Creating a College: State of the College 1976-1993

By Edmond L. Volpe

Creating a College is a collection of President Volpes annual addresses on the state of the College of Staten Island. They constitute a history of the early years of the College, which was established in 1976 by the merger of an upper division institution, Richmond College and Staten Island Community College. The fiscal collapse of New York City in 1975 led to the unification of the two City University of New York institutions on Staten Island. The complex process of merging two disparate institutions, with differing missions and educational philosophies at two locations, miles apart, during a period of severe fiscal constraint is recorded in these eighteen addresses. Such a merger has been a rare occurrence in American higher education. Its end result was the creation of a new type of institution, the comprehensive college.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Aug 22, 2003
• ISBN: 9781469105932

Edmond L. Volpe

Dr. Edmond L. Volpe served as president of The College of Staten Island, a unit of the City University of New York, for twenty years. A Professor of English and American Literature at the City College of New York from 1954-1974, he has written and edited seventeen books and has published many articles on literature and higher education.

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Contents

PREFACE

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

TO

ADRIAN, MARIANNA, ALEX, EMMA, LUKE

PREFACE

This collection of my State of the College addresses from 1976 to 1993 provides, I think, a good history of the early years of the College of Staten Island. It records the struggle, internally and externally, to create a new college from the merger of Staten Island Community College and an upper division institution, Richmond College. It reveals the complex and difficult process of wresting order out of the chaos of merging two disparate institutions. It depicts the unending struggle to develop morale and confidence in the various constituencies within the College and to win the support of the Staten Island community. It records the many battles with City University’s central office and the New York State Division of the Budget for proper funding for an institution that fit no established model, and it traces the drawn-out campaign for recognition and status. At any given period, an institution is the sum of its history, and future generations at CSI may well find clues to their present in this record of the College’s creation and early development.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful, as ever, to my wife Rose for her partnership during my two years as president of Richmond College and my eighteen as president of the College of Staten Island. She has provided invaluable editorial assistance in preparing the manuscript of this book

CHAPTER 1

1976-1977

The federation of Staten Island Community College and Richmond College into the College of Staten Island provides us an exciting and challenging opportunity to create a unique four-year institution. The college we create must be truly responsive to the educational needs of an urban population in the final quarter of the twentieth century. Our curriculum must reflect in its diversity a student body with wide range of aspirations and needs, including students who wish to develop career skills while working for bachelor’s degrees, students who are trained in career and occupation areas but now seek additional education, and students who enter and exit during different moments in their lives and careers.

This document is a first step toward defining the educational philosophy of the federated institution, clarifying its mission and setting planning priorities. It is not intended, of course, as a definitive statement of our College’s mission and goals but as a focus for discussion and as an incentive for curricular planning and development by the faculty.

Below is a suggested list of priorities and deadlines. Each program is discussed in the document.

Short Range Planning

Longer Range Planning

Our educational philosophy should be one based upon educational diversity. An urban institution, such as the College of Staten Island, serves a variety of student groups, each with different educational backgrounds and goals. The traditional four-year curriculum offered in most of our liberal arts colleges is not capable of responding to the educational needs of this diverse student body. It was developed many decades ago for a homogeneous student population, drawn from a restricted age group and from a restricted socioeconomic strata.

City College, and later the other colleges of the City University of New York, justly earned their national reputation because they eliminated many of the social and economic barriers to higher education. The City University has not been alone during recent years in the move to extend higher educational opportunity to new student populations. Before World War II, colleges throughout the nation were educating about a million and a half people. Today there are over eleven million students in American colleges and universities.

A large percentage of this expanded student population has been served by community colleges, which have introduced a variety of degree programs. Yet the structure of the liberal arts curriculum in both the two and four-year colleges has undergone little basic alteration, despite the fact that the homogeneous adolescent population it was developed for has been replaced by an amazingly diverse student body.

As a federated institution, the College of Staten Island can offer two and four-year degrees. It can also offer graduate education. It can provide both associate’s and bachelor’s career programs. It can provide traditional liberal arts curriculum for lower and upper division students. It can develop new curricular structures with opportunities clearly defined for students to enter and exit at different levels.

Our task is to incorporate into one vital institution, the mission of the community college—a mission well begun by the Community College—the mission of the upper division—again begun by Richmond College during the last several years—and the mission of the traditional four-year college. If we succeed, we shall have developed a curriculum that not only will serve our students well but also will provide a model for other colleges seeking a curriculum that is responsive to a heterogeneous student body.

The assumed mission of the community college is to provide: (1) one-year and two-year career programs that offer immediate employment opportunities; (2) educational opportunity for new groups of students in the community through special programs, out-reach programs, and continuing education, non-credit programs that take into account the needs of those who wish to retrain for new jobs or enter new careers after years away from school and employment; and (3) educational opportunity for students who might not have been prepared to go directly to a senior college and wish to explore the liberal arts and sciences or need the time to develop their skills and to define their aspirations before continuing on to upper division courses of study.

The distinctive mission of the upper division college is:

(1) to provide ready access for graduates of community colleges to junior and senior study; (2) to develop compatible curricula that reinforce and expand upon the first two years of study; and (3) to ensure the vitality of community college programs by providing educational opportunities beyond the associate degree in a way that cannot and will not be done by traditional four-year colleges.

The present mission of the traditional four-year liberal arts college is difficult to identify. If curriculum defines mission, then these colleges are primarily concerned with preparing students for professional and graduate schools. Most students, however, do not go on to graduate work; therefore the four-year colleges are presumably preparing students for various careers as well as providing them with personal skills and experiences that will enable them to lead fuller and richer lives. The four-year liberal arts college that is now possible to us in the College of Staten Island can be strengthened by the extraordinary diversity in associate’s and bachelor’s degrees we can offer; the liberal arts students need no longer be segregated from the courses available to students in career programs.

Operating in isolation, the structure of each of these separate kinds of institutions too often imposed limitations upon the educational services that could be rendered. As a five-year institution, the College of Staten Island need not suffer from such restrictions. It can offer—within one college—the full scope of education previously available separately and in fragments by any one of the three basic institutions—and can do it better.

My quarrel with the traditional four-year curriculum is that it has been unable to adapt to the changing student body, and all students are therefore forced into the same curricular mold. The rapid development of community colleges over the past few decades probably reflects the attempts of higher education to be responsive to a new student population without having to respond to the basic questions of structure and curriculum built into four-year colleges. If we, as a new college, set as our goal educational openness and diversity the best way to proceed is to consider our academic programs in terms of the various types of students we are attempting to educate.

The Traditional Student:

Two-Year Career Programs The Business/Economics Program Four-Year Pre-Professional Program A New Liberal Arts A.A. & B.A. Curriculum The Three-Year B.A. The Four-Year B.A./M.A.

For the purposes of definition, the traditional student includes those students who are approaching adult responsibility and view college as a preparation for a variety of careers, from the most specialized to the most general.

The immediate career objectives of many students can be fulfilled by one or two-year curricula offerings. Our current programs in business, technology, and in the health services, including nursing, were designed for these students and must be maintained as an integral part of the overall curriculum of the new four-year institution.

The four-year Business/Economics program, which was instituted September 1, 1976, demonstrates the flexibility that our federation provides for curricular development. By utilizing the associate degree Business curriculum and the Economics program of the upper division, the B.S. in Business/Economics was created to provide students a concentrated economics sequence and specialization in particular area of business.

For those students who want to pursue a career in law or medicine or go to graduate schools, we most provide a challenging four-year program with rigorous admission and high retention standards. Although I envision this program as basically traditional, highly structured with broad distributional requirements, I think it should be enriched by a series of interdisciplinary core courses at all levels that synthesize the educational experience of the student. Access to the program need not be limited to freshmen, but those who complete the program should have ready access to the best graduate and professional schools. A faculty committee, I am pleased to report, is already at work developing this course of study.

Perhaps ninety percent of the students I have described as being traditional do not go on to graduate or professional schools, but they seek the breadth of the liberal arts curriculum, instead of a specialty, while in pursuit of a career. It is this group of students, who actually compose the bulk of our liberal arts colleges, that we in Academia have ignored far too long. The traditional curriculum in both the two and four-year colleges tends to force these students to concentrate in an academic discipline. I have serious doubts about our compulsion, as academics, to force a discipline upon our students. While the traditional major tends to promise a form of specialization that will be useful after graduation, there seems little indication that such promises are fulfilled.

I think that we should begin at once to reconsider the goals of the liberal arts curriculum and determine if we can devise a program that does not hold out false promises but that does provide the best possible preparation for nonspecialized careers.

I should like to propose that we go about this review in two stages. First, we should develop a new program that falls within the present four-year time sequence.

The second stage would construct a liberal arts program on a three-year base. However, since I am not certain that our college can guarantee at this time general acceptance of a new shortened curricular structure, this program should be developed with implementation scheduled for 1978.

The concept of majoring in a discipline has, I would suggest, outlived its usefulness. Instead of offering a curriculum that holds out little promise for those seeking careers, and that prematurely intrudes upon the specialization of graduate study, we would concentrate upon providing three years of general education that challenges the intellect and that develops intellectual skills, useful in any career. A three-year program of study must not merely concentrate four years of study into three but should approach the entire educational process in a new way. Such a program might revolve around an interdisciplinary course of study centering upon major intellectual ideas and problems, extending over a three-year period. In devising such a program, we should be willing to ignore established concepts of class and credit hours and develop entirely new patterns appropriate to a new educational approach to liberal arts study.

If such a program could be developed, then master’s level study in the fourth year could provide a newly focused concentration in a discipline for those students wishing to go on for some further study. In addition, this kind of a four-year B.A./M.A. program would, I believe, better prepare students for graduate work and professional schools than does our current curriculum and do so in a shortened period of time.

In this process of reconsidering our liberal arts curriculum, we should take advantage of the cooperation that has been developed through the Staten Island Continuum and coordinate our own curricular changes with the high schools by bringing in their representatives to serve on our committees.

The Non-Traditional Student:

The Evening Program The Weekend College The Miniversity The Contractual B.A./B.S. The Inverted B.S. Special Admission Programs

This broad category includes those students who do not fit easily into the traditional four-year institution and whom the community colleges and the upper division colleges were established to accommodate. They are, for the most part, working adults, housewives, and in general, those students who enter college at least several years after graduating from high school. Since many of them must continue to work or have the responsibilities of a family to consider, we must construct programs that take into account their schedules, their background and experience, and the distinct possibility that their jobs may be enriched by the education they receive while they continue to work. Many of the programs we develop for the traditional student will be suited to the non-traditional student, and equally, some of the programs directed to the non-traditional student will appeal to the young adult who comes directly to college from high school.

We must extend the availability of our programs so that students can be guaranteed the ability to earn associate or bachelor’s degrees by taking their courses during evening hours. Over the last two decades, Staten Island Community College has graduated thousands of students with associate degrees who chose employment rather than additional higher education. We must reach out to those students by offering upper division programs that are available during evening hours, that meet the needs of working adults, and that link up naturally to their previous associate degree study and their present occupational experience.

In constructing bachelor’s programs that extend the associate degree, we might consider scheduling these new programs primarily in the evening since this would recognize that the intent of many two-year career programs is immediate full-time employment upon receipt of the degree. Hence, these evening offerings would meet the needs of a large segment of our adult population who have been excluded from higher educational opportunities beyond the associate degree.

During the past month, a team has been hard at work developing a weekend college for working students. This concentrated program, structured for the adult, will allow students to complete an associate degree within two years and a bachelor’s degree within four years by attending classes held from Friday evening through Sunday. In addition, self-sustaining, non-credit programs will be available to degree-seeking students, their families and other members of the community. Final plans for this program will be publicized within a week or two.

The Community division, through its miniversities and its continuing education program and several of its special programs, has been providing non-credit courses and also credit-bearing courses of study in several localities off-campus on Staten Island, as well as in Manhattan, and in Brooklyn.

These out-reach programs shall be continued and extended to include, whenever feasible and necessary, courses at the junior and senior levels. Our four-year program with Consolidated Edison in Manhattan is thriving, and other extension services for industrial and business concerns are being developed.

Many adult students will, of course, opt for the programs I have described as those designed for the traditional student. Others have had life experiences and careers upon which further education can be structured. Building upon the extensive experience both divisions have had with the CUNY B.A., we should develop our own contractual degree program. The basic idea of such a program is the establishment, with a mentor, of a rigorous course of study that recognizes the mature student’s background and experience. Fulfillment of the contract results in the awarding of a degree. Flexibility and non-traditional educational methods of instruction and study would characterize such programs, but they could also draw on the existing curriculum.

This new degree program, which the Richmond division had begun developing last year, is a course of study specially designed for students with Applied Science degrees from community colleges. Their two-year program has provided these students with, in effect, the equivalent of a major. The inverted B.S. would permit them to complete the liberal arts credits necessary for a bachelor’s degree and, at the same time, perhaps, allow them to move ahead in their careers by adding courses in management or business or advanced courses in their career specializations. This degree program was given a high priority by the Task Force on Program Articulation, and a committee is at work developing final plans for its implementation.

The Community division has had a number of programs that have provided entrance into the regular college through special programs that are designed to develop academic skills, which were not developed in high school or have long been forgotten. Such programs provide opportunity for highly motivated students who were previously barred from college, and they should continue to be part of the opportunities offered by our federated college.

Many factors, obviously, go into offering and delivering quality education. Some, in an institution such as ours, are very difficult to control. Our facilities are disgracefully overcrowded, especially on the Sunnyside campus. Our classes are too large; we hardly work in ideal conditions. But that situation has always prevailed in our city’s colleges and great education still went on. What we can control is what takes place in each classroom, the respect created for intellectual endeavor, the excitement of learning, the sense of intellectual fulfillment at satisfying the requirements of a course and the standards of a teacher. Our reputation as a college will depend upon the respect our graduates have for their degrees. No matter what the program of study, the standards should be high and the students constantly challenged.

Before the uprisings in the late 60’s our curriculum tended to be too prescriptive. Since that time it has, I believe, gone to the other extreme and become too permissive. Some of the transcripts I have examined show masses of courses in one subject, many of which cover the same material, and insufficient exposure to critical methodologies in other areas of knowledge. Prescriptiveness should extend beyond the specialized program or the major. We must guarantee all our students the necessary skills for oral and written communication and a good basis in mathematics, and we must expose them to a variety of experiences in the methodologies of a variety of disciplines.

All of our programs should therefore be sufficiently structured to provide direction as well as educational breadth. Our students, today, will, if I hear them correctly, welcome far more assistance in programming than we have been offering in the past few years. So long as we can provide a variety of program options from which a student can choose, then we should be able to tell the student how best to reach his or her educational goal. I do not think we need return to basic required courses in each subject; but I think we can provide options to fulfill requirements, thereby not only guaranteeing a quality education but also utilizing our resources in a way that will make programmatic variety economically feasible.

One of our major goals must be the development of a system that will guarantee to every student essential assistance by faculty members in the development of academic programs. Such service to students should be considered a professional responsibility, given special attention in the reappointment and promotional processes, and evaluated in the same way, as are other service activities. The character of a college is built upon the attitudes of faculty toward the students; and, as we all know, the process of education incorporates far more than contact for a few hours in a classroom.

375 full-time faculty members and 150 professional staff represent a tremendous reservoir of intellect, imagination, talent and energy. The College needs your dedication, efforts, and your ideas if it is to become a vital and dynamic educational institution. We have a number of special programs under development, such as the program in International Studies and Foreign Service, which is being funded by a government grant. the Community division has piloted a number of new programs supported by non-tax levy funds. Other programs can and must be developed. Vice President Michael Shugrue is in charge of curriculum development and will welcome your suggestions and provide whatever assistance is necessary for their development. Mr. Eugene Stein, the Grants Officer, stands ready to assist each faculty member in preparing individual or institutional grant proposals.

Because curricular innovation and development is time consuming and obviously cuts into time that might go into research, I am setting aside seven thousand dollars from the money that the College derives from grants for Curriculum Development Awards providing seven $1,000 (total) awards. The purpose of these awards is not only to encourage faculty initiative in curriculum development, but also to provide opportunity to make up for lost research time during the summer. There shall also be five $1,000 (total) awards to provide opportunity for younger scholars to do research and writing in the summer rather than teach. Details about these awards will be provided later in the semester.

This College came into existence on September 1, 1976, because the people in this borough demanded the right