Regular readers will remember that a few weeks ago an administrator at CUNY’s Queensboro Community College threatened to eviscerate the college’s English Department — eliminate composition courses at the college, terminate all adjuncts, halt all job searches, fire full-time faculty — in retaliation for the department’s refusal to scale back its comp courses to comply with Pathways, a controversial new CUNY-wide curricular scheme. It was bizarre, and scary.
The administrator in question eventually apologized in the face of criticism from this site and a bunch of other good folks, and the president of QCC walked back — but didn’t quite close the door on — her threats. The story has been simmering on campus ever since, but there haven’t been any big public developments until now.
Last night the Queensboro Academic Senate met and made it clear that they’re standing by the department and will resist any attempt to go forward with the administration’s threats. I’m still working on getting all the official details out of the meeting, but here’s what I’ve been told so far.
First, in a “nearly unanimous” vote, the Academic Senate passed a resolution affirming Queensboro’s non-negotiable obligation to continue to offer composition courses to its students. “It shall be the official policy of Queensboro Community College,” the resolution declared, that the college “must not violate state law or regulation … jeopardize its accreditations … [or] violate its agreements … by failing to offer courses in sufficient number required for its degree programs.” It further declared that “these obligations must be honored, irrespective of whether Queensboro’s course listings adhere to the specifications of the CUNY Common Required and Flexible Cores.”
Queensboro needs to offer composition, in other words, and as far as the Academic Senate is concerned the college will continue to offer composition, whatever happens with the Pathways fight.
An additional resolution saw more debate, a little more opposition, and a few amendments, and I don’t yet have a precise picture of how that discussion turned out. But in its original form, the second resolution noted the CUNY administration’s lack of attention to “the objections of faculty across CUNY” to the Pathways plan, and called the proposal to scale back composition and similar courses a “particularly problematic” change to “already flawed … schema.” Reviewing showdown between the English department and the QCC administration the resolution declared its “strong support” for the department’s “academic freedom … to render their best academic judgments” on such issues.
In a meatier, forward-looking passage the resolution — again, as originally proposed — declared that “no further review” of Pathways course specifications “can proceed … until and unless the academic judgment and academic freedom of the faculty are fully respected, and guaranteed, in a written document” and the threats to cut course offerings and faculty “is formally retracted” in writing.
Finally, the resolution declared that “no curriculum, adopted by the faculty under pressure and constraint, should ever be interpreted by Administrative personnel … or any media organization as denoting any degree of faculty support for the Pathways initiative, which is overwhelmingly rejected by members of our faculty as harmful to our students and poor educational practice.”
I’m told that this resolution passed by a margin of about four-to-one after unspecified amendments. As soon as I have the exact details I’ll pass them along.
studentactivism.net 
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October 10, 2012 at 6:00 pm
Austin Smith
Great reporting on this key battleground in the international student movement. The same legal issue is at the core of both the QCC English department’s struggle, and objections to the process by which Pathways was passed by the Chancellor & CUNY BOT: NYS Education Law gives primary responsibility to the University and College Faculty Senates in formulating and recommending academic and curricular policy, full stop. The various senates (students included) are the recognized representatives of their constituencies. Additionally, case law has recognized the CUNY BOT, University and College Senates as de facto legislative bodies, their powers devolved from the NYS Legislature. Therefore, the Pathways steering committee of Chancellor’s appointees was illegitimate under black-letter law, since the faculty, students, and staff participants were not selected by the relevant University Senates. The same holds true at the college level at QCC. It’s beyond bad policy, it’s illegal. Not much of the PSC’s case against Pathways is public, but one would think an injunction against implementation would be reasonable. This is all tragic, as intra-CUNY articulation reform is sorely needed, and a collegial process through appropriate shared governance bodies was not impossible, just substantially longer. It would, however, have yielded sounder policy, and left the various stake-holders relatively satisfied, rather than embroiling the entire CUNY professoriate in this needless acrimony. Keep up the fight, keep up the coverage!