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With the new appointment of Solomon “Sam” Sutton, and the unexpected re-appointment of Jeffrey Wesienfeld to the CUNY Board of Trustees, former governor George Pataki has implicitly approved and helped to reinforce the continued corporatization of the City University of New York. Like other university boards, the board of the City University of New York is composed almost exclusively of current or former corporate and/or business elites, often with little, if any, actual experience in the classroom or in educational administration. In other words, the members of the CUNY Board of Trustees have practically no understanding of what it is like to teach, work, or attend classes at the university. Instead, what they know, and what they are best at, is what all corporations are best at: selling products, cutting wages, fighting unions and unionization, defending shareholders’ interests, and creating efficiency at all costs. This model, depending on how you look at it, may or may not work well for an auto manufacturer facing stiff global competition, but it is certainly not an appropriate way to run a university, where the product isn’t merely knowledge, but experience.
The newest stooge to take to the dais of the BOT, Solomon Sutton is a fine example of the continued corporatization of the university. As the Chief Executive Officer of Accessory Exchange, Mr. Sutton has made a prestigious career, not publishing or teaching undergraduates, but, like his father, manufacturing and selling leather handbags. In a capitalist society like ours this is a lovely way to provide for one’s family, and The Advocate admires Mr. Sutton’s many community activities and his participation in the civic life of his city. However, Mr. Sutton, like nearly all of the members of the BOT, is woefully under qualified to deal with the real, complex, ethical, and political problems that face the university, and like so many members before him is bound to become another living, breathing, rubber stamp for the continuance of the Schmidt/Goldstein/ Pataki agenda of corporate governance over the nation’s largest urban university. In addition to his many civic activities, Mr. Sutton, who apparently has a lot of time on his hands, is also Vice-President of the Education Association for Children in New York State, a group whose name sounds suspiciously like The National Education Association, but whose politics could not be more different. The Education Association for Children in New York State, or TEACH NYS is, according to its critics, a largely pro voucher group with a slick veneer of concerned citizenship, whose slogan “working for parents…and their children” uncannily reveals their real priorities to the parents of students who attend private (see religious) education institutions. Mr. Sutton’s obvious pro-privatization stance will fit right in on a board of trustees whose ring leader is the former Chairman of the Board for Edison Schools: a company dedicated to the model of for-profit private education.
But Solomon’s appointment is still less controversial than former Governor Pataki’s last minute decision to push through the re-appointment of Jeffrey Weisenfeld, the loose cannon of the BOT, and a man who has virulently spoken out against the PSC CUNY union and called anti-war teach-ins at CCNY “seditious.” Largely despised, Wiesenfeld’s re-appointment was originally proposed by Pataki too late to be approved by the State Senate, a move that many pundits saw as a snuff against Wiesenfeld. However, Pataki, in his rush toward the presidency, scheduled an emergency session of the senate on Dec. 13, 2006 to, according to the New York Sun, “hammer out an agreement on a civil confinement bill for sexual predators.” Under the guise of sexual predation, however, Pataki put forth a whole slew of bills that included, among other things, the two new appointments to the CUNY Board of Trustees.
Now that Governor Spitzer is in office we can only hope that he will prioritize an investigation of the structure and membership of the Board of Trustees. A good place to begin would be to refer to the Rand Corporation’s report “The Governance of the City University of New York: A System at Odds with Itself” and to consult directly with the PSC, the Student Senate, and the University Faculty Senate before appointing any new members to the board. It is time that university governance reflects the concerns of the students, faculty, and staff of the university, and not the interests of politicians and corporations.
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