CHAPTER LETTER CAMPAIGN: to President Michelle Anderson

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 signatures

9) Film Department, 21 signatures

10) Distinguished Professors, 8 signatures

11) MLAN Department, 6 signatures

12) SPCL Department, 9 signatures

 

We hand-delivered the letters on November 21, 2023.

Professor Daniel Tinkleman reads the Accounting Letter

Professor Helen Georgas reads the Library Letter

 

Unfortunately, President Anderson was not available. Given her absence, we chose to read our letters out loud as a way to learn about what our colleagues do so well, what we need to do this even better, and what we share as a community of educators and educational staff. 

Professor Alan Aja reads the PRLS Letter

 

 

Professor David Bloomfield read fromthe Letter from SPCL.

It was a beautiful and moving event, reminding us why we love to work at Brooklyn College. A diverse collection of teachers, scholars, mentors, and staff across the disciplines and schools, we took power from listening to each other and clarifying all that connects us. 

Professor Joseph Entin reads the English Department Letter

Professor Yana Kuchirko reads the Psychology Letter

 

We were sorry she couldn't hear us.

Professor David Grubbs reads the letters from Distinguished Professors

Professor Ana Ana Djordjevic reads a synthesis letter signed by over 80 faculty and staff.

The synthesis letters begins:

Dear President Anderson, 

The Brooklyn College Chapter of the PSC has been reflecting on our collective work across
departments and offices on campus. We asked members to think about the strengths of their
departments and offices and what they need to thrive.

We see this as a pivotal moment in the history of Brooklyn College. Our members are deeply concerned about the budget, enrollment, and the kind of quality education we can deliver under an austerity model. We want the college administration to better understand what we do well, even under these ever harder circumstances, how hard we work for our students and school, and the real institutional support we need not just to maintain previous levels of excellence but to thrive as workers and as an institution.

 

Michelle Anderson responded with a detailed letter (below) on December 10. We will share and discuss her thoughts and possible next steps at our final Fall chapter meeting on Thursday, 14, 12:30-2, on ZOOM. 

Please RSVP for the December 14 Chapter Meeting HERE. 

President Anderson's Response- December 10, 2023

Dear colleagues,

 

Thank you for the letters you delivered on Nov. 21, 2023. I appreciate the effort that went into writing them and the thoughtfulness with which you described the strengths of your academic departments and what they need to thrive. These are important questions, and you have given them the attention that they deserve.

 

Overview

 

It was beneficial to read the descriptions of departmental strengths. They included areas of excellence that are well-known, such as Psychology’s award-winning research, as well as areas of excellence that we should also herald, such as Sociology’s model of advising and mentoring. It was also beneficial to read about what the academic departments need to thrive. The range of needs points to the importance of collaboration between faculty members and administrators to achieve a bold and bright future.

 

The College is now developing a new Strategic Plan. These letters and the information contained therein, both about the strengths of the departments and their needs to thrive, will be valuable to that process. The Strategic Planning Committee will include these letters with other critical pieces of evidence collected during the process to inform its final Plan. Even though they represent only ten of the 34 academic departments at the College, they still afford the Strategic Planning team considerable insight about the campus’s most pressing concerns.

 

Last week, Senior Vice President Alan Gilbert issued an update on the College’s progress in food services, which is a critical priority for all of us. In January, he will issue another update on campus infrastructure, discussing the major buildings on campus and the critical improvement projects associated with each of them. This update will address the facilities concerns expressed in your letters, including temperature control, Wi-Fi coverage, leaks, roof repairs, humidity control issues, and, as Anthropology noted, the lack of consistency in working clocks. It will also discuss the renovation of Ingersoll Hall as an instructional and research laboratory-intensive hub for the School of Natural and Behavioral Sciences and Roosevelt Hall as a space dedicated to the work of quantitative departments. It will describe plans for the bookstore and work to assess student and employee lounge spaces with the goal of enhancing opportunities for informal engagement. Finally, it will review the College’s repair priority plan and explain how state capital funds may be used for general building repairs. With decades of deferred maintenance, facilities have deteriorated over time, and, as your letters attest, there is much work to be done.

 

Fiscal Reality

 

Most of the letters’ concerns, including those about facilities, are deeply related to the College’s budget. One may hesitate to confront that issue directly, however, because of English’s allegation that: “Rather than education, ‘fiscal reality’ has become the rubric that governs our stifled outlook.” The scare quotes in that sentence are designed to suggest that there is no fiscal reality that constrains the College, or perhaps that the described “fiscal reality” masks a plot to corporatize the academy and undermine its focus on education. Although colorful, these theories are fatuous. The fact is: Our current finances dictate the work we must do together to enhance and uplift our educational mission. We ignore this reality at our peril.

 

The state has not funded CUNY’s mandatory cost increases in more than a decade, including the escalating annual costs of its labor and operational contracts. Despite state investments in new programs, the lack of funding for the increased expenses over which we have no control has degraded the colleges’ financial positions over time.

 

On top of these reductions, the COVID-19 pandemic and the demographic cliff in the number of high school graduates hit Brooklyn College hard. Over the last three years, it lost an unprecedented 20% of its student headcount. Underfunding over time and rapid enrollment loss created a structural deficit that now poses an existential crisis.

 

In March of 2023, CUNY mandated that Brooklyn College develop a $9.3 million savings plan to reduce the structural deficit. The College was not alone, as other CUNY colleges also had to develop significant savings plans. Brooklyn College’s Fiscal Review Advisory Committee (FRAC), made up of faculty, staff, and student leaders, developed our plan through a combination of increased revenues and decreased expenses. The University announced last week that the College must develop and absorb an additional $3.5 million in savings this year and an additional $4.5 million in savings next year. Those savings plans are due Dec. 21, 2023.

 

To put the challenge into context, over 90% of the College’s operating budget is made up of employee salaries. Opportunities to generate savings in that area usually only occur when an employee leaves the College. The remaining less than 10% of the budget includes all non-salary costs of the College, such as library subscriptions to academic journals, the elevator maintenance contract, the rent for the Feirstein Graduate School of Cinema, and basic supplies to ensure a functional campus (e.g., toilet paper and cleaning supplies). More than half of those non-salary costs are fixed, providing no discretion from which the College might derive savings.

 

In its letter, PRLS wrote, “we hope you will do the right thing” and “reverse the budget cuts.” This plea misunderstands how budgets work at CUNY. The state decides on the budget for the University and its constituent campuses each year and allocates that funding to CUNY. The CUNY Central budget office then holds state money for its campuses and controls the flow of money from the state.

 

When a person’s money in the bank runs out, she cannot continue to spend. Likewise, the College cannot hire new employees or invest new resources once it has spent its allocation. The College has no authority or ability to “reverse the budget cuts.” There are lots of things we cannot control in this situation. We must focus on what we can control to help ourselves.

 

Plan to Strengthen the College

 

I will fight like hell in the annual legislative budgeting process to ensure that the state funds the operational costs and mandatory cost increases at CUNY and Brooklyn College. I will also fight, shoulder to shoulder with you, to ensure that the state funds a new labor contract for the PSC. I will also work to ensure that Brooklyn College receives its fair share of the allocations the University receives from the state and the city. I will continue to push Central for equitable one-time and ongoing investments in our operational and capital needs, where we have been successful of late.

 

Thereafter, doing what we can to increase enrollment, enhance other sources of income, find efficiencies, and reduce expenses is the only way to improve the College’s financial strength. This strategy is not, as the distinguished professors alleged, “a bankrupt mindset of austerity.” Rather, it is the only way we can thrive within a system not of our making, but by which we are bound.

 

To be sure, faculty and administrators can work together to change the rules of the system and enhance state funding, but thereafter, we must work together to operate within our budget. To pretend otherwise—to decry the consequences of state fiscal policy and dramatically reduced enrollment, demanding that the administration repeal those consequences as if by magic wand—takes a stand for an empty political purity and helps not one iota with the critical work in front of us.

 

The only way forward is to collaborate. We must work together to lobby for additional state support and greatly increase enrollment. Unless we do, the existential crisis we face may overtake our ability to operate in any recognizable way.

 

The demographic cliff has damaged higher education across the country. The pandemic then exacerbated that looming change: students experienced a deep loss of learning, many were turned off by zoom classes, and they did not perform well. As a result, fewer students are graduating high school, fewer are interested in college, and fewer still are academically prepared for college. Every week, we see colleges across the nation ending academic programs, laying off staff and faculty, merging with other campuses, or closing altogether. We must work together to do everything we can to avoid that fate.

 

Working together to lobby for additional state support and greatly increase enrollment would allow the College to retain and hire more staff. The reduction of employees across departments through attrition often saddles remaining staff with new work. As the Library traced in detail, employee departures whose positions remain unfilled may also erode the services it is able to provide. Managers across the campus must now prioritize the work of their direct reports, as reduced teams may not be able to accomplish the same level of work. Additionally, managers must find work efficiencies so that staff do not face unrealistic performance expectations.

 

Working together to lobby for additional state support and greatly increase enrollment would specifically allow the College to invest more in student and faculty research (including in, as Psychology noted, graduate student stipends and the Office of Sponsored Research), bolster student services (including in, as Sociology noted, the Magner Career Center, CAASS, Financial Aid, and Personal Counseling), enhance administrative departments (including in, as PRLS noted, Human Resources, Budget, and Custodial), and hire more tenure track faculty and lecturers (including, as Accounting noted, those with specialized expertise to teach new graduate programs, and, as SPCL noted, those who are necessary for accreditation).

 

Together, we must grow revenue, including theater rentals, film and other rentals, and fundraising. Over the last three years, we raised almost $50 million in new private donor commitments. Our fundraising has focused on increasing student support, especially in scholarships, emergency grants, internship stipends, and completion grants, which enhance our enrollment, support our mission, and make our campus more student-centered.

 

Together, we must increase enrollment. An increase in overall headcount will be hard to achieve because we will be graduating older and larger classes of students as we are left with the smaller classes recruited more recently. We must attract more of the same types of students we currently have, including first-time fulltime students, transfer students, and graduate students. We must also attract new types of students, including adult learners, readmit students, and international students.

 

Together, we must also enhance the retention of current students by engaging with and supporting them. Our year-to-year retention of students decreased during the pandemic, so we must work together to reverse that trend. We must also make good use of CUNY’s Online Passport program next fall, so we funded 50 faculty members to train in best practices in asynchronous online teaching this semester. 

 

Working together to increase revenue and trim expenses is the only way we can strengthen the College, enhance our mission, and thrive. Every time we increase our revenue through lobbying, enrollment, rentals, and fundraising, we decrease the amount we will have to trim. We can only do this together. It will require the cooperation of all faculty and staff to realize this plan to strengthen the College.

 

Vision for the Future of the College

 

Solving the challenges caused by chronic underfunding and significant enrollment loss is necessary but not sufficient to developing a vision for a more prosperous future at Brooklyn College. Especially in these challenging times, faculty and staff yearn to hear a bold articulation of a bright future for the College. Some, like Film, requested the president’s own “affirmative vision for the College.” Others, like English, called on the president “to work with us and other departments to craft an affirmative vision and plan for defending and rebuilding the college.” Ideally, a vision of the College’s future would be mutually generated, shared, and collectively owned by all segments of the campus.

 

The last time the College developed a collective vision statement was in its 2018 Strategic Plan:

 

We strive to make Brooklyn College a world-class, distinctive engine of intellectual discourse and social mobility that draws on our exceptional faculty, staff, and vibrant location to graduate students and prepare them to shape and improve the rapidly changing world around them.

 

That vision statement articulates a baseline of excellence and ambition that will always be true at the College. It was written before the pandemic, during a very different social, political, and financial time. We should enhance it for the current moment. We also know that our vision must be responsive to unanticipated change, as well as new challenges and opportunities as they unfold.

 

English asserted that the vision of the College’s future “must exist independent of any fiscal, logistical, or political obstacles.” It is helpful, of course, to imagine the ideal scenario of the College’s strength and excellence in the future, but such imagination must be grounded in the fiscal, logistical, and political roads we can follow or build together to get there. To be effective, we must make strategic choices in the real world.

 

Brooklyn College is a jewel in the CUNY system. We must reach a future that shows everyone—prospective students and their families, the wider academy, our neighborhood and the larger society—the advantages Brooklyn College offers: the excellence of its research, the rigor of its teaching, the depth of its learning, and the warmth of its community. When students attend college, they want a home away from home. The College must, as Modern Languages pointed out, “foster a sense of true community rather than a stop on the way.” Students must feel welcomed, appreciated for what they contribute, free to explore intellectual possibilities, challenged, and ready to tackle a new career when they graduate.

 

Student-Centeredness

 

Student-centeredness is a key component of our vision for the future. Our new focus on student-centeredness is consistent with the core mission of the College, and it responds to the current moment. In addition to a loss of learning, many students felt adrift post-pandemic—without the skills to navigate an unfamiliar world. Especially for first generation and immigrant students, connection to others and knowledge of how to navigate complex bureaucracies has, at times, felt elusive. Student-centeredness as our lodestar guides us in an area where we need to grow.

 

Student-centeredness emerged as a central theme in our Strategic Enrollment Management Plan, which said we must “change our campus culture to become more student-focused—where everyone is an advocate for students, and ... we all have a role to play in their success.” Everyone has a role in helping the campus become more student-centered.

 

Our decision-making must center students. In every way that we work at the College, we must consider students’ needs and preferences. For example, student services must be attuned to how and when students want to access resources. Scheduling classes must be based on what students want and need. Wherever possible, work in administrative offices must be prioritized according to what would most benefit students. We must be willing to place the needs of our students above our own as administrators, staff, and faculty.

 

This vision for Brooklyn College as deeply student-centered has corollaries across the campus. Here are a few:

 

Mentoring

 

Mentoring is a key component of our vision for the future. The work on mentoring at the College began before the pandemic, as a response to the insistence of faculty of color that the College better mentor junior faculty members on the standards for promotion and tenure. I appointed five school-based Senior Faculty Mentors to respond to that need: Rosamond King, Maria Sharron del Rio, Peter Lipke, James Lynch, and Stephanie Jensen-Moulten. When two of them became Interim Deans and one retired, Tanya Pollard, Sophia Suarez, and Laura Acenzi-Moreno took their places. A year later, when one left for a Guggenheim fellowship and another became an Interim Dean, Maria Conelli and Paisley Currah joined the team of Senior Faculty Mentors. Together, these ten faculty members have offered exceptional support to all pre-tenured faculty, as well as many tenured and non-tenure track faculty.

 

I raised a $600,000 gift from the Tow Foundation to launch the Tow Mentoring Initiative. In addition to supporting the mentoring of faculty, it supports the mentoring of students. The Tow Mentoring Initiative funds at least 40 faculty members and 40 students in research and mentoring pairs across disciplines for semester-long research projects. It builds on mentoring work across the campus, such as the NIH-funded MARC Program, the Mellon Undergraduate Transfer Student Research Program, the Mellon Mays Undergraduate Fellowship Program in the humanities, and other initiatives.

 

As part of this larger ecosystem of mentoring at Brooklyn College, we want every student to have the opportunity for a transformative mentoring experience in which they realize their intellectual capacity to shape their own lives and the world around them. This mentoring is an expression of intense student-centeredness.

 

We are also beginning to offer mentorship training to staff members to enhance their connection to the campus and their sense of meaning and purpose at work. Our vision is for a campus in which every student, faculty, and staff member has a rich and rewarding experience at the College.

 

Diversity, Careers, and Research

 

Our student body is changing. We are a Minority-Serving Institution, and we take great pride in the diversity of our student body. We have also become an Asian-American, Native American, and Pacific Islander-Serving Institution, reflecting the evolving diversity of our borough. We want to continue to enhance our diversity, as we work toward becoming a Hispanic-Serving Institution.

 

These diverse students come to Brooklyn College with hopes of graduating and getting good jobs. We must create more opportunities for students’ social and economic mobility. The Magner Career Center has enhanced its mentoring of students through connections with devoted alumni who help our students get into the career fields they want.

 

Across the campus, we are working to enhance students’ career prospects. For example, we have brought the licensed doctoral program, the Au.D. in Audiology, a clinical professional degree program, to Brooklyn College. Audiology employment opportunities are on the rise. With potentially transformative impact on the campus, the Au.D. program is also part of our plan to become an R3 institution, as the Au.D. would be our first clinical doctorate. R3 status would give faculty opportunities to obtain new and larger grants to support faculty research, and would help us recruit more students.

 

Centers of academic excellence at Brooklyn College are also important to both faculty and students, as they enhance opportunities for research, internships, and jobs. We need to support them more, such as the Science and Resilience Institute at Jamaica Bay, the Haitian Studies Institute, and the Brooklyn College Center for Cancer Research. More recently, we have been working with colleagues at CUNY Law to establish the Institute for Gender, Law, and Transformative Peace, directed by Nobel Peace Prize-winner Leymeh Gbowee, the Liberian Peace activist who received an honorary degree at graduation two years ago. She is eager to work with faculty and students at Brooklyn College, and we look forward to launching the Center this spring.

 

Each aspect of this vision for our future—student-centeredness, mentoring, diversity, careers, and research—requires greatly enhanced facilities and a commitment to working together to improve the campus. The Strategic Planning process, currently underway, is our opportunity to collaborate in developing a more extensive, collective vision of what we can achieve together. I look forward to continuing that process and to your participation within it.

 

Conclusion

 

To realize our vision of student-centered excellence in our future, we must set aside our differences and work together. I hope we can make a concerted effort to lobby Albany, raise significant new revenue, and reduce expenses where we can. The pain of limited resources will not last forever. This is not the time to feel hopeless or discouraged. We need to understand the reality of our situation, come together, face our challenges, and collaborate to strengthen the College to ensure its vibrant future.

 

There is much that each one of you can do right now to help the College thrive, especially as the fall semester closes: Please support your students. Reach out to them through Navigate with an encouraging message. If your students have not registered for the winter intersession, and there are appropriate classes for them, encourage them to do so. If they have not yet registered for spring 2024, encourage them to do so as well. Your individual connection with students at this critical transition time is important to enhance our student retention.

 

In each of your letters to me, your steadfast dedication to the College, our students, and our mission shines. As English wrote, “Our ranks have been depleted, but we have not lost our love, hope, and vision for our intellectual community with our students.” We all share a grand commitment to public education, to serving the diverse people of Brooklyn, to lifting families out of poverty, to enriching young minds and nurturing the leaders of tomorrow. The potential for our students’ intellectual enlightenment beats in our hearts and gives meaning to our work. We believe in the work we are doing here at Brooklyn College.

 

I am committed to this great College, its diverse and deserving students, its talented and hard-working staff, its passionate and brilliant faculty, and its future as a polished jewel of public higher education. If we work together, we will improve the campus, enhance its vital educational mission, and shape a future that lives up to its highest aspirations.

 

Very truly yours,

---

Michelle J. Anderson

President, Brooklyn College

2900 Bedford Ave.

Brooklyn, NY 11210

(718) 951-5671