The City University of New York (CUNY) (my employer) is a behemoth of public university
education. It has 280,000 undergraduates--four times more than the entire Ivy League. The system includes 17 senior and community colleges. The administration, led by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, has proposed a general-education curriculum plan, called Pathways. However, the faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), is going to court to block the plan. Who has the better case?
education. It has 280,000 undergraduates--four times more than the entire Ivy League. The system includes 17 senior and community colleges. The administration, led by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, has proposed a general-education curriculum plan, called Pathways. However, the faculty union, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC), is going to court to block the plan. Who has the better case?
The plan would, essentially, do two things. One, it would streamline the gen-ed requirements across the colleges, which at present aren't uniform. This would allow easier transfers from the community to the senior colleges and eliminate situations where students had to take more gen-ed courses to meet one college's idiosyncratic graduation requirements. Two, it would reduce the aggregate number of gen-ed courses, many of which are taught by adjuncts and graduate students.
The opposition of the PSC stems largely from the second point. The union represents adjuncts as well as the regular tenured and tenure track faculty. And there are many more of the former than the latter. Given that the union must represent all members equally, and that the adjuncts form a considerable voting block, it is not surprising that the union is trying to put on the brakes. KC Johnson of Brooklyn College also argues that the union's track record on issues of academic rigor is suspect, while the Chancellor's is relatively good.
However, I should also note that some academic traditionalists have argued against Pathways on the grounds that it will reduce academic rigor. Their principal concern is that not enough remediation will take place for students moving up from the community to the senior colleges and for some of the students graduating unprepared from New York City's high schools and managing to make it into one of the senior colleges.
The opposition of the PSC stems largely from the second point. The union represents adjuncts as well as the regular tenured and tenure track faculty. And there are many more of the former than the latter. Given that the union must represent all members equally, and that the adjuncts form a considerable voting block, it is not surprising that the union is trying to put on the brakes. KC Johnson of Brooklyn College also argues that the union's track record on issues of academic rigor is suspect, while the Chancellor's is relatively good.
However, I should also note that some academic traditionalists have argued against Pathways on the grounds that it will reduce academic rigor. Their principal concern is that not enough remediation will take place for students moving up from the community to the senior colleges and for some of the students graduating unprepared from New York City's high schools and managing to make it into one of the senior colleges.
Dan,
I still can't figure this out. KC Johnson's piece--which I just read--doesn't pass the "laugh test" itself. You have too much integrity to be here, frankly, as your qualifying last paragraph suggests. The academic traditionalists include many in PSC-CUNY and the reasons given there are precisely the reasons that are highlighted in PSC's opposition to Pathways. I don't really buy your analysis, either. If you ask adjuncts, you'll find that they do not think for a second that PSC represents them equally. And the union, frankly, cannot. The point is not to protect adjunct jobs. That's silly, since the union desperately wants more full-timers. The point is almost all pedagogical and student-centered in nature. Everyone wants a more streamlined system. But in addition to all of this, faculty are rightly concerned about "innovations" from Goldstein that end up by taking away faculty ability to make educational and pedagogical judgments in their classes and about their majors. Nobody is being capricious here, at least not on the union side.
Do you really buy KC Johnson' piece? Is the Chancellor's record on education all that good if we've been moving steadily toward an adjunct faculty? If we've cut out opportunities for remediation--in specific areas--from senior colleges when they could really come in handy (think about it when next you're grading papers!). Is it all that good if he's shifting to raising money through higher tuition? Even if this means that students have less time to spend in class?
And we have seen both benefits and drawbacks form Macauley (which, in general, I quite like). So the union isn't always right, but it does tend to get the arrogance at the top to stop and revise plans that are typically devised without consultation with the faculty and in consultation from ideological yes-men and women.
See you in the hallways (any other reader should know that I'm right down the hall from Dan, whom I consider to be strangely courageous for being a junior faculty member and swimming against the tide of his colleagues' opinion, though with the tide of policymakers). Dan is a marvelous colleague, which increases my frustration that he (and most of the people likely to read this) is making these arguments.