CUNY Administration Declares War On Rebel English Department

[xchrom]

http://studentactivism.net/2012/09/15/cuny-administration-declares-war-on-rebel-faculty/

This is an astounding story.

On Wednesday the English department at Queensborough Community College voted not to adopt a policy of the City University of New York to reduce composition course credits from four to three. In so doing, they rejected the CUNY Pathways initiative, a proposal for streamlining and centralizing CUNY curricula which many faculty regard as antithetical to students’ needs.

Administrators didn’t like this. And in fact they disliked it so much that Queensborough announced two days later that they’re dismantling the QCC English department in retaliation.

In an email sent to the department chair yesterday QCC Interim Vice President for Academic Affairs Karen Steele announced that because the English department insists on granting four credits for composition courses, those courses will no longer be offered by the college and QCC students will be sent to other CUNY campuses to fulfill their composition requirements. Since composition represents such a significant portion of the department’s offerings, moreover,

All searches to fill full-time positions in the department will be cancelled.

All English department adjuncts at Queensborough will be fired.

And the appointments of all current full-time faculty in the department will be “subject to ability to pay and Fall ’13 enrollment in department courses.”

When I first read this, I assumed that there must be some spin involved — surely the administration wouldn’t be so brazen as to explicitly state that they were prepared to essentially eliminate a college’s English department over a credit-hour dispute.

[exboyfil]

1. That is something I noticed about

my some of my daughter's engineering classes. They are offering less credit hours for the same work than I experienced when I went through engineering 30 years ago.

Statics has gone from 3 to 2 credit hours (it meets 3 hours/wk like my course except 1 of the hours is a recitation section)

Circuits was two courses for 4 credit hours but it is now 1 course of 3 hours (meets 4 hours/wk)

The Calculus I-II sequence used to be 5 credit hours each. It is now 4 credit hours each.

In general it appears that additional content has been packed into the major without increasing the credit load.

[eppur_se_muova]

3. Since faculty are contracted to teach a specific # of credit hours ...

this means faculty will now have to teach more classes, while students will have to sign up for more classes, thus increasing the teaching load still further.

It's all about squeezing the greatest amount of work out of faculty, rather than paying for more faculty.

Firing all the adjunct faculty will mean their courses must still be taught, so regular faculty will have to take on extra teaching loads beyond their usual contracted hours. The admins want to make sure faculty know they are being punished "pour encourager les autres".

[jimlup]

2. As a former adjunct faculty

It is always amazing how the little guy is forced to take the punishment. "Fire all adjuncts"... the adjuncts don't even have a vote dummies! That's a really vengeful and misdirected punishment.

[ProgressiveProfessor]

5. Most departments could not function without adjuncts

One step up from TAs in the academic wage slave hierarchy

[Recursion]

4. "Credit hour dispute" means "money dispute"

Four credit hour classes require you to pay more for professors without getting as much more in tuition, so boards don't like them but faculty do.

As they say, academic politics are so bloody because the stakes are so low...

[HiPointDem]

6. +1