Pathways to Reform: Credits and Conflict at The City University of New York

By Alexandra W. Logue

A personal account of the implementation of a controversial credit transfer program at the nation's third-largest university

Change is notoriously difficult in any large organization. Institutions of higher education are no exception. From 2010 to 2013, Alexandra Logue, then chief academic officer of The City University of New York, led a controversial reform initiative known as Pathways. The program aimed to facilitate the transfer of credits among the university’s nineteen constituent colleges in order to improve graduation rates—a long-recognized problem for public universities such as CUNY. Hotly debated, Pathways met with vociferous resistance from many faculty members, drew the attention of local and national media, and resulted in lengthy legal action. In Pathways to Reform, Logue, the figure at the center of the maelstrom, blends vivid personal narrative with an objective perspective to tell how this hard-fought plan was successfully implemented at the third-largest university in the United States.

Logue vividly illustrates why change does or does not take place in higher education, and the professional and personal tolls exacted. Looking through the lens of the Pathways program and factoring in key players, she analyzes how governance structures and conflicting interests, along with other institutional factors, impede change—which, Logue shows, is all too rare, slow, and costly. In this environment, she argues, it is shared governance, combined with a strong, central decision-making authority, that best facilitates necessary reform. Logue presents a compelling investigation of not only transfer policy but also power dynamics and university leadership.

Shedding light on the inner workings of one of the most important public institutions in the nation, Pathways to Reform provides the first full account of how, despite opposition, a complex higher education initiative was realized.

All net royalties received by the author from sales of this book will be donated to The City University of New York to support undergraduate student financial aid.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Release date: Sep 8, 2017
• ISBN: 9781400888337

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Pathways to Reform

Pathways to Reform

CREDITS AND CONFLICT AT THE

CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

Alexandra W. Logue

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINCETON AND OXFORD

Copyright © 2017 by Alexandra W. Logue

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to Permissions, Princeton University Press

Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Logue, A. W. (Alexandra W.), author.

Title: Pathways to reform : credits and conflict at the City University of New York / Alexandra W. Logue.

Description: Princeton : Princeton University Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017019498 | ISBN 9780691169941 (hardback : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: City University of New York—Curricula. | General education—New York (State)—New York. | Education, Higher—New York (State)—New York.

Classification: LCC LD3835 .L64 2017 | DDC 378.747/1—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017019498

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available

This book has been composed in Minion Pro text with Helvetica Neue Condensed Display

Printed on acid-free paper. ∞

Printed in the United States of America

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

To the memory of William G. Bowen,

who inspired this work,

and

To CUNY students,

past, present, and future

All net royalties received by the author from sales of this book

will be donated to

The City University of New York

to support undergraduate student financial aid

Contents

Illustrations

Publisher’s Note

The late William G. Bowen, commemorated in the dedication to this book, served for many years as an invaluable informal adviser to Princeton University Press in the area of higher education. This volume inaugurates a new series in his honor, in recognition of his signal contributions to the Press and to the field. We are grateful to Dr. Bowen for bringing this work, whose author he admired, to our attention. We offer our sincere thanks for his assistance in this and countless other matters.

Peter Dougherty

Director

Princeton University Press

Acknowledgments

There is no way to express adequately the gratitude that I feel to the hundreds of people who helped Pathways and this book about it come to be. In terms of the establishment of Pathways itself, I must acknowledge here the stupendous support that it received from former City University of New York Board of Trustees Chair Benno Schmidt and former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. Other than these two exceptional leaders, I will let the book itself serve as testimony to the great many contributions, small and large, humdrum and courageous, that a great many people directly made to the project. As you read about each of them, know that what they did was sometimes very hard, that doing it was a choice that they made, and send them your heartfelt thanks to accompany mine.

Here I will just give my thanks to those people who directly contributed to the existence of this book, and to a few people whose place in my past guided me in my actions concerning Pathways. However, I do want to emphasize that, although all of these people taught me and helped me, all opinions and errors expressed in this book are entirely my own.

First—in every way—I must thank William Bowen, former president of Princeton University and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, as well as founding chair of Ithaka Harbors, Inc. This book was his idea and he helped me obtain a grant from the Spencer Foundation that was essential in its preparation, for which I am exceedingly grateful.

As I was completing the Pathways project, Bill was working on a book with Eugene Tobin (senior program officer for higher education and scholarship in the humanities at Mellon and former president of Hamilton College), published by Princeton University Press, titled Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education. Bill had been a huge supporter of Pathways from the beginning, and he saw what happened during the establishment of Pathways as an excellent example of why change is very difficult in higher education. I was so involved in the project itself, and so exhausted from it, that I could not see its implications for higher education as a whole. But Bill and Gene first had the idea to include a chapter about CUNY with a section on Pathways in Locus of Authority—a fascinating chapter about the history and governance of CUNY written by Martin Kurzweil, director of the educational transformation program at Ithaka. Then, in fall 2013, just as I was starting my study leave from my position as the CUNY system executive vice chancellor and university provost, Bill had the vision that an entire book should be devoted to CUNY’s Pathways initiative, a vision that he transmitted to me and that I began to work on actively as I began my new position as a research professor at the CUNY Graduate Center’s Center for Advanced Study in Education. Through Bill, I was also able to have wonderful discussions about Pathways with Gene, as well as with Earl Lewis, president of the Mellon Foundation.

In addition, Bill helped smooth the way for Ithaka to assist me in obtaining and organizing materials for the project. These tasks were all conducted under the protective wing of Ithaka S+R, the part of Ithaka that conducts research and provides guidance to institutions of higher education and other academic entities with regard to technological and economic transitions. As an organization that has JSTOR at its core, Ithaka is chock-full of people who know a great deal about storing and organizing information, and I was extremely fortunate to have their assistance. Deanna Marcum, and now Catharine Bond Hill, have served as managing director of Ithaka S+R since I began work on this book. Deanna, the Ithaka S+R managing director when this book project began, in particular ensured that I received the help that I needed from many Ithaka members concerning information retrieval, organization, and storage, including help from Johanna Brownell, Dermont Bruce, Malgorzata Chrzanowska, Daniel Eads, Dale Hermann, Nancy Kopans, Deborah Longino, Heidi McGregor, Marlon Palha, Clara Samayoa, Liam Sweeney, Kate Wulfson, and Martin Zapata. And, of course, providing overall support, was always Ithaka’s dynamic President, Kevin Guthrie. Conversations with him and with Martin and Deanna about Pathways were always helpful.

Bill also made the initial contact for me with Princeton University Press, resulting in my meeting the incomparable Peter Dougherty, director of PUP. Peter believed in this book and trusted in my approach to it from the very beginning and through to its publication. At the same time, he did not hesitate to share with me what about the manuscript he thought could be improved, and I believe that the book has benefited a great deal as a result. Many others associated with PUP have contributed significant effort to bringing this book into existence, including Mark Bellis, Shaquona Crews, Ashima Dayal, Adam Fortgang, Julia Haav, Lauren Lepow, Debra Liese, Theresa Liu, Stephanie Rojas, Laurie Schlesinger, and Jessica Yao.

Bill passed away just as this book’s manuscript was being completed, in the fall of 2016. His contributions to this book, and to higher education as a whole, are immeasurable. It is to my great sorrow that he was never able to see this book in finished form, but I am extremely proud that Pathways to Reform is a member of PUP’s William G. Bowen Memorial Series in Higher Education. And I think Bill would have heartily approved my decision to donate my net revenues from sales of this book to CUNY undergraduate student financial aid.

I also wish to thank some very special CUNY technology staff who, supervised by Vice Chancellor Brian Cohen, kept my equipment operating well throughout the years of preparation of the book: Roberto Appolon, Daniel Volpe, and Abdool Yacub. They saved me from panic at some critical times.

Additional technical help that I have received has come from Eyes and Ears Design, a design agency headed by Kate Okeson and Erica Borkowski that has modified my website (awlogue.com) so that it can now contain significant information and resources relevant to this book and to college student transfer more generally. They have been extremely responsive to my requests and technological stumbles, and have suggested many website improvements. I am likewise grateful to the very talented photographer Karen Obrist for the photograph she took of me that is on the book’s jacket.

Support of a nontechnical sort has come from multiple places. The New York University’s Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives provided wonderful assistance in my gaining access to and reviewing their archived papers of Professor Emerita Sandi Cooper. Labor Attorney Douglas Catalano taught me well about labor relations when I worked at New York Institute of Technology, knowledge that was very useful during the establishment of Pathways. Much additional legal information and assistance relevant to Pathways came from Ian Shrank. I have been motivated in the writing of this book by the many excellent writers whom I have known, in particular Keith Raffel, one of my oldest friends, who turned to writing later in life, and Elizabeth Nunez, who steered me to what is my favorite book on writing: Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. I also must thank those friends and colleagues who read parts or all of the book, taking their time to give me comments, including several anonymous reviewers, Steven Bassin, Camille Logue Orman, Liam Sweeney, and in particular Ian Shrank and Samuel Logue Shrank, who each read every draft word, sometimes multiple times. Countless other friends and colleagues (such as Teagle Foundation President and former Barnard College President Judith Shapiro, and former Under Secretary of Education Martha Kanter) listened to my never-ending stories about what was happening, or had happened, with Pathways, and I tried to learn from their reactions what about the events was most perplexing and intriguing. And I will always be grateful to Tina for sharing with me her personal experience with Pathways, and to her mother Ann, whose pride in her daughter’s CUNY community college graduation first led me to Tina.

There is no question that I was not easy to live with while Pathways was being established. I was working endless hours and was extremely tense. I had to keep my emotions totally under control at work and so they frequently spilled over at home, and I had little time for recreation or simply enjoying life. My husband, Ian Shrank, put up with a great deal (not for the first time), and he wasn’t always happy about it. But at the same time, he valued enormously what I was doing, and I knew that. I couldn’t have continued without being confident that we both shared the value of working hard in order to enable opportunities for others, a value that he personifies more than anyone else I know. He inspires and sustains me.

Equal opportunity for all is a value that has been well represented in the history of my family. My father was the first physician in Philadelphia (other than at Woman’s Hospital) to have female residents working with him, and my maternal grandfather, a Marine Corps Colonel, after whom I was named, commanded Montford Point during World War II, the first training camp for black Marines, established following an order by President Franklin D. Roosevelt (against the wishes of many in the Marine Corps). With Pathways, I hope to have honored their legacy.

Abbreviations

Chronology

INTRODUCTION

Starting the Journey

This book is about the journey to establish Pathways, a set of policies designed to facilitate students’ transfer of credits among the colleges of The City University of New York (CUNY), a complex university consisting of many different colleges. This journey was filled with controversy and conflict, frequently played out in the media, with struggles primarily between administrators and faculty.

The size and complexity of CUNY provided a large landscape within which the conflict and controversy occurred. CUNY, a public university with relatively low-cost programs, is the third-largest university, and the largest urban university, in the United States. It encompasses 24 colleges and freestanding professional schools (19 of them serving undergraduates), which together enroll over 270,000 students in credit-bearing courses (over 240,000 of these students are undergraduates), along with about 250,000 more students in non-credit-bearing courses. There are over 7,500 full-time faculty, over 11,000 part-time faculty, and over 13,000 staff.¹ In sum, well over half a million people are formally associated with CUNY at any one time. There are close to 1.3 million CUNY alumni/ae.² Speak with anyone living in the New York metropolitan area and either that person or a relative or a friend of that person is or has been associated with CUNY.

CUNY has always provided a route to the American dream for many thousands of New Yorkers, New Yorkers seeking to step up through education. Currently, the CUNY undergraduate student population consists of 58 percent students from underrepresented groups (black and Hispanic), 45 percent students for whom English is not their first language, 42 percent students who are the first in their families to attend college, and 58 percent students who are recipients of the federal financial aid known as Pell Grants³ (i.e., these students’ families have significantly limited financial resources).

CUNY is a critical piece of the foundation of New York City, providing education, research, and service to New Yorkers.

Yet the story of CUNY is not all positive. Although they are rising, current undergraduate graduation rates are low. Currently, a total of 54 percent of students who enter CUNY’s bachelor’s-degree programs receive a CUNY bachelor’s degree within six years, and for associate’s-degree programs, which are intended to take two years, only 18 percent of students graduate within three years. The low associate’s-degree rate is partly due to students transferring to CUNY’s bachelor’s-degree programs before earning their associate’s degrees. But even six years after entry, only 32 percent of CUNY students who started in associate’s-degree programs have earned either an associate’s or a bachelor’s degree.⁴

These graduation rates are similar to those of other urban public colleges and universities around the United States. But that doesn’t make them acceptable. In the words of William G. Bowen and Eugene M. Tobin in their insightful book Locus of Authority: The Evolution of Faculty Roles in the Governance of Higher Education, If we are going to increase the fraction of the population with college degrees to as much as 60 or 70 percent . . . and provide meaningful opportunities for upward mobility, the heaviest lifting will have to be done by the less privileged and less well-resourced institutions that serve so many of our students.⁵ Therefore, similar to the great majority of institutions of higher education in this country, CUNY is continuously trying to find ways to increase graduation rates while simultaneously maintaining or raising standards.

For decades CUNY has targeted what happens to CUNY students’ credits when they transfer within the system as an important factor in CUNY’s graduation rates. Chapter 2 of this book describes the history of the attempts to facilitate credit transfer at CUNY, and the particular events leading up to our (the CUNY central administration’s) 2010 decision that a new attempt was needed. Chapter 1 describes a pivotal moment in the project—the June 2011 approval by the CUNY Board of Trustees of the resolution establishing the Pathways policies, the formal start of the project. That chapter introduces most of the people who played significant roles in the Pathways Project, and in the associated controversy, as well as introducing the content of the Pathways policies. Chapters 3–10 describe how that resolution was formulated and then how it was carried out. These chapters also recount how, along the way to full implementation, and even afterward, there was significant faculty resistance, in addition to some significant support from faculty, students, administrators/staff, and members of the higher education community outside CUNY. Chapter 11 describes the legal actions taken against the Pathways initiative and their outcomes, and chapter 12 gives my views regarding what can be learned from the Pathways Project. Finally, the epilogue describes some of what has happened in the higher education community, at CUNY, and among the main people involved in the origins of Pathways since the full implementation of Pathways in fall 2013.

In telling what happened during the establishment of Pathways (e.g., in chapter 1), I have chosen to present the material as a narrative, told from my point of view. At other times, in providing background for and interpretation of the initiative (e.g., in chapter 2), I have chosen to present the material in a more formal way, similar to the approach that would be taken in an academic journal. This use of different styles in the book arises from my wish to present as full as possible an accounting of what happened and why it happened. Events are not separable from the people who create and witness them, and thus understanding the interactions of people with their environments and with each other is key to understanding the events in which these people are involved. Such information can often best be conveyed as a nonfictional narrative that attempts to convey the experiences of the story’s participants. This information then becomes the source material—the raw data—for the book’s, and readers’, more academic analyses and interpretations of the lessons learned and policy implications of the events.

Two early chapters—2 and 3—contain much information about why we formulated the Pathways resolution as we did—the history and events at CUNY that helped to shape the resolution. Here in this introduction it may be useful to give a brief description of the national context for our work, as well as how little we, and others, actually knew about transfer at the time that we started formulating the Pathways resolution in the fall of 2010.

At that time, as well as before and since, looming over public higher education in the United States was the urgent need to find ways to compensate for the continuing decline of state funding. At least since 1990, across the United States, state funding per college student had decreased, particularly following the start of the recession in 2008. Public institutions of higher education were compensating for these decreases with increasing tuition⁶ and by becoming more efficient. Awareness of the low graduation rates of these institutions was also increasing,⁷ putting state funding of these institutions in further jeopardy. Tying funding to target graduation rates—performance-based funding—was therefore being instituted in many states.⁸ Putting some courses online was seen by some as one way, under some conditions, to deliver effective higher education at lower cost. However, many faculty were questioning the ability of these courses to deliver a learning experience as effective as that provided by face-to-face courses.⁹ Adding further pressure to this situation, research was predicting an increasing need for college degrees in the workforce.¹⁰

Awareness was just beginning to dawn in higher education that more effective credit transfer could offer another way to increase degree production without increasing funding per student. As of June 2011, when the CUNY Board of Trustees passed the Pathways resolution, transfer had certainly been discussed nationally, although it was not a top-five subject on almost anyone’s list. National surveys of transfer policies had been conducted.¹¹ Researchers had observed that students who began in an associate’s-degree program at a community college were less likely to obtain a bachelor’s degree than comparable students who started in a bachelor’s-degree program, but it was not yet entirely clear why.¹² Other researchers were examining what sorts of students transferred and under what conditions.¹³ There was some publicity about a few states, such as California, instituting transfer policies,¹⁴ and researchers were starting to look at the effect of articulation agreements on credit transfer.¹⁵ One timely publication presented best practices for facilitating credit transfer. These best practices included making the transfer credit rules simpler and more transparent and standardizing the curriculum, both for general education courses and for a major’s initial courses at different colleges.¹⁶ All of this information was useful. However, it was not absolutely convincing that reviewing and overhauling their transfer policies needed to be near the top of every college’s and university’s priority list.

As a result of the increasing funding constraints and the pressures on degree production, at the time of Pathways’ inception some leaders were calling for significant change in higher education. Yet there was concern about the ability of higher education to make the changes needed.¹⁷ Supervision of higher education faculty has long been described as herding cats, and there is that old joke: Question: How many faculty members does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: Change?¹⁸ Shared governance, a foundational concept for most nonprofit colleges and universities in the United States (see chapter 12), has meant that at least some faculty, as well as some of their administrators, have seen the faculty as having a say, or even a final say, in all academic decisions. Such decisions include those about how to make degree delivery more efficient and/or effective. Similar to most people, in some situations, some (and that some can be a big number) faculty resist change. But whereas in other employment sectors an employee can be overruled by his or her supervisor, higher education faculty—who are frontline in the classrooms and who, because of tenure, outlast most administrators—are in an unusual situation: if they really don’t want something to happen, sometimes it doesn’t. Thus there were concerns that the changes higher education needed to make would not, and perhaps could not, be made.

At CUNY in the fall of 2010, when we first started formulating the Pathways resolution, we were aware of, and influenced by, all of these pressures for change in higher education. We certainly expressed the need to provide better education for more students at the same or a lower cost. And we certainly had some awareness of how difficult making such changes could be. However, when it came to Pathways, the primary driving force for us was a much more specific one—a concern for the welfare of our students who were being harmed by an often nonfunctional credit-transfer system—and we were determined to remove that harm no matter how difficult that might be.

Nevertheless, comparable to the extent of knowledge about transfer across the United States, our specific knowledge about transfer at CUNY at that time was rather limited. For example, we knew that, at CUNY, approximately ten thousand students were transferring among our colleges each fall alone,¹⁹ and we knew that many of their credits were not transferring as they were supposed to transfer (as general education or major credits), or they were not transferring at all (students were not receiving any credit for many courses taken prior to their transferring). However, we had no idea how big many was.

We also knew that everyone said that lack of credit transfer was the biggest student complaint and had been for decades. But everyone said does not constitute evidence. Further, we knew that there had been many attempts to institute policies to fix the alleged problems. But just because some people have been trying to fix something doesn’t mean that it needs fixing. We knew that New York State Education Law required that CUNY maintain its close articulation between senior and community college units . . . [and] maintain the university as an integrated system and . . . facilitate articulation between units,²⁰ and that our major accreditor and the Chair of the New York State Assembly Higher Education Committee Deborah Glick had said that we had a problem that needed fixing, but none of that constituted evidence that there was a problem. In fall 2010 the Chronicle of Higher Education had published a diagram showing what many people would call breathtaking inconsistencies in how a single course would transfer among the different CUNY colleges.²¹ But that was one course at one college, and no one knew how many people had tried to transfer that course to each of the eighteen other colleges and what had been the actual result.

All we knew about CUNY’s situation when we started working on Pathways was pretty much contained in the report that Associate University Provost Julia Wrigley had written²² (discussed further in chapter 3). That report showed that when transfer students were awarded bachelor’s degrees, they tended to have more excess credits than so-called native students, but the difference was small and there were a number of possible explanations for that difference. The report also gave many examples of courses whose credits, according to specifics listed in CUNY’s transfer software system, would transfer inconsistently among the different CUNY colleges. However, as with our limited knowledge about the course in the Chronicle diagram, we didn’t actually know how often those course transfers occurred, nor did we know the actual result (we were looking at what the software said should happen, not what actually happened). Julia’s report also discussed the existing policies’ inconsistent treatment of students in different degree programs, the fact that the entire credit-transfer system was built on a principle of subjective judgments as to whether courses from different colleges matched, and the delays students experienced in trying to get their credits evaluated when they transferred to a new college. Much of this information came from focus groups that Julia convened, as well as from some discussions with faculty. The report also emphasized that articulation agreements were too piecemeal to deal with the problems, which needed a comprehensive solution.

In summary, at the beginning of the project, there was an overwhelming amount of smoke, but little in the way of visible, quantifiable fire. Little quantitative evidence. And no rigorous quantitative evidence. We talked many times about how to obtain such evidence. We thought we needed to have someone study hundreds of students’ transcripts one by one to see what sort of credits the students did or did not retain when they transferred. But this would have taken months of work by a highly trained and dedicated person, working only on that task, and we didn’t have such a person to spare for that amount of time.

In February of 2011, CUNY’s Office of Institutional Research and Assessment, headed by University Dean David Crook, released critical data (obtained by Director of Policy Analysis Colin Chellman using linear probability models and logistic regression) demonstrating that, all else being equal (i.e., taking into account all measurable demographic and performance characteristics), CUNY’s transfer students were at a disadvantage in terms of graduation compared to native students. Transfer students’ credits weren’t propelling them to graduation as much as was the case for native students. More specifically, a one standard deviation increase in credits accumulated led to a 38 percent greater chance of graduating for native students compared to only 20 percent for transfer students.²³ These data strongly suggested that transfer students’ credits weren’t counting as effectively toward graduation requirements as were those of native students. But there were other possible explanations (e.g., transfer students might have been more likely to change their major, so that credits they had taken in their first major wouldn’t help them to graduate), and in any case we didn’t yet have these data when we wrote the first draft of the Pathways Board of Trustees resolution.

Not only were we lacking extensive data supporting our beginning work on Pathways, we also had little idea of how we were going to carry out what we were planning. From the first draft of the resolution in the winter of 2010–2011, we planned to establish extremely large faculty committees, drawn from all the undergraduate colleges, to approve CUNY-wide general education courses. We also planned to support many other faculty in their recommending CUNY-wide eligible general education courses, and in their changing some general education and major programs. Though we did consult with people who had taken similar actions at other universities, none of us had ever done anything quite like this before, and no one had ever done anything like this at CUNY. We knew where we had to go, but not exactly how we were going to get there. We had to trust in ourselves that we would figure it out as we went along, taking one step at a time. As it turned out, there were many surprises along the way for which no one could have been prepared.

In many ways, what we did and why we did it entailed a leap of faith, faith that was certainly not shared by everyone. In retrospect, the amount that we knew about transfer at CUNY was barely sufficient to have justified our embarking on the Pathways journey that resulted in such a huge conflagration. However, in truth, though we realized that there would be significant resistance to what we were doing, none of us realized how much.

By the time the project was over, the national situation had changed significantly. Funding for public colleges and universities was still decreasing,²⁴ and there was still deep concern over low graduation rates.²⁵ None of that had changed. However, as described in the epilogue, credit transfer has become a much-discussed and much-investigated national topic in the drive to increase graduation rates while maintaining or decreasing the cost of higher education for students, institutions, and taxpayers. Further, most people at CUNY now accept that, pre-Pathways at least, CUNY had a transfer credit problem that needed fixing. We in the CUNY central administration certainly did not set out to provide an example of why change is needed in higher education, and how such changes might or might not be made, but in the end that is what we did.

Pathways to Reform focuses on what happened from 2010 through 2013 when we were establishing the Pathways policies. My account of these events is based on my memories, backed up by documentation as much as possible (in addition to this book, please see my website, http://awlogue.com/, for many examples of this documentation and for additional resources concerning Pathways and transfer). And not only is much of what I report here from my own memory, but I have far too many memories to include in one book. Therefore I have had to be selective in what I have reported here and what I have not. As an experimental psychologist I am only too aware that memories can be distorted in myriad ways, and that my selections of what to report can be unconsciously, as well as consciously, biased. For all of these reasons, along with the fact that I wrote this book after I left the CUNY administration and became a CUNY research professor—with no interactions with anyone at CUNY regarding the book until after it was completed—any errors or misinterpretations or distortions in the book, as well as all views expressed, are entirely my own. I do not speak on behalf of CUNY in this book. But to the best of my ability, my report here is accurate. In some cases I have withheld people’s names in order to help protect their confidentiality, but I have not changed any names. In cases in which I have used quotation marks, I have reliable documentation (not just my own memory) regarding what was actually written or said. When I have had access to a recording of an event or meeting, as well as a written transcript, I have relied on the former. Any grammatical or other errors in the quotations accurately represent errors in the originals. In cases in which I lack a recording or reliable written documentation, I have chosen not to use quotation marks and instead to paraphrase what I believe someone said. I have used endnotes only for publicly available documentation, not for my own memories, email content, or other informal documents. I also try to distinguish clearly between events and my opinions.

This book can be useful in helping readers to understand the issue of credit transfer—why it is important and what facilitates and hinders it, along with the sensitivities surrounding general education requirements. This book also provides considerable information about CUNY, an institution that has both similarities to and differences from other institutions of higher education. But it can also be helpful in elucidating why change is difficult to effect in higher education, the struggles over the authority to make change, and the ways in which change can be hindered or facilitated at our colleges and universities. I hope that this recounting of the Pathways journey will be useful to you.

CHAPTER 1

Passing the Pathways Resolution

JUNE 27, 2011

NOTICE OF THE JUNE 27, 2011 BOARD MEETING

A regular meeting of the Board of Trustees shall take place on MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2011 AT 4:30 P.M., IN ROOM 14-220, BARUCH COLLEGE VERTICAL CAMPUS, at 55 Lexington Avenue (corner of 24th Street), New York, New York. . . . The proceedings will be telecast live on CUNY-TV, cable Channel 75, and online at www.cuny.edu/trustees.

Room 14-220 at Baruch College is one of the largest rooms for meetings at The City University of New York. When you sit at one end of the room, as I always did, the faces of the people at the other end are smudges. This room was chosen for meetings of CUNY’s Board of Trustees because it was so big—not in order to hold large audiences, but to make sure there was a large gap between the people in the audience at one end of the room and the people participating in the meeting at the other end: no-man’s-land. Some time in the memories of veterans of the CUNY central office, when the board meetings were held at what was then CUNY headquarters on East Eightieth Street, someone in the audience had leapt up and stood on the meeting table until a trustee grabbed the leaper’s leg and pulled him down. And on another occasion, when the board was meeting at CUNY’s LaGuardia Community College, an audience member had thrown a stink bomb, hitting a vice chancellor. Thus the necessity of no-man’s-land.

Now, for every board meeting, the official participants—CUNY board members, chancellor, vice chancellors, and college presidents—sat at a huge square made of tables. Given that CUNY has twenty-four college presidents and deans of freestanding professional schools, as well as a couple dozen board members and vice chancellors, the square needed to be very big indeed. As executive vice chancellor and university provost, I sat on the farthest edge of that square, along what might be called the top of the room, to the right of the chancellor, Matthew Goldstein. The chancellor is the CEO of the CUNY system of colleges, and I was its chief academic officer.

The room’s layout meant that people sitting on the side of the square opposite me and Matt had their backs to no-man’s-land and the audience. These seats were always occupied by college presidents.

On one side of the room was a low platform for the technicians doing the recording and broadcasting of the meeting, and there were also multiple technicians around the room operating large standing video cameras. By law, CUNY board meetings are public—they are broadcast live on CUNY TV and the web, and a video recording is available online afterward, in addition to the fact that members of the public may attend in person.

On June 27, 2011, the audience consisted of the usual staff members from the CUNY central office and colleges, and a few interested faculty members. But on this day there were also a lot of additional staff from my section of the CUNY central office (the Office of Academic Affairs), plus around twenty students. All these people were there because a vote on Pathways—CUNY’s controversial proposed new policy for fixing CUNY students’ decades-long problems in transferring credits—was on the board agenda. I couldn’t see the students well from where I was sitting, but I knew they were there because many were wearing the blue sports shirts of the CUNY Coalition for Students with Disabilities (CCSD), a group that had been strongly supporting Pathways due to the particular challenges facing disabled students when their credits didn’t transfer. I also couldn’t see well the plainclothes peace officers who were always scattered through the audience in case of trouble (to prevent a dash through no-man’s-land or the throwing of noxious substances). On this day, given the controversy about Pathways, there was a greater-than-zero probability that someone would do something that would interfere with the meeting’s proceedings.

One person whom I could see well was sitting directly behind me and the chancellor, in the small space between us and the shaded windows at the top of the room. This person was Dave Fields, senior university dean and special counsel to the chancellor. Dave’s job at board meetings was to watch the whole room while staying close to the chancellor. For these meetings he put on a jacket and tie, rare for him, and his long gray hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail.

Dave and Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations, had been student protest leaders at Queens College in their distant youth, and both had a long history of supporting students. In fact, Dave, who is a few years older than Jay, had once been Jay’s instructor for a college course. As part of that course, Dave, a lawyer, gave Jay the assignment to change a law. Through some hard work in Albany, Jay managed to change the law specifying the composition of the CUNY board so that, ever since, the board had included a voting student representative (Jay, at the time), but a nonvoting faculty representative, in addition to the many voting members appointed by the governor and the mayor.¹ For the several decades leading up to June 2011, Jay, consistent with his substantial physique, had been a formidable, unstoppable force in the CUNY central administration, and with Dave and others he had worked tirelessly to preserve and enhance CUNY’s reputation, some might say at no matter what the cost. At board meetings Jay sat at the top of the room, where he no longer had a vote but could survey everything going on and give directions to staff around the room as needed.

A protest leader of a different sort was seated on the edge of the square to my right: Professor Sandi Cooper, chair of the University Faculty Senate (UFS) and the sole faculty member participant in board meetings. The UFS consists of faculty representatives elected from each CUNY college. This was Sandi’s third stint as the chair of this group. Her previous two chairships, which lasted from 1994 to 1998, were marked by greater-than-usual acrimony between the UFS and the CUNY central administration, including multiple lawsuits filed by Sandi and the UFS.²

On June 27, 2011, I knew this about her, and I also knew that she was a historian (though I had little awareness of her scholarship). Consistent with her academic specialty, I knew that she frequently made references to CUNY events that she had witnessed many decades in the past, including when she was emitting her frequent critiques of current administrative efforts. Most notably on this day, I knew her as the leader of the faculty opposition to Pathways. Had I also known at that time that her scholarly specialty involved the history of peace movements (or one might say protest movements)—and that, prior to the Pathways controversy, she had published close to twenty letters/op-eds in the New York Times and engaged in anti-CUNY-administration activities for many decades—I might have thought a little longer about opposing her on Pathways. Her New York University doctoral dissertation, which she conceived in a 1958–1959 NYU class following her undergraduate work at CUNY’s City College, contained a section on modern European peace movements. Her New York Times pieces were on topics ranging from the deteriorating New York subways (1977) to reform in Russia (1987) to the particular difficulties that women have in reaching career heights (2000) to the Nobel Peace Prize (2006).³ I also didn’t know that just two years before this board meeting she had won the Peace History Society Lifetime Achievement Award.⁴ Nor that she had been the subject of more than one news article describing allegations that she was racist and a Communist.⁵ She was a public, controversial figure.

Instead, at that time, what I saw was a professor near the end of a long career at CUNY. With gray hair gathered loosely in back of her head, she had a habit of pursing her lips, downturned at the corners, when she finished a statement. I had been told that she had recently lost her husband.⁶ I believed that she cared deeply about her family and junior colleagues. In fact, it was just half an hour before the meeting started that Sandi told us she would attend—she had originally said she had to care for a sick relative at the time of the meeting, but then she had found someone else to provide that care in her stead.

Though many of my interactions with Sandi had been difficult, some had not. For example, a few months earlier, when she and I and others were being instructed on how to use iPads to access board committee meeting materials, she asked our instructor whether she would get cancer of the fingers from using the iPad. I thought that comment clever and laughed. Then I realized that no one else in the room was laughing.

But on this day amusing incidents involving Sandi were far from my mind. As usual, I entered room 14-220 the back way, escorted by peace officers, thus avoiding having to pass through the metal detectors required for anyone seeking to sit in the audience. As soon as I entered the room, I scanned it for any possible trouble. My colleagues and I had tried to anticipate everything that could interfere with passing the Pathways resolution, but I had learned only too well in the past few months that I could not predict what form trouble might take. Just a few weeks earlier Sandi had advised faculty to protest Pathways by attending a public meeting in their academic regalia and passing out leaflets. What had she told them to do at this board meeting? I couldn’t see many faculty in the audience, but maybe that was just because the audience was so far away.

Soon after we entered the room, Benno Schmidt—board chair and former president of Yale and dean of Columbia’s Law School—sitting between Matt and Jay, called the meeting to order. With his wire-rim glasses, round face, dark suit, light shirt, and striped tie, he had a scholarly as well as authoritative appearance. As at every board meeting, on this day he first read aloud the rules of conduct:⁷ The Board must carry out the functions assigned to it by law and therefore cannot tolerate conduct that disrupts its meetings. In the event of disruptions, including noise, which interferes with Board discussion, after appropriate warning I will ask the security staff to remove persons engaging in disruptive conduct. The University may seek disciplinary and/or criminal sanctions against persons who engage in conduct that violates the University’s rules or State laws, which prohibit interference with the work of public bodies.

I sat in my place, trying not to move, and especially not to activate any of my facial muscles in ways that would indicate any emotions. Seated next to Matt, I could be on camera at any time, and I had had much experience with people telling me that they could see exactly how I felt. I couldn’t show how anxious I was about the Pathways resolution, and there would be close to an hour before we got to that part of the agenda.

I was wearing a new yellow suit, bought for the occasion. I knew it would be visible in the sea of dark jackets all around me (including the one Sandi wore), and yellow had special significance for me. It had been my mother’s favorite color; she said it was associated with intelligence, and—without consulting me or my soon-to-be husband—she had announced it as the color theme for my wedding almost forty years previously. To me yellow heralded the beginning of summer, a special time for academics, who use that season for scholarly productivity and rejuvenation. Then, too, the suit and the white shell I was wearing underneath it provided coverage for the heart rate monitor I was wearing for a week to check on my occasional heart arrhythmia (atrial fibrillation), which had been flaring up in recent months. Large patches of my skin underneath the suit were raw from repeatedly using tape to hold the many pieces of the monitor close to my body so that no one could detect that I was wearing it.

Benno then made his opening remarks. Much of what he said concerned CUNY’s now having a rational tuition policy. After years of effort by CUNY, New York State had finally approved CUNY’s raising full-time annual tuition for New York State residents by up to three hundred dollars in each of the next five years, and there was a commitment that CUNY could keep the additional funds. Benno thanked Governor Cuomo and the New York State Legislature for this, and pointed out that this new policy would allow CUNY to have long-term financial stability and the ability to do long-term planning, rare in American public higher education. Given the research I had done since graduate school on the maximization of long-term rewards, I agreed with Benno that this new policy would be highly instrumental in enabling a better future for CUNY. Later in the meeting, Benno said that the rational tuition policy deserves to be seen . . . as the Chancellor’s greatest achievement to date. Nowhere in his remarks did Benno mention Pathways.

Matt’s report followed Benno’s. On this day, as usual, he wore an expensive dark suit and an expensive watch. To me his suits, wire-rim glasses, fascination with watches, and large, pale, oval head, with a little bit of gray hair remaining on the sides, projected wisdom. Other people did not react so positively.

Matt’s report, also as usual, lasted about thirty minutes. He read from his notes slowly, covering many topics. As chancellor since 1999, widely credited with reversing CUNY’s decline, he always presented reports that contained much good news. Similar to Benno, Matt talked about the rational tuition policy. Students would know how much money they would have to pay years in advance, and CUNY would know how much money it had to spend years in advance. It took ten years to establish this policy, with CUNY working so hard on something, not giving up, and finally seeing the light of day. He praised Governor Cuomo for taking on something that others either never thought about doing or dismissed from doing, but he really made it happen. This sounded to me like what we (the CUNY administration) had been doing with the Pathways Project, but Matt never mentioned Pathways.

In addition to the rational tuition policy, Matt reported on two nascent CUNY entities: the new CUNY School of Public Health (a complex, collaborative SPH involving four CUNY colleges, which had recently been granted full, five-year accreditation), and Guttman Community College (CUNY’s first new college in over forty years, which had just been approved by the Higher Education Committee of the New York State Board of Regents). I had been the central office lead person for the School of Public Health initiative since its inception in 2008, and had also played a critical role in the establishment of Guttman, so Matt’s report on these two entities was very gratifying to hear.

Many chancellors would never have taken on even one of these projects—the rational tuition policy, the collaborative School of Public Health, and Guttman Community College—each of which involved huge amounts of work and also huge amounts of political controversy.

Toward the end of his report Matt always mentioned honors won by people participating in the meeting, and on that day, for the first time, I was one