Brooklyn College PSC-CUNY

At the heart of the governance battles going on at CUNY right now is the cozy relationship between the Chancellor and CUNY Board of Trustees. While most suspect that initiatives such as Pathways originate with the Chancellor, he hides behind the alleged statutory power of the Board of Trustees to impose his plans. Who is on this board and why don’t they stand up to him and protect the interests of the students and communities they are supposed to serve? The CUNY Board of Trustees has 17 members, including two ex officio members: the head of the CUNY University Student Senate, and the head of the University Faculty Senate (who cannot vote).   The other members are appointed by either the Mayor or the Governor. Eight members were initially appointed by Pataki, four by Bloomberg, and one each by Giuliani, Patterson, and Cuomo. They serve seven year terms and can be reappointed for additional terms. The Chairman of the Board is Benno Schmidt, the only educator appointed to the Boa...

Faculty Council Steering Committee Responds More than a month ago, the Provost's office submitted Pathways-compliant courses to CUNY Central from the English Department despite the department's decision not to participate in Pathways. Recently, the English Department brought a proposal before Faculty Council to change the majority of its courses to 4-credits. The Provost and several other administrators spoke out strongly against the proposal and it missed passing by a single vote. When the Provost learned that the English Department would submit this proposal again at the next Faculty Council meeting, he declared that if it passed, he would not submit the proposal to CUNY Central. In other words, when the English Department doesn't want the Provost to submit courses, he does; when it does, he says he won’t. It's hard to imagine more obvious contempt for faculty control of the curriculum. (For more details on the English Department proposal, read below.) In...

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...

On March 12 the Brooklyn College Faculty Council voted overwhelming to “ condemn the College administration’s grievous action of making curriculum changes not approved by the College’s faculty.” The text of the resolution is below.   Over the last year the faculty at Brooklyn College , and throughout CUNY, have emphatically demonstrated their opposition to Pathways. The PSC website has links to the various resolutions, petitions, and letters of opposition: http://www.psc-cuny.org/our-campaigns/faculty-staff-and-students-mobilize-pathways-town-hall . Many campuses refused totally or partially to implement Pathways, and even those that passed Pathways courses and implementation plans often did so only under extreme pressure from local administrators. The vast majority of CUNY faculty remain outraged at CUNY Central’s grab for control over curriculum. Here at Brooklyn College , our Faculty Council has twice passed resolutions that condemn Pathways and refuses to implement it. ...