings at which resolutions against Pathways would be voted on. There were many advantages to the UFS joining forces with the PSC to protest Pathways. One was the PSC’s connection to the AAUP, a powerful national organization with a prominent voice. Another was access to the PSC’s funds. The UFS has limited funds, which are provided by the CUNY central office. However, all CUNY faculty pay 1.05 percent of their gross earnings as dues to the PSC.29 This is a substantial amount of money—­sufficient for paying law firms helping with lawsuits, for rental of meeting spaces, and for various forms of publicity. Toward the end of the 2012 spring semester, we learned that Sandi would not continue as UFS chair for a second two-­year term. Instead, Terry would become the UFS chair. As stated in an email sent out by the UFS office, at its May 2012 Plenary meeting the UFS passed a resolution of appreciation for Sandi’s work as UFS chair. The resolution said, in part: Whereas, Dr. Cooper . . . as Chair of the City University Faculty Senate through two contentious periods, between May, 1994 and May, 1998, and then, again,

Devil in the Details (1/12–8/12)  ■ 215 between May, 2010, and this evening of May 15, 2012 . . . has fearlessly, forcefully, eloquently, and tirelessly defended the responsibility of elected faculty for “the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights, and freedoms of the faculty, university level, educational level, and instructional matters, and research and scholarly activities of university-­wide import” . . . Whereas, Sandi Cooper’s exemplary insistence on the truth, on facts, on reason, on integrity, and openness in her dealings with the University, the public, and with appointed and elected officials has established the standard for leadership for all who hold ­positions of responsibility, and Whereas, it is unimaginable that there could have been a more forceful voice nor a more effective representative and proponent of the will of the faculty, therefore BE IT RESOLVED that, on the occasion of Sandi Cooper’s completion of a second exemplary term of office as Chair of the University Faculty Senate, after an equally illustrious previous term as Chair, the University Faculty Senate, on behalf of the entire CUNY Faculty once more expresses its deep and sincere admiration, and its heartfelt and abiding gratitude; And BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the University Faculty Senate re-­affirms its 1998 estimation of Sandi Cooper as a FACULTY TREASURE; And BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED that the University Faculty Senate declares Dr. Sandi Cooper to be a PILLAR OF THE CUNY faculty and of the City University of New York.

The contrast between this resolution’s description of Sandi’s performance as UFS chair and the CUNY administration’s own opinions was quite large, and astonishing. However, such opinion differences seem to occur in many settings, even in national politics. On July 30 I had lunch with the new UFS chair, Terry, at my initiative. I told him that I regretted how contentious the relationship had become between the UFS and the central office. “Yeah,” he said, “We’re suing each other.” “No,” I replied. “You’re suing us.” Two days later the UFS and the PSC filed their second lawsuit, a lawsuit Terry never mentioned at our lunch, a lunch at which I picked up the check.

Conclusions Had all our activity that spring and summer been devoted to Pathways, our office would have been incredibly busy. But we were doing far more. Many new degrees were approved—­including a bachelor’s degree in disability studies at the School of Professional Studies and doctor of physical therapy degrees at the

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College of Staten Island and Hunter College, as well as a new Mexican Studies Institute at Lehman College and a new Institute for Language Education at the Graduate Center. We also approved three new distinguished professors. Many pedagogical and research projects were also supported. Most significantly, in June our office finished the next CUNY Master Plan, “Investing in Our Future,” for the period 2012–­2016.30 We had been working on this document over the past year with input from every CUNY constituency (including the UFS), and it would guide CUNY’s actions over the next four years. After approval by the board, we submitted this document to the New York State Education Department, as required, and we started effecting its elements. Pathways played a major role in this plan. July and August were much quieter than the preceding months, perhaps because of the end of Sandi’s term as chair of the UFS. But I wondered whether we would start hearing from her again in September. After all, she hadn’t retired from her faculty position; she had just stepped down as UFS chair. Perhaps, as a result of no longer being chair, she would have even more time for anti-­ Pathways activities. I expressed my concern to Jay, and he advised that, over time, Sandi would gradually fade away. This made me think about the fact that I too would gradually fade away once I stopped being executive vice chancellor and university provost (the CUNY system’s chief academic officer). But for the moment we seemed to be on track for Pathways. So far about five hundred potential Common Core courses had been submitted to the CCCRC, and we had until December for the rest. Although we were deeply concerned about the lawsuits—­judicial decisions could be unpredictable—­now, said Julia and I to each other, surely the worst must be over.

CHAPTER 8

English Studies ■■■■■

SEPTEMBER 2012 THROUGH DECEMBER 2012

July and August had been quiet, at least in comparison to the preceding months, and the first part of September was the same way. Everyone was settling in to a new academic year. Filling the eight categories of Pathways Common Core courses for each of the nineteen undergraduate CUNY colleges was making good progress, and so was establishing CUNY-­wide entry-­level courses for the most popular transfer majors. We had one year left until Pathways would be in effect. But it turned out that—­both figuratively and literally—­we were in the eye of the storm, not past it.

Refusal, Retaliation, and No Redemption Since the beginning of the Pathways implementation process, we in the central office had speculated that, before the implementation was done, at least one of the colleges would encounter serious trouble. It was hard to believe that everything would be done properly at all nineteen colleges. But as I participated in this speculation, I always imagined that the problems would involve one of the better-­known—­and more politically powerful—­of the colleges, one of the senior (bachelor’s-­degree) colleges that did not want to accept all the credits brought by community college transfers. Perhaps the senior college that was known as a center of PSC activity. Or the senior college where the arts and sciences faculty thought they had so much to lose by a decrease in general education credits. Or the senior college whose president, despite my telling that president that this was not necessary (twice), had insisted that each of that president’s science departments produce 3-­credit, 3-­contact-­hour Common Core courses. Instead, the biggest trouble was at, and the biggest source of trouble was from, Queensborough Community College, a college located in the far reaches

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of New York City’s Queens County, almost into Long Island’s Nassau County, and having about sixteen thousand students and just under four hundred full-­ time faculty. About 9:30 a.m. on September 14, 2012, in quick succession I received emails both from Queensborough’s president and from its vice president for academic affairs (Queensborough’s chief academic officer, the equivalent of a provost). Both were writing to let me know about an email that the provost had sent late the previous day to the chair of Queensborough’s English Department. Until Pathways, that department had had 3-­credit, 4-­contact-­hour English composition classes. Now Pathways was requiring that they change those courses so that they had 3 contact hours. Some of the department’s faculty had prepared new versions of the courses that conformed to the Pathways guidelines. On September 12, the provost, whose academic background was in English, had gone to the English Department to discuss the situation. Soon after her visit, the department voted against the new Pathways versions of the composition courses. The next day, September 13, about 6:30 p.m., the provost had sent her email to the department chair. Here is some of what it contained: We will no longer be able to offer [the courses with 4 contact hours] as of Fall 2013 [when Pathways would start]. Since we don’t have in place courses that will meet the Pathways requirement for the Common Core, we can’t put forward a Fall 2013 schedule of classes that includes English Composition courses. Given that fact, and the resultant dramatic drop in enrollment, we will have to take the following actions: • All searches for full time faculty in the English Department will be cancelled immediately • The existing [4-­contact-­hour courses] will not be included in the common core, and therefore will not be offered in Fall 13 •  . . . continuing and new students will be advised to take the common core requirement . . . at another CUNY institution, since the courses will not be available at Queensborough •  . . . Of necessity, all adjunct faculty in the English department will be sent letters of non-­reappointment for Fall 2013 • The reappointment of full time faculty in the English Department will be subject to ability to pay and Fall 13 enrollment in department courses

According to the CUNY Bylaws, every president had the right and, in fact, the obligation, to submit to the central office whatever was needed for Pathways,

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whether there was a positive faculty vote or not. A couple of presidents in fact submitted some courses without a positive vote, explaining to the faculty that they (the presidents) had no choice as officers of the university. But at Queensborough, the administration had chosen another path. The actions the administration promised would decimate the English Department were they to take place. I did not immediately understand the full import of the provost’s email to the English Department chair. But my understanding grew quickly when the email, which the English Department chair apparently forwarded to all of Queensborough’s English faculty, went viral. For those opposed to Pathways, here at last was documented evidence that the CUNY administration was threatening the CUNY faculty to get them to comply with Pathways, saying that if they didn’t comply, there would be retaliation. Even before I had received either the president’s or the provost’s emails, that morning the PSC had sent an email to its distribution list describing the provost’s email to the English Department chair as containing “outrageous reprisals” and “extraordinary retaliation.” This email went on to describe what the English Department had done as rejecting “the reduction of credit hours for English Composition courses from four to three.” That was incorrect—­the credit hours were, and would stay at, 3; it was the contact hours that would be decreased from 4 to 3. The email said: “There is no reason for the administration to eliminate English Composition courses, or any other courses, that do not comply with Pathways. They will still fulfill the college’s degree requirements. Such courses could still transfer to other colleges for credit outside the general education curriculum.” What was the PSC saying in these sentences—­that a student could take entry-­level Pathways English composition courses that had 3 credits and 3 contact hours, in complete satisfaction of the student’s general education requirements for English composition, and take additional entry-­ level English composition courses, and also get credit for those? Perhaps the PSC was referring to elective course credit, but essentially repeating a course doesn’t sound like a practical or efficient path to graduation. And why would any students even want to repeat such courses? The PSC email went on: “The PSC firmly stands with the faculty at QCC who were exercising their rights as faculty and citizens. [The provost’s] response signals the clear intention to undermine academic freedom and freedom of speech. If the threatened actions in [the provost’s] message are not rescinded immediately, PSC legal counsel will file a charge with the Public Employment Relations

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Board regarding this act of retaliation. The union is also exploring filing a federal lawsuit on First Amendment grounds.” In other words, the QCC administration should back off or face very negative consequences from the PSC. “The union will stand by you as you exercise your academic freedom and professional responsibility. QCC’s department of English has taken a brave and necessary stand. They have demonstrated that we have the power to stand for the preservation of a quality curriculum that serves our students’ interests and that we need not succumb to the administration’s scare tactics. When you are confronted with a vote on Pathways, we urge you not to be intimidated into voting against your conscience. Every faculty member should know that the union is here to defend your rights.” “The faculty’s decision was guided by a deep commitment to sustaining a quality education for students. . . . Students at Queensborough speak 120 different languages. Faculty understand that such a reduction would compromise students’ ability to learn to write at the college level.” The argument that CUNY students needed more general education because they had particularly poor skills was one that I had been hearing over and over. In addition to problems that arise whenever faculty feel that their students are inadequate, the problem with this belief was that every discipline seemed to be convinced that the inadequate skills of CUNY students necessitated the students’ spending more time in that discipline in order to learn it adequately. However, it was standard national practice, and CUNY policy, that associate’s degrees would be completed in 60 credits and bachelor’s degrees in 120 credits. Therefore, if one discipline had more credits, then another had to have fewer. English, to my mind, had a particularly poor case for more of the 30 Common Core credits. First, English composition was the only course area other than science in which all students were required to take two courses, a total of 6 credits and 6 contact hours. Second, the learning outcomes for the Common Core specified that all Common Core courses, not just those in English composition, were to include work on writing skills. And I knew that some courses submitted to the CCCRC (the committee consisting of close to 150 tenured faculty that was reviewing courses for the Common Core) had been returned to colleges for revision precisely because the CCCRC felt that the courses didn’t contain enough writing assignments. After the institution of Pathways, CUNY students would not learn everything they were to learn about writing in English composition courses. According to the PSC, faculty opinions about curriculum, independent of whatever might be the basis for those opinions, should govern final decisions

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about all curricular matters. To do otherwise was to “undermine academic freedom and freedom of speech” and “rights as faculty and citizens.” If I were a faculty member and read the PSC’s email, and had no knowledge of the situation other than what that email provided, I would probably have agreed with the PSC’s views as expressed in the email. As it was, my opinions differed greatly from the PSC’s. Word of what was going on at Queensborough didn’t just spread quickly to the PSC. The UFS also got involved. And within a few days, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, and the New York Times had all published articles on the conflagration (for a list of Pathways media coverage see http://​ awlogue​.com). Moreover, Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, had spoken on WNYC Radio about the controversy. CUNY administrators received letters from all over the United States, as well as from outside the United States. During this period there was a great deal of consultation between the central office and Queensborough about what sorts of communications should be generated by whom and to whom, and we all relied heavily on the advice of Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations and secretary of the Board of Trustees. There was general agreement in the central office that the provost’s email to the English Department chair had been—­extremely—­ill-­advised. I never had any idea of the precise circumstances that had led the provost to write that email. Within a few days, the president and the provost had sent multiple letters of apology to the Queensborough community. For example, in one, the provost stated that she recognized there were problems with her original email to the English Department chair, that it had been “hurtful,” and that there was no excuse for what she had done. She hoped that the administration and the faculty could continue to talk and could come up with a solution that would satisfy the Pathways requirements. In my office we started worrying about the repercussions of all this in the other colleges’ English departments and in all English studies aspects of Pathways. At the time when the Queensborough incident happened, only seven of the nineteen colleges had submitted their English composition courses for review by the English Composition Subcommittee of the CCCRC, and only five of those seven had so far been approved. Given the Queensborough troubles, the missing or revised English composition courses might never be submitted. We also worried that the Pathways-­related demands coming from the ­English faculty might increase as a result of the Queensborough incident. Since February I had been asked, multiple times, by the English Discipline Council

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(which consists of all the CUNY college English Department chairs) to provide the English composition category of the Common Core with more hours. These requests had come in the form of correspondence with the chair of the English Discipline Council, an associate professor in the Hunter College English Department and also, at that time, the chair of that department. Between February and the Queensborough incident, this faculty member had written to me with her request three times, and I had responded three times. A major theme in her letters was that “the dominant pattern of composition courses throughout the university is 3 credits/4 contact hours.” This statement was incorrect, though I became convinced through our correspondence that her incorrect statements arose from—­understandable—­confusion about terminology. She was confusing contact hours with all the time that a faculty member spent with students (the time for which the faculty member was credited with workload hours). The official definition of a contact hour was scheduled time that a faculty member met with a whole class together. Although it was true that just over half (58 percent) of the pre-­Pathways English composition courses carried 4 workload hours for faculty, it was not true that the typical English composition course had 4 contact hours. At first the English Discipline Council chair had said that “the fourth hour is necessary for meeting in conference with students and for reading and grading papers,” activities and time that were in no way limited by any Pathways policy. However, as we continued to correspond (including two more exchanges after the Queensborough incident), what she seemed to want my office to do was to mandate 4 hours of workload for faculty for all the English composition courses, something that had been the case for only 58 percent of the English composition courses prior to Pathways. Since the previous spring, when I first started setting CUNY-­wide policy about contact hours, I had tried to stay away from any policies concerning workload hours. As described in chapter 7, there are many reasons that colleges might (and do) grant workload hours to a faculty member for teaching a certain course, workload hours that are beyond the number of credits that the course carries for students, and/or are beyond the number of hours that it meets (the contact hours). Colleges, not the central office, have always been in the best position to make those judgments. Further, I did not want the central office to get involved in any more aspects of college-­specific curricular matters than we already were. Again, our goal was to set CUNY-­wide policy only to the extent that it was needed to ensure smooth transfer for students. Anything else

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was up to the colleges. Then, too, a CUNY-­wide mandate for faculty to be credited with 4 workload hours for teaching an English composition course could open the floodgates for faculty teaching other Common Core courses who were convinced that 3 workload hours were insufficient given the work they had to do for those courses. The English Discipline Council chair argued that English composition courses wouldn’t be comparable, and thus wouldn’t be transferable, unless all of them carried 4 hours. But since she meant workload hours and not contact hours, and since Pathways required all Common Core courses to have 3 contact hours, I didn’t see how anyone could say that all faculty deserved 4 workload hours for teaching English composition. English composition class sizes could vary widely across the colleges, even after Pathways. Further, faculty might do different things with students in return for a fourth workload hour, and it was up to the colleges to judge whether the faculty’s activities were worthy of a fourth workload hour. Perhaps there might even be cases in which a college would want to give 5 workload hours to a faculty member teaching a section of English composition; that should be a college’s prerogative. We didn’t want to standardize the English composition courses and their workload arrangements any more than was absolutely necessary to facilitate transfer. I tried to explain to the English Discipline Council chair that we were mandating only the credits that the students received and the contact hours, and that the workload hours were up to the college. I further explained that colleges could, if they wished, schedule a fourth hour for a course to use for the instructor to meet with individual or subgroups of students in the course. As long as the hour was used for such scheduling conveniences, and not for meetings of a whole class, it did not count as a contact hour. The English Discipline Council chair also wanted my office to give every college funds to enable them to pay for a fourth workload hour for all faculty teaching English composition (a multimillion-­dollar request). I explained that money for general operating expenses was already all distributed to the colleges; the central office didn’t hold any back. We could have funded such an additional workload hour, but to do that we would first have had to decrease the colleges’ base budgets. What it all came down to, apparently, was that some college administrations were refusing to give the English faculty a fourth workload hour for teaching English composition under Pathways, and the English Discipline Council and its chair wanted me to mandate that the colleges do so. It seemed that faculty

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wanted central office intervention only when it would result in their getting something that they could not get from their college administrations. After the Queensborough incident, the tide of public opinion was clearly sympathetic to the Queensborough English faculty (and possibly also to the entire CUNY English faculty), because the Queensborough administration had pushed them around (or tried to push them around). If the Queensborough English Department ended up with a fourth workload hour as a result for its English composition courses in order to calm the Queensborough political ­waters, this could strengthen the English Discipline Council’s case for a fourth contact hour for all English composition courses. In addition to concerns about the English Discipline Council, within a few days after the Queensborough incident I received a letter from the English Composition Subcommittee of the CCCRC (all of whose members were tenured English faculty) stating that “faculty teaching the composition courses know the number of hours that best serve their particular student bodies. As long as [English Composition Subcommittee] submissions fulfill the Learning Outcomes described for [Pathways] English Composition 1 and 2, we plan to approve courses in a variety of configurations.” In other words, despite the stated central office policy that all Common Core courses should have 3 credits and 3 contact hours, the English Composition Subcommittee of the CCCRC was saying that it would approve courses with any number of credits and contact hours. I knew that once a course had been approved by this subcommittee, there would be a political furor if the central office then said the course couldn’t be offered. So I was glad that, just the previous week, I had given instructions to Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley, whose staff provided administrative support to the CCCRC, that the CCCRC should not review any course unless it had 3 credits and 3 contact hours. Julia’s staff was to constantly monitor the submissions, and immediately remove from the CCCRC’s online review system any course with anything other than 3 credits and 3 contact hours. Julia had wanted the colleges to remove such courses themselves, and certainly the act of removal would have been less likely to cause trouble that way. However, in the time it took for a college to remove a course, even if it were only a couple of hours, committee members might see the course and even vote on it, causing huge problems if we then had to say that course was not allowed (as had already happened in a couple of cases). Going forward, with the help of the Computer Information Systems office, we were having criteria built into the submission software so that courses with

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invalid structures could not be submitted to the central office in the first place, which was the best solution of all. Another English-­studies aspect of Pathways that caused us concern following the Queensborough incident was the committee working on obtaining CUNY-­wide agreement on at least three English major courses. A letter from that committee (another group of tenured English faculty) arrived within a few days of the Queensborough incident. The authors said they were writing to unanimously register our astonishment at the totally disproportionate administrative response to the vote of the English Department at [Queensborough] not to reduce instructional hours for English Composition courses from four to three. . . . The seed for the present controversy was planted when the Central Office declared that all Pathways courses, with very limited exceptions for STEM courses, must be limited not only to 3 credits, but also 3 hours. The latter restriction was required neither by the resolution of the Board of Trustees nor by recommendations of the Task Force which designed Pathways. Subsequently the Central Office, at the urging of some faculty charged with overseeing General Education curricula, wisely saw fit to adopt a more flexible policy for STEM courses, so as not to place at a disadvantage students pursuing those majors.

Did the English faculty think that the science faculty had convinced us to permit the STEM variant courses? The truth was that we had known from the beginning that exceptions would be needed for these courses. STEM majors all take substantial numbers of time-­consuming (many credits and many contact hours) STEM courses in a variety of STEM fields, and, unlike introductory courses in other majors, STEM majors’ introductory courses could not be 3-­credit/3-­contact-­hour courses suitable for the Common Core. Therefore, requiring STEM majors to take two 3-­credit/3-­contact-­hour Common Core science courses, in addition to the courses for their majors, seemed unduly narrowing for their educations. For these reasons we had inserted this sentence into the Pathways resolution that the board had passed in June 2011 (see chapter 1): “The Task Force may make more specific recommendations regarding individual associate-­and baccalaureate-­degree programs, such as Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) programs,”1 and then in December 2011 we had set as policy the task force’s recommendation that students could satisfy their Common Core science requirements by taking introductory STEM courses of any numbers of credits and contact hours (what became known as the STEM variant courses). Were the English faculty

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saying that if the science faculty got an exception, then they should too? It sounded like that to me. Adding to the pressure of these letters from various groups of tenured ­English faculty was the overall political power of the English faculty. Although English departments are the source of much delightful fiction about academia,2 they can also be quite intimidating in the world of college politics. At every CUNY college the English Department was one of the largest. English departments can cover a wide range of subjects—­including, at times, not only writing and literature, but cultural studies, film studies, journalism, linguistics, and theater, as just a few examples. These departments usually teach a major portion of a college’s core curriculum (a minimum of 20 percent of the total Pathways Common Core), resulting in many full-­time faculty lines for these departments, large part-­time faculty budgets, and relatively large operating budgets. The substantial size of the English departments means that if any given English Department decides to vote as a block, which I had seen happen, they could sway many, if not most, votes involving all of the faculty at a given college. For this reason, some administrators—­including some presidents—­are particularly loath to offend their English faculty. I suspected that was why some of the ­English departments had in the past been able to make arrangements at their colleges for additional workload hours for English composition. I also wondered whether these past experiences contributed to the English faculty’s astonishment when their insistence on special workload arrangements for Pathways courses had a null result. And I wondered whether some college administrators had seen Pathways as an opportunity finally not to have to give in to the political power of the English departments. On September 18, Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC and herself an ­English faculty member (at Queens College), wrote to all the faculty saying, in part, that given Queensborough’s apology and change of stance, the union will hold in abeyance its filing of a legal charge of retaliation at the Public Employment Relations Board while we continue to monitor the University’s actions. An apology, however, is not a retraction.  .  .  . Faculty at Queens­ borough have now heard that their reappointment is potentially connected to their vote on curriculum. That message is not easily forgotten. And the explicit threats at Queensborough echo more subtle threats that have been made at other campuses, as administrators communicate to department chairs and faculty members about the consequences of their votes on Pathways curriculum. . . . the

English Studies (9/12–12/12)  ■ 227 CUNY administration [should send] an unambiguous message that it respects the faculty’s right to vote on matters of curriculum—­free from intimidation—­ according to their judgment of the best interests of their students and the standards of their profession. The Pathways resolution was imposed on the University without participation by elected faculty governance. . . . At a minimum, it is time for a moratorium on implementation of Pathways to allow academic freedom and open deliberation at CUNY to be repaired.

So Barbara was saying that the PSC would not file legal challenges now, but might in the future depending on the administration’s actions. She also was not reporting that the reason for the lack of involvement of elected faculty governance in CUNY-­wide Pathways work was the UFS’s refusal to participate. Further, Barbara was not mentioning the fact that, at many colleges, the administration was working productively (if not always happily) with the college-­ elected faculty governance leaders. Finally, Barbara was encouraging the faculty to stop all work on Pathways, an anti-­Pathways strategy against which, I knew, we would have little recourse. The next day Barbara was at Queensborough speaking with members of the English Department. By a couple of days later, we were getting reports that faculty at the two other CUNY community colleges that are geographically closest to Queensborough, neither of which had yet submitted their English composition courses to the CCCRC, would submit only 3-­credit, 4-­(apparently contact-­) hour courses. At all three colleges administrators were in close contact with their English faculty, trying to effect such compromises as a fourth workload hour instead of the prohibited fourth contact hour. In contrast to what was going on at Queensborough, the College of Staten Island was making progress with Pathways, despite the campus presence of Professor Sandi Cooper, recent chair of the UFS and the single most outspoken Pathways opponent. The new Staten Island Interim President, William Fritz, had appointed a highly respected interim provost, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry Fred Naider, and Fred and Bill were working wonders at obtaining faculty approval for Staten Island’s Common Core structure and courses. Pre-­Pathways, Staten Island’s English composition curriculum had consisted of two courses, the first with 3 credits but 4 contact hours, and the second with 4 credits and 4 contact hours. Fred was able to work with the faculty so that the faculty general education committee agreed that their English composition courses for Pathways would both be 3 credits and 3 contact hours, but

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both would have an extra hour for faculty to meet with students individually or in subgroups, and faculty would get 4 workload hours for each course. The agreement came on October 2, in the middle of the Queensborough tumult. My office was ecstatic when we heard this news. In the meantime, at Queensborough, there was more trouble. The English Department chair, who had been trying to work with both the faculty and the administration, was given what amounted to a vote of no confidence by her department, and she subsequently resigned as chair. As is the usual practice at CUNY, the department faculty then held an election for a new chair. The winner of the election was someone who had been outspoken against Pathways. But would that person actually become chair? As discussed in chapter 2, one of the many policy myths at CUNY is that department chairs are chosen solely on the basis of a department election—­that the department holds an election and whoever wins is automatically the new chair. However, according to the CUNY Bylaws (Section 9.1 (c)), “In any case where the president does not approve the election of a department chairperson . . . he/she shall confer with the department and thereafter shall report to the board, through the chancellor, any subsequent action by the department with respect thereto, together with his/her own recommendation for a chairperson.” In other words, if a president doesn’t support the person whom a department has elected, the president can send his or her own recommendation to the Board of Trustees, and it is the board that makes the final decision. Although it is not common, there have been several cases in recent years in which a president has picked the department chair, someone other than the person elected by the department faculty. At Queensborough, after meeting with the supposed chair-­elect, the president decided to exercise her option of sending her own pick to the Board of Trustees. She said that she would not recommend the elected person’s appointment, and she began looking for someone else to chair the department. All of this, not surprisingly, caused another significant outcry. Many faculty saw this as an abrogation of their rights, rather than as a president exercising hers. But the person elected by the department appeared to have a connection to the central CUNY administration. The chair-­elect had received his PhD at the Graduate Center, and William (Bill) Kelly, who had been an English faculty member at Queens College before working at the Graduate Center as provost and then as president, had been a member of his dissertation committee. So Bill knew the chair-­elect well. Bill was also well acquainted with many other CUNY English faculty, whom he reported as besieging him with complaints about the

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poor treatment that English was receiving via Pathways. As described earlier, Bill and Chancellor Matthew Goldstein had had extensive interactions over the years, and Matt greatly admired Bill. Matt had appointed Bill as head of the Pathways effort to establish CUNY-­wide entry courses for the most popular transfer majors, and Bill had written multiple public statements in support of Pathways at Matt’s request. Now, after conversation between Bill and Matt, and conversation between Matt and the Queensborough president, the president suddenly announced that she would appoint as chair the winner of the Queensborough English Department’s faculty election. We in the central Office of Academic Affairs wondered what that meant for completing Pathways. While these events related to the Queensborough English Department were unfolding that fall, there was yet more Pathways-­related upset at Queens­ borough, in this case concerning the writing of a student and of a Queens­ borough faculty member (who was not a member of the English Department). On September 25, right in the middle of the Queensborough English Department tumult, a Queensborough faculty member who was a member of the UFS Executive Committee sent an email containing some unusual language to all the Queensborough faculty. The email was about an alleged quote from a CUNY student reported in a New York Daily News piece.3 The faculty member’s email said, “Check out this story and the poor use of English in the quote from the student and error in sentence construction in the story itself. Sure we can give dem Les time and no problem in wat we get on news stories frum graduates students frum colleges. Dey don’t need no stinkin mor time wit der English! We don’t need no education. We don’t need no thought control. Right? Remember to vote as you are told. Happy Pathways!” Emails started circulating charging that the faculty member was making fun of the student, and especially of black students (because the language used in the email purportedly mimicked a black dialect). Then emails circulated in response to those emails. A formal complaint describing the faculty member’s original email as racist—­a complaint that was copied to dozens of people—­was made to the Queensborough president, who spoke with the faculty member. Months later, in December, that faculty member sent a formal apology about the controversial email to all the Queensborough faculty, and that particular furor finally died down. None of this deterred this same faculty member from requesting to meet with me that fall to talk about resolving the conflicts about Pathways. I did so, but I later felt that giving that faculty member special access to the Pathways

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deliberations was an error. Such access, I later felt, encouraged him to think that he could speak with authority against Pathways, as he had tried to do in the email about the student. By the end of the fall semester, the Queensborough English composition courses still hadn’t been submitted to the CCCRC, and we were quite anxious about that. Four other colleges had also not yet submitted any English composition courses, and one more college had submitted only one of the required two courses. But that also meant that we had all of the English composition courses for thirteen colleges, despite all the trouble involving English faculty. The provosts were working hard with the English faculty to come to agreements with them about whether the courses would have an extra scheduled (but not contact) hour, and whether faculty would get 4 workload hours for teaching the courses (even though all of these courses had 3 credits and 3 contact hours). What had happened at Queensborough that fall with the English composition courses had become what seemed to us in the central Office of Academic Affairs a basis for a worldwide rallying cry against the abuses perpetrated by higher education administrators. From that time forward, when people speaking against Pathways claimed that the faculty had been threatened with retaliation if they did not comply, they would cite Queensborough as an example (and my memory is that that was the only example ever given). The Queensborough crisis resulted in our getting many more anti-­Pathways letters, many more college faculty votes against Pathways (increasingly calling for a moratorium on Pathways work), more anti-­Pathways petitions, and additional letters from the MLA and the AAUP (to which we once again responded). Queensborough was the only one out of nineteen colleges that had made a significant mistake while under enormous pressure, scrutiny, and stress. And the Queensborough administration had done everything possible to undo the resulting damage. But we would hear about the negative aspects of that case over and over again.

The UFS and the PSC Throughout that fall, our Pathways activity continued to be framed by the activity of the UFS and the PSC. Despite her no longer being UFS chair, Sandi was still involved in actions opposing Pathways, although at a decreasing frequency. In December, the New York Daily News published an editorial titled “Pipe Down, Profs” which criticized the faculty opposition to Pathways.4 Sandi

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then emailed her faculty list on December 15: “Unless my computer skills are really worse than I thought, I find that the invitation by the Daily News to publish comments on its editorial . . . is blocked and signing in is not feasible. So much for the free press. If you bother to read the editorial you will see it sounds like it was written at [the CUNY central office] by the PR operation which is in high gear. No one appears to care if students graduate about as culturally deprived as many of them enter”. My own opinion was that headlining an editorial “Pipe Down, Professors” was not likely to facilitate productive conversation about Pathways, but I doubted that comments on the editorial were being deliberately prevented. I never heard anything of that nature, nor had I heard that the editorial was written by anyone at the central office. And I was dismayed at her characterizing CUNY students, for whom I had so much admiration, as “culturally deprived.” However, it was the PSC, not Sandi, whom we heard from the most that fall. And the UFS messages that were sent out to the faculty were often not signed by either her or the new UFS chair, Baruch Business School Saxe Distinguished Professor of Finance Terrence Martell, but instead just came from the UFS office. It was traditional for the UFS to hold a conference on a topic of current interest each fall. On October 12, the UFS and the PSC together held a conference titled “Pathways: We Do Have a Choice.” The conference included information presented by the “Joint UFS-­PSC Faculty Group on Transfer.” To the best of my knowledge, the documents from this conference constituted the only information I ever had about this group. Also to the best of my knowledge, no one from the administration was invited to participate in this conference. The conference covered three topics: (1) the data we had used in support of Pathways (but the conference focused only on the data in Julia’s fall 2010 report, not the mounds of data that we had collected and made public in the two years since);5 (2) articulation agreements (usually agreements between pairs of colleges, often regarding a single major—­useful as far as they went, but woefully inadequate for solving the transfer problems of a system of nineteen colleges with hundreds of departments and in which students transfer in every direction); and (3) how transfer was handled at other public universities. There was no follow-­up to this conference as far as we could detect except that, after it was over, the UFS sent the conference’s materials to all of the faculty. In those materials was a section entitled “Alternative Solution.” Here is the entirety of that section, written two years after we had been working as publicly as possible on solving CUNY’s transfer issues, trying to involve the UFS at every stage: “There

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should be a thorough review and analysis of all the factors that affect transfer and excess credits so that we can craft a proposal to address these issues. The CUNY administration should slow down the current Pathways process so that we can craft a proposal that addresses the root causes of transfer problems and excess credits.” There was a subsequent section with more specific recommendations, but it was based on the assumption that what we were primarily trying to do was to decrease the number of excess credits (credits that were in excess of what was required for a degree). That was one of our goals, but from the beginning, as described in Julia’s 2010 report and earlier in this book, we had realized that excess credits were due to many factors, and that students could have transfer problems without accumulating excess credits (e.g., their graduation could be delayed, and/or their ability to take electives could be hindered, all because credit for requirements that were fulfilled at their original institutions did not transfer to their new institutions; see also chapter 3). The conference’s recommendations also included, as we had heard before, using the Discipline Councils to solve the problems (impossible, with just the first reason being that there could never be a well-­functioning Discipline Council for every discipline that was contributing to the transfer problems), enforcing earlier board resolutions designed to improve transfer (the current transfer problems weren’t due solely to lack of enforcement; it had also become apparent that there were huge holes in those former policies), and adopting other universities’ best practices (precisely what we thought we were doing in using the University System of Georgia as a model). And of course, the conference materials stated that the central office had been “circumventing elected governance bodies both CUNY-­wide and on local campuses.” I have always wondered whether we made the right decision in never directly attacking the incorrect statements that were made over and over, particularly by the UFS and the PSC, and instead just stating the facts, without resorting to ad hominem arguments. For example, we never directly communicated to the faculty our dozens of meetings with the UFS leadership, or our many requests to the UFS for nominations for all of the Pathways committees, none of which received any response. My judgment is that we took the correct approach. Had we attacked specific statements of the UFS or the PSC, they would then have mounted their own attack. The faculty would most likely have ignored the entire exchange, or just have gone on believing that the UFS must be right, because so many faculty distrust the administration. And in truth, I

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don’t blame them, having myself seen plenty of inappropriate behavior on the part of administrators. Generally my approach as an administrator was to try to show faculty, over time, that I could be trusted. But I have also always believed in traditional organizational structures in which one person (in this case the chancellor, under the direction of the Board of Trustees) makes the final decision, which is antithetical to the beliefs of many faculty. And with Pathways we didn’t have years to gain the trust of the UFS and PSC leaders before carrying out this multiyear project, one that required the continued presence of both me and Matt. It wasn’t clear to me that any strategy involving first trying to gain trust would have worked in this case anyway, given the UFS and PSC leadership with whom we had to work at the time. On September 20, Terry and Barbara sent the faculty what, in the view of us in the central office, was an astounding email. It referred to “mounting e­ vidence that Pathways will hurt our students.” What evidence? It also stated, “We believe that the CUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor Goldstein’s administration are in violation of the law, and we have brought two lawsuits against the University related to Pathways.” But the really breathtaking part was this: Pathways is not inevitable. As faculty with the right to vote on curriculum, we have the power to say yes or no to its implementation. We do not have to wait for the outcome of the lawsuits to act if we believe that the Pathways curriculum does not meet professional standards in our disciplines or does not provide the education our students deserve. The courses developed for the Pathways core curriculum must be approved by the elected faculty governance bodies on each campus before they can be put in place. New or revised courses must also be voted on by the appropriate academic department and then in college-­wide curriculum committees and governance bodies. As faculty we have the right—­in fact, the ­responsibility—­to vote in the best interest of our students on matters of curriculum. Faculty at CUNY fought for the right to faculty governance, and we have had to fight to keep it. . . . you have the right to vote your conscience as a member of an academic department, a curriculum committee or a college senate. . . . Voting according to the professional standards of your discipline is a matter of academic freedom. Under the union contract, the University explicitly subscribes to academic freedom, and pledges to maintain freedom of inquiry, teaching, research and publication. . . . The leadership of UFS and PSC are prepared to challenge any college that does not honor its faculty governance vote, as

234  ■  Chapter 8 we challenged six CUNY college administrations in a lawsuit filed this summer [this referred to the second Pathways lawsuit that the UFS and PSC had filed].

In other words, you do not have to follow what the board says, or what the chancellor or executive vice chancellor say regarding carrying out the board’s decisions. If you don’t like something, you have the right to vote it down, and any attempts to stop you are attacks on your academic freedom. We in Matt’s senior staff conferred quickly, and this time we decided to make a more direct response. Matt immediately wrote to all the faculty saying that Terry and Barbara erroneously state that the faculty have the power to block the implementation of Pathways. This claim misstates the core principle, embodied in state law and the bylaws and policies of the University, that the authority for the governance of the University on all matters rests with the Board of Trustees. The Board of Trustees has delegated a significant role to the faculty on academic matters, and the faculty have the right to exercise their professional judgment in fulfilling that role. However, the faculty are not empowered to ignore or violate a policy established by the Board of Trustees or the implementation of that policy by the Chancellor.

Did the faculty pay any attention to Terry and Barbara’s email? To Matt’s? There was no way to know. But we all did know that what was at stake was submission of courses to the CCCRC. We had been continuing to receive multiple, time-­consuming FOIL requests. In late summer we received one from the PSC for a large amount of student data, and in November we had the data ready to send. In December Julia told me that she was convinced that the PSC was planning some kind of huge, substantive attack, and that they would use the data we had sent them and the many talented people associated with them to conduct this attack. She thought that we should begin meeting to prepare for this attack. From what I had seen, however, both the PSC and the UFS were incapable of making any substantive attacks, and so I decided that we would not start having such meetings. There was too much other work to do.

The “Ordinary” Course of Pathways Business Even without all these unexpected problems and crises, there was much work to do on Pathways that fall. Our main focus was on getting courses to the CCCRC

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for all 8 × 19 = 152 cells of the Common Core (8 Common Core course categories for each of 19 undergraduate colleges). There were problems with colleges not following the submission directions, including submitting incomplete or incorrect materials; there were problems when some CCCRC subcommittees refused to vote on submitted courses unless the relevant college’s faculty governance body had approved the courses first; there were problems with some CCCRC subcommittees voting not to approve many courses (sometimes because the subcommittee went beyond its mandate of simply determining whether the courses would meet the Pathways-­specified learning outcomes), and with the rejected courses having to be sent back to the relevant college for revision and resubmission; and sometimes the software we were using for submission and review of the courses just didn’t function properly. It was hard work for the close to 150 faculty who were members of the CCCRC—­especially for the CCCRC subcommittee chairs, ­it was hard work for the colleges’ other faculty and staff who were involved in submitting courses, and it was hard work for the central office staff as well. By the beginning of December, despite all the problems, about twelve hundred courses had been submitted for CCCRC approval (as well as about four hundred STEM variant courses, which needed approval only from my office, not from the CCCRC). However, by no means all of those courses had been approved, and some cells were conspicuously lacking in submissions. We had originally set the deadline for submission of all courses in November, but we extended that deadline multiple times as we realized that the colleges needed still more time to finish their submissions, and the CCCRC needed still more time to finish their reviews. The CCCRC was supposed to serve only until the end of December, but we extended its term through February. We worked with the CCCRC subcommittees to schedule special meetings as needed, and we stayed in close touch with Dave Fields (senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor) and Hourig Messerlian (deputy executive to the secretary of the board) who, together with Ekaterina Sukhanova (director of program review, articulation and transfer in my office), were responsible for putting the CCCRC-­approved courses into the Chancellor’s University Report for approval by the board. We knew that the last possible date on which the board could approve courses so that they could be listed in the materials and databases that the students would use to register for fall 2013 courses (when Pathways was supposed to be completely in effect) was the February 25, 2013, board meeting. Student registration for the fall started in March, and at least some time was needed to construct the appropriate materials and populate the

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relevant databases. Further, the Chancellor’s University Report needed to go to the board before the February meeting, in order to give the board members time to review it before voting on it in February. We were determined to make available for fall semester registration the maximum number of CCCRC courses. We wanted students to have choices, and we wanted colleges to have a full opportunity to provide those choices (not to mention that there could be major negative repercussions if even one of the 152 cells was empty when fall 2013 registration began). But it was a rocky road to that goal that fall. We discovered an “Unofficial University Student Senate Site,”6 which contained much anti-­Pathways material. Looking at the site someone would have had the initial impression that it was the website for the USS, but closer examination revealed that, although the USS had a website, this was not it.7 It was a site purportedly created by a graduate student representative to the USS. This made some sense—­I had been given firsthand accounts of faculty telling graduate students that when Pathways was effected, there would no longer be any part-­time teaching positions for CUNY graduate students. For example, one Brooklyn College master’s student told me that her professor had twice stopped class to tell the students that, were Pathways to go into effect, these students would no longer be able to get part-­time jobs as instructors. This particular student had previously been an undergraduate at CUNY and had testified multiple times in favor of Pathways, including once in a hearing where Professor Sandi Cooper (when she was chair of the UFS) had challenged her testimony. I had never seen this student lose her conviction or her professional demeanor, and so it was not surprising to me to learn that she had been unmoved by her master’s program professor’s comments. But there were certainly other students who believed such statements. In any case, fears that graduate students would not have teaching positions post-­Pathways were unfounded. There would be as many total teaching positions after as before Pathways. The distribution of positions by department might be somewhat different, but virtually every department at CUNY employed so many part-­time faculty, and there was so much turnover among those faculty, that I was confident that cases in which our graduate students couldn’t find part-­time teaching positions as a result of Pathways would be few and far between. Undergraduate students had been told by some faculty that with Pathways their general education courses would be less valued by employers, that all CUNY students would take the exact same general education courses, that general education would be only 30 credits even at the senior (bachelor’s-­degree)

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colleges, and that their general education courses wouldn’t transfer outside CUNY, all also 100 percent untrue. That November some Baruch students made a video repeating some of the incorrect negative things that they had heard about Pathways.8 I knew that the USS as a whole, headed by the remarkable Kafui Kouakou, a graduate student at Brooklyn College and a tutor and coach at York College, continued strongly in support of Pathways. Nevertheless, it hurt to see any student opposed to Pathways. What we were doing, and what we were going through, was all for the students. There was also, in November, a demonstration by about two dozen people opposed to Pathways outside the main central office building. They held up a few big anti-­Pathways signs for a few hours. In progress inside the building was a hearing on a grievance about Pathways that had been submitted by the PSC. I have always been intrigued by demonstrations, but I did not enjoy this one, right outside my front door and directed at a project that I was leading. One of my staff took a photo of the demonstration for me. I thought it prudent not to appear anywhere in the vicinity myself. October 29, 2012, resulted in a substantial, though temporary, setback for Pathways, but this time the faculty had nothing to do with it. That was the day that Hurricane Sandy hit New York City with so many devastating effects. Thousands of students, staff, and faculty had homes in severely affected areas, some CUNY colleges had flooded buildings, and many CUNY colleges became shelters for dispossessed people. There were whole colonies of cots, homeless people, and support and medical staff at multiple CUNY colleges. The name of the hurricane seemed ironic given the perceived difficulties that we in the central office had been having with our own Sandi, but no one said that. What the hurricane meant for Pathways is that many Pathways-­related meetings were postponed for one or more weeks, and faculty work, when it could take place at all, focused primarily on that semester’s teaching. At first many CUNY buildings were without electricity, and it was many weeks before all the shelters for dispossessed people on CUNY property were closed. We were proud that CUNY was helping to address the damage caused by the hurricane, but at the same time we felt that the shelters, some of which were large and included medical operations and shelterees who had been homeless before the hurricane, were disruptive to college operations, and that CUNY had done more than its sheltering share. All of us in the central office were entirely focused on helping dispossessed people and on getting the colleges operating again. In the academic

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area, decisions had to be made regarding how to make up the lost class time. Pathways was definitely not top priority for a couple of weeks. Given that I never had time to watch TV under the best of circumstances, it is not a surprise that, just two days after Hurricane Sandy hit, I missed this insightful statement made in the sixth episode of the sixth season of The Big Bang Theory (a TV show that, at least in some ways, celebrates academia): “Make sure to keep an eye on which credits transfer to a four-­year college,” says Leonard to Penny when she tells him that she is taking a course at a local community college. Problems with credit transfer had entered popular culture. A handful of the CCCRC members caused difficulties all through that fall semester. Perhaps the most convoluted case involved a tenured professor from a senior college who also happened to be a UFS representative. On November 9, just as things were beginning to calm down after the hurricane, this faculty member emailed dozens of faculty members and many administrators (including the faculty member’s college’s leadership and leadership in the central office) expressing various concerns about Pathways. The next day Sandi forwarded that email to her faculty list. In this email, the faculty member stated the faculty member’s opposition to Pathways, the reasons for the faculty member’s opposition, and what the faculty member was doing to express opposition. The faculty member wrote that at a recent college governance meeting I spoke strongly in support [of a moratorium on Pathways], citing as my main grounds the persistent and utterly unacceptable bullying of the English Department at Queensborough and the absurdly rushed timetable for implementation, which has had predictably arbitrary and irrational consequences. One consequence of the rushed timetable is that normal procedures for revising the curriculum at each college are being bypassed. This has not been happening at [my college]. The union says it has happened elsewhere. Another predictable consequence is a failure to co-­ordinate the work of the course review committees. My experience on [this faculty member’s subcommittee of the CCCRC] has convinced me that this has certainly happened. I continue to believe that the utter failure to control what ends up in what bucket [the term many people used for each of the eight Pathways Common Core categories] will ensure tha Pathways, when implemented, will begin in chaos and immediately be subject to ridicule. I intend to subject it to the ridicule it deserves at every opportunity. At an undergraduate Open House the other day I told any prospective student that would

English Studies (9/12–12/12)  ■ 239 listen that CUNY was in the process of dumbing down its general education curriculum in order to improve retention and graduation rates, and that the effects of this are as yet unknown, but that they should certainly consider whether a degree from CUNY will be worth as much in 2020 as it was worth in 2010. I think that the work done by our committee has been done as responsibly as possible, given the absurdly rushed timetable. But it is obvious from the poor presentation of many courses that normal procedures are not being followed at various campuses, and that we are seeing course proposals that have not gone through any serious scrutiny before reaching us—­not even a spelling and grammar check. As the pressure mounts on the review committees, this problem will worsen. I have a large backlog of courses to catch up on. I will do as soon as I can. But I will then resign from the committee, as my position has clearly become untenable.

Speaking his or her views at a college governance meeting is the right of every faculty member, even if the truth of what is said can be debated. This faculty member had reported saying at such a meeting that Pathways should be stopped, giving as one reason the usual example of faculty mistreatment due to Pathways: what had happened at Queensborough, and as a second that colleges other than the faculty member’s own were doing a poor job with Common Core course preparation. I wondered that it did not occur to this faculty member that, without the CCCRC (i.e., pre-­Pathways), some of these other colleges might have been offering general education courses that were subpar, courses that then got transferred to this faculty member’s senior college. Surely the time pressures involved in establishing Pathways (the colleges ended up having over a year to prepare the courses) should not have prevented the colleges from doing a “spelling and grammar check” on their syllabi? Perhaps the review by the CCCRC was serving to raise the level of general education courses at CUNY, as many of us in the central administration had hoped. However, this faculty member seemed to have no awareness of such a possibility. To the best of my knowledge, there were no consequences to this faculty member for the things that the faculty member reported saying at the Open Houses for prospective students, however harmful to CUNY such statements may have been. Further, as it turned out, this faculty member did not resign from the CCCRC. On December 19, this same faculty member revealed in an email to the UFS and CUNY governance leaders’ discussion list—­an email that Sandi also forwarded to College of Staten Island faculty—­that the faculty member had

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had viewing access to all the courses submitted to the CCCRC, not just those submitted to the faculty member’s subcommittee. This was due to a programming error made in my office. As soon as we learned of it, we cut off this faculty member’s access to all courses being reviewed by the CCCRC except those that were being reviewed by the faculty member’s own CCCRC subcommittee. The CCCRC review of courses was supposed to be a confidential process, and CCCRC members were supposed to see only the courses submitted to their own subcommittee. The purpose of this confidentiality was to maximize the ability of the committee members to review courses objectively, with the minimum political pressure, and to protect colleges whose initial submissions, before undergoing revision, may not have received positive votes. This faculty member wrote to all the faculty: I made public some of the information available to me. . . . so I was not surprised that my access was cut off. I have since been informed that the access was a mistake in the first place. I continue to have access to all the information in [my subcommittee’s] portion of the system. It occurs to me that all I need is to find sympathetic colleagues on each of the other review sub-­committees who are willing to share their information with me and I will again be able to inspect the slop in all the buckets rather than just one. So I am asking [UFS] Senators to spread the word. Please get in touch with members of the review sub-­committees and ask if they are willing to take the side of openness and transparency rather than secrecy and opacity.

As far as we could tell, none of the other subcommittee members ever gave this faculty member information about the work of other subcommittees. But we didn’t know that at first, and so we were determined to get the faculty member off the CCCRC. The colleges needed to feel secure in the sub­ mission of their course information in order to facilitate the filling of all 152 cells of the Common Core. Given that we hadn’t asked each CCCRC member to sign a confidentiality agreement, we had nothing in writing to justify the faculty member’s removal, and any such action that we took would get lots of play on the Internet stage. So we weren’t sure what to do. The problem was solved when we reconstituted the CCCRC to extend the members’ terms from their original end date of December 31, 2012, to February 28, 2013, so that the CCCRC could review the last batch of submitted courses. When we did that, we just didn’t ask this faculty member to continue as a CCCRC member and substituted someone else.

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There were positive moments that fall too. One involved one of the most selective and research-­active senior colleges: Queens. On October 18 the Queens Academic Senate was to vote on the first batch of Queens courses for the Pathways Common Core (if approved, the courses would next be considered by the CCCRC). We had been hearing of a lot of anti-­Pathways activity at Queens, which was not surprising, because the Queens English Department is the academic home of the PSC President, Barbara Bowen. Nevertheless, the Queens Academic Senate voted unanimously to approve the courses, and they were sent to the CCCRC. On such occasions, Julia would say: “That’s huge!”—­ bolstering my spirits. That same day, another senior college, John Jay, voted to approve its first Pathways Common Core courses. There was a speech against Pathways by a faculty member at the meeting of the John Jay College Council at which the vote took place, but apparently that same faculty member also said that he would vote in favor. We celebrated each positive vote and did what we could to spread the news of the positive votes throughout the rest of CUNY. We were walking a fine line in this. We didn’t necessarily want to advertise where specific positive votes had taken place; we feared that would increase anti-­Pathways pressure at those colleges from people based at other colleges. So what we did instead was to communicate specific successes orally to the provosts, and to publicize the total number of courses that had been submitted to the CCCRC. This number was growing, not as rapidly as we wished, but at a reasonable pace. However, all this time we knew that some of the cells remained empty, and that filling them might take more top-­down management, resulting in lots more trouble. Then on November 8 the Queens College Academic Senate considered a Pathways moratorium resolution, a resolution for Queens to stop participating in Pathways. Particularly given that Queens is Barbara’s academic home, many people—­on both sides of the Pathways controversy—­waited anxiously for the results. If the moratorium resolution were to lose at Queens, that would be a big blow for the PSC. And if it won, the Pathways moratorium movement would gain critical momentum. Fortunately for us, Dave Fields, who is not only a senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor but CUNY’s top parliamentary procedure expert, as well as a huge Pathways and CUNY fan (he gave $1 million to the CUNY School of Law in spring 2012, and another $1 million to Queens College in spring 2017), was in the room for that senate meeting. Dave had been an undergraduate

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at Queens, and for multiple decades had been serving as the parliamentarian for the Queens College Academic Senate meetings at that senate’s request. At this senate meeting, with Dave providing the appropriate parliamentary guidance, the first thing that happened was that the moratorium resolution was ruled out of order. Then the anti-­Pathways faculty at the meeting tried to postpone sending courses (including Pathways Common Core courses) to the central office for approval (the central approval process for the Pathways courses would start with a review by the CCCRC), but that motion received only 28 votes and 31 were needed to pass. Next there was an attempt to separate out the Pathways courses so that they could conceivably be voted down without impeding the approval of other courses. However, that attempt to derail the Pathways courses also failed. Then Dave called the question on the Queens Curriculum Committee report. This ended debate and forced a vote on sending all the courses to the central office for approval. That vote got 32 votes in favor—­one above the minimum needed to pass. Many of the votes in favor were from students. Each CUNY college constitutes its senate differently, and the Queens Senate has about 20 voting student members, not just faculty senators. Dave (who had been active in student government when he was a student), as well as Division of Student Affairs staff, had been working closely with the Queens Student Senate representatives to ensure that they knew the facts about Pathways. The Pathways courses would not have passed the Queens Senate that day without the student representatives. I was extremely grateful for Dave’s and the Student Affairs staff ’s help, and I was proud of what the students had done, but I wished that the vote could have succeeded on the basis of faculty votes alone. Essential to both the October and the November positive votes at the Queens Senate, as well as to another positive Queens College vote on Pathways that had occurred the previous March, was the President, James Muyskens. Jim, like Bill Fritz, president of the College of Staten Island, had been an administrator at the University System of Georgia when Georgia had instituted the policies after which we had most closely modeled Pathways. And Jim, like Bill, was a strong supporter of Pathways. Despite the unpopularity of the topic with many faculty, he spoke up frequently in favor of Pathways at meetings with faculty and students. He showed true leadership in this regard. In December we had just a couple more months to get all the Pathways Common Core courses approved for fall 2013. In addition to the college-­specific and CUNY-­wide groups that were already meeting regularly to take care of all the details necessary to effect Pathways, a relatively small group of us started

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meeting weekly in the central office. Every week I updated a long punch list of the things that still needed to be done, including by whom and by when. Our group tried to cover every detail. The members (and their relevant areas of Pathways responsibility) were Julia (guiding and overseeing all central Office of Academic Affairs staff work), University Academic Affairs Director Erin Croke (providing academic research and links from that research to CUNY practice), Director of Communications Erika Dreifus (communications of all sorts and Internet research), Director of Administration and Grants Karen Kapp (all aspects of this difficult project’s management), Senior University Dean for the Executive Office and Enrollment Robert Ptachik (registrar and academic software systems), University Dean for Undergraduate Studies Lucinda Zoe (all aspects of undergraduate curriculum), Dave (legal, parliamentary, and CUNY Bylaw matters), and me. Every single person in that group would have worked 24-­7 had that been needed to complete the Pathways Project. I felt privileged to work with each of them and will never forget our meetings. I constantly tried to remind myself that not everything was going poorly. One hint of the good that we were achieving came from a college whose pre-­ Pathways general education requirement totaled an unusually large number of credits, and whose most popular majors also tended to require a lot of credits, leaving that college’s students with few elective courses. A new provost had recently been appointed at that college. The old provost was not a supporter of Pathways, and the new provost was someone who had been an active critic of Pathways. The new provost approached me with a question about the technicalities of establishing a new double major at that provost’s college. This was a college that, though quite selective, according to our data had very few students graduating with double majors, a disadvantage for the college’s students because, on average, students with double majors earn more after graduation.9 Why, I asked this new provost, was the college looking into establishing this double major now? Pathways makes it possible, muttered the new provost, looking down at the floor.

Shadows of the Future That fall we continued, as usual, with the non-­Pathways part of our work. This included the approval of some wonderful new college degrees such as a BS in nursing at the School of Professional Studies, an MS in financial risk

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management at Baruch College, a doctor of nursing practice at the College of Staten Island, and an AS in geographic information science at Borough of Manhattan Community College. And just two weeks after the start of the Queensborough English Department conflagration, my husband and I held a fund-­ raiser in our apartment for the outstanding antipoverty organization Single Stop, with guest speaker Julian Bond. Matt attended and beautiful photographs were taken of the event by CUNY photographer extraordinaire André Beckles. But perhaps most satisfying for me that fall was the progress that I was making in my own research. In my heart I was a faculty member, and engaging in research helped me maintain that identity. So that semester, Mari Watanabe-­ Rose, a senior research associate in the CUNY central office, and I conducted a pilot randomized controlled trial (RCT), a pilot experiment, testing a way to help students succeed in college, students who had been assessed as lacking college-­level quantitative skills. We were inspired to conduct this experiment by another RCT already in progress, an experiment that I had conceived and helped obtain millions of grant dollars to conduct. That RCT was evaluating CUNY’s ASAP program (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs), which we now know, based on excellent evidence, approximately doubles associate’s-­ degree graduation rates.10 In addition, during fall 2012 I signed a contract for a fourth edition of my book The Psychology of Eating and Drinking.11 I knew that there was no way I could finish that fourth edition as long as I was executive vice chancellor and university provost. So signing the contract was a pre­ commitment of sorts that the life I was leading would not go on forever.

Conclusion What was the biggest lesson I had learned that fall? That, especially in this technological age, all it takes is one mistake—­such as the email from the Queensborough administration to the Queensborough English Department chair—­for everything to go to pieces. However, that maxim doesn’t apply to everyone. There did not appear to be much lasting effect of any sort as a result of, for example, the faculty member sending an email containing an inappropriate critique of a student’s writing, or the faculty member telling prospective students not to come to CUNY, or even the faculty governance and union leaders telling all the faculty that they did not have to follow board policies. In contrast, the administration email about the English faculty not complying with Pathways

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caused harm to CUNY and to the effecting of Pathways. So it is not everyone at a university who cannot make a single mistake—­it is administrators. And thus it is not surprising that many administrators are literally afraid to speak their minds. Instead, their speech is too often full of bland platitudes and blather. In my own case my new refrain became “Never break form,” as I strove to be 100 percent calm, correct, and respectful in all of my professional interactions. Pathways could not afford another mistake.

CHAPTER 9

Sprinting and Stretching for the Finish Line ■■■■■

JANUARY 2013 THROUGH JUNE 2013

For his pride and his cunning, the ancient Corinthian King Sisyphus was condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill, to watch it roll back down, and to repeat that task eternally. This myth has resonated from ancient Greece to the present. I often thought of Sisyphus as our work on Pathways unfolded—­even worrying that I possessed some of the same character flaws as Sisyphus. Pathways had been over two years of constant work, 24-­7, and over two years of feeling attacked and besieged, much more difficult than any of us had imagined. But in truth, we were making progress. It was now only eight months until students would be taking the Pathways courses, and only two months until students would start registering for those courses. However, that eight-­month period was plenty of time for something to happen that would stop the whole project. All it would take would be for our major accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, or for the New York State Education Department, to say: “What is all this that we hear? You must stop what you are doing until we can review it.” All it would take would be one incident or problem serious enough for us to say, “We can’t get this done by this September 2013,” which could then easily turn into “We’re not sure we can get this done by next year,” which could then turn into silence, as the project was quietly abandoned. So we had to get that boulder to the top of the hill, and we had to do it as quickly as possible, before something happened that would destroy everything. My newest motto for myself became “I will not be complacent.” We had learned that anything could happen at any time, and we had to be ready for whatever came next. The Pathways opponents were not giving up, and so we could not relax. This was our pattern: take the next step on the project, hit resistance, find a way around the resistance, and then get that step finished—­over and over, more times than we could count. Just when we had accommodated to one set of objections, a whole new unexpected set would arise, and these final months

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until Pathways was to be in effect were to be no exception. I could not think about how close we were to implementing Pathways. Instead I had to focus on all the things that still needed doing. During every minute of every day I worried that something would go wrong, including that the Pathways bulwark, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, would retire.

Eight Months to Go: The Final Countdown Begins The most time-­sensitive part of effecting Pathways was making sure that there were sufficient Pathways Common Core courses for students to take during the fall 2013 semester. These were to be the general education courses that every CUNY student would be required to take, with the bachelor’s-­degree students taking an additional 6–­12 credits of general education courses (the College Option general education courses). Every new student—­freshmen as well as transfers—­would be required to follow the Pathways policies for their general education requirements, and continuing students could choose to switch from the general education requirements in effect when they entered CUNY to the Pathways requirements. The Pathways courses had to be available in the computer systems by the time that students started registering for fall 2013, which would happen in March 2013. But no course could be available for registration until it had been approved by the Board of Trustees, and there was no March board meeting. The last board meeting before the beginning of registration in spring 2013 was on February 25. As explained previously, before the board could approve a course for the Pathways Common Core, that course had to be approved by the CCCRC. And before the CCCRC could approve a course, it had to be submitted to the CCCRC from a college. And a college could submit only courses that it had approved, which could involve as many as three separate levels of votes at that college. (This is another illustration of why curricular change takes so long in higher education.) We were determined not to circumvent any of the usual methods of approval—­that would only inflame the anti-­Pathways factions even more. So we watched and encouraged the colleges’ and the CCCRC’s progress, and we worried. A total of 152 cells of the Common Core (19 colleges times 8 Common Core categories) needed to be populated before February 25. By January that year we were checking the status of each of the 152 cells on an almost daily basis, and were in direct touch with the president and/or

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chief academic officer (provost) of a college if there were indications of any problems. Karen Kapp, director of administration and grants in the Office of Academic Affairs, was providing Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley and me with every possible detail on the status of each cell. At that point, over 1,400 courses had been submitted for review to the CCCRC. That sounded good, but as of January 28, 4 of the 152 cells were completely empty—­courses for those cells had not been submitted to the CCCRC. Those cells were the English Composition cells for Kingsborough Community College, LaGuardia Community College, and Queensborough Community College, as well as the Scientific World cell for Bronx Community College. Queensborough’s lack of submission of English composition courses was an aftereffect of the incident with the Queensborough English Department the previous fall (see chapter 8), and from what we could tell, Kingsborough’s and LaGuardia’s nonsubmissions were fallout from that same explosion. Bronx’s situation was a result of a successful Pathways moratorium resolution passed by the faculty a month earlier. The faculty had later voted to resume sending courses to the CCCRC, but there were still several stages of approval needed at Bronx before the courses Bronx was submitting for the Scientific World category of the Common Core could be sent to the CCCRC. Nevertheless, courses had been submitted for 148 of the 152 cells, and that would never have happened without the help of literally hundreds of faculty. Faculty at nineteen colleges had identified the courses for the Common Core, as well as for additional general education courses for bachelor’s-­degree students and for the entry courses of many majors, had voted in favor of all these courses in multiple levels of college-­based committees, and had reviewed the proposed Common Core courses as part of the university-­wide CCCRC. I knew that many of these faculty did these things because they felt they had to, not because they wanted to. But they did do what needed to be done, and it was a lot of challenging work. Unfortunately, most of these faculty who helped move the process along were largely invisible to us in the central office. Mostly our visual fields were occupied by the faculty who were trying to slow down or stop the implementation of Pathways. We wanted to recognize the contributions to Pathways of the many faculty who had been doing the work. And so in January 2013, as the Common Core course submissions were coming to completion, the Board of Trustees passed a resolution of appreciation for the faculty’s work on Pathways, ending with this statement:

The Finish Line (1/13–6/13)  ■ 249 RESOLVED, That the Board of Trustees of The City University of New York extends its profound gratitude to the many CUNY faculty who have been participating in Pathways committees and course development, for their outstanding service to the board and to the entire University community and their ongoing contributions to the implementation of the Pathways initiative and the academic mission of the University.1

Every month something was happening that made it difficult for us to think about all of the faculty who were helping get Pathways done. That same month the resolution was passed, there was an incident involving, yet again, the ­English Department at Queensborough. As described in chapter 8, in fall 2012 that department acquired a new chair who was publicly opposed to Pathways. In January 2013 he sent an email to Matt, me, the academic freedom unit of the AAUP, the president of the PSC, the chair of the UFS, the chair of the CUNY English Discipline Council (which consists of the English Department chairs at all the CUNY colleges), and several Queensborough faculty leaders. The email, which was specifically addressed to Matt, stated: Yesterday I received word, which was later confirmed by multiple sources, that at a recent meeting of the CUNY English Comp Review Committee [one of the eight CCCRC subcommittees], Executive Vice Chancellor Alexndra Logue repeated the same threats which you seemed to distance yourself from—­namely, that any college that does not submit and receive approval for composition courses by February 22nd will have no composition courses offered in the fall and its students will be told to go elsewhere to take their composition courses and encouraged, when possible, to take them online. In other words, we are back to the same threats of last fall—­English Departments that do not comply with the Pathways initiative on the timeline that has been forced on them will be dissolved. The only difference is that in this case the threats come directly and unquestionably from your office.

In contrast to what the email said, to the best of my knowledge the only statements that had been made by any CUNY administrator that were even remotely similar to these described “threats” were those made by a Queensborough administrator to the Queensborough English Department the previous fall (see chapter 8). Certainly I had never made any such statements (I was opposed to such an approach), and I had never even been to a meeting of the Pathways English Composition Review Committee. Yet according to this English Department

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chair, what I had said there had been “confirmed by multiple sources.” And now he had sent this information CUNY-­wide and way beyond. I tried to figure out how such incorrect information could arise. I doubted that this chair would have completely made it all up with the purpose of discrediting me. My guess was that the chair believed what he had written. Perhaps, I thought, this was a distortion of what I had said—­not at a meeting of the English Composition Subcommittee of the CCCRC, but at a meeting involving all the chairs of each of the eight subcommittees of the CCCRC. We had so many different faculty committees working on Pathways that it could be hard for someone to keep them straight. At the meeting of the chairs of the eight CCCRC subcommittees, I had been asked what would happen if, come the February board meeting, a college didn’t have courses approved for each of the eight required areas of the Common Core, the last chance for a college to get courses approved in time for fall registration. I replied that we were working with each college to make sure that didn’t happen, and that we would make sure that students didn’t get hurt. In response to a specific question, I stated that the presidents, under the bylaws, have the authority to send in courses on their own, and one of the subcommittee chairs there (not the English Composition Subcommittee chair) said I was right about that. I also stated clearly that that was something that we absolutely did not want to happen and were doing everything possible to avoid, giving the example of extending the course submission deadline from the end of November to December, to January, and then to February 22. I believe I did mention that there were online versions of these courses, but I believe I also said that if everyone tried to take them, it wouldn’t be possible for these courses to accommodate all of the students. This discussion primarily concerned the CCCRC subcommittees’ needing to review and approve courses as efficiently as they could, rather than what would happen to English departments, or any other departments, if they didn’t turn in their courses for Pathways. No matter the origins, a widely circulating email containing incorrect statements by a department chair was a potentially serious problem, particularly given that one of the addressees (the AAUP) was still considering investigating, and potentially censuring, CUNY about Pathways, and two of the addressees (the heads of the PSC and the UFS) were litigants in the two Pathways lawsuits against CUNY (chapter 11 covers Pathways legal matters). Therefore CUNY’s Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs and General Counsel, Frederick Schaffer, wrote to the Queensborough English Department chair, telling him that his

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statements were not correct and why (in detail). Rick’s email ended: “In conclusion, your message is premised on a great deal of incorrect information. I trust you will convey that to your department and to each of the other people who have received your message.” Here is the chair’s reply: Dear Mr. Shaffer, I will pass along your message to all those who received my earlier email. Regards, Dr. [the chair’s first name and last name]

In the meantime, Queensborough’s Common Core cell for English Composition was empty because the Queensborough English Department had not yet submitted the courses for even Queenborough approval, and the Queensborough English Department chair was negotiating with the Queensborough president about what it would take for the department to agree to submit its courses. The Queensborough English Department was not the only location of Pathways problems early that semester. For example, there were continuing difficulties at Queens College. As described in chapter 8, despite strong opposition, the Queens College Academic Senate had voted to send some courses to the CCCRC. But more were needed and the requisite votes for those additional courses could not be obtained. The Queens College President, James Muyskens, continued to speak in favor of Pathways to try to break the logjam (course approvals finally started to flow again later that semester). We were getting more reports of faculty trying to convince students that Pathways was a bad idea. I was told on more than one occasion that PSC representatives had contacted a college’s undergraduate student government association. As I commented earlier in this book, faculty told some graduate students that there would be insufficient part-­time teaching positions for them post-­ Pathways. It was hard for me to understand why anyone would believe that Pathways would significantly affect teaching positions, given the nature and extent of CUNY’s instructional needs, but such beliefs were not rare. Thus it was not a great surprise when we received a FOIL request from the Graduate Center’s student newspaper, a paper that mostly serves master’s and doctoral students. To help counter the inaccurate information that some students might be getting about Pathways, Matt wrote to the college presidents, attaching a sample letter that my office had prepared, asking them to write to all their students giving them the facts about Pathways.

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Objections to Pathways from outside CUNY were in full swing at the beginning of that semester as well, involving, for example, the MLA (one of the largest national faculty professional associations, a source of previous negative communications about Pathways, as described previously). In early December, I had received a new letter, dated December 4, from the MLA’s Executive Director, Rosemary Feal, stating, “An MLA member has submitted a resolution (copy enclosed) that concerns the City University of New York and has also provided background materials intended to support the claims made in the resolution (background documents also enclosed).” She did not name the person who had submitted the resolution and background materials, but stated that the MLA “will present the resolution to the MLA Delegate Assembly, an elected body with over 250 members, on 5 January 2013 for discussion and action. If approved by the assembly either as submitted or as amended, the resolution will be forwarded to the MLA Executive Council for review [and then] the resolution will be forwarded to the MLA membership next year for a ratification vote. The MLA’s procedures also require that parties named in resolutions be given the opportunity to respond. Your response to the resolution will therefore be most welcome.” The key part of the resolution itself were these paragraphs: Whereas Pathways bypasses faculty governance, and only the administration’s ­appointees “participated” in the decision-­making; Whereas the AAUP states “faculty has primary responsibility for  .  .  . ­curriculum [and] subject matter,” and college governance regulations state, “The ­Faculty . . . confer degrees”; Whereas the Administration acted despite senates’, councils’, and nearly 5,000 instructional staffs’ opposition, Resolved the MLA affirms the faculty’s right to determine curriculum and graduation requirements and to withhold implementation of any curriculum that has not been recommended by the appropriate college governance body.

In other words, the faculty should always have final say over the curriculum. This is contrary to what New York State Education Law states (the CUNY board has final say; see chapter 11 on Pathways legal matters), and is—­surprisingly, given the resolution’s second “Whereas” clause quoted above—­also contrary to what the AAUP (the largest faculty union) states (chapters 7 and 12 also discuss the AAUP). It is correct that the AAUP’s own policy document states that the faculty has “primary responsibility [over] curriculum,” but the AAUP’s policy also states that “the administration and the governing board have the authority

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to overturn the faculty’s judgment—­for compelling reasons,” and that the faculty exercise their primary responsibility concerning curriculum “subject to final approval by the administration and the governing board.”2 So once again I wrote to the MLA with detailed information about Pathways and the faculty’s role in it, along with complete information on AAUP policy. Yet it was to no avail. In that January of 2013, the MLA Delegate Assembly passed the resolution. The only other resolution that they passed at that meeting was one “calling for a far-­reaching solution to gun violence.”3

Seven Months to Go: Can We Fill the Last Few Cells? As of January 27, the CCCRC still had not received Bronx Community College’s Scientific World courses for the Pathways Common Core, and Bronx’s interim provost was telling us that the courses wouldn’t have all the needed college approvals until February 21. I told him and his president that that would probably be too late for the courses to be reviewed by the CCCRC and be ready for a vote at the February 25 board meeting. The college had to find a way to get the courses approved sooner. The president assured me that Bronx was ­scheduling special meetings to approve the courses. However, on February 11, we still had not received the courses, and the CCCRC’s Scientific World Subcommittee was meeting the next day to consider courses for the February 25 board meeting. Julia and I sent urgent messages to the interim provost and president. They assured us they were on it, but when the Scientific World Subcommittee meeting began, early the morning of February 12, the courses had not been received. They were finally received later that day, but too late for the Scientific World Subcommittee’s consideration. At the beginning of February, Kingsborough, LaGuardia, and Queens­ borough Community Colleges still had not submitted their English composition courses for review by the CCCRC. There were now only a couple of weeks left for the CCCRC to approve those courses in time for the board’s approval on February 25. We were constantly communicating with the administrations of these three colleges, and they with their faculty, about the Pathways-­acceptable options the English faculty had for structuring English composition, hoping that the faculty would find at least one of them acceptable. Although the ­English composition courses could not have more than 3 contact hours (the hours that the instructor met with the whole class at regularly scheduled times),

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we let the colleges know that a fourth hour could be put into the schedule to ensure that there was time set aside for faculty to meet with students one-­on-­one or in subgroups, and we formalized the terminology for such scheduling so that everyone would be clear on what a course was requiring in terms of attendance. On February 8, Queensborough submitted its English composition courses for review by the CCCRC, and Kingsborough submitted its courses around the same time. Now the only English Composition cell that had no submitted courses was LaGuardia’s. The LaGuardia President, Gail Mellow, and her Provost, Paul Arcario, were working closely with the faculty to achieve the submission, and on February 19 we received the courses. Now all colleges had submitted courses for all 152 cells. But as of February 20, 16 of the 152 cells had not yet had any courses approved by the CCCRC (this included the Bronx Scientific World cell, as well as the LaGuardia and Queensborough English Composition cells). In some cases that was because of the meeting schedule of a CCCRC subcommittee, so that a particular subcommittee had not yet considered the latest submissions (which were sometimes very late indeed), and in some cases it was because a college’s course had been rejected by the CCCRC so that the course needed to be revised, and the revision had not yet been submitted or it had been submitted but not yet reviewed. In a few cases we pleaded with subcommittee chairs to schedule yet another meeting of their subcommittee so as to review the latest submissions. We had multiple complaints from faculty and colleges that certain subcommittees of the CCCRC were too slow or too picky, but virtually no complaints that they were too lax or that they acted without a college’s knowledge or involvement. (I should add that, by the end of this review cycle, the CCCRC had rejected about 12 percent of courses initially submitted to it, despite those courses having already received all possible levels of college faculty approval, evidence that Pathways did not decrease course standards.) As is often the case with human endeavors, though the colleges had had fourteen months to prepare their Common Core courses and the CCCRC to review them, the process would go down to the wire. There were only five days remaining until the board meeting. An empty cell could cause a major political problem, in that it could become a symbol of Pathways resistance, and an empty cell could also cause significant problems for students who needed courses for which to register. We were fortunate that Dave Fields, senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor, was continuing to work closely with us in these endeavors,

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along with Hourig Messerlian, deputy executive to the secretary of the board, and Ekaterina Sukhanova, director of program review, articulation, and transfer in my office. Dave and Hourig, with Ekaterina’s help, made exception after exception for us in order to put courses into the Chancellor’s University Report past the usual deadline, up until literally an hour before the board meeting. And we made it. Thanks to heroic efforts on the part of the faculty in the CCCRC, faculty at the colleges, college staff and administrators, and central office staff, when the board met on February 25 and voted on the Chancellor’s University Report, they approved courses that ensured that every one of the 152 cells of the Pathways Common Core was filled. At the moment of the vote, the meeting video shows Dave sitting, as usual, behind board Chair Benno Schmidt and Matt, where he could watch over the entire room, wearing, as was usual for him only for these meetings, a jacket and tie, with one of his light-­pink shirt collar points sticking up, just like the corners of his mouth.4

Six Months to Go: Media Battles Even though all the courses needed for a fall 2013 start of Pathways had been approved by the board, the courses still had to be scheduled and the students had to enroll in them, starting that March of 2013. And any conflagrations that had the potential to delay a September 2013 start had to be avoided. Everything had to proceed well and on schedule, thus making it likely that the project would be completed even if an event such as Matt’s retirement were to occur. Undoubtedly the PSC and the UFS knew this too, because they continued to work to disrupt a smooth start to Pathways. All of this was reflected in the media battles about Pathways that, while ongoing, seemed heightened around March of 2013. For a list of media coverage of Pathways see http://​www​.awlogue​.com. For example, PSC President Barbara Bowen and I both participated in a WNYC Radio show about Pathways,5 one for which I had only a couple of hours’ notice. In order to help address the continuing misinformation about Pathways directed at students, on March 1, I met with a group of student journalists from all the regularly published CUNY college student newspapers. The student papers had been mentioning Pathways, and we wanted to make sure that the student journalists had correct information. The meeting lasted at least two hours. More than one of the student journalists came into the meeting with prior negative information about Pathways, and I did my best to counter it. But at least one unfavorable

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Pathways story appeared in a student paper following my meeting with the student journalists, with the article stating: “The Brooklyn College Faculty Council is considering holding a vote of no confidence in the CUNY Board of Trustees. The new Pathways curriculum will require students to take fewer credits in Science and English Composition to complete their CORE requirements. This means that some of the departments will have to lay off some of their adjunct professors.”6 This was some of the same misinformation that I had tried—­ apparently unsuccessfully—­to counter in speaking with the student journalists. In contrast, that same month the Hechinger Report published a reaffirming piece by Jon Marcus on the problems associated with credit transfer, and why these problems are so difficult to resolve but so important to address, bolstering our motivation. The piece opens: As March Madness nears its all-­consuming climax, a less widely noticed kind of intercollegiate competition is forcing students to churn endlessly through the higher-­education system, wasting their own—­and taxpayers’ money. In this game, the players score but it doesn’t count. That’s what happens when students earn academic credit at one university or college, then try to transfer to another, which won’t accept it—­even within the same states and systems. The result is that they end up spending far more time and money trying to finish their degrees, assuming that they even stick around to bother.7

The PSC, for its part, was using the media extensively to make negative statements about Pathways, the most prominent example being the advertisements that they devised. I first encountered one on opening the New York Times one spring morning. The PSC ultimately ran several half-­page advertisements against Pathways. Each one featured a large color photograph of a faculty member. We could only imagine how much money it had cost to run such advertisements. This was another example of how the UFS (which has limited funds) had benefited from joining anti-­Pathways forces with the PSC (which has a great deal of money from the dues it collects from every faculty member). The first of these advertisements that I saw featured Distinguished Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook and said: PROTECT THE QUALITY OF A CUNY EDUCATION. I am a Distinguished Professor of History at the City University of New York, the author of a prize-­ winning biography of Eleanor Roosevelt. I am also a Hunter College graduate. I teach at CUNY because I believe a quality education should be within the reach

The Finish Line (1/13–6/13)  ■ 257 of every New Yorker. I stay because I am inspired by my students. It is critical that CUNY retain academic standards. That is why my colleagues and I oppose Pathways, the new core curriculum at CUNY. It means less time in writing classes, reduced foreign language study, and less rigorous basic science classes without lab work. It will weaken a CUNY education for the next generation. Pathways cuts costs by sacrificing educational excellence.8

To the contrary, (1) although Pathways was reducing the time spent in some English composition courses, that was the case in a minority of colleges, and Pathways was also increasing the total writing requirements at all colleges; (2) within Pathways, colleges could require multiple years of foreign language study (as Hunter College now does); and (3) within Pathways colleges could require many credits of science with laboratory (as Baruch College now does, requiring a 6-­credit combined lecture/laboratory course for all students). We did our best to counter these anti-­Pathways media items. In mid-­April the Chronicle of Higher Education published my letter to the editor defending Pathways, heading it “Provost Defends CUNY General-­Education Reforms.”9 We also put our own full-­page advertisement in the New York Times (though just once) and in the New York Daily News. The text was headed “Top Academic Leaders Support CUNY Pathways Reform. CUNY Board thanks hundreds of faculty for Pathways work.” These ads listed multiple national higher education leaders and CUNY distinguished professors who supported Pathways. Although I was concerned about the PSC ads when they first appeared, my concern soon decreased. Among my own circle of friends, almost all of whom claimed to read the New York Times, not one remembered seeing any of the ads—­the PSC’s or the CUNY central administration’s. This made me wonder even more about the wisdom of the large expenditure of funds on all these ads. Despite the continuing complaints about administrator intervention in general education, in the waning days before full Pathways implementation, we were still fielding requests for administrator actions favoring certain disciplines. In one such request, some health sciences faculty wrote to CUNY Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt, asking that health sciences courses be permitted as part of the Pathways Common Core. In another, fifty-­three New York State assemblymen wrote to Matt, asking that computer science be permitted as part of the Common Core. However, as described earlier, the CUNY faculty committee that had recommended the framework for the Common Core in fall 2011 had specified that all the Common Core courses had to

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come from disciplines on New York State’s list of liberal arts disciplines, thus ensuring that all CUNY graduates had the New York State–­regulated sufficient proportion of liberal arts credits (see chapter 6). Neither computer science nor health sciences was on that list, and now, over a year later, the faculty in those disciplines were expressing their concerns. Although in my opinion some courses in both of these disciplines could be considered general education, we were bound by New York State requirements and by the faculty committee’s recommendations, which Matt had accepted. So all we could do was to remind the petitioners that the restrictions on computer science and health sciences applied only to the Common Core, not to the additional College Option general education credits at the bachelor’s-­degree colleges, or to elective credits. But I never expected that such comments would be reassuring to these two disciplines. Top priority for departments was to have one or more of their courses required for all students.

Five Months to Go: The Chancellor Plays His Wild Card From mid-­March through the beginning of April my office was busy with the nonacademic matter of moving. During those weeks the CUNY central office, which had been located on Manhattan’s East Eightieth Street for decades, moved two miles south to East Forty-­Second Street. The new location, near Grand Central Station and its many train and subway lines, would be particularly good for staff who commuted on public transportation. But moving meant we all had to sift through mountains of documents and objects, and pack what we thought should be kept. Although I had a lot of help with this, it was necessarily a major distraction from the Pathways work. I had just finished unpacking my things in my new office, and was starting to know where things were, when what I had dreaded for years happened. Matt told me that he was retiring in June. I had known that his retirement wasn’t that far away (he had already served as chancellor for fourteen years and was over seventy years old). Nevertheless, I had no premonition that the moment had finally arrived. That the moment was traumatic for me is evidenced by my incomplete memories of his giving me the news. I remember only that there was no one else in the room. Were we in his office or mine? What time of day was it? What day was it? I do remember feeling glad for him, that he was doing what he wanted to do, but also feeling overwhelmed by worry.

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When you are an academic administrator with no contract, in what is called an at-­will position, as I was, your usual first thought when you hear that your boss is leaving is: What will happen to me? A new academic CEO often wants to remove all the people who were close to the old CEO to ensure staff loyalty, and the new CEO has the authority to carry out those removals at any time and for no stated reason.10 But in this case my first thought was this: Are we far enough along with Pathways that it will persist no matter who sits in Matt’s seat? In addition to getting rid of people who were close to the old CEO, a new CEO often undoes the old CEO’s programs. The new CEO decides that those programs were too expensive and/or too much trouble. The new CEO wants to show that he or she is wiser than the old CEO, that the actions of the old CEO weren’t the best possible actions. It didn’t help that there were also rumors that Benno was going to step down as chair of the CUNY board. Benno had also been a strong and insightful supporter of Pathways. And he and Matt had worked together harmoniously and productively. There wasn’t enough time to conduct a search for a new permanent chancellor between Matt’s announcement and his departure date. So Matt immediately announced that there would be an interim chancellor: William Kelly, president of the Graduate Center. Given all that Bill had done to support Pathways for the past two years, this should have been reassuring. But interims can sometimes behave in unexpected ways, especially if they are candidates for the permanent position. And it wasn’t yet clear whether Bill would be a candidate. There was going to be at least one year until CUNY had a new permanent chancellor, and only a permanent chancellor could be truly a strong chancellor. Would the UFS and/or the PSC try to take advantage of this situation to hurt Pathways? I needed to make sure that Pathways was firmly established, and it wasn’t clear that I would have the opportunity to do so for much longer. I thought I needed to be present at least for the start of Pathways in September and for the first semester that it was in effect in order to make sure that any remaining bugs were eliminated. At the same time I had made a vow to myself many years before that I would not take another position as someone’s second-­in-­command (unless my supervisor were Matt). In October 2012 Matt had promised me a six-­month study leave, to be taken at a mutually convenient time. I had always thought that I would use that study leave to complete the fourth edition of my book The Psychology of Eating and Drinking, the contract for which I had signed in August 2012. The contract had an original completion deadline of December

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2013, a deadline it was clear I could not meet under my current working conditions. (In fact, it was clear I could not meet any writing deadline under my current working conditions.) I could also use that study leave to analyze the data that Senior Research Associate Mari Watanabe-­Rose and I would be collecting that fall in our Spencer-Foundation-supported experiment on mathematics remediation, for which we had conducted the pilot in fall 2012 (mentioned in chapter 8). So, though I initially wanted to leave as soon as Matt did, instead I decided that I wanted, if possible, to remain as executive vice chancellor and university provost (the CUNY system’s chief academic officer) until the end of the fall 2013 semester, the first semester in which Bill Kelly would be the interim chancellor and in which Pathways would be in effect. During that time I could help firmly establish Pathways and also help Bill become established in his chancellorship. Then I hoped to take my study leave. After that, perhaps I would return and perhaps I would retire. It would depend on what was happening with the search for a permanent chancellor and how things went with my study leave. I thought it would be close to impossible for me to be selected for a new administrative position outside the CUNY central office, given faculty involvement in searches and my reputation associated with Pathways. There were still websites transmitting falsities regarding the alleged 2011 vote of no confidence against me by the UFS Executive Committee (see chapter 5), and items such as the following were continuing to appear in cyberspace: “Many of us may be happy to see the departure of Chancellor Goldstein. . . . Will this usher in an even greater role for the Gates Foundation and other groups who want to ‘enhance performance’ by reducing faculty power, homogenizing and digitizing the curriculum, and reducing standards, a la Pathways? And who will be left at CUNY Central to help guide a new Chancellor? . . . Executive Vice Chancellor and Provost Alexandra ‘Lexa’ Logue, chief implementer of Pathways and architect of the shadow system of centrally appointed committees that bypass governance.”11 I also didn’t think I wanted to take up my tenured faculty position (from which I was on leave to serve as executive vice chancellor and university provost), and so continue to be tied to the college academic calendar, as I had been for decades. For all these reasons I asked Matt whether I could start my study leave on January 1, 2014, he spoke with Bill about it, and both said it was fine for me to stay in my position through December 31, 2013, and then start my study leave. I began meeting with Bill, informing and updating him on everything that my office was doing, including our activities regarding Pathways. So far

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his Pathways involvement had mostly been limited to the work on transfer of major courses. Matt reassured me repeatedly, saying that he would be around for a while, helping with the search for a new permanent chancellor and helping to raise funds for CUNY. Amid the flurry of media coverage that now ensued regarding Matt’s retire­ ment, which also meant more media mentions of Pathways, my focus had to be, not on all the hubbub, but on establishing Pathways, and not only on having it work in fall 2013, but having it work years in the future. And that meant colleges following the Pathways policies set out in the June 2011 board resolution12—­right then and for the foreseeable future, until those policies were changed. But over time, as administrators forget, or move on, the tendency to follow official policies can diminish. How would we ensure that didn’t happen with Pathways? One way was to make sure that the students knew how Pathways was supposed to work, and that they had opportunities to have any policy lapses addressed. As a group, CUNY students had always impressed me, and I felt that their actions could constitute one way to ensure that the Pathways policies were not forgotten. This was one of the reasons that the June 2011 board resolution on Pathways contained the following: “Resolved, that as an additional component of improving transfer, an appeals mechanism will be established by the Chancellor for undergraduate students who wish to appeal denial or restriction of transfer credit.”13 With a public, clear appeals process for students in place, students could monitor whether Pathways was occurring as it should. And if it wasn’t, students could appeal, and presumably, if Pathways policies had not been followed, the problem would be addressed. But of course it wouldn’t be that simple. In 1999 the CUNY Board of Trustees had tried to address CUNY’s transfer problems by setting some new policies. However, I knew of at least one college that had subsequently set policies of its own that ignored the 1999 board policies. By the time the college did that, a few years after 1999, I’m not sure that college was even aware of the 1999 board policy. There had been much administrator turnover at that college around 1999 and the years just after. In any case, it was clear that we could not rely on each college to accurately consider each student appeal. So we decided to establish a two-­layer appeals mechanism. Students would appeal first to their college, by whatever appeals mechanism the college wanted to set up. Then, if the student was not satisfied with the result, the student had the right to appeal to the central office.

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In the course of our discussions with Matt’s senior staff, Senior Vice Chancellor for University Relations and Secretary of the Board Jay Hershenson, who had been active as a student leader some decades earlier, had an excellent suggestion. Not only should students be notified of their rights with regard to Pathways; they should also be notified of their responsibilities. The opportunity to appeal a perceived misapplication of Pathways policy should be accompanied by a responsibility on the students’ part to engage in appropriate behaviors in obtaining their education. For example, the final Pathways “Student Rights, Responsibilities, and Appeals” document states: “Students are responsible for reviewing their curricula and programs and confirming their degree requirements with the assistance of an advisor and the degree audit tools provided for such purposes. . . . Students are expected to stay informed of changes in policies, procedures, deadlines, programs, and other changes by reading their college email and other communications from their campuses. . . . Students are responsible for asking for help when they need it and for taking responsibility for their own educational experience.”14 Given my background in behavioral psychology, I strongly agreed that a clear statement regarding the behaviors expected of students would be useful in promoting appropriate student behavior. At the same time, the document stated that students had certain rights, for example: Students have the right to complete the general education Common Core in 30 credits. . . . Students have the right to have three-­credit courses available to them in all areas of the Common Core, every semester. . . . All courses taken for credit at an undergraduate CUNY college will be accepted for credit at every other CUNY undergraduate college, regardless of whether a specific equivalency exists at the transfer college. . . . Students who satisfactorily complete courses within the Common Core will have those courses certified by the college where they took them as having met Common Core requirements, as appropriate. That certification will transfer among all CUNY colleges. . . . Students in all degree programs have the right to accurate and timely information provided by the colleges to clearly identify program requirements and courses that are part of the Common Core or the College Option. . . . Students may appeal a decision of denial or restriction of transfer credit.15

Lucinda Zoe, university dean for undergraduate studies in my office, worked on this document for several months, pushing to get it done in time to effect it for the fall. We consulted with many people—­at the colleges and in the central

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office—­about its contents, including the UFS and the USS. After the document was complete, Lucinda ensured that every college designated an appeals officer, so that students would know to whom they should go if they thought that their Pathways rights might have been violated. We were hopeful that this system of checks and balances would ensure that Pathways was enacted appropriately for many years into the future.

Four Months to Go: Fear and Paranoia There had always been a lot of emotions associated with Pathways, positive as well as negative, and as Pathways continued on track, it became increasingly clear that fear and paranoia were among those emotions. Pathways-­related fear among some faculty was not just about the possible repercussions if a faculty member spoke out against Pathways. Some faculty also expressed fear about possible repercussions if they spoke out in favor of Pathways. For example, a piece in the March issue of the CCNY student paper (probably written as a result of the meeting I had had with student journalists earlier that month) reported: “Though most faculty seem to be against Pathways, one professor says that she likes the idea. ‘I was a transfer student myself and I know it would be great to know that all your credits will be transferred and none will have to be retaken,’ says the [media and communication arts] professor, who requested anonymity.”16 Some faculty did not want to be seen by their colleagues to be supporting an administrator-­initiated project that other faculty didn’t like. A few other faculty Pathways supporters didn’t care what their colleagues thought: “Seriously, if you hate Pathways, just de-­friend me. Don’t even talk to me in person,” an English professor at one of the community colleges wrote on Facebook, I was told. Sometimes Pathways-­related fear took the form of the belief that large organizations outside CUNY were intent on manipulating CUNY faculty and curricula through Pathways. On more than one occasion, people stated that the Lumina Foundation was really behind Pathways. For example, concerning a September 12, 2012, WNYC Radio show featuring Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed, speaking about Pathways, an online comment read: “The [CUNY Board of Trustees] did not come up with this themselves. The Lumina Foundation (http://​www​.luminafoundation​.org/) is financing this initiative in CUNY.”17

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On May 9, 2013, an assistant professor of English at one of the community colleges wrote the following to all of that college’s faculty: The curricula and learning outcomes of Pathways can’t possibly have been driven in the first place by CUNY faculty. . . . the Pathways reconfiguration of our system, as well as its curricula and learning outcomes, were already pre-­planned by corporations. The Lumina Foundation (with money from student loan providers such as Sallie Mae, hardware and software companies such as Oracle and Microsoft) planned the curricula years in advance, publishing them in The Degree Qualifications Program and implementing them in project Tuning USA. . . . How could CUNY faculty in 2011 serendipitously have arrived at system changes planned as early as 2001 by corporate interests funding Lumina? Only if faculty were told in advance what the configration should be and/or if faculty deviations from that plan were disregarded. Even the name “Pathways” comes from Lumina. It did not originate with CUNY faculty or even its Board of Trustees. The question, I believe, is whether we feel that our students’s educational pathways are better determined by Dell, Microsoft, Oracle, Kaplan, Apollo Group (which owns Phoenix University), and Pearson. In exchange for our cooporation CUNY has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from Lumina to establish its “Strategy Lab” (which we know as [Guttman Community College]).

In other words, not only Lumina, but huge, multinational, for-­profit corporations were behind CUNY’s Pathways initiative. Such feelings may perhaps have been related to many faculty’s ongoing fears—­everywhere, not just at CUNY—­ that higher education was becoming more like a business, complete with typical business practices and buzzwords (e.g., referring to students as “customers”), a trend in which the bottom line, instead of knowledge, increasingly ruled. There were plenty of other examples of feelings that Pathways was somehow related to the goals of non-­CUNY organizations. One was Sandi’s belief that Pathways was copied from the AAC&U’s LEAP initiative18 discussed in chapter 4. Still another was that Pathways was connected to the Gates Foundation, in addition to Lumina. In February 2013 someone who self-­identified as a CUNY English and journalism instructor wrote in Dissent magazine, “Driven by the ideology of such philanthropically funded national education reform organizations as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumina Foundation, Pathways is yet another veiled attempt to impose economic and intellectual austerity upon one of the most ethnically diverse university systems in the country.”19

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Not one of the fears described above was true. There wasn’t anyone or anything behind Pathways except those of us at CUNY. Yes, we did read the ­materials distributed by these organizations, and we also read a great deal about how universities in other states were dealing with similar problems. However, the Pathways structure was entirely homegrown. Furthermore, as I have stated earlier, our main goal was to help the students. Helping the students meant giving them an excellent education that was also efficiently delivered. This, we hoped, would decrease the cost of education for individual students, but it would not necessarily save the colleges or the taxpayers any money. After all, if more students enrolled in and stayed in college because of Pathways, which was a real possibility, colleges and taxpayers would spend just as much, if not more, on CUNY students’ education. I certainly wasn’t immune to feelings of fear and mistrust. In February of that semester, Professor Karen Kaplowitz, a member of the UFS’s Executive Committee, asked me for a copy of the chart showing how many courses had been approved in each of the 152 cells of the Common Core. I was worried about giving it to her, because at that point a couple of the cells were still empty, and if they stayed that way, there would be big problems for starting Pathways in the fall. Giving her the chart was like waving a red flag over the college departments that were not sending in their courses and letting the Pathways detractors know exactly where to devote their attention to make sure that Pathways fell apart. But in the end, I thought it best to give her the chart. I knew her to be a good person who intended no harm, I had already given the chart to dozens of administrators across the colleges, and she could probably get the chart through a FOIL request anyway. So I gave it to her, and from what I could tell, there were no negative consequences. Sometimes my emotions took another tack. I had given up keeping a graph of the number of negative emails and letters that I received about Pathways over time. The shape of the graph hadn’t been sufficiently reassuring. So I started to indulge in another coping mechanism. When I had been a dean at Baruch College, one of the other administrators had told me that the way he got through cabinet meetings was to imagine that each member of the cabinet was a Star Trek character. He said he had me pegged as Counselor Deanna Troi, which was definitely not my image of myself, but I remembered the overall distraction technique. So now, to help deal with everything all around me, I started to identify central office members as characters from The Lord of the Rings. I

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was Frodo, Julia was Sam, Matt was Gandalf, Allan Dobrin (the other executive vice chancellor, in charge of all nonacademic matters) was Boromir, Dave was Merry, etc. I often thought of Frodo’s last journey—­to the Grey Havens—­and this quote: “I have been too deeply hurt, Sam. I tried to save the Shire, and it has been saved, but not for me. It must often be so, Sam, when things are in danger: some one has to give them up, lose them, so that others may keep them.”20 Melodramatic, ridiculous, and self-­centered, but thinking about all of those Lord of the Rings characters would briefly take my mind off the continuing pain experienced by many people on all sides of this project, and off my own exhaustion. We had been parrying unexpected attacks now for almost two and a half years, many times longer than we had expected. It felt as if our quest would never end. There were plenty of negative emotions for everyone, but there were also some positive ones. In May we had had a huge thank-­you dinner for all the faculty and staff who had worked directly with the central office to implement Pathways. It was a time of great celebration. I made remarks in which I expressed to those gathered how much what they had done meant to CUNY students: Pathways has been a very long journey for a huge number of people. In fact, it has been such a long road that some people who played significant roles in its beginning stages never encountered some of the people who played significant roles in its latter stages. But this party brings people from the beginning, middle, and end together in one big celebration. Assembled at this party are just some of the people who helped in university-­wide ways with this project. There are hundreds and hundreds more who helped on specific campuses. There are multiple people in the central office who have literally worked on this project day in and day out for years. And dozens of others who worked part-­time on it for years. Plus dozens of people on campuses who put in significant amounts of work for years. You are those people. This party is for you. To thank you.

Also in those remarks I gave a brief outline of the history of transfer problems at CUNY, which, though I had no inkling of it at the time, became the foundation of chapter 2 for this book. I concluded my remarks with this statement: This tells the story of the how, but not really the why. Pathways is important to do because it will help students to transfer and complete their degrees more ­easily and with a better quality education. But that is not the only reason. CUNY stands for access to and opportunity for an excellent education. CUNY embodies the

The Finish Line (1/13–6/13)  ■ 267 principle stated in one of my most favorite quotations: “Of all the civil rights for which the world has struggled and fought for 5,000 years, the right to learn is undoubtedly the most fundamental” (W.E.B. DuBois, 1949).21 But for many decades CUNY has been failing on that promise to students who transfer. Students were told, you can study here, but if you want to get a degree, we’re going to put all kinds of obstacles in your way. Pathways helps CUNY to achieve its core mission. In fact, it has been said that Pathways is the biggest positive change for under­ graduate students in the history of CUNY. Lack of smooth transfer has been a problem at CUNY for over 40 years. There will be literally millions of future students who will benefit from Pathways. And it is because of each of you! Thank you for your help in getting us to the end of this very long road.

Three Months to Go: I Learn a New Phrase (Push Poll) The PSC still seemed to be doing everything possible to disrupt the implementation of Pathways. It did not matter that students in the thousands were already registering for Pathways fall courses. Matt’s imminent retirement gave them another angle to use, and so now they tried a new tack. On April 25 PSC President Barbara Bowen wrote to the faculty telling them that they would soon receive a secret ballot to vote “No Confidence in Pathways.” In her preface to the ballot Barbara wrote (with my comments indicated in brackets): We know it’s not true that the faculty as a whole is in support of Pathways. But we need to make that clear in a form that the CUNY administration cannot ignore and about which they cannot lie. [We had never said that the faculty as a whole supported Pathways.]. . . . The vote will be conducted by the American Arbitration Association through a secure ballot among all full-­time faculty. . . . All you have to do to vote No Confidence is click or check the box indicating that you support the motion . . . CUNY is about to see a change of at least the two top management positions—­interim chancellor and chair of the Board of Trustees. [As it turned out, Benno stayed in his position for several more years.] This moment of transition offers a chance to demand a rethinking of Pathways and a return to respect for academic freedom and faculty governance. A strong vote of No Confidence would. . . . register the injustice of moving ahead with a curriculum that

268  ■  Chapter 9 will hurt our students. [We strongly believed it would help students.] It would constitute a public demand for change. Many faculty over the past two years have taken courageous stands against Pathways, sometimes risking their jobs to do so. But too many faculty have been intimidated or coerced into remaining silent or voting against their conscience. . . . Pathways is about deprofessionalizing the faculty and consolidating administrative power at least as much as it is about a new curriculum. [All Pathways courses were developed and approved by CUNY faculty, and would be taught and assessed by them.] If we do not do everything we can now to challenge the deprofessionalization of the faculty, we can expect to see it take root and grow. [Our only goal was to establish a framework that would enable credits to transfer across our single university of CUNY; wherever possible we were determined to leave curriculum to the faculty—­for Pathways and in all other respects.] . . . After hundreds of conversations with faculty across the University, the other union officers and I have heard a profound lack of confidence—­ intellectual, professional and moral confidence—­in Pathways. If that is your position, make it known by voting No Confidence. Whatever your position, vote in the referendum in May. Your voice should be heard. [I.e., everyone else is opposed to Pathways. Now say what you think of it.]

The actual ballot was headed “NO CONFIDENCE IN PATHWAYS,” followed by two paragraphs—­one headed “Faculty control of curriculum is essential for academic quality,” and the other headed “Pathways reduces academic rigor at CUNY.” Full-­time faculty were then asked to vote “AGREE” or “DISAGREE” with the statement “I have No Confidence in Pathways.” It seemed to me that this was rather like saying to someone: So-­and-­so is beating his (or her) parent—­isn’t that awful? Jay explained to me that this sort of vote is what is called a “push poll.” Push polls are often used during political campaigns to solicit responders’ views on specific candidates or issues. However, a push poll is more of a marketing technique than what someone might traditionally think of as an opinion poll. Even though they are technically identified as polls, the purpose of push polls is to influence respondents’ expressed views. A push poll will have introductory one-­ sided material, and will ask questions framed in such a way that respondents are likely to give certain answers. Push polls do not present both sides of an argument. Instead, they “push” respondents towards expressing certain views. By April 29 there was national media coverage of the upcoming vote, but the content of that coverage may not have been as the PSC wished. The PSC

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represents both full-­time and part-­time CUNY faculty, as well as some staff. The PSC leadership had made a decision that only full-­time faculty could participate in this vote, presumably because they thought that the vote would then have more impact on the administration. But many part-­time faculty were not happy about that decision. These part-­time faculty thought that this decision was symptomatic of their ongoing inferior treatment in comparison to full-­ time faculty. So for the moment, the media’s stories were not as much about the upcoming vote as about the strain between full-­time and part-­time faculty.22 Having once, during collective bargaining (not at CUNY), seen full-­time faculty ask for raises at the expense of part-­time faculty, I had a lot of sympathy for part-­time faculty when it came to union matters. The PSC spared no effort in its media campaign about the vote. They used versions of their previous advertisements, retitling them “VOTE NO CONFIDENCE IN PATHWAYS.” I stared at these ads when I first saw them pop up on my computer on the weather​.com website. On June 1 the PSC announced the results of the vote: 92% VOTE NO CONFIDENCE IN PATHWAYS, CUNY’S NEW CURRICULUM In a faculty vote on Pathways, a CUNY-­wide overhaul of curriculum scheduled to go into effect next fall, 92% declared they have No Confidence in the new plan. In a University-­wide referendum completed late yesterday, 3,996 full-­time faculty voted to support a statement of No Confidence, with only 323 voting against. Close to two-­thirds of CUNY’s full-­time faculty participated in the vote, which was conducted by the American Arbitration Association at the request of the faculty union. Traditionally used to confront profound failures of university leader­ ship, a vote of No Confidence is the most serious expression of opposition that a faculty governance body can make. The CUNY vote is exceptional because it involved thousands of faculty—­far more than would usually vote on a resolution of No Confidence. The result is a stunning rebuke to the Pathways curriculum, which faculty say reduces the quality of a CUNY education.23

We in the CUNY central office looked at this vote a little differently. The title of the announcement made it sound as if 92 percent of the faculty had voted no confidence in Pathways, but it was 92 percent of the faculty who voted, not 92 percent of the faculty as a whole. Further, according to our calculations, 60 percent of the eligible faculty had participated in the vote, not quite the

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“close to two-­thirds” in the PSC announcement. The numbers also meant that the percentage of all eligible faculty who had voted no confidence in Pathways was 55 percent. That was more than half, but quite a different picture from the PSC’s “92%.” Frankly, I was surprised that, given the language associated with the PSC’s ballot, 323 people had nevertheless voted against no confidence in Pathways. And I had to wonder how many of the 45 percent of the faculty who did not vote at all were in support of Pathways. There was extensive press about the vote, and some of it misrepresented what had occurred. For example, the New York Post reported: “In a university-­ wide vote, 92 percent of professors voted ‘no confidence’ in CUNY’s curricular credit overhaul. . . . Two-­thirds of CUNY’s full-­time faculty participated in the vote.” However, since this article first appeared, it has been changed online to say: “In a university-­wide vote, 92 percent of professors who participated expressed ‘no confidence’ in CUNY’s curriculum and credit overhaul. . . . About 60 percent CUNY’s full-­time faculty took part in the vote.”24 Several faculty said that they were opposed to the way the PSC had conducted and characterized the vote. KC Johnson, a professor of history at Brooklyn College, wrote a June 12 piece online titled “A Faculty Union Rigs a Plebiscite,” in which he gave many reasons for his concerns about the vote, including the following: The PSC’s latest gambit has been to rally opposition to Pathways, the CUNY-­wide general education program. . . . the disingenuousness of the union’s conduct on this issue has been breathtaking.  .  .  . Even though debates over curricular requirements would seem well beyond the purview of a union, the PSC organized a plebiscite to express “no confidence” in Pathways. . . . Sadly, the results of this ballot—­which amounted to little more than a push poll—­were uncritically accepted by some in the media. . . . The rigging of the ballot procedures began from the start: the original ballots identified the professor’s name, sending a message to untenured faculty that they could face retaliation if they didn’t vote the union’s way. The oppressive atmosphere that the PSC leadership has cultivated extended even to the ranks of the tenured, the most widely circulated critique of the union’s position came from a pseudonymous e-­mail penned by a senior faculty member, who concluded that “the union’s leadership is uninterested in constructive dialog about anything,” but declined to give his name for fear of retaliation. Such arguments appeared nowhere on the ballot, which included language presenting only the union’s arguments against Pathways, with no counter from faculty who

The Finish Line (1/13–6/13)  ■ 271 supported the initiative. . . . A PSC “organizer,” John Gergely, contacted professors individually to pressure them to vote against the administration. . . . Faculty dues pay not only Gergely’s salary but that of other “organizers” and even an “organizing coordinator.” . . . So in a contest rigged in almost every manner, only a bare majority of all professors actually cast ballots in favor of the union’s position.25

The PSC vote apparently stimulated the AAUP to contact us yet again. On June 15 we learned that at the AAUP annual meeting just a few days earlier, meeting delegates had adopted a “Resolution in Support of Faculty Control of the Curriculum at the City University of New York.” This resolution included the statements that more than 60 percent of CUNY’s full-­time faculty participated in a university-­ wide referendum about Pathways . . . 92 percent of voters declared they had No Confidence in the Pathways curriculum.  .  .  . the AAUP calls upon the CUNY Board of Trustees to repeal the June 2011 resolution which established the Pathways curriculum, because it has failed to earn the confidence of the faculty who must implement it . . . and . . . the AAUP calls upon the CUNY chancellery and the CUNY Board of Trustees to reinstate shared governance at CUNY and respect the role of elected faculty leaders in formulating the curriculum.26

Matt, still functioning as the strong chancellor that he was right up to the minute of his retirement, responded vigorously to the AAUP on June 21 in a letter that he made public to the entire CUNY community. He pointed out that the CUNY central office had had no communication with the AAUP since we last wrote to them nine months earlier, which meant that any further information they had about Pathways had come solely from such sources as the PSC and UFS. He critiqued the no-­confidence poll’s methodology, reviewed CUNY’s legal and policy foundation for the enacting of Pathways, including that its establishment was within the AAUP’s own published guidelines, and pointed out the important functions that Pathways is serving for students, that the courses are already in the registration system, and that the students support Pathways. Coincidentally also on June 21, Barbara wrote a public letter to Benno stating, “I am writing to call on you, as Chairperson of the Board of Trustees, to take the necessary actions to rescind the June 27, 2011 resolution, ‘Creating an Efficient Transfer System.’ In a vote counted on May 31, the full-­time faculty of CUNY, by a margin of 92%, voted No Confidence in the curriculum

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the resolution produced. Nearly four thousand full-­time faculty—­an absolute majority—­voted No Confidence in Pathways.” There was nothing to say to her about these statements that we hadn’t said countless times before.

The Beginning of the End It was June, with less than three months until Pathways was fully in effect, and despite all the attacks and distractions, we remained on track. On June 5 I sent out a message to the entire CUNY community summarizing the status of Pathways at that time. The highlights were the following: • All Common Core courses needed for the fall, a total of approximately 2,000 courses, had been approved by the Board of Trustees (this number included the STEM variant courses). A complete list of these courses was available online and was available for student registration. • Each one of these courses had been developed by one or more CUNY faculty members and had been approved by CUNY faculty members. • Every future new student—­freshmen and transfers—­would now need to satisfy Pathways general education (Common Core) requirements. There would be about 58,000 such new students in fall 2013. • As of June 5, the Common Core courses already had close to 200,000 enrollments for fall 2013, with many more expected by September. • Of the over 700 CUNY undergraduate-­degree programs, 95 percent had been aligned with the Pathways Common Core requirements, and it would be 100 percent by the end of the summer. • The first three to five CUNY-­wide courses for the ten most popular majors had been identified. These majors covered approximately two-­thirds of the students who transfer (approximately ten thousand each fall alone). • Advisers were undergoing extensive training about the Pathways requirements. • Software had been modified to help students pick Pathways courses and to indicate when students have successfully passed these courses. • The Student Rights and Responsibilities document had been created and widely distributed, and was posted online.

My concluding statement was this: “We want to again thank all of the faculty and staff who have arduously worked to develop and implement this program that will assure substantially greater student access to a wider choice of courses,

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including more advanced courses. Thank you for your dedication to academic excellence in the service of student success.” On June 11, I had an unexpected visit from Allen Castañeda. He was head of the Hostos Community College student government when the public hearing on Pathways was held there in June 2011. He had been involved in arranging for students to come early to testify, providing them with a meal. Subsequently he had transferred to a bachelor’s-­degree program at CUNY’s City College. Allen had come that day to give me a trophy—­a screaming eagle with wings raised and talons extended. The text on the trophy said, in part, “Hostos Community College SGA [Student Government Association] Proudly Honors University Provost Alexandra W. Logue. In recognition and appreciation of your service to the SGA of Hostos C.C. and its student body.” I will always treasure that trophy and Allen’s kindness in giving it to me. A number of other projects reached completion at the end of that semester. The Board of Trustees named CUNY’s new community college as the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College in honor of a $25 million gift from the Stella and Charles Guttman Foundation (a gift that I and many other people had been involved in). Also around the same time, the first permanent Dean of the CUNY School of Public Health, Ayman El-­Mohandes, was appointed, following a search that I chaired. I had led the central office efforts at establishing this new CUNY school since 2006, when Matt first announced that it would be formed. At least as satisfying as these two events was the final authorization of the phased retirement policy for faculty and some staff. The PSC announced that they had “reached agreement with CUNY on a three-­year pilot program of Phased Retirement for full-­time instructional staff.  .  .  . Faculty can phase at 50% of workload and 50% of pay for one, two or three years.”27 Reading this statement, someone might think that what had happened was that the PSC had conceived of, and then successfully negotiated with CUNY for, a faculty phased retirement policy. I’m sure that none of the CUNY faculty knew anything different. But that is far from what happened. When I was the provost at New York Institute of Technology from 2001 to 2006, I had started a phased retirement program there. Then, when I came back to CUNY in 2006 and found that CUNY did not have a phased retirement policy, and discovered that Matt would be supportive of such a policy, I decided to establish one. I began this project just as I was becoming the executive vice chancellor and university provost in 2008, working with central office and college administrators and staff, as well

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as with the UFS. The main concerns expressed about such a policy came from the central office’s financial affairs and human resources offices. Mostly because of lengthy interactions with those offices, along with a much shorter time negotiating with the PSC (a negotiation that was ably handled by Vice Chancellor for Labor Relations Pamela Silverblatt), it took a total of five years from when I started work on this policy until it received final approval by all parties. What kept me from giving up during this long period of time was something that a highly respected Queens College psychology faculty member, Professor Bruce Brown, had said to me around 2006—­that a phased retirement policy was one that faculty would appreciate having. So, despite all the uncertainty associated with Matt’s leaving, I had much to be thankful for and much reason to hope that what I had done would have good results for future CUNY students and faculty. However, as I stood and listened to the speeches at Matt’s retirement party on June 25, I was well aware that the final chapter had not yet been written. The two lawsuits against Pathways were still pending, and no one really knew what effects Matt’s departure would have.

CHAPTER 10

Transitions ■■■■■

JULY 2013 THROUGH DECEMBER 2013

No one had to tell me that this was a dangerous time. Pathways was about to go into effect, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein had left, and we had an Interim Chancellor, William Kelly. This wasn’t the first time that I had experienced a departure by Matt. In 1998, when I was dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch College, Matt had left the presidency of that college to become president of Adelphi University. From right before he left Baruch until I left to become provost at New York Institute of Technology three years later, Baruch had four presidents and three provosts (my immediate super­ visors). Each of these people had his or her own priorities, which sometimes differed by 180°. For example, Matt and his Provost Lois Cronholm had encouraged the Weissman School to develop more master’s programs, a task on which the faculty were happily working, but a subsequent provost wanted the development of Weissman’s new master’s programs stopped and the existing ones closed down. Many of these short-­lived administrators saw their new positions as their opportunity to do what they alone thought was important for the Weissman School. They had scarcely gotten any experience with managing the Weissman School when they were replaced. These various presidents and provosts also had vastly different management styles, ranging from an essentially hands-­off approach to micromanagement. One provost was determined that the Weissman School provide a professorship for a (albeit extremely accomplished) close friend of the provost’s, without going through the usual vetting procedures, something that would have (justifiably) infuriated the faculty. I incurred this provost’s wrath when I refused to comply. That three-­year period after Matt left was simply chaos, and I struggled to keep the Weissman School on a steady track and isolated from as much of the chaos as possible. Now Matt had left again, I would be leaving in five months, likely not to return, and there was a new (interim) chancellor. My thoughts were consumed

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by my desire to make a good end to my term as executive vice chancellor—­ with a good end defined first and foremost by Pathways operating smoothly and by my leaving on good terms with as many people as possible. Just before Matt left, the CUNY trustees had passed a resolution praising him, including among his accomplishments that he had “initiated the creation of a common curricular structure through the ‘Pathways to Degree Completion’ initiative, in order to streamline student transfer, enhance the quality of general education across the University, and ensure system-­wide learning outcomes, bringing CUNY more in line with national norms and ensuring that students do not exhaust financial aid resources and increase time to degree because of inconsistent transfer and general education policies.”1 But that resolution didn’t mean that everyone was going to work to firmly establish Pathways now that Matt was gone.

Curve Balls Given my experience at Baruch, I should have learned to expect the unexpected during this sort of transitional period. But I was still surprised when, in August, Bill called me into his office and told me with no preamble that my Associate University Provost, Julia Wrigley, who had previously been his interim provost when he was president of the Graduate Center, would become the interim executive vice chancellor and university provost when I went on study leave. Further, he told me that Julia was to start shadowing me immediately, and that he would soon announce all of this to everyone. He said that otherwise people would wonder why she was going everywhere with me. What was so surprising to me was not his choice of Julia (I already knew he thought well of her), but that he had made these decisions so soon, more than four months before I was to leave. Though Bill’s plan could provide Julia with much information that would be useful to her when she became the interim university provost, it would make it difficult for her to carry out her existing heavy responsibilities. There was also the possibility that some people would interpret Julia’s assignments at this time as signaling that Bill did not have confidence in me, which could make it difficult for me to finish what I wanted to finish. However, it was Bill’s decision and I would have to make the best of it. I was definitely relieved, though, that he had chosen Julia, because she was a strong supporter of and very knowledgeable about Pathways.

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After telling me his choice for my replacement, Bill had minimal contact with me, but he sometimes met just with Julia concerning his academic priorities. It was frustrating for me not to be as involved as before. But, after all, I was going on study leave, and Bill knew I might not come back, so it made sense for him to work with someone who would be with him in the long term. So I tried to put aside my sadness that Matt was gone and that so much had changed, and I resolved, again, to do everything I could, as professionally as I could, before leaving, especially for Pathways.

Changes in High Places Matt had held monthly group meetings with all the CUNY presidents, vice chancellors, and top central office staff. Bill continued this practice, but he met alone with the presidents for the first part of each of these meetings. We vice chancellors were explicitly told not to enter the room until that part of the meeting was over. Bill also started holding these monthly meetings at various colleges rather than holding them all at the central office. Some of the vice chancellors were deeply concerned about these changes. Among their concerns were these: that the roles of the vice chancellors had been downgraded (Matt had always said that his vice chancellors were extensions of himself); that Bill didn’t trust the vice chancellors; that Bill had always harbored resentment against the authority that the central office held over his presidency of the Graduate Center; that the vice chancellors wouldn’t be able to help Bill answer the presidents’ questions if they weren’t in the meetings with the presidents; that the vice chancellors wouldn’t be able to help Bill carry out whatever he promised in these meetings, etc. My main concern was that these changes seemed symptomatic of the general view that Bill supported a more decentralized CUNY than had Matt, a CUNY in which the colleges had more independence. And I knew that there were a good number of presidents who, if given a choice, would rather not participate in Pathways. Would Bill support those presidents in their preferences? All of us in the central office wondered what Bill was saying to the presidents while we were not in the room. And Bill’s background as an English professor at Queens College didn’t help to reassure me, given the outsize part that some English faculty had played in the Pathways protests. Perhaps he had particular sympathy for those faculty. All these things started to worry me more than

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Bill’s past actions in support of Pathways reassured me. On the other hand, I thought, the presidents reported directly to Bill, and so they had a right to meet alone with him. How would the vice chancellors, who also reported directly to the chancellor, have felt if in every meeting with the chancellor the presidents were also in attendance? We vice chancellors were used to confidential contact with the chancellor; why shouldn’t the presidents have the same? It wasn’t only transitions in the chancellor’s office that seemed to signal potential threats to Pathways. The mayor’s office was also a major concern. ­Michael Bloomberg had been mayor since 2002, and he and Matt had worked together extremely well. There was much evidence that each respected the other, and the mayor had ensured that significant additional funds came to CUNY. However, Mayor Bloomberg was term limited; he would have to leave his office at the end of 2013. Who would replace him? The leading candidate appeared to be Bill de Blasio, a Democrat. In August, the PSC, CUNY’s faculty union, endorsed de Blasio, and the following statement appeared on the PSC’s website as part of a PSC question-­and-­answer session with de Blasio: In a referendum among CUNY’s full-­time faculty, 92% voted “no confidence” in the administration’s Pathways curriculum. What does that vote say to you?2 As mayor, I would take additional steps to evaluate the effectiveness of a curriculum that has been rejected so dramatically by faculty. The experience and training that faculty members bring to their profession must be taken into consideration during curriculum development, or we risk sacrificing the academic quality of our city’s institutions.3

It was chilling to think that a mayor would get involved with CUNY curriculum, and even more chilling to think that a mayor’s views on curriculum could be tied to a political endorsement. Of course, even were he elected (and he was indeed elected later that fall), he would have no authority over CUNY curriculum. New York State law made it clear that only the CUNY Board of Trustees and state governance had any such authority. Nevertheless, a mayor who was opposed to Pathways could make things difficult for CUNY in many ways.

Pathways Preparations Proceed Despite the possible dangers looming all around, we tried to keep to our list of unfinished Pathways tasks. This list had shrunk to just a handful of items, but

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some of them involved a good deal of effort. For example, that summer we required each college to create a special website devoted to Pathways. These websites had to contain all sorts of Pathways information, including the name of the college’s transfer appeals officer and all basic information on students’ transfer rights and responsibilities. Many colleges quickly created helpful websites on their own, with no prompting from us. But some colleges’ websites lacked critical Pathways information, and some of those colleges were nonresponsive to our requests for changes in their websites. We just kept asking, and by the time that fall classes started, all of the colleges had Pathways websites that included all important pieces of information. The central office’s Pathways website did not escape our attention. We put a new front page on it that was designed to help Pathways users—­students, faculty, and staff—­but structured that page so that a website visitor could still get to all of the substantial information about transfer and Pathways that we had been posting to the site since early 2011. Our web work turned up some surprises. Sometimes we discovered that the colleges weren’t following Pathways policies, behavior that went beyond just being late in constructing an appropriate website. One of the most striking examples concerned Lehman College. We had known since the beginning of the Pathways Project that Baruch had a required minor—­Baruch’s concern about Pathways had been largely about how to keep requiring that minor post-­ Pathways. But it was only in checking the college websites in the summer of 2013 that we learned that Lehman also had a required minor. And we also learned that the faculty were intending to keep that requirement after Pathways began that September, a requirement separate from and in addition to the Pathways general education. Some Lehman majors were exempt from the minor requirement, but these were majors in which it would be impossible for students, with the addition of the minor, to complete all of their required courses within the total number of credits allowed for their degrees. Were Lehman to keep its minor requirement following the effecting of Pathways, that would be in violation of the Pathways resolution passed by the Board of Trustees in June 2011, which included the following statement: “Any course or disciplinary area that is required of all students and is not specifically required for a student’s major must fall within the Common Core or College-­ Option courses [the general education courses required for all students and the additional general education courses required for students in bachelor’s-­degree programs].”4 We had included that statement in the resolution specifically to prevent colleges such as Baruch from layering on requirements for students

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that would function as additional general education requirements and limit students’ choices of electives. We were not saying that a student couldn’t do a minor, just that a student couldn’t be required to do one. After explaining the situation to the Lehman administration, whose members understood what was at issue, we informed Lehman that their minor as originally structured could no longer be required after Pathways went into effect. One option for Lehman was to do what Baruch had done, which was to fashion a minor using the College Option part of the Pathways general education requirements (the 6–­12 general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree students that were entirely at each senior college’s discretion). We thought the matter was then closed, but in December, just before I started my study leave, a faculty representative of the Lehman Senate wrote to Bill asking that the minor be permitted (as a requirement separate from and in addition to the Pathways general education courses, including the College Option courses). As far as I knew, permission to require a separate minor was not granted. That summer of 2013 we also established the CCCRC for 2013–­2014.5 This was the faculty committee responsible for reviewing and approving courses for the Pathways Common Core that had already been approved by individual colleges. Although more than two thousand Common Core courses had already been approved, we knew that the colleges would want to approve additional courses, some entirely new and some as substitutions for already-­approved courses. However, given that most of the courses had already been approved, we decided to combine the previously eight CCCRC subcommittees (one for each of the eight categories of the Common Core) into three, with one representative from each of the undergraduate colleges on each of these three subcommittees, a total of about sixty faculty members—­far fewer than when we had first established the CCCRC almost two years earlier, but still a substantial number of faculty. Another task concerned the courses for the most popular transfer majors that we were aligning as part of Pathways. Faculty committees had identified a minimum of three entry-­level courses for each of the ten majors that had the most transfer students. But those courses (e.g., Introductory Psychology in the case of the psychology major) often had different titles and course numbers at different colleges. We could have asked the colleges to rename and renumber these courses so that they were the same CUNY-­wide (what is sometimes known as a common course-­numbering system). This would have made it easy

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for anyone to spot, for example, Introductory Psychology in any list at any college. However, such an approach would have required changes in too many documents and lists, and these changes might have been incompatible with a college’s overall course-­numbering and -­naming system. Instead, we decided to just ensure that each college’s relevant courses were listed prominently for students, faculty, and staff, and we asked the colleges for any information that was needed to construct these lists. It was gratifying that we had been able to identify these transfer courses for ten majors. This meant that CUNY students could start one of these majors at any CUNY college and, without losing any credits, finish that major at any other CUNY college that offered that same major. But my happiness at this accomplishment was significantly diminished by what we—­and the burden was really on me—­did not achieve in this area. There were two popular majors for which we had established faculty committees (computer science and engineering), but for which we were never able to establish the entry-­level transfer courses. As I understood the problems regarding identifying the transfer courses for these two majors, in the case of computer science one issue was the first computer language that a student learned for that major. Some colleges taught one language first, and others taught another, variation that is apparently common across the country. Subsequent computer science courses were based on the knowledge of that initial language. So students who transferred from a college that started with language A to a college that started with language B had some catching up to do in terms of extra coursework. But that wouldn’t do for Pathways. A hallmark of the Pathways system of transfer of credits in the major was that a student should suffer no negative consequences as a result of transferring. Having to start over in a new computer language was thus inconsistent with Pathways principles. One way around this problem (other than requiring all the colleges to start with either language A or language B) would have been simply to identify some other major courses as the ones that a student should start with and could transfer. However, the possibilities for such courses were limited. Engineering had a similar problem in that there were many different types of engineering, and so the courses that all of them had in common and that could therefore serve as Pathways transfer courses constituted a small set. Nevertheless, for both computer science and engineering, one entry-­level major course that could be useful for transfer was calculus. I realized that if we could agree on a CUNY-­wide calculus course (a calculus course that would transfer seamlessly between any pair of CUNY colleges), it would likely be

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possible to identify at least three CUNY-­wide entry-­level transfer courses for both computer science and engineering, and the ten majors for which we had agreements would become twelve. Further, given that there are many majors besides computer science and engineering that require calculus, a CUNY-­wide calculus course would benefit a huge number of transfer students. Once I understood how important calculus was to facilitating transfer among the CUNY colleges, I contacted Professor Warren Gordon, chair of mathematics at Baruch College and chair of the CUNY Mathematics Discipline Council (a committee whose membership consists of all the colleges’ Mathematics Department chairs). I have known Warren since 1995, when I first became dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences at Baruch. He has been Mathematics Department chair at Baruch since 1985 and is one of B ­ aruch’s (and probably CUNY’s) longest-­serving chairs in any discipline. Warren understood why calculus was so important for transfer students and indicated his willingness to help. He invited me to speak about the issues at the Mathematics Discipline Council. He also helped compile lists of topics that each of the chairs thought should be taught as part of calculus. In addition, computer science Professor Ted Brown, who was using every means possible to find a solution for helping computer science students transfer, spent a great deal of time putting together a chart showing which CUNY colleges accepted the credits of which other CUNY colleges’ calculus courses. All this work showed significant commonality among the different colleges’ calculus courses, and so I was hopeful that we could devise a CUNY-­wide calculus curriculum. In recent years, the Mathematics Discipline Council had successfully done something like this for elementary algebra. However, as I kept reminding myself, elementary algebra is a remedial, not a college-­level, course, one that is taught primarily by part-­ time, not full-­time, faculty. Therefore full-­time mathematics faculty such as the department chairs are likely to be less invested in the content of elementary algebra than in the content of calculus, a course that many such faculty teach. I discussed the issues with the members of the Mathematics Discipline Council at one of their Friday meetings. These meetings were always held around a long table in a small, windowless room at the Graduate Center (with the picked-­over remains of the Mathematics Discipline Council’s bagel breakfast on a table at the back). At first the discussion seemed to be going well. One relatively new chair who had previously taught in Europe said that he didn’t see what the problem was with establishing a CUNY-­wide calculus course. The university he used to teach at in Europe had many campuses, and calculus was

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taught in the same way at each. I smiled inside and thought, “We’re going to do this!” But then a vocal, long-­term, chair, someone I knew from my many past visits to the Mathematics Discipline Council, said something very similar to, no, I don’t want to do it. If I want to change the calculus course I don’t want to have to go to a committee about it. Immediately the tone of the discussion changed, and not for the better. It became apparent that the Mathematics Discipline Council would not agree, at least not then, to a CUNY-­wide curricular framework for calculus. This was a big loss for students, one that I could have overridden with the chancellor’s support, but I did not feel that this was the time to do so. We had already had too many battles with English and other faculty, and the chancellor’s office was in transition. So I thought it best to wait and take this problem on again later, realizing that, as so often occurs in higher education, later could very well be never, especially if I didn’t return to the central office after my study leave. I have always wondered whether I made the right decision. So far, years later, the calculus problem remains unsolved.

Pathways Begins After three years of work and preparation, Pathways went into full effect in the fall of 2013. For most CUNY colleges, classes began that fall on the Wednesday before Labor Day, August 28, a good end-­of-­summer day with a high of 82°F and no rain. But we in my office scarcely noticed the weather as we continued work on our many tasks. We anxiously waited for news of some cataclysm that had befallen the initiation of Pathways, but none came. There were always glitches at the start of any semester, and this semester’s glitches were no worse than usual. That first fall a total of 16,000 sections of the Pathways Common Core courses were taught, with a total of some 360,000 occupied seats. Analyses conducted by University Executive Director of Academic Financial Affairs and Planning Robert Maruca and his staff showed that the colleges had offered courses in virtually all possible Common Core areas. We received only a handful of student appeals alleging violation of students’ Pathways rights.6 We had taken bets in my office as to how many appeals there would be, and the people who had predicted there would be dozens lost their bets (no money, only credibility, was exchanged). On the Pathways front, things were actually relatively quiet, and all of us in the central Office of Academic Affairs breathed a sigh of relief. Part of the

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relative calm was undoubtedly due to Professor Sandi Cooper’s continued low profile. After she had stepped down as chair of the UFS in June of 2012, she had taken a one-­year sabbatical for academic year 2012–­2013. Now she was back, and she was soliciting input from the faculty for a talk she planned to give about Pathways at the MLA conference in January 2014. But we heard relatively little from her. The UFS did send an (unsigned) email to their news distribution list criticizing Matt’s responses about Pathways to the AAUP (the largest faculty union in the United States). In the chancellor’s senior staff meeting I asked whether we should prepare a response, as we had always done when Matt was chancellor. Several people said that the piece had been written by a UFS Executive Committee member of mixed reputation among the faculty, and Julia said she was much relieved to hear that, and that she had heard the UFS was divided on these issues. Then Bill said that he was continuing to speak with the new head of the UFS, and that it looked as if some changes would be made in Pathways’ workings. He didn’t say what they would be, and he didn’t say anything about the initial Pathways review mandated for that year by the June 2011 Board of Trustees Pathways resolution.7 The outcome of the discussion was that there would be no response to the UFS communication. I continued to worry—­virtually none of the faculty knew who had written that piece, nor did they know the other parts of the backstory. The faculty would just see the UFS’s communication sitting out there unchallenged. Despite many promises, in all these years, neither the UFS nor the PSC leadership, nor any other faculty, had come up with a workable alternative to Pathways. The UFS and PSC leadership did ultimately agree that transfer of students’ credits was an issue that needed to be addressed. For example, an email sent by Sandi and PSC President Barbara Bowen to the UFS news listserv on May 16, 2012, stated, “There are genuine problems in CUNY’s current transfer policies and practices,” and in an August 2012 article in the PSC’s newspaper, Clarion, the new UFS Chair, Terrence Martell, was quoted as saying, “We recognize that the transfer process needs to be improved.”8 However, as described previously (see, e.g., chapter 4), although in some cases faculty offered ideas for alternatives, the ideas were sometimes so lacking in details as not to provide a viable alternative; the proposals were unworkable because of the faculty’s lack of knowledge about the variety of disciplines at CUNY, about how various administrative systems function, and/or about the nature of student transfer at CUNY; or multiple contradictory suggestions were offered. Other than the insistence in 2011 that the number of Pathways general education credits should

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be simply increased, a fully developed alternative to Pathways was never offered, despite many promises over many years by the UFS and the PSC and others that such an alternative would be forthcoming. Here are some examples of these promises, through 2013 and beyond: • February 28, 2011, more than three weeks after the draft board resolution on Pathways had been distributed, Sandi writes in a letter to the editor of a CUNY newsletter (distributed to the UFS news listserv) that the “faculty are in process of formulating a program.” • May 16, 2012, almost one year after the board had approved the Pathways resolution, Sandi and Barbara write in an email to the UFS news listserv that the UFS “in conjunction with the [PSC] has begun a major effort to develop an alternative to Pathways. By the end of the fall 2012 semester, we will produce a proposal.” • September 4, 2012, Terry states at a UFS Plenary meeting that “over the summer, the PSC and the UFS decided to try to devise an alternative transfer system to Pathways. . . . The findings of this project will be presented at the UFS Fall Conference on October 12.” • October 12, 2012, a document presented at the UFS fall conference (distributed October 15, 2012, to the UFS news listserv) states, “ALTERNATIVE ­SOLUTION [to Pathways] There should be a thorough review and analysis of all the factors that affect transfer and excess credits so that we can craft a proposal to address these issues.” No such proposal ever appeared. • June 21, 2013, two years after the board approved the Pathways resolution, and two months before Pathways was to go fully into effect, Barbara sends a letter to Benno Schmidt, the board chair, Matt, Bill, and all faculty and professional staff, stating, “Our demand is that Pathways be removed  .  .  . and replaced by a curriculum or curricula formulated by elected faculty bodies. The elected faculty bodies stand ready to work expeditiously on the important issue of student transfer.” • September–­October 2014, more than one year after Pathways was fully in effect, an article by Alex Vitale, an associate professor of sociology at Brooklyn College, in Academe, an AAUP magazine, states, “Some campuses are pursuing yet another strategy. The crux of this strategy is to engage faculty in a redesign of general education without reference to Pathways.”9

The PSC was, however, continuing to criticize Pathways throughout 2013, although their attention was divided. In addition to their commitment to

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stopping Pathways, they were emphasizing that a top priority was to obtain a new contract (collective bargaining agreement) for the faculty. It had been several years since the PSC-­CUNY contract had expired, and there was no new one in sight. Although some faculty were still getting what are known at CUNY as step increases (annual automatic salary increases in recognition of a faculty member’s increasing experience), the salary of many faculty had reached the top of their ranks’ salary ranges, and the tops of these ranges—­low even in 2009—­had not increased since then. The PSC and many faculty were justifiably upset about all of this. The PSC conflated their upset over the lack of a contract with their antipathy toward Pathways. At a faculty demonstration at the September 2013 Board of Trustees meeting, according to a PSC article, the faculty chanted, “R-­e-­s-­p-­e-­c-­t, we reject austerity.”10 And on the videotape for that meeting, demonstrators are heard chanting, “Good education, good contract.”11 A PSC article explained the reasoning underlying these phrases: “ ‘We need to be at the first meeting of the CUNY Board of Trustees this year to demand a response to the no-­confidence in Pathways vote and to show the urgency of our demand for a fair contract,’ said PSC President Barbara Bowen. ‘The board is taking CUNY in the wrong direction. CUNY faculty and staff need a new contract, and CUNY students need a first-­rate education. The trustees should see and hear how serious we are about what we need: no austerity contract for us, and no austerity education for our students.’ ”12 Another PSC article stated, “We’re here to tell them it’s time to start negotiating seriously on a new contract and it’s time for them to listen to us on Pathways.”13 In other words, according to the PSC, both Pathways and the lack of a contract were evidence that the CUNY administration didn’t want to spend money on the things that matter: the students and the faculty. None of the PSC’s rationale made any sense to me. With regard to the contract and faculty salaries, I knew that the administration was dedicated to obtaining higher salaries for the faculty. As I understood it, we were constrained in this task by forces beyond our control—we were subject to bargaining policies and precedents set by both New York City and New York State, and some government officials had no interest in any raises for CUNY faculty. And, as I have stated previously, Pathways is not and never has been about saving CUNY money. There were reasons why Pathways would both decrease (if students took fewer excess courses) and increase (if students were more likely to enroll and be retained) CUNY revenue. We had no idea what would be the net result. What Pathways was always about for us was enabling students

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to transfer without losing credits and without exhausting their financial aid, therefore helping transfer students graduate in a timely manner. Pathways has also always been about quality curriculum, requiring that all Pathways courses undergo multiple levels of faculty review and have clearly stated learning outcomes. Another major distraction from Pathways for the PSC during the fall 2013 semester concerned General David Petraeus, former director of the Central Intelligence Agency. That fall he began his position as a visiting professor at ­CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College. Some faculty and students were upset about his hire, and there were multiple organized protests, including one that played out on Central Park West in Manhattan in which the protesters accused General Petraeus of being a war criminal.14 At a subsequent protest on September 17, several students were arrested, and two days later the “Delegate Assembly [of the PSC] unanimously passed a resolution opposing police violence against peaceful protesters and affirming the right of faculty, staff and students to engage in peaceful protest free from fear of a violent police response.”15 However, despite all the upset about the faculty contract and General Petraeus, Pathways was never far from the minds of those in the PSC. One of their concerns was the evaluation of Pathways. The last part of the Pathways resolution passed by the CUNY Board of Trustees in June 2011 stated, “Resolved, that all of these pathways policies and processes, including the Common Core, be reviewed and evaluated each year for three years beginning in 2013, and every three years thereafter, to modify them as necessary to improve them or to meet changing needs.”16 My office had inserted that statement into the resolution because it would help to quiet our critics as we brought the resolution for a vote to the Board of Trustees, but also because we believed in it. Ever since I had become executive vice chancellor and university provost in 2008, I had tried to foster a culture of evidence, one in which we made policy decisions based on data, not gut feelings (when I was a dean at Baruch College, the Provost, Lois Cronholm, once introduced me as “Dean show-­me-­the-­data Logue”). From what I could tell, such an approach was deeply supported throughout the central CUNY Office of Academic Affairs. We were determined to assess whether Pathways was working as it was supposed to work, and whether it was accomplishing what it was supposed to accomplish, and to change the Pathways policies if the data supported such change. The PSC repeatedly expressed an interest in this assessment. That fall they wrote: “The Board of Trustees resolution that authorized Pathways also calls for

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the curriculum overhaul to be evaluated annually for the first three years after its implementation. The PSC has called for the evaluation to be carried out by an independent, unbiased panel with academic expertise—­not a panel handpicked by the CUNY administration.”17 In addition to the PSC demands, there were others outside my office who wanted to guide the required Pathways assessment. In the summer of 2013, as Pathways was about to go into effect, I started putting together some ideas about how the assessment should be done. However, when I discussed these ideas with Bill, he first seemed upset that more had not been done, and then he told me that he wanted to be responsible for the assessment. Before Bill’s appointment, with Matt as chancellor, I would have run my ideas by Matt, he would have given me his input, and then I would have taken care of the assessment, repeatedly checking in with Matt, and also involving other members of the senior staff and important constituencies (e.g., the UFS and the college chief academic officers—­the provosts). But now Bill told me to stop working on the assessment, so I did. As the fall progressed, Bill didn’t speak with me about what he was planning or doing concerning the assessment. As I waited to hear something, there were a couple of isolated assessment-­related activities that my office engaged in nevertheless. One had to do with another concern expressed by the PSC that fall, a concern that echoed many previous criticisms of Pathways: “The lower limits on general education credits and class time mean that . . . foreign language instruction is being scaled back.”18 This, my office thought, is something that we can easily measure. Were there fewer students enrolled in course sections of LOTE that fall—­with Pathways in effect—­than the previous, pre-­Pathways, fall? The data showed that, although some colleges had substantial increases and others decreases in these enrollments, across the university these enrollments had decreased just under 1 percent. I gave these data to Bill on December 18, just two days before my last day in the office prior to my study leave, noting: “We will need to wait and see if those numbers change in upcoming years due to current freshmen advancing in their academic careers and taking more LOTE courses (using the increased electives they have as a result of Pathways). Also, we hope and expect that the efforts of the Graduate Center’s CUNY Institute for Language Education in Transcultural Context (founded in 2012 with support from the central office and several colleges, and whose mission is to foster language learning at CUNY) will in coming years result in increasing LOTE enrollments.” I don’t have any record of a response from Bill.

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Another assessment-­related effort that we worked on that fall was a suggested overall assessment framework that the colleges could use for evaluating individual Common Core courses. This effort was led by University Dean Lucinda Zoe, and we sent the final result out to college leadership on December 11, after receiving input from the UFS and the colleges’ chief academic officers. The document that we sent contained suggestions and CUNY college examples of best practices for assessment of the student learning outcomes specified for the Pathways Common Core. One other bit of Pathways business that I was determined to take care of before leaving was a CUNY policy called e-­permit. E-­permit is essentially an electronic system that CUNY students were using to obtain permission to take a course at a college other than their home college. I had heard a great many complaints about e-­permit over the years. Students said that it took so long to receive permission to take a course via e-­permit that it became impractical for the students to take the requested courses. Over time, as I learned about e-­permit, it became apparent that the delays were due not to programming issues but to policies allowing, or requiring, approval of e-­permits by multiple administrators and/or faculty, each of whom could take days or weeks to give or deny permission. In addition, it was common practice for colleges to require students taking courses via e-­permit to register for those courses only after all of the colleges’ own students had already registered, even if the student with the e-­permit was a senior needing only the requested course in order to graduate. This practice meant that many courses desired by students making e-­permit requests were already filled by the time that the student got permission to register for them. In my opinion, and the opinion of many in the CUNY central office and many of the college provosts, CUNY students were students of one integrated university and should be able to take courses at any CUNY college, a principle underlying Pathways. Therefore, in December, after extensive work done by a provost committee ably led once more by dynamic Hunter Provost Vita Rabinowitz, with significant support from Senior University Dean Dave Fields and University Registrar AnnaMarie Bianco, and after consultation with the UFS, the USS, and the presidents, I issued a new set of e-­permit policies that were designed to facilitate CUNY students’ ability to take courses at any CUNY college, and thus facilitate these students’ progressing in obtaining their degrees.19 It was great that we were able to finish the assessment framework and the e-­permit policy revision, but I could not stop thinking about what might happen to Pathways after I left. I felt that there were good reasons for all the new

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transfer policies we had established, but those reasons were spread all over the Internet, in reports, memoranda, transcripts of speeches, and emails. There were administrators and also some faculty who knew some of these reasons, but none of them knew them all. I felt that the only place where all the reasons coexisted in an organized fashion was in my own head, because of my having had to explain and justify, both orally and in writing, hundreds if not thousands of times, why we were doing what we were doing with Pathways. This was not good. If I weren’t functioning within the CUNY administration, even if I were just on a temporary study leave, my head and its contents would not be around to answer objections to Pathways that were certain to continue. So for months I thought about how to get the information in my head into a format that would survive my absence. Ultimately, we created a large pamphlet that contained some of the relevant information, including some documents written about Pathways in the past, and in November I distributed the ­pamphlet widely.

My End Approaches The close of the semester brought me much personal gratification in terms of completed projects. Toward the end of the semester, the CUNY Board of ­Trustees approved two graduate degrees in cinema for Brooklyn College, together with the founding of Brooklyn College’s new Barry R. Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, which formally opened in 2015 (an affordable option for students seeking graduate training for all types of careers in the cinema industry, and the only cinema school in the United States in operation on a working film lot). This was a new school that I had strongly supported. Also approved by the board was a letter of intent for a combined BS in biomedical studies and MD degree, to be offered at City College starting in 2016. Offering this degree would mean that City College would finally have a full-­fledged medical school, and not just the first two years of medical school. This was a potentially expensive venture, but one that I felt City College was well prepared to undertake and that would provide primary care physicians for underserved areas. So I had strongly supported the new medical school despite skepticism from some administrators in the central office’s financial area. The approvals of all these new programs provided evidence that CUNY would continue to develop and grow and serve New York City far into the future.

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However, perhaps most rewarding was the removal that fall of CUNY’s Medgar Evers College from warning status by CUNY’s major accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. Largely because of problems with a Medgar Evers report to Middle States in 2012, that college had been put on warning, the first step toward possibly being put on probation and toward possibly even de-­accreditation, which would have meant that Medgar Evers students would have been unable to receive federal financial aid. In addition to communicating closely with Middle States about their Medgar Evers concerns, I had arranged for a new provost for Medgar Evers (Karrin Wilks, a former university dean in my office), as well as for a new assistant provost (Theresa Williams, whom I had known since my years as provost of New York Institute of Technology, and who was already working part-­time at Medgar Evers). A new president was also appointed around that time. Further, I set up a central office committee to work with Medgar Evers in accomplishing the tasks, including a new report, that would be needed to remove the warning. This committee was ably led by the University Dean for Libraries and Information Resources, Curtis Kendrick. Curtis, Karrin, Theresa, many other faculty and staff at Medgar Evers, and, in the central office, University Dean Lucinda Zoe, Faculty Fellow Erec Koch, Faculty Fellow Howard Wach, University Director of Administration and Grants Karen Kapp, and my Executive Assistant Andrea Baker did extensive work in the next year culminating, in fall 2013, in the removal of the warning. At the same time, my opportunities for future research and writing were expanding. First, the experiment on mathematics remediation that Senior Research Associate Mari Watanabe-­Rose and I had conducted that fall (supported by the Spencer Foundation) had yielded results with the potential to greatly increase college completion among students who entered college needing remediation in mathematics. There was much to be done in terms of analyzing and communicating the results, as well as in following the future academic performance of the students who had participated in our experiment. Second, I still needed to complete the fourth edition of my book The Psychology of Eating and Drinking, now due to my publisher by the end of my study leave in June 2014. Third, I was now the co–­principal investigator on a major grant proposal to the Institute of Education Sciences of the US Department of Education to do a randomized controlled trial of CUNY Start, a highly successful program for students entering CUNY with significant remedial needs. We had submitted the proposal in September and were waiting to hear the results. Fourth, I was continuing my writing of opinion/policy pieces for Inside Higher Ed. The latest

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piece, published in November 2013, was about the consequences of the present trends toward higher education learning becoming independent of time and space. As with everything else in the years between 2010 and 2013, I saw this piece through the lens of Pathways, and it included this material: A relatively recent example of CUNY’s focus on learning outcomes concerns CUNY’s Pathways initiative, approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees and then-­ Chancellor Matthew Goldstein in 2011. Designed to smooth transfer for CUNY students, Pathways includes a framework for general education that applies to all 19 undergraduate colleges of CUNY. This framework is defined, not in terms of particular courses that students must take (which would be inputs), but in terms of learning outcomes. . . . CUNY’s focus on learning outcomes for the Pathways general education curriculum directly promotes space-­independent learning in that students can take Pathways courses anywhere at CUNY and then receive credit anywhere at CUNY.20

However, perhaps most important for this narrative, another major project had appeared—­a project that had arisen that fall through the intervention of William Bowen, former president of Princeton and of the Mellon Foundation, and founder of Ithaka (a nonprofit organization that helps colleges and universities make the digital transition, that houses the well-­known digital journal repository JSTOR, and on whose board I had been a member since 2012). From the beginning, Bill was a huge supporter of Pathways. As just two examples of that support, in 2012 he had provided a laudatory quote for the Pathways brochure we put together,21 and he had published a letter supporting Pathways in the Wall Street Journal22 (see chapter 7). Now, in the fall of 2013, he was about to publish his new book, cowritten with Eugene Tobin (former president of Hamilton College and senior program officer for higher education and scholarship in the humanities of the Mellon Foundation), entitled Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education.23 In this book, published by Princeton University Press, Bill and Gene consider how decisions are made in American institutions of higher education, and how those governance systems may be inhibiting needed change. The last few chapters of the book consist of case studies of several institutions of higher education, and the very last of these, written by Martin Kurzweil, director of policy at Ithaka S+R (Ithaka’s research and consulting division), is about CUNY. The final four pages of that chapter are about Pathways and the difficulties in effecting it. That fall of 2013 Bill told me that,

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although this chapter was excellent (an opinion with which I strongly agreed), there was much more to be told about and learned from Pathways, and he strongly suggested that I write a book about what had happened. Both of us felt that what had happened with Pathways provides an illustration of why change is so difficult in today’s colleges and universities. If you believe that higher education needs to respond to changes in the environment (e.g., new technologies that have become available, the increasing proportion of jobs that require a college degree, the decreasing state support of higher education, etc.) then the Pathways example may help to explain why those responses are sometimes so slow in coming, and may suggest ways to speed things up. With Bill’s help, I applied for and received a grant from the Spencer Foundation to support the writing of this book. I planned to start working on the book intensively after I finished the fourth edition of The Psychology of Eating and Drinking.

Remaining Questions I now had much more to accomplish in terms of research and writing than could be done in a six-­month study leave. So the possibility that I would not return from the study leave to my position of executive vice chancellor and university provost was even greater. Then, too, who my boss would be if I returned was now up in the air. By the end of fall 2013 it was apparent that Bill Kelly would not become the permanent chancellor. Instead the new permanent chancellor would likely be one of the then-­current candidates, and so far it was not clear which one. So yet another chancellor. Could Pathways survive three chancellors in three years? I had seen so many initiatives ignored or removed upon the departure of the administrators who had put them into place. Without both Matt and me, what responses would be made to Pathways resistance? And what about the new mayor? Had we done enough to make sure that Pathways survived no matter which administrators and government officials were in place? And what about the legal challenges to Pathways? There were still two pending lawsuits and other legal actions. If their results didn’t support Pathways, anything could happen. Friday, December 20, was dry and unseasonably warm in New York City, exceeding 50°F. It was finals week of the first semester that Pathways was in effect. A whole semester in which Pathways had appeared to function as intended. My

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office staff (the incomparable Andrea, Dominique, Freddie, and Jeanette) and I went out to a delicious lunch at our favorite restaurant, JoJo, my annual holiday present to them. At the restaurant, as always, Jeanette had the soup appetizer, and Freddie had French fries. We all had dessert. We were all going to go back to the office together where I knew there would be many people wanting to say good-­bye to me before my study leave. But after we finished lunch, I told Andrea, Dominique, Freddie, and Jeanette that I wasn’t doing that—­I would walk home from the restaurant through Central Park and work the rest of the day there. Holiday best wishes were expressed by all. And, hoping that I had done the best I could for Pathways and all of CUNY academic affairs, I turned and left.

CHAPTER 11

Legal Matters ■■■■■

JUNE 2011 THROUGH JUNE 2015

Legal matters were a constant theme from the beginning of our work on Pathways. They were the warp and woof on which we, as well as the UFS and the PSC, wove all our Pathways actions. The UFS and the PSC tried to stop, or at least hinder, our work on Pathways with multiple, and multiple kinds of, legal actions, and we in the CUNY administration responded. All the parties involved justified their actions on the basis of what they claimed were legal principles. Instead of describing the major legal actions as they happened in the preceding chapters, I have chosen to collect most of the information about these actions in the present chapter, for three reasons. First, I think that it will be easier for many readers to follow what happened with the various legal actions if their descriptions are collected all in one place, rather than being doled out piecemeal throughout the course of multiple chapters. Three of the four major legal actions that the UFS and the PSC took against Pathways lasted at least three years (the fourth lasted seven months), and so their descriptions encompass the time periods covered by several chapters. Second, there will be some readers of this book whose primary interest will be in the legal background and actions taken concerning Pathways, and I believe that they will appreciate the opportunity to go straight to this chapter to obtain a relatively concise description of the Pathways legal actions. And third, the final result of the UFS’s and the PSC’s legal actions against Pathways is an ending of sorts for this book’s description of how Pathways was established. So it seems fitting that the account of the Pathways legal matters should come here in chapter 11, near the end of the book.

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The Legal Foundation The first legal action taken regarding Pathways was the resolution passed by the CUNY Board of Trustees, the resolution entitled “Creating an Efficient Transfer System,” on June 27, 2011, described in detail in chapter 1.1 This resolution set out many principles regarding how Pathways was to be established and conducted. As far as the CUNY administration was concerned, these principles were inviolate once the board, to whom the CUNY administration reported, had approved them. However, some faculty felt otherwise. For example, after the resolution had passed, on August 24, 2011, Professor Sandi Cooper, chair of the UFS at that time, sent the following to all the faculty on her UFS news list: “The UFS stands firmly by the principles of the Bylaws, the Charter of the UFS, the Polishook settlement [a 1995 lawsuit in which Sandi had been involved]—­ that academic matters needed to be decided by the professionals who meet the students on a daily basis.” Then the following month, in discussing the administration’s establishment of the faculty-­dominated committees that would recommend the Pathways Common Core framework (as required by the Pathways resolution), she stated in a UFS Plenary meeting, “In our view, this is a process which violates [sections] 8.6 and 8.13 [of the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws], as well as something called the Polishook Settlement.”2 As mentioned in chapter 2, in the 1990s, Sandi had actually been a plaintiff in three lawsuits against CUNY, one of which was the Polishook case, and so her concerns about the legality of the Pathways resolution were not to be taken lightly. To try to head off trouble, and to make clear to everyone that the CUNY administration was on firm ground in effecting Pathways, on November 3, 2011, while the Pathways Common Core Steering Committee and Task Force were deep into their consultative construction of a general education framework for all of CUNY (see chapter 6), Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs and General Counsel Frederick Schaffer distributed a memorandum that he had prepared entitled “The Pathways Project and Faculty Authority Regarding Academic Policy.”3 He sent this memo to the Board of Trustees, the chancellor and his cabinet, the CUNY college presidents, their chief academic officers and legal affairs designees, faculty campus governance leaders, and the Executive Committee of the UFS. The memo was also posted on the CUNY website. This

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nine-­page single-­spaced document sets out the justification for the Pathways Project, both in terms of students’ needs and in terms of the legal authority of the Board of Trustees. The memo opens with the following paragraph: Questions have been raised as to whether the resolution adopted by the CUNY Board of Trustees . . . regarding the establishment of an efficient transfer system and the subsequent implementation of that policy by the Chancellor are inconsistent with certain authority granted to faculty councils and the . . . UFS . . . by the Board’s Bylaws as interpreted by case law. For the reasons set forth below, the Board has clear and final authority to adopt academic policy as set forth in that resolution and to direct the Chancellor to implement it in accordance with the procedures established by the Board.

The memo then outlines the extent of CUNY students’ transfer difficulties and the reasons for those difficulties: “The basic problem is structural—­it is difficult to establish a smooth and comprehensive system of transfer when each college, and each department at each college, retains the authority to evaluate every transfer credit to determine whether it is the equivalent of a course that satisfies the requirements of the general education or major curriculum. This problem is compounded by the fact that there are wide discrepancies in the number of general education credits required at each college, and at some of them the required number of credits far exceeds national norms.” The memo also contains information about the extensive consultation among faculty and staff that was done prior to the passing of the resolution, including the June 20, 2011, public hearing, “which lasted more than three hours and was almost exclusively devoted to the final proposal.” Rick’s memo then summarizes the content of the resolution, listing the tasks that were to be performed to effect Pathways. With regard to the formation of the task force, the memo states, “The UFS chose not to nominate faculty for the Task Force because the Chancellor would not agree to its demand that a majority of the Task Force be selected from a list of nominees to be supplied by the UFS.” Next follows more than five single-­spaced pages of material directly concerning the “Applicable Law.” There are four main points in the memo’s argument that CUNY is legally justified in implementing Pathways. First and foremost, the memo establishes that the CUNY Board of Trustees has final authority over all aspects of education at CUNY, as shown by this quote from section 6204 of New York State’s Education Law:

298  ■  Chapter 11 The board of trustees shall govern and administer the city university. The control of the educational work of the city university shall rest solely in the board of ­trustees which shall govern and administer all educational units of the city university.4

Second, the memo states that the Board of Trustees has assigned certain duties to the chancellor (though always retaining final authority for itself), as expressed in the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws: The chancellor . . . shall be the chief administrative officer for the board and shall implement its policies.  .  .  . The chancellor shall have the following duties and responsibilities . . . To initiate, plan, develop and implement institutional strategy and policy on all educational and administrative issues affecting the university. . . . To unify and coordinate college educational planning, operating systems, business and financial procedures and management.5

Third, the memo states the duties of the faculty, also as expressed by the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws (note especially the phrases that I have italicized): The faculty shall be responsible, subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including health and scholarship standards therefor, student attendance including leaves of absence, curriculum, awarding of college credit, granting of degrees.6

Fourth, given that Sandi had been publicly implying that the UFS had been guaranteed certain authority by the CUNY Bylaws, Rick’s memo also included the section of the CUNY Board of Trustees’ Bylaws that sets out the UFS’s duties and responsibilities (again especially note the phrase that I have italicized): There shall be a university faculty senate, responsible, subject to the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the academic status, role, rights, and freedom of the faculty, university level educational and instructional matters, and research and scholarly activities of university-­wide import. The powers and duties of the university faculty senate shall not extend to areas or interests which fall exclusively within the domain of the faculty councils of the constituent units of the university.7

Some of the conclusions to be drawn from these legal points are that, although faculty have an important role in all academic matters, they do not have

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final authority over these matters. In addition, the chancellor has the authority to effect policy under guidance from the Board of Trustees. It is for these reasons that changes in CUNY curricula have, for decades, been approved by the following method: Once a college has approved curricular changes internally, the college submits its requested curricular changes for approval by the central Office of Academic Affairs; routine matters are then entered into the Chancellor’s University Report, approved by the chancellor, and then approved by the board; and nonroutine matters are approved individually by the chancellor, by a Board of Trustees subcommittee, and then by the full board. Subsequent approval by the New York State Education Department (NYSED) is also needed for some types of curricular changes. In sum, curricular changes cannot be made without, first, the approval of the chancellor, and second, the approval of the board (and sometimes by the NYSED as well). Only after curricular changes have been properly approved can they be entered into the CUNY software from which students select their courses, and only courses in that software are eligible for financial aid. Faculty do not have, and have not had, final authority over curriculum at CUNY. A related question is who has authority to initiate curricular changes and policy. The section of the CUNY Bylaws quoted above shows that CUNY faculty have the authority to “formulate” policy. In addition, the bylaws state that the chancellor can “initiate” policy. Rick’s memo explains that the chancellor has the authority to act without consulting with the faculty. Thus both the faculty and the chancellor can introduce policy changes, but only the board has final authority regarding their approval. Another related point concerns who should be working on curricular and policy changes once they are in process. Here Rick’s memo states: The Chancellor has on numerous occasions created task forces to develop, modify or implement policy on a wide variety of subjects, including academic integrity, intellectual property, computer use, sexual assault, tobacco use on campuses, student learning assessment and the establishment of the CUNY School of Public Health and the New Community College. In each of those cases the Chancellor or his designee has selected faculty to serve on the task force, including some proposed by the UFS. In no case, however, did the UFS nominees constitute a majority of the task force.

In his memo, Rick also strove to correct some faculty members’ misconceptions and/or miscommunications about what is known as the Polishook case

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(see also chapter 2). Prior to, during, and after the establishment of Pathways, the term Polishook was sometimes used by faculty as a general justification for faculty having authority over educational matters. For example, in a September 21, 2011, email from Sandi to the faculty summarizing what had happened at the recent UFS Plenary, she stated: “Dr. Bowen [Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC] reported on the decision of the Executive Committee of the PSC to file a legal complaint in State court against CUNY for violation of the Polishook settlement of 1997 which is part of the contract. The PSC has concluded that the Pathways resolution passed by the Board ignored the Polishook agreement.” Polishook is a case originally filed in the New York Supreme Court in 1995. Irwin Polishook, then president of the PSC, Sandi Cooper, then in her first term as chair of the UFS, and some other faculty were the plaintiffs, and CUNY, its trustees, and then Chancellor Ann Reynolds were the defendants.8 As stated in Rick’s memo, the Polishook case “challenged resolutions of the Board of Trustees that had declared fiscal exigency, terminated faculty, implemented budget cuts and reduced the number of credits required for a baccalaureate degree from 128 to 120 and for an associate degree from 64 to 60, subject to waivers granted by the Office of Academic Affairs.” A complicated series of legal actions ensued concerning this complaint. However, the upshot, as held by the Appellate Division, and as quoted in Rick’s memo, was that “the Bylaws do not require the Board of Trustees to consult with the senior college faculties prior to implementing the Long Range Planning Resolution as the Board of Trustees is charged with ‘govern[ing] and administer[ing] the city university.’ Education Law §6204.” In addition, the final legal action taken concerning the Polishook case, a settlement agreement, once more affirmed and quoted this section of the CUNY Bylaws (italics added): The faculty shall be responsible, subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, for the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including health and scholarship standards therefor, student attendance including leaves of absence, curriculum, awarding of college credit, granting of degrees.9

Thus, contrary to some faculty’s interpretation, the Polishook case actually confirms the final authority of the CUNY Board of Trustees over curriculum and all other academic matters. The remainder of Rick’s memo cites additional legal cases in support of these points. For example, the memo states that

Legal Matters (6/11–6/15)  ■ 301 nothing in the holding of Perez [Perez v. CUNY, 5 N.Y.3d 522 (2005)] casts doubt on the authority of the Board of Trustees to make the final decision with respect to academic policy. On the contrary, as the opinion makes clear, the role of faculty councils is to make policy “recommendations” or “proposals” that the Board may decide to enact or not; and unless enacted by the Board, they do not become University policy. Nor does anything in Perez suggest that the Chancellor may not consult with faculty on the implementation of policy outside of the formal structure of faculty councils, especially where, as here [i.e., Pathways], the Board has specifically authorized the Chancellor to do so. Indeed, even the UFS does not maintain that the implementation of the Pathways policy had to be undertaken solely through faculty councils and/or the UFS; rather, it demanded only that a majority of the Task Force should be selected from a list of its nominees. That demand had no support in law or prior practice, and the Chancellor correctly refused to accede to it.

Further, as stated in Rick’s memo, the Perez decision described the bylaws’ statement that faculty are responsible for the “formulation of policy” as meaning that the “ ‘Senate is explicitly imbued with the power to formulate new policy recommendations and review existing policies, forwarding those recommendations to the Board of Trustees’ ” (italics added in Rick’s memo). Rick’s memo did not contain, but we posted on the Pathways website and used in our later legal arguments, this additional section of New York State Education Law, Section 6201, which gives guidelines for the actions of the CUNY Board of Trustees, guidelines critical to the justification of Pathways: The university must remain responsive to the needs of its urban setting and maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units. Where possible, governance and operation of senior and community colleges should be jointly conducted or conducted by similar procedures to maintain the university as an integrated system and to facilitate articulation between units.10

In addition to being widely distributed, Rick’s memo was posted on the CUNY website. I thought this memo was excellent—­compelling in its arguments, with the legal support for each point clearly laid out, and well written. It would seem, given the content of this document, that we were on solid ground in everything that we were doing with Pathways, and that no legal challenges would be possible. However, as my attorney husband has always told me, everyone—­whether in the right or in the wrong—­has the right to sue.

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Filing of the First Pathways Lawsuit Since at least September 2011 we had been hearing from the UFS and the PSC that a lawsuit would be filed against Pathways. Thus it was not a new subject when the status of the impending lawsuit was a featured item at the PSC’s March 8, 2012, town hall meeting about Pathways. Barbara said in her speech at that meeting: “We cannot do our real work if we no longer have a meaningful voice in setting the most important element of that work. Pathways is about working conditions. To protect those rights, the PSC is filing a lawsuit against CUNY within the next ten days in State Supreme Court.” Her announcement was followed by cheers from the audience.11 Ten days came and went on the calendar following the town hall meeting with no news of an actual lawsuit. But then, on March 20, 2012, the first lawsuit against Pathways was filed with the Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County.12 Barbara, Sandi, and Terrence Martell, vice chair of the UFS, were the plaintiffs, and CUNY and its trustees were named as the defendants. Two local law firms served as the plaintiffs’ attorneys. Technically the lawsuit claimed that the contract between the PSC and CUNY had been breached. More descriptively, the main point of the lawsuit was that CUNY had not followed the Polishook settlement agreement in passing the June 27, 2011, Pathways resolution: In violation of the Settlement Agreement, the CUNY Board passed a Resolution [Pathways] . . . which formulated policy regarding these and other matters without properly including the Faculty in the resolution process and without the Faculty’s first formulating the policy on those matters for consideration by the CUNY Board or its committees, as required by the Settlement Agreement. By excluding the Faculty from the process of formulating the 2011 Resolution, CUNY and the CUNY Board breached the Settlement Agreement. . . . The Settlement Agreement was contingent upon . . . CUNY’s faculty, through the Faculty Senate and College Senates . . . remain[ing] responsible for “the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including . . . curriculum, awarding of college credit, and granting of degrees . . . ,” and recognizing and reaffirming CUNY Bylaw §8.6 (Duties of Faculty) and §8.13 (University Faculty Senate).13

The lawsuit also stated that “the Settlement Agreement and the 1997 Resolution do not permit the CUNY Board to formulate its own policy on educational

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issues. . . . Instead, they require that educational policy be formulated by the College Senates and Faculty Senate for consideration by the CUNY Board or its committees. . . . The 2011 Resolution violates the Settlement Agreement by establishing a task force to perform duties that are the responsibility of the Faculty Senate.”14 Thus, in contrast to what Rick had reported concerning the Perez decision, from the viewpoints of this lawsuit and of the PSC and the UFS, having the authority to formulate new policy meant that only faculty could initiate curricular and educational policy change. Further, the lawsuit contended, only the Faculty Senate could work on matters such as Pathways. Note that, if only the faculty can initiate a curricular or educational policy change, faculty essentially have veto power over all academic matters, vitiating the board’s authority. The lawsuit concluded with the plaintiffs requesting a court order that would invalidate the 2011 Pathways resolution, as well as grant a “permanent injunction barring CUNY from implementing the 2011 Resolution.”15 What we noticed immediately about the lawsuit was that the introductory pages twice left out a critical phrase in describing the faculty’s duties. Here is the first such instance, from pages 1–­2 of the complaint, with the omitted material indicated in bold font: The [Polishook] Settlement Agreement resolved a case then pending before the New York State Court of Appeals. It required . . . CUNY . . . and the . . . CUNY Board . . . to adopt a resolution recognizing and reaffirming that CUNY’s faculty, through the University Faculty Senate and college faculty senates and councils, (collectively “Faculty”) would be responsible, subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, for the “formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including health and scholarship standards  .  .  . ­curriculum, awarding of college credit, and granting of degrees.”16

And here is the second instance, from pages 5–­6 of the complaint, again with the missing material indicated in bold font: The Settlement Agreement was contingent upon the CUNY Board’s approving a resolution recognizing and reaffirming, among other things, that CUNY’s faculty, through the Faculty Senate and College Senates, would remain responsible, subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the board, for “the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students including health and scholarship standards . . . curriculum, awarding of college credit, and granting of degrees.”17

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The critical phrase was again left out in a quote later in the document. Although there were also several instances in which the critical phrase was included, these instances did not start until page 8, and missing entirely was the section of the bylaws that authorized the chancellor “to initiate, plan, develop and implement institutional strategy and policy on all educational and administrative issues affecting the university. . . . To unify and coordinate college educational planning, operating systems, business and financial procedures and management.”18 There was extensive media coverage of the filing of this lawsuit, including, within a few days, by the Chronicle of Higher Education, Inside Higher Ed, the New York Daily News, and the New York Post.19 (A list of all media coverage is available at http://​www​.awlogue​.com.) As part of our own media efforts, we published an article in the CUNY newsletter (known as CUNY­ Matters).20 This article was based on the Pathways brochure that we released that spring, the document containing quotes supporting Pathways from some of the leading educators in the United States, as well as from several CUNY distinguished professors (see chapter 7). A sidebar of this article was headed “Fair or Frivolous?” and began with this text: “In a lawsuit filed by the Professional Staff Congress and the University Faculty Senate against the City University of New York and the Board of Trustees in March, in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, the PSC/UFS claim that CUNY breached a 1997 agreement regarding the role of faculty in formulating policy by establishing a new core curriculum. The lawsuit, however, omits some important language.” Three examples were then given in which the lawsuit omitted the critical phrase “subject to guidelines, if any, established by the Board.” In the view of the central office, and as described in detail in Rick’s memo, the chancellor had complete authority to initiate and effect Pathways, as established by New York State Education Law and the Bylaws of the CUNY Board of Trustees.

More Legal Challenges During the next year the legal challenges to Pathways multiplied. Next up after the March 20, 2012, initial lawsuit was a grievance that CUNY received from the PSC on May 8, 2012. A second lawsuit,21 a second grievance, and a PERB (Public Employees Relation Board) charge followed in August 2012, January 2013, and January 2013, respectively.

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The grievance was based on a rationale similar to that of the first lawsuit—­ that in establishing Pathways CUNY had not followed college governance procedures, the PSC-­CUNY collective bargaining agreement (contract), and the CUNY Bylaws. A grievance is “a breach, misinterpretation or improper application of a term of this Agreement [the PSC-­CUNY contract]; or . . . an arbitrary or discriminatory application of, or a failure to act pursuant to the Bylaws and written policies of the Board related to the terms and conditions of employment.” Grievances “must be filed by an employee or the PSC within thirty (30) days . . . after the PSC or the employee on whose behalf the grievance is filed became aware of the action complained of.” If the parties are not able to settle the grievance among themselves, then they select an arbitrator from a list of arbitrators who have been previously deemed acceptable to both parties, and the case is presented to that arbitrator by attorneys representing the parties. Witnesses can be called and documents submitted as evidence. The arbitrator’s decision is final and binding on all parties—­no appeals are possible. However, the arbitrator cannot override the CUNY Board of Trustees Bylaws or the PSC-­CUNY contract. The parties jointly pay the costs of arbitration, except for witness costs, which are paid by the party who called a given witness. These terms are specified in the PSC-­CUNY contract,22 and they are fairly typical for such contracts. The CUNY central office’s arguments against this particular grievance were similar to those made in the first lawsuit—­as described in Rick’s memo, the chancellor had complete authority to initiate and effect Pathways, because of the content of New York State Education Law and the Bylaws of the CUNY Board of Trustees. In addition, the CUNY central office felt that this grievance concerned issues that should not be arbitrable. Arbitration is only for issues related to the collective bargaining agreement (the PSC-­CUNY contract), which, according to New York State’s Taylor Law, is supposed to cover terms and conditions of employment.23 CUNY’s position was that the violations alleged by the PSC did not constitute terms and conditions of employment that fell within the PSC-­ CUNY collective bargaining agreement. The nature of the second lawsuit, which we learned about in August 2012, was not what we expected. At the March 8, 2012, town hall meeting on Pathways, Barbara had stated: “I’m pleased to be able to announce tonight that the union will support a second lawsuit, this one to be filed at a future date, will be brought by students, whose educational prospects will be damaged by

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Pathways. As faculty and staff, we stand by our students, and supporting their lawsuit is the right thing to do.”24 However, a lawsuit by students never materialized. The plaintiffs of the second lawsuit were again the PSC and the UFS. But, in contrast to the first lawsuit, now the plaintiffs were only Barbara and Terry; Sandi had stepped down from being chair of the UFS and Terry had become UFS chair. The defendants were CUNY, the CUNY Board of Trustees, fourteen of the nineteen CUNY undergraduate colleges, and six of the CUNY undergraduate college presidents. The same two local law firms again served as attorneys for the Plaintiffs.25 The rationale for this lawsuit was different from the first one. This time the rationale was based on the Open Meetings Law, a New York State law requiring that “public business be performed in an open and public manner.” The law requires that meetings of public bodies (which are “any entity, for which a quorum is required to conduct public business and which consists of two or more members, performing a governmental function for the state or for an agency or department thereof . . . or committee or subcommittee or other similar body of such public body”) “be open to the general public” (except for executive sessions). Public notice of such meetings must be provided, and minutes must be taken and then made available.26 The second lawsuit argued that approval of the Pathways curriculum, and the forwarding of courses from the colleges to the central office, had occurred at some CUNY colleges without the approval of the faculty by a vote taken in a meeting covered by the Open Meetings Law. In some cases the curricular changes were voted on at such a meeting but the faculty did not approve, and in one case the curricular changes were never voted on at such a meeting. At the end of their petition initiating the second lawsuit, the PSC and the UFS requested that the court issue orders essentially stopping the development of Pathways and “requiring the members of the defendant colleges and defendant college presidents to participate in a training session conducted by the staff of the committee on open government concerning the obligations imposed by the Open Meetings Law.”27 CUNY central’s position was that the Open Meetings Law applied only to how meetings should be held; it did not apply to what should be discussed and voted on at such meetings, which are matters for New York State Education Law and the CUNY Bylaws. Further, the CUNY Bylaws, in addition to charging presidents with effecting board policies, gave them the right to refer curricular matters to the CUNY central office on their own initiative, without first obtaining faculty approval:

Legal Matters (6/11–6/15)  ■ 307 The president, with respect to his/her educational unit, shall: a. Have the affirmative responsibility of conserving and enhancing the educational standards and general academic excellence of the college under his/her jurisdiction. . . . Be an advisor and executive agent of the chancellor and have the immediate super­ vision with full discretionary power to carry into effect the bylaws, resolutions, and policies of the board, the lawful resolutions of any board committees, and policies, programs, and lawful resolutions of the several faculties and students where appropriate. . . . advise the chancellor and the board on all matters related to educational policy and practice. . . . Consult with and make recommendations to the chancellor concerning all matters of significant academic, administrative or budgetary consequence affecting the college and/or the university. . . . Present to the chancellor communications from faculties, officers, employees, or students together with any advice or recommendations of his/her own concerning the subject of such recommendations or communications.28

None of this material from the CUNY Bylaws was referenced in the second lawsuit. The second grievance was filed five months later, in January 2013. Its rationale was similar to that of the first grievance, but the second grievance included a charge that CUNY had retaliated against faculty who had not supported Pathways. Three months later, in April 2013, the PSC agreed to consolidate the two grievances. In January 2013 we also learned that what is known as a PERB improper practice charge had been filed. A PERB improper practice charge is filed when one or more members of a collective bargaining unit wish to contend that management has changed the terms or conditions of employment without going through the collective bargaining process. PERB improper practice charges were not unknown to me. I had faced one toward the beginning of my administrative career when, as chair of the Psychology Department at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I worked with some of the department’s faculty to effect a workload policy that would assign faculty different numbers of courses to teach in accordance with how much other work each faculty member was doing. The faculty union at Stony Brook said that in doing this I was changing working conditions without going through the collective bargaining process. Thus the PERB improper practice charge. However, as far as I understood the legalities of the situation, the Stony Brook contract at that time stated that assignment of teaching load was at the

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discretion of the Stony Brook president, and the Stony Brook president had delegated the setting of faculty teaching load to the Stony Brook department chairs. Therefore I was on firm legal ground in assigning different teaching loads to different faculty members. As it turned out, however, I left Stony Brook to become dean of arts and sciences at CUNY’s Baruch College before anything had occurred with that PERB case beyond its original filing, and the next chair simply dropped the new workload policy that many faculty and I had worked so hard to establish. With Pathways, the PERB improper practice charge was an outgrowth of the Pathways problems that concerned the English Department at Queensborough Community College (see chapter 8). As part of an agreement for the English faculties to submit their courses for the Pathways Common Core, the administrations of Queensborough and two other CUNY community colleges, Bronx and LaGuardia, had negotiated with their English faculty that these faculty would receive workload hours in excess of the 3 actual contact hours involved in teaching the Pathways Common Core English Composition course. The PSC then filed the PERB charge, saying that these colleges had changed the terms and conditions of the faculty’s employment outside of the contract without going through the collective bargaining process. It didn’t seem to matter to the PSC that the faculty were getting a benefit—­workload hours in excess of the course contact hours. The PSC was arguing that the administration had violated this section of the contract: “The annual undergraduate teaching contact hour** workload shall be as follows . . . Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors in the senior Colleges . . . 21 hours. Professors, Associate Professors, Assistant Professors in the Community Colleges . . . 27 hours. . . . ** For purposes of this Agreement, an undergraduate teaching contact hour is defined as an organized class which meets at a regularly scheduled time during the semester, quarter or session for one fifty-­minute period or its approved equivalent period.”29 So the PSC seemed to be arguing that this section of the contract required that workload be assigned according to a course’s contact hours, period. And given that we had required that each Pathways Common Core course have 3 contact hours (see chapter 7), the implication was that each such course could carry only 3 hours of workload for faculty. If it were not possible for the administration of a college to give more hours of workload than a given course’s contact hours, then, in some cases, that would make faculty at some CUNY colleges much less willing to submit their courses for review, and eventual approval, by the CCCRC, the central administration,

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and the CUNY Board of Trustees. And if the faculty didn’t submit Common Core courses for central approval, the relevant college presidents would have to submit them without having their college’s faculty governance approval, a situation likely to result in huge conflagrations, ones that all administrators wanted to avoid. In other words, were this ability to set workload hours taken away from the college administrations, effecting Pathways could likely become impossible. However, our interpretation of this section of the contract was different from what was indicated by the PERB charge. To us, this section of the contract set a minimum number of hours of workload that a faculty member could receive for teaching a course (the number of contact hours of that course), but not a maximum. Those of us who had worked at a CUNY college knew of many circumstances in which faculty were given workload hours greater than the number of contact hours of a course. To quantify our subjective impressions, University Dean of Institutional Research and Assessment David Crook’s office looked at all the CUNY courses (pre-­Pathways) to determine which ones had a greater number of workload hours than contact hours. It turned out that there were many hundreds of such courses. Faculty were receiving workload hours beyond the contact hours of their courses for all kinds of reasons—­unusually high class enrollment, teaching the class for the first time, an unusually large number of writing assignments, etc. As detailed in chapter 7, we in the central administration left designation of workload hours entirely to the colleges; there were no CUNY-­wide policies about that because colleges were in the best position to decide what the workload hours should be for each course. So this PERB improper practice charge, similar to the other legal challenges filed by the PSC and the UFS, made no sense to us. If the PSC won, although effecting Pathways would become difficult, if not impossible, it seemed that a lot of faculty would be required to do more work, much of which would be for courses that had nothing to do with Pathways. An overriding concern with regard to these legal actions was deadlines. To the best of my knowledge, CUNY met all its deadlines in responding to all these legal challenges. But from the first lawsuit, which was filed in March of 2012, we wondered whether timing was posing problems for the PSC and the UFS. By the date on which they actually filed the first lawsuit, it was almost nine months since the Board of Trustees had approved the Pathways resolution, and almost one and a half years since we first began public discussions about the need for Pathways.

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In our response to that lawsuit—­in addition to arguing that, as described above, everything the CUNY administration had done was within the provisions of New York State Education Law and the CUNY Bylaws—­we also argued that the PSC and the UFS were too late in filing their lawsuit. We argued that the first lawsuit should have been brought as what is known as an “Article 78 proceeding,” which is a legal action brought by someone, or by an organization, disputing a decision that has been made by a New York State agency (such as CUNY), a legal action claiming that that decision did not follow the agency’s own guidelines or was arbitrary or capricious.30 The PSC and the UFS had brought the second lawsuit as an Article 78, and, we argued, the first lawsuit should have been done similarly. However, we argued further, if the PSC and the UFS had brought the first lawsuit as an Article 78 proceeding, that would have been beyond the four-­month time limit allowed for such a proceeding. In that first lawsuit, the PSC and the UFS had argued that they were objecting to actions whose culmination was at the end of fall 2011, but all the actions to which they objected were laid out clearly, including a time line for those actions, in the June 2011 Pathways resolution. Yet the first lawsuit wasn’t filed until March of 2012.31 Within the central office we speculated that the reason that the PSC and the UFS had not (properly) brought the first lawsuit as an Article 78 was precisely because it would have been beyond the four-­month limit.

We Win Some and Lose One These legal actions were a lot of work for us. Each of them required us to respond with some sort of written document or documents, often followed by written counterresponses from the plaintiffs, and then more responses from us. In each case there were deadlines by which all of these documents had to be submitted, and there were multiple meetings and other communications involving CUNY and the PSC and the UFS. Attorneys in our central office, as well as, in some cases, attorneys in the New York State attorney general’s office, spent a great deal of time and effort preparing our relevant documents and oral statements. Rick led the CUNY central office efforts, but also involved were other attorneys in his office and Vice Chancellor for Labor Relations Pamela Silverblatt (Pam is also an attorney). I provided them with many pieces of information as needed, and commented on some of the written documents that they prepared.

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Certainly through all of this I was extremely worried. No matter how firm the legal ground was for us, I knew from my past university labor relations experience that arbitrators and judges could issue decisions that seemed to bear little relation to what my colleagues and I thought should be the correct and fair outcome. Consider what happens with arbitrators. At CUNY and at some other universities with collective bargaining, arbitrators, whose function is to decide grievances that cannot otherwise be resolved, are chosen from a list previously approved by both management and labor. This means that arbitrators, who at least in the cases with which I’m familiar, are paid by the case, have an incentive to stay in the good graces of both sides. As a result, the arbitrators’ decisions almost always split the baby, instead of giving a clear win to either side—­hardly an attractive outcome when you are convinced that your side is 100 percent in the right. In the case of judges, some have unusual views or politics, and so their decisions can seem at odds with the facts and/or the law. In the appeals courts, where groups of judges make the decisions, outcomes seem to be more consistent with your expectations (a good description of what happened in the Polishook case), but it can take years before a case gets to an appeals court. What if an arbitrator ruled that we had to significantly scale back Pathways? What if the initial judge or judges ruled against CUNY in the two lawsuits? Wouldn’t we have to stop effecting Pathways until our appeal was decided? Rick did his best to reassure me. He told me that if a judge ruled against us, we would indeed not be able to work on effecting Pathways. However, as soon as we appealed, we would be able to start working on it again. He said that the PSC and the UFS could then ask the appellate court to stop us while our appeal was being considered. However, he thought it unlikely that the appeals court would grant such a request, because our appeal would be based on a ruling by the appellate division of the court (the Polishook case). So we waited and kept up with the needed responses and filings for each of the PSC and the UFS’s legal actions. Every few weeks I would make sure to get an update from Rick about how things were progressing. He was always totally calm and answered all of my questions. He gave me realistic appraisals of how the various legal challenges might turn out, and what we would do if an outcome were not in our favor. But still I worried. Then in August of 2013, just days before Pathways was to go fully into effect, we had our first piece of good news. The PSC withdrew the PERB charge. Apparently they had listened when Rick told them about the hundreds of existing (non-­Pathways) courses that already provided faculty with more workload

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hours than the courses’ contact hours. Rick had pointed out to the PSC that if they had won the PERB charge, faculty would no longer be able to get extra workload hours for teaching a course for the first time, teaching a course with an unusually large enrollment, teaching a course with an unusually large number of written assignments, etc. As a result of the withdrawal of the PERB charge, CUNY colleges retain the prerogative to decide how many extra workload hours faculty may get for teaching certain courses, a principle that we had reaffirmed while we were first effecting Pathways. But our happiness on the legal front was to be short-­lived. On November 6, 2013, the oral arguments for both lawsuits were heard by a New York State Supreme Court judge in downtown Manhattan. I was present in the audience, along with several attorneys from CUNY and from the New York State attorney general’s office in Albany. Also present were several PSC and UFS faculty leaders. We said hello politely as we passed each other going into and out of the small, cramped, dingy courtroom, but otherwise did not speak. The oral arguments for CUNY were presented by an attorney from the attorney general’s office. I had wished that it would be Rick—­he was so knowledgeable about Pathways and such a good speaker. But although he was a senior vice chancellor, the highest-­ranking attorney at CUNY, and has a sterling legal pedigree, his speaking on our behalf was not allowed by the New York State attorney general’s office, which had authority over our side of the cases. The attorney speaking for the PSC and the UFS was, I believe, ill-­informed, but he was a good speaker, and it seemed to me that he had a much more persuasive style than the attorney speaking for us. My impression was that the faculty present thought so too, smiling and laughing as they left the room after the arguments were over, while we from the CUNY administration walked out quietly with somber faces. It did not improve my opinion of the Albany attorneys when one of them attempted a couple of jokes at the expense of faculty in general when we were talking outside the courtroom. I was CUNY’s executive vice chancellor and university provost, but I have always been a faculty member at heart, and I believe that the great majority of faculty are to be admired, not disparaged. Rick again tried to reassure me. He said that even if the PSC and UFS’s attorney had been more verbally persuasive than ours, the judge wouldn’t be deciding the lawsuits for many months, and by then he would have basically forgotten the oral arguments and would primarily refer to the submitted documents in making his decisions, as opposed to consulting his memories of the oral

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arguments. And, Rick said, our papers are good. I tried to recall how the judge had behaved in listening to the oral arguments from both sides. But mostly he just seemed to have sat listening impassively, not showing any reaction one way or the other. Did that mean anything? I didn’t know. Five weeks later, in mid-­December of 2013, just one week before I was to go on my study leave, bad news arrived that seemed to justify my worries. We learned that an arbitrator had ruled that the PSC’s grievance against Pathways was arbitrable, despite CUNY’s objections. This decision meant that the PSC’s complaints had to be considered by an arbitrator, not that their complaints were valid, but it was still a problematic decision for us. From what I understood from Rick, who explained these matters to me repeatedly, this decision was not appealable. The best we could do was to argue once again—­during the arbitration itself, whenever that might be scheduled—­that the issues should not be subject to arbitration. In the meantime, the PSC posted about their victory on their website, multiple times. One posting said, “CUNY management was defeated in its attempt to block consideration of a union grievance on the way the University implemented Pathways, and was told in no uncertain terms that faculty’s curricular duties are terms and conditions of employment covered by the PSC’s contract.”32 A PSC article on the grievance was headlined, “Arbitrator refuses to dismiss Pathways grievance, says contract covers faculty rights on curriculum.”33 Rick was worried that this ruling would open up all kinds of grievances on the part of the PSC. From our point of view, the nature of curriculum was an academic, not a union, issue. For the next year and a half I repeatedly asked Rick what was happening with the grievance. His answer was always the same: nothing. The PSC was not pursuing it, and so neither was CUNY. His favorite adjective to describe the grievance was “sleeping.” Rick’s theory as to why the PSC was not pursuing the grievance was that they knew that the grievance’s basic complaints would not be successful, and that the arbitrability of the issues might be overturned as well. So the PSC’s best strategy was to just let the grievance lie, and thus to let stand the arbitrability of the issues. There was a good reason that the PSC might have thought that they would lose the grievance. The grievance was based on complaints similar to those in the first lawsuit, and on February 24, 2014, we learned, to our great joy, that we had won that lawsuit. And we had won it decisively, with the judge accepting each argument that we had made—­all of the arguments concerning New York State Education Law, the CUNY Bylaws, and the Polishook case, and that the

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A portion of New York Supreme Court Justice Anil C. Singh’s ruling on the first lawsuit: “Plaintiff ’s position, that bylaw §§ 8.6 and 8.13 and the 1997 settlement agreement and resolution constituted a contractual commitment that only the faculty and the Faculty Senate could initiate academic policy, is devoid of merit. . . . in view of the absence of any valid breach of contract claim, the complaint effectively urges nothing more than alleged bylaw violations, and, accordingly, this matter should have been brought, if at all, as an Article 78 proceeding. . . . However, conversion is inappropriate here because, aside from the fact that respondents did not violate bylaw §§ 8.6 and 8.13, any such Article 78 proceeding would be time-barred. . . . In conclusion, it is ORDERED that defendants City University of New York and the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York’s motion to dismiss the complaint herein is granted, and the complaint is dismissed in its entirety as against said defendants, with costs and disbursements to said defendants as taxed by the Clerk of the Court, upon submission of an appropriate bill of costs.”* *Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Index No. 151021/2012, February 21, 2014. Honorable Anil C. Singh Supreme Court Justice.

complaint should have been brought as an Article 78 proceeding but was past the four-­month deadline for such an action. Three days later, on February 27, 2014, our joy multiplied when we learned that we had also decisively won the second lawsuit. Again, the judge had accepted all of our arguments, concluding: There is no evidence whatsoever that the procedures followed by CUNY to develop, approve and implement the Pathways Initiative were designed to circumvent the law. On the contrary, it appears that respondents disseminated information widely and sought input from any interested parties through meetings, websites, webinars, consultations, discussions with members of the CUNY community, and telecasts online, on cable television and on the CUNY channel. In other words, the record clearly reflects that the Pathways Initiative was not drafted behind closed doors. The Court finds, therefore, that petitioners have not met their burden to show good cause warranting judicial relief. Accordingly it is ADJUDGED that the petition is denied, and the proceeding is dismissed.34

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It Wasn’t Over Yet The PERB charge may have been withdrawn, the grievance may have been sleeping, and the two lawsuits may have been won, but the legal challenges were not yet over. As expected, at the end of 2014, the PSC and the UFS appealed the decisions in both lawsuits. CUNY then had to file responses to these appeals. We waited for decisions, again, this time from New York’s highest court, the Court of Appeals. On June 9, 2015, word came from Rick that CUNY had won both appeals. It was a unanimous decision by five appeals judges who considered both lawsuits together. The decision said, in part: “Contrary to plaintiff ’s argument, the settlement agreement that defendants are alleged to have breached does not extend to the faculty the exclusive power to formulate university-­wide academic admissions and accreditation policies such as the ‘Pathways to Degree Completion Initiative’ approved by respondent Board of Trustees in the June 27, 2011 resolution. . . . Petitioners failed to assert a viable claim of violation of the Open Meetings Law.”35 Rick said that this should end the litigation. Although the PSC and the UFS could try to obtain permission to submit another appeal to the Court of Appeals, he was doubtful that any additional appeals would be granted given that the original appeals had been denied unanimously, and that this unanimous decision affirmed a lower court’s decision.

Conclusions The legal battles described in this chapter were perhaps inevitable given the parties involved, each of whom—­Sandi and the UFS, the PSC, Matt (who became chancellor just as Sandi’s late-­1990s lawsuits were winding down), and me—­had a history of involvement in similar battles. Each party believed in standing firm for what she or he believed in, even if it meant legal action. A legal system is supposed to help individuals and society as a whole. Certainly there were many times when CUNY administrators, including me, felt that the legal battles were more of a hindrance than a help. But in the end we were vindicated, and there is therefore at least a chance that the precedents established will help the CUNY administration take future difficult actions to help students.

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The persistence of the PSC and the UFS in their legal challenges to Pathways was remarkable in light of the clearly soft ground—­one might say quicksand—­on which their legal actions were based. The PSC undoubtedly spent countless hours and a great many thousands of dollars of faculty union dues on these legal actions—­paying two law firms in addition to taking the time of their internal counsel—­which resulted in definitive, public, legal decisions stating that the CUNY faculty do not have final authority over academic matters. Why, then, did the PSC and the UFS take this road? It seems doubtful that they thought they would win the lawsuits. More than one of Barbara’s public statements show that she knew that the phrase “subject to guidelines, if any, as established by the Board” existed in critical places in the bylaws. The fact that the PSC and the UFS did not seek a preliminary injunction regarding Pathways after filing their first lawsuit also suggests that they knew they were not on firm legal ground. Further, it seems possible that the PSC knew its first lawsuit was too late to file as an Article 78, because they never converted it to an Article 78. And of course there was Rick’s November 3, 2011, memo, which laid out all the relevant legal principles well before the PSC or the UFS took any legal actions. It is hard to believe that leaders of the PSC and the UFS, along with their attorneys, did not read this memo, or that they read it but did not understand it. It therefore seems likely that the PSC and the UFS submitted their legal challenges for reasons other than the expectation of winning. People in the central office repeatedly speculated about what these other reasons might have been. A popular guess was related to the fact that the PSC-­ CUNY contract had expired in 2010, and, given the political situation in New York State, a new contract containing any real raises seemed unlikely for years. Therefore the Pathways controversy was a way for the PSC to show that it was doing something for its members in the meantime, thus deflecting away from the PSC the faculty’s anger about the lack of a contract. Recall the demonstration that concerned both Pathways and the lack of a contract at a Board of Trustees meeting in September 2013 (see chapter 10). Another possibility was that many faculty didn’t like Pathways, and the legal actions were the PSC’s way of showing support for these faculty, even if the PSC knew that they couldn’t win these legal actions. More generally, perhaps the PSC and the UFS simply had a tendency to oppose major projects that the administration wanted. Certainly Sandi’s history of participating in lawsuits against CUNY (at least four in total) suggests that she was inclined to behave in that way. Or perhaps the PSC and the UFS thought

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that by taking up CUNY’s time and money with the legal actions, as well as with the FOIL requests described in earlier chapters, the central administration would be more likely to modify Pathways or to cancel it. Or perhaps the PSC was trying to promote its image as a champion for faculty by opposing Pathways. Many of the actions taken to challenge Pathways appeared to be tied to image making or maintenance. We were constantly amazed at the inaccuracy of both Sandi’s and the PSC’s statements about Pathways, including those about the legal aspects of Pathways. As described earlier in this chapter, Sandi repeatedly incorrectly described the Polishook case. The PSC’s communications were repeatedly deceptive in their own way. Although the PSC was quick to publicly communicate that their grievance had been ruled arbitrable, over CUNY’s objections, and though there are multiple reports on their website about the filed PERB charge and the two lawsuits, including their appeals, their website says nothing about the subsequent slumber of the grievance, about their withdrawing the PERB charge, or about their losing the lawsuit appeals. But can I blame the PSC for not publicizing their losses? After all, we didn’t publicize losing the grievance arbitrability issue. Still, I certainly believe that we were more accurate in our communications than either the PSC or the UFS. There are thus multiple reasons why the PSC and the UFS may have filed repeated legal actions that were unlikely to succeed, and may have sought to string them out as long as possible. I doubt that we will ever know which one or more of the many possible reasons underlay these behaviors of the PSC and the UFS. I only know for sure that there were a great many resulting costs for all of the battling parties. That such battles are not unique to CUNY will be discussed more extensively in the next chapter. Various US states have different laws that address the authority of the faculty and the administration at public colleges and universities, and private colleges and universities have their own governance principles regarding academic authority. Yet, independent of this variation, power struggles between administrators and faculty are not rare. Despite years of many challenges of many types from some faculty, the CUNY administration finally, fully, and legally, implemented Pathways.

CHAPTER 12

What Does It All Mean? ■■■■■

CHANGING COURSE WITH PATHWAYS

The implementation of Pathways took three years. What happened during that period provides many lessons. One set of lessons has to do with which sorts of policies do and do not facilitate effective credit transfer and general education curricula. Another set of lessons has to do with how CUNY and, more generally, higher education, functions. A third set of lessons relates to change in higher education. The description of the implementation of Pathways provides ample evidence that change in higher education is challenging, and why that is so. Some of what was challenging about Pathways was fairly specific to CUNY’s particular situation. However, what happened with Pathways also illustrates some more general principles—­many of which are related to who controls what—­that make change challenging at many colleges and universities across the United States. This chapter will focus on that third set of lessons. How can Pathways help us understand how change initiatives might or might not arise, whether they might or might not be implemented, and how to increase or decrease the probability that they will be implemented? If American higher education is to make significant future changes, as some think is necessary in order for the United States to remain a world leader in higher education,1 what factors will increase or decrease the probability of such changes occurring? In order to develop some general principles about change in higher education, this chapter will consider the Pathways Project as a whole. I will discuss what Pathways can teach us about the constituencies and the individuals likely to be involved, an effective communications strategy, obtaining and using support, and identifying effective leaders. The chapter will also provide some examples of struggles about curricular change at other colleges and universities—­ struggles about what each constituency controls and should control. None of the factors to be discussed are present for all American institutions of higher education, and some of these factors are present for only a few

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American colleges or universities other than CUNY—­CUNY is but one example of a public system of higher education. Nevertheless, examination of these factors, factors that seem to have made the effecting of Pathways more or less likely to succeed, may provide useful information for other colleges, universities, systems, or states contemplating establishing new transfer policies or modifying general education requirements, or for any situation in which attempts are being made to effect significant change in higher education. The present chapter contains much material of a subjective nature, material based more on my own observations and interpretations than on research.

Who Is Likely to Facilitate Change, Who Isn’t, and Why Constituencies An institution of higher education is made up of numerous constituencies. The CUNY constituencies most discussed in this book are the students, administrators, faculty, Board of Trustees, academic departments, colleges, the UFS, and the PSC, as well as New York State government. Each group has its own functions, responsibilities, characteristics, and incentive structures. How did the roles of these different constituencies affect what happened with Pathways, and what can this information teach us about how to effect change? Students. Students were extremely active in supporting Pathways. They testified at numerous public hearings, signed petitions, passed resolutions, wrote newspaper articles, made videos, and served on committees. Yet all of this happened after the CUNY central administration proposed the Pathways resolution for the Board of Trustees’ approval. Prior to that event, though there were certainly complaints by individual students concerning credit loss following transfer, and though we had all heard anecdotally that lack of credit transfer was the most common student complaint, I am aware of no concerted movement by students for transfer credit reform. Similarly, though there are CUNY board and central administration members who have vivid memories of losing credits when they transferred decades ago, and though some of these people have always been active in important causes, lack of transfer credit was never one of them until Pathways. There is no way to know definitively why there was a lack of pre-­Pathways student (or alumni/ae) activism regarding transfer credit. There is a widespread—­ again anecdotal—­view among CUNY employees that CUNY students are

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relatively unlikely to protest anything (except tuition hikes). The reasoning behind this view is that CUNY students are almost all commuting to college, often living with their parents, and often work more than twenty hours per week and come from families with limited financial resources. They are also often (42 percent) the first in their families to attend college.2 When something related to college goes wrong, or doesn’t go smoothly, most CUNY students lack the time and other resources to do something about it. They may not even recognize that their treatment is inconsistent with policy. Further, they are students only temporarily. Thus for many reasons it may be easier (or so the students think) to just take another course rather than to try to change something by complaining, which can be a consuming process with an unclear method and an uncertain outcome. Alison Kadlec, senior vice president at Public Agenda, described a general (not just CUNY) lack of student complaining about loss of transfer credit in this way: “We focus on losing time and money, but there’s also an impact on [students’] sense of hope and possibility. . . . Students are blaming themselves. And I’m listening to these stories and thinking, ‘Why aren’t you furious?’ And I think it’s because they’re thinking, ‘Maybe I should have known that these colleges are competitors.’ ”3 Students may see lack of transfer credit as their problem because they started at one college and then decided to transfer to another, and so if they lose credits, it is their own fault. Some in higher education have therefore called for students being given a transfer bill of rights, so that they know to what they should be entitled.4 CUNY developed just such a document as part of Pathways (see chapter 9).5 In any case, students such as CUNY’s are likely to be very helpful in effecting change, but not in initiating it. Administrators. Many administrators (and here I’m talking primarily about the institution-­wide positions of president and provost—­the chief academic officer, the CAO) are also at a college or university for relatively short periods of time. Surveys by the American Council on Education have shown that, at the time of the survey, over two-­thirds of provosts had been in their positions five years or less, and that the average length of service of presidents had decreased from eight and a half years at the time of a 2006 survey to seven for a 2011 survey. Further, over 50 percent of CAOs in one of the surveys were hoping to be selected for a presidency.6 Administrators hoping to obtain another position need to demonstrate, in their current position, accomplishments as well as (in many cases) an absence of controversy—­in other words, a record that will not alienate the faculty who commonly sit on president and provost search

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committees. For all these reasons, some administrators may therefore favor relatively short, sometimes expensive, initiatives that are not necessarily to the long-­term benefit of the institution, but for which the administrator can take credit.7 These factors do not bode well for initiatives, such as Pathways, that will take many years to complete. Adding to the time horizon issue is that some presidents or provosts may have a strong need for admiration, a fear of no-­confidence votes (see chapter 5), and/or a fear of using up all the social capital that they have accumulated with the faculty, leaving nothing for any other initiatives.8 The result can be as described by Clark Kerr, former president of the University of California (the equivalent of the CUNY chancellor position): “Some . . . presidents will confront their problems actively, seeking to fight their way through to satisfactory solutions. . . . Some other . . . presidents will confront their problems, take a careful look, and then turn tail and run.”9 A chancellor, president, or provost who will not confront difficult situations is demonstrating behavior that is incompatible with initiatives such as Pathways. At CUNY, a system consisting of twenty-­four colleges and freestanding graduate and professional schools, presidents can be characterized in an additional way—­as college or university presidents. Some presidents have the primary goal of furthering their own colleges’ reputation and success, and others have the primary goal of furthering the university (CUNY) as a whole. This latter type of president realizes that a strong CUNY results in strong colleges, while the former sees his or her loyalties as being primarily to the members of her or his own college, even if other CUNY members are harmed.10 With Pathways, these traits manifested themselves when some presidents made sure that their colleges complied with all Pathways policies, and a couple of other presidents tried to undermine those policies so that their own colleges’ general education curricula (or close approximations of them) could remain in effect, as desired by those colleges’ faculty. Given all these factors, it should not be surprising that some presidents address issues at their colleges such as credit transfer and Pathways more effectively than do other presidents. When in 2016 Ithaka S+R (Ithaka’s research and consulting division) surveyed over one hundred higher education leaders, they identified senior leaders of colleges and universities as the top constituency whose behavior needs to change in order to increase student success.11 Faculty. The role and the situation of faculty are quite different from those of either students or administrators (and primarily here I’m talking about

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full-­time tenure-­track and tenured faculty). Consider the consequences for good and bad performance. Faculty may receive a raise for good performance, although at some colleges and universities, such as CUNY, merit raises are uncommon. For unsatisfactory performance, there are few if any consequences for a tenured faculty member. In contrast, conceptually at least, administrators receive raises when they perform well and can be fired when they perform poorly. It can therefore be harder to hold faculty accountable.12 However, perhaps the most important way in which faculty differ from students and administrators has to do with the faculty’s time horizon. With the exception of some staff, the faculty are the constituency that spends the longest amount of time at a college or university. Since 1993 setting a mandatory faculty retirement age has been illegal, so once faculty members have tenure, they can usually stay in their jobs as long as they wish (unless they are removed for cause, which is quite rare). Faculty are therefore likely to remain in their professorial positions for thirty, forty, or even fifty years.13 As the UFS Chair Terrence Martell put it, “Although administrators and board members come and go, the ‘faculty’ is there forever.”14 An expectation of virtually lifetime employment could contribute to a relative lack of urgency with regard to reform on the part of faculty members as compared to other college constituencies. With Pathways, some faculty repeatedly complained that the project was moving too quickly, though it was three years from the public announcement of the project until it was fully effected. A three-­year project period can feel relatively short to people who are expecting to be in their jobs for forty years. Administrators need to be prepared to hear such remarks from faculty, to understand their basis, and to put them into the context of the students’ immediate needs. Further, given their expected long term of employment, faculty can engage in the strategy of delaying a project for several years in order to prevent that project from ever coming to completion, because the administrators and students who support it will then have left, while the faculty who oppose it will remain. Such a strategy was mentioned at the board meeting at which the Pathways Project was approved (see chapter 1). The relatively long employment periods of faculty mean that they, of all the constituencies, often have the most extensive experience with a particular college or university, which can contribute to their (often justified) feelings of special knowledge regarding the operations of their institution. Also contributing to those feelings are the individual faculty members’ training and

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academic knowledge in their individual areas of expertise. However, given that they spend most of their time on their own teaching, research, and creative activity, faculty are usually not very familiar with such matters as their colleges’ finances, bylaws, data systems, accreditation policies, and disciplines other than their own, to name a few. And they are usually even less familiar with aspects of colleges other than their own or with aspects of the central office in a university system such as CUNY. It is the full-­time job of administrators and other staff to be intimately familiar with such matters, the intricacies of which faculty may not recognize, and often did not recognize during the institution of Pathways. Another way to understand some faculty’s opposition to change is the importance of a stable environment to the faculty’s work. It is difficult, and sometimes impossible, for a faculty member to be productive if the conditions keep changing under which that faculty member is supposed to be teaching and conducting research and creative activity. Everyone’s cognitive resources are limited, and it is possible to use them all up on work-­related matters other than your personal scholarship and teaching. On this subject, too, Kerr weighed in, saying, “The university . . . needs to create an environment that gives to its faculty members: a sense of stability—­they should not fear constant change that distracts them from their work . . . a sense of continuity—­they should not be concerned that their work and the structure of their lives will be greatly disrupted.”15 I believe this to be a good principle, important for faculty, and there is no question that we (the CUNY central administration) violated it with the Pathways initiative. I would argue that we did so for compelling reasons, but there is no question that the individual work lives of many individual faculty were thereby harmed. There are times when the value of what is to be gained by a change exceeds the value of what is to be gained by maintaining stability for the faculty, but change implementation should not be undertaken without significant thought and deliberation. In considering what factors may contribute to faculty behavior regarding change at their institutions, it is also useful to consider the overall incentive structures for the faculty. By and large, at CUNY and elsewhere, when faculty are rewarded, it is for the quality of their teaching and research/creative activity. Their contributions to committee work, including new program development, are usually considered less important than the other two legs of the three-­ legged-­stool metaphor for faculty work (the three legs are teaching, research/ creative activity, and service). Thus, typically, faculty rewards (raises, tenure,

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and promotion) are for faculty individual, not group, work,16 but it is through group work that significant curricular changes are usually made. Such factors may be exacerbated at CUNY where most raises are across-­ the-­board, with 0 percent for merit, so that the administration does not have even the opportunity to focus a raise for a particular year or years on specific service contributions (e.g., committee participation). Raises (other than across-­ the-­board raises) happen primarily at the time of promotion (from assistant to associate professor, and from associate to full professor) and at the time of tenure (a onetime event during a faculty member’s career, usually coincident with promotion to associate professor), and those raises will focus on the faculty member’s teaching and research/creative activity accomplishments. This context also helps us to understand faculty reactions when one among them becomes aggressive, combative, deceptive, and/or manipulative. Some faculty will join with the disruptive faculty member, or oppose that person, but many, desiring to focus only on their own teaching and research/creative activity, the work for which they are most rewarded by their colleges and colleagues, will do whatever they can to ignore or actively avoid any confrontation with such a faculty member. A particular faculty member may even be inflicting harm on students, faculty, or others, and many faculty will look the other way. There are few, if any, rewards for intervening, and there are perhaps negative consequences in that the intervenor could be the next victim and/or lose personal work time. Perhaps contributing to the independent, some might say self-­interested, behavior of the faculty is the fact that many faculty (including me) choose this profession at least partly because they do not want to have a traditional boss. They want to pursue a life of the mind and to do so in whichever way or ways they themselves see fit. This pursuit of a life of the mind is reinforced by the concept of academic freedom,17 a foundational principle of American higher education, according to which faculty have the right to say and write and create what they wish. Some might say that this principle results in faculty sometimes being permitted to say too much.18 During the establishment of Pathways it could certainly have contributed to a few faculty apparently feeling able to speak and write inappropriately without fear of any consequences, while the slightest mistake by an administrator was not tolerated—­an unequal relationship. Although typical faculty members do not feel unconstrained in saying what they wish publicly until after their second and final promotion (to full

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professor),19 being able to say whatever you believe is a value held dear by many faculty. As Professor Emerita Laurie Fendrich stated in the Chronicle of Higher Education: “After all, how many jobs are there, aside from that of a tenured full professor, where you are almost completely free to do your work your way, without supervision? In how many jobs is there no way to be fired than if you stumble off the deep end in some egregious way?”20 Also contributing to many faculty’s reactions to Pathways, especially their inability to raise specific objections and to develop alternatives in a timely manner, may be humans’ typically slow reactions to changes in the environment (see also chapter 4). There were only twelve PSC and UFS official statements about Pathways in 2011 when we considered and passed the board resolution on Pathways and developed and established the Common Core, but there were forty-­six the year after, when we were mostly effecting policies that had already been formally established. Writer John Tagg has argued that resistance to change is common among humans, and that faculty are no different.21 Physicians, for example, are also known to often resist changes in their practice methods. Many physicians feel that they have the best methods, and will argue to maintain those methods. However, based on rigorous evidence, hospitals and insurance companies often decide which methods are most successful and then compel physicians who are out of compliance to conform.22 As mentioned in chapter 1, the difference between physicians and faculty is that nonconforming or malperforming physicians can be (successfully) sued, fired from a hospital, or delicensed. No comparable consequences exist for faculty. For all these reasons, it is not hard to understand the faculty’s reaction when, as in Pathways, someone comes to them and says: You must stop teaching this course the way that you personally have decided to teach it and that you have been teaching it for years, a course that you may truly love,23 and you must work now in a group with other faculty, spending time deciding how to do your course in some other way that will be good for students but will not directly benefit you. It is, in fact, impressive that, with Pathways, a good number of faculty did not object to the resulting changes, and even spent time and risked (and sometimes incurred) attack from other faculty in supporting this initiative. Within this context it is also not surprising that, despite the unheard-­of amount of consultation with the faculty about Pathways, many faculty said they wanted still more, making the desirable amount of consultation seem to the administration to be unattainable.24

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Nor is it surprising that, other than saying they did not want Pathways, the faculty were slow (to the point of infinity) to develop specific alternatives to Pathways. But object many faculty did. As occurs in many settings, not just in academia, many CUNY faculty hoped that by voicing these objections they could prevent from happening what they didn’t want to happen. That sort of strategy does work sometimes, and other times it doesn’t, but the fact that it sometimes works makes it more likely that people such as faculty will continue with their protests, in the hopes that eventually they will get the result they want. I have heard some administrators say that the smart thing to do is to try an initiative and then, if there are substantial complaints, even if you don’t agree with the complaints, to back off from the initiative. But that was not how Matt and I believed we should approach administration. We believed (consistent with my background in operant conditioning) that acceding to a complaining group would ultimately increase that group’s future complaining, not decrease it. Therefore we tried to consult and listen carefully to concerns about what we were doing, but if we thought those concerns were invalid, we stayed the course, including with Pathways. Change in higher education may be so rare and so slow that taking many years to effect a change has become accepted widely, not just by faculty. For example, as described in chapter 2 of his excellent book Checklist for Change, Robert Zemsky, chair of the Learning Alliance for Higher Education, lauds general education reform at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, which was called for by the institution’s major accreditor beginning in 1997, and was not yet fully effected as of the book’s publication in 2013. “Haste makes waste,” writes Zemsky.25 Even if Oshkosh’s reforms were of higher quality and faculty were more cooperative because of the many years spent to develop and effect these reforms, what of the harm done to generations of students in the meantime, such as the excessive time to graduation described in the book?26 Although there are exceptions, faculty are unlikely to initiate change and are likely to resist it. Board of Trustees. Though no one tends to remain at a college or university as long as or longer than do faculty, many trustees also have relatively long periods of service. At CUNY, during the implementation of Pathways, a majority of the appointed trustees had been in their positions for at least ten years. Trustees have been described as the constituency that is most mindful of the long-­term interests of the institution—­as “protecting the future from the present.”27

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Constraints on trustees’ work include that they do not work full-­time for the institution, and that the higher education experience of many of them is confined to their own days as a student, or perhaps their children’s. Thus their knowledge and experience of higher education can be limited.28 In fact, some would even describe them as the “least educated and well informed” of the constituencies involved in governing the institution.29 Given that trustees are often from the world of work outside higher education, they may not be familiar with, or accepting of, the relatively slow pace of change in higher education.30 In the years during which Pathways was being established, CUNY was fortunate in that the appointed trustees saw their positions as critical in guiding and supporting the long-­term interests of the institution. The CUNY trustees held fast in their support of Pathways despite a steady barrage of emails, phone calls, and other forms of attempted contact and influence. The CUNY trustees, beginning with long-­term board chair and former Yale President and Columbia Law School Dean Benno Schmidt, understood immediately what Pathways was about and why it was important to implement it, and supported our work on Pathways in every way possible. Trustees can prove a fertile source of needed major policy changes. The role of the trustees will be discussed in more detail in the section below concerning shared governance. Departments, Colleges, UFS, PSC, and New York State Government. There were also some organizational units, along with some contingencies affecting those units, whose roles were influential in the Pathways controversy. First are the contingencies related to enrollment. As discussed in earlier chapters, both departments and colleges can have incentives to obtain as large an enrollment as possible. Department and college budgets at public institutions are usually some quantitative function of enrollment. More specifically, departments, on average, will be able to have more full-­time faculty, as well as a larger budget for part-­time faculty, if their enrollments are relatively large. And one way that both departments and colleges can gain more enrollment, at least in the short run, is by not granting transfer credit. Second, given that in most institutions most full-­time faculty obtain tenure, there tends to be little turnover in full-­time department members. This low turnover can contribute to departments viewing themselves as a unified entity continuously in opposition to others (us versus them).31 There certainly seemed to be evidence of such attitudes during the implementation of Pathways (see, e.g., chapter 8). To try to combat such tendencies on the part of colleges,

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CUNY has sometimes employed a college-­evaluation procedure called the Performance Management Process (PMP).32 The PMP sets many goals for each college. In some years one of these goals has concerned intercollege cooperation (see chapter 6). However, the PMP’s focus has always been on other goals that involve individual college achievement (i.e., individual colleges’ retention, graduation, and fund-­raising rates). Nevertheless, during Pathways, it was made clear to all the colleges by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein that the presidents were to support Pathways (and the chancellor controls 100 percent of the presidents’ salaries, subject to the trustees’ final approval). Setting such a priority was certainly made easier by the fact that since the late 1990s the presidents have reported to the chancellor, instead of to the board, a change that occurred when Matt became chancellor (see chapter 2). As a symptom of many colleges’ self-­focused, as compared to CUNY-­ focused, identities, faculty and administrators of CUNY bachelor’s-­degree colleges have sometimes tended to talk about “their” college’s students as being those students who started at their colleges as freshmen. As discussed earlier in this book, these views exist even though the majority of graduates of each of the CUNY bachelor’s-­degree colleges consists of transfer students, not students who started there as freshmen. Two other organizational units that played roles in how Pathways was established are the UFS and the PSC. The purpose of both of these CUNY units is to serve specific needs of the faculty. The UFS is the faculty governance body for  university-­wide  academic matters at The City University of New York. The 136 elected Senators represent 12,000 full-­and part-­ time faculty, and provide a representative, collective faculty voice supporting faculty, and their governance bodies, on the campuses of CUNY’s schools and colleges.33

System-­wide faculty governance entities are common, but CUNY’s UFS may be somewhat unusual in that the colleges are geographically clustered such that it is possible for the UFS to hold regular (six times per year) in-­person meetings of all of the colleges’ UFS representatives. Such meetings likely allow for more communication and cohesion among faculty at different colleges, and between the faculty and central office administrator representatives, than would be the case in a more physically dispersed system, such as the State University of New York or the California State University systems. CUNY’s physical structure

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gives the UFS the potential for being an active and supportive agent in the development and refinement of CUNY-­wide curricular matters. And given that Pathways has, from the beginning, involved a set of curricular policies applicable to all CUNY undergraduates, and that the UFS defines itself as concerned with “university-­wide academic matters,” there should have been a primary role for the UFS in the Pathways Project. However, because the UFS, as led by Professor Sandi Cooper, first questioned the need for any significant changes in order to address the transfer problems, and then objected to Pathways and refused to participate in it, the UFS unfortunately never filled that primary role. Also hindering a productive relationship between the administration and the UFS during the implementation of Pathways was the fact that the UFS’s reputation, at that time, among many administrators, was consistent with the widespread, unfortunate, national reputation of faculty senates, perhaps best expressed in the novel Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher, a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of Minnesota. In this novel, the main character, Professor Jay Fitger, is writing a letter of recommendation to the dean for another professor who has nominated himself for chair of the Curriculum Committee: You may not have had time to grasp or appreciate the nature of Kentrell’s contributions. He is, to put it mildly, insane. If you must allow him to self-­nominate his way into a position of authority, please god let it be the faculty senate. There, his eccentricities, though they may thrive and increase, will at least be harmless. The faculty senate, our own Tower of Babel, has not reached a decision of any import for a dozen years.34

Nevertheless, though I have seen multiple examples of such faculty senates, I have also seen one that functioned extremely well, including in collaboration with the administration. Therefore for a faculty senate to be ineffective is not inevitable. The PSC is the union that represents more than 25,000 faculty and staff at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the CUNY Research Foundation. It is dedicated to advancing the professional lives of its members, enhancing their terms and conditions of employment, and maintaining the strength of the nation’s largest, oldest and most visible urban public university. In the past decade, unions have become increasingly critical to professional workers and higher education as

330  ■  Chapter 12 pressure builds to corporatize the university and allow market forces rather than professional judgment to determine academic policy. With its long history and strong affiliations, the PSC is a forceful advocate for the professional conditions that allow its members to offer a serious education to all New Yorkers. The union negotiates, administers and enforces collective bargaining agreements; protects the rights of staff through the grievance and arbitration process; engages in political activity on behalf of CUNY and its staff and students; and advocates for the interests of the instructional staff in its various forums. It also provides benefits and services to its members through such related organizations as the PSC/CUNY Welfare fund and New York State United Teachers (NYSUT).35

As discussed earlier, the PSC collects approximately 1 percent of faculty salaries for its operations.36 It is therefore necessary for the PSC to demonstrate to the faculty that it is providing something to the faculty in return for those funds, something that the faculty would not get (from the administration or another source) were the PSC not in existence. Thus, by definition, if it were not already apparent that the administration is inadequate in its treatment of the faculty, the PSC must show that this is the case, making cooperative effort unlikely. Finally I should mention New York State government. It is because of laws passed by the legislature many decades ago that the CUNY trustees had the legal foundation that they needed in order to effect Pathways, a legal foundation that stated that facilitating connections among the CUNY colleges is an essential function of the university.37 However, these are general guidelines, and I am not aware of any other intervention in transfer at CUNY by any New York State government entity. In contrast, as of spring 2016, in 70 percent of states—­but not New York—­a common, transferable, lower-­division core has been mandated for all public institutions of higher education in that state by a statewide governance entity. And that percentage is growing.38 New York State is also not part of an alliance of states working on facilitating timely college graduation.39 In chapter 3, I described how, in 2010, when I was testifying before New York State Assembly member Deborah Glick, who is chair of the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee, she asked me about whether credit transfer had been fixed at CUNY. I told her no, and she said that we needed to fix it. There was, however, no official legislative mandate that we do so. Yet it has been reported that “one of the most common complaints a legislator gets from a constituent

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about higher education is, ‘My credits don’t transfer,’ ”40 and a 2013 report for state legislatures listed credit transfer as an important area for their focus.41 In New York State it seems that it has been up to CUNY and SUNY42 to take care of their transfer problems themselves. Even now that Pathways has been effected, the legislature, or the New York State Board of Regents (the governing board for all education in New York State), might require CUNY and SUNY to facilitate transfer between their two systems, which would help many students. However, to date, no such mandate has appeared. In general I do not believe in government officials involving themselves in curriculum; that should be up to the experts—­the faculty—­with supervision by their administrators. However, some aspects of effecting Pathways would certainly have been easier had there been a legislative mandate from outside CUNY requiring us to improve credit transfer.

Governance The roles of the various CUNY constituencies intersect within the context of college-­wide and university-­wide governance. Governance can be defined as “the location and exercise of authority.”43 It determines who can do what in terms of making recommendations and decisions about the institution. There are different conceptions of how governance does and should work in higher education. What happened with Pathways can be used to illustrate these points. Conflicts of Interest. It will be helpful in evaluating existing and proposed models of college and university governance to first consider the potential conflicts of interest that exist at CUNY colleges, as well as at other colleges and universities. Henry Rosovsky, then dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Harvard University, in 1990 stated, “In universities, the quality of decisions is improved by consciously preventing conflict of interest.”44 Nonprofit organizations such as colleges and universities have striven to meet standards comparable to those in the for-­profit world regarding identifying and meliorating conflicts of interest, at least with regard to financial conflicts of interest.45 With regard to curricular decisions, which were an integral part of establishing Pathways, the constituency that has the largest potential conflict of interest is the faculty, but such conflicts are rarely discussed, and even more rarely are structures put in place to deal with them. At all CUNY colleges, as well as at most other colleges and universities in the United States, what happens

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with curriculum is entirely, or almost entirely, determined by the faculty. However, decisions about which courses students can or must take, and how those courses should be taught, directly affect the work lives of the faculty; such decisions affect what and how the faculty must teach. When faculty must prepare new courses, or must change how they are teaching their courses, this is more work for the faculty than if they continue to teach the same courses in the same way. Further, if students are required to take courses that are taught only by certain faculty, those faculty will never be seen as in any way superfluous, and their jobs will be secure (at some colleges and universities, even tenured faculty can be discharged if their academic area faces dwindling enrollments and there is a financial crisis). Likewise, if students are required to take one or more courses that are taught by only one department, that department (along with its faculty) is likely to be secure, receiving additional funds for its operations, as well as receiving permission to employ additional part-­time and/or full-­time faculty. The same effect is also present for a college as a whole. The more courses incoming students are required to take, the greater the number of occupied classroom seats a college will have, and the more revenue it will receive. So conflicts of interest regarding curriculum are present for the department and the college, and not just the faculty. And this means that decisions regarding curriculum may be influenced by the self-­interest of the decision makers (faculty, department, and college)—­that is, a conflict of interest can exist. As mentioned in chapter 11, Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC, has said that not only does this conflict exist, but it is an integral and necessary part of the higher education structure: “The ability to formulate policy on curriculum is essential to our ability to work as teachers and scholars. We cannot do our real work if we no longer have a meaningful voice in setting the most important element of that work. Pathways is about working conditions.”46 She was essentially saying that faculty can’t do their work unless they themselves determine what that work is. For me, at least, it is hard to imagine how CUNY’s credit-­ transfer problems would ever have been fixed if the work to be done was determined only by the people providing the credits—­the faculty. The University of Pennsylvania’s Robert Zemsky is quoted on this topic by Judith Shapiro (former president of Barnard College, current president of the Teagle Foundation, and board chair of Ithaka) in her insightful and informative pamphlet Community of Scholars, Community of Teachers): “It is as if the way to run an upscale restaurant is to allow every customer to define his or her own menu and the chefs in the kitchen to cook only what they wanted to cook.”47

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Nevertheless, I do believe that faculty must be an integral part of the curricular decision-­making process, because it is primarily (some would say only) the faculty who have the scholarly expertise necessary for making the best possible decisions regarding curriculum. Administrators and trustees may also have conflicts of interest with regard to the curriculum (although such conflicts are not inherent in their work, as is the case for faculty). For example, a trustee might have a relative who is a student at the college and who will be required to take a certain course as a result of a curricular change to be voted on by trustees. Nonprofit organizations such as colleges and universities usually have policies requiring decision-­making individuals, such as some administrators and all trustees, to identify any potential conflicts, as well as having methods by which such conflicts are addressed. In the example given, such a relationship would be identified and the trustee in question would probably recuse him-­or herself from any decisions regarding the curricular matter. Policies and processes such as these generally do not exist regarding faculty and curriculum. Instead, real conflicts of interest are present but are often ignored.48 During the Pathways conflict, there were many times when administrators and some faculty thought that other faculty were acting primarily in their own self-­interest with regard to the curriculum. But there was little open discussion reflecting such suppositions. Instead, much effort was expended trying to follow the usual curricular approval processes wherever possible, processes that are virtually entirely controlled by faculty. However, it is with curriculum in their own academic areas that the faculty’s expertise stops. With rare exceptions, faculty are not experts outside of their own fields, and they are not expert in the finances of their college or university. They are also generally not expert in such areas as student support services or admissions processes. Given that a college or university has a fixed set of funds that cannot expand as faculty and others may wish, and given that curricular decisions often have financial implications, to give faculty exclusive authority regarding curriculum could have significant negative implications for an institution. There are thus multiple reasons, in addition to potential conflicts of interest, why faculty should not be the sole or final curricular decision makers. I discuss alternatives in the next section. Types of Governance and Their Implications. “Shared governance” is the phrase used to describe how most colleges and universities are governed. The parties doing the sharing are supposed to be (primarily) the faculty, the

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administration, and the trustees. However, there are frequently disagreements as to precisely what the phrase means and the degree to which it does, and should, characterize what actually happens at institutions of higher education in the United States today. Consider these statements. Larry Gerber, a retired history professor at Auburn University, has described the current status of American higher education governance as a “retreat from the practices of shared governance, [which poses] a danger to the future well-­being of American society.”49 Another faculty member, Benjamin Ginsberg, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University, has written that “at some schools, the faculty has already surrendered and is hoping that the Geneva Convention will protect it from water boarding.”50 In contrast, Kerr said that “academic governance might best be viewed as the interactions among a series of loosely bound ‘estates’ [he was referring to academic departments], as in pre-­revolutionary France, with each estate having a separate constituency, its own form (or forms) of decision-­making, and its own spheres of control and/or influence.”51 In other words, in sharp contrast to the views of the two faculty quoted at the beginning of this paragraph, Kerr’s belief was that departments (which are largely controlled by faculty) function primarily on their own, without overall governance by administrators. Now consider this example from a CUNY college. At a large meeting to discuss the college’s accreditation, a meeting presided over by an official from the accrediting agency, with many faculty in the audience, one faculty member challenged the official. The faculty member asked the official whether shared governance didn’t require that the institution’s faculty agree with the strategic plan to be submitted by the college’s administration to the accreditor. The official replied that it is the institution that has to present the strategic plan, and that the accreditor has stopped referring to shared governance and instead now talks about collegial governance. It therefore seemed to me that the accreditor had recognized that some interpretations of traditional shared governance could inhibit progress in today’s institutions of higher education. More specifically, the necessity of always having to obtain faculty approval could paralyze an institution, and sometimes a college administration might need to act without the agreement of the faculty. Understanding these different conceptions of governance and how they played out in the establishment of Pathways is facilitated by employing the distinction made by William Bowen and Eugene Tobin in their excellent book Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher

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Education.52 Bowen and Tobin discuss two overall types of governance, what I will call “shared” and “divided.”53 According to Bowen and Tobin, what many people actually mean when they talk about shared governance is divided governance. In divided governance different constituencies have different responsibilities, and the decision-­making pie gets divided among those constituencies. In such a governance structure the faculty are typically responsible for curricular and all other academic decisions, and the administration is responsible for everything else. In contrast, the governance structure that Bowen and Tobin prefer to term “shared governance” is one in which all involved constituencies, including the faculty, are consulted regarding important decisions, but there is a central administrative authority, usually the president (and in the case of the CUNY system, the chancellor), as well as the trustees, who make the final decisions. Prior to and during the Pathways Project, what faculty leaders apparently thought governance at CUNY should be (and what they tried to effect) was divided governance. The result, as described in Locus of Authority, was that “so long as individual campuses . . . had near-­complete control over their own degree requirements and over how they would treat efforts to transfer credits from another campus to their own, inefficiency and wasted motion (judged from a system-­wide perspective) were inevitable. . . . The lack of central direction and coordination was paralyzing.”54 In contrast to the faculty leaders’ concept of the governance structure at CUNY, the CUNY administration thought (and the lawsuits confirmed) that governance at CUNY was what Bowen and Tobin would describe as true shared governance: consultation by the administration with the faculty, with all final decisions made by the administration (the chancellor and, ultimately, the ­trustees). For example, this concept of true shared governance was inherent in the statements of CUNY Trustee Peter Pantaleo at the June 2011 CUNY Board of Trustees meeting at which the Pathways resolution was approved (see chapter 1). Thus a big challenge in effecting the Pathways Project was that the faculty and the administration had different concepts of how CUNY governance functioned and should function, and where final authority lay. The fact that CUNY has both a faculty senate and a faculty union (collective bargaining unit) may complicate the governance relationships between the CUNY administration and the CUNY faculty. Professor Nicholas Burbules of the University of Illinois at Urbana-­Champaign, writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, has stated that when a college or university has a faculty

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union, the administration and the faculty are less likely to have productive discussions. “The contractual [i.e., union] model. . . . begins with a presumption of conflicting interests that need to be negotiated through concessions on both sides. . . . shared governance is a matter of relationships based on mutual respect and trust. The fundamental problem with the contractual model is the presumption that every contract is a fight with the ‘bosses’ to force them to recognize and address the needs of the faculty. There is a self-­fulfilling dynamic.” Burbules makes the further points that any shared sense of purpose and mutual reliance and respect on the part of the faculty and the administration is weakened by the fact that all benefits for the faculty arise through negotiations between the faculty and the administration, and the fact that when there are both a union and a senate the financially related matters tend to be handled by the union.55 As one example of Burbules’s points, when two PSC officers stepped down from their positions in the summer of 2015, the Clarion (the PSC’s newspaper) published an interview with them in which they were asked to “recall some of their most memorable fights, discoveries and triumphs over years they served as PSC officers.”56 Working together with the administration for the better­ment of faculty was apparently not an activity worthy of recall. At CUNY, it is certainly possible that the presence of the PSC detracts from potential positive interactions that the UFS could have with the administration. It is also true, as described earlier in this book, that the UFS-­PSC collaboration, along with the PSC’s access to funds, apparently enabled UFS, in addition to PSC, involvement in multiple expensive anti-­Pathways activities (New York Times half-­page advertisements, rental of a meeting hall, attorneys, and access to the AAUP) that the UFS could not have afforded on its own. In addition, the resistance to Pathways was stronger with two faculty organizations involved than it would have been with just one. In a variety of ways, having both a university-­wide senate and a faculty union could have contributed to the many negative interactions of the CUNY administration with the faculty during Pathways. What Does the Pathways Experience Indicate about How Effective Governance Should Be Structured? Similar to Bowen and Tobin,57 I would argue that some CUNY faculty members’ view that divided governance is, and should be, in effect at CUNY made establishing Pathways more difficult (we had to use more resources, including time resources), and that Pathways is therefore a good example of the need in higher education for central decision-­making authority (though not in place of extensive consultation with and involvement of faculty).

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Similar views about the need for a central decision-­making ­authority are expressed in a report that was published by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni in 2014, following the effecting of Pathways, and for which Benno was the lead author.58 Other former presidents have made similar points.59 One who has written a great deal about university governance is the former president of Harvard University, Derek Bok. According to Bok, there are multiple problems associated with faculty working on curriculum. They are too absorbed in their own work and their own departments to be able to see the needs outside their departments, and in any case they have neither the administrative nor the financial knowledge needed to do so. In addition, faculty want to minimize any disruption to their teaching and research activities. As a result, they have trouble agreeing on institution-­wide priorities, instead offering something to everyone and thus avoiding controversy.60 I would agree that such problems contributed to the credit-­transfer difficulties preceding Pathways, and to the difficulties in effecting Pathways. In contrast, some CUNY faculty have argued that the ability of faculty to veto or stop the actions of administrators and trustees, as almost occurred with Pathways, is not only right but necessary. Recent actions of the AAUP have repeatedly indicated concurrence with this view. An article in the PSC’s newspaper, the Clarion, written by Henry Reichman (a retired professor who is first vice president of the AAUP and head of the AAUP’s Academic Freedom and Tenure Committee), an article that originally appeared in the AAUP blog in August of 2014, strongly criticized Benno’s 2014 report. In his article, Reichman gives multiple examples of what he feels to have been trustee mistakes. The 2014 “report’s aggressive advocacy of increased trustee intervention in academic decision-­ making is both unrealistic and potentially dangerous,” says Reichman.61 One of the examples that Reichman gives of trustees’ mistakes is the CUNY trustees’ support of Pathways. The trustees were wrong to support Pathways, says the author, because Pathways has a number of extremely undesirable characteristics. He then proceeds to repeat all the usual incorrect characterizations of Pathways. It is a “stripped-­down and dumbed-­down general education program” that “scaled back the number of credits required for general education classes,” resulting in changes at CUNY colleges that included “elimination of foreign language study requirements,” “reduction of time spent on writing instruction,” and “removal of laboratory sessions from science classes.” In fact, as documented in earlier chapters, although the number of general education credits in Pathways is lower than what most CUNY colleges had previously, it

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is consistent with national norms; the general education courses now have to undergo an additional level of faculty scrutiny and approval; individual colleges could and did retain languages-­other-­than-­English requirements and science labs; and post-­Pathways students benefit from both composition classes similar to those that existed pre-­Pathways and from additional core courses that include work on writing skills. Reichman’s article even states, “In a referendum vote among CUNY’s full-­ time faculty, 92% expressed ‘no confidence’ in the program.”62 This statement implies that 92 percent of all CUNY faculty voted no confidence in Pathways; it was actually 92 percent of those faculty who voted (and only 60 percent of the total faculty voted). Further, the question the faculty were asked to vote on was not neutrally framed—­it was a push poll, as discussed in chapter 9. Despite my disagreements with Reichman’s characterizations of Pathways, I would certainly agree with him that trustees sometimes make mistakes (although so do faculty, and trustees are less likely than faculty to have conflicts of interest when they make curricular decisions). In the past, I have seen relatively uninformed trustees essentially order an institution to take specific actions that, in my opinion, were not helpful and were possibly harmful to the institution. And I would make similar statements about administrators as well. Some administrators sometimes make harmful decisions regarding the institutions at which they work. Some examples have been given in earlier chapters of this book. At the very least the sometimes frequent turnover among administrators can be harmful to the long-­term health of the institution. Initiatives such as Pathways cannot be effected if administrators are being replaced every two or three years, and such turnover is not unusual. The question is not whether administrators and trustees make mistakes, but how to minimize them, as well as how to minimize the harm that can be done to an institution by the faculty, including faculty who have a conflict of interest and/or obstruct productive change for other reasons. Toward these ends, I would argue that each constituency at an institution of higher education needs to have clear conflict-­of-­ interest rules, to have clear goals, to be reviewed for achievement of those goals, and to be held accountable for achievement of those goals. In addition, with the exception of certain personnel actions, all activities of the administration should be transparent, and everyone in the institution should have access to the institution’s data, including its financial information. In contrast, Reichman’s position is that, to prevent potential trustee mistakes, trustees should not have final say over curriculum. This is a governance

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structure that is unlikely to lead to change at a college or university, even if change is needed. Nevertheless, it is a position consistent with an official document that the AAUP released in November of 2013, titled “Statement on the Freedom to Teach.” In this document the AAUP states that, when teaching a course, faculty have the right to “select the materials, determine the approach to the subject, make the assignments, and assess student academic performance . . . without having their decisions subject to the veto of a department chair, dean, or other administrative officer.”63 However, both this official AAUP document and Reichman’s Clarion piece seem inconsistent with what is set forth in the AAUP’s own codified principles,64 as contained within what is informally known as the AAUP Red Book. The section of that publication titled “College and University Government” states that the governing board of an institution of higher education in the United States operates, with few exceptions, as the final institutional authority. . . . As the chief planning officer of an institution, the president has a special obligation to innovate and initiate.  .  .  . The president must at times, with or without support, infuse new life into a department. . . . The president will necessarily utilize the judgments of the faculty but may also, in the interest of academic standards, seek outside valuations by scholars of acknowledged competence. . . . The faculty has primary responsibility for such fundamental areas as curriculum, subject matter and methods of instruction, research, faculty status, and those aspects of student life which relate to the educational process. On these matters the power of review or final decision lodged in the governing board or delegated by it to the president should be exercised adversely only in exceptional circumstances, and for reasons communicated to the faculty.65

In other words, the AAUP’s own codified principles, republished in 2015, state that the trustees, and through them the president, should have decision-­making authority concerning academic matters that supersedes that of the faculty. In their letters to CUNY about Pathways, the AAUP did not question the authority of CUNY with regard to central curricular decision making. However, they did suggest that such decisions, if at odds with faculty wishes, were in violation of the faculty’s academic freedom (see chapter 7), which seems to me to be a contradiction. However, neither Reichman’s statement, nor the AAUP’s “Freedom to Teach” document, nor the Red Book has any authority over anyone at CUNY. CUNY’s responsibility is to follow New York State Education Law, the bylaws of its Board of Trustees, individual college governance documents that

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have been approved by the Board of Trustees, applicable federal laws, and its accreditation guidelines. As it turns out, CUNY’s governance structure is consistent with the AAUP Red Book (though not with the other two AAUP-­related documents). And it is because of the nature of that structure that the PSC and the UFS lost both of their lawsuits regarding Pathways. What happened with Pathways, and what has happened at other institutions, indicates that there is a need for consistent clarity at institutions of higher education regarding who has responsibility and authority for what.66 That means making sure that everyone knows the lines of responsibility and authority, and also that those lines of responsibility and authority are followed consistently. If the board has the final say—­and I agree with the AAUP archival documents and with many higher education leaders that it should—­then the faculty need to be aware of that. That many CUNY faculty did not understand CUNY’s governance structure caused severe difficulties for effecting Pathways. And I firmly believe that if CUNY’s structure had not vested final authority in the Board of Trustees, superseding the individual colleges’ authority, Pathways would never have been effected and improved credit-­transfer policies would never have been put in place. Faculty should be given as much time as possible for their teaching and scholarship. But a bit of time should be taken, in orientation or professional development sessions, when a college is not experiencing a curricular control controversy, to help faculty understand how the institution within which they are employed is structured. What are the duties of a department chair, dean, provost, president, and trustees? How do new programs get approved? Who decides who teaches what and who can override that decision? It isn’t just faculty who are becoming administrators who need to know these things; other faculty do too. Perhaps it is uncomfortable to discuss such subjects, but ultimately colleges and universities will function better if all involved share an understanding of their roles in and responsibilities to their institutions. Just making sure that everyone knows their roles, and that the central administration has the authority to make a final decision, will, of course, not necessarily make it easier to effect change. Gaining faculty support for change initiatives may be the most difficult part of effecting change at a college or university.67 And this is particularly challenging for administrators for whom widespread approval is important by virtue of their personalities or the uncertainty of their positions. There are times when, in order to help protect the long-­term health of the institution, administrators will need to proceed without

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widespread approval, as occurred with Pathways. This is a situation that some administrators will avoid, even to the detriment of their institutions. The CUNY central administration has on occasion found its own ways to minimize faculty controversy when effecting change. When CUNY wanted to start new online and other leading-­edge degree programs in 2006, and a new, innovative, community college in 2012, it did not do so by trying to gain approval from an existing college’s faculty. CUNY felt that no college’s faculty would approve such curriculum changes. Therefore, rather than go through a difficult, time-­consuming, and possibly self-­damaging approval process with a college’s faculty, and given the CUNY central administration’s authority to take any curricular action with the trustees’ approval, CUNY established these new entities by starting new, independent, governance units. This type of solution was, of course, not possible for the credit-­transfer problems. Another approach for avoiding faculty obstruction, or attempted obstruction, was explained to me by a professor who is active in college mathematics education reform in his state. He told me that gaining faculty approval for reform is so difficult that he and his colleagues instead work with their state legislature, asking legislators to pass laws that mandate the reforms that these academics want. I have since heard of similar efforts by professors in other states. Similarly, at a 2016 conference that I attended, I asked a researcher, who was giving a presentation about the importance of improving credit-­transfer policies to increase graduation rates, where there had been success in obtaining such improvement. In every one of the several cases of successful reform that he mentioned, the state legislature had mandated the policy changes; the higher education institutions had not initiated these changes themselves. As stated earlier in this chapter, CUNY has never had any such mandate from the New York State Legislature. This meant that we were able to structure the contents of the Pathways curriculum according to faculty preferences (those of the Pathways Common Core Task Force and the faculty of the individual colleges), but we also made ourselves the target for criticisms that we were compelling curricular changes that were not initiated by the faculty. The world within which higher education operates will continue to change, and higher education will need to change accordingly. With tuition continuing to rise faster than inflation, with the United States lagging in the percentage of young adults with college degrees, and with the percentage of jobs needing college degrees increasing,68 to maintain the status quo is to fall backward. Clear lines of decision-­making authority that require consultation but not consensus will contribute to our making needed changes efficiently and effectively.

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Keep in Mind That Not All Faculty and Not All Groups of Faculty Are the Same So far I have discussed the constituencies involved in Pathways as if the members within each constituency behaved similarly, and as if the behavior of constituencies at CUNY was typical of constituencies elsewhere in higher education. But there were interindividual differences, and these differences may have played a part in what happened with Pathways. Discussing them may help both to illustrate the difficulty of effecting change and to suggest ways to facilitate change. First, there is no question that the Pathways Project might have proceeded more easily had someone other than Sandi been chair of the UFS at the time that the project started. Sandi had a history of filing lawsuits against CUNY, and few faculty are as energetic and determined as she was in taking actions in support of a cause. In addition, her attacks were often directed at individuals, and were often personally and informally delivered. The PSC also had a strong history of opposition to the administration, up to and including lawsuits. However, the PSC’s approach to protesting Pathways was more institutional, as opposed to personal. Usually the PSC as a whole objected to the CUNY administration as a whole with regard to the implementation of Pathways, and the PSC more often used formalized mechanisms to voice their objections. Both styles of protest required time-­consuming responses from us, but in my opinion, Sandi’s approach tended to generate more negative emotions and unproductive discussions among the CUNY central administration (including me). Considering Sandi and the PSC together, you might conclude that New York City faculty are, on average, more resistant to changes imposed by administrators than are faculty in other parts of the United States. One CUNY administrator who had previously worked on changes in the Georgia system—­changes that were similar to Pathways, but that were met with far less resistance—­proposed such an explanation, including stating that there was no faculty member comparable to Sandi in the Georgia system. Two other (non-­CUNY) administrators made a similar point regarding why it had been relatively easy to institute strong transfer policies in Washington State: “We tend to be ‘nice’ people up here in the Northwest!”69 they wrote. It is hard for me to assess such assertions: there are no data on this subject, and I’ve never worked outside the New York metropolitan area. Regardless, any administrator contemplating making

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significant change should be prepared for the possibility of resistance, including the use of intimidation and extensive distribution of incorrect information, techniques that were used regularly to prevent the implementation of Pathways. There is also, however, a structural factor that may help explain why it was more difficult to institute new transfer policies at CUNY than in Georgia. Recall that at CUNY faculty workload is set according to the number of contact hours that a faculty member teaches. Full-­time faculty at the bachelor’s-­and the associate’s-­degree colleges must teach 21 and 27 contact hours per year, respectively (unless they are granted reassigned time for other activities), with a typical 3-­credit course meeting 3 hours per week and thus carrying 3 contact hours. In contrast, I am told, in Georgia faculty workload is determined according to the number of courses taught, not the credits or the contact hours. So unlike what occurred at CUNY, when implementation of Georgia’s new transfer policies required institution of some courses that had fewer credit/contact hours than previously, this did not cause any problems with the faculty. It meant that the faculty would actually have less work to do than before, whereas, at CUNY, institution of reduced contact/credit-­hour courses in some cases may have caused more work for faculty (see chapter 7). This example shows what a difference the particular terms of a collective bargaining agreement (a union contract) can make, and how important it is to know the precise terms of that agreement before undertaking a project such as Pathways. Another structural factor that may have made it relatively more difficult for CUNY to effect Pathways is CUNY’s origin as a set of relatively independent colleges (see chapter 2). The CUNY colleges have had traditions of curricular decision making that did not include much or any consideration of system-­ wide policies. The individual colleges’ accreditation by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, and the fact that each college is led by someone with the title of president, likely also contribute to the colleges’ sense of independence. Similar effects, albeit on a smaller scale, occur within colleges as well. Large universities with powerful school deans may also have organizational units (the schools) that have histories of functioning relatively independently. Yet if some of the factors making effecting CUNY’s Pathways Project difficult were due to the colleges’ perceived autonomy, others were due to the close relationships between those colleges. Unlike most other systems, the CUNY colleges are physically close enough, and the system of public transportation is good enough, that it is possible, within two hours, to travel from any college to any other college for the cost of a subway or bus ride. As I have mentioned

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previously, this geographical proximity allows the UFS to meet together in person multiple times each semester. It also allows the chairs of several disciplines—­notably mathematics, English, languages, and science—­to meet together in person multiple times per year as Discipline Councils. During the implementation of Pathways these meetings sometimes facilitated resistance to Pathways.

Pay Attention to Communications—­Yours and Everyone Else’s Any higher education change project will involve many sorts of communications, and the people effecting the changes will need to try to manage these communications. We did our best with this while implementing Pathways. One reason for our frequent communications was that people with little accurate information will imagine all kinds of things inconceivable to those who are more knowledgeable (see chapter 9). In addition, in the case of Pathways, after a relatively slow start, the PSC and the UFS kept up a thick and steady stream of communications containing much misinformation, and so we tried to counter that misinformation with correct information. However, despite our many communications, we nevertheless often felt as if we were being reactive, instead of proactive, in our communications, so that we were constantly behind in the communication battles. Several factors made our getting ahead difficult. First, in addition to being in physical proximity, the CUNY faculty are also electronically linked. As described in chapter 5, during the start of the Pathways Project, the CUNY central office continued its past practice of distributing UFS emails to all the faculty at the request of the UFS, a practice that I have heard does not occur in some other states’ public higher education systems. During the Pathways Project, CUNY ceased forwarding the UFS’s emails to the faculty, but Sandi was still able to reach many hundreds, if not thousands, of faculty by using her own email lists, and the PSC had a list of faculty email addresses as well. There is no question that the technological developments of the past twenty years facilitated CUNY faculty resistance to Pathways. Sandi and the PSC were able to send the faculty incorrect, inflammatory information over and over, with just a few clicks. Multiple websites posted further such disinformation, and the Internet was used to solicit “signatures” for several anti-­Pathways petitions. Negative news about Pathways—­usually (though not always)—­easily

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circled the world. Even social media came into play: Twitter and online blogs were used to communicate negative (and sometimes positive) information about Pathways, in addition to the negative emails. According to Susan Resneck Pierce, former president of the University of Puget Sound: “Today’s media climate makes it more dangerous than ever to take a public stance on a contentious issue. . . . Social media lets partisans attack immediately. Websites allow opponents to organize or leak damaging documents.”70 The contributions of technology to the spread of information, and misinformation, about controversial issues has become a fact of life, in academia and elsewhere.71 For example, the blog of Professor Corey Robin of CUNY’s Brooklyn College played an influential role in the boycott by academics of the University of Illinois because of its rescission of a job offer to Dr. Steven Salaita “for incendiary tweets about Israel.”72 No one can undertake a controversial project today and not expect there to be all kinds of electronic communications—­ correct and incorrect—­about that project. In this context it is useful to compare Sandi’s anti-­CUNY-­administration actions during the 1990s (before the widespread use of email and the Internet) and during the establishment of Pathways (when she had easy access to email and the Internet). Though her techniques were similar during both time periods (telling faculty as well as people outside CUNY that CUNY was doing terrible things), I believe that she was able to reach many more people, and reach them more effectively, during the establishment of Pathways as a result of her extensive use then of email and the Web. The PSC likewise made extensive and effective use of electronic communications in order to press their anti-­Pathways agenda. Another reason why it was hard for us to stay ahead of the anti-­Pathways communications was that we simply could not predict what was coming next. For example, we never expected half-­page color anti-­Pathways ads in the New York Times. I could not fathom the faculty spending so much money for something like that. And then we had to quickly figure out how to respond, ultimately placing our own ad. As often as we said to ourselves that we needed to expect the unexpected, we still couldn’t predict what the unexpected would be. The only way that we could deal with such a situation was to regularly distribute positive, effective pieces concerning Pathways, which we did, and to be prepared, at a moment’s notice, to design and write our own communications in response to the UFS’s and the PSC’s, which we were. Although we were certainly inadequate in our responses to some of the UFS’s and the PSC’s communications designed to enhance negative feelings

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about Pathways, there were other actions that we took with regard to our communications and our interactions with all constituencies that I felt were more effective. For example, from the beginning we resolved to be completely open about what we were doing, and to consult constantly. We did our best to listen respectfully to the faculty’s and others’ opinions about how to solve the credit transfer problems, and to acknowledge everyone’s valid concerns. We also resolved, from the beginning, to respond to every written inquiry or concern directed to us, which resulted in our writing dozens, if not hundreds, of responses. It was important to communicate not just with people who might be opposed to Pathways, but also with people who were supporters. Implementing Pathways required the help of hundreds of people in the central office and at the colleges—­administrators and staff in addition to faculty. I repeatedly spoke at meetings of administrators and staff about Pathways’ progress, and urged other CUNY leaders to do the same, so that the people whose help we needed were informed and continued to be motivated to help. The Pathways website73 was a critical component of this work. As described in earlier chapters, we posted everything that we could think of there, from data on transfer students to meeting agendas to informational memos. The website also included a comment form so that everyone had an easy way to reach us with their comments, questions, and concerns. Over time the website became an archival resource that chronicled our progress with Pathways, as well as providing current user information. Further, in our communications, as discussed earlier in this book, we decided early on not to attack individuals or to be confrontational, and with a few exceptions we stuck to that approach while implementing Pathways. Our goal was to emphasize the many accurate, positive aspects of Pathways in our communications, rather than attacking inaccurate, negative characterizations of the project. There is no way for me to know whether this was the best strategy for us to have followed; certainly there was not much evidence that we were changing the minds of faculty with our communications. But we felt that we needed to be a model for others, and we believed that, in the end, we would be more convincing to the faculty by using logic and evidence than by engaging in a slugfest. We also tried to make clear to everyone the legal and policy framework within which we were operating, who had the authority to do what, who was responsible for doing what, and how final decisions regarding transfer policies would be made. We were fortunate that New York State Education Law and the

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CUNY Bylaws were clear about the authority held by the Board of Trustees and the chancellor. We were therefore startled by the widespread lack of awareness of these foundational policies, and by the ignorance of them displayed by the PSC and UFS lawsuits. Because of their lack of knowledge of foundational policies, many faculty saw Pathways not as an assertion of existing board authority but instead as an attempted rescission of the faculty’s own authority. For these reasons we devoted much energy to trying to communicate the legal and policy framework to faculty and others. This strategy did not result in all faculty having the correct information, nor did it convince all of the faculty to support Pathways (far from it), but at the very least I believe that doing whatever we could to communicate with the faculty helped us to maintain our resolve. It helped us to maintain our confidence that we were behaving responsibly. In addition, this strategy may have helped us with the lawsuits. In his opinion the judge explicitly acknowledged the huge amount of consultation and communication that we had done with the faculty concerning Pathways. We also tried to get to the newspapers—­the higher education daily periodicals as well as the New York papers—­at the earliest possible moment whenever there was a particular Pathways conflagration, and even when there wasn’t. Clearly sometimes we failed in this (see chapter 5), but I am not sure that any administration could have controlled the media campaign against Pathways while still supporting free speech, a right highly (and justifiably) cherished by virtually everyone in academia. We were, however, with Senior Vice Chancellor Jay Hershenson’s excellent help, extremely successful in obtaining positive, or at least not negative, pieces about Pathways in virtually all the papers. Negative pieces could potentially have hurt CUNY by, for example, encouraging an external accreditor to question what we were doing with Pathways. A guiding principle of our communications strategy was our resolution to be 100 percent honest in all our communications. Further, I personally resolved (as did others) never to lose my temper or to threaten, and to use personal, face-­to-­face communication whenever possible. My delivering aversive stimuli could cause others to behave in unproductive ways, including avoiding me, which would not help the project. Personal relationships, built up over time, can go a long way in a controversial situation such as Pathways, and some faculty did help us with Pathways as a result of such relationships. At the same time, it can be advisable to get some communications into the written record, either by using email or by writing a summary of a conversation

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afterward. However, in a situation such as the Pathways Project, when you know that future litigation is possible, such needs must be balanced against the knowledge that written documents are obtainable within the context of a lawsuit or simply by a FOIL request. We increasingly worried about that potentiality as the Pathways Project went on, and so became increasingly cautious in our use of email. Often, we picked up the phone instead.

Marshal and Protect Your Strength There were a number of factors that helped us to maintain our strength during the project—­factors that helped us privately and publicly keep to our position, continue forward, and make a strong case, despite multiple obstacles and attacks. First, our strength was founded on the students who supported Pathways. We were inspired by what they told us about what had happened to them when they transferred, and by their willingness to advocate for Pathways even under extremely difficult circumstances, such as by testifying at interminable, contentious public hearings. Data are essential, but the human stories related to a project can provide much-­needed motivation when times get tough. Second, virtually everyone in the central Office of Academic Affairs was involved in and supportive of the project, as were most members of the chancellor’s cabinet. As with any significant academic project, Pathways touched on many administrative areas in addition to academics (budget, communications, human resources, institutional research, labor, legal, student affairs, technology, etc.). Virtually every one of the involved people in the central office made Pathways a high, if not top, priority among their responsibilities, and they did so with minimal persuasion. Further, we had great support among many college administrators and staff. Everyone was not equally dedicated, but there were many dozens of super-­dedicated people, whatever expertise was needed was available to us, and we presented a consistent, unified view on everything to do with Pathways. Access to funds as needed (e.g., to pay faculty appropriately for working on revised courses) was key, as was the ability to collect, analyze, interpret, and use relevant data, including financial as well as enrollment data. It is critical, in a project of this kind, to know in detail the legal and policy framework within which you are operating. Then you can go up to, but not beyond, the boundaries of your authority, and you can publicly and in total confidence justify your actions. It was fascinating to watch how, at one college

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with a president whose first concern was not upsetting the faculty, the faculty repeatedly refused to send in courses for Pathways, and that college lagged in having sufficient Pathways courses for the students. By contrast, at another college, one with the strongest possible anti-­Pathways faculty leadership, the president told the faculty that they could object as much as they wished, but as an officer of the university he was obligated to follow board policy, and that required him to send in courses for Pathways whether the faculty agreed or not (all true). At that latter college, the faculty processed all the needed Pathways courses on time. Knowing your legal and policy framework means not only knowing what must or can be done, but knowing what does not need to be done—­knowing where there are areas of flexibility. For Pathways our goal was to help students transfer their credits. Therefore, as shown by multiple examples in this book (such as allowing colleges to set faculty workload hours for a given course, as described in chapter 11), whatever the faculty or a college wanted was fine with us as long as it did not hinder students’ ability to transfer their credits. There were times when some administrators said that Pathways’ Common Core should contain this or that, or when a college administrator said that a particular department should contribute a particular course to the Common Core. But when I heard about such statements, I strongly (and usually successfully) objected to them, because they involved what these administrators thought the students should be learning, rather than a method for helping them transfer their credits. And it was for the latter purpose that the administration intervened with the institution of Pathways. The content of the curriculum should be up to the faculty. Although gaining the support of many faculty proved challenging, we did have the backing of many people who helped maintain Pathways’ forward momentum. The first priority for me was to ensure that my supervisor supported the project, and Matt did, from the beginning to the end, in every possible way. His previous efforts on behalf of transfer students had helped to inspire Pathways, and his contributions to Pathways at every stage were wide and deep. And before taking any definitive action, Matt and I also made sure that the CUNY board supported the project, which they did, to a person, beginning with Benno, wherever and whenever support was needed. In fact, about fifteen years earlier, the 1999 report on CUNY of which Benno was the lead author, before he was chair of the CUNY Board of Trustees, stated that CUNY had a serious problem with credit transfer: “Strong institutional identities” were identified

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as contributing to the constituent institutions’ “sense of independence—­even immunity—­from the mandates of the central administration.  .  .  . this resistance has led to serious deficiencies in the area of intra-­CUNY transfer and system-­wide academic planning.”74 Benno’s 1999 report outlined the problems that Pathways was to help solve. The CUNY presidents were also mostly supportive. Since Benno’s 1999 report was written, the CUNY Bylaws had been changed such that the presidents reported to the chancellor instead of the board, and Matt had repeatedly made it clear to the presidents that they were to support Pathways. Many needed no convincing. We also obtained the support of some CUNY distinguished professors, as well as some leaders in higher education from across the United States.75 At the very least, the positive comments of all these people about Pathways raised and helped sustain our spirits. We hoped that there were some people, inside and outside CUNY, who, though initially negative about the project, at least considered the possibility that Pathways might have some benefits as a result of the supportive statements that we obtained from these leaders. Their statements supported ours in communicating that Pathways would provide students with a good general education, contrary to what some faculty were saying. Sometimes people have more difficulty noticing that something is missing than that something is present (what is known as the feature-­positive effect in psychology).76 So I should not fail to mention again the absence of any challenges related to our interactions with CUNY’s major accreditor, the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, or with the New York State Education Department, which is responsible for approving each of CUNY’s programs. There had been past instances in which faculty had complained to one or both of these organizations about something going on at CUNY, with resulting attention paid to CUNY by the organization. As described in chapter 6, I tried to inform both organizations about what was happening with Pathways at an early stage of the project. Subsequently, neither organization raised any objections to Pathways or even questioned us about it. Further, contrary to what I had feared (see chapter 10), the new mayor (Bill de Blasio) did not try to interfere with CUNY curriculum, and instead has been quite supportive of CUNY’s efforts to increase student success. At times, outside, unrelated events can help to bolster, or can harm, your position. For example, when we started the Pathways Project in 2010, it was just after the end of the 2007–­2009 recession, when CUNY was experiencing

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substantial enrollment growth as people who were not satisfied with their work situations went back to school. Enrollment growth can help to assuage faculty fears that curricular changes will compromise their own positions and/or their departments’ futures. Unfortunately, in fall 2012, after the economy had recovered, and in the middle of Pathways’ implementation, CUNY’s enrollment shrank for the first time in ten years: 1.1 percent in comparison to the previous fall.77 Bad timing for the project—­but we were not immediately aware of the possible negative effects on opinions about Pathways and so did not take any actions to counter such effects. Administrators need to watch out for whatever environmental factors might contribute to or hinder a project’s success, and then take proactive steps, if possible.

Some Characteristics of Effective Leaders Personal characteristics of the leaders of a project such as Pathways can influence the project’s outcome. For example, I believe that several of Matt’s and my traits contributed to our being able to successfully implement Pathways, and I am not alone in believing that. Bowen and Tobin state, “Personalities, and particularly the personality and leadership style of the president, make an enormous difference.” They highlight, in fact, “Matthew Goldstein, whose strength of personality and outgoing manner were just what CUNY needed at a decisive time in its history.”78 More specifically, I believe that Matt’s and my and others’ consistency and persistence (to the point of what might be called stubbornness, at least in my case) helped all of us in leading the project. Though the challenges persisted much longer than anyone expected, and were more severe than anyone expected, we did not give up. We stayed on target. In addition, by the time the Pathways Project began, both Matt and I had extensive, long-­term experience with CUNY, one of the most complex systems of higher education in the United States. Matt had received his bachelor’s degree from City College, had been a faculty member at Baruch College, and then had worked continuously as a CUNY administrator in successively more responsible positions since 1982 (except for one year as president of Adelphi University in the late 1990s, after which he became the CUNY chancellor).79 He also had long experience with Sandi’s and the PSC’s styles of protest, and so was not fazed when they objected to Pathways. I had served as the dean of Baruch College from 1995 to 2001, as special advisor to the chancellor from 2006 to

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2008, and then as the CUNY chief academic officer (executive vice chancellor and university provost) beginning in 2008, including supervising the annual evaluations of all the CUNY colleges and presidents starting in 2006, affording me an unusual degree of familiarity with the entire system. Our experience helped Matt and me to understand, for example, what might be motivating a college to ask for Pathways to be structured in a certain way, and thus how we should respond to that college’s request. Specialized experience and knowledge can be useful. Administrators are not necessarily fungible. Another key shared characteristic was that, as far as I could tell, neither of us was strongly considering taking a subsequent academic leadership position. As I have stated previously, most search committees for high-­level administrators include faculty members. And many faculty members would not want to hire as their supervisor someone who clearly believed that the central administration, and not the faculty, should have final say over the curriculum. But Matt and I were both in the position of not having to worry about that—­ although I’m not sure we would have anyway. Both of us have always had a reputation for doing what we thought was right, even when there was protest. And that allowed us to focus our concern on doing the best we could for the students, as well as for the faculty, in the long term, rather than favoring our own personal short-­term interests. As Bowen and Tobin put it, “The effort to realign the system [with Pathways] required enormous effort and dedication from administrators who were more committed to what they viewed as good policy than to enhancing their own popularity.”80 At times during the establishment of Pathways it may have appeared that we had what could be described as thick skins—­an imperviousness to the slings and arrows being propelled our way (see chapter 7). I can speak only for myself, but my skin did not feel at all thick. The attacks bothered me greatly. But I thought that I would feel worse if I didn’t do what I thought was right regarding credit transfer at CUNY.

Conclusions There is currently much concern about stagnant college completion rates, increasing time to degree, and the cost of higher education in the United States.81 Difficulties in the transfer of credit from one institution to another—­credits taken to satisfy general education or major requirements but transferring only

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as elective credits, or credits not transferring at all—­contribute to all of these problems. This book has told the story of CUNY’s Pathways initiative, which was undertaken to improve the transfer of credits for CUNY students. The story provides much information regarding how credit transfer does and does not work at CUNY, but also in higher education in general, and how credit-­transfer difficulties can be addressed. The book also provides a detailed illustration of why change can be challenging in American higher education, and some suggestions regarding how to facilitate such change, particularly with regard to the interactions between faculty and administrators. The Pathways story provides abundant illustration of the challenges that can beleaguer these relationships, which involve struggle over who controls what. However, even though effecting Pathways would have been more pleasant without such relationship challenges, I deeply believe that Sandi’s and others’ criticisms actually helped us to do a better job than would otherwise have been the case. The criticisms helped us focus on some aspects of the project that needed our careful attention, even if that attention didn’t help us to prevent the criticisms. In my opinion, the Pathways story provides ample illustration of the principle that, if change is to be effected in higher education, there should be a single person (a president or a chancellor) with the authority to make operational decisions (under guidance of principles and policy established by the Board of Trustees or a similar entity). That person should have the time, the access, and the skills—­including the ability to learn—­to fully employ all types of relevant information in making those decisions. And that person should take actions openly, consulting as much as possible with relevant others. Further, the authority of that person to make decisions needs to be established by an even higher authority (e.g., state law and/or a board of trustees). Finally, administrators (as well as trustees) should not serve short terms of just a few years each. Long projects, and controversial projects, will be much less likely to be undertaken when there is frequent administrator turnover. My observation has been that many presidents and other administrators will work hard to avoid controversy. Sometimes this can be for the positive reason of keeping the college on a productive path. But sometimes it is because those administrators are hoping to be selected for another position (following a recommendation by a search committee including faculty), and sometimes it is simply because they have an aversion to any negative social interactions.

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Administrators should be chosen for their ability to do what is best for the short-­and long-­term health of the institution. Now that higher education finally possesses some rigorous evidence indicating which programs increase student success,82 the issue is often not figuring out what to do, but simply doing what needs to be done, even if there is opposition. To assist in the selection of appropriate lead administrators, institutions should at least consider a decrease in faculty input to selection of new administrators. This is a complex issue because so much of the work of a college or university depends on a good working relationship between the administration and the faculty, a relationship that is facilitated by, from the beginning, faculty involvement in the choice of a particular administrator. However, administrators need to feel that their current and future positions are sufficiently secure to enable them to take difficult, unpopular, steps that are necessary for the overall health of the institution, and searches need to select administrators who are willing to do so. Faculty have invaluable expertise. They are the academic experts. Therefore they should have a prominent and special role in all academic matters. However, their expertise is of limited scope, and they do not ordinarily have the time to devote to gaining the necessary wide expertise needed for many academic decisions, decisions that may affect multiple areas of the institution. In addition, faculty may have a clear conflict of interest regarding the outcomes of many academic decisions. Thus they should not be the final decision makers concerning curriculum. Nevertheless, the default response of administrators should be not to intervene in faculty work. However, there will be times when it is necessary to do so, such as when student and faculty needs and desires are incompatible. When such incompatibilities occur, the needs of the students should take priority over those of the faculty. The students will not necessarily speak up for themselves, they are dependent on the institution for their education, and they are the foundation on which all of higher education is based. But a college or university cannot be expected to take actions to benefit students—­such as granting transfer credit—­if those actions are inconsistent with the incentive structure that funds the institution. Incentives need to be aligned with goals. Everyone involved in making recommendations and decisions in higher education—­faculty as well as administrators and trustees—­should be held accountable for their actions by a higher authority. At all times the goal of

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everyone at an institution of higher education should be the long-­term, in addition to the short-­term, good of the faculty, students, and staff. Instituting effective policies is an essential first step, but enforcing them, maintaining them, and modifying them over time as needed are also necessary. Given all of my criticism of higher education in this book, some might think that my intended message is that higher education is dysfunctional. Nothing could be further from the truth. At CUNY, as well as at other institutions of higher education, it can feel as if controversy and resistance to change are the rule and not the exception. Nevertheless, students are learning, discoveries are being made, creativity is prevalent, and the lives of a great many people are being improved. The vast majority of CUNY and other faculty are working hard, benefiting their students and their disciplines in amazing ways. There is also a huge preponderance of dedicated staff, administrators, and trustees. And in the case of CUNY and Pathways, we—­CUNY faculty, trustees, administrators, staff, and students—­accomplished something as a system to help students. Something that didn’t get done in many other states except as a result of a legislative mandate. Something that, because we did it ourselves, enabled us to have more faculty input than otherwise. In this way, and in many other ways, CUNY has particularly demonstrated its dedication to helping students. Could CUNY and higher education in general function better? Certainly CUNY has a good distance to go to be the truly integrated university that New York City needs, but it has already come a long way down that road. It is my love for and belief in CUNY and in American higher education that compels me to hold them to such high standards. I hope that this book will help our system of higher education to continue to change in order to meet the highest of standards.

EPILOGUE

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In the years since Pathways was conceived in fall 2010, both higher education and CUNY have changed. The higher education research and policy literature on transfer has increased and diversified, with credit transfer now considered an essential component in the drive to increase graduation rates. The discussion about credit transfer has expanded from transfer between specific pairs of institutions, to transfer among institutions within a specific state, and even to transfer among institutions in a group of states. Some aspects of Pathways, such as making sure that each course has designated learning outcomes—­which was controversial when we began Pathways—­are increasingly considered the norm.1 In the years since Pathways was implemented, CUNY has had several changes in circumstances and in leadership with resulting effects on the implementation of the Pathways policies. In multiple ways the playing field and the environment around it are not the same as they were in 2010. CUNY’s Pathways Project has likely itself been an agent promoting the changing emphasis on transfer. The extensive media coverage (e.g., so far about five mentions in New York Times articles and letters to the editor, about twenty each in the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed, as well as many pieces in other text-­based media, plus multiple mentions on National Public Radio—­see my website, http://​www​.awlogue​.com, for a full list of media coverage), conference presentations at the AAUP and the MLA, as well as anti-­Pathways national organization votes and national and international petitions, are just a few of the means by which CUNY’s Pathways Project has become widely known in the higher education community outside CUNY. As I write this epilogue, in the fourth year since Pathways was implemented, three books—­published by Princeton, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins university presses—­have mentioned and discussed Pathways, expressing varying views about its origins and nature. The authors include well-­known higher education leaders and researchers Thomas Bailey, William Bowen, Shanna Jaggars, Davis Jenkins, and Eugene Tobin, as well as Michael Fabricant, the first vice president of the CUNY faculty union (the PSC), someone who spoke publicly against

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Pathways during its establishment (see chapters 5 and 6), and whose coauthor is another CUNY faculty member, Stephen Brier.2 Fabricant and Brier’s book, titled Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education, makes the now old, always false, statement that the reason we instituted Pathways was to spend less money on education. The only money we were trying to save was the students’ when they had to take excess credits and/or ran out of financial aid due to having to repeat courses whose credits didn’t transfer. Our hope was always that Pathways would enable and encourage more students to enroll in and stay in college, ultimately increasing the amounts that colleges, and taxpayers, spend on higher education. The other two books contain more positive material about Pathways. Yet another book, by two CUNY faculty, Anthony Picciano and Chet Jordan, titled CUNY’s First Fifty Years: Triumphs and Ordeals of a People’s University, to be published in summer 2017 by Routledge, has a chapter about Pathways.

The Growing Discussion in Higher Education of Transfer and Curricular Control It would be impossible to describe in detail here even some of the recent research studies concerning the difficulty that students have in transferring their credits,3 not to mention all of the national organizations that have called for such problems to be addressed. Just a sampling of the organizations currently emphasizing the importance of ensuring that students can transfer their credits includes the American Association of Community Colleges, the American Council on Education, the AAC&U, Complete College America, the Charles A. Dana Center, Public Agenda, and the Aspen Institute, among others. The Association of Governing Boards has listed credit transfer as one of the essential responsibilities of higher education board members.4 The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students was founded in 2002 and has grown and developed steadily every year, and in 2012 the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education first established its standards concerning “Transfer Student Programs and Services.”5 Improving credit transfer is now widely perceived as an important mechanism for increasing graduation rates and decreasing students’ higher education costs. One major report released in August of 2014 by the Institute of Education Sciences and the National Center for Education Statistics found that 35 percent

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of students transfer within six years of beginning college.6 The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center found in a 2015 report that 37 percent of students transfer within six years of beginning college, and in a 2017 report that 49 percent of bachelor’s-degree recipients have prior credits from community colleges (the report didn’t cover prior credits from bachelor’s-degree colleges).7 Still another major report on transfer released in January 2016,8 authored by Davis Jenkins and John Fink (both researchers at the Community College Research Center, which is housed at Teachers College, Columbia University), called for better data collection concerning transfer students, and urged better usage of policies to ensure that students from lower-­income backgrounds are able to transfer their credits as effectively as students from higher-­income backgrounds. This report was followed a few months later by the Aspen Institute’s and the Community College Research Center’s publication of The Transfer Playbook: Essential Practices for Two-­and Four-­Year Colleges.9 Several factors have undoubtedly contributed to the intensifying attention paid to the difficulties facing transfer students. These include former President Obama’s national priority for increasing graduation rates,10 the growing emphasis on community colleges as an affordable way to start college (and from which students must transfer in order to receive their bachelor’s degrees),11 and an increasing focus on how the cost of college may prevent students from finishing (loss of credits when a student transfers can increase the cost).12 The many articles on transfer have detailed what it is about transfer that makes it hard (complex processes, unclear policies, inadequate guidance, delays in transcript evaluation, credits transferring as electives when the courses were taken to satisfy general education or major requirements, decreased motivation when credits are lost, additional costs for students, etc.).13 The ability to transfer both general education and initial major courses has been described as essential.14 There have been detailed expositions about why articulation agreements, which are generally between pairs of institutions, if they exist at all, won’t work for the many students who cannot be sure several semesters ahead of time to which institution they will be transferring.15 Another factor promoting the increased focus on transfer has been, perhaps surprisingly, the increased attention being paid to remedial education. Nationally 60 percent of students enter college having been assessed as not yet prepared for college-­level work, and most students either avoid taking their assigned remedial classes or take them and fail them. Some remedial reforms, usually undertaken in community colleges, have been shown to be effective in

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helping students over these barriers, but there have been subsequent difficulties for such students in transferring their credits and/or their new status as remediation-­exempt to bachelor’s-­degree colleges.16 There has now been rigorous national research investigating precisely what happens when students transfer, and the results are clear: they lose credits and those losses delay, or even prevent, graduation. An excellent example of this work is a 2015 publication, in the highly regarded journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, by David B. Monaghan, former CUNY PhD student and now a senior researcher at the Wisconsin HOPE Lab at the University of Wisconsin, and Paul Attewell, CUNY distinguished professor, who has appeared several times in this book as a Pathways supporter. Monaghan and Attewell used a national data set to investigate the well-­known fact that transfer students from a community college, as compared to students who begin college in a bachelor’s program, have a lower probability of completing a bachelor’s degree. Monaghan and Attewell found that “inferior academic preparation does not seem to be the main culprit.” Instead, “one important mechanism is the widespread loss of credits that occurs after undergraduates transfer from a community college to a 4-­ year institution; the greater the loss, the lower the chances of completing a BA.”17 Additional publications have discussed the reasons behind credit loss upon transfer. Echoing much of the material in this book, some articles have stated that the incentive structures in place do not favor credit transfer, have expressed concern about the apparent conflicts of interest inherent in faculty judgments of whether credit should transfer, and have pointed to the impossibility of community colleges solving the transfer credit problems on their own (not only is it the case that many transfer students do not originate at community colleges, but one reason why credits do not transfer is that the receiving colleges sometimes change their requirements).18 Other areas of recent focus within higher education have implications for CUNY’s and other colleges’ and universities’ work on credit transfer. For example, there is increasing acceptance that many college students, including those who are low-­income and/or the first in their families to attend college, will be assisted on their way to graduation if they have what are referred to as “Guided Pathways”—­in other words, if they have limited choice in terms of which courses to take19 (a good example of the many uses to which the word “Pathways” is being put in addition to CUNY’s Pathways Project; for others see my website, http://​www​.awlogue​.com). However, the college years are also recognized as a period in which students should have the opportunity to grow

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by means of their own explorations. The general education portions of CUNY’s Pathways policies can do both in that it is clear that students need to satisfy all of the Pathways general education categories, but at most CUNY colleges students have choices as to which courses to take within each of those categories. An understanding of CUNY’s Pathways Project is also informed by, and informs, the ongoing struggles in higher education regarding who controls curriculum. Recent controversies over who does or should control higher education curriculum have made the press for colleges and universities in California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Virginia.20 In some of these situations, the faculty either have formally had, or have effectively gained, veto power over the curriculum. In others, such as at CUNY, faculty have not had, and still do not have, such power. Evoking a particular sense of déjà vu was an Inside Higher Ed 2016 report of a vote of no confidence in the vice president of Concord University in response to a decrease in the number of general education credits.21 In some cases, state law gives independent authority over curriculum to faculty, whereas in others it does not but the faculty have nevertheless obtained such authority. An example of the former concerns Illinois. Statutes regarding the University of Illinois state: “Each [faculty] senate shall determine for its campus matters of educational policy. . . . No new line of work involving questions of general educational policy shall be established on any campus except upon approval of the senate concerned.”22 In other words, in Illinois, the faculty apparently have veto power over all academic matters. However, despite this legislation, other recent legislation in Illinois gives transfer students (limited) guarantees in terms of credit transfer.23 A well-­publicized case regarding who controls curriculum concerns what happened in the past few years at San Jose State University in California. The president wanted the philosophy department to use a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) as part of one of its courses, and the department refused. Subsequently, the president agreed that the relevant academic department would need to approve any outside contract for any sort of technology-­intensive, hybrid, or online course. The following year the president left the university for a position in Afghanistan.24 In another highly publicized case, in 2015 Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin led an initiative that resulted in changes in the Wisconsin law that essentially removed final decision-­making authority regarding curriculum from the public university faculty.25

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Still another example concerns the California Community Colleges System, which consists of 112 community colleges with more than two million students and 72 different boards of trustees. For many of these community colleges, agreement by the faculty senates is required for many decisions, essentially giving faculty veto power over curriculum. An organization called California Competes has asked the head of the California Community Colleges System to change that structure, using, in part, the rationale that giving faculty final decision-­ making authority results in dysfunctional governance. California Competes’ goal is to have final decision making in the hands of the trustees (as is the case at CUNY).26 In the University of California system, the independent authority of the faculty has been causing difficulties with students transferring. When one college in the system creates an online course, that course can be taken for credit at any of the colleges in that system. However, each separate academic department has the power to approve whether such a course counts for that department’s major.27 Back on the East Coast, in an ongoing battle in Connecticut over online courses and other plans for the state system of colleges and universities, it has been reported that “administrators agreed that the faculty should have control over curricular moves, including questions of which programs should move online.”28 There have been similar struggles in Minnesota.29 In contrast, Delta College in Michigan first engaged in a trial period in which its introductory writing course was taught with 4 class hours instead of 3. The president subsequently said that there was no evidence that students learned more as a result, and so he decided to remove the fourth hour except for students who needed additional help. The faculty complained about this, but the board backed the president.30 An older example of curriculum-­related changes initiated by administration, not faculty, consists of the transfer policies effected by the University System of Georgia, repeatedly referred to in this book, and a model for Pathways. Transfer policy changes in Georgia were facilitated by the fact that the Georgia system, similar to CUNY’s, has a single governing board with complete authority over all educational matters: “The government, control, and management of the University System of Georgia and each of its institutions are vested by the people of Georgia exclusively with the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia.”31 Despite national struggles over who controls the higher education curriculum, 2016 data indicate that 72 percent of states now have a core of entry-­level

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courses that transfers statewide among all public institutions (New York is not one of these states),32 and many other university systems now also have such cores (similar to CUNY’s Pathways Common Core). Yet it is still the case that numerous states, as in the California example above, and also in Texas,33 are still undergoing struggles with regard to credit transfer despite having these transferable cores. Therefore one question in the literature has been this: Are the policies, designed to facilitate credit transfer, working? There is circumstantial evidence indicating that Georgia’s is. The graduation rate at the University System of Georgia increased over 10 percent between 1999 and 2006,34 and it was in fall 1998 that their new transfer policies were put into effect. But, of course, that is not proof that Georgia’s transfer policies were responsible for the increased graduation rates. In California, despite significant efforts by legislators, by the California community college and state university systems, as well as by the private organization The Campaign for College Opportunity, the great majority of students still do not have seamless transfer between these two systems.35 In general, publications about the success of these statewide and system-­ wide policies seem to be more focused on how these policies are not functioning, or on the lack of evidence as to whether they are effective, than on presenting data showing whether or not they are effective. In addition, these publications point out that there are many ways for colleges and universities to work around the intent of the new policies, as summarized by this quotation attributed to CUNY’s Distinguished Professor Paul Attewell: “You can drive a truck through the loopholes.”36 As described earlier in this book, it was certainly the experience of those of us in CUNY’s central Office of Academic Affairs that the CUNY colleges had found ways to avoid the intent of the CUNY Board of Trustees transfer policies that existed prior to Pathways. It was because of this knowledge that we devoted much effort to trying to make the board resolution establishing Pathways loophole free.

What Has Happened and Hasn’t Happened at CUNY Recall that the original Pathways resolution stated: “Resolved, that all of these pathways policies and processes, including the Common Core, be reviewed and evaluated each year for three years beginning in 2013, and every three years thereafter, to modify them as necessary to improve them or to meet changing needs.”37 Such an evaluation should consist of a description of the policies in

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effect, including any modifications that have been made, a determination of the degree to which the policies are functioning as specified, an assessment of the effects of those policies, and an analysis of whether any of the policies need to be changed. On February 13, 2014, six weeks after I had begun my study leave, Interim Chancellor William Kelly, who had previously served as an English faculty member at Queens College and as executive officer of the English doctoral program (as well as provost and then president of the Graduate Center),38 issued a memorandum about Pathways. In this memo he stated that he had carried out “an informal review [of Pathways] involving faculty members from the key disciplines of the natural sciences, English, and the humanities, as well as representation from the University Faculty Senate [UFS].” (I thought it curious that, in describing the participating faculty, the memo listed English separately from the humanities, but I read on.) “Participants quickly reached consensus on three changes.”39 One of the three changes listed in the memo was that colleges would continue to be allowed to ask for waivers from the central office if “a major or degree program cannot be accommodated within the Common Core framework. . . . Efforts will be made to ensure that every college is fully aware of the waiver process.” It wasn’t entirely clear to me exactly what that meant. I wondered whether it was related to my having turned down all but one waiver request because the requesters had not made a convincing case (to me) that their programs were incompatible with the Common Core, and providing these programs with waivers would have made it more difficult for these programs’ students should they have chosen to transfer (see chapter 7). A second change was that the members of the CCCRC (the CUNY-­wide faculty committee that reviews college-­approved courses for the Pathways Common Core) would no longer be appointed by the central office. Instead, the members would be “chosen through college governance processes.” I wondered whether it would be possible to balance representatives appropriately by this method, so that the committees weren’t dominated by the largest departments. But given that most Common Core courses had already been approved, it didn’t seem to be a critical issue, and I knew it was something that the UFS wanted. Nevertheless, my concerns seemed to have some basis about one year later—­the committee that was now responsible for reviewing three areas of the Common Core (English Composition, Creative Experience, and Individual and Society, areas that encompass courses likely to be in many social science

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and all humanities fields) now consisted of over 50 percent English department faculty.40 The third change was the one of most concern to me: “The University will no longer specify a limit on course hours in Common Core areas.” The 30-­credit curriculum would remain in effect; however, each college could choose how many contact hours each of its Common Core courses would carry. As explained in detail in prior chapters, particularly with regard to the disciplines of English, languages other than English, mathematics, and natural sciences, this meant that, depending on a college’s choices, a student might have to end up spending, for multiple courses, more than 3 hours in class per week, for no evidence-­based additional educational benefit, and still receiving only 3 credits for each course, although the faculty would receive more than 3 hours of workload (and thus have to teach fewer courses), and the colleges would have to pay more to have these courses taught (while still receiving only 3 credits’ worth of tuition). In one way the timing of this announcement was surprising. It seemed that some members of the UFS leadership and other faculty, particularly in certain disciplines, were obtaining some changes in Pathways that they had wanted for a long time. Would it not have been more strategic to reserve any such changes until CUNY was required to make some changes in Pathways? To be more explicit, as of February 13, 2014, when the memo was released, CUNY had not yet learned the results of the two Pathways lawsuits (CUNY won these lawsuits at the end of February 2014, and the resulting appeals in June 2015; see chapter 11). If the lawsuits had been lost, that might have been an appropriate time to make these concessions. Further, if the memo’s goal was to quiet faculty protests, that goal was not achieved—­anti-­Pathways faculty protests continued despite this announcement,41 and appeals were still filed by the PSC and the UFS after the lawsuits were lost. But perhaps Bill Kelly, and others who may have been involved in writing that memo, simply felt that these changes were the right thing to do, no matter when they were made and under what circumstances. In contrast, in a conversation that I had about the memo with a former highly placed official at the US Department of Education, that person immediately listed the same possible negative consequences of allowing more contact hours that I listed above. I didn’t have to lay them out. And Martin Kurzweil, in his chapter in Bill Bowen and Gene Tobin’s book Locus of Authority, states, “Although supporters of the faculty position view [the changes outlined in the memo] as a welcome change in tone and willingness to compromise, supporters

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of the Goldstein administration and Pathways view it as the beginning of a slippery slope.”42 I myself have never understood the value of compromise when the “compromise” meant that one group got something at what I felt to be the expense of another group. Still, the 8-­category 30-­credit Common Core, the 6–­12 additional general education credits for bachelor’s-­degree students, the step function (see chapter 4), the aligned initial parts of ten majors, and most other parts of the Pathways policies remained intact, which was far better than what has happened with many other administrators’ policies when they left their positions, as the former Department of Education official reminded me. Further, in January 2015, the CUNY central administration put to good use the part of the Pathways resolution requiring that “all courses taken for credit at an undergraduate CUNY college be accepted for credit at every other CUNY undergraduate college.”43 In one simple act, all the courses—­many thousands of them (over four thousand listed by one college alone)—­whose credits were still listed in the CUNY software as not transferring at all from one college to another, were changed so that they would yield at least elective credit on transfer to any CUNY college. I also heard that the early college high schools associated with CUNY (public high schools that facilitate students’ taking many college courses during high school) had begun focusing on Pathways Common Core courses for their college course offerings, giving the students a real leg up when they went to a CUNY college to finish their degrees. To the best of my knowledge, there have been no significant changes in Pathways policies since Chancellor J. B. Milliken began his tenure in June of 2014. All of that is to the good. So the majority of the Pathways policies remain in place. However, only if these policies are effective in helping students to transfer without losing credits and to graduate more quickly will all the trouble in implementing Pathways have been worth it. But any relevant public data have been slow in coming. For over two years after I left for my study leave, at least partly over a concern to preserve the program, the central office apparently kept a low profile regarding Pathways. There were many requests that evaluations of Pathways be conducted, with those requests coming both from within and from outside CUNY. The New York City Council held a hearing on Pathways on February 25, 2014, at which at least three council members asked the CUNY administration panel that testified to provide specifics on how CUNY would assess Pathways’ effects. Barbara Bowen, president of the PSC and leader of the PSC panel, said to the council members at the beginning of her presentation, “You should ask for the

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data.” However, minimal data were released during that period. I heard of some preliminary data that were extremely promising—­data indicating that a great many transfer students had not lost credits though these students would have lost credits pre-­Pathways, and that many more community college students were waiting to transfer until after they had received their associate’s degrees, but I understood that these data were preliminary and needed verification. In early 2015 there was a column about Pathways in CUNY’s newsletter, CUNY Matters.44 According to this brief piece, in fall 2014, the second fall semester that Pathways was in effect, there were 135,510 students satisfying their general education requirements in accordance with Pathways requirements, and 419,607 filled seats in Pathways courses. In addition, from September 2013 to December 2014, students had transferred more than 418,000 Pathways courses. By the end of fall 2014, the CCCRC had approved more than 1,660 courses for the Common Core (the 30 credits of general education that every CUNY student must now take). And a total of 639 courses had been approved as entry-­level courses for the ten majors that had been aligned across the system as part of Pathways. However, these data simply showed that what Pathways is intended to cover is big, not that Pathways is helping students transfer their credits. Ever since I left the CUNY central office, people have been telling me that they hear both that Pathways is and is not working. I have been told, for example, that students have filed relatively few Pathways-­related appeals with the central office (appeals stating that a student’s rights under Pathways have been violated, and that the student is not satisfied with her or his college’s decision on the appeal). But the number of appeals coming to the higher, central, level could be low because students don’t know about the appeals process, or are choosing not to follow it, rather than because the colleges are following the Pathways policies. I have also heard that some policies are not being enforced, and that alignment of the ten majors’ courses has not always proceeded as intended, and needs some attention. There appear to be cases in which credits are being denied for transferred major courses that, although they do not have different learning outcomes, have different prerequisites. Pathways also needs to be expanded. Alignment of far more than ten majors is needed, and there are still some associate’s degrees that need to be better aligned with Pathways. In addition, similar to many other universities, CUNY needs to address more explicitly a variety of types of prior experiences and accomplishments so that these experiences and accomplishments result in, not

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just higher course placement, and not just college elective credit, but actual college general education or major credit (e.g., credit for Advanced Placement courses, dual enrollment/early college courses in high school, veterans training/ experience, study abroad, and International Baccalaureate courses). Further, again similar to many other universities, CUNY does not yet have a functioning reverse transfer policy, whereby students who transfer from a community to a senior college before earning their associate’s degree can receive that associate’s degree after earning some additional credits at the senior college. Finally, there is much work to be done, at CUNY and elsewhere, in terms of ensuring that new transfer students have supports comparable to new freshmen, which can greatly enhance new transfer students’ persistence and graduation, avoiding what is known as “transfer shock.”45 Mostly what I have heard, though, is that Pathways is working. Perhaps those who know me would not dare to say otherwise. But here are some examples of what I have heard. This is a comment posted online on one of Matt Reed’s excellent blog pieces in Inside Higher Ed, this one dated November 17, 2015, from someone calling him-­or herself “Pathways Guide”: “CUNY’s Pathways Initiative has done an amazing job of [credit transfer]. You’ll find no shortage of faculty whining that they weren’t able to force transfer students to retake courses or force all students to satisfy every department’s desire to mandate their own discipline’s favorite course. Of course faculty use different holy language when complaining, but it’s a thin layer to dig through to see it’s almost always what I just said.”46 Consider also what I heard from a community college provost in fall of 2015. The provost told me that Pathways was working well there, and that an extra benefit had turned out to be that when a student adopts a major that requires a particular mathematics course, and the student has taken a different mathematics course, pre-­Pathways the student had to go through a time-­consuming waiver process in order for that other mathematics course to be accepted instead. Now, the college’s staff can just look to see whether this other course satisfies the Mathematical and Quantitative Reasoning category of Pathways, and if it does, the student can immediately count that course toward his/her major. In addition, a 2016 study by Ithaka S&R of CUNY’s Guttman Community College reported that, despite the work involved, “many Guttman administrators and faculty feel that Pathways provided great benefit to students at Guttman and other CUNY community colleges by easing transfer to the senior colleges.”47

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At a 2016 event at MoMath (the National Museum of Mathematics in Manhattan), I saw Robert Thompson, professor and department chair of mathematics at Hunter College and one of the most effective members and subcommittee chairs of the CCCRC since its inception in 2012. He told me that he believed that the conversations among faculty from across CUNY that resulted from CCCRC membership had been useful and productive. He felt that these conversations had resulted in improvements to the courses submitted to the CCCRC for approval. It has also been reinforcing to hear that the central office has not had any reports whatsoever of CUNY graduate students being unable to find part-­time teaching positions because of Pathways. That fear, like many others, appears to have been unfounded. But perhaps my favorite example of anecdotal evidence that Pathways is working concerns a CUNY student whom I have come to know. First I got to know her mother, who told me, in summer 2014, that her daughter was about to graduate from CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College. I asked the mother to ask her daughter whether she knew what Pathways was. The mother showed me the text she received in reply—­the daughter wrote that Pathways was a good program that helped students transfer their credits. When I later got to know this student, I learned that she had started at LaGuardia Community College in fall 2011, where she was in a joint program operated by LaGuardia and John Jay College (part of the Justice Academy). When Pathways began in fall 2013, this student had had a choice whether to follow the general education requirements that were in effect when she entered LaGuardia, or to follow the Pathways requirements. She opted in to the Pathways requirements. After finishing her associate’s degree, she transferred to John Jay College for her bachelor’s degree in fall 2014. She told me that because of her deciding to opt in to Pathways, several more of her courses counted toward requirements when she transferred; as a result, in comparison to her friend who had taken identical courses but did not opt in to Pathways, the student I know was two courses ahead of her friend in completing her bachelor’s degree. Then, during the fall 2016 semester, CUNY finally released some initial evaluative analyses related to Pathways.48 The cover message noted (correctly) that it was still “too early to answer key long term questions about the Pathways initiative” (e.g., the effect of Pathways on graduation rates), but that the percentages of students taking courses in various disciplines has not significantly changed (so fears by language and other faculty and graduate students that there would

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not be courses for them to teach were unfounded), that post­transfer retention rates and grade point averages have not decreased (so the quality of students transferring into the senior colleges has not decreased), and that transfer from associate’s-­to bachelor’s-­degree programs has increased (so Pathways has positively impacted senior college enrollments). In other words, many of the negative predictions about Pathways’ effects have already proven untrue. Later that semester, the New York City Council held another hearing on Pathways. I watched the video of this hearing, which is available online.49 CUNY’s panel was led by University Dean for Undergraduate Studies Lucinda Zoe, and she was joined by a CUNY president, a provost, and a student. Lucinda said it was still too early to see the effects of Pathways on graduation rates (the very first students to begin college and transfer under Pathways would not graduate until 2017). However, Lucinda was able to present some other data. First, the percentage of students transferring to bachelor’s-­degree programs with an associate’s degree had increased 31 percent. Transferring with an associate’s degree is a big advantage for students because, if for any reason they don’t finish their bachelor’s degree, they nevertheless have their associate’s degree. The data Lucinda reported demonstrated that students were no longer transferring as soon as possible due to fear that their credits wouldn’t transfer, and/or that the step function (described in chapter 4) was providing an incentive for students to obtain their associate’s degrees before transferring (such students have fewer general education requirements after transferring). Lucinda also reported that the total number of credits transfer students earned in the year following transfer had remained stable, demonstrating that the new Common Core was just as effective in preparing transfer students for courses at their new colleges as were the pre-­Pathways general education requirements. Finally, prior to Pathways, 33 percent of students who transferred had at least one course that did not contribute to any degree requirements (including the total number of credits needed), but after Pathways that value had decreased to 13 percent. That was a 60 percent decrease in the percentage of students transferring with courses that did not contribute to their degree requirements, a very large decrease, benefiting many thousands of students each semester. The PSC also did a panel presentation at this hearing. Barbara led their panel, accompanied by James Davis, a professor of English at Brooklyn College, and Kevin Sailor, an associate professor and chair of the Department of Psychology at Lehman College.

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I paid particular attention to Kevin’s presentation. He described the results of analyses that he had done on CUNY transfer data. From what I could tell, this was the first public presentation, of any sort, of the analyses that the PSC had apparently done on the large amount of data they obtained from CUNY based on a FOIL request in the late summer of 2012, four years earlier (see chapter 8). Though he made some good points in his presentation, and it is difficult to critique an analysis without a close examination of a complete written paper, Kevin’s analyses and conclusions appeared to be flawed. • He appeared to have looked only at data from CUNY students who transferred from community to senior (bachelor’s-­degree) colleges, but, as stated earlier in this book, close to half of transfer students do not fit this pattern. Pathways was designed to help all transfer students. • In order to determine whether a course transferred, he seemed to have relied on the information in TIPPS. However, again as stated earlier in this book, the information in TIPPS is about what should happen to transfer credits, not about what does happen. • He seemed to have focused simply on whether a transfer student’s credits transferred, and to have ignored the problems that students have when credits for courses they have taken to satisfy general education or major requirements become elective credits after transfer. • He seemed to have assumed that if a student didn’t have to take more credits than his/her degree required as a result of transferring, then transfer caused the student no problems, ignoring the fact that the student may have ended up having virtually no electives and/or could not do a minor or a double major. • He apparently assumed that all associate’s degrees require 60 credits and all bachelor’s degrees 120, which is not the case. • He said, “Unlike the older associate’s degree policy [Pathways] does not provide any incentive to finish the associate’s degree.” This made me wonder whether he had ever read the original board resolution establishing Pathways, with its provision of the step function, and even whether he had listened to Lucinda’s testimony just a few minutes earlier when she stated that, since Pathways, the percentage of students transferring to bachelor’s-­degree programs with an associate’s degree had increased 31 percent. • He concluded that “if there has been any reduction in excess credits or improvement in graduation rates I don’t think it can be attributed to Pathways. It is probably more likely to be attributable to things like reverse transfer

Reaching the End of the Path  ■ 371 policies.” This was a curious conclusion because, as CUNY had stated in its own presentation, it was still too early to see any effects of Pathways on graduation rates, and CUNY currently doesn’t have any reverse transfer policies. Was he saying that if, in the future, there were any improvements in CUNY graduation rates, they would be due to new policies, other than Pathways, that CUNY would have instituted by that time? According to that logic, no one would ever be able to see any positive effects of Pathways.

Listening to this testimony reminded me of the great difficulties in quantifying any negative consequences of transfer, pre-­Pathways or otherwise, difficulties that my office had recognized as early as 2010 when we first started working on Pathways. It was unfortunate that the central office and the PSC could not have teamed up on their analyses. We could have steered the PSC away from unnecessary pitfalls in their data analyses, and have ourselves benefited from extra eyes and hands.

The Paths They Have Taken And what of all the people who played a major role—­supporting or opposing—­in the establishment of Pathways? The trustees who were most involved—­including Board Chair Benno Schmidt and Chair of the board’s academic committee, CAPPR, Wellington Chen—­remained trustees for some time. However, in June 2016, the governor replaced Benno, whose term had expired years earlier, as well as many other trustees (with Wellington leaving the Board in June 2017). Matt continues as chancellor emeritus, and he is writing, serving on boards, and serving CUNY in a variety of ways. In 2016 he and George Otte, University Director of Academic Technology, published a book that they had edited: Change We Must: Deciding the Future of Higher Education (RosettaBooks). Bill Kelly returned to the faculty in June of 2014 when J. B. took office as the permanent chancellor succeeding Matt. At the end of 2015 Bill became the New York Public Library’s Andrew W. Mellon Director of the Research Libraries. Julia, who had been my associate university provost, finished her term as interim executive vice chancellor and university provost in the summer of 2015, returning to her faculty position at the CUNY Graduate Center, and then Vita Rabinowitz succeeded me as the permanent executive vice chancellor and university provost. I was delighted with the choice, in part because she had been a

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strong supporter of Pathways when she was the provost at Hunter College, but more so because she is a kind, dedicated, hardworking, smart person whose first priority is to serve everyone at CUNY. Some college leaders who were deeply involved, such as New York City College of Technology’s President Russell Hotzler, remain in place. However, others—­Queens College’s President James Muyskens, Macaulay Honors College Dean Ann Kirschner, City College’s President Lisa Coico, and the School of Law’s Dean, Michelle Anderson—­have left their positions (Michelle to become president of CUNY’s Brooklyn College). There has been a large amount of turnover among the many central office administrators who helped Pathways and me—­huge losses for CUNY. Starting in the fall of 2016, following the governor’s replacing a large number of t­ rustees, Allan Dobrin (executive vice chancellor and chief operating officer), Frederick Schaffer (senior vice chancellor for legal affairs and general counsel), Jay Hershenson (senior vice chancellor for university relations), Dave Fields (senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor), Michael Arena (university director of communications and marketing), and then Robert Ptachik (senior university dean for the executive office and enrollment), all of whom played essential roles in the Pathways Project, left the CUNY central office. Multiple excellent people have left my former office (the Office of Academic Affairs) as well, without being replaced. Although many of those who remain have been promoted, I have repeatedly wondered how all the departures and uncertainty must be affecting the ability of the central office to set long-­term, as well as short-­term, priorities and then to act on them. In contrast, not surprisingly, there has been relatively little turnover among the faculty who were involved in the Pathways controversy. The PSC is still led by Barbara Bowen, who has been president of that organization since 2000.50 In the UFS, Terrence Martell, who took over from Sandi Cooper as UFS chair in 2012, finished the maximum two, two-­year, contiguous terms as UFS chair and so in 2016 was replaced by a member of the UFS Executive Committee, Katherine Conway, now a full professor at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and someone who played a constructive role during the establishment of Pathways. The other members of the UFS Executive Committee remain largely the same. One notable change, however, is that, in 2014, Sandi Cooper, so prominent in what happened at CUNY concerning Pathways, began the CUNY retirement process, though she has remained active, including in pro-­Palestinian causes.51

Reaching the End of the Path  ■ 373

She has continued to criticize LEAP52 and Pathways, repeating misleading statements. In 2016 she wrote that “Following the 2011 Board acceptance of Logue’s ‘Pathways’ we have perhaps the most embarrassing general education programs in US academic history, justified as a student friendly policy. To fulfill general education, students can select from over 2000 courses.”53 Yes, there are over 2,000 courses approved for the Common Core. But that is the number combined for 19 colleges and 8 Common Core categories, an average of 13 courses per category per college, including all the STEM major introductory courses (the STEM variant courses). Further, as was the case pre-­Pathways, it is totally the colleges’—­not the central office’s—­choice as to whether to have more than one course per category. The board policy could be satisfied by a total of fewer than 200 courses across the entire system of 19 undergraduate colleges. The distinguished professors who spoke repeatedly in favor of Pathways all remain in their CUNY positions, as do many of the faculty who spoke out against Pathways. For example, the first faculty member to speak against Pathways at the June 2011 public hearing, William Crain, remains a professor of psychology at City College, continuing to protest what he considers to be unjust causes (e.g., bear hunts).54 Some of the people who served together on the Common Core Steering Committee became lasting good friends. I saw Kay Conway, Erika Dreifus, and Patricia Matthews-­Salazar at an April 2016 talk that Elizabeth Nunez gave about her new book, Even in Paradise.55 Many of the students who took time that they did not have, time that they spent supporting Pathways so bravely, have graduated and moved on. Steven Rodriguez, for example, who testified and who served on the Pathways Common Core Steering Committee, graduated from City College and has become an entrepreneur, involved with start-­ups in Washington, DC. Cory Provost, who saved the day for the Pathways resolution at the June 2011 CAPPR board committee meeting, and who was chair of CUNY’s University Student Senate (USS) at that time, is now the male state committeeman and district leader of Brooklyn’s Fifty-­Eighth New York State Assembly District, and is running for a position on the New York City Council. Kafui Kouakou, who was chair of the USS in the latter stages of Pathways implementation and helped provide so much support for Pathways, is now a field liaison for the CUNY Service Corps and manager for the Program for Dreamers at CUNY. One student has made a different kind of transition. James (Jamie) Robinson, the student who testified “we love you Lexa” at the June 2011 public hearing on the Pathways

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resolution (see chapter 5), died unexpectedly in January 2016. He was active in many causes, an inspiration to many, and is much missed. Another death has hit very hard. William G. Bowen, former president of Princeton University and the Mellon Foundation, and founder of JSTOR, ­Artstor, and Ithaka, who inspired this book in every possible way, died on October 20, 2016.56 No human being has ever matched, or will ever match, his unique combination of dedication to data, the success of all students, and hard work, all infused with consummate courage. The enormity of higher education’s loss at his passing is tempered only by the many groundbreaking writings he left behind for us. In my own case, I chose not to return to the CUNY administration after my study leave ended. I had thought I would retire and become an independent scholar, but the CUNY central administration had a different idea. Instead I have become a CUNY research professor. I finished the fourth edition of The Psychology of Eating and Drinking,57 and then focused on my research concerning methods for helping the majority of all college students who have been assessed as not prepared for college-­level work, research supported by three grants. As a professor, I now have the time, and the opportunity, to express my opinions. And I do. But do I miss aspects of being executive vice chancellor and university provost? Yes. Every May and June, walking around Manhattan’s Lincoln Center and Beacon Theater, I see people dressed in academic robes and am reminded that it is commencement season. Each CUNY college and freestanding professional school has its own commencement ceremonies each spring, and every year, as executive vice chancellor and university provost, I attended several to bring greetings on behalf of the chancellor. Though very time-­consuming, it was a welcome task, which always included sitting on the stage with the rest of what is known as the platform party. A common practice at these ceremonies is for each graduate to come up and cross the stage after her or his name is called. If you are in the platform party during this part of the ceremony, you have a good view of the graduates’ shoes. In fact, other than their heads, this is the only part of them that you can really see because of the graduates’ identical robes, which make the differences among the graduates’ shoes particularly noticeable. Many times I have heard platform party members—­faculty, administrators—­commenting on these differences while celebrating the new graduates. You can see sandals, sneakers, and spike heels so high it is hard

Reaching the End of the Path  ■ 375

to imagine how the graduate can cross the stage, much less get up and down the stairs leading to it. But for me, other differences were always more salient. Sometimes I was asked to shake the hand of each graduate. There could be hundreds of them, taking more than an hour. The hands differed in many ways. Small to large. Loose to firm. Pale to dark. Low down to high up. And very dry to very sweaty. The hands took a huge variety of forms. But I felt joy when I grasped each one. I miss those hands and all the other hands that have helped and sustained me.

Where We Are and Where We Have Yet to Go The turmoil at CUNY about Pathways seems largely to have subsided. Other than pieces about Mike’s book and the fall 2016 New York City Council Hearing,58 there has been no coverage specifically on Pathways in the PSC newspaper, Clarion, since the spring of 2014. The last three UFS website mentions to criticize Pathways are three blog pieces, one by Sandi in March 2015 (the one in which she also again criticizes the use of learning outcomes and AAC&U’s LEAP initiative), a second by another UFS Executive Committee member in February 2016, which simply referred to “the lessons of the recent Pathways debacle”59 (and also criticized our research on mathematics remediation, published in September 2016 in Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis),60 and a third by another UFS Executive Committee member in November 2016, which refers obliquely to “the faculty-­administration conflict over Pathways.”61 The AAUP published an article about the history of Pathways in the fall of 2014,62 but nothing since. That article mentions the filing of the PSC-­UFS lawsuits, but not that CUNY won those lawsuits (as well as the subsequent appeals). In the legal arena, only the grievance remains unsettled—­it is still “sleeping” (see chapter 11), but it concerns events so many years in the past that it is doubtful that it would have any legal traction. CUNY now has an admissions video stating, “The CUNY system is very convenient as there are colleges everywhere, and no matter what college you go to you can transfer credits very easily.”63 The quieting of the Pathways controversy could be due to many reasons. One possibility is that many CUNY leaders involved with the Pathways controversy have since moved on. Another is that everyone at CUNY—­faculty, administrators, UFS, and PSC—­had a much bigger issue of concern, addressed

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only in 2016: there was no new contract and thus no raises for many faculty and administrators for some seven years. Or it could just be that Pathways has now become the status quo, with any changes to it to be resisted. Whatever the reason for the calming of the controversy, it is time to study thoroughly what has happened with Pathways and to learn from it. This book helps make a start.

Notes ■■■■■ Introduction. Starting the Journey 1. Office of Institutional Research. (n.d.). Enrollment. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/ira​/ir​ /data​-book​/current​/enrollment​.html The City University of New York. (n.d.). CUNY interactive factbook. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: https://​public​.tableau​.com​/profile​/oira​.cuny​#!​ /vizhome​/CUNYInteractiveFactbook​_1​/Start 2. The City University of New York. (n.d.). Alumni. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/alumni​.html 3. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​ /sites​/4​/media​-­­­­­­­­assets​/ug​_student​_profile​_f15​.pdf 4. Office of Institutional Research. (n.d.). System retention and graduation rates. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​ cuny​ .edu​ /about​ /administration​/offices​/ira​/ir​/data​-­­­­­­­­book​/current​/retention​-­­­­­­­­graduation​/system​.html 5. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 2. 6. State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. (2016). SHEF: FY 2015. State higher education finance. Retrieved from SHEEO website: http://​www​.sheeo​.org​ /sites​/default​/files​/SHEEO​_SHEF​_FY2015​.pdf 7. Bowen, W. G., Chingos, M. M., & McPherson, M. S. (2009). Crossing the finish line: Completing college at America’s public universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 8. National Conference of State Legislatures. (2015, July 31). Performance-­based funding for higher education. Retrieved from National Conference of State Legislatures website: http://​www​.ncsl​.org​/research​/education​/performance​-­­­­­­­­funding​.aspx 9. Bowen, W. G. (2013). Higher education in the digital age. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 10. Carnevale, A. P., Smith, N., & Strohl, J. (2010, June). Help wanted: Projections of jobs and education requirements through 2018. Center on Education and the Workforce. Retrieved from Georgetown University website: https://​cew​.georgetown​.edu​/cew​ -reports​/help​-wanted/ 11. Brenneman, M. W., Callan, P. M., Ewell, P. T., Finney, J. E., Jones, D. P., & Zis, S. (2010, November). Good policy, good practice II: Improving outcomes and productivity in higher education: A guide for policymakers. Retrieved from NCHEMS website: http://​ www​.highereducation​.org​/reports​/Policy​_Practice​_2010​/GPGPII​.pdf Smith, M. (2010, December). Transfer and articulation policies. Retrieved from Education Commission of the States website: http://​www​.ecs​.org​/clearinghouse​/90​/70​ /9070​.pdf

378  ■  Notes to Introduction 12. Bowen, W. G., Chingos, M. M., & McPherson, M. S. (2009). Crossing the finish line: Completing college at America’s public universities. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Long, B. T., & Kurlaender, M. (2009). Do community colleges provide a viable pathway to a baccalaureate degree? Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 31, 30–­53. Tobin, E. M. (2009). Appendix A: The modern evolution of America’s flagship universities. In W. G. Bowen, M. M. Chingos, & M. S. McPherson (Eds.), Crossing the finish line: Completing college at America’s public universities (pp. 239–­264). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 13. Goldrick-­Rab, S., & Pfeffer, F. T. (2009). Beyond access: Explaining socioeconomic differences in college transfer. Sociology of Education, 82, 101–­125. Roksa, J., & Calcagno, J. C. (2008, June). Making the transition to four-­year institutions: Academic preparation and transfer. Community College Research Center Working Paper No. 13. Retrieved from Community College Research Center website: http://​ccrc​ .tc​.columbia​.edu​/publications​/transition​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­four​-­­­­­­­­year​-­­­­­­­­institutions​.html 14. Moltz, D. (2010, October 20). Golden state’s transfer guarantee. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2010​/10​/20​/california 15. Roksa, J. (2009). Building bridges for student success: Are higher education articulation policies effective? Teachers College Record, 111, 2444–­2478. 16. Brenneman, M. W., Callan, P. M., Ewell, P. T., Finney, J. E., Jones, D. P., & Zis, S. (2010, November). Good policy, good practice II: Improving outcomes and productivity in higher education: A guide for policymakers. Retrieved from NCEMS website: http://​www​ .highereducation​.org​/reports​/Policy​_Practice​_2010​/GPGPII​.pdf 17. Bacow, L. S., Bowen, W. G., Guthrie, K. M., Lack, K. A., & Long, M. P. (2012, May 1). Barriers to adoption of online learning systems in U.S. higher education. Retrieved from Ithaka S+R website: http://​www​.sr​.ithaka​.org​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/2015​ /08​/barriers​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­adoption​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­learning​-­­­­­­­­systems​-­­­­­­­­in​-­­­­­­­­us​-h ­­­­­­­­ igher​-­­­­­­­­education​.pdf 18. Ehrenberg, R. G. (2004). Chapter 5: Herding cats in university hierarchies: Formal structure and policy choice in American research universities. In R. G. Ehrenberg, Governing academia. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Friedrich, A. (2012, March 21). On campus. MPR News Intelligence on higher education. Retrieved from Minnesota Public Radio News website: http://​blogs​.mprnews​ .org​/oncampus​/2012​/03​/how​-many​-faculty​-members​-does​-it​-take​-to​-change​-a​-bulb/ 19. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2011, February 25). Transfer type: Fall 2010. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​ www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/Transfer​_Top​ _Major​.pdf 20. N.Y. EDN. LAW §6201: NY Code—­Section 6201: Legislative findings and intent. Retrieved from FindLaw website: http://​codes​.lp​.findlaw​.com​/nycode​/EDN​/VII​/125​/6201 21. Lipka, S. (2010, October 17). Academic credit: Colleges’ common currency has no set value. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​ /Academic​-­­­­­­­­Credit​-­­­­­­­­Colleges​/124973/ 22. Wrigley, J. (2010, October 22). Improving student transfer at CUNY. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​ www​ .cuny​ .edu​ /academics​ /initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/TransferReport​.pdf 23. Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (n.d.). Academic performance of baccalaureate students: Comparing transfer students with first-­time freshmen. Retrieved

Notes to Chapter 1  ■ 379 from The City University of New York website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​ /pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/ComparingPerformanceTransferFTFStudents​.pdf 24. State Higher Education Executive Officers Association. (2016). SHEF: FY 2015. State higher education finance. Retrieved from SHEEO website: http://​www​.sheeo​.org​ /sites​/default​/files​/SHEEO​_SHEF​_FY2015​.pdf 25. Bowen, W. G., & McPherson, M. S. (2016). Lesson plan: An agenda for change in higher education. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 1. Passing the Pathways Resolution: June 27, 2011 1. Kurzweil, M. A. (2015). The City University of New York. In W. G. Bowen & E. M. Tobin, Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education (pp. 315–­360). New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2. Polishook, I., Cooper, S. E., Bell, M., De Jongh, J., Bakewicz, D., & Stearns, S. J. v. The City University of New York et al. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 95-­119332. P-­Orridge, C., Gomes, W., Ma, S. P., & Cooper, S. v. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 98-­121848. 3. Cooper, S. E., & Farkas, J. (1977, February 19). Letter 50. New York Times, p. 22. Cooper, S. E. (1987, June 24). History can’t tell us what Gorbachev is up to. New York Times, Section A, p. 26. Cooper, S. E. (2000, April 4). Bush and Gore, middling in ivy. New York Times, Section A, p. 22. Cooper, S. E. (2006, October 3). A noble gesture. The New York Times, Section F, p. 4. 4. Cooper wins Peace History Society Lifetime Achievement Award. (2009, October 29). Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/forum​/2009​/10​/29​/cooper​-­­­­­­­­wins​ -­­­­­­­­peace​-­­­­­­­­history​-­­­­­­­­society​-­­­­­­­­lifetime​-­­­­­­­­achievement​-­­­­­­­­award/ 5. Avenoso, K. (1995, April 27). Prof in race flap on CUNY hard cell. New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​.nydailynews​.com​/archives​/news​/prof​-­­­­­­­­race​-­­­­­­­­flap​ -­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­hard​-­­­­­­­­cell​-­­­­­­­­article​-­­­­­­­­1​.688003 Capshaw, R. (2006, March 6). CUNY’s Stalinist left. FrontPage Magazine. Retrieved from http://​archive​.frontpagemag​.com​/readArticle​.aspx​?ARTID​=​5346 6. Cook, B. W., & Markowitz, G. (2008, October). John McKay Cammett (1927–­ 2008). Perspectives on history. Retrieved from https://​www​.historians​.org​/publications​-and​ -directories​/perspectives​-on​-history​/october​-2008​/in​-memoriam​-john​-mckay​-cammett 7. All quoted and summary statements from the board meeting are taken from a video of the meeting retrieved from http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/about​/trustees​/meetings​-­­­­­­­­of​ -­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­board​/meeting​-­­­­­­­­broadcasts​/video​-­­­­­­­­archive​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­2011/ 8. Springside School merged in 2011 with Chestnut Hill Academy to form Springside Chestnut Hill Academy. See http://​www​.sch​.org​/page​/about​-­­­­­­­­sch​/our​-­­­­­­­­history 9. The complete text of the resolution was retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​ /academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/text​-draft​/Reso​.pdf 10. Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2011, July 11). Performance management report 2010–­11, pp. 65, 70. Retrieved from The City University of New York Website:  http://​owl​.cuny​.edu:​7778​/portal​/page​/portal​/oira​/Current​%20CUNY​%20Data​ %20Book​%20​-​%20Accountability​/2010​-11​.Year​-End​.University​.PMP​.2011​-07​-11​.pdf

380  ■  Notes to Chapter 2 11. Cooper, S. E. (2000, May 28). The battle of CUNY: The roots of discontent. New York Times, Section A, p. 12. 12. New Hampshire court upholds professor’s firing. (2016, January 4). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2016​/01​/04​/new​ -hampshire​-court​-upholds​-professors​-firing 13. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2014, May 14). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2013. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​ /ira​/ir​/data​-book​/current​/student​/ug​_student​_profile​_f13​.pdf 14. For discussions regarding whether colleges and universities should have voting board members who are students and/or faculty see Bowen, W. (2011). Lessons learned: Reflections of a university president. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press; Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-­administrative university and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 2. Antecedents: 1961 to Summer 2010 1. THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY, Fifth Edition, p. 78, by Clark Kerr, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1963, 1972, 1982, 1995, 2001, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1991 by Clark Kerr. 2. Hechinger, G. (2003, December 2). Clark Kerr, leading public educator and former head of California’s universities, dies at 92. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​ www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/12​/02​/us​/clark​-­­­­­­­­kerr​-­­­­­­­­leading​-­­­­­­­­public​-­­­­­­­­educator​-­­­­­­­­former​-­­­­­­­­head​ -­­­­­­­­california​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­universities​-­­­­­­­­dies​-9­­­­­­­­ 2​.html 3. Asimov, I. (2004). Foundation. New York: Bantam Dell. 4. Unless indicated otherwise, sources for the historical information in this chapter are, in addition to my own direct personal knowledge of past events: Kurzweil, M. A. (2015). The City University of New York. In W. G. Bowen & E. M. Tobin, Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education (pp. 315–­360). New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. The birth of a modern university (September 16, 2011). Retrieved from http://​www1​ .cuny​.edu​/mu​/forum​/2011​/09​/16​/the​-­­­­­­­­birth​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­a​-­­­­­­­­modern​-­­­­­­­­university/ Gordon, S. C. (1975). The transformation of the City University of New York, 1945– 1970 (Unpublished doctoral dissertation). Columbia University, New York, NY. 5. Gill, B. P. (1999, May). The governance of the City University of New York: A system at odds with itself. Rand report DRR-­2053–­1, p. 14. Retrieved from New York City website: http://​www​.nyc​.gov​/html​/records​/rwg​/cuny​/pdf​/randdrr​-­­­­­­­­2053​-­­­­­­­­1​.pdf 6. New York State Education Law. City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​public​.leginfo​.state​.ny​.us​/lawssrch​.cgi​?NVLWO: 7. CUNY Bylaws, Article XI Duties and Qualifications of Titles in the Instructional Staff > Section 11.2 Chancellor. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_xi​ /section​_11​.2.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 8. P-­Orridge, C., Gomes, W., Ma, S. P., & Cooper, S. v. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 98-­121848. 9. Logue, A. W. (2010, May 21). The power of the system. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2010​/05​/21​/logue

Notes to Chapter 2  ■ 381 10. CUNY Bylaws, Article IX Organization and Duties of Faculty Departments > Section 9.1. Department Organization. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​ /article​_ix​/section​_9​.1.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 11. PSC CUNY (2014, June 5). 4 decades of PSC history. Retrieved from http://​psc​ -­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/about​-­­­­­­­­us​/psc​-­­­­­­­­history 12. P-­Orridge, C., Gomes, W., Ma, S. P., & Cooper, S. v. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 98-­121848. For the original Polishook lawsuit see Polishook, I., Cooper, S. E., Bell, M., De Jongh, J., Bakewicz, D., & Stearns, S. J. v. The City University of New York et al. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 95-­119332. 13. CUNY Bylaws. Article VIII Organization and Duties of the Faculty > Section 8.5 Duties of Faculty. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_viii​/section​_8​.5.​ /text​/​#Navigation​_Location Schaffer, Frederick P. (2011, November 3). A message from General Counsel and Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Frederick P. Schaffer on the Pathways Project and faculty authority regarding academic policy. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​ /mu​/vc​_la​/2011​/11​/03​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­general​-­­­­­­­­counsel​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­senior​-­­­­­­­­vice​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​ -­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­legal​-­­­­­­­­affairs​-­­­­­­­­frederick​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­schaffer​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­project​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­authority​ -­­­­­­­­regarding​-­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­policy/ 14. Judge upholds CUNY Pathways, twice. (2014, April 22). CUNY Matters. Retrieved   from   http://​ w ww1​ . cuny​ . edu​ / mu​ / forum​ / 2014 ​ / 04 ​ / 22 ​ / judge ​ - upholds ​ - cuny​ -pathways​-twice/ Schaffer, Frederick P. (2011, November 3). A message from General Counsel and Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Frederick P. Schaffer on the Pathways Project and faculty authority regarding academic policy. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​ /mu​/vc​_la​/2011​/11​/03​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­general​-­­­­­­­­counsel​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­senior​-­­­­­­­­vice​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​ -­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­legal​-­­­­­­­­affairs​-­­­­­­­­frederick​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­schaffer​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­project​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­authority​ -­­­­­­­­regarding​-­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­policy/ 15. P-­Orridge, C., Gomes, W., Ma, S. P., & Cooper, S. v. The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. No. 98-­121848. 16. Cooper, S. (1998–­2000). Sandi Cooper papers on the future of the City University of New York. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. New York, NY. 17. Cooper, S. (1998–­2000). Sandi Cooper papers on the future of the City University of New York. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. New York, NY. 18. Solomon, A., & Hussey, D. (1998, April 21). Enemies of public education. Village Voice. Retrieved from http://​archive​.psc​-cuny​.org​/enemies​.htm 19. Cooper, S. (1998–­2000). Sandi Cooper papers on the future of the City University of New York. The Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. New York, NY. 20. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021.

382  ■  Notes to Chapter 2 Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, Local 2334, AFT, AFL-­CIO, Bowen, B., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, and the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, Baruch College, Lehman College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, College of Staten Island, Queensborough Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, York College, New York City College of Technology, New Community College, Medgar Evers College, LaGuardia Community College, Hostos Community College, City College, Bronx Community College, Wallerstein, M., Fernandez, R., Travis, J., Fritz, W., Call, D., & Perez, A. Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­103414. 21. New York State Education Law. City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​public​.leginfo​.state​.ny​.us​/lawssrch​.cgi​?NVLWO: 22. The chancellor’s desk: New pathways to continued progress (2011, Summer). CUNY Matters, p. 2. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​/cm​ -­­­­­­­­summer2011​.pdf 23. Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York. (1969, April 28), p. 60. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​ _minutes​/1969​/04​-­­­­­­­­28​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 24. Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York. (1973, February 26), p. 26. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​ _minutes​/1973​/02​-­­­­­­­­26​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 25. Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (1985, June 24), p. 101. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​ _minutes​/1985​/06​-­­­­­­­­24​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 26. Gill, B. P. (1999, May). The governance of the City University of New York: A system at odds with itself. Rand report DRR-­2053-­1, pp. 14–­15. Retrieved from New York City website: http://​www​.nyc​.gov​/html​/records​/rwg​/cuny​/pdf​/randdrr​-­­­­­­­­2053​-­­­­­­­­1​.pdf 27. Schmidt, B. C., Badillo, H., Brady, J. V., MacDonald, H., Ohrenstein, M., Roberts, R. T., & Schwartz, R. (1999, June 7). The City University of New York: An institution adrift. Retrieved from New York City website: http://​www​.nyc​.gov​/html​/records​/rwg​ /cuny​/pdf​/adrift​.pdf 28. Board of Trustees minutes of proceedings. (1999, November 22), p. 225. Retrieved from  http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/1999​/11​-­­­­­­­­22​/pdf​/​#Navigation​ _Location 29. US Department of Education. (2006). A test of leadership: Charting the future of U.S. higher education. ERIC Number ED493504. Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://​eric​.ed​.gov​/​?id​=​ED493504 30. US Department of Education. (2006). A test of leadership: Charting the future of U.S. higher education. ERIC Number ED493504. Washington, DC. Retrieved from http://​eric​.ed​.gov​/​?id​=​ED493504 31. Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (2009). Characteristics of excellence in higher education: Requirements of affiliation and standards for accreditation. Philadelphia, PA. Retrieved from MSCHE website: http://​www​.msche​.org​/publications​ /CHX​-­­­­­­­­2011​-­­­­­­­­WEB​.PDF 32. New York State Commission on Higher Education (2008, June). Final report of findings and recommendations. Pp. 39–­40. Retrieved from SUNY website: http://​system​ .suny​.edu​/media​/suny​/content​-­­­­­­­­assets​/documents​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­senate​/NYSHIE​-­­­­­­­­final​-­­­­­­­­report​.pdf

Notes to Chapter 2  ■ 383 33. SUNY. (n.d.). Bigger dreams realized. Retrieved from SUNY website http://​www​ .suny​.edu​/attend​/get​-­­­­­­­­started​/transfer​-­­­­­­­­students/ 34. Neal, A. (2009, April 4). The SUNY core curriculum in context. Presentation at the SUNY 60th Anniversary Conference. Retrieved from http://​www​.goacta​.org​/images​ /download​/SUNY​_core​_curriculum​_in​_context​.pdf Neal, A. D. (2009, April 26). No room for backsliding on SUNY’s core curriculum. ACTA in the News. Retrieved from http://​www​.goacta​.org​/news​/no​_room​_for​ _backsliding​_on​_sunys​_core​_curriculum 35. Education Commission of the States. (2016, April 18). Transfer and articulation policies: State profiles. Retrieved from http://​www​.ecs​.org​/transfer​-and​-articulation​ -policies​-state​-profiles/ 36. Bok, D. (2013). Higher education in America, chapter 8. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 37. Education Commission of the States. (2016, April 18). Transfer and articulation policies: State profiles. Retrieved from Education Commission of the States website: http://​www​.ecs​.org​/transfer​-and​-articulation​-policies​-state​-profiles/ 38. Bok, D. (2013). Higher education in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 176. 39. Pearlstein, S. (2015, November 25). Four tough things universities should do to rein in costs. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​ /opinions​/four​-tough​-things​-universities​-should​-do​-to​-rein​-in​-costs​/2015​/11​/25​ /64fed3de​-92c0​-11e5​-a2d6​-f57908580b1f​_story​.html 40. Hart Research Associates (2009, May). Trends and emerging practices in general education. Hart Research Associates: Washington, DC. Retrieved from AAC&U website: www​.aacu​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/files​/LEAP​/2009MemberSurvey​_Part2​.pdf 41. Zemsky, R. (2013). Checklist for change: Making American higher education a sustainable enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 42. Cooper, S. E., & Savage, D. (1996, April 8). CUNY, the vocational university. New York Times, p. 15. 43. Cooper, S. E. (2000). General education—­should every student study the same curriculum? In C. Landsman (Ed.), General education and the core curriculum. Nu Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Hunter College. 44. CUNY Senior Colleges, general education requirements. (2011, July 19). Retrieved   from   http:// ​ w ww​. cuny​. edu ​ / academics​ / initiatives​ / pathways ​ / about ​ / archive​ /resources​/cge​/SeniorCollegeGenEdRequirements​_7​_19​_11​.pdf 45. The City University of New York. (n.d.). CUNY Master Plan 2000–­2004. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/events​/press​/mplan​_tableoc​.html 46. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2011, July 11). Performance management report, p. 103. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​ owl​ .cuny​.edu:​7778​/portal​/page​/portal​/oira​/Current​%20CUNY​%20Data​%20Book​%20​-­­​ %20Accountability​/2010​-­­­­­­­­11​.Year​-­­­­­­­­End​.University​.PMP​.2011​-­­­­­­­­07​-­­­­­­­­11​.pdf 47. CUNY Justice Academy. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.jjay​.cuny​.edu​/cuny​ -­­­­­­­­justice​-­­­­­­­­academy 48. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2011, February 25). Transfer type: Fall 2010. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​ /initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/Transfer​_Top​_Major​.pdf

384  ■  Notes to Chapter 3 49. Logue, A. W. (2011, June 27). Executive Vice Chancellor Alexandra W. Logue’s remarks. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​ /archive​/archive​/vc​-­­­­­­­­logue​-­­­­­­­­remarks​-­­­­­­­­62711​.html 50. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2014, May 14). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2013. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/ira​/ir​/data​-­­­­­­­­book​/current​ /student​/ug​_student​_profile​_f13​.pdf 51. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2014, May 14). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2013. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/ira​/ir​/data​-­­­­­­­­book​/current​ /student​/ug​_student​_profile​_f13​.pdf 52. Del Rossi, A. F., & Hersch, J. (2016, May 21). The private and social benefits of double majors. Journal of Benefit-­Cost Analysis. Retrieved from https://​papers​.ssrn​.com​ /sol3​/papers​.cfm​?abstract​_id​=​2782141 Hemelt, S. W. (2010). The college double major and subsequent earnings. Education Economics, 18, 167–­189. Makridis, C. (2017, March 30). Does it pay to get a double major in college? PBS Newshour. Retrieved from http://​www​.pbs​.org​/newshour​/making​-sense​/pay​-get​-double​-major​ -college/ 53. Excelsior College. (n.d.). Retrieved from www​.excelsior​.edu 54. CUNY. (2008, June 23). CUNY 2008–­2012 Master Plan, p. 27. Retrieved from CUNY website: https://​www​.cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/chancellor​/materplan​_08​_12​.pdf 55. Board of Regents. (n.d.). Bylaws of the Board of Regents. University System of Georgia. Retrieved from http://​www​.usg​.edu​/regents​/bylaws​#charter​_and​_constitutional​ _authority 56. Doyle, W. R. (2010, February). Open-­access colleges responsible for greatest gains in graduation rates. Policy Alert. Retrieved from http://​www​.highereducation​.org​ /pa​_0210​/index​.shtml 57. Shulock, N., & Koester, J. (2014, July). Maximizing resources for student success by reducing time-­and credits-­to-­degree. HCM Strategists. Retrieved from HCM Strategists website: http://​www​.hcmstrategists​.com​/maximizingresources​/images​/Maximizing​ _Resources​_Paper​.pdf 58. Quotes (n.d.). Retrieved from www​.quotes​.net​/quote​/35740 59. Washington, B. T. (1977). In L. R. Harlan & R. W. Smock, R. W. (Eds.) The Booker T. Washington papers (Vol. 7: 1903–­1904). Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 235. Retrieved from http://​web​.archive​.org​/web​/20071031084056​/www​ .historycooperative​.org​/btw​/Vol​.7​/html​/235​.html 60. Bok, D. (2013). Higher education in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 204.

Chapter 3. Formulating the Resolution: October 2010 through January 2011 1. Much of the information on the events in this and future chapters comes from my personal calendar and email records. 2. Lipka, S., & Coddington, R. (2010, October 15). One math course, variously valued within a single university system. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/One​-­­­­­­­­Math​-­­­­­­­­Course​-­­­­­­­­Variously​/125002/

Notes to Chapter 3  ■ 385 3. Roksa, J. (2012). Equalizing credits and rewarding skills: Credit portability and bachelor’s degree attainment. In A. P. Kelly & M. Schneider (Eds.), Getting to graduation: The completion agenda in higher education (pp. 201–­222). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 4. Lipka, S. (2010, October 17). Academic credit: Colleges’ common currency has no set value. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​ /Academic​-­­­­­­­­Credit​-­­­­­­­­Colleges​/124973/ 5. New York State Education Law. City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​public​.leginfo​.state​.ny​.us​/lawssrch​.cgi​?NVLWO: 6. Wrigley, J. (2010, October 22). Improving student transfer at CUNY. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​ /archive​/TransferReport​.pdf 7. Other factors resulting in excess credits include changing majors, attempting to increase grade point averages, and maintaining full-­time status in order to obtain health insurance or financial aid. See also Mangan, K. (2013, December 4). Group hopes to map a faster path to college completion. Chronicle of Higher Education. ­Retrieved from http://​www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/Mapping​-­­­­­­­­a​-­­­­­­­­Faster​-­­­­­­­­Path​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­a​ /143359/ 8. The City University of New York. Investing in our future: The City University of New York’s Master Plan 2012–­2016, p. 1. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www​ .cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​/masterplan​.pdf 9. City University of New York. (n.d.). General-­education requirements: Selected public universities and CUNY prior to Pathways reform. From Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor, p. 8. Retrieved from CUNY website: https://​www​.cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​ /pathways​.pdf 10. Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (Online Version—­Revised March 2009). Characteristics of excellence in higher education: Requirements of affiliation and standards for accreditation. Middle States Commission on Higher Education: Philadelphia, PA. Retrieved from MSCHE website: http://​www​.msche​.org​/publications​ /CHX​-­­­­­­­­2011​-­­­­­­­­WEB​.PDF 11. Minutes of the 355th Plenary Session of the University Faculty Senate of The City University of New York. (2010, December 14). Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​ /Plenaryminutes​/2010​_12​.pdf Neal, A. (2009, April 4). The SUNY core curriculum in context. Presentation at the SUNY 60th Anniversary Conference. Retrieved from http://​www​.goacta​.org​/images​ /download​/SUNY​_core​_curriculum​_in​_context​.pdf Neal, A. D. (2009, April 26). No room for backsliding on SUNY’s core curriculum. ACTA in the News. Retrieved from http://​www​.goacta​.org​/news​/no​_room​_for​ _backsliding​_on​_sunys​_core​_curriculum 12. Hebel, S. (2010, November 28). States seek ways to take measure of college degrees. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​ /Refining​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­Recipe​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­a​/125545/ 13. Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-­administrative university and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 214–­215. 14. Minutes of the 363rd Plenary Session of the University Faculty Senate of The City University of New York. (2011, December 13). Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​ /Plenaryminutes​/2011​_12​.pdf

386  ■  Notes to Chapter 3 15. Middle States Commission of Higher Education. (n.d.). Frequently asked questions. Retrieved from http://​www​.msche​.org​/​?Nav1​=​About​&​Nav2​=​FAQ​&​Nav3​=​ Question07 16. Hart Research Associates. (2016, February 17). Trends in learning outcomes assessment: Key findings from a survey among administrators at AAC&U member institutions. Association of American Colleges & Universities. Retrieved from AAC&U website: https://​www​.aacu​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/files​/LEAP​/2015​_Survey​_Report3​.pdf 17. Wagoner, R. L., & Kisker, C. B. (2012, Winter). Putting the pieces together and asking the hard questions: Transfer associate degrees in perspective. New Directions for Community Colleges, no. 160, pp. 91–­103. 18. Association of American Colleges & Universities. (n.d.). The LEAP challenge. Retrieved from http://​www​.aacu​.org​/leap 19. Association of American Colleges & Universities. (n.d.). Quantitative literacy VALUE rubric. Retrieved from https://​www​.aacu​.org​/value​/rubrics​/quantitative​ -­­­­­­­­literacy 20. CUNY Board of Trustees. (2010, November 22). Minutes of proceedings, p. 219. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/2010​/11​-­­­­­­­­22​/pdf​/​ #Navigation​_Location 21. For some history of this issue and Sandi’s involvement in it see chapter 2. 22. City University of New York. (n.d.). Pathways archive. Retrieved from http://​ www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​.html 23. Smith, M. (2010, December). Transfer and articulation policies. Education Commission of the States: Denver, CO. Retrieved from Education Commission of the States website: http://​www​.ecs​.org​/clearinghouse​/90​/70​/9070​.pdf 24. Minutes of the 355th Plenary Session of the University Faculty Senate of The City University of New York. (2010, December 14). Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​ /Plenaryminutes​/2010​_12​.pdf . All quotations from the Plenary have been taken directly from the minutes, which I believe to be a transcription made from an audio recording that is not publicly available, although there appear to be some errors in this transcript. 25. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (n.d.). Academic performance of baccalaureate students: Comparing transfer students with first-­time freshmen. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/ComparingPerformanceTransferFTFStudents​.pd Lichtenberger, E., & Dietrich, C. (2017, January). The community college penalty? Examining the bachelor’s completion rates of community college transfer students as a function of time. Community College Review, 45, 3-­32. Monaghan, D. B., & Attewell, P. (2015). The community college route to the bachelor’s degree. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 37, 70–­91. Retrieved from http://​epa​.sagepub​.com​/content​/37​/1​/70​.full​.pdf​+html 26. Pathways archive. (n.d.). Central office reports, statements, & data. Retrieved from http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/undergraduate​-studies​/pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/​#reports 27. City University of New York. (n.d.). General-­education requirements: Selected public universities and CUNY prior to Pathways reform. From Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor, p. 8. Retrieved from CUNY website: https://​www​.cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​ /pathways​.pdf

Notes to Chapter 4  ■ 387 28. CUNY Board of Trustees. (2011, January 24). Minutes of proceedings. Retrieved   from   http:// ​ p olicy​. cuny​. edu ​ / board ​ _ meeting ​ _ minutes ​ / 2011 ​ / 01 ​ - ­­­­­­­­2 4 ​ / pdf ​ /​ #Navigation​_Location 29. Dunkin, A. (2013, April 12). CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein to retire this summer. Retrieved from http://​www​.journalism​.cuny​.edu​/2013​/04​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​ -­­­­­­­­matthew​-­­­­­­­­goldstein​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­retire​-­­­­­­­­this​-­­­­­­­­summer/

Chapter 4. The True Colors of Spring 2011: Shaping the Final Resolution 1. THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY, Fifth Edition, p. 27, by Clark Kerr, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1963, 1972, 1982, 1995, 2001, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1991 by Clark Kerr. 2. Hechinger, G. (2003, December 2). Clark Kerr, leading public educator and former head of California’s universities, dies at 92. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​ www​.nytimes​.com​/2003​/12​/02​/us​/clark​-­­­­­­­­kerr​-­­­­­­­­leading​-­­­­­­­­public​-­­­­­­­­educator​-­­­­­­­­former​-­­­­­­­­head​ -­­­­­­­­california​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­universities​-­­­­­­­­dies​-9­­­­­­­­ 2​.html 3. Draft   resolution:   http:// ​ w ww​. cuny​. edu ​ / academics ​ / initiatives ​ / pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/DraftResolutionWeb​.pdf. We first started using the name “Pathways” at the beginning of March 2011, when we referred to the project as “­Pathways to Degree Completion.” By later that semester, it had become, simply, “Pathways.” 4. City University of New York. (n.d.). General-­education requirements: Selected public universities and CUNY prior to Pathways reform. From Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor, p. 8. Retrieved from CUNY website: https://​www​.cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​ /pathways​.pdf 5. Board of Trustees minutes of proceedings, November 22, 1999. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/1999​/11​-­­­­­­­­22​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 6. Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2014, July 16). The City University of New York performance management report: 2013–­2014 year-­end university report final. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/ira​ /ir​/data​-­­­­­­­­book​/current​/accountability​/PMPUniversityReport​_2013​-1­­­­­­­­ 4​_Final​.pdf 7. Olmeda, R., A., & Wasserman, J. (1998, March 3). New prez for Adelphi. Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​.nydailynews​.com​/archives​/boroughs​/new​-prez​-adelphi​ -article​-1​.800795 8. Draft resolution: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​ /archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/DraftResolutionWeb​.pdf 9. Pathways Archive. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​ /pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​.html 10. Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (n.d.). Academic performance of baccalaureate students: Comparing transfer students with first-­time freshmen. Retrieved from The City University of New York website: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​ /pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/ComparingPerformanceTransferFTFStudents​.pdf 11. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2011, April 29). Percentage of senior college general education classes taught by full-­time faculty. Retrieved from  CUNY  website:  http://​w ww​. cuny​. edu​/academics​/ initiatives​/ pathways​/ about​ /archive​/archive​/gen​_ed​_classes​_by​_ft​_faculty​_sr​_colleges​.pdf

388  ■  Notes to Chapter 4 12. Minutes of the 357th Plenary Session of the University Faculty Senate of The City University of New York. (2011, March 15). Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​ /Plenaryminutes​/2011​_03​.pdf 13. Dictionary​.com. Hysteresis. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.dictionary​.com​ /browse​/hysteresis 14. Reynolds, G. S. (1975). A primer of operant conditioning (rev. ed.). Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman and Company. 15. Glenn, D. (2011, April 20). CUNY faculty fears course-­transfer proposal could jeopardize its say on curricula. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​ www​.chronicle​.com​/article​/CUNY​-­­­­­­­­Faculty​-­­­­­­­­Fears​/127217 16. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from CUNY  website:  http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/media​-assets​/ug​ _student​_profile​_f15​.pdf 17. US Department of Education. (n.d.). United States Department of Education accredited postsecondary minority institutions. Retrieved from http://​www2​.ed​.gov​ /about​/offices​/list​/ocr​/edlite​-­­­­­­­­minorityinst​-­­­­­­­­list​-­­­­­­­­tab​.html 18. Churchill, J. (2011, April 22). Letter to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. Retrieved from http://​www​.cunyufs​.org​/A​/PBKLetter​.pdf 19. Hanks, T. (2015, January 14). I owe it all to community college. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2015​/01​/14​/opinion​/tom​-hanks​-on​-his​-two​ -years​-at​-chabot​-college​.html?​_r​=​0 20. The City University of New York University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Resolutions letters, and statements on general education, articulation, and the CUNY Pathways Process. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/A/ 21. Association of American Colleges & Universities. (n.d.). The LEAP challenge. Retrieved from http://​www​.aacu​.org​/leap 22. University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Pathways responses. Retrieved from https://​ sites ​ . google​ . com​ / site​ / universityfacultysenatecuny ​ / senate ​ - action ​ / resolutions ​ - on​ -pathways 23. City University of New York. Board of Trustees minutes of proceedings, June 27, 2011. (2011, June 27). Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​ /2011​/06​-­­­­­­­­27​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 24. Glenn, D. (2011, April 20). CUNY faculty fears course-­transfer proposal could jeopardize its say on curricula. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​ chronicle​.com​/article​/CUNY​-­­­­­­­­Faculty​-­­­­­­­­Fears​/127217/ 25. Moltz, D. (2011, April 21). Who decides on transfer credit? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2011​/04​/21​/cuny​_divided​_over​ _potential​_changes​_to​_general​_education​_requirements​_and​_transfer​_rules 26. Draft resolution: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​ /archive​/archive​/text​-draft​/DraftResolutionWeb​.pdf 27. B.I.14—­Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/text​ -draft​/Reso​.pdf 28. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 80.

Notes to Chapter 5  ■ 389 29. Foderaro, L. W. (2011, May 20). At CUNY, concerns that overhaul of the curriculum may erode academic gains. New York Times, p. A19. Retrieved from http://​www​ .nytimes​.com​/2011​/05​/20​/nyregion​/at​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­fears​-­­­­­­­­that​-­­­­­­­­a​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​-­­­­­­­­overhaul​-­­­­­­­­might​ -­­­­­­­­erode​-­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­gains​.html?​_r​=​0 30. Central Office of Academic Affairs. (2011, May). Summary of feedback on CUNY Pathways proposal. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​ /pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/PathwaysFeedbackSummary1​.pdf 31. CUNY Pathways PSA. (2013, August 21). Directed by Alex Leu. Retrieved from https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​hUlUjCfZE2g 32. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/media​-­­­­­­­­assets​/ug​ _student​_profile​_f15​.pdf

Chapter 5. Models of Governance in June 2011: Rwanda, a CAPPR Meeting, and a Public Hearing 1. From THE UNIVERSITY: An owner’s manual, p. 262, by Henry Rosovsky. Copyright © 1990 by Henry Rosovsky. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 2. Department of Economics, Harvard University. Henry Rosovsky. Retrieved from http://​economics​.harvard​.edu​/people​/henry​-­­­­­­­­rosovsky 3. CUNY University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Pathways responses. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/site​/universityfacultysenatecuny​/senate​-action​/resolutions​-on​ -pathways 4. Bowen W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, pp. 135–­136. 5. Zweifler, S. (2013, July 15). No-­confidence votes are no longer a death knell. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/No​ -­­­­­­­­Confidence​-­­­­­­­­Votes​-­­­­­­­­Are​-­­­­­­­­No​/140325/ 6. Bok, D. (2013). Higher education in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 51. 7. Lederman, D. (2011, May 27). Vote of no confidence in CUNY provost. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2011​/05​/27​ /vote​-­­­­­­­­no​-­­­­­­­­confidence​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­provost 8. CUNY must take action now to keep students from losing credits when they transfer between colleges. (2011, June 6). New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://​ www​.nydailynews​.com​/opinion​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­action​-­­­­­­­­students​-­­­­­­­­losing​-­­­­­­­­credits​-­­­­­­­­transfer​-­­­­­­­­colleges​ -­­­­­­­­article​-­­­­­­­­1​.125926 Voice of the people. (2011, June 9). New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​ .nydailynews​.com​/opinion​/voice​-people​-june​-9–2011​-article​-1​.128342 9. Badillo, Herman (2011, June 2). Standards at CUNY. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2011​/06​/03​/opinion​/lweb03cuny​.html?​_r​=​0 10. B.I.14—­Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/text​-draft​ /Reso​.pdf

390  ■  Notes to Chapter 6 11. All quotations from the CAPPR meeting are taken from CUNY’s board meeting video. Retrieved from http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/about​/trustees​/meetings​-of​-the​-board​ /meeting​-broadcasts​/video​-archive​-for​-2011/ Benno was referring to Robert’s rules of order (revised, by H. M. Robert, 1951. Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company), which states that all motions, including amendments of motions, need to be seconded before the body can discuss them. 12. Charter of the University Faculty Senate, CUNY. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​ .org​/CHARTER​.pdf 13. Post staff report. (2011, June 20). Matt Goldstein’s mission. New York Post. Retrieved from http://​nypost​.com​/2011​/06​/20​/matt​-­­­­­­­­goldsteins​-­­­­­­­­mission/ Johnson, KC. (2011, June 20). The usual suspects attack a reformer. Minding the campus. Retrieved from http://​www​.mindingthecampus​.org​/2011​/06​/the​_usual​_suspects​ _attack​_a​_re/ 14. Ceci, S. J., Williams, W. M., & Mueller-­Johnson, K. (2006). Is tenure justified? An experimental study of faculty beliefs about tenure, promotion, and academic freedom. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 553–­569. 15. All quotations of people at the hearing are taken from the written transcript prepared from an audio recording by CUNY’s Office of the Senior Vice Chancellor for University Relations and Secretary of the Board of Trustees. Small changes, such as in spelling and punctuation, have been made for readability when those changes would not be obviated by audio material. 16. Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2014, July 16). The City University of New York performance management report: 2013–­2014 year-­end university report final. Retrieved from http://​cuny​.edu​/about​/administration​/offices​/ira​/ir​/data​ -­­­­­­­­book​/current​/accountability​/PMPUniversityReport​_2013​-­­­­­­­­14​_Final​.pdf\ 17. For more information on Demond Mullins see http://​ www​ .npr​ .org​ /templates​/story​/story​.php​?storyId​=​16272276 and the website of Indiana University of Pennsylvania. 18. One of the first indications of the PSC becoming involved in Pathways issues was the June 2011 issue of their paper, the Clarion, which had an article about general education and Pathways, retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/june​-­­­­­­­­2011​ /gen​-­­­­­­­­ed​-­­­­­­­­debate​-­­­­­­­­sharpens​-­­­­­­­­ufs​-­­­­­­­­says​-­­­­­­­­its​-­­­­­­­­views​-­­­­­­­­dismissed, although the PSC did not officially launch a campaign against Pathways until March of 2012: http://​www​.psc​-cuny​ .org​/issues​/timeline​-resistance​-pathways 19. City University of New York. (n.d.). Bylaws. Article VIII, Section 8.10. University Faculty Senate. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_viii​/section​_8​ .10.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location

Chapter 6. A Core Foundation: July 2011 through December 2011 1. City University of New York. (n.d.). B.I.14—­Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 2. Association of American Colleges & Universities. (n.d.). The LEAP Challenge. Retrieved from https://​www​.aacu​.org​/leap 3. University Faculty Senate. (2011, September 20). Minutes of the 360th Plenary Session. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/Plenaryminutes​/2011​_09​.pdf

Notes to Chapter 6  ■ 391 4. Complete lists of the members of the Steering and Working Committees of the Common Core Task Force are available at http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-news​ /2011​/08​/04​/pathways​-steering​-committee​-announcement/ and http://​www​.cuny​.edu​ /academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/about​/working​-committee​.html 5. PSC CUNY. (n.d.). Article 14: Leaves and holidays. Retrieved from http://​www​ .psc​-cuny​.org​/contract​/article​-14​-leaves​-and​-holidays 6. Complete lists of the members of the Steering and Working Committees of the Common Core Task Force are available at http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-news​ /2011​/08​/04​/pathways​-steering​-committee​-announcement/ and http://​www​.cuny​.edu​ /academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/about​/working​-committee​.html 7. University Faculty Senate. (2011, September 20). Minutes of the 360th Plenary Session. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/Plenaryminutes​/2011​_09​.pdf 8. Adelman, C. (2009). The Bologna Process for U.S. eyes: Re-­learning higher education in the age of convergence. Institute for Higher Education Policy. Retrieved from http://​files​.eric​.ed​.gov​/fulltext​/ED504904​.pdf 9. Anderson, Michelle J. (2011, October 31). Pathways Task Force releases draft recommendations and invites comment. Retrieved from http://​ www1​ .cuny​ .edu​ /mu​/academic​-­­­­­­­­news​/2011​/10​/31​/pathways​-­­­­­­­­task​-­­­­­­­­force​-­­­­­­­­releases​-­­­­­­­­draft​-­­­­­­­­recommendations​ -­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­invites​-­­­­­­­­comment/ 10. University Faculty Senate. (2011, September 20). Minutes of the 360th Plenary Session. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/Plenaryminutes​/2011​_09​.pdf 11. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from CUNY website:  http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/media​-­­­­­­­­assets​/ug​_student​ _profile​_f15​.pdf 12. Clarion coverage of Pathways. (2015, April 28). Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​ -cuny​.org​/issues​/clarion​-coverage​-pathways CUNY Pathways: Paved with good intentions? (2011, June). Senate Digest. Pp. 1, 4, and 6. Pathways update. (2011, November). Senate Digest. Pp. 1, 3. 13. From labyrinth to Pathways. (2011, October 12). CUNY Matters. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/forum​/2011​/10​/12​/from​-­­­­­­­­labyrinth​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­pathways/ 14. Martinez, J. (2011). Stand against the dumbing-­down of CUNY’s liberal arts colleges. Retrieved from https://​www​.change​.org​/p​/new​-york​-governor​-andrew​-cuomo​ -and​-mayor​-michael​-bloomberg​-stand​-against​-the​-dumbing​-down​-of​-cunys​-liberal​ -arts​-colleges 15. University Faculty Senate. (2011, December 13). Minutes of the 363rd Plenary Session. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/Plenaryminutes​/2011​_12​.pdf 16. American Association of University Professors. (n.d.). Mission. Retrieved from http://​www​.aaup​.org​/about​/mission​-­­­­­­­­1 17. Schmidt, P. (2014, September 5). U. of Texas Cancer Center intensifies its challenge of AAUP. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​ /blogs​/ticker​/u​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­texas​-­­­­­­­­cancer​-­­­­­­­­center​-­­­­­­­­intensifies​-­­­­­­­­its​-­­­­­­­­challenge​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­aaup​/85503 18. University Faculty Senate. (2011, September 20). Minutes of the 360th Plenary Session. Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​/Plenaryminutes​/2011​_09​.pdf 19. Speri, A., & Phillips, A. M. (2011, November 21). CUNY students protesting tuition increase clash with police. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​www​

392  ■  Notes to Chapter 7 .nytimes​.com​/2011​/11​/22​/education​/cuny​-students​-clash​-with​-police​-in​-manhattan​ .html?​_r​=​0 20. Cooper, S. (2011, November). On the crash of the faculty. Presentation given at the AAUP Annual Governance Conference. Washington, DC. 21. City University of New York. (2011, November 3). A message from General Counsel and Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Frederick P. Schaffer on the Pathways Project and faculty authority regarding academic policy. Retrieved from http://​ www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/vc​_la​/2011​/11​/03​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­general​-­­­­­­­­counsel​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­senior​ -­­­­­­­­vice​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­legal​-­­­­­­­­affairs​-­­­­­­­­frederick​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­schaffer​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­project​-­­­­­­­­and​ -­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­authority​-­­­­­­­­regarding​-­­­­­­­­academic​-p ­­­­­­­­ olicy/ 22. Cooper, S. (2011, November). On the crash of the faculty. Presentation given at the AAUP Annual Governance Conference. Washington, DC. 23. Public Officers Law, Article 6. Sections 84–­90. Freedom of Information Law. Retrieved from http://​www​.dos​.ny​.gov​/coog​/foil2​.html 24. City University of New York Pathways Task Force. (2011, December 1). Common Core structure: Final recommendation to the chancellor. Retrieved from CUNY website:  http://​w ww1​. cuny​. edu​/ mu​/ academic​-­­­­­­­­news​/ files​/ 2011​/ 12​/ CommonCore StructureFinalRec​.pdf 25. Wood, P. (2011, December 15). How central is the core? Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/blogs​/innovations​/how​-­­­­­­­­central​-­­­­­­­­is​-­­­­­­­­the​ -­­­­­­­­core​/31113 Wood, P. (2011, December 18). CUNY’s pathway to whatever. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/blogs​/innovations​/cunys​-­­­­­­­­pathway​-­­­­­­­­to​ -­­­­­­­­whatever​/31150 26. Kelly, W., & Anderson, M. (2011, December 30). Pathways to higher standards. Chronicle of Higher Education.

Chapter 7. The Devil Is in the Details: January 2012 through August 2012 1. THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY, Fifth Edition, p. 23, by Clark Kerr, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1963, 1972, 1982, 1995, 2001, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1991 by Clark Kerr. 2. THE USES OF THE UNIVERSITY, Fifth Edition, p. 7, by Clark Kerr, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, Copyright © 1963, 1972, 1982, 1995, 2001, by the President and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © renewed 1991 by Clark Kerr. 3. American Association of Colleges & Universities (2007). College learning for the new global century. Washington, DC: Association of American Colleges & Universities. 4. The City University of New York agreement between The City University of New York and the Professional Staff Congress/CUNY September 20, 2007–­October 19, 2010, Appendix A. This agreement is still in effect as of March 2017. Retrieved from http://​ www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/sites​/default​/files​/PSC​%20CUNY​%202007​-­­­­­­­­2010​%20CBA​%2005​ %2029​%2014​.pdf 5. Anderson, P., Gonyea, R. M., Anson, C. M., & Paine, C. (2015). The contributions of writing to learning and development: Results from a large-­scaled multi-­institutional study. Research in the Teaching of English, 50, 199–­235.

Notes to Chapter 7  ■ 393 6. Thomsen, J. (2015, July 23). Faculty members and president face off in fight over curriculum changes. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​ /news​/2015​/07​/23​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­members​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­face​-­­­­­­­­fight​-­­­­­­­­over​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​-­­­­­­­­changes 7. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/media​-assets​/ug​ _student​_profile​_f15​.pdf 8. This document sets forth the flexible aspects of Pathways that had been identified as of February 23, 2012: General education at CUNY: Pathways possibilities. (2012, February). Retrieved from http://​www​.csi​.cuny​.edu​/pathways​/pdf​/memo​.pdf 9. Office of Academic Affairs. (2011). Best teaching practices. New York: The City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www​.mec​.cuny​.edu​/Office​-of​-Academic​ -Affairs​/Center​-for​-Teaching​-and​-Learning​/Best​-Teaching​-Practices​-2011​-1​.aspx 10. Mervis, J. (2012, January 30). New CUNY curriculum squeezes science. Science­ Insider. Retrieved from http://​news​.sciencemag​.org​/2012​/01​/new​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​ -­­­­­­­­squeezes​-­­­­­­­­science 11. Price, M. (2012, January 30). CUNY relaxes science standards. Science blog. Retrieved from http://​blogs​.sciencemag​.org​/sciencecareers​/2012​/01​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­relaxes​-­­­­­­­­sc​.html 12. de Jong, T., Linn, M. C., & Zacharia, Z. C. (2013, April 19). Physical and virtual laboratories in science and engineering education. Science, 340, 305–­308. Retrieved from http://​www​.sciencemag​.org​/content​/340​/6130​/305​.abstract​?sid​=​98d6ef9d​-­­­­­­­­b1bd​ -­­­­­­­­4ca6​-­­­­­­­­aa0c​-­­­­­­­­a440b17738cc 13. This document sets forth the flexible aspects of Pathways that had been identified as of February 23, 2012: General education at CUNY: Pathways possibilities. (2012, February). Retrieved from http://​www​.csi​.cuny​.edu​/pathways​/pdf​/memo​.pdf 14. Sternberg, R. J. (2015, July 24). Coping with verbal abuse. Chronicle of Higher Education, pp. A26–­A27. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/Coping​-­­­­­­­­With​ -­­­­­­­­Verbal​-­­­­­­­­Abuse​/231201/ 15. The correspondence between the AAUP and the UFS, as well as the AAUP letters to the CUNY administration, can be found at https://​ sites​ .google​ .com​ /site​ /universityfacultysenatecuny​/senate​-­­­­­­­­action​/resolutions​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­pathways 16. PSC-­CUNY. (2008, June). Resolution on AAUP membership. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/about​-­­­­­­­­us​/policies 17. Schaffer, F. P. (January 2, 2012). A guide to academic freedom. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/vc​_la​/2012​/01​/02​/a​-­­­­­­­­guide​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­freedom/ 18. New York State Education Law, Section 6201. Retrieved from http://​codes​.lp​ .findlaw​.com​/nycode​/EDN​/VII​/125​/6201 19. Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor. (2012). Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​ /news​/publications​/pathways​.pdf 20. Bowen, W. G. (2012, May 9). How to keep American Colleges on top. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://​www​.wsj​.com​/articles​/SB10001424052702304363104577 389944183121660 21. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (2016, Spring). Snapshot report: Postsecondary student mobility. Retrieved from National Student Clearinghouse Research Center website: https://​nscresearchcenter​.org​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/SnapshotReport21​ -­­­­­­­­PostsecondaryStudentMobility​.pdf

394  ■  Notes to Chapter 8 22. Final recommendation Pathways biology major committee. (2012, March 1). Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-news​/files​/2012​/03​/Biology​.pdf 23. CUNY University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Pathways responses. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/site​/universityfacultysenatecuny​/senate​-action​/resolutions​-on​ -pathways 24. Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (2016, January 17). Statement of accreditation status. College of Staten Island of the City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www​.msche​.org​/​/Documents​/SAS​/58​/Statement​%20of​ %20Accreditation​%20Status​.htm 25. Hogness, P. (2014, April 25). Town hall meeting: Speaking out on Pathways, organizing for an alternative. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/town​-­­­­­­­­hall​-­­­­­­­­meeting​ -­­­­­­­­speaking​-­­­­­­­­out​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­organizing​-­­­­­­­­alternative 26. PSC-­CUNY. (2014, April 25). Pathways videos. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​ -cuny​.org​/issues​/pathways​-videos 27. PSC-­CUNY. (2014, April 25). Pathways videos. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​ -cuny​.org​/issues​/pathways​-videos 28. Cooper, S. (2011, November). On the crash of the faculty. Presentation given at the AAUP Annual Governance Conference. Washington, DC. 29. PSC CUNY. Current PSC dues/fee structure and history. Retrieved from http://​ www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/current​-psc​-duesfee​-structure​-and​-history 30. Investing in our future: The City University of New York’s Master Plan 2012–­ 2016.  Retrieved  from  http://​w ww2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/2014​/12​ /masterplan​.pdf

Chapter 8. English Studies: September 2012 through December 2012 1. The full text of the CUNY Board of Trustees June 2011 Pathways resolution is available at: http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​ /text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 2. A few examples of fiction about the academy that are authored by current or former English professors: Coetzee, J. M. (1999). Disgrace. New York: Penguin. Cross, A. (1985). Death in a tenured position. New York: Ballantine. Russo, R. (1997). Straight man. New York: Vintage. Schumacher, J. (2014). Dear committee members. New York: Doubleday. Smiley, J. (1995). Moo. New York: Knopf. 3. The piece is Trapasso, C. (2012, September 25). Two Queens community colleges fight CUNY changes. Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​.nydailynews​.com​ /new​-­­­­­­­­york​/queens​/queens​-­­­­­­­­community​-­­­­­­­­colleges​-­­­­­­­­fight​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­article​-­­­­­­­­1​.1167179.  However, the quote from the student is not available online. 4. New York Daily News (2012, December 15). Pipe down, profs.” New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​.nydailynews​.com​/opinion​/pipe​-­­­­­­­­profs​-­­­­­­­­article​-­­­­­­­­1​.1220729 5. Archive. (n.d.). The City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www​ .cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​.html 6. The unofficial university student senate site. (2011–­2012). Retrieved from http://​ opencuny​.org​/uuss/

Notes to Chapter 9  ■ 395 7. University Student Senate. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.usscuny​.org/ 8. Students reflect on the Pathways initiative. (2012, November 21). Retrieved from https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​B2EbfcegpHw 9. Del Rossi, A. F., & Hersch, J. (2016, May 21). The private and social benefits of double majors. Journal of Benefit-­Cost Analysis, 7, 292–325. Retrieved from https://​ papers​.ssrn​.com​/sol3​/papers​.cfm​?abstract​_id​=​2782141 Hemelt, S. W. (2010). The college double major and subsequent earnings. Education Economics, 18, 167–­189. Makridis, C. (2017, March 30). Does it pay to get a double major in college? PBS Newshour. Retrieved from http://​www​.pbs​.org​/newshour​/making​-sense​/pay​-get​-double​-major​ -college/ 10. City University of New York. (n.d.). ASAP: Evaluation. Retrieved from http://​ www1​.cuny​.edu​/sites​/asap​/evaluation/ 11. Logue, A. W. (2015). The psychology of eating and drinking (4th ed.). New York: Routledge.

Chapter 9. Sprinting and Stretching for the Finish Line: January 2013 through June 2013 1. City University of New York. (2013, January 28). Board of Trustees minutes of proceedings. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/2013​/01​ -­­­­­­­­28​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location, p. 3. 2. American Association of University Professors (2015). Policy documents and reports (11th ed). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. From the chapter: “Introduction: AAUP policies and their effective use.” 3. Requests for comments on delegate assembly resolutions. (2013, Fall). MLA Newsletter, 45(3). Retrieved from http://​www​.mla​.org​/pdf​/nl​_453​_web​.pdf 4. City University of New York. (2013, February 25). Board of Trustees meeting video. Retrieved from http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/about​/trustees​/meetings​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­board​ /meeting​-­­­­­­­­broadcasts​/video​-­­­­­­­­archive​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­2013/ 5. CUNY administration, union at odds over ‘Pathways’ initiative. 2013, March 21). WNYC News. Retrieved from http://​www​.wnyc​.org​/story​/277405​-­­­­­­­­blog​-­­­­­­­­cuny​ -­­­­­­­­administration​-­­­­­­­­union​-­­­­­­­­odds​-­­­­­­­­over​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­initiative/ 6. Ellefson, A. (2013, March). Brooklyn College faculty want Board of Trustees to resign! Brooklyn College Kingsman. 7. Marcus, J. (2013, March 22). Stopping the clock on credits that don’t count. Hechinger Report. Retrieved from http://​hechingerreport​.org​/stopping​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­clock​-­­­­­­­­on​ -­­­­­­­­credits​-­­­­­­­­that​-­­­­­­­­dont​-­­­­­­­­count/ 8. PSC-­CUNY. (2013, March 18). Dr. Blanche Wiesen Cook Pathways ad text. Retrieved from http://​psc​-cuny​.org​/dr​-blanche​-wiesen​-cook​-pathways​-ad​-text 9. Logue, Alexandra W. (2013, April 16). Provost defends CUNY general-­education reforms. The Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/blogs​ /letters​/provost​-­­­­­­­­defends​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­general​-­­­­­­­­education​-­­­­­­­­reforms/ 10. Samuels, T. M. (2014, April 14). Essay on new college presidents who get their advice from the wrong people. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​ /advice​/2014​/04​/14​/essay​-­­­­­­­­new​-­­­­­­­­college​-­­­­­­­­presidents​-­­­­­­­­who​-­­­­­­­­get​-­­­­­­­­their​-­­­­­­­­advice​-­­­­­­­­wrong​-­­­­­­­­people

396  ■  Notes to Chapter 9 11. Brooklyn College PSC-­CUNY. (April 14, 2013). Who will choose the next chancellor? Retrieved from http://​pscbc​.blogspot​.com​/2013​/04​/who​-­­­­­­­­will​-­­­­­­­­choose​-­­­­­­­­next​ -­­­­­­­­chancellor​.html 12. City University of New York. (2011, June 27). Board of Trustees Minutes of Proceedings, p. 122. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/2011​ /06​-­­­­­­­­27​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 13. City University of New York. (2011, June 27). Board of Trustees minutes of proceedings, p. 122. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​/2011​ /06​-­­­­­­­­27​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 14. City University of New York. (n.d.). Student rights, responsibilities, and appeals.  Retrieved   from   http:// ​ w ww​. cuny​. edu ​ / academics ​ / initiatives ​ / pathways​ /rightsandresponsibilities​.html 15. City University of New York. (n.d.). Student rights, responsibilities, and appeals.   Retrieved   from   http:// ​ w ww​. cuny​. edu ​ / academics ​ / initiatives ​ / pathways​ /rightsandresponsibilities​.html 16. Bueno, D. (2013, March 11). Pathways: In or out? The Campus. Retrieved from http://​www​.ccnycampus​.org​/2013​/03​/pathways​-­­­­­­­­in​-­­­­­­­­or​-­­­­­­­­out/ 17. The Brian Lehrer Show (2012, September 20). Pathways from CUNY. WNYC. http://​www​.wnyc​.org​/story​/238523​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­cuny/ 18. Association of American Colleges & Universities. (n.d.). Liberal education & America’s promise. Retrieved from https://​www​.aacu​.org​/leap 19. Dennis, J. (2013, February 12). CUNY’s Pathways initiative and the future of higher education reform. Dissent. Retrieved from http://​www​.dissentmagazine​ .org​/online​_articles​/cunys​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­initiative​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­future​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­higher​-­­­­­­­­education​ -­­­­­­­­reform 20. Tolkien, J.R.R. (1994). The return of the king. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, p. 1006. 21. Du Bois, W.E.B. (1949). The freedom to learn. Quoted in Darling-­Hammond, L. (1997). The right to learn: A blueprint for creating schools that work. Retrieved from http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/books​/first​/h​/hammond​-learn​.html 22. Jaschik, S. (2013, April 29). Adjuncts angry over being excluded from vote by CUNY faculty union. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​ .com​/news​/2013​/04​/29​/adjuncts​-­­­­­­­­angry​-­­­­­­­­over​-­­­­­­­­being​-­­­­­­­­excluded​-­­­­­­­­vote​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­union 23. PSC-­CUNY. (2013, June 1). 92% vote on confidence in Pathways, CUNY’s new curriculum. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/news​-­­­­­­­­events​/92​-­­­­­­­­vote​-­­­­­­­­no​ -­­­­­­­­confidence​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­cuny​%E2​%80​%99s​-­­­­­­­­new​-­­­­­­­­curriculum 24. Edelman, S. (2013, June 2). CUNY on war ‘Path.’ New York Post. Retrieved from http://​nypost​.com​/2013​/06​/02​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­war​-­­­­­­­­path/. 25. Johnson, KC (2013, June 12). A faculty union rigs a plebiscite. Minding the Campus. Retrieved from http://​www​.mindingthecampus​.org​/2013​/06​/a​_faculty​_union​_rigs​ _a​_plebisc/ 26. American Association of University Professors. (2013, June 15). Resolution in support of faculty control of the curriculum at the City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www​.aaup​.org​/resolution​-support​-faculty​-control​-curriculum​-city​ -university​-new​-york 27. PSC-­CUNY. (2013, June). Phased retirement program announced—­June 2013. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/latest​-­­­­­­­­news​/phased​-­­­­­­­­retirement​-­­­­­­­­pilot​-­­­­­­­­program​ -­­­­­­­­announced

Notes to Chapter 10  ■ 397

Chapter 10. Transitions: July 2013 through December 2013 1. Board of Trustees. (2013, June 24). Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​ _meeting​_minutes​/2013​/06​-­­­­­­­­24​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 2. See chapter 9 for a discussion of the actual numbers and methods involved in this vote. 3. Clarion Staff (2013, August). Questions and answers with Bill de Blasio: ‘Reasserting fairness’ in NYC. Retrieved from http://​psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/august​-­­­­­­­­2013​/Q​-­­­­­­­­A​ -­­­­­­­­with​-­­­­­­­­de​-­­­­­­­­Blasio 4. Board of Trustees. (2011, June). Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/text​ -­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 5. CUNY-­wide Common Core Course Review Committee update. (2013, September 18). Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-news​/2013​/09​/18​/cuny​ -wide​-common​-core​-course​-review​-committee​-update​-2/ 6. Student rights, responsibilities, and appeals. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​ .edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/rightsandresponsibilities​.html 7. Board of Trustees. (2011, June). Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​/archive​/text​ -­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 8. Hogness, P. (2012, August). Faculty pan Pathways at public hearing, plan to develop alternative. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/august​ -­­­­­­­­2012​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­pan​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­public​-­­­­­­­­hearing​-­­­­­­­­plan​-­­­­­­­­develop​-­­­­­­­­alternative 9. Vitale, A. (2014, September–­October). The fight against Pathways at CUNY. Academe. Retrieved from https://​www​.aaup​.org​/article​/fight​-­­­­­­­­against​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­cuny​#​ .WEwkHaIrLaZ 10. Tarleton, J. (2013, October). A call for r-­e-­s-­p-­e-­c-­t: PSC says no more austerity education. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/november​-­­­­­­­­2013​ /call​-­­­­­­­­r​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­c​-­­­­­­­­t​-­­­­­­­­psc​-­­­­­­­­says​-n ­­­­­­­­ o​-­­­­­­­­more​-­­­­­­­­austerity​-­­­­­­­­education 11. CUNY Board of Trustees Mmeeting. (2013, September 30). Retrieved from http://​w ww2​.cuny​.edu​/about​/trustees​/meetings​-of​-the​-board​/meeting​-broadcasts​ /video​-archive​-for​-2013/ 12. Hogness, P. (2013, September). PSC plans protest at CUNY trustees’ meeting. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/september​-­­­­­­­­2013​/september​ -­­­­­­­­30​-­­­­­­­­psc​-­­­­­­­­plans​-­­­­­­­­protest​-­­­­­­­­cuny​-­­­­­­­­trustees​-­­­­­­­­meeting 13. Tarleton, J. (2013, October). A call for r-­e-­s-­p-­e-­c-­t: PSC says no more austerity education. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/november​-­­­­­­­­2013​ /call​-­­­­­­­­r​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­c​-­­­­­­­­t​-­­­­­­­­psc​-­­­­­­­­says​-n ­­­­­­­­ o​-­­­­­­­­more​-­­­­­­­­austerity​-­­­­­­­­education 14. CUNY students confront war criminal David Petraeus. (2013, September 9). Retrieved from https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​DIbl28O99Lg 15. PSC-­CUNY. (2013, October 4). Resolution in protest of police violence against peaceful protesters. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/news​-events​/resolution​ -protest​-police​-violence​-against​-peaceful​-protesters 16. Board of Trustees. (2011, June). Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​ /archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf

398  ■  Notes to Chapter 11 17. Tarleton, J. (2013, October). A call for r-­e-­s-­p-­e-­c-­t: PSC says no more austerity education. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/november​-­­­­­­­­2013​ /call​-­­­­­­­­r​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­c​-­­­­­­­­t​-­­­­­­­­psc​-­­­­­­­­says​-n ­­­­­­­­ o​-­­­­­­­­more​-­­­­­­­­austerity​-­­­­­­­­education 18. Tarleton, J. (2013, October). A call for r-­e-­s-­p-­e-­c-­t: PSC says no more austerity education. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/november​-­­­­­­­­2013​ /call​-­­­­­­­­r​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­s​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­e​-­­­­­­­­c​-­­­­­­­­t​-­­­­­­­­psc​-­­­­­­­­says​-n ­­­­­­­­ o​-­­­­­­­­more​-­­­­­­­­austerity​-­­­­­­­­education 19. CUNY policies on E-­permit. Effective: December 10, 2013. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/policies​/epermit​_policies​ _12​_10​_13​_final​.pdf 20. Logue, A. W. (2013, November 18). Time, space and learning. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2013​/11​/18​/essay​-changing​ -ideas​-time​-space​-and​-learning​-higher​-ed 21. Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor. (2012). Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​ /news​/publications​/pathways​.pdf 22. Bowen, W. G. (2012, May 10). How to keep American colleges on top: The City University of New York pioneers an approach to making graduating easier while keeping standards up. The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://​www​.wsj​.com​/articles​ /SB10001424052702304363104577389944183121660 23. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 11. Legal Matters: June 2011 through June 2015 1. Board of Trustees. (2011, June). Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system.  Retrieved  from  http://​w ww​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​ /archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 2. Minutes of the 360th Plenary Session of the University Faculty Senate of the City University of New York. (2011, September 20). Retrieved from http://​cunyufs​.org​ /Plenaryminutes​/2011​_09​.pdf 3. A message from General Counsel and Senior Vice Chancellor for Legal Affairs Frederick P. Schaffer on the Pathways Project and faculty authority regarding academic policy (2011, November 3). Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/vc​ _la​/2011​/11​/03​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­general​-­­­­­­­­counsel​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­senior​-­­­­­­­­vice​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­legal​ -­­­­­­­­affairs​-­­­­­­­­frederick​-­­­­­­­­p​-­­­­­­­­schaffer​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­project​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­authority​-­­­­­­­­regarding​ -­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­policy/ 4. N.Y. EDN. LAW §6204: NY Code—­Section 6204: Board of trustees. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​codes​.lp​.findlaw​.com​/nycode​/EDN​/VII​/125​/6204 5. City University of New York Bylaws, Article XI, Duties and Qualifications of Titles in the Instructional Staff, Section 11.2. Chancellor. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​ policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_xi​/section​_11​.2.​/a.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 6. City University of New York Bylaws, Article VIII, Organization and Duties of the Faculty, Section 8.5. Duties of Faculty. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​ /bylaws​/article​_viii​/section​_8​.5.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 7. City University of New York Bylaws, Article VIII, Organization and Duties of the Faculty, Section 8.10. University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​policy​ .cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_viii​/section​_8​.10.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location

Notes to Chapter 11  ■ 399 8. Polishook, I., Cooper, S. E., Bell, M., De Jongh, J., Bakewicz, D., & Stearns, S. J. v. The City University of New York; Badillo, H., Berman, H., Del Giudice, M. J., Eve­ rett, E., Fink, S., Mounder, S. M., Murphy, J. P., Inniss, C., Stone, R., Rios, G., Berg, J. S., Marino, R., Tam, T., the voting members of the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, collectively and individually in their capacity as Trustees; Reynolds, W. A., as Chancellor of the City University of New York. (1995, August 4). Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. Index No. 95-­119332. 9. City University of New York Bylaws, Article VIII, Organization and Duties of the Faculty, Section 8.5. Duties of Faculty. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​ /bylaws​/article​_viii​/section​_8​.5.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 10. N.Y. EDN. LAW §6201: NY Code—­Section 6201: Legislative findings and intent.(n.d.). Retrieved from http://​codes​.lp​.findlaw​.com​/nycode​/EDN​/VII​/125​/6201 11. Hogness, P. (Updated 2014, April 24). Town hall meeting: Speaking out on Pathways, organizing for an alternative. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/town​-hall​ -meeting​-speaking​-out​-pathways​-organizing​-alternative Pathways videos. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/issues​/pathways​ -­­­­­­­­videos 12. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. 13. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. 14. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. 15. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. 16. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. City University of New York, Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, & Schneiderman, E. T. (2012, May 24). Memorandum of law in support of defendants’ motion to convert the action to a special proceeding and to dismiss the complaint. Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trustees of The City University of New York. (1997, November 24). Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​ /1997​/11​-24​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location 17. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. City University of New York, Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, & Schneiderman, E. T. (2012, May 24). Memorandum of law in support of defendants’ motion to convert the action to a special proceeding and to dismiss the complaint. Minutes of the meeting of the Board of Trustees of The City University of New York. (1997, November 24). Retrieved from http://​policy​.cuny​.edu​/board​_meeting​_minutes​ /1997​/11​-24​/pdf​/​#Navigation​_Location

400  ■  Notes to Chapter 11 18. City University of New York Bylaws, Article XI, Duties and Qualifications of Titles in the Instructional Staff, Section 11.2. Chancellor. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​ policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_xi​/section​_11​.2.​/a.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 19. Berrett, D. (2012, March 21). CUNY faculty sues to block new core curriculum. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/blogs​/ticker​/cuny​ -­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­sues​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­block​-­­­­­­­­new​-­­­­­­­­core​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​/41498 CUNY faculty lawsuit assaults overdue curriculum reform effort. (2012, March 25). New York Daily News. Retrieved from http://​www​.nydailynews​.com​/opinion​/cuny​ -faculty​-lawsuit​-assaults​-overdue​-curriculum​-reform​-effort​-article​-1​.1050081 Fain, P. (2012, March 22). Completion and quality at CUNY. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2012​/03​/22​/cuny​-faculty​-sue​-block​ -new​-core​-curriculum Gonen, Y. (2012, March 21). CUNY professors’ union files lawsuit against new course credit rules. New York Post. Retrieved from http://​nypost​.com​/2012​/03​/21​/cuny​ -­­­­­­­­professors​-­­­­­­­­union​-­­­­­­­­files​-­­­­­­­­lawsuit​-­­­­­­­­against​-­­­­­­­­new​-­­­­­­­­course​-­­­­­­­­credit​-­­­­­­­­rules/ 20. Fair or frivolous? (2012, Spring). CUNY Matters, p. 7. Retrieved from https://​ www​.cuny​.edu​/news​/publications​/cm​-­­­­­­­­spring12​.pdf 21. Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, Local 2334, AFT, AFL-­CIO, Bowen, B., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, and the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, Baruch College, Lehman College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, College of Staten Island, Queensborough Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, York College, New York City College of Technology, New Community College, Medgar Evers College, LaGuardia Community College, Hostos Community College, City College, Bronx Community College, Wallerstein, M., Fernandez, R., Travis, J., Fritz, W., Call, D., & Perez, A. (2012, August 1). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­103414. 22. Article 20: Complaint, grievance and arbitration procedure. PSC-­CUNY 2007–­ 2010 contract. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/contract​/article​-20​-complaint​ -grievance​-and​-arbitration​-procedure 23. Overview. Public Employment Relations Board. (2012, February 17). Retrieved from http://​www​.perb​.ny​.gov​/Overview​.asp 24. Pathways videos. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/issues​/pathways​ -videos 25. Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, Local 2334, AFT, AFL-­CIO, Bowen, B., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, and the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York, Baruch College, Lehman College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, College of Staten Island, Queensborough Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, York College, New York City College of Technology, New Community College, Medgar Evers College, LaGuardia Community College, Hostos Community College, City College, Bronx Community College, Wallerstein, M., Fernandez, R., Travis, J., Fritz, W., Call, D., & Perez, A. (2012, August 1). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­103414. 26. Public Officers Law, Article 7. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://​www​.dos​.ny​.gov​ /coog​/openmeetlaw​.html 27. Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, Local 2334, AFT, AFL-­CIO, Bowen, B., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, and the Board of Trustees of the City Univer-

Notes to Chapter 12  ■ 401 sity of New York, Baruch College, Lehman College, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, College of Staten Island, Queensborough Community College, Borough of Manhattan Community College, York College, New York City College of Technology, New Community College, Medgar Evers College, LaGuardia Community College, Hostos Community College, City College, Bronx Community College, Wallerstein, M., ­Fernandez, R., Travis, J., Fritz, W., Call, D., & Perez, A. (2012, August 1). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­103414. 28. City University of New York Bylaws, Article XI, Duties and Qualifications of Titles in the Instructional Staff, Section 11.4. The President. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​ policy​.cuny​.edu​/bylaws​/article​_xi​/section​_11​.4.​/text​/​#Navigation​_Location 29. PSC-­CUNY 2007–­2010 Contract. Appendix A. Pertinent sections of the workload settlement agreement. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/contract​/appendix​ -pertinent​-sections​-workload​-settlement​-agreement 30. Article 78 Proceeding Law & Legal Definition. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​ definitions​.uslegal​.com​/a​/article​-­­­­­­­­78​-­­­­­­­­proceeding/ 31. Bowen, B., Cooper, S. E., & Martell, T. v. City University of New York, & the Board of Trustees of the City University of New York. (2012, March 20). Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County. Index No. 12-­151021. 32. Professional Staff Congress. (Updated 2013, December 16). Contract rights upheld in Pathways grievance. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/news​-events​ /contract​-rights​-upheld​-pathways​-grievance 33. Hogness, P. (2014, January). Arbitrator refuses to dismiss Pathways grievance, says contract covers faculty rights on curriculum. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​ .psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/january​-­­­­­­­­2014​/arbitrator​-­­­­­­­­refuses​-­­­­­­­­dismiss​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­grievance​ -­­­­­­­­says​-­­­­­­­­contract​-­­­­­­­­covers​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­righ 34. Supreme Court of the State of New York, New York County, Index No. 103414/2012, February 21, 2014. Honorable Anil C. Singh Supreme Court Justice. 35. Friedman, J.P., Acosta, Moskowitz, Richter, & Feinman, JJ. (2015, June 9). Professional Staff Congress/CUNY, etc., et al., v. City University of New York, et al., Queensborough Community College, et al., Supreme Court, Appellate Division, First Department. Index No. 151021/12, 103414/12.

Chapter 12. What Does It All Mean? Changing Course with Pathways 1. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2. The City University of New York. (2016, May 4). A profile of undergraduates at CUNY senior and community colleges: Fall 2015. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www2​.cuny​.edu​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/4​/media​-­­­­­­­­assets​/ug​_student​_profile​ _f15​.pdf 3. Kadlec, A., quoted in Marcus, J. (2013, March 22). Stopping the clock on credits that don’t count. Hechinger Report. Retrieved from http://​hechingerreport​.org​/stopping​ -­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­clock​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­credits​-­­­­­­­­that​-­­­­­­­­dont​-­­­­­­­­count/ 4. Pittinsky, M., & Hopkins, K. (2015, October 8). Underserved and overburdened, transfer students face an uphill battle to earn their degrees. Hechinger Report. Retrieved

402  ■  Notes to Chapter 12 from http://​hechingerreport​.org​/underserved​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­overburdened​-­­­­­­­­transfer​-­­­­­­­­students​-­­­­­­­­face​ -­­­­­­­­an​-­­­­­­­­uphill​-­­­­­­­­battle​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­earn​-­­­­­­­­their​-­­­­­­­­degrees/ 5. The City University of New York. (n.d.). Student rights, responsibilities, and appeals. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​ /rightsandresponsibilities​.html 6. Eckel, P. D., Cook, B. J., & King, J. E. (2009). The CAO census: A national profile of chief academic officers. Washington, DC: American Council on Education. Leading demographic portrait of college presidents reveals ongoing challenges in diversity, aging. (2012, March 12). American Council on Education. Retrieved from http://​www​.acenet​.edu​/news​-­­­­­­­­room​/Pages​/ACPS​-­­­­­­­­Release​-­­­­­­­­2012​.aspx 7. Logue, A. W. (2011, February 11). Money, money, money. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2011​/02​/11​/money​-­­­­­­­­money​-­­­­­­­­money 8. Bornstein, R. (2003). Legitimacy in the academic presidency: From entrance to exit. Washington, DC: American Council on Education; Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. 9. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 182. 10. A similar concept applied to faculty (“cosmopolitan” and “local” faculty) dates back at least to the mid-­twentieth century. See Shapiro, J. (2016). Community of scholars, community of teachers. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press. 11. Alamuddin, R., Kurzweil, M., & Rossman, D. (2016, September 29). Higher ed insights: Results of the spring 2016 survey. Ithaka S+R. Retrieved from http://​www​.sr​ .ithaka​.org​/publications​/higher​-­­­­­­­­ed​-­­­­­­­­insights​-­­­­­­­­results​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­spring​-­­­­­­­­2016​-­­­­­­­­survey/ 12. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. (2015, June 22). Scott Walker’s test of academic freedom. Chicago Tribune. Retrieved from http://​www​.chicagotribune​.com​/news​/opinion​ /commentary​/ct​-scott​-walker​-tenure​-university​-wisconsin​-perspec​-0623​-20150622​ -story​.html 13. Jaschik, S. (2013, August 2). They aren’t retiring. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2013​/08​/02​/new​-study​-shows​-difficulty​ -encouraging​-professors​-retire 14. Martell, T., quoted in Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 359. 15. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 71. 16. Shapiro, J. (2014, November 17). The value of a shared education. Chronicle of Higher Education. Available at http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/The​-­­­­­­­­Value​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­a​-­­­­­­­­Shared​/150047/ 17. Schaffer, F. P. (2012, January 2). A guide to academic freedom. The City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/vc​_la​/2012​/01​/02​/a​-­­­­­­­­guide​ -­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­academic​-­­­­­­­­freedom/ 18. Carey, K. (2016, January 15). Academic freedom has its limits. Where they are isn’t always clear. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​ .com​/article​/Academic​-­­­­­­­­Freedom​-­­­­­­­­Has​-­­­­­­­­Limits​/234925​?cid​=​at​&​utm​_source​=​at​&​utm​ _medium​=​en​&​elq​=​cef4c921eaba46249b9f000dcd858c0a​&​elqCampaignId​=​2233​&​ elqaid​=​7549​&​elqat​=​1​&​elqTrackId​=​7ba541f59c0c4944b9903edad4a29bd3 Garland, J. C. (2009). Saving alma mater: A rescue plan for America’s public universities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Notes to Chapter 12  ■ 403 19. Ceci, S. J., Williams, W. M., & Mueller-­Johnson, K. (2006). Is tenure justified? An experimental study of faculty beliefs about tenure, promotion, and academic freedom. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 553–­569. 20. Fendrich, L. (2014, November 14). The forever professors. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/The​-­­­­­­­­Forever​-­­­­­­­­Professors​/149965 21. Tagg, J. (2012, January–­February). Why does the faculty resist change? Change. Retrieved from http://​www​.changemag​.org​/Archives​/Back​%20Issues​/2012​/January​ -February​%202012​/facultychange​-full​.html 22. Gawande, A. (2012, August 13). Big med. The New Yorker. Retrieved from http://​ www​.newyorker​.com​/magazine​/2012​/08​/13​/big​-­­­­­­­­med 23. Kadlec, A. (2016, October 12). Faculty engagement in college program redesign: Lessons from the field. Public Agenda. Retrieved from http://​www​.publicagenda​ .org​/blogs​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­engagement​-­­­­­­­­in​-­­­­­­­­college​-­­­­­­­­program​-­­­­­­­­redesign​-­­­­­­­­lessons​-f­­­­­­­­ rom​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­field 24. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Garland, J. C. (2009). Saving alma mater: A rescue plan for America’s public universities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 25. Zemsky, R. (2013). Checklist for change: Making American higher education a sustainable enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 153. 26. Zemsky, R. (2013). Checklist for change: Making American higher education a sustainable enterprise. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 27. Riesman, D., quoted in Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 138. 28. Trower, C., & Eckel, P. (2016, January 25). Mired in mediocrity. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2016​/01​/25​/governing​-boards​ -are​-too​-often​-only​-mediocre​-their​-performance​-essay Woodhouse, K. (2015, December 9). What trustees think. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2015​/12​/09​/report​-outlines​-trustee​ -frustrations​-over​-transparency​-and​-finances 29. Mitchell, B. C. (2016, March 28). How data can help shape higher education policy. Huffpost College. Retrieved from http://​www​.huffingtonpost​.com​/dr​-­­­­­­­­brian​-­­­­­­­­c​ -­­­­­­­­mitchell​/how​-­­­­­­­­data​-­­­­­­­­can​-­­­­­­­­help​-­­­­­­­­shape​-­­­­­­­­h​_b​_9556700​.html 30. Pierce, S. R. (2015, September 21). How did you get stuck being a college ­president? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​ /2015​/09​/21​/essay​-challenges​-confronting​-presidents​-and​-how​-they​-can​-best​-deal​ -them 31. Edwards, R. (1999, September/October). The academic department: How does it fit into the university reform agenda. Change, 17–­27. Retrieved from http://​www​ .tandfonline​.com​/doi​/abs​/10​.1080​/00091389909604219 32. The City University of New York. (n.d.). Performance management. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/sites​/6​/about​/administration​/chancellor​/office​/performance​ -management/ 33. University Faculty Senate. (n.d.). Mission. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​ .com​/site​/universityfacultysenatecuny​/about​-us​/mission

404  ■  Notes to Chapter 12 34. Schumacher, J. (2014). Dear committee members. New York: Doubleday. 35. PSC-­CUNY. (n.d.). Mission. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/about​-­­­­­­­­us​ /mission 36. PSC-­CUNY. (n.d.). Membership. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/about​ -­­­­­­­­us​/membership 37. New York State Legislature. (n.d.). Laws of New York. Education. Article 125: City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​public​.leginfo​.state​.ny​.us​/lawssrch​ .cgi​?NVLWO: 38. Education Commission of the States. (2016, April 18). 50-­state comparison: Transfer and articulation policies. Retrieved from http://​www​.ecs​.org​/transfer​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­articulation​ -­­­­­­­­policies​-­­­­­­­­db/ 39. Complete College America. (2014). Four-­year myth. Retrieved from http://​ completecollege​.org​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/2014​/11​/4​-­­­­­­­­Year​-­­­­­­­­Myth​.pdf 40. D. Jenkins quoted in Marcus, J. (2013, March 22). Stopping the clock on credits that don’t count. Hechinger Report. Retrieved from http://​hechingerreport​.org​/stopping​ -­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­clock​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­credits​-­­­­­­­­that​-­­­­­­­­dont​-­­­­­­­­count/ 41. Bautsch, B. (2013, January). State policies to improve student transfer. National Conference of State Legislatures. Retrieved from http://​www​.ncsl​.org​/documents​/educ​ /student​-­­­­­­­­transfer​.pdf 42. State University of New York. (n.d.). Bigger dreams realized: Transfer students. Retrieved from https://​www​.suny​.edu​/attend​/get​-­­­­­­­­started​/transfer​-­­­­­­­­students/ 43. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. ix. 44. Rosovsky, Henry. (1990). The university: An owner’s manual. New York: Norton, p. 273. 45. Logue, A. W., & Shrank, I. (2015, August 3). An ignored conflict of interest. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2015​/08​/03​ /essay​-conflicts​-interest​-regarding​-faculty​-members​-and​-curricular​-decisions 46. Bowen, B. (2012, March 8). Pathways is a union issue. Professional Staff Congress. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/issues​/pathways​-videos 47. Shapiro, J. (2016). Community of scholars, community of teachers. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, p. 22. 48. Logue, A. W., & Shrank, I. (2015, August 3). An ignored conflict of interest. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2015​/08​/03​ /essay​-conflicts​-interest​-regarding​-faculty​-members​-and​-curricular​-decisions 49. Gerber, L. G. (2014). The rise & decline of faculty governance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, p. 169. 50. Ginsberg, B. (2011). The fall of the faculty: The rise of the all-­administrative university and why it matters. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 2. 51. Kerr, C. (2001). The uses of the university. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 144. 52. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 53. For further discussion of shared vs. divided governance see Shapiro, J. (2016). Community of scholars, community of teachers. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, p. 22.



Notes to Chapter 12  ■ 405 54. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 186. 55. Burbules, N. C. (2013, October 28). How unions weaken shared governance. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/How​ -­­­­­­­­Unions​-­­­­­­­­Weaken​-­­­­­­­­Shared​/142625/ 56. DeSola, A., & Cermele, B. (2015, July). Lookback: Recalling the early days. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/july​-­­­­­­­­2015​/lookback​-­­­­­­­­recalling​ -­­­­­­­­early​-­­­­­­­­days 57. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 58. Schmidt, B. C. (2014, August). Governance for a new era: A blueprint for higher education trustees. The American Council of Trustees and Alumni. Retrieved from http://​www​.goacta​.org​/publications​/governance​_for​_a​_new​_era 59. Garland, J. C. (2009). Saving alma mater: A rescue plan for America’s public universities. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pierce, S. R. (2015, September 21). How did you get stuck being a college president? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2015​/09​/21​ /essay​-challenges​-confronting​-presidents​-and​-how​-they​-can​-best​-deal​-them 60. Bok, D. (2013). Higher education in America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 61. Reichman, H. (2014, December). Benno Schmidt backs report calling on trustees to reduce faculty authority. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​ /december​-­­­­­­­­2014​/benno​-­­­­­­­­schmidt​-­­­­­­­­backs​-­­­­­­­­report​-­­­­­­­­calling​-­­­­­­­­trustees​-­­­­­­­­reduce​-­­­­­­­­faculty​-­­­­­­­­authority 62. Reichman, H. (2014, December). Benno Schmidt backs report calling on trustees to reduce faculty authority. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​ /clarion​/december​-2014​/benno​-schmidt​-backs​-report​-calling​-trustees​-reduce​-faculty​ -authority 63. AAUP. (2013, November 7). Statement on the freedom to teach. Retrieved from http://​www​.aaup​.org​/news​/statement​-­­­­­­­­freedom​-­­­­­­­­teach 64. Bacow, L. S., Kopans, N., & Picker, R. C. (2014). Exploring the contours of the freedom to teach. Retrieved from http://​www​.sr​.ithaka​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2014​ /12​/SR​_Issue​_Brief​_Freedom​_to​_Teach​_Issue12182014​.pdf 65. American Association of University Professors. (2015). Policy documents and reports (11th ed.). Washington, DC: American Association of University Professors; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 66. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Pierce, S. R. (2015, September 21). How did you get stuck being a college president? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2015​/09​/21​ /essay​-challenges​-confronting​-presidents​-and​-how​-they​-can​-best​-deal​-them 67. Bickerstaff, S., & Scaling Innovations Team. (2014, February). Faculty orientations toward instructional reform. Community College Research Center. Retrieved from http://​ccrc​.tc​.columbia​.edu​/publications​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­orientations​-­­­­­­­­toward​-­­­­­­­­instructional​ -­­­­­­­­reform​.html

406  ■  Notes to Chapter 12 68. Carnevale, A. P., Smith, N., & Strohl, J. (2013, June). Recovery: Job growth and education requirements through 2020. Georgetown Public Policy Institute. R ­ etrieved from https://​repository​.library​.georgetown​.edu​/bitstream​/handle​/10822​/559311​/Recovery2020​ .FR​.Web​.pdf​?sequence​=​1​&​isAllowed​=​y College Board. (n.d.) Tuition and fees and room and board over time, 1976–­77 to 2016–­17, selected years. Retrieved from https://​trends​.collegeboard​.org​/college​-pricing​ /figures​-tables​/tuition​-and​-fees​-and​-room​-and​-board​-over​-time​-1976​-77​_2016​-17​ -selected​-years de Vise, D. (2011, September 13). U.S. falls in global ranking of young adults who finish college. Washington Post. Retrieved from https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com​/local​ /education​/us​-falls​-in​-global​-ranking​-of​-young​-adults​-who​-finish​-college​/2011​/08​/22​ /gIQAAsU3OK​_story​.html 69. Sherman, J., & Andreas, M. (2012, Winter). The successful transfer structure in Washington State. New Directions for Community Colleges, issue 160, pp. 17–­29 (quote from p. 27). 70. S. R. Pierce quoted in Seltzer, R. (2016, September 12). A different era. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2016​/09​ /12​/look​-­­­­­­­­career​-­­­­­­­­late​-­­­­­­­­haverford​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­illustrates​-­­­­­­­­how​-­­­­­­­­college​-­­­­­­­­leaders​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­times​ -­­­­­­­­have 71. Schmidt, P. (March 10, 2014). One email, much outrage. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/One​-­­­­­­­­Email​-­­­­­­­­Much​-­­­­­­­­Outrage​/145227 Seltzer, R. (2016, September 12). A different era. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2016​/09​/12​/look​-career​-late​-haverford​-president​ -illustrates​-how​-college​-leaders​-and​-times​-have 72. Parry, M. (2014, September 19). Scholar behind U. of Illinois boycotts is a longtime activist. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​ /Scholar​-­­­­­­­­Behind​-­­­­­­­­U​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­Illinois​/148907/ 73. The City University of New York. (n.d.). Pathways. Retrieved from http://​www​ .cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​.html 74. Schmidt, B. C., Badillo, H., Brady, J. V., MacDonald, H., Ohrenstein, M., Roberts, R. T., & Schwartz, R. (1999, June 7). The City University of New York: An institution adrift. Report of the mayor’s advisory task force on The City University of New York, p. 82. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/sites​/21stcenturycuny​/wp​ -­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/sites​/22​/2015​/09​/cuny​_adrift​_1999​.pdf 75. The City University of New York. (2012). Pathways ahead: Reform and rigor. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​/about​/archive​ /Pathways​_brochure​.pdf 76. Newman, J., Wolff, W. T., & Hearst, E. (1980). The feature-­positive effect in adult human subjects. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory, 6, 630–­650. 77. CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment. (2015, April 20). Trends in total enrollment: Fall 1990–Fall 2016. Retrieved from CUNY website: http://​www​ .cuny​.edu​/irdatabook​/rpts2​_AY​_current​/ENRL​_0012​_ALLYR​_TRND​.rpt​.pdf 78. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 96.

Notes to Epilogue  ■ 407 79. The City University of New York. Biography of Dr. Matthew Goldstein. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/events​/press​/goldstein​_bio​.html 80. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 186. 81. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 82. Two good examples are MDRC’s randomized controlled trial of CUNY’s ASAP program (Accelerated Study in Associate Programs), which significantly increases associate’s-­degree graduation rates (http://​www​.mdrc​.org​/project​/evaluation​ -accelerated​ - study​ - associate​ - programs​ - asap​ - developmental​ - education​ - students​ #overview), and Logue, Watanabe-­Rose, and Douglas’s (2016) randomized controlled trial demonstrating support for an alternative to traditional remedial mathematics (http://​journals​.sagepub​.com​/doi​/pdf​/10​.3102​/0162373716649056).

Epilogue. Reaching the End of the Path 1. Changing student pathways. (2014, February). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from http://​www​.parchment​.com​/wp​-content​/uploads​/StudentPathways​-final​.pdf DeSantis, N. (January 7, 2014). Agreement seeks to smooth interstate transfers using learning outcomes. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​ .com​/blogs​/ticker​/agreement​-­­­­­­­­s eeks​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­smooth​-­­­­­­­­interstate​-­­­­­­­­transfers​-­­­­­­­­using​-­­­­­­­­learning​ -­­­­­­­­outcomes​/71087 Fain, P. (January 23, 2014). General education’s remake. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2014​/01​/23​/association​-wants​ -create​-portable​-competency​-based​-general​-education​-framework Keierleber, M. (2014, April 7). 4-­year colleges’ view of transfer credits may hinder graduation. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​ /4​-­­­­­­­­Year​-­­­­­­­­Colleges​-­­­­­­­­Views​-­­­­­­­­of​/145753/ Lederman, D. (January 7, 2014). 4 states agree on ‘block transfer’ of gen ed core. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2014​/01​ /07​/4​-states​-agree​-block​-transfer​-gen​-ed​-core Shea, P., & Walker, C. (2016). The interstate passport: A new framework to streamline student transfer. In Handel, S. J., & Strempel, E. (Eds.). Transition and transformation: Fostering transfer student success, pp. 69–­82. Dahlonega, GA: National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students and University of North Georgia Press. Retrieved from https://​ transferinstitute​.org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2016​/05​/Transition​-And​-Transformation​ -NISTS​-book2​.pdf 2. Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015). Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fabricant, M., & Brier, S. (2016). Austerity blues: Fighting for the soul of public higher education. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

408  ■  Notes to Epilogue 3. For reviews of some of the relevant research, see: Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015). Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Handel, S. J., & Strempel, E. (2016). Transition and transformation: Fostering transfer student success. Dahlonega, GA: National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students and University of North Georgia Press. Retrieved from https://​transferinstitute​.org​/wp​ -content​/uploads​/2016​/05​/Transition​-And​-Transformation​-NISTS​-book2​.pdf Jenkins, D., Kadlec, A., & Votruba, J. (2014, July). The business case for regional public universities to strengthen community college transfer pathways (with guidance on leading the process). HCM Strategists. Retrieved from HCM Strategists website: http://​ hcmstrategists​.com​/maximizingresources​/images​/Transfer​_Pathways​_Paper​.pdf 4. AGB Editor. (2016, February 25). 5 principles for college completion. AGB Blog. Retrieved from http://​agb​.org​/blog​/2016​/02​/25​/5​-principles​-for​-college​-completion 5. The National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students (n.d.). Retrieved from https://​transferinstitute​.org/ Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education (2014). Transfer student programs and services. Retrieved from http://​standards​.cas​.edu​/getpdf​.cfm​ ?PDF​=​1C93DD47​-0676​-FCF1​-0903338D7B2FCE15 6. Simone, S. A. (August 2014). Transferability of postsecondary credit following student transfer or coenrollment: Statistical analysis report. US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, National Center for Education Statistics, NCES 2014-­ 163. Retrieved from National Center for Education Statistics website: http://​nces​.ed​.gov​ /pubs2014​/2014163​.pdf 7. National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. (2017, March 29). Snapshot report: 49 percent of 2015–16 bachelor’s degree earners previously enrolled at two-year public institutions. Retrieved from https://​nscblog​.org​/2017​/03​/49​-percent​-of​-2015​-16​ -bachelors​-degree​-earners​-previously​-enrolled​-at​-two​-year​-public​-institutions/ Shapiro, D., Dundar, A., Wakhungu, P. K., Yuan, X., & Harrell, A. (2015, July). Transfer and mobility: A national view of student movement in postsecondary institutions, fall 2008 cohort (Signature Report No. 9). Herndon, VA: National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Retrieved from National Student Clearinghouse Research Center website: https://​nscresearchcenter​.org​/signaturereport9/ 8. Jenkins, D., & Fink, J. (2015). What we know about transfer. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College, Community College Research Center. Retrieved from Community College Research Center website: http://​ccrc​.tc​.columbia​.edu​/media​/k2​ /attachments​/what​-­­­­­­­­we​-­­­­­­­­know​-­­­­­­­­about​-­­­­­­­­transfer​.pdf 9. Wyner, J., Deane, K.C., Jenkins, D., & Fink, J. (2016, May). The transfer playbook: Essential practices for two-­and four-­year colleges. The Aspen Institute and the Community College Research Center. Retrieved from the Community College Research Center website: http://​ccrc​.tc​.columbia​.edu​/media​/k2​/attachments​/transfer​-playbook​-essential​ -practices​.pdf 10. Stratford, M. (2014, January 16). Pledges for low-­ income students. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2014​/01​/16​/obama​ -administration​-announces​-new​-college​-commitments​-and​-funding​-low​-income 11. Jenkins, D., & Fink, J. (2015). What we know about transfer. New York: Columbia University, Teachers College, Community College Research Center. Retrieved from

Notes to Epilogue  ■ 409 Community College Research Center website: http://​ccrc​.tc​.columbia​.edu​/media​/k2​ /attachments​/what​-we​-know​-about​-transfer​.pdf 12. Soliz, A. (2015, July 16). Increasing community college student transfer rates. The Brown Center Chalkboard. Brookings. Retrieved from http://​www​.brookings​.edu​ /blogs​/brown​-­­­­­­­­center​-­­­­­­­­chalkboard​/posts​/2015​/07​/16​-­­­­­­­­community​-­­­­­­­­college​-t­­­­­­­­ ransfers​-­­­­­­­­soliz 13. Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015). Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Jenkins, D., Kadlec, A., & Votruba, J. (2014, July). The business case for regional public universities to strengthen community college transfer pathways (with guidance on leading the process). HCM Strategists. Retrieved from HCM Strategists website: http://​ hcmstrategists​.com​/maximizingresources​/images​/Transfer​_Pathways​_Paper​.pdf Reed, M. (2015, November 17). Guided pathways for transfer. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/blogs​/confessions​-community​-college​ -dean​/guided​-pathways​-transfer 14. Wyner, J., & Jenkins, D. (2016, February 2). Narrower pathways to a bachelor’s degree. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/views​/2016​ /02​/02​/essay​-state​-policy​-solutions​-improve​-student​-transfer​-community​-colleges​ -four​-year 15. Reed, M. (2015, November 17). Guided pathways for transfer. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/blogs​/confessions​-community​-college​ -dean​/guided​-pathways​-transfer 16. Hern, K., & Snell, M. (2014, Fall). The California Acceleration Project: Reforming developmental education to increase student completion of college-­level math and English. New Directions for Community Colleges, 167, 27–­39. 17. Monaghan, D. B., & Attewell, P. (2015). The community college route to the bachelor’s degree. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 37, 70–­91, p. 70. 18. Jenkins, D., Kadlec, A., & Votruba, J. (2014, July). The business case for regional public universities to strengthen community college transfer pathways (with guidance on leading the process). HCM Strategists. Retrieved from HCM Strategists website: http://​ hcmstrategists​.com​/maximizingresources​/images​/Transfer​_Pathways​_Paper​.pdf Marcus, J. (March 22, 2013). Stopping the clock on credits that don’t count. Hechinger Report. Retrieved from http://​hechingerreport​.org​/stopping​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­clock​-­­­­­­­­on​-­­­­­­­­credits​ -­­­­­­­­that​-­­­­­­­­dont​-­­­­­­­­count/ Reed, M. (2016, January 24). What do you advise Amy to take? Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/blogs​/confessions​-community​-college​ -dean​/what​-do​-you​-advise​-amy​-take 19. Bailey, T. R., Jaggars, S. S., & Jenkins, D. (2015). Redesigning America’s community colleges: A clearer path to student success. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. 20. Baron, K. (2013, November 7). Judge upholds shared governance at community colleges. Edsource. Retrieved from http://​edsource​.org​/2013​/judge​-­­­­­­­­upholds​-­­­­­­­­shared​ -­­­­­­­­governance​-­­­­­­­­at​-­­­­­­­­community​-­­­­­­­­colleges​/41077 Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education. New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 186. California Competes. (n.d.). Local community college governance. Retrieved from http://​californiacompetes​.org​/issues​/local​-­­­­­­­­community​-c­­­­­­­­ ollege​-­­­­­­­­governance/

410  ■  Notes to Epilogue Flaherty, C. (2015, June 5). Losing hope in Wisconsin. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2015​/06​/05​/faculty​-members​-protest​-tenure​ -shared​-governance​-changes​-board​-regents Kelderman, E. (2014, November 19). The plight of the public regional college. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/The​-­­­­­­­­Plight​-­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­the​ -­­­­­­­­Public​/150127 Mytelka, A. (2015, July 14). San Jose State president, who led online push, will leave for post in Afghanistan. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​ .com​/blogs​/ticker​/san​-­­­­­­­­jose​-­­­­­­­­state​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­who​-­­­­­­­­led​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­push​-­­­­­­­­will​-­­­­­­­­leave​-­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­post​-­­­­­­­­in​ -­­­­­­­­afghanistan​/101991 Reichman, H. (2014, December). Benno Schmidt backs report calling on trustees to reduce faculty authority. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​ /clarion​/december​-­­­­­­­­2014​/benno​-­­­­­­­­schmidt​-­­­­­­­­backs​-­­­­­­­­report​-­­­­­­­­calling​-­­­­­­­­trustees​-­­­­­­­­reduce​-­­­­­­­­faculty​ -­­­­­­­­authority Straumsheim, C. (May 9, 2014). Rutgers graduate faculty rejects online degree compromise. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​ /2014​/05​/09​/rutgers​-graduate​-faculty​-rejects​-online​-degree​-compromise Straumsheim, C. (August 13, 2014). A changing economy changes online education priorities at the U. of California. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​ .insidehighered​.com​/news​/2014​/08​/13​/changing​-­­­­­­­­economy​-­­­­­­­­changes​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­education​ -­­­­­­­­priorities​-­­­­­­­­u​-­­­­­­­­california Straumsheim, C. (2014, November 10). U. of Florida political science department declines to build a fully online degree. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​ .insidehighered​.com​/news​/2014​/11​/10​/u​-­­­­­­­­florida​-­­­­­­­­political​-­­­­­­­­science​-­­­­­­­­department​-­­­­­­­­declines​ -­­­­­­­­build​-­­­­­­­­fully​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­degree Thomsen, J. (2015, July 23). Faculty members and president face off in fight over curriculum changes. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/news​ /2015​/07​/23​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­members​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­face​-­­­­­­­­fight​-­­­­­­­­over​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​-­­­­­­­­changes ‘Truce’ in battle over Connecticut State Colleges? (2014, November 24). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2014​/11​/24​ /truce​-battle​-over​-connecticut​-state​-colleges 21. Jaschik, S. (2016, October 21). Professors criticize gen ed changes at Concord U. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2016​/10​ /21​/professors​-­­­­­­­­criticize​-­­­­­­­­gen​-­­­­­­­­ed​-­­­­­­­­changes​-­­­­­­­­concord​-­­­­­­­­u 22. Board of Trustees. University of Illinois. (2013, January 24). Statutes. Retrieved from http://​www​.bot​.uillinois​.edu​/statutes 23. Education Commission of the States. (2016, April 18). Transfer and articulation policies: State profiles. Retrieved from http://​www​.ecs​.org​/transfer​-and​-articulation​ -policies​-state​-profiles/ 24. Mytelka, A. (2015, July 14). San Jose State president, who led online push, will leave for post in Afghanistan. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​ chronicle​.com​/blogs​/ticker​/san​-­­­­­­­­jose​-­­­­­­­­state​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­who​-­­­­­­­­led​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­push​-­­­­­­­­will​-­­­­­­­­leave​ -­­­­­­­­for​-­­­­­­­­post​-­­­­­­­­in​-­­­­­­­­afghanistan​/101991 25. Flaherty, C. (2015, June 5). Losing hope in Wisconsin. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved  from  https://​w ww​.insidehighered​.com​/news​/2015​/06​/05​/faculty​-members​ -protest​-tenure​-shared​-governance​-changes​-board​-regents

Notes to Epilogue  ■ 411 26. Baron, K. (2013, November 7). Judge upholds shared governance at community colleges. Edsource. Retrieved from http://​edsource​.org​/2013​/judge​-­­­­­­­­upholds​-­­­­­­­­shared​ -­­­­­­­­governance​-­­­­­­­­at​-­­­­­­­­community​-­­­­­­­­colleges​/41077 California Competes. (n.d.). Local community college governance. Retrieved from http://​californiacompetes​.org​/issues​/local​-­­­­­­­­community​-c­­­­­­­­ ollege​-­­­­­­­­governance/ 27. Straumsheim, C. (August 13, 2014). A changing economy changes online education priorities at the U. of California. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​ .insidehighered​.com​/news​/2014​/08​/13​/changing​-­­­­­­­­economy​-­­­­­­­­changes​-­­­­­­­­online​-­­­­­­­­education​ -­­­­­­­­priorities​-­­­­­­­­u​-­­­­­­­­california 28. ‘Truce’ in battle over Connecticut State Colleges? (2014, November 24). Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/quicktakes​/2014​/11​/24​ /truce​-battle​-over​-connecticut​-state​-colleges 29. Kelderman, E. (2014, November 19). The plight of the public regional college. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​/article​/The​-­­­­­­­­Plight​ -­­­­­­­­of​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­Public​/150127 30. Thomsen, J. (2015, July 23). Faculty members and president face off in fight over curriculum changes. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​ /news​/2015​/07​/23​/faculty​-­­­­­­­­members​-­­­­­­­­and​-­­­­­­­­president​-­­­­­­­­face​-­­­­­­­­fight​-­­­­­­­­over​-­­­­­­­­curriculum​-­­­­­­­­changes 31. Board of Regents. (n.d.). Bylaws of the Board of Regents. University System of Georgia. Retrieved from http://​www​.usg​.edu​/regents​/bylaws​#charter​_and​_constitutional​ _authority 32. 50-­state comparison: Transfer and articulation policies. (2016, April 18). Education Commission of the States. Retrieved from Education Commission of the States website: http://​www​.ecs​.org​/transfer​-and​-articulation​-policies​-db/ 33. Watkins, M. (2017, February 12). Texas lawmakers search for ways to avoid wasted college credits. The Texas Tribune. Retrieved from https://​www​.texastribune​.org​ /2017​/02​/12​/texas​-lawmakers​-search​-ways​-stop​-millions​-wasted​-college​-credit​-hours/ 34. National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, Policy Alert, February 2010, p. 3. 35. Keeping the promise: Going the distance on transfer reform. (2016, March). The Campaign for College Opportunity. Retrieved from http://​collegecampaign​.org​/wp​ -­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/2016​/03​/2016​-­­­­­­­­Keeping​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­Promise​_Full​-­­­­­­­­Report​-­­­­­­­­FINAL​.pdf 36. Keierleber, M. (2014, April 7). 4-­year colleges’ view of transfer credits may hinder graduation. Chronicle of Higher Education. Retrieved from http://​chronicle​.com​ /article​/4​-­­­­­­­­Year​-­­­­­­­­Colleges​-­­­­­­­­Views​-­­­­­­­­of​/145753/ 37. City University of New York. (n.d.). B.I.14—­Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 38. William Kelly. The Graduate Center. City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www​.gc​.cuny​.edu​/Faculty​/Core​-­­­­­­­­Bios​/William​-­­­­­­­­Kelly 39. Kelly, W. P. (2014, February 13). A message from the interim chancellor regarding Pathways review. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-­­­­­­­­news​/2014​ /02​/13​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­interim​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​-­­­­­­­­regarding​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­review/ 40. CUNY-­wide Common Core Course Review Committee update. (2015, January 20). The City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​ -­­­­­­­­news​/2015​/01​/20​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­wide​-­­­­­­­­common​-­­­­­­­­core​-­­­­­­­­course​-­­­­­­­­review​-­­­­­­­­committee​-­­­­­­­­update​-­­­­­­­­3/

412  ■  Notes to Epilogue 41. Brooklyn College PSC-­CUNY. (n.d.). Blog archive 2014. Retrieved from http://​ pscbc​.blogspot​.com​/search​?updated​-min​=​2014–01–01T00:​00:​00–08:​00​&​updated​-max​ =​2015​-01​-01T00:​00:​00​-08:​00​&​max​-results​=​33 42. Kurzweil, M. A. (2015). The City University of New York. In Bowen, W. G., & Tobin, E. M. (2015). Locus of authority: The evolution of faculty roles in the governance of higher education (pp. 315–­360). New York: Ithaka; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, p. 360. 43. City University of New York. (n.d.). B.I.14—­Resolution on creating an efficient transfer system. Retrieved from http://​www​.cuny​.edu​/academics​/initiatives​/pathways​ /about​/archive​/archive​/text​-­­­­­­­­draft​/Reso​.pdf 44. Newswire: Pathways curriculum. (2015, March 11). CUNY Matters. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/forum​/2015​/03​/11​/newswire​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­curriculum/ 45. De Sousa Jr., D., & Rodriguez, L. (2016). Steering transfer student toward the right path: Advising and recruitment strategies used at Texas A&M University. In S. J. Handel & E. Strempel (Eds.), Transition and transformation: Fostering transfer student success (pp. 105–­114). Dahlonega, GA: National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students and University of North Georgia Press. Retrieved from https://​transferinstitute​ .org​/wp​-content​/uploads​/2016​/05​/Transition​-And​-Transformation​-NISTS​-book2​.pdf Eller, C. C. (2017). Increasing success for two-­to-­four-­year transfer students within The City University of New York. GraduateNYC. Retrieved from http://​bit​.ly​/2mGe6r5 46. Reed, M. (2015, November 17). Guided pathways to transfer. Inside Higher Ed. Retrieved from https://​www​.insidehighered​.com​/blogs​/confessions​-community​-college​ -dean​/guided​-pathways​-transfer 47. Brown, J., & Kurzweil, M. (2016, February 4). Student success by design: CUNY’s Guttman Community College. New York: Ithaka S+R. Retrieved from http://​ www​.sr​.ithaka​.org​/wp​-­­­­­­­­content​/uploads​/2016​/02​/SR​_Case​_Study​_Student​_Success​_by​ _Design​_Guttman020416​.pdf 48. Rabinowitz, V. (2016, September 30). A message from the executive vice chancellor regarding Pathways review. The City University of New York. Retrieved from http://​www1​.cuny​.edu​/mu​/academic​-­­­­­­­­news​/2016​/09​/30​/a​-­­­­­­­­message​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­the​-­­­­­­­­executive​ -­­­­­­­­vice​-­­­­­­­­chancellor​-­­­­­­­­regarding​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­review/ 49. The New York City Council. (2016, October 26). Oversight—­CUNY Pathways update. Hearing. Retrieved from http://​legistar​.council​.nyc​.gov​/DepartmentDetail​.aspx​ ?ID​=​6909​&​GUID​=​3B12A295​-­­­­­­­­AC6A​-­­­­­­­­4C24​-­­­­­­­­BF6B​-­­­­­­­­4C3993F7BE24​&​Search= 50. President Barbara Bowen. (n.d.). Retrieved from http://​psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/about​-­­­­­­­­us​ /president​-­­­­­­­­barbara​-­­­­­­­­bowen 51. Cooper, S. (2017, January 31). Saving the National Endowment for the Humanities. UFS Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­ufs​/UFS​ -­­­­­­­­blog​/savingthenationalendowmentforthehumanities Historians’ letter to President Obama and members of Congress. (2014, July 31). Retrieved from http://​www​.historiansagainstwar​.org​/gazapetition​.html Jadaliyya Reports. (2014, September 1). On SJP’s freedom to organize: An open letter from CUNY faculty. Retrieved from http://​www​.jadaliyya​.com​/pages​/index​/19058​/on​ -­­­­­­­­sjp​%E2​%80​%99s​-­­­­­­­­freedom​-­­­­­­­­to​-­­­­­­­­organize​_an​-­­­­­­­­open​-­­­­­­­­letter​-­­­­­­­­from​-­­­­­­­­c Pro-­Palestinian historians file resolution to be debated at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association. (2015, November 16). Retrieved from http://​ historynewsnetwork​.org​/article​/161226

Notes to Epilogue  ■ 413 52. Cooper, S. (2015, March 4). Faculty views of experiential learning, continued: Look before you LEAP. UFS Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​ /cuny​-ufs​/UFS​-blog​/facultyviewsofexperientiallearningcontinuedlookbeforeyouleap 53. Cooper, S. (2016, November 23). Cuomo, CUNY and the Inspector General. UFS Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​/cuny​-ufs​/UFS​-blog​ /theinspectorgeneralsreportoncunyandgovernorcuomosstatement 54. City College professor is sentenced to jail over bear hunt protest. (2016, December 9). New York Times. Retrieved from http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/12​/09​/nyregion​ /city​-­­­­­­­­college​-­­­­­­­­professor​-­­­­­­­­william​-­­­­­­­­crain​-­­­­­­­­jail​-­­­­­­­­bear​-­­­­­­­­hunt​-­­­­­­­­protest​.html?​_r​=​0 55. Nunez, E. (2016). Even in paradise. Akashic Books. 56. Roberts, S. (2016, October 21). William G. Bowen, Princeton educator who championed poor and minority students, dies at 83. New York Times. Retrieved from http://​www​.nytimes​.com​/2016​/10​/22​/nyregion​/william​-­­­­­­­­bowen​-­­­­­­­­dead​.html?​_r​=​0 57. Logue, A. W. (2015). The psychology of eating and drinking (4th ed.). New York: Routledge. 58. Fabricant, M., & Brier, S. (2016, October). How cost-­cutting and austerity affect public higher education. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-cuny​.org​/clarion​ /october​-2016​/how​-cost​-cutting​-and​-austerity​-affect​-public​-higher​-education Paul, A. (2016, November/December). Members speak the truth about Pathways. Clarion. Retrieved from http://​www​.psc​-­­­­­­­­cuny​.org​/clarion​/novemberdecember​-­­­­­­­­2016​ /members​-­­­­­­­­speak​-­­­­­­­­truth​-­­­­­­­­about​-­­­­­­­­pathways 59. Cooper, S. (2015, March 4). Faculty views of experiential learning, continued: Look before you LEAP. CUNY University Faculty Senate Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­ufs​/UFS​-­­­­­­­­blog​/facultyviewsofexperiential learningcontinuedlookbeforeyouleap Pecorino, P. (2016, February 29). Who needs algebra? CUNY University Faculty Senate Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​/cuny​-­­­­­­­­ufs​/UFS​-­­­­­­­­blog​ /whoneedsalgebra 60. Logue, A. W., Watanabe-­Rose, M., & Douglas, D. (2016). Should students assessed as needing remedial mathematics take college-­level quantitative courses instead? A randomized controlled trial. Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 38, 578–­598. Retrieved from http://​journals​.sagepub​.com​/doi​/pdf​/10​.3102​/0162373716649056 61. Tai, E. (2016, November 28). Share we must: Shared governance & small groups. UFS Blog. Retrieved from https://​sites​.google​.com​/a​/cunyufs​.org​/cuny​-ufs​/UFS​-blog​ /sharewemustsharedgovernancesmallgroups 62. Vitale, A. (2014, September–­October). The fight against Pathways at CUNY. Retrieved from https://​www​.aaup​.org​/article​/fight​-­­­­­­­­against​-­­­­­­­­pathways​-­­­­­­­­cuny​#​.WFA​-­­­­­­­­aaIrJTY 63. Support the CUNY value. (2016, February 11). CUNY Media. Retrieved from https://​www​.youtube​.com​/watch​?v​=​0PenhrRje8g​&​feasture​=​youtu​.be

Names Index ■■■■■ Adelman, Clifford, 160, 391n8 Alamuddin, R., 402n11 Anderson, Michelle, 29, 152, 154, 156, 163, 165, 171, 177, 372, 391n9, 392n5, 392n26 Anderson, P., 392n5 Andreas, M., 406n69 Anson, C. M., 392n5 Appolon, Roberto, xvii Arcario, Paul, 254, 413n58 Arena, Michael, 190 Asimov, Isaac, 31, 380n3 Attewell, Paul, 144, 146, 147, 174, 199, 359, 362, 386n25, 409n17 Atwood, Margaret, 170 Avenoso, K., 379n5 Bacow, Lawrence S., 118, 378n17, 405n64 Badillo, Herman, 122, 382n27, 389n9, 398n8, 406n74 Bailey, Thomas R., 356, 407n2, 407–8n3, 409n13, 409n19 Baker, Andrea, 156, 205, 291, 294 Bakewicz, D., 379n2, 381n12, 398n8 Barnhart, Michael, 157 Baron, K., 409–10n20, 410n26 Bassin, Steven, xvii Bautsch, B., 404n41 Beal, Valerie Lancaster, 22 Beatha, Lisa, 142–43 Beck, Elizabeth, 154 Bell, M., 379n2, 381n12, 398n8 Bellis, Mark, xvi Berdahl, Robert, 199 Berg, J. S., 398n8 Bergad, Laird, 143, 146, 174, 199 Berman, H., 398n8 Berrett, D., 399–400n19 Berry, Philip, 25, 122, 123, 131, 135 Bianco, AnnaMarie, 155, 289 Bickerstaff, S., 405n67 Bloomberg, Michael, 167, 168, 278 Bok, Derek, 41, 43, 54, 118, 337, 383n36, 383n38, 384n60, 389n6, 405n60 Bond, Julian, 244 Borkowski, Erica, xvii Bornstein, R., 402n8

Botman, Selma, 51 Bowen, Barbara, 37, 79–80, 160–61, 169, 201, 212–13, 214, 226–27, 233, 234, 241, 255, 267–68, 271, 284, 285, 286, 300, 302, 305–6, 316, 332, 365, 369, 372, 381n20, 399nn12–17, 400n21, 400n25, 400– 401n27, 401n31, 404n46, 412n50 Bowen, William G., xiii, xv–xvii, 2, 118, 199, 292–93, 334–35, 336, 351, 352, 356, 364, 374, 377n5, 377n7, 377n9, 378n12, 378n17, 379n1, 379n25, 380n4, 380n14, 389n4, 393n20, 398nn22–23, 401n1, 402n12, 402n14, 403n24, 403n27, 404n43, 404n52, 404n54, 405n57, 405n66, 406n78, 407n2, 407nn80–81, 409–10n20, 411–12n42, 413n56 Bradford, Greg, 136 Brady, J. V., 382n27, 406n74 Brenkman, John, 142 Brenneman, M. W., 377n11, 378n16 Brier, Stephen, 357, 407n2, 413n58 Broad, Molly Corbett, 199 Brown, Bruce, 274 Brown, J., 412n47 Brown, Ted, 282 Brownell, Johanna, xvi Bruce, Dermont, xvi Bueno, D., 396n16 Burbules, Nicholas, 335–36, 405n55 Burke, Martin, 141–42 Calcagno, J. C., 378n13 Call, D., 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Callan, P. M., 377n11, 378n16 Carey, K., 402n18 Carey, Rosalind, 143–44 Carnevale, A. P., 377n10, 405–6n68 Castañeda, Allen, 134, 148, 273 Catalano, Douglas, xvii Ceci, S. J., 390n14, 402n19 Cermele, B., 405m56 Chellman, Colin, 6 Chen, Wellington, 15–16, 18, 27, 116, 125–26, 130–32, 371 Chingos, M. M., 377n7, 378n12, 379n25

416  ■  Names Index Chrzanowska, Malgorzata, xvi Churchill, J., 388n18 Clarkson, Sandra, 142 Clegg, Johnny, 109 Coddington, R., 384n2 Coetzee, J. M., 394n2 Cohen, Brian, xvii, 90, 123, 204 Coico, Lisa, 25, 94, 136, 372 Cole, Jonathan, 199 Conte, Christopher A., 66 Conway, Katherine, 95, 156–57, 372, 373 Cook, B. J., 402n6 Cook, Blanche Wiesen, 256–57, 379n6, 395n8 Cooper, Sandi, xvii, 11–12, 13, 15, 16, 20–22, 26, 27, 28, 29–30, 31, 33, 35, 36–37, 44, 54, 59, 65, 66, 68, 70, 73–82, 89–91, 92–93, 94, 95, 98, 100, 102, 105, 106, 107, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128, 129, 131, 132–33, 135, 146–48, 149–50, 153–54, 156, 157, 158–60, 161, 162, 167, 168, 169, 170–72, 173–74, 175, 178, 189–90, 193, 197, 199, 202–3, 204, 207, 208–10, 211, 213, 214–15, 216, 227, 230–31, 236, 237, 238, 239, 264, 284, 285, 296, 298, 300, 302, 306, 315, 316, 317, 329, 342, 344, 345, 351, 353, 372, 375, 379nn2–4, 380n11, 380n8, 381n12, 381nn15–17, 381nn19–20, 383nn42–43, 386n21, 392n20, 392n22, 394n27, 398n8, 399nn12–17, 401n31, 412nn51–52, 413n53, 413n59 Cornford, F. M., 109 Cosby, Bill, 213 Crain, William, 140, 373 Crews, Shaquona, xvi Croke, Erin, 52, 156, 243 Cronholm, Lois, 45, 275, 287 Crook, David, 6, 52, 58, 70, 72, 156, 165, 266, 309 Cross, A., 394n2 Crow, Michael, 199 Cuomo, Andrew, 13, 14, 167, 168 Davis, James, 369 Dayal, Ashima, xvi de Blasio, Bill, 278, 350 de Jong, T., 393n12 De Jongh, J., 379n2, 381n12, 398n8 De Sousa, D., Jr., 412n45 de Vise, D., 405–6n68 Deane, KC, 408n9

Del Giudice, M. J., 398n8 Del Rossi, A. F., 384n52, 394n9 Dennis, J., 396n19 DeSantis, N., 407n1 DeSola, A., 405n56 Dietrich, C., 386n25 DiTommaso, Dominique, 156, 205, 294 Dobrin, Allan, 90, 171, 203, 266, 372 Dougherty, Peter, xiii, xvi Douglas, D., 407n82, 413n60 Doyle, W. R., 384n56 Dreifus, Erika, 52, 88, 125, 156, 170, 243, 373 Du Bois, W.E.B., 396n21 Dundar, A., 408n7 Dunkin, A., 387n29 Eads, Daniel, xvi Eckel, P. D., 402n6, 403n28 Edwards, R., 403n31 Ehrenberg, R. G., 378n18 Ellefson, A., 395n6 Eller, C. C., 412n45 El-Mohandes, Ayman, 273 Evenbeck, Scott, 80, 136 Everett, E., 398n8 Ewell, P. T., 377n11, 378n16 Fabricant, Michael, 145, 161, 356–57, 374, 407n2, 413n58 Fain, P., 399–400n19, 407n1 Farkas, J., 379n3 Feal, Rosemary, 168–69, 252 Feinman, J. J., 401n35 Fendrich, Laurie, 325, 402–3n20 Fernandez, Dolores, 192 Fernandez, R., 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Fields, Dave, 10–11, 27, 126, 132, 135, 156, 174–75, 204, 235, 241–42, 243, 254–55, 266, 289, 372 Fink, John, 358, 408nn8–9, 408n11 Fink, S., 398n8 Finney, J. E., 377n11, 378n16 Fitger, Jay, 329 Flaherty, C., 409–10n20, 410n25 Foderaro, L. W., 389n29 Fortgang, Adam, xvi Fossey, Dian, 116 Foster, Freida, 19, 22 Friedman, J. P., 401n35 Friedrich, A., 378n18

Names Index  ■ 417 Fritz, Bill, 53, 63, 210, 211–12, 227, 242, 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Garland, J. C., 402n18, 403n24, 405n59 Gawande, A., 403n22 Gerber, Larry, 334, 404n49 Gergely, John, 271 Gill, B. P., 380n5, 382n26 Ginsberg, Benjamin, 66, 334, 380, 385n13, 404n50 Giuliani, Rudy, 36, 39 Gizis, Evangelos, 155 Glenn, D., 388n15, 388n24 Glick, Deborah, 5, 70, 71, 76–77, 193, 330 Goldrick-Rab, S., 378n13 Goldstein, Matthew, xv, 10, 12, 13, 14, 15, 28, 32–33, 34, 37, 40, 41, 43, 45, 52, 54, 59, 68, 72, 78, 79, 82, 86, 87, 92, 93, 95, 98–100, 102, 105, 117, 119, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 128–29, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 147, 148, 152, 153, 156, 162, 165, 167, 175, 176–77, 186, 188, 189, 193, 194, 196, 198, 208, 210, 211, 212, 229, 233, 234, 244, 247, 249, 251, 255, 257, 258, 259, 260, 261, 262, 266, 267, 271, 273, 274, 275, 276, 277, 278, 284, 285, 288, 292, 293, 315, 326, 328, 349–52, 365, 371 Gomes, W., 379n2, 380n8, 381n12, 381n15 Gonen, Y., 399–400n19 Gonyea, R. M., 392n5 Gordon, Warren, 282 Gregorian, Vartan, 199 Grindley, Carl, 144–45 Grossman, Edward, 162–63 Guthrie, Kevin M., xvi, 378n17 Gutierrez, Luis, 136–37 Guttman, Charles, 273 Guttman, Stella, 273 Haav, Julia, xvi Handel, S. J., 407n1, 407–8n3, 412n45 Hanks, Tom, 102, 388n19 Harlan, L. R., 384n59 Harrell, A., 408n7 Harris, Townsend, 60 Hartle, Terry, 122 Hearst, E., 406n76 Hebel, S., 385n12 Hechinger, G., 380n2, 387n2 Hemelt, S. W., 384n52, 394–95n9 Hermann, Dale, xvi

Hern, K., 409n16 Hersch, J., 384n52, 394n9 Hershenson, Jay, 10–11, 12, 18, 27, 28, 70, 98, 99, 106, 107, 110, 119, 124, 125, 132, 133, 134, 170, 198, 216, 221, 262, 268, 347, 372 Hill, Catherine Bond, xvi Hogness, P., 394n24, 397n8, 397n12, 399n11, 401n33 Hopkins, K., 401n4 Hotzler, Russell, 78, 124, 136, 372 Hussey, D., 381n18 Inniss, C., 398n8 Jaggars, Shanna S., 356, 407n2, 407–8n3, 409n13, 409n19 Jaschik, Scott, 221, 263, 396n22, 402n13, 410n21 Jenkins, Davis, 356, 358, 404n40, 407n2, 407–8n3, 408nn8–9, 408n11, 409nn13–14, 409nn18–19 Johnson, KC, 132, 198, 270–71, 390n13, 396n25 Jones, D. P., 377n11, 378n16 Jordan, Chet, 357 Jordan, Peter, 70 Kadlec, Alison, 320, 401n3, 403n23, 407–8n3, 409n13, 409n18 Kanter, Martha, xvii–xviii Kaplowitz, Karen, 80, 116–17, 118, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 130–31, 132, 149, 265 Kapp, Karen, 243, 248, 291 Kasinitz, Philip, 205 Kaye, Judith, 171 Keierleber, M., 407n1, 411n36 Kelderman, E., 409–10n20, 411n29 Kelly, A. P., 385n3 Kelly, William, 26, 165, 166, 177, 198, 199, 228–29, 259, 260–61, 275, 276–77, 277–78, 280, 284, 285, 288, 293, 363, 364, 371, 392n26, 411nn38–39 Kendrick, Curtis, 291 Kerr, Clark, 31, 83, 109, 179, 321, 323, 334, 380nn1–2, 387n1, 388n28, 392nn1–2, 402n9, 402n15, 404n51 King, J. E., 402n6 King, John, 158 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 25 King, Stephen, xvii Kirschner, Ann, 109, 372

418  ■  Names Index Kisker, C. B., 386n17 Koch, Erec, 291 Koester, J., 384n57 Kopans, Nancy, xvi, 405n64 Kouakou, Kafui, 198, 237, 373 Kurlaender, M., 378n12 Kurzweil, Martin, xv–xvi, 292, 364, 379n1, 380n4, 402n11, 411–12n42, 412n47 Kushner, Tony, 15

Moltz, D., 378n14, 388n25 Monaghan, David B., 359, 386n25, 409n17 Morales, Tomás, 210, 211–12 Mounder, S. M., 398n8 Mueller-Johnson, K., 390n14, 402n19 Mullins, Demond, 145, 390n17 Murphy, J. P., 398n8 Muyskens, James, 63, 242, 251, 372 Mytelka, A., 409–10n20, 410n24

Lack, K. A., 378n17 Lavallee, David, 122 Lederman, D., 389n7, 407n1 Lepow, Lauren, xvi Lewis, Earl, xvi Lichtenberger, E., 386n25 Liese, Debra, xvi Linn, M. C., 393n12 Lipka, S., 378n21, 384n2, 385n4 Littman, Cheryl, 62 Liu, Theresa, xvi Long, B. T., 378n12 Long, M. P., 378n17 Longino, Deborah, xvi Lopez, Liliete, 125, 137

Naider, Fred, 227–28 Nair, Parameswaran, 131 Neal, A., 383n34, 385n11 Newman, J., 406n76 Norton, Clare, 139 Nunez, Elizabeth, xvii, 139–40, 146, 199, 373, 413n55

Ma, S. P., 379n2, 380n8, 381n12, 381n15 MacDonald, H., 382n27, 406n74 Makridis, C., 384n52, 394–95n9 Marcum, Deanna, xvi Marcus, Jon, 256, 395n7, 401n3, 404n40, 409n18 Marino, R., 398n8 Markowitz, G., 379n6 Martell, Terrence, 69, 73–74, 76, 77–78, 79, 81, 82, 83, 84, 100, 159, 193, 213, 214, 215, 231, 233, 234, 284, 285, 302, 306, 322, 372, 381–82n20, 399nn12–17, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27, 401n31, 402n14 Marti, Eduardo, 70, 125, 132 Martinez, J., 391n14 Maruca, Robert, 283 Matthews-Salazar, Patricia, 373 McGregor, Heidi, xvi McPherson, M. S., 377n1, 378n12, 379n25 Mellow, Gail, 254 Mervis, J., 393n10 Messerlian, Hourig, 134–35, 235, 255 Milliken, J. B., 365, 371 Mitchell, B. C., 403n29 Mogulescu, John, 80

Obrist, Karen, xvii Ohrenstein, M., 382n27, 406n74 Okeson, Kate, xvii Olmeda, R. A., 387n7 Orman, Camille Logue, xvii Otte, George, 371 Paaswell, Robert E., 146 Paine, C., 392n5 Palha, Marlon, xvi Pantaleo, Peter, 22–25, 26, 335 Parry, M., 406n72 Pataki, George, 20 Paul, A., 413n58 Pearlstein, S., 383n39 Pecorino, P., 413n59 Perez, Tony, 26, 171, 172, 301, 303, 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Pesile, Kathleen M., 26 Petraeus, David, 287 Pfeffer, F. T., 378n13 Phillips, A. M., 391–92n19 Picciano, Anthony, 357 Picker, R. C., 405n64 Pierce, Susan Resneck, 345, 403n30, 405n59, 405n66, 406n70 Pittinsky, M., 401n4 Polishook, Irwin, 35, 37, 379n2, 381n12, 398n8 P-Orridge, C., 379n2, 380n8, 381n12, 381n15 Price, M., 393n11 Provost, Cory, 15, 20, 24–25, 59, 69, 125, 129–30, 135, 210, 373 Ptachik, Robert, 155, 243

Names Index  ■ 419 Rabinowitz, Vita, 208, 289, 371, 412n48 Raffel, Keith, xvii Rawlings, Hunter, 43, 199 Reed, M., 409n13, 409n15, 409n18, 412n46 Reichman, Henry, 337–39, 405nn61–62, 409–10n20 Reynolds, Ann, 33, 34, 300 Reynolds, G. S., 388n14 Reynolds, W. A., 398n8 Riesman, D., 403n27 Rios, G., 398n8 Roberts, H. M., 390n11 Roberts, R. T., 382n27, 406n74 Roberts, S., 413n56 Robin, Corey, 345 Robinson, James, 138, 373 Rodriguez, Felix V. Matos, 25, 135 Rodriguez, Jeanette, 156, 205, 294 Rodriguez, L., 412n45 Rodriguez, Steven, 137, 154, 373 Rojas, Stephanie, xvi Roksa, Josipa, 56, 378n13, 378n15, 385n3 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 256 Roosevelt, Franklin D., xviii Rosa, Chris, 149 Rosovsky, Henry, 115, 331, 389nn1–2, 404n44 Rossman, D., 402n11 Russo, R., 394n2 Sailor, Kevin, 369–70 Salaita, Steven, 345 Samayoa, Clara, xvi Samuels, T. M., 395n10 Sanchez, Frank, 149 Sapienza, Matthew, 70 Savage, Dean, 44, 383n42 Schaffer, Frederick P., 16, 92, 107, 125–26, 172–73, 194, 250–51, 296-301, 303–5, 310, 311–13, 315–16, 372, 381nn13–14, 392n21, 393n17, 402n17 Schlesinger, Laurie, xvi Schmidt, Benno, xv, 12, 13–14, 24, 26–27, 39, 95, 122–23, 125, 127–31, 167, 193–94, 199, 255, 257, 259, 267, 271, 285, 327, 337, 349–50, 371, 382n27, 390n11, 405n58, 405nn61–62, 406n74 Schmidt, P., 391n17, 406n71 Schneider, Carol Geary, 152 Schneider, M., 385n3 Schneiderman, E. T., 399nn16–17 Schumacher, Julie, 329, 394n2, 403n34

Schwartz, R., 382n27, 406n74 Seltzer, R., 406nn70–71 Shapiro, D., 408n7 Shapiro, Judith, xvii, 332, 402n10, 402n16, 404n47, 404n53 Shea, P., 407n1 Sherman, J., 406n69 Shorter, Charlie, 128 Shrank, Ian, xvii, xviii, 115, 404n45, 404n48 Shrank, Samuel Logue, xvii Shulock, N., 384n57 Sibolski, Elizabeth, 158 Silverblatt, Pamela, 274, 310 Simone, S. A., 408n6 Singh, Anil C., 314, 401n34 Small, Gillian, 125, 188 Smiley, J., 394n2 Smith, M., 377n11, 386n23 Smith, N., 377n10, 405–6n68 Smock, R. W., 384n59 Snell, M., 409n16 Soliz, A., 408n12 Solomon, Alisa, 36, 381n18 Sparrow, Jennifer, 141 Spellings, Margaret, 40 Speri, A., 391–92n19 Spitzer, Eliot, 41 Stearns, S. J., 379n2, 381n12, 398n8 Sternberg, Robert J., 192, 393n14 Stone, R., 398n8 Stratford, M., 408n10 Straumsheim, C., 409–10n20, 411n27 Strempel, E., 407n1, 407–8n3, 412n45 Strohl, J., 377n10, 405–6n68 Sukhanova, Ekaterina, 235, 255 Summers, Lawrence, 118 Sweeney, Liam, xvi, xvii Tagg, John, 325, 403n21 Tai, Emily, 80, 149, 413n61 Tam, T., 398n8 Tananbaum, Duane, 145 Tarleton, J., 397n10, 397n13, 397nn17–18 Thompson, Robert, 368 Thomsen, J., 392n6, 409–10n20, 411n30 Tobin, Eugene M., xv, xvi, 2, 118, 292, 334–35, 336, 351, 352, 356, 364, 377n1, 378n12, 379n1, 380n4, 389n4, 398n23, 401n1, 402n12, 402n14, 403n24, 403n27, 404n43, 404n52, 404n54, 405n57, 405n66, 406n78, 407n2, 407nn80–81, 409n20, 411–12n42

420  ■  Names Index Tolkien, J.R.R., 396n20 Torres, José (Freddie), 70, 114, 134, 294 Torres, Washieka, 125 Travis, Jeremy, 106, 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Troi, Deanna, 265 Trower, C., 403n28 Vitale, Alex, 285, 397n9, 413n62 Volpe, Daniel, xvii Votruba, J., 407–8n3, 409n13, 409n18 Wach, Howard, 291 Wagoner, R. L., 386n17 Wakhungu, P. K., 408n7 Walker, C., 407n1 Walker, Scott, 360 Wallerstein, M., 381–82n20, 400n21, 400n25, 400–401n27 Washington, Booker T., 54, 384n59 Wasserman, J., 387n7 Watanabe-Rose, Mari, 244, 260, 291, 407n82, 413n60 Watkins, M., 411n33 Wiesenfeld, Jeffrey, 20 Wilks, Karrin, 162, 291 Williams, Cheryl, 70

Williams, Theresa, 291 Williams, W. M., 390n14, 402n19 Wolff, W. T., 406n76 Wood, Peter, 177, 392n25 Woodhouse, K., 403n28 Worthy, Charmaine, 114 Wrigley, Julia, 5–6, 28, 52, 56–59, 64, 68–69, 72–74, 78, 80–81, 83–84, 86, 92–95, 99–100, 103–4, 109, 117, 121, 124–25, 135, 156, 162, 165, 167, 178, 205, 207–8, 216, 224, 231–32, 234, 241, 243, 248, 253, 266, 276–77, 284, 371, 378n22, 385n6 Wulfson, Kate, xvi Wyner, J., 408n9, 409n14 Yacub, Abdool, xvii Yao, Jessica, xvi Yuan, X., 408n7 Zacharia, Z. C., 393n12 Zapata, Martin, xvi Zemsky, Robert, 44, 326, 332, 383n41, 403nn25–26 Zis, M., 377n11, 378n16 Zoe, Lucinda, 243, 262–63, 289, 291, 369 Zweifler, S., 389n5

Subject Index ■■■■■ AAC&U, xix, 44, 67, 105, 152, 180, 264, 357, 375. See also LEAP AACRAO. See American Association of Collegiate Registratrs and Admissions Officers AAUP, xix, xxii, 99, 169–71, 173, 193–95, 213–14, 230, 249–50, 252–53, 271, 284–85, 336–37, 339–40, 356, 375. See also AAUP Red Book; Academe AAUP Red Book, 339–40. See also AAUP Academe, 285. See also AAUP academic advising, 47–50, 60, 68–69, 82, 90, 102, 105–6, 110, 126, 138, 140–42, 146, 181, 188, 206, 218, 262, 272 academic freedom, 81, 111, 117, 169, 194, 209, 212, 219–21, 227, 233–34, 249, 267, 298, 324, 337, 339. See also freedom of speech; freedom to teach academic integrity, 16, 126, 212, 299 Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP), 244 accounting, 76 accreditation, 5, 14, 33, 40, 66–67, 168, 207, 210–11, 246, 291, 315, 323, 326, 334, 340, 347, 350. See also Middle States Commission on Higher Education Adelphi University, 34, 275, 351 adjuncts. See faculty, part-time administration. See chancellors; CUNY, central administration of; CUNY, Office of Academic Affairs of; CUNY, vice chancellors of; deans; department, chairs of; presidents; provosts advanced placement, 64, 208, 367 Afghanistan, 360 algebra, 56, 282. See also mathematics alumni/ae, 1, 14, 28, 36, 99, 107, 110, 319, 337 American Arbitration Association, 267, 269 American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers (AACRAO), 143 American Association of Community ­Colleges, 357 American Association of Teachers of German, 166 American Association of University Professors. See AAUP

American Council of Trustees and Alumni, 99, 337 American Council on Education, 122, 320, 357 anthropology, 43, 49 Apollo Group, 264 appeals, 65, 108, 137, 261–63, 279, 283, 311, 313, 315, 366, 375. See also litigation; New York State, Court of Appeals of arbitration, 305, 311, 313, 317, 330. See also litigation architecture, 27 Article 78, 310, 314, 316. See also litigation articulation, 4–6, 37–38, 41, 46–47, 50–52, 56, 58, 69, 71, 74, 76, 90, 96–97, 111, 126, 138, 145, 195, 231, 235, 255, 301, 358. See also credits, transfer of Artstor, 374. See also Ithaka ASAP. See Accelerated Study in Associate Programs Aspen Institute, 357–58 Association of American Colleges and Universities. See AAUP Association of Governing Boards, 357. See also board of trustees Association of Scholars, 141–42, 177 Barnard College, xvii, 332 Baruch College, 9, 29, 34, 36, 43, 45, 48, 54, 61, 73, 83–89, 93, 100, 108, 136, 142, 196, 231, 237, 244, 257, 265, 275–76, 279, 282, 287, 308, 351 Beacon Theater, 374 bears, 373 Bell Atlantic Corporation, 36 The Big Bang Theory, 238 biochemistry, 189 biology, 60, 166, 187, 189, 191, 205–7 biomedical studies, 290 board of trustees, 118, 332–34, 337–39, 353–54, 357, 361; of CUNY, xv, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 2, 4, 9, 11–13, 15, 20–21, 23–24, 26, 28–33, 35–39, 58–59, 62, 64, 65, 68–69, 80, 82, 86, 88–89, 92–93, 95, 97, 100, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 114, 116, 121–35, 142, 144–45, 148, 150–51, 156, 160, 162,

422  ■  Subject Index board of trustees (continued) 164–65, 167–68, 170–74, 188–90, 193–94, 198–201, 209–11, 214, 221, 225, 228, 232– 36, 244, 247–50, 252–53, 255–57, 259, 261, 264, 267, 271–73, 276, 278–79, 284–87, 296–307, 309, 314–16, 319, 322, 326–28, 340–41, 347, 349, 355, 362, 371–73. See also Association of Governing Boards Bologna Process, 160 Borough of Manhattan Community College, 25–26, 48, 94–95, 156, 171, 244, 372 Bronx, 26, 122, 133, 135 Bronx Community College, 32, 56, 136, 248, 253–54, 308 Brooklyn, 95 Brooklyn College, 15, 25, 29, 32, 48, 94, 98, 107, 127, 132, 136, 193, 198, 236–37, 256, 270, 285, 290, 345, 369, 372 business, 103, 156, 166, 207–8 bylaws, 23, 32–35, 107, 145, 160, 172, 218, 228, 234, 243, 250, 296–302, 304–7, 310, 313–14, 316, 323, 330, 335, 337, 338, 339, 347, 350. See also board of trustees; CUNY, administration of calculus, 281–83. See also mathematics California, 2, 107, 360, 362 California Community College System, 361–62. See also individual college names California Competes, 361 California State University, 328, 362. See also individual college names California State University, Sacramento, 102 California State University San Bernardino, 212 California State University San Jose State, 360 Campaign for College Opportunity, 362 CAPPR, xix, xxii, 15–16, 27, 59, 80–81, 114–16, 120–21, 124–26, 130–31, 145–46, 371, 373 CCCRC, xix, xxii, 177, 203–5, 216, 220, 221, 224, 227, 230, 234–36, 238–42, 248–51, 253–55, 280, 308, 363, 366, 368 CCNY, xix, 11, 25, 27, 32, 36, 82, 94, 98, 131, 136–37, 140, 162, 185, 263, 273, 290, 351, 372–73 CCSD, xix, 10, 112, 134, 136–37. See also students, with disabilities Center for Advanced Study in Education, xvi Central Intelligence Agency, 287 Chabot Community College, 102

chancellors, 10, 14, 17, 26, 28–29, 32, 34–35, 37, 40, 52, 54, 55, 59, 68–69, 72, 78–79, 82, 86–87, 92, 95, 98–100, 104, 110, 117, 119, 121, 123, 125, 128–35, 141–42, 144, 147, 151–52, 156, 160, 162–63, 167, 172, 175– 77, 186, 188–90, 193–94, 198, 204, 208, 210–11, 228–29, 233–36, 244, 247, 249, 251, 254, 255, 257–62, 267, 271, 273–78, 280, 283–85, 288, 292–93, 296–301, 304–7, 315, 321, 326, 328, 335, 348–49, 351, 363–65, 371, 374 Charles A. Dana Center, 357 chemistry, 187, 189, 191, 227 Chinese. See LOTE Chronicle of Higher Education, 5–6, 28, 56–57, 65, 93, 107, 177, 221, 257, 304, 336, 356 cinema studies. See film studies City College of New York. See CCNY City University of New York. See CUNY civil rights, 267 Clarion, 167, 284, 336–37, 339, 375 collective bargaining, 155, 158, 169, 174, 180, 269, 286, 305, 307–8, 311, 330, 335, 343. See also contract; PSC college: community (associate’s-degree) college, xviii, 4–5, 25–26, 32–33, 37–39, 46–47, 49, 55–56, 58, 60, 62–63, 69–70, 73, 75, 77, 84–85, 87–88, 90, 94–96, 100– 103, 106, 108, 110–12, 125, 128–29, 136, 139, 141–42, 144, 155, 159–60, 172–74, 180–81, 187, 189, 195–96, 199–200, 207–8, 213, 217, 227, 238, 263–64, 301, 308, 341, 357, 358–59, 366, 367 (see also individual colleges); senior (bachelor’sdegree) college, 5, 22, 25–26, 33, 36–39, 44, 46, 50, 53, 56, 58, 60–63, 70, 75, 77, 89–91, 95–96, 101, 103, 105, 108–9, 111–12, 128–29, 136, 139–42, 153, 160, 167, 172–73, 179–81, 187–91, 195–96, 199–201, 213, 217, 236, 238–39, 280, 300–301, 308, 358–59, 366–67, 369–70 (see also individual colleges). See also degree, associate’s; degree, bachelor’s College of Staten Island, 32–33, 53–54, 63, 89, 94, 136, 164, 195, 210–12, 216, 227, 239, 242, 244 College Option, 187, 247, 258, 262, 279–80 Columbia University, 12, 39, 137, 327, 358. See also Teachers College Committee on Academic Policy, Programs and Research. See CAPPR

Subject Index  ■ 423 Common Core, xxii–xxiii, 71, 79, 108, 127, 130, 136, 151–52, 156–58, 162–69, 174, 176–79, 181, 183–87, 189–91, 202–4, 210, 213, 216–18, 220, 222, 225–26, 235, 238–39, 241–42, 247–48, 250–51, 253–58, 262, 265, 272, 276, 279–80, 283, 289, 296, 304, 308–9, 325, 349, 362–66, 369, 373; Course Review Committee for (see CCCRC); Steering Committee for, 151, 153–57, 162–64, 166, 175–78, 186, 199, 202, 296, 373; Task Force for, xix, xxii, 151–52, 154–58, 164, 166, 173, 175, 186–87, 189, 196, 225, 296–97, 301, 303, 341; Working Committee for, 151, 155, 157, 166, 175. See also credits, required for a degree or general education; general education common course-numbering system, 45, 59, 280 communication studies, 171, 263. See also communications communications, xxii, 16, 52, 67, 75, 88–89, 93–95, 98–99, 122–25, 147–48, 153, 155–56, 168–69, 171, 177–78, 189–90, 197–98, 201, 204, 209, 211, 221, 243, 252, 262–63, 271, 284, 299, 307, 310, 317–18, 328, 344–48, 372. See also communication studies Communism, 11, 210, 212. See also Stalinism Community College Research Center, 358 Complete College America, 357 computer information systems, 16, 88, 224. See also technology computer science, 42, 176, 196, 257–58, 281–82. See also technology Concord University, 360 conflict of interest, 331–33, 336, 338, 354, 359 Connecticut, 360–61 Connecticut State System of Colleges and Universities, 361 consul general of Italy in New York, 166–67, 170 contract, 155, 180, 233, 244, 259, 286–87, 300, 302, 305, 307–9, 313–14, 316, 330, 336, 343, 360, 376. See also collective bargaining; PSC core curriculum. See Common Core; general education Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education, 357 CPE. See CUNY, proficiency exam of credits, i, 1, 45, 72–73, 173, 195, 366; excess of, 6, 48, 50, 58–60, 68, 74–76, 96, 140, 199,

232, 285–86, 357, 370; credits required for a course, xxii, 84–85, 95, 100, 163–64, 168, 176, 179–92, 195, 217–19, 222–25, 227, 230, 262; credits required for a degree or general education, xxii, 35, 44, 38, 50, 62, 72–75, 77, 79, 85, 87, 89–91, 93–95, 99– 101, 104–6, 108, 119–20, 127, 129, 140–43, 151, 164, 167–68, 173, 176, 179, 181, 183–89, 190, 192, 195–97, 200, 208, 217, 219–20, 222–23, 232, 236, 243, 247, 258 262, 270, 279, 284, 297, 300, 302–3, 338, 360, 364, 367, 369–70; transfer of, xvii, xxi, xxii, 1–2, 4–8, 10, 16–22, 24, 26, 31, 37–41, 45–53, 55–60, 63–64, 69, 71, 73, 75–76, 78, 81–82, 84, 88, 90–92, 96–97, 101–3, 105–7, 110, 112, 117, 119, 127, 131, 134, 136–46, 165, 172, 174, 188, 194–95, 200–201, 204, 206–8, 212–13, 219, 222–23, 232, 237–39, 256, 261–63, 266–68, 276, 281–82, 284–85, 287, 292, 297, 318–21, 327, 329–32, 335, 337, 340–41, 347, 343, 349–50, 352, 354, 356–62, 365–370, 375 criminal justice, 46, 48, 106, 166 cultural studies, 226 Cuniversity, 29–30 CUNY: central administration of, 2, 7, 11, 15, 19, 22–23, 29, 30, 37–38, 54, 60, 70, 74, 90, 105, 107, 119–20, 122, 140, 149, 156, 159–61, 164, 171, 197, 199, 220, 227, 231–32, 239, 252–53, 257, 269, 271, 278, 286, 296, 316, 323, 325, 329–30, 335–36, 340, 341, 342, 350, 365, 374 (see also ­chancellors; deans; department, chairs of; presidents; provosts); commencements of, 374; distinguished professors of, xxii, 36, 55, 73, 131, 139, 142–44, 146, 154, 174, 199, 216, 227, 231, 256–57, 304, 350, 359, 362, 373; donations to, vii, xvii, 241, 328; enrollment in, 1, 16, 18, 37, 50, 55, 70, 81, 218, 351, 369; history of, xxi-xxiii, 1–3, 8, 31–54, 161, 266, 292, 351; institutional research and assessment at, 6, 52, 89, 156, 165, 309, 348; master plans of, xxi, 45, 51, 216; mission of, 20, 24, 60–61, 199, 267; Office of Academic Affairs of, 10, 28, 30– 31, 52–53, 55, 91, 100, 103, 117, 119–21, 125, 152, 154, 154, 170, 205, 222, 229–30, 243, 248, 283, 287, 294, 299–300, 348, 362, 372; proficiency examination of (CPE), 68, 182, 184; public hearings of, xxii, ix, 21, 28, 36, 115, 132–50, 154, 157, 171, 174,

424  ■  Subject Index CUNY: central administration of (continued) 192, 199, 273, 297, 319, 348, 373; Research Foundation of, 329; structure of, 5, 19, 22, 31–39, 56, 87, 97, 110–11, 138–39, 141, 160, 165, 194–95, 197, 233, 277, 289, 301, 318–19, 321, 328, 330, 335–36, 340–41, 343, 346–47, 351, 355; transfer data concerning, 5–7, 46, 52, 58, 65, 73, 156, 165–66, 182, 184, 231, 234, 287–88, 346, 348, 358–59, 362, 365–66, 369–371; tuition of, 13–15, 18, 24, 37, 49, 58, 68, 74–75, 84, 136, 138–139, 171, 183, 193, 320, 364; vice chancellors of, 10, 29, 41, 45, 51, 55, 59, 70, 92, 95, 97–99, 106–7, 110, 119, 121–25, 132–35, 138, 141–42, 144, 147–49, 154, 159, 162, 170–75, 188–89, 194, 198, 201, 203, 210, 213, 216, 221, 234, 244, 249–50, 260, 262, 265, 273, 276–78, 287–88, 293, 296, 299–301, 303–5, 310, 312–13, 315–16, 347–48, 352, 371–72, 374 CUNY Coalition of Students with Disabilities. See CCSD CUNY Matters, 167, 304, 366 CUNY Newswire, 167 CUNY Service Corps, 373 CUNY Start, 291 CUNY-TV, 9–10 dance, 16 deans, 10, 34, 54, 61, 70–72, 80, 83, 85, 126, 132, 135, 155–56, 160, 162, 165, 174–75, 177, 204, 235, 241–43, 254–55, 262, 265, 287, 289, 291, 309, 329, 339–40, 343, 351, 369, 372 degree, 2–4, 35, 37, 40, 49, 60, 79, 173–74, 239, 272, 293, 298, 300, 302–3; associate’s, 2, 4, 18, 20, 32, 38–40, 57–59, 62–63, 69, 76, 79, 86–87, 90, 96, 100–102, 139, 141, 151, 171, 180, 220, 225, 244, 300, 366–70; bachelor’s, 2, 4, 6, 18, 20, 24, 32, 34, 38–40, 42, 55, 62, 69, 79, 82, 87, 93, 96, 99, 100–102, 108, 115, 136–37, 139, 151, 153, 167–68, 171, 173, 180, 185, 201, 215, 220, 225, 243, 247–48, 258, 279–80, 290, 300, 351, 357–59, 365, 369–70; doctoral, 81, 165, 251, 290; master’s, 136, 236, 243, 251, 275. See also credits, required for a degree; graduation rates delay: of graduation, 49, 96, 136, 195, 206, 232, 352, 359, 276 (see also graduation rates); of evaluation of credits, 6, 39, 58, 96, 358

Dell, 264 Delta College, 182, 361 Democracy, 115 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 116 department, xxiii, 18, 21–22, 34–39, 42–44, 47, 50, 60–61, 66, 67, 104, 127, 218–19, 226, 228–29, 231, 233, 251, 256, 319, 327, 332, 334, 337, 339–40, 361, 363–64, 367; chairs of, 18, 21, 34–35, 61, 81, 91, 181, 199–201, 218–19, 222, 226, 228–29, 244, 249–51 DeVry University, 51 disability studies, 215 discipline councils, 21, 94, 102–4, 106, 119, 129, 153, 162, 166–67, 183, 221–24, 232, 249, 282–83, 344. See also faculty, committees of Dissent, 264 economics, 49 education: change and, 4–5, 7–8, 293, 318–20, 323–24, 326–27, 341–42, 344, 353, 356, 371 (see also faculty, resistance to change of); cost and finances of, 3–5, 7, 90, 96, 110–11, 113, 138–40, 142–44, 146, 193, 195, 199, 226, 256–57, 259, 261, 264–65, 278, 286, 293, 327, 330, 332–33, 338, 341, 353–54, 357–58 (see also performance-based funding); quality of, 16, 23, 23, 25, 27, 104, 109, 112, 117, 119, 122, 124, 126, 129–30, 132, 139–42, 144–47, 168–69, 174, 177, 181, 183–85, 188–91, 193–96, 200, 202, 209, 211–15, 220, 227, 233, 236, 238–40, 253–54, 256–57, 265–66, 268–69, 272–73, 278, 286–87, 298, 300, 303, 307, 337–39, 350, 355, 357, 368–69 (see also Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education; learning, quality of); structure of, 332, 334–35, 337, 339–40, 351, 355, 360–62 (see also CUNY, structure of). See also teacher education Education Commission of the States, 71 Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis, 359, 375 Egypt, 81 electives, 38–39, 42, 47, 49, 50, 53, 56–57, 60, 62, 75–76, 85, 99, 103, 141–42, 219, 232, 243, 258, 280, 288, 353, 365, 367, 370 engineering, 64, 103, 105, 151, 185, 191, 207, 281–82. See also STEM English, 21–22, 24, 36, 42, 48, 115–116, 122, 142, 144, 162–68, 176, 180, 182–84,

Subject Index  ■ 425 186, 190, 217–30, 238, 241, 244, 248–51, 253–54, 256–57, 263–64, 277, 283, 308, 329, 337–38, 344, 361, 363–64, 369 e-permit, 289 Europe, 160, 282 Excelsior College, 51 extinction, 93 Eyes and Ears Design, xvii faculty, 10, 12, 31, 37, 42–44, 97, 114, 148, 152, 168–69, 175, 209, 218–19, 226, 237, 244, 253, 264, 275, 279, 284–285, 287, 290, 307, 309, 312, 319–21, 328, 331, 336, 374; characteristics and demographics of, 1, 4, 22, 121, 154, 324–25, 342; committees of, xix, xxii, 7, 17, 21–22, 30, 72, 77, 79–80, 91–92, 94, 103, 105, 120, 121, 127–29, 141, 150–55, 160, 164–66, 172, 174, 177, 187, 197, 203–206, 214, 232, 239, 248–50, 260, 280, 283, 285, 296, 299, 329, 336, 361, 363 (see also names of individual committees); Fellows, 291; full-time, 18, 72, 89, 155, 161, 204–5, 218, 226, 270–71, 282, 327–28, 332; governance of and by, 89, 105, 115, 118, 128, 144, 161, 171, 179, 189, 194–95, 210–12, 218, 220–21, 227, 232–34, 238–39, 241–42, 244, 247, 249, 251–53, 256, 260, 267, 269, 272, 292, 296, 301, 305–6, 309, 317, 328, 341, 354, 360–61, 363; opposition to Pathways by, xxii, 1, 2, 7, 11, 23–24, 28, 55, 69, 82, 94, 99, 105–7, 110–12, 117, 121, 127, 133–34, 138, 141–46, 157, 170–71, 174, 179–80, 182, 185–86, 189–92, 194–95, 197–98, 200, 202, 204, 209–10, 212–14, 216, 228, 230, 237–44, 246, 248–49, 251–53, 255–57, 259, 265, 267–71, 277–78, 285, 296, 307, 316–17, 322, 325, 327, 329, 336, 342–47, 349, 351, 353, 357, 364, 372–73, 375; part-time, 18, 80, 90, 146, 161, 218, 236, 251, 256, 269, 282, 327–28, 332, 368; payment of, 155, 174, 182–83, 203, 223, 286, 316, 322–24, 348; resistance to change of, 4, 80, 92, 109, 111, 143, 165, 168, 323, 326, 338, 341–43; rights of, xxiii, 4, 35, 39, 66, 98, 145, 160, 173, 215, 227, 252, 292, 296, 299, 302–3, 315–17, 322, 325, 339–41, 347, 355; roles of, xv, 2, 4, 19–20, 27, 41, 60–61, 63–64, 72, 74–75, 92, 99, 104, 107, 118, 123, 127–28, 140, 146–47, 172–74, 206, 212–15, 219–21, 228, 233, 239, 252–53, 268, 271,

287, 292, 296, 298, 300–301, 313, 335, 339–40, 352, 355, 360–61; support of Pathways by, 2, 23, 27, 111, 133, 141, 143, 146, 148, 157, 174, 197, 241, 248–49, 255, 257, 266–67, 270–72, 325, 345–47, 359, 373; tenure of, 21, 153, 180, 224, 226, 238, 322, 324, 332, 337; views and knowledge of, 3–4, 6, 44, 74–75, 77–79, 83–85, 90, 92, 94, 96–97, 105, 108–10, 119, 132–33, 139–40, 143–44, 153–54, 157, 161, 163, 173, 178, 199, 204, 206, 220, 224, 227, 233–34, 238, 248, 253, 260, 263, 268, 270, 275, 284, 289, 297, 321–23, 325–27, 333–35, 337, 339–41, 346, 349–50, 352–54, 361, 364, 367; union (see PSC); work and workload of, 18, 118, 155, 157, 171, 180–83, 185–87, 222–24, 226–28, 230, 254, 273, 302, 307–9, 311–12, 323–24, 332, 337–38, 340, 343, 349, 355, 364. See also CUNY, distinguished professors of; UFS feature-positive effect, 350. See also psychology Feminist Press, 55 film studies, 226, 290 financial aid, vii, xvii, 1, 16, 19–20, 33, 40, 58, 71, 75, 96, 113, 129–30, 136, 276, 287, 291, 299, 357. See also Pell Grant; students, economic status of; VESID First Amendment, 220. See also freedom of speech Florida, 71, 360 FOIL, xix, 174–75, 192, 234, 251, 265, 317, 348, 370 France, 334 Free Academy, 32. See also CUNY, history of Free University, 193 Freedom of Information Law. See FOIL freedom of speech, 209, 219, 221, 325, 347. See also academic freedom; First Amendment freedom to teach, 339. See also faculty, rights of game design, 16 Gates Foundation, 260, 264 general education, 4–5, 7–8, 16–18, 20–21, 23–24, 26–28, 30, 38–39, 41–45, 47, 49, 52–54, 55, 58–65, 67, 68, 70–72, 74–77, 79–80, 83–87, 89–90, 92, 94–95, 100–106, 108, 110–11, 117, 128, 134, 139–42, 145, 150–52, 155, 164, 167–70, 173, 179–80, 187–91, 195–97, 207–8, 210–12, 217, 219–20, 225–27, 236–37, 239, 243, 247–48, 257–58, 262, 270, 272, 276, 279, 280, 285,

426  ■  Subject Index general education (continued) 288, 292, 296–97, 318–19, 321, 326, 330, 337, 350, 353, 358, 360, 362, 365–70, 373. See also Common Core geographic information sciences, 244 geology, 58, 103 German. See LOTE gorillas, 114, 116, 119 governance, 318, 331–41, 353; collegial, 334; divided, 335–36; role of faculty in, 4, 92, 329, 333; shared 8, 24, 30, 145, 159, 161, 169, 173, 271, 327, 333–36. See also faculty, governance of and by; faculty, rights of; faculty, roles of grade point average, 46, 90, 369 Graduate Center, 26, 71, 81, 94–95, 141–42, 144, 145, 165–66, 174, 193, 198, 205, 216, 228, 251, 259, 276–77, 282, 288, 363, 371 graduation rates, 1–3, 7, 18, 53, 55, 70, 72–74, 86, 89, 110–11, 139, 142, 144, 177, 195, 232, 239, 244, 256, 286, 291, 326, 328, 330, 341, 352, 356–59, 362, 365, 367–71. See also delay of graduation Greece, 246 grievance. See litigation Guided Pathways, 359 Guttman Community College, 24, 33, 55, 80, 136, 264, 273, 299, 341, 367 Hamilton College, xv, 118, 292 Harvard Club, 178 Harvard University, 16, 36, 115, 118, 180, 188, 331, 337 Harvard University Press, 356 health science, 176, 196, 257–58 Hechinger Report, 256 high school, 20, 36, 49, 93, 102, 104, 128, 143, 200, 365, 367. See also Skyline high school history, 11–12, 20, 23–24, 31, 36, 42, 66–67, 110, 141, 145, 162, 207, 256, 270, 334. See also CUNY, history of hospitality management, 115 Hostos Community College, 16, 25, 112, 133–35, 137, 144, 147–49, 171, 192, 273 humanities, 49, 67, 72, 77, 94, 167, 189, 199, 292, 363–64. See also specific disciplines Hunter College, 16, 32, 34, 48, 81, 94, 98, 105, 136, 139, 142, 145, 168, 185, 208, 216, 222, 256–57, 289, 368, 372 Hurricane Sandy, xxiii, 237–38 hysteresis, 91

Illinois, 360 incentive. See reward Indiana University of Pennsylvania, 145 Inside Higher Ed, 28, 107, 109, 118–19, 122, 132, 221, 263, 291, 304, 356, 360, 367 Institute for Language Education, 216, 288 Institute of Education Sciences, 291, 357 integrated university. See CUNY, structure of intellectual property, 299 International Baccalaureate, 367 Iraq, 145 Israel, 345 Italian. See LOTE Ithaka, xv, xvi, 199, 292, 321, 332, 367, 374 JCPenney, 36 John Jay College, 16, 46, 48, 56, 80, 94–95, 105–6, 116, 170, 241, 368. See also Justice Academy Johns Hopkins University, 334 Johns Hopkins University Press, 356 journalism, 176, 226, 255–56, 263–64 JSTOR, xvi, 199, 292, 374 judges, 311–15. See also litigation Justice Academy, 46, 106, 368. See also John Jay College Kaplan, 264 Kingsborough Community College, 25, 137, 157, 248, 253–54 laboratory, 48, 163, 176, 182, 186–91, 205, 257, 264, 337–38, 359. See also sciences; technology LaGuardia Community College, 9, 16, 248, 253–54, 308, 368 Languages Other Than English. See LOTE Latin American Studies, 143 law, xix, 5, 10–13, 16, 21, 23, 29, 32–33, 37, 39, 56, 65, 109, 126, 152, 156, 171–72, 174–75, 194–95, 197, 214, 233–34, 241, 252, 278, 297, 300–302, 304–7, 310–11, 313–17, 327, 330, 339–41, 346, 353, 360, 371. See also bylaws; litigation; New York State, Education Law of lawsuit, See litigation LEAP, xix, 67, 105, 152, 160, 264, 373, 375. See also AAC&U learning, 267, 292; online, 3, 341, 360–61; outcomes of, 17, 40–41, 61, 63–64, 65–68, 72, 74–75, 77, 90–91, 108, 123, 136, 140–41,

Subject Index  ■ 427 151–52, 160, 163–65, 168, 177, 180, 204–5, 211–13, 220, 224, 235, 264, 276, 287, 289, 292, 356, 366, 375; quality of, 3, 41, 90, 93, 299, 355 (see also education, quality of). See also education Learning Alliance for Higher Education, 326 legal studies. See law legislature, 341. See also New York State, legislature of Lehman College, 29, 59, 94, 141, 143, 145, 216, 279–80, 369 Liberal Education and America’s Promise. See LEAP Lincoln Center, 374 linguistics, 42, 226 litigation, 11, 15, 35, 36–37, 112, 148, 160–61, 195, 212, 214–16, 220, 226–27, 233–34, 237, 250, 252, 274, 293, 295–317, 330, 335, 342, 347–48, 364, 375. See also ­appeals; arbitration; Article 78; judges; New York State, Attorney General of; New York State, Court of Appeals of; New York State, Supreme Court of; Perez; Polishook Lord & Taylor, 36 The Lord of the Rings, 265–66 LOTE, xix, 21, 24, 34, 48, 50, 94–95, 104, 111–13, 141–42, 166–69, 183–84, 195–96, 220, 257, 288, 337–38, 344, 364 Lumina Foundation, 263–64 Macaulay Honors College, 109, 287, 372 major of undergraduate degree, 4–5, 7, 16–18, 26, 38–39, 42, 46–50, 52–53, 60, 65, 73, 85, 102, 104, 140–42, 146, 150, 156, 164–66, 179, 185, 205; double, 49, 62, 75, 85, 96, 99, 102–5, 141, 192, 195–96, 198, 200, 202, 206–8, 213, 217, 225, 229, 231, 243, 272, 279–81, 297, 358, 361, 363, 365–67, 370. See also particular majors Manhattan, 138, 287, 312, 367, 374 Massachusetts, 360 Massive Open Online Course. See MOOC mathematics, 21, 23, 42, 56, 57, 64, 94, 100, 104, 109, 142, 151, 162–64, 168, 171, 176, 183–85, 186, 195, 260, 282–83, 291, 341, 344, 364, 367–68, 375. See also algebra; calculus; statistics; STEM Medgar Evers College, 95–96, 139, 141, 291 media, xxii, 1, 21, 28, 36, 98, 104, 108, 110, 122, 124, 132, 167, 170, 192, 221, 255, 257,

261, 263, 268, 269, 270, 304, 345, 347, 356. See also names of individual media medicine, 20, 290, 325 Mellon Foundation, xv, xvi, 199, 292, 374 Mexican Studies Institute, 216 Michigan, 107, 360–361 Microsoft, 264 Middle Eastern Studies, 16 Middle States Commission on Higher Education, xi, 5, 33, 37–38, 40, 41, 61–62, 66–67, 86, 90, 158, 210–11, 246, 291, 343, 350 Minding the Campus, 132 Minnesota, 360–361 minor of undergraduate degree, 42, 62, 85–86, 141, 196, 279–80, 370 MIT, 102 MLA, xix, xxii, 99, 168–70, 230, 252–53, 284, 356 Modern Language Association. See MLA MOOC, 360. See also learning, online motivation, 24, 209, 256, 348, 358 Nassau County, 218 National Black Writers Conference, 146 National Center for Education Statistics, 357 National Institute for the Study of Transfer Students, 357 National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), 368 National Organization for Women. See NOW National Public Radio, 356. See also WNYC radio National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, 358 natural sciences. See sciences neuroscience, 42 New Community College. See Guttman Community College New Jersey, 360 New York City, 114–15, 237, 286, 290, 330; Council of, 55, 365, 369, 373, 375; Department of Education of, 139, 143; government of, 36; mayor of, 32, 36, 167–68, 209, 278, 293, 350; Mayor’s Advisory Task Force of, 38–39 New York City College of Technology, 16, 78, 124, 171, 372 New York Daily News, 36, 122, 129, 147–48, 198, 229–31, 257, 304 New York Historical Society, 55 New York Institute of Technology, xvii, 40, 43, 54, 83, 273, 275, 291

428  ■  Subject Index New York Post, 132, 147–48, 198, 270, 304 New York Public Interest Research Group, 193 New York Public Library, 55, 371 New York State, 286, 310, 316, 362; Assembly of, 257, 373; Assembly Higher Education Committee of, xxii, 5, 69–72, 76–77, 193, 330; Attorney General of, 310, 312 (see also litigation); Board of Regents of, 14, 36, 76, 331; Commission for the Blind of, 113; Commission on Higher Education of, xxii, 41; Court of Appeals of, 303, 311, 315 (see also appeals; litigation); Education Department of, 16, 33, 62, 70, 158, 188, 196, 216, 246–58, 278, 299, 350; Education Law of, 5, 23, 30, 32–33, 37, 56, 65, 126, 171–72, 194–95, 197, 234, 252, 271, 278, 297, 300–301, 304–6, 310, 313, 339, 346; government of, 36, 319, 327, 330; governor of, 32, 167–68, 209, 371; law of, 174–75; legislature of, 13, 70–71, 76, 209, 330–31, 341; liberal arts courses of, 176, 196, 258; Open Meetings Law of, 306, 315; Senate of 209; Supreme Court of, 300, 302, 304, 312, 314 (see also litigation); Taylor Law of, 305 New York State United Teachers. See NYSUT New York Times, xxiii, 11, 20, 44, 110, 122, 221, 256–57, 336, 345, 356 New York University, 11; Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives of, xvii Nissan, 36 NOW, 36 nursing, 48, 81, 103, 105, 166, 207, 243–44 NYSUT, 330 Occupy Wall Street, 192 operant conditioning, 31, 54, 326. See also psychology Oracle, 264 Orange County Community College, 76 outcomes assessment. See learning, outcomes of Palestine, 372 Pathways: brochure about, 170, 198–99, 209, 292, 304; controversy about, 1–2, 10–11, 35, 37, 42, 110, 122, 166, 177, 212, 217, 221, 225, 229–30, 244, 255, 267, 292, 309, 327, 333, 347, 376 (see also faculty, opposition to Pathways; faculty, support of Pathways); legal aspects of (see law, litigation); moratorium on, 227, 230, 238,

241–42, 248; policies of, xxii–xxiii, 1–2, 8, 10, 41, 60–61, 72, 79, 88–89, 104–5, 110, 127, 137, 139, 145–46, 207, 218, 221–22, 242, 247, 261–62, 265, 279, 284, 287, 290, 296–97, 301–2, 321, 343, 346, 356, 360–63, 365–66, 368, 371 (see also Common Core; step function); resolution about, 2–5, 7, 10, 13–21, 22, 24, 26–30, 55, 78, 82, 83, 85, 88–89, 91, 93, 100, 104, 107–8, 111–14, 117, 121, 123, 125–26, 130, 134, 137, 139–40, 145–46, 150, 161, 164–65, 167, 170, 172, 174, 189–90, 202, 209, 227, 252, 261, 271–72, 279, 284, 287, 296–97, 300, 302–3, 309–10, 319, 325, 362, 365, 370, 372–73; review of, 108, 130, 284, 287, 288, 362–63, 365–71, 375; webinar about, 19, 22, 109, 314; websites for, xxii, 19, 74, 88, 105, 111–13, 122, 158, 170, 175, 279, 302, 314, 346. See also students, opposition to Pathways of; students, support for Pathways of Pearson, 264 Pell grants, 1, 48, 113. See also financial aid; students, economic status of Penn State, 188 PERB, xxiii, 219–20, 226, 304, 307–9, 311–12, 315, 317. See also litigation Perez, 171–72, 301, 303. See also litigation Performance Management Process. See PMP performance-based funding, 3. See also education, cost and finances of performing arts, 176, 196 petition, 107–8, 166, 168, 170, 192, 197, 200, 202, 214, 230, 319, 344, 356 Phi Beta Kappa, xxii, 98–99, 117, 127, 147, 170 philosophy, 16, 110, 143, 157, 180, 196, 360 Phoenix University, 264 physical therapy, 215 physics, 60, 91, 131, 187, 189, 191 PMP, 328 poetry, 60 police science, 171 Polishook, 35, 296, 299–300, 302–3, 311, 313, 317. See also litigation political science, 84, 334 presidents, 10, 32, 34–35, 55, 59, 64, 78, 80, 84, 86–87, 94, 106, 110, 118, 120, 123–25, 127, 133, 135–36, 151, 153–55, 159–60, 162, 165–66, 177–78, 189, 198–99, 210–12, 217–19, 227–29, 242, 247, 250–51, 253–54, 275–78, 291, 296, 306–7, 309, 320–21, 328,

Subject Index  ■ 429 335, 337, 339–40, 343, 349–53, 360–61, 363, 369, 371 Princeton University, xv, 118, 199, 292, 374 Princeton University Press, xiii, xv, xvi, xvii, 356 Professional Staff Congress. See PSC Program for Dreamers, 373 provosts, xvi, xxi–xxiii, 5, 9, 28, 45, 51–53, 56, 59, 61, 65, 78, 83, 86–87, 99–100, 103, 109–10, 117–19, 124–25, 135, 138, 154–56, 162, 189, 203, 206, 208, 210–12, 216, 218–19, 221, 224, 228, 230, 241, 243–44, 248, 253–54, 257, 260, 273, 275–77, 287–91, 293, 296, 312, 320–21, 340, 352, 363, 367, 369, 371, 374 PSC, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 20, 30, 35, 37, 79–80, 145, 150, 155, 158, 160–61, 167, 169–70, 193, 195, 197, 200–202, 212–14, 217, 219– 21, 226–27, 230–34, 237, 241, 244, 249–51, 255–57, 259, 267–71, 273–74, 278, 284–87, 295, 300–306, 308–17, 319, 325, 327–30, 332, 335–37, 340, 342, 344–45, 347, 351, 356, 364–65, 369–72, 375. See also Clarion; collective bargaining; contract PSC/CUNY Welfare fund, 330 psychology, 38, 42–43, 45, 49, 61, 68, 93, 140, 166, 244, 259, 262, 274, 280–81, 291, 293, 307, 369, 374. See also feature-positive effect; operant conditioning Public Agenda, 357 Public Employee Relations Board. See PERB public health, 79 Puerto Rico, 25, 36, 78, 143 Pulitzer Prize, 15 push poll, 267–68, 270, 338 Queens, 138, 218 Queens College, 10, 16, 25–26, 27, 32, 63, 70, 76, 94, 131, 137, 226, 228, 241–42, 251, 274, 277, 363, 372 Queensborough Community College, xxiii, 26, 32, 80, 94, 105, 138, 149, 217–22, 224–30, 238–39, 244, 248–51, 253–54, 308 racism, 11, 174, 193, 213–214, 229 radiological science, 16 RAND, xxi, 38 randomized controlled trial, 244 real estate, 48 reassigned time. See faculty, work and workload of

registrar, 143, 155, 243, 289 release time. See faculty, work and workload of remediation, xxi, 20, 36, 70, 81, 136, 171, 174, 244, 260, 282, 291, 358–59, 374–75 retention rates, 35, 48, 53, 55, 113, 142, 173, 239, 286, 298, 300, 302–3, 328, 357, 369 retirement, 21, 258, 260, 267, 273–74, 322, 372; phased, 55, 273–74 reverse transfer, 367, 370–71 reward, 13, 18, 37, 93, 101, 134, 157, 291, 311, 319, 323–24, 327, 354, 359, 369–70 risk management, 243 Rwanda, 114–116, 119–20, 127, 131 Sallie Mae, 264 SAT, 70 School of Law, 12, 29, 39, 109, 152, 156, 241, 327, 372 School of Professional Studies, 16, 33, 138, 141, 144, 243 School of Public Health, 14, 79, 273, 299 sciences, 49, 50, 58, 64, 94, 103–4, 151, 163, 176–77, 180, 182–83, 185–92, 195, 220, 225–26, 248, 253–54, 256–57, 337–38, 344, 363–64. See also specific disciplines; STEM SEEK, 71 Senate Digest, 167 Single Stop, 244 Skyline High School, 102 social sciences, 49, 67, 72, 75, 77, 94, 363. See also specific disciplines social welfare, 145 Society for the Study of Social Problems, 99 sociology, 43, 144, 145, 205, 285 Spanish. See LOTE Spanish consul for cultural affairs in New York, 166 speech, 44. See also communication studies Spellings report, xxi, 40 Spencer Foundation, xv, 293 Springside School, 14 Stalinism, 147. See also Communism Star Trek, 265 State University of New York. See SUNY statistics, 100, 142. See also mathematics Stella and Charles Guttman Foundation, 273 STEM, xix, 185–186, 189–190, 225, 234, 272, 373. See also engineering, mathematics, sciences, technology step function, 100, 101, 102, 105, 106, 108, 365, 369, 370. See also Pathways, policies of

430  ■  Subject Index Stony Brook University, 38, 61, 73, 192, 307–8 strategic plan, 334. See also CUNY, master plans of students: admission of, 19, 35–36, 46–47, 50– 51, 84, 101, 106, 122, 139, 143, 155, 173, 200, 238–39, 244, 298, 300, 302–3, 315, 322, 333, 354, 375; characteristics of, 1, 22, 48, 94, 113, 184, 196, 213, 220, 229, 231, 264, 320, 374; economic status of, 1, 22, 24, 48–49, 320, 356–59 (see also financial aid; Pell grant; VESID); freshmen, 51, 63, 73, 84, 86, 101, 200, 247, 272, 288, 328, 367; graduate, 15, 81, 196, 236–37, 251, 368; harm to, 5, 100, 184–85, 187, 195, 199, 201, 206, 233, 250, 253, 268, 283, 297, 305, 324, 326, 364; juniors, 63, 182, 200; LGBT, 113, 138, 146; Muslim, 193; native, 6–7, 58–59, 89, 101; opposition to Pathways of, 107, 111–12, 117, 145, 212, 236–37, 255, 305; rights and responsibilities of, 19, 127, 144, 262–63, 272, 279, 283, 287, 320, 366, 368; seniors, 63, 289; sophomores, 63, 200; support for Pathways of, 10, 20, 25, 28–29, 69, 96–98, 111–14, 122, 125, 133–34, 136, 146, 149, 168, 174, 198, 236–37, 242, 271, 273, 319, 348, 373; support services for, 25, 333, 348; with disabilities, 113, 136–37, 146, 148 (see also CCSD); veterans, 145, 367 SUNY, 41, 64, 70–71, 110, 122, 139, 144, 160, 192, 328, 330 teacher education, 166, 171 Teachers College, 358. See also Columbia University Teagle Foundation, xvii, 332 technology, 64, 91, 102, 105, 108, 142, 146, 150–51, 185, 204, 244, 247, 264, 272, 289, 293, 299, 344–45, 348, 360, 371. See also computer information systems; computer science; STEM Texas, 362 theater, 16, 102, 226 time horizon, 13, 52, 197, 321, 322, 326–27, 338, 352–55, 372 time to degree. See delay of graduation TIPPS, xix, 6, 45, 46–47, 50, 56, 79, 91, 96, 102, 141, 143, 370 tobacco, 79–80, 91, 299 Transfer Information and Program Planning System. See TIPPS transfer shock, 367

Trinidad, 146 Tufts University, 118 Tuning USA, 264 turf, 44, 140, 143–44, 147 Twitter, 345 UFS, xix, xxi, xxii, xxiii, 11, 16, 20–23, 29–31, 35, 37, 53–54, 57, 59, 65–66, 68–69, 71–75, 77–83, 89–95, 97, 100, 102–4, 106–7, 109, 112, 116–17, 119–29, 132–33, 147, 149, 153–59, 161, 166–67, 169–72, 175, 181, 189, 194–95, 204, 208–9, 212–16, 221, 227, 229–34, 236, 238–40, 249–50, 255–56, 259–60, 263, 265, 271, 274, 284–85, 288–89, 295–304, 306, 309–12, 315–17, 319, 322, 325, 327–29, 336, 340, 342, 344–45, 347, 63–364, 372, 375; Executive Committee of, xxii, 59, 65, 69, 73, 92, 95, 97, 102–3, 106, 116–17, 119–22, 143, 147–49, 153–54, 156–57, 161–62, 166, 172, 189, 229, 233–34, 265, 284, 296, 372, 375 United States, 331, 334, 341–42, 351, 352; Department of Education of, xvii, 36, 40, 158, 191, 364–65 University at Albany, 76 University Faculty Senate. See USS University of Arkansas, 111–12 University of California, 83, 321, 361 University of Illinois, 345, 360 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 335 University of Massachusetts, 110 University of Minnesota, 329 University of Pennsylvania, 332 University of Puget Sound, 345 University of Southern Maine, 51 University of Virginia, 56 University of Wisconsin, 359 University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, 44, 326 University of Wyoming, 192 University Student Senate. See USS University System of Georgia, 53, 63, 64, 110, 203, 232, 242, 342–43, 361–62 USS, xix, 15, 59, 69, 95–98, 114, 122, 124–25, 130, 134–35, 137–38, 146, 148–49, 151, 198, 236–37, 263, 289, 373 VESID, 113, 137, 146. See also financial aid Village Voice, 36 Villanova University, 102 Virginia, 360

Subject Index  ■ 431 Vocational and Educational Services for Individual with Disabilities. See VESID vote of no confidence, xxii, xxiii, 92, 117–23, 131–32, 143, 153, 161, 210–11, 228, 256, 260, 267–72, 278, 286, 321, 338, 360 Wall Street Journal, 199, 292 Washington, D.C., 373 Washington State, 342 water boarding, 334 water buffalo, 115

Wisconsin, 360 Wisconsin HOPE Lab, 359 WNYC radio, 221, 255, 263. See also National Public Radio wolves, 192 Wrigley report, 5–6, 57–59, 69, 72–74, 78, 81, 92, 231–32 Yale University, 12, 36, 39, 122, 152, 327 Yellowstone National Park, 192 York College, 94, 237