Brooklyn Eagle: Brooklyn College faculty breaks with CUNY: votes to retake control of curriculum

Brooklyn College faculty breaks with CUNY: 

votes to retake control of curriculum

Brooklyn College, CUNY
Brooklyn College. Photo courtesy CUNY



















Has 'no confidence' in CUNY Board of Trustees

By Mary Frost

Brooklyn Daily Eagle

The full-time faculty at Brooklyn College passed a resolution on Wednesday to “retake control of curriculum decision making” and demand that the Brooklyn College and CUNY administrations “respect the faculty’s historic role in designing courses,” programs and degree requirements.
Professors are rejecting CUNY's move to “override faculty decision making” to implement the “inadequate” Pathways general education program, according to the Brooklyn College Faculty Council.
Pathways implements a set of course requirements that every student must complete to earn an undergraduate degree from CUNY, making it easier to transfer one CUNY college to another.
But professors complain that Pathways “waters down” the core curriculum and is meant as a cost-cutting measure. Faculty members say they were excluded from the planning stages of the program, and the move is an attempt to “consolidate power at the top.”
Fran Clark, spokesperson for CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY), told the Brooklyn Eagle the Pathways program reduces significantly the number of credits a student has to take to fulfill their general education requirements.
The standardized, "compressed" curriculum will mean “less flexibility for students to pursue wide-ranging academic interests, and fewer opportunities for students to explore different and important ideas, because of a reduction in specialized course offerings,” Clark said. She said she feared the program would lead to a narrower understanding of cultures and international diversity.
Professors from across the CUNY system have complained about Pathways, which was opposed by 92 percent of full-time faculty who voted in a referendum held last year.
Nivedita Majumdar, professor of English at John Jay College, said, “[Pathways] means students could graduate with a bachelor’s degree without ever having taken a literature or a history course or without any training in a foreign language or reduced time in science labs. Our students are denied the intrinsic value of a good education.”
CUNY did not respond to a request for comment by press time.
Wednesday’s resolution calls for the Brooklyn College and CUNY administrations to abide by the decisions of local faculty in designing a new general education program at Brooklyn College. The vote was 298 in favor, 9 against and 18 abstentions.
The resolution also states that the faculty have “no confidence” in the CUNY Board of Trustees to make curricular decisions. “The current Board of Trustees is almost completely devoid of educators and is comprised of political appointees, whose main qualification was political support for current and former mayors and governors, rather than their expertise in educational policy,” according to the Faculty Council’s statement.

Comments

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated just to make sure they are not spam! We aim to review and publish within 24 hours.

Popular posts from this blog

CUNY First Computer System to Aid Administrative Control over Colleges at the Expense of Efficiency and Effectiveness

Guest Post   Every once in a while I get a question, either privately or in a department meeting, regarding CUNYFirst. Here is what I know of CUNYFirst, based on a few years of working with the project as a "training liaison" (which is a fancy term for room-scheduler). (1) The idea of CUNYFirst is a good one: to have a unified, integrated "enterprise"-scale system that encompasses all university/campus business processes. Such a system could, in principle at least, have saved a lot of expenditure on maintaining dozens of disparate, redundant, barely cooperating third-party systems. Such a system could have offered information access that would have benefited the administration, the staff, the faculty, and students. (2) CUNY Central's motives in pursuing CUNYFirst were dominated by an agenda that has nothing to do with such benefits however. Rather, CUNY Central sought absolute control over all college activity, including curriculum. Think of it: whoev
Read more

CHAPTER LETTER CAMPAIGN: to President Michelle Anderson

Image
In the Fall of 2023, we asked all departments or units to write and sign letters to the college President, Michelle Anderson. We wanted her to know what our colleagues do well. We wanted her to hear our vision for work and mission at Brooklyn College. We wanted her to understand what we all need to thrive. We wanted to model a mission-driven discourse, not a workplace lead by austerity.  We wanted our President to hear us. Professor Naomi Braine reads the Sociology Dept Letter Professor Jillian Cavanaugh reads the Anthropology Letter     Twelve letters, signed by 100s of our colleagues were submitted—although many more were penned (many felt uneasy about being visible in this way). 1) Synthesis letter signed by over 80 faculty and staff 2) Sociology Department , 26 signatures 3) Anthropology Department, 16 signatures 4) Accounting Department , 14 signatures 5) Library , 28 signatures 6) PRLS , 6 signatures 7) Psychology Department , 30 signatures 8) English Department , over 100 signat
Read more

93% Vote No Confidence in Pathways

The referendum votes have been tallied: a total of 4,322 votes were cast, out of a total number of 7,202 possible votes: a 60% turnout. Of those, 3,996 full-time faculty agreed that they have No Confidence in Pathways, with only 323 voting Disagree (and 3 void ballots). An absolute majority of the full-time faculty are on record as having no confidence in Pathways. That is a stunning rebuke to the new curriculum and the coercive process used to implement it. I will send a longer message to the entire membership shortly, but for now I want to congratulate you all on your extraordinary collective effort in defense of our students' right to a rigorous education. Equipped with this result, we can take the campaign to a new level in the fall. In solidarity, Barbara Bowen
Read more