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Pathways, the CUNY administration’s controversial system-wide general education plan, is supposed to be in place by this fall, but meeting that goal may prove difficult.
Yesterday the College Senate at LaGuardia Community College in Queens — a joint student-faculty governance body — voted 23 to 7 to declare a moratorium on Pathways implementation, making LaGuardia the latest in a string of colleges to either decline to approve Pathways courses or actively declare their refusal to do so.
Last fall an administrator at Queensborough Community College was forced to back down from and apologize for a threat to dismantle the QCC English Department — canceling job searches, firing adjuncts, and eliminating full-time positions — in response to the department’s refusal to accept a Pathways plan to cut contact hours (and, as a result, faculty pay) for composition courses.
Faculty opposition to Pathways gained national attention in January when the delegate assembly of the Modern Language Association voted by an overwhelming margin to declare that CUNY’s attempts to implement Pathways had violated faculty rights and established principles of university governance.
Though the CUNY general counsel asserts that the Board of Trustees “has clear and final authority to adopt academic policy … and to direct the Chancellor to implement it,” a January letter to the CUNY administration from the American Association of University Professors notes that “no campus-level faculty governance body has supported the process or endorsed” the Pathways plan, and that in fact “faculty bodies at virtually all of the [CUNY] senior colleges” have “adopted resolutions opposed to the project.”
While not taking a position on the legal ramifications of a decision to move forward with Pathways in the face of such opposition, the AAUP expressed the opinion that it would “run counter to generally accepted standards of governance.”
Oberlin College has cancelled classes for the day in the wake of “a report of a person wearing a hood and robe resembling a KKK outfit” walking around campus. But the cancellation isn’t a public-safety lockdown.
The KKK sighting, which is still under investigation, is the latest in a string of bias incidents on campus. On five separate occasions in February, graffiti bearing swastikas and racial and homophobic slurs were left at various campus locations, often defacing multicultural offices or event posters. On February 17, a student reported that he was robbed and knocked to the ground on campus by an assailant “who made a derogatory remark about his perceived ethnicity.”
In response to this string of incidents, the Oberlin administration has suspended “formal classes and all non-essential activities” for the day, and will be holding “a series of discussions of the challenging issues that have faced our community.”
Today’s events will include a noon teach-in by the Afrikana Studies department, a 2 pm “demonstration of solidarity,” and a 3 pm community convocation.
Tuesday Update | As many as a thousand students — one third of Oberlin’s enrolled student body — attended yesterday’s solidarity demonstration in opposition to the hate crimes of the last month, which culminated in a march through the city of Oberlin. Some five hundred students attended the earlier teach-in and planning session at the Afrikana Studies department.
Oberlin was one of the first racially integrated and co-educational colleges in the United States. It has admitted black students since 1835 and women since 1837.
In the summer of 1942 a small group of German students began to speak out against the Nazi regime. Because any criticism of the government was illegal, they distributed their writings anonymously and in secret. Calling themselves the White Rose, they tucked leaflets into phone books, mailed them to randomly chosen recipients, and left them to be found in public places, particularly on high school and college campuses. They produced six pamphlets in all, printing several thousand copies of each.
On February 18, 1943, siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl took a suitcase full of their latest leaflet to the University of Munich, where they were both enrolled — unlike those which had gone before, this leaflet was written specifically for a student audience. Two excerpts:
“Get out of the lecture rooms of the SS corporals and sergeants and the party bootlickers! We want genuine learning and real freedom of opinion. No threat can terrorise us, not even the shutting down of the institutions of higher learning.
“The name of Germany is dishonoured for all time if German youth does not finally rise, take revenge, and atone, smash its tormentors, and set up a new Europe of the spirit. Students! The German people look to us. As in 1813 the people expected us to shake off the Napoleonic yoke, so in 1943 they look to us to break the National Socialist terror through the power of the spirit.”
Acting quickly during classes, Hans and Sophie left stacks of pamphlets in corridors for their fellow students to find. As one class session was nearing an end they realized they had a few copies left, and climbed to the top of the building they were in. Leaning over the balcony of a floor-to-ceiling atrium, Sophie threw the remaining copies out into the air, leaving them to float to the lobby below.
For the first time in Hans and Sophie’s eight month campaign they had been observed. A college custodian saw them, and reported them to the Gestapo. They were arrested that afternoon, and tried four days later. At the conclusion of their trial, which lasted just a few hours, they were allowed to visit briefly with their parents and then beheaded.
Hans and Sophie Scholl and their friend and comrade Christophe Probst were executed seventy years ago today.
In all, seven members of the White Rose were executed by the Nazis, and more than a dozen others were imprisoned for their activities. Seven members of a Hamburg student resistance group who were inspired by the White Rose died in Nazi jails.
Note: Two years ago I wrote some thoughts on the lessons the White Rose offers for youth organizers today. They can be found here.
Cooper Union students’ fight to preserve the college’s century-plus tradition of free tuition is kicking into gear again, as administrative dithering and blackmail has thrown the new entering class into disarray.
Two of the three schools that make up CU have submitted proposals for integrating tuition into their budgets going forward, but the third — the School of Art — has refused to do so, saying that they will not cooperate with “any solution to The Cooper Union’s current financial crisis that depends, even in part, on tuition compromises and irreversibly damages the ideals of art, education, freedom, and citizenship.”
In retaliation for this act of defiance, Cooper Union president Jamshed Bharucha announced last week that the college would not honor the School of Art’s decisions on its early admission applicants, and would instead inform those applicants that they would be considered as part of the general admissions process later in the spring.
The most immediate result of this retaliation against the School of Art is to weaken their applicant pool — and, by extension, the student body and reputation of Cooper Union itself. By announcing that the school to which they applied does not intend to honor their commitment to the early admissions process, and that it in fact has no “sustainable model” for operating in the future, Cooper Union will surely drive many of those applicants — the very students who were most committed to enrolling at CU — to other colleges.
As I wrote last fall, Cooper Union’s reputation rests more than usually on the quality of its students. To dilute the college’s applicant pool as part of an attempt to force recalcitrant faculty to accede to administration policies they abhor is an astoundingly short-sighted and pernicious act.
It is, as a group of activist students at Cooper Union have said, a betrayal:
These applicants have gone above and beyond their due diligence in holding up their end of the application process … applicants and their families were told on numerous occasions by administrators, the school’s official website, and admissions literature that the incoming class of 2017 would not be affected by the financial struggles plaguing the Cooper Union.
Cooper Union students, who last semester occupied a campus building for most of a week in opposition to the tuition plan, will be holding a rally in support of the deferred students at one o’clock this afternoon.
More to come.
Here’s a mind-boggling one.
Florida Atlantic University, a 29,000-student public university in Boca Raton, will announce today that it has sold the naming rights to its football stadium to a private prison company that until recently ran a youthful offender facility in Mississippi whose “pervasive level of brazen staff sexual misconduct” was called “among the worst in the nation” by a 2012 Department of Justice investigation.
The Justice Department report on the Walnut Grove Youth Correctional Facility found not only that Walnut Grove management was “deliberately indifferent to staff sexual misconduct,” but also that the facility “often use[d] excessive force as a first response” to disciplinary issues, tolerated active gang membership by facility employees, failed to protect inmates against physical and sexual assault by peers, and was “deliberately indifferent to the suicide risks and serious mental health needs of its youth.”
Walnut Grove was operated at the time by GEO Group, a global private prison operator. Later that year, after a federal judge described Walnut Grove as “a cesspool of unconstitutional and inhuman acts,” GEO was removed as manager of the institution. The company would later claim that it had chosen not to renew the contract because Walnut Grove was “financially underperforming.”)
So why would FAU choose to associate itself with a company with such an appalling record? Two reasons.
First, the university has been searching for a corporate sponsor for the stadium without success since it opened two years ago. The $5 million reportedly offered by the GEO Group was apparently impossible to resist.
And second? Well, there’s GEO Group’s CEO, George Zoley. He’s a FAU alum and the former chair of the university’s board of trustees.
Update | It’s official. Thanks to a $6 million donation to the university, the stadium will now be named “GEO Group Stadium.” The university’s press release on the deal calls GEO Group a “fully integrated equity real estate investment trust specializing in the design, financing, development, and operation of correctional, detention, and community reentry facilities around the globe.”
Wednesday Update | The New York Times reports on the story, calling the deal a “a jarring case of the lengths colleges and teams will go to produce revenue, of the way that everything seems to be for sale now in sports — and to anyone with enough cash.” As well, it quotes local private-prison opponent Bob Libal as saying that the GEO Group has recently “poured enormous resources” into attempts “to take over a large portion of the Florida prison system,” characterizing yesterday’s agreement as an extension of that lobbying effort. GEO is, Libal says, “a company whose record is marred by human rights abuses, by lawsuits, by unnecessary deaths of people in their custody and a whole series of incidents that really draw into question their ability to successfully manage a prison facility.” As the Times itself notes, GEO “has been cited by state and federal regulators and lost a series of high-profile lawsuits.”
Asked by a Times reporter whether FAU had investigated such incidents before partnering with GEO, university president Saunders said, “we think it’s a wonderful company, and we’re very proud to partner with them.”
The Times also notes that two past FAU student government presidents have gone on to work for GEO Group.
Third Update | It has emerged that the GEO Group owns an immigrant detention center just ten miles from the Florida Atlantic campus that has been the target of criticism based on complaints of inadequate medical care and unjustified incarceration. The Miami Herald reported today that at least one current FAU student is a former detainee at the center.
studentactivism.net 
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