Embattled CUNY students, already laboring under the stresses of a broken economy, are being forced to absorb another blow to their pocketbooks. On November 22, the CUNY Board of Trustees voted to raise tuition by 5 percent for the coming spring semester, and then another 2 percent for the fall of 2011.  Not only that, but the BoT also empowered CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein to raise tuition another 3 percent during the coming year if he deemed it necessary. Such a move would have to be based on an assessment of New York City and State’s budgetary health.  Which basically means that it will happen, given the fact that there is currently no end in sight for the continuing problems each is expected to suffer over the next five years or so.

“These tuition increases are unfortunate but necessary for the University to continue to provide the high quality educational opportunity our students deserve,” Goldstein said shortly after the decision.  According to the CUNY News Wire, Lord Vader sees tuition increases as “necessary to stabilize college operations, protect new faculty hired over the last several years and maintain the University’s widely regarded progress in enhancing academic quality and the value of its degrees.” 

The tuition increases hit all students hard.  Full-time college undergraduates will notice a $115 increase on their tuition bills in the coming semester, while community college students will pay an additional $75 in the spring. Meanwhile Master’s students will get hammered with a $185 increase per semester, slightly more than the $165 fulltime doctoral students can expect. CUNY Law students will see a $255 tuition hike, while Hunter College School of Social Work students will be hit the hardest, with a whopping $500 per semester increase.

CUNY Students and Faculty Take to the Streets

As the Board of Trustees was voting on tuition raises, several dozen CUNY students and faculty attempted to shut down the meeting before the vote took place. As the Advocate’s own Doug Singsen reported in the Indypendent, “As the Board was preparing to vote on the proposed tuition hikes, students in the audience began chanting slogans against the tuition hike, forcing the meeting to come to a temporary halt. Within a few minutes, the Board’s security forces began ejecting the students and teachers leading the chants, forcibly when necessary, to the exit. Outside in the hallway, the ejected protesters took up their chanting again.

“Once all the protesters had been removed, the security guards instructed the protesters to vacate the hallway. The protesters refused to move, so the guards began pushing the crowd of students down the hallway and into the elevators, which were sent to the lobby. Once there, the protesters continued to be shoved toward the building’s main entrance, but the guards could not force them out. As Baruch students watched and cheered from a balcony and other parts of the lobby, the protesters began chanting again and speaking to the students in the lobby. After twenty minutes, the protesters were finally pushed out into the street, where they continued to chant and speak out for another half hour.”

Despite taking to the streets to voice their displeasure, the protest did not alter the course of BoT voting, which was near unanimous in approving the tuition hike.  The only dissenting vote was cast by the Student Senate representative on the board, Cory Provost. 

Not Only Do Students Get to Pay More, They Get Less in Return!

As tuition rates begin to rise, CUNY obviously has to offer something extra in return.  And boy has it ever!  According to Advocate sources, at least one senior college, Baruch, plans on offering “super jumbo classes” in the coming semester.  No, these won’t be super in the sense of better, but bigger.  Baruch is planning to combine several sections of their tier-two courses (electives and second year requirements like Great Works, Modern American History, American Government, Art History Surveys, and Principles of Biology) into expanded gigantic courses of 150-500 students each. These moves are intended to make up for the huge cuts to departments across Baruch, especially in the humanities and social sciences. Savings will be realized through the elimination of what will likely be hundreds of adjuncts who would otherwise be teaching these courses. One source within the English department notes that the college requested that the department slash its budget by $250,000. That would come to about twenty adjuncts let go at a course-load of 2/2!

Thankfully, these moves are not being accepted without challenge. The Advocate has obtained access to a letter from Glen Peterson, chair of the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Baruch which we hope provides an example others will follow.  In the letter, worth quoting at length, Peterson notes that

“On November 22, I sent a message to Baruch College’s top administrators, forwarding it to our personnel and budget committee as well as our Faculty Senate’s executive committee. I described a conversation I had with Chancellor Goldstein and Vice Chancellor Logue earlier that day, in which I explained the impact of the cuts at Baruch, where the administration wants introductory level courses that are taught at normal class sizes to be tripled across the board, thereby devastating years of work developing writing- and communication- intensive classes and pedagogy based on close interaction with students.

“Chancellor Goldstein stated that any changes in class size could have to do only with enrollment increases and constraints on space, and nothing to do with the budget cuts. I explained that the changes were being imposed solely as cost-cutting measures, that very large numbers of adjuncts were being laid off, and that we had been shown the savings that would be thereby achieved.

“In my November 22 message, I asked: ‘What is going on here? The Chancellor insists that budget cuts will not affect the quality of education at CUNY while Baruch’s administration quite forthrightly admits that the shift to an all-jumbo model for Tier-two courses will have significantly adverse impacts on the quality of teaching we provide our students. Clearly there is a major disconnect between the university’s leadership and Baruch’s.’

“In a meeting on November 30 with adjuncts and full-time faculty from several departments, I reiterated that our department opposes, and will not cooperate with, measures that can only damage the quality of education while eliminating the jobs of our adjunct colleagues. We need to join together to stop such measures, before they become “the new normal” and cause irreparable damage.

“At a [recent] Baruch Faculty Senate meeting [on December 2] Baruch’s administration responded to my query by providing financial data demonstrating the marked degree to which the college is underfunded in comparison with every other CUNY campus. The “disconnect” between CUNY’s leadership and Baruch’s leadership exists, the administration explained, because “The average situation facing CUNY senior colleges is dramatically different from the situation facing Baruch.”

“This response, unfortunately, merely restates the problem mathematically; it does not explain why CUNY’s leadership denies that its policies are doing what they are in fact doing, that is, forcing Baruch to dramatically diminish the quality of the education it provides to its students.”

Peterson’s letter underscores the need for broad-based organization against jumbo-sized classes, both within Baruch and beyond. Indeed, if what we understand is true—that the Provost’s actions in this matter are largely taken in a willy-nilly fashion—then this offers an imminently winnable fight for the Professional Staff Congress, the Adjunct Project, the CUNY Contingents Unite, and any other allies interested in joining forces.  Indeed, it’s critical that action is taken immediately in order to stave off similar actions at other campuses. And winning might just prove to be a desperately needed shot in the arm to a CUNY labor movement that has seen better days. 

The Graduate Center Tightens its Belt

A dispiriting memo circulated the Graduate Center community during November detailing the painful belt-tightening measures to be adopted by the GC in the face of major cuts to the CUNY budget.  In the letter, GC President William Kelly outlined the challenges facing our institution:

“The Graduate Center…has experienced diminished tax-levy support over the last few years.  From 2008 to 2010 we absorbed permanent budget allocation reductions totaling $2, 477,600…The 2010-11 budget allocation imposed a further reduction of $2.4 million.  The Chancellery’s mandate that we sequester an additional 1.25 percent of our base budget as a reserve against mid-year cuts added an additional $1.1 million to the total.  Collectively, that’s a $6 million base budget reduction.”

Holy shit!  Kelly also notes that “the prospect of even greater cuts in 2011-12 looms large.”  Great.  As a result, the Graduate Center leadership has taken steps to fill holes punched into being by Albany’s budget pillaging. So pay attention, GC students: this is going to play out in big ways in your life over the years to come.

First, President Kelly has ordered that except in “very rare circumstances,” faculty vacancies will not be filled.  One wonders what might constitute the circumstances under which this rule is not followed, but thus far there is no word on that score.  Second, the GC will institute major cutbacks in its spending on supplies and equipment, and authorize no new expenditures, whether they be requests for conference funding, lecture series or the creation of new research centers.  Third, and most directly important for students will be efforts to expand enrollment. While the president insists that across the board expansion will not be the objective, he expects that the number of Master’s and special certificate program students (those who, surprise, pay the most tuition and receive the least financial aid) will be increased in coming years. 

So, get ready for swelling class sizes everyone! Who knows?  Maybe soon we’ll be treated to our own super-duper mega-courses!

Adjuncts (Actually) Unite!

On November 4, the Professional Staff Congress met to vote on a bargaining agenda for the next round of contract negotiations with the state.  The PSC’s executive council proposal was adopted after a lopsided vote in favor.  But what was most important in many respects was the effectively organized turnout of adjuncts to protest the possibility of a repeat of what took place in the previous round where, despite gains for the PSC, adjuncts were largely left behind.

In addition to the 115 delegates present for the vote, another hundred or so Adjunct Project and CUNY Contingents Unite members showed up to make their voices heard.  Wearing bright orange t-shirts with “We Are the Teaching Majority” and “Pay Parity Now!” emblazoned across the fronts and backs, protestors vocally applauded delegate statements in support of adjunct parity and heckled those that did not.

The AP and CCU position comprises four key demands:  a minimum three-year contract for adjuncts that begins building a system of seniority; $30 wage increase per credit hour for all contingent categories and the promise of step raises ever year; comprehensive employer-paid health insurance for all contingent positions in the CUNY system; and promotional series for Higher Education Officers who receive similar pay rates, benefits and job security as other contingent classifications. 

As the Socialist Worker notes, the superhuman efforts of the AP and CCU organizers have already begun to pay off.  “Even before the DA met, however, the adjuncts’ campaign for the four demands was already bearing results.  The PSC’s bargaining committee adopted the health care and HEO demands nearly verbatim, but significantly weakened the job security and wage demands. The bargaining committee replaced the $30 per credit hour raise, which represents an approximately 50 percent raise for adjuncts, with the vague demand for ‘measurable progress toward pay parity.’ The committee also replaced the demand for three-year contracts, which would protect adjuncts from being laid off without cause, with job protections that only kick in after an adjunct has taught two courses per semester for five years, a condition that department chairs could easily evade by simply laying off adjuncts before they reach the necessary five years.”

Obviously, there is still significant work to be done.  If real change is to occur, the commitment level of adjuncts and contingent labor will need to be both deepened and broadened.  Progress is possible, as the November 4 PSC vote testifies.  But it demands perseverance, creativity, an aptitude to point the way to a more equitable future, and the refusal to sit back and take yet another for the team.

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A professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, Scott Galloway, recently sent an email that has gone viral, due largely to its unique approach in response to a student’s particularly obnoxious behavior.  The student, who remains anonymous, had arrived an hour late to class and been denied admission, and later emailed the professor to explain that he was late because he had been “sampling” different classes, the last of which was Professor Galloway’s, and that it was within his rights to explore different options at the beginning of the semester.

Galloway’s response has caught attention because of his brutal honesty in addressing what he sees as the student’s overall functional weaknesses.   In short, he takes him down a few notches.  The full exchange is easily googled, but I want to focus on a specific piece of Galloway’s final advice

            “Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant,         navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these       are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners,          demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy        stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful.         However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your    potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in             spades. It’s not too late xxxx…”

Opinion on the web seems split, centered largely around discussions of Galloway’s known personality quirks.  The entire controversy, though, provides an opportunity to think about the appropriate tone and level of “honesty” in student-teacher communications.  As an adjunct at Baruch for five years, I’ve certainly felt the occasional urge to respond to particularly ridiculous requests with a similar sense of disbelief.  Galloway’s message, however, takes the impulse a step further, directly and personally addressing what he perceives to be the student’s overall failures.  His main point seems to be that, by exhibiting such a lack of decorum, the student is effectively handicapping himself, making it impossible to succeed in college or the larger world.

I find Galloway’s response generally appropriate considering the student’s rather arrogant assumption that “sampling” courses (by walking in and out of several classes mid-lecture) was reasonable behavior.  His most memorable advice (“get your shit together”), while perhaps obscene, communicates an underlying truth.  If the student wishes to succeed in the business world, his presumed career direction, he will have to drastically adjust the attitude and expectations reflected in his brief interaction with Professor Galloway.

This is not to say that it is always within a professor’s rights or responsibilities to dole out life advice to undergrads.  Yet, while the desire to tell students exactly what you think about them seems like a road fraught with peril, there is an undeniable mentorship inherent to a teacher-student relationship that leaves room for a certain degree of guidance.  Highlighting a student’s particularly wrong-headed approach can sometimes be, both personally and professionally, the right thing to do.  Under what circumstances such intervention is necessary is where the issue gets tricky.

I teach a course on the history of the Vietnam War that lends itself to sometimes controversial discussions.  Several semesters ago a student began challenging my selection of course material and subject matter through a series of increasingly antagonistic emails that essentially attacked me as some kind of un-American propagandist.  At first I was incensed, and my anger made me want to write a vicious and humiliating email in retaliation for such an affront.  After realizing that I was about to engage in what would essentially be an internet flame war with a student, I reconsidered.  Ultimately I didn’t think it was within my role to “correct” this kid’s absurd political notions, or to change the student’s beliefs about the Vietnam War.  However, I did find it important and appropriate to tell this student, in a decidedly softened email, that in communicating with a professor (or anyone else) a tone of personal hostility is not the most effective way to win someone to your side.  I held my tongue on the political points I wanted to score because I felt it was more important—and more in keeping with my position as an educator—to help this student correct his communication-related behavior, than what I perceived to be his misguided political stances. 

The pedagogical role has historically been fluid enough to accommodate a wide range of interpretations about the degree of intellectual contact between student and teacher.  As adjuncts in a huge urban system like CUNY, though, this relationship is circumscribed by a host of economic, social, and cultural factors that often override the adjunct’s ability and/or willingness to develop meaningful professional relationships with students.  Before intervening in the kind of “brutally honest” way that Galloway demonstrates, the best kinds of questions to ask yourself are:  how will this help the student in the long-term?  Does “brutal honesty” directly address important, correctable behavior, or are you just blowing off steam?

Finally, it’s important to consider that the Galloway controversy happened in the context of a business school, which operates under a different set of educational imperatives than most of us are accustomed to at CUNY. Galloway’s email was meant to address the student’s lack of professional decorum, which would ostensibly impact his dreamed-of career in business.  Certainly a student headed for a humanities degree would require a slightly different set of standards.  But the main lesson of Galloway’s now-infamous transmission is that teachers should be bold enough to tell a student to get his or her “shit together” if that is in fact the correct diagnosis and prescription.  It can be unquestionably difficult to judge if and when it’s appropriate to put on the counselor suit and start handing out life lessons, but if our ultimate duty is to better prepare our students for whatever challenges face them outside of college, it’s vital that we develop our ability to recognize and capitalize on the opportunity to assert ourselves in the lives of those students who are stumbling in the most profound ways.

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Imaginal Machines by Stevphen Shukaitis. Autonomedia (2009).

At every level, Imaginal Machines is a subversive text. Against the rising tide of complacency, Stephven Shukaitis sketches out new possibilities for political engagement that are at once seditious and savvy. Resolutely anti-disciplinarian (in both senses of the word), he leaps recklessly from philosophy to art criticism to social movement studies. In the book’s opening pages, Shukaitis promises to “connect Surrealism with migrant workers, the Industrial Workers of the World with Dadaism, and back again.” Against all odds, he does so, and with great aplomb. From its non-linear organization to its whimsical typeface, Imaginal Machines courageously defies convention. Throwing caution to the wind, the book explodes the limits of both what can be said and how it might be said.

Stylistically, Imaginal Machines is both entertaining and terrifically complex. The text overflows with prescient metaphors, digressions, in-jokes, and parenthetical observations. But these quips and asides are not merely adjunct to the primary text but rather rival the “main” narrative for attention. The subtext quickly becomes the surface, and in an affront to neo-positivist ways of knowing, Shukaitis bends his lyrical prose sideways and backwards, without ever compromising lucidity. Reflecting the uncertainty of postmodern times, nearly every declarative statement comes paired with a qualifier or a caveat. The result is a text that folds in upon itself with multiple levels of meaning.

The body of the text is centered around a series of case studies (though the notion of a case doesn’t align with the author’s method). Shukaitis takes us on a whirlwind tour of what others have called “alternative institutions” (several of which he was involved in personally) and offers a probing introspective analysis. Yet unlike other recent assessments of the global Left “scene,” which tend to be optimistic to the point of absurdity (for example, We Are Everywhere, NowTopia, Real Utopia), Shukaitis maintains his (self-)critical edge throughout. Indeed, Shukaitis is keenly aware that—by most measures of success—the Left is losing badly. For example, in a chapter on worker self-management (WSM), Shukaitis describes his four-year-long involvement with a worker-owned record label in vivid detail. But ultimately, he concludes that WSM may have limited radical potential (though his argument is significantly more complex), and in the process offers the type of deep self-critique that is painfully absent in most
Left circles.

The term Imaginal Machines merits some explanation. As Shukaitis notes, his title is borrowed from a term coined by Peter Lamborn Wilson (aka Hakim Bey), itself a derivative of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s desiring-machine. So the imaginal machine is “a particular arrangement or composition of desires and creativity as territorialized through and by relations between bodies in motion.” The idea of outer space figures prominently here. For Shukaitis, the metaphor of space is relavant precisely because it represents that which cannot be (entirely) known. In science fiction film, the music of Sun-Ra, and the popular imagination, space functions as a zone of limitless possibility. Shukaitis suggests that a politics bounded by the coordinates of the known world is hopelessly constrained. Instead, “an imaginal landscape is a precondition for actually finding a northwest passage in the physical world.” Whether or not space is operating at the level of metaphor here, it is a powerful heuristic device.

Imaginal Machines is often remarkable for what it doesn’t do. Though the concept of “radical imagination” emerges as a dominant theme, Shukaitis self-consciously refuses to mention C. Wright Mills, whose Sociological Imagination is usually considered among the most important contributions to the concept. For a traditional social scientist to write a book on the “imagination” without explicitly invoking Mills would approach blasphemy. But Shukaitis is no traditional social scientist (though he may be a blasphemer). Likewise, Karl Marx appears mainly through his metaphors (the architect and the bee, the old mole, “storming heaven”). Yet Marx lurks in the deep crevices of Imaginal Machines’ pages and his influence is never far from the surface. Though the book is, in part, a critical encounter (rencontre) between autonomist Marxism and poststructuralist theory, this is not Shuakitis’ main intellectual project.

While it adheres to some extent to traditional book-publishing conventions, Imaginal Machines strives to be a rhizomatic text with no beginning and no end—only a boundless middle. Characteristically, most of the book’s conclusions arise from the embedded case studies, while the book’s final chapter (the “actual” conclusion) opens up far more questions than it provides answers to. In the section on work and self-management, Shukaitis at one point recommends a politics based on “the constant immanent shaping and creativity that will not allow itself to ever be totally bound in a fixed form.” There is a sense here that Shukaitis is commenting on the very text he is producing—or better yet, the “work” of book-writing. If there is an enemy in Imaginal Machines, it is the idea of closure—that struggle should at some point cease, that the revolution should be contained, that organizations should seek permanence.
This opens the question of failure, another major theme in the book. For the post-9/11 Left, most of the last decade has been characterized by moods that don’t translate well into English—malaise, ennui, schaedenfreude, and melancholia. Large street protests seem to have quieted down, while, at the same time, the ever-resilient late capitalist state has demonstrated a unique ability to co-opt dissident movements. Of course, as Shukaitis reminds us, this is nothing new. thirty years ago, the threat of worker militancy and factory occupations famously portended the rise of worker participation committees, quality circles, and the team concept—a blow from which most unions have yet to recover. More recently, in continental Europe, widespread protests around (against?) precarious work were “answered” in the form of “flexicurity” (flexible security) regimes—a Phyrric victory at best. Yet accelerated cycles of recuperation—defeat via compromise—may well be a unique feature of post-Fordism. The task then becomes devising a politics that can resist the overarching tendency toward capture—even temporarily.

Here, Shakaitis draws heavily on the notion of infrapolitics, as posited by James Scott and popularized by the cultural historian Robin Kelley. Much like Deleuze’s minor politics, Kelley’s infrapolitics suggest a “hidden transcript of power…or a space that is somewhat encoded or otherwise made less comprehensible to those in power.” Shukaitis argues that in order to avoid recuperation, resistance must operate largely in the sphere of infrapolitics—beyond the watchful gaze of the state—and speak in ways that defy understanding. Perhaps the answer to Guyatri Spivak’s prescient question “Can the Subaltern Speak?” is a definitive “yes”—but not in ways that are universally intelligible.

The audience for Imaginal Machines is sure to be broad. On the one hand, the book is written by a movement insider with extensive knowledge of the contemporary American Left and is grounded in real political struggles. On the other, Imaginal Machines is a sophisticated endeavor, deeply informed by high theory (especially of the Italian autonomist and the French poststructuralist variety). Yet Imaginal Machines is not just another “social movement study” by an academic from the distant perspective of a “neutral” observer. Shukaitis constantly reminds us that actually-existing political practice is already immersed intheoretical presuppositions, just as good theory emerges from real struggles. But Shukaitis transcends and ultimately dispenses with the classic binary between “theory” and “practice” by masterfully weaving both into a seamless narrative. The result is the rare academic book that is certain to appeal to activists and organizers, but does not compromise its scholarly integrity in so doing.

This is a unique and extraordinary text that deserves wide attention. Just as Baruch Spinoza famously posed the question “What can a body do?” Shukaitis seems to ask “What can a book do?” The answer, it appears, is far more than we think.

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Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center

On paper, there are so many points of contact, so many similarities between Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts’s Medea and Its Double and International WOW Company’s Auto Da Fe that constructing a double review around them should be easy. Both were written by East Asian playwrights; both rely heavily on “physical theatre” techniques of the Western avant-garde, ranging from Viewpoints to Grotowski; both are based on or inspired by material from classical Greece; and both were directed by Columbia graduates. When I ordered my tickets for these shows, this article was already very much on my mind. Perhaps the review would begin with an interrogation of why so many theatre artists, even those half a world away, have engaged with Greek antiquity in recent years. Perhaps it would focus on one of the two obvious differences in the pieces, contrasts evident in press releases and publicity material: Medea and Its Double is a Korean production, here on tour, while Auto Da Fe has been translated into English and directed by an American; Auto Da Fe has a specific political point of view, while Medea and Its Double is an exploration of passion and violence, both psychological
and physical.

In performance, however, these two productions are such different experiences that the only real connection between them is that each needs to be taken on its own terms to be understood. Each also serves as a reminder that, however much theatre you’ve seen, and however skilled you imagine yourself to be at reading publicity material, it’s impossible to know when you buy a ticket just what you’ve
gotten yourself into.

The concept of Medea and Its Double is to split the title character literally into two parts: the (jealous) lover and the (loving) mother, thus physicalizing Medea’s internal struggle and making the narrative more about her anguish than her crimes. Director Hyoung-Taek Limb adapted the story from Euripides, but only kept a fraction of the original text. In keeping with his company’s mission, Limb and his cast incorporate elements of Viewpoints and Grotowski techniques (which he picked up while an MFA student at Columbia) as well as elements from “traditional” Korean forms ranging from martial arts to p’ansori to masked forms like t’alch’um and ogwang-dae.

I had some qualms about the show as I entered the theatre, fearing the pitfalls that might arise from what seems to me an overly simplified psychological approach. I was also concerned about the likely stylistic result of merging the various forms and techniques at play in the show. I think directors should draw on whatever tools are available to them, but this kind of cultural pastiche too often results in a watered down “universal” aesthetic that neither serves its constituent influences nor adds up to much of anything new. Finally, the title gave me pause: Why Medea and Its Double instead of Medea and Her Double?

The only reason I could think of was a play on The Theatre and Its Double, a seminal book by theatre theorist and director Antonin Artaud; as important as Artaud’s work has been for contemporary theatre, artists who go out of their way to pay homage to Artaud tend to produce theatre that is self-righteous and pretentious in the manner of a trust-fund kid turned flower child. (I will owe apologies to several friends if they read this.) Thankfully, though, most of my concerns proved unfounded. While Medea and Its Double doesn’t shed much new light on its source material, it is a moving and idiosyncratic re-envisioning of the Medea tale that draws on the specific strengths of a terrific ensemble cast.

While Medea and Its Double was advertised as a performance in Korean with English supertitles, the only text that appears in this production—the title, followed by a brief and somewhat awkward bit of exposition—is projected onto the set’s upstage scrim/wall at the very beginning of the show. The fragmented dialogue, which is indeed in Korean throughout, is untranslated. Once the text has faded, though, and the performers have taken over, cerebral objections to the production’s approach seem petty in comparison to the grace, beauty, and commitment of
this company.

A children’s game accompanied by a sing-song chant serves as a thematic and aural motif. The game sets the stage for flirtation and then seduction, as children become adolescents, and then adults. A martial-arts-like ritual signifies Medea and Jason’s first sex; their children, represented by two puppets, soon appear. Jason’s negligence and infidelity splits an enraged Medea in two, eventually leading to tragedy. The children are ultimately reduced to fragile paper cutouts, unable to withstand their mother’s rage. Candles floating peacefully on two shallow pools embedded into the stage are suddenly full of menace as the “children” are torn asunder and exposed
to the elements.

Throughout, the melody from the game reasserts itself, reminding us that the seeds of all of this—the laughter, the sex, the resentment, the murder—were planted by a deceptively playful ring of dancing, singing children. Throughout, passages of chanted narration performed p’ansori style by a singer seated behind the upstage scrim, add another layer to the onstage soundscape.

It’s impossible for me to judge the quality of Limb’s textual adaptation, but it seems clear that his work with the performers is his real accomplishment here. While the staging is reminiscent of work from Joseph Chaiken, Anne Bogart, and other luminaries of the Western avant-garde, this Medea, ultimately, is one that could only have been created by this company. That specificity, that commitment to growing a piece of theatre from the bodies and personalities of the performers rather than mapping it on to them, is what renders Medea and Its Double more than the sum of its parts.

•  •  •

International WOW’s Auto Da Fe also seeks a kind of theatrical synergy, but there are so many parts that the whole simply can’t keep up. This isn’t to say that there is no value in the production, only that Josh Fox, who directed with assistance from Paul Bargetto, sometimes blurs the line between artistic ambition and artistic hubris, and the grander the statement he’s trying to make, the less coherent he is.

Masataka Matsuda’s dense, difficult play is a meditation on history as an act of erasure, of creative forgetting. Set outside of time in a place called the “History Processing Center,” the play finds Odysseus (or a version of him) abandoning the battlefield and seeking a kind of peace. While publicity materials summarize the plot as Odysseus’s “return home,” Auto Da Fe doesn’t depict a return so much as a kind of retirement. To transform war into history, workers at the Processing Center shuffle papers, bathe soldiers, write articles, sing ballads, cart files, and tell stories. Little by little, the present recedes, trauma becomes mythology, and entire cultures are erased in the service of a grand narrative.

Fox and his collaborators have pulled out all the stops in their attempt to theatricalize Matsuda’s very abstract text. The cavernous Performing Arts Center at Baruch plays right into Fox’s penchant for epic stagings. Ushered into the theatre a few at a time, the audience is confronted, even assaulted, by the sheer size of the experience and the number of cast members making their way from point to point. A woman perched high above the stage lip-synchs an aria; half a dozen performers push carts and boxes along an imaginary grid, trying to keep up with the pointing fingers and shouted instructions of their supervisors. Little by little, the war theme emerges, as the audience realizes that a pile of downstage rubbish is made up of military uniforms, and that there may be bodies living and dead writhing within. All of this takes place before Odysseus has even entered the space.

My audience-mates at Auto Da Fe, which I saw on a Saturday afternoon, were nonplussed and confused. Several older people fell asleep only to be awakened by a particularly loud moment in the sound design, while the younger women to my left kept whispering things along the lines of “I don’t know what the hell this is.” This is not an unusual response to Fox, who belongs to that strain of the avant-garde that preaches populist politics and aesthetics but paradoxically creates relatively inaccessible work with a high barrier to entry. Critical response has been mixed, ranging from fawning praise to lukewarm befuddlement to righteous indignation.

My own response was a mixture of admiration and frustration. International WOW’s aesthetic ambition and political engagement remain worthy of praise, but their work remains intellectually and emotionally muddled, the result of a lack of conceptual and intellectual rigor. Fox clearly has a knack for eliciting incredible commitment from a large cast but, thirteen years after the company’s debut, and nine years since they garnered attention with one of the first theatrical responses to 9/11, his work doesn’t seem to have developed much beyond its initial
(considerable) promise. 

Medea and its Double by Euripides, adapted and directed by Hyoung-Taek Limb. Production Manager: Soo-Mi You; Lighting Designer: Tae-Jin Chung; Cast: Min-Jung Kim, Kyoung Lee, See-Yeon Koo; Do-Yup Lee, Su-Yeon Lee, Kyu-Hwa Choi, Da-Il Lee. Presented by Seoul Factory for the Performing Arts and La MaMa ETC at The First Floor Theatre at La MaMa ETC, 74 East 4th Street, NYC through January 24th.

Auto Da Fe by Masataka Matsuda, translated by Kameron Steele and Shigeki Mori, directed by Josh Fox with Paul Bargetto. Lighting Designers: Charles Foster and Jeremy Cunningham; Set Designer: Nate Lemoine; Sound Designer: Julian Mesri; Costume Designer: Cait O’Connor; Dramaturg: Heather Denyer. Cast: Lydia Blaisdell, Adam Boncz, Mike Callaghan, Melissa Chambers, Stefani Charitou, Lisa Clair, Herbie Go, Sara Gozalo, Beth Griffith, Ikuko Ikari, Georgia X. Lifsher, Joanna Lu, Tommy Mcginn, Mary Notari,Jennifer Oda, Blaire O’leary, Martina Potratz, Brent Reams, Iracel Rivero, Pedro Rafael Rodriguez, Robert Saietta, Kristina Siapkara, Brandon Smith, Carlton Tanis, Evan True, Aya Tucker, Michael Villastrigo, Deborah Wallace, and Folami William. Presented by International WOW Company and the Baruch Performing Arts Center at Baruch Performing Arts Center, 55 Lexington Avenue, NYC through January 24th.

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Governor Paterson set to slash CUNY budget yet again

Putting the Criminal Back in Criminal Justice

Hats off to the John Jay College of Criminal Justice who made this month’s most significant contribution to ensuring CUNY’s enduring track record of cooking the books. A recently released audit by the State Comptroller’s Office finds that a handful of CUNY colleges aren’t bothering to report campus felonies. John Jay leads the way, failing to report nineteen of twenty felonies, followed closely behind by Queens, Baruch, Hunter and Medgar Evers Colleges, who collectively buried a whopping 73 percent of campus crimes during the period under State review. According to the Gothamist, “John Jay administrators are also accused of keeping two sets of crime logs, one created two weeks before auditors arrived.”

Students, unsurprisingly, were upset by the news. Speaking to the New York Post, John Jay sophomore Deana Kelley pointed out that “I think it’s unethical. It’s like if there’s a crime in your neighborhood, you want to know what’s going on.” A graduate student at the college, Juliana Velazquez, added, “It’s shocking to hear you attend a criminal-justice school and there’s still crime.” Yeah, imagine that.

In case you were worried that CUNY couldn’t care less about the safety of its students, university spokesman Michael Arena reassured anyone who’d listen that the colleges were taking concerted action to remedy the situation. An emergency two-day training session for every campus security director was immediately convened. What, exactly, these crime-fighting professionals were being trained in remains unclear, but CUNY officials contend that the problem has been meaningfully addressed.

Of course, as in all things, despite CUNY’s impressive capacity for internal corruption, the university once again failed to beat out New York University for top honors in the city. You thought our numbers were bad? NYU failed to account for nearly 90 percent of its campus crime last year. When all crimes committed in the NYU’s residency halls and classroom buildings are tallied up, the school ranks as the second most dangerous campus in the country. And here we were thinking those kids on Washington Square were just a bunch of poseurs!

Bed Bugs

While the authorities at John Jay are busy covering up campus crimes they pretend never happened, students are falling victim to another kind of assault—this time, from bed bugs. Towards the end of September, the school announced that an army of bedbugs had taken up residence in John Jay’s classrooms and administrative offices. But don’t be alarmed: just as there isn’t any crime at the school, John Jay officials assure their community that the bugs aren’t a major problem, describing the situation as a “condition.” “Infestation is when you can see them swarming,” college spokesman Jim Grossman told reporters.

This bit of nonsense was followed by more of the same from the college president, Jeremy Travis, who attempted to allay fears by noting that “no bites had been reported, only skin rashes.” That’s reassuring! All the same, the school has a significant problem on its hands. According to the New York Times, a “crowd of about 200 faculty and staff members and students let out a gasp when school officials showed a map of affected areas. Evidence of bedbugs was found in roughly half of the rooms on the second floor, and the inspection had not been completed on the third or fourth floors of North Hall, though evidence was found on the third floor. Officials said that other buildings would also be inspected.” And then what?

It Takes a Pillage

Just to make sure that he seals his legacy as “WORST GOVERNOR EVER” of New York State, David Paterson has ordered yet another rape and pillage campaign against the state budget, unsurprisingly proposing to slash $53 million from allotted funds for CUNY. This, of course, instead of, uh, we don’t know, maybe increasing taxes on the rich by ½ a percent? In case other educational institutions might have been feeling left out, the governor also proposed cutting $90 million from SUNY’s annual budget, and hacking off $35 million from monies allotted to the Higher Education Services Corporation which administers student aid.

Paterson’s proposed cuts come on the heels of the $44 million he cut earlier this year, which followed $68 million in downsizing in 2008. Meanwhile, CUNY students were also squeezed for an additional 15 percent tuition raise to make up for Paterson’s unwillingness to go after other areas of the budget or raise taxes on New York’s wealthiest. What a coward.

According to Professional Staff Congress president Barbara Bowen, “CUNY cannot absorb any more cuts. The University is already cramming students into overcrowded classrooms and squeezing sixty adjunct faculty into a single office. Enrollment is the highest it has ever been; the demand for a CUNY education has never been greater. It makes no sense—economically or morally—to cut the University now.” The PSC, she announced, “calls on the legislature to reject this destructive proposal. Now more than ever, when the recession continues to hit New Yorkers hard, CUNY represents the only chance for a college education for thousands of ordinary people. A cut of this size could force the University to reduce its student population and deny thousands of people an opportunity for a better life. That’s the wrong choice at any time, and especially the wrong choice now.”

CUNY Research Foundation Workers Walk Out

The Advocate reported last month on the one-hour CUNY Research Foundation (RF-CUNY) walkout on September 14. Fed up with a seemingly intractable contract dispute, PSC members at the Research Foundation Central Office walked out of their offices and began picketing along the West 41st street headquarters of the RF.

The action began at 8:30 when the PSC began picketing at the front and back entrances to the RF-CUNY’s West 41st Street headquarters. After an hour of boisterous chanting and marching, the workers entered the building with PSC President Barbara Bowen to seek a meeting with RF-CUNY President Richard Rothbard. But the RF turned off the elevators to prevent Bowen from reaching Rothbard’s office.

PSC members ratcheted up the pressure shortly thereafter. The PSC’s This Week reports that “members at the RF-CUNY Central Office voted 91 percent “yes” for a strike authorization on Thursday, September 24 with 83 percent of the workers voting.

“‘This is about respect,’ explained Chapter Chair Tony Dixon. ‘By all indicators, RF-CUNY has plenty of money. It’s hard for us to watch as they spend it on a 44 percent raise for President Rothbard and on an expensive anti-union law firm, when they could be putting that money toward a fair contract for us. So it’s really about respect.’”

The vote authorizes the bargaining committee to call for a strike at any point of their choosing moving forward. Since then, “PSC members at the central office of RF-CUNY have met RF-CUNY management at the bargaining table once since the union members voted to authorize a strike. RF-CUNY made some encouraging moves, but maintains its proposal to increase the employee contribution to the health insurance to 19 percent in the third year and keep it at 19 percent in a newly proposed fourth year.”

The PSC goes on to announce that “there are two more bargaining dates scheduled for this month, and PSC members continue to mobilize for a fair contract…To join other PSC members in supporting the RF workers, or with any questions about their mobilization, please email Kian Frederick at kfrederick@pscmail.org or call her in the PSC office, 212-354-1252.”

More CUNY News In Brief

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A New Start

As you know, this year started off with the biggest payroll fiasco that we’ve seen to date. And, as student representative and student advocates, we in the Executive and Steering Committees of the Doctoral Students’ Council have responded as quickly as possible. We have met with many different levels of administrators, trying to work out a coherent account of what went wrong when no coherent account was available. And we have worked with the tireless coordinators of the Adjunct Project, Renee McGarry and Alison Powell, to help disseminate this information and provide you possible solutions if you didn’t get paid.  And we must also thank the Bursar, Ab Abraham for the countless hours of unpaid overtime that he put in so that he could process paycheck advances for those students who didn’t get paid.  If you do have any unresolved horror stories, please email them to us so that we can help (dsc@cunydsc.org).

Here are the DSC people who have already started and will continue to work for you this year.

New Leadership

First, Suzanne Tamang has replaced Gregory Donovan as the new Co-Chair for Student Affairs.  She comes from the Computer Science program.  Last year she served on the Steering Committee and on the Graduate Council’s Committee for Structure.  We’re glad to have kept her around.

Shawn Rice has stepped into Rob Faunce’s old office, Co-Chair for Communications.  You will undoubtedly get way too many emails from him this semester regarding things that we hope you find informative, relevant, and useful.

Chris Sula returns for his second shot at the Co-Chair for Business.  Over the summer, we all appreciated Chris’ energy and dedication: he spent most of his summer trying to catalog and make sense of all of our financial records dating back to 1991. He hails from the Philosophy program.

Ally Foster from the English program consented to remain in her position as the University Student Senate Representative.  We all admire the endless patience that she has to remain in this position.

Jill Belli, also from the English program, is serving her second term on the Steering Committee.

Anick Boyd from the Comparative Literature program has become a new Steering Committee member.  You might know her in her alternate capacity as the “nice one” from the registrar’s desk.

Kyle Ferguson, also from philosophy, spent his summer training chimpanzees at a lab in Louisiana, and now he happily serves on both grants committees.

Kim Libman is also a fresh face on the Steering Committee. She is from Environmental Psychology where she studies urban food environments and plans to bring her expertise to work for us as she now chairs the Health Issues Committee.

From Anthropology, Christine Pinnock has returned to the steering committee for a second term and keeps us all mindful that some Graduate Center students are often in the field or stationed in labs not at 365 Fifth Ave.

Jared Simard, a representative of the Classics program, is starting his first term on the Steering Committee.  He aims to make student participation in program governance easier and more transparent.

We hope to do many things this year.  We hope to convince facilities to put in more electric plugs around the building to keep up with the number of students who want to use their laptops for more than two hours at a time.  We plan to act as student advocates by trying to ensure that students have adequate representation within their programs.  And, as usual, we plan to fight hard to expand the Travel and Research fund.

Emergency Loan Fund and Dissertation Fellowships

Last years’ DSC did a few things that were under-publicized but that they deserve much credit for doing.  The first is that they created four new dissertation fellowships to be distributed across the major fields in the Graduate School. They also contributed a large amount of money to an emergency loan fund, and their donation was matched by a generous alumnus.  The emergency loan fund is meant for students in times of crisis, be they crises brought about by a sudden change in financial aid status or, perhaps, an employer failing to pay on time.  Lastly, they also earmarked monies to try to make the ever-precarious and always underfunded Travel and Research Grant program more stable.

Free Legal Advice

In the last weeks of the summer, in late August, the Co-Chairs had an idea to start offering free legal services to students.  We didn’t think that we would be able to realize this idea until at least the Spring semester, but we asked the CUNY School of Law if they have any training programs for their students to provide legal advice or other services.  The Dean then pointed us to the Community Legal Resource Network, a group of CUNY School of Law graduates who have banded together to provide affordable legal services for those who normally wouldn’t be able to afford them.  The CLRN already had relationships with Baruch and Queens Colleges, and so we were able to use the same structure and network for the Graduate Center.  Now, since the first day of the semester, we have free legal advice available for you one day a week, alternating between afternoons and evenings.  Sign up for an appointment on the DSC website (www.cunydsc.org), or stop by for a walk-in appointment.

New Website

Over the summer, we redesigned the website so that we could streamline the process of many of our services.  For instance, to enter the locker lottery (for lockers in 5409 and 5414), one used to have to fill out a paper form and drop it off by our office.  Now you all received an email with a link to simple web form to sign up for the lottery.  (Un)fortunately this worked well, which is a testament that paper forms are so 2002.  We received 291 locker requests, up from 110 the year before.  That shows that we made the process easier, and, in turn reduced the chance of any person getting a locker from 54% to 21%.  We’ll now work on getting more lockers.

Similarly, we have moved old paper systems to the website, like Room Requests, Check Requests, Grant Applications, and Legal Appointments.  You can also see all of the events going on in 5414, 5409, and 5489 by clicking on the reservation calendar on our website.

We’ve also started posting short updates on an almost-daily basis, which get fed into our Twitter (www.twiter.com/cunydsc) and Facebook (www.facebook.com/cunydsc) pages. So far, posts have included announcements about important meetings and funding opportunities, as well as reminders about services we provide. They were also crucial in getting the word out about the payroll crisis.

Please, Get Involved

We will work for you, but we’d rather work with you.  Please, bring us your concerns.  If you’re having trouble with services on the campus and don’t know how to address them, come talk to us.  If you don’t like what we’re  doing send us an email (dsc@cunydsc.org), or, better, come talk to us in person, or, even better, come to one of our meetings and address the DSC as a body.  We are here to represent you, and we can’t do that well if we don’t know how you need to be represented.  Also, come unwind with us at our parties.  This semester, we’ll be throwing a Halloween Bash (costumes optional).  The party will be a few days before the holiday, but we can celebrate anyway (October 23^rd @ 8pm in room 5409).  We’ll also have an end of the semester party to help you blow off steam.  That one is on December 11^th.

Plenary Meetings (all are in 5414 and start at 6pm):

—Septemer 25^th,

—October 23^rd,

—November 20^th,

—December 11^th.

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As the economic crisis continues to deepen, many New Yorkers are choosing to return to school, and are looking to do so as cheaply as possible. CUNY has enjoyed a sharp 12 percent increase in applications over the past year, which will likely lead to CUNY’s highest enrollment ever next semester.

According to CUNY overlord Matthew Goldstein, rising numbers of applications are to be expected during moments of economic turmoil. Speaking with the Daily News–Advocate staff was too busy adjuncting to take his call–Goldstein noted that “When the economy takes a dip [people] run to higher education institutions to shore up their skills.”

Goldstein also notes that the financial squeeze suffered by working class citizens makes CUNY schools particularly attractive. At $4,000, CUNY’s annual tuition for four-year colleges stacks up nicely against other American universities, where school fees can run as much as $50,000 a year.

CUNY officials expect a total enrollment boost of 25 percent by year’s end, and made sure to note that the system’s colleges have more than doubled the number of incoming freshman graduating at the top of their high school classes, while also increasing the number of graduate students by roughly 25,000 since the start of the decade.

CUNY community colleges have also enjoyed a significant bump in enrollment, where the number of incoming students has jumped 6 percent already this year. Increased enrollment makes sense, as the job skills offered at CUNY’s community college campus are in high demand right now, among employers and employees alike.

Even on the Cheap, Education Costs are Difficult to Bear

While rising numbers of first-time and returning students to CUNY campuses is news to be cheered, incoming students face the unpleasant task of figuring out how to pay for their educations–a particularly daunting challenge in the current environment.

CUNY officials reported that while the number of applications to the system have increased at a healthy clip, these numbers are dwarfed by those of students seeking federal education assistance. In the past year, federal financial aid requests have ballooned by 33 percent, a striking departure from the usual annual increase of 13 percent.

Congressman Anthony Weiner, representing parts of Brooklyn and Queens, chose Baruch College in Manhattan to highlight the importance of increased demand for federal assistance. “We now have another indicator of how difficult it is for middle class New Yorkers,” Weiner said. “The number of people asking for financial aid to make ends meet has gone up as the economy has gone down.” Despite money allotments set aside for financial aid assistance in the recent federal stimulus package, Weiner argued that the government must take further action to continue insuring that working-class Americans have the opportunity to pursue their education. “We need students being able to come here. We need Baruch to be able to sustain its programs. And the federal government needs to take an active role.”

While Students Struggle to Make Ends Meet, CUNY Fundraising Goals Exceeded…and then Some

Students struggling to find money for CUNY might want to get in touch with Matthew Goldstein. Our esteemed chancellor can’t seem to stop people from throwing their money at him.

In late March, Goldstein announced that he had reached CUNY’s fundraising goal of $1.2 billion…three years in advance. The chancellor noted that over 200 donors have agreed to hand over at least $1 million each, the largest gift coming from City College graduate Bernard Spitzer. The father of ex-governor Eliot lavished the university with a gift of $25 million which he asked be funneled in its entirety to his alma mater in Harlem.

CUNY expects that by 2015, the chancellor will have extracted over $3 billion from potential and continuing donors. Others are skeptical, noting that the economic downturn will likely tighten the amounts philanthropists would otherwise consider.

Whatever the result in three years’ time, the current flush of money is to be welcomed…we think. While CUNY promised to direct spending to student services, scholarship endowments, and new faculty hires, full details have not yet been articulated. Stay tuned. 

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Enrollment at Record High

With the economy spiraling into a nose dive of recession, the number of New Yorkers returning to school has spiked in the past recent academic year. Enrollment has surged to record highs since September 2008, as the total CUNY-wide student body has reached nearly a quarter of a million students.

But the crappy economy cannot claim full responsibility for the high demand for a CUNY education. With their majority adjunct faculties leading the way, four of the systems colleges—Hunter, City, Queens and Baruch Colleges—were recently ranked by USA Today and Princeton Review as among the fifty “top value” educations in the United States. Many of CUNY’s other campuses have also been recently recognized for their continued improvements and academic excellence.

Not surprisingly, then, classrooms across CUNY’s various campuses have swelled to capacity. Demand has been felt most pressingly at the Community College level, where CUNY brass, led by Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, have called for the creation of a seventh community college to meet increasing demand.

New Community College

Always mindful to promote his commitment to excellence, prestige, and the best interests of CUNY’s student body, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein pushed ahead recently with his plan to inaugurate a seventh community college into the City University family within two years time.

Citing increased economic pressures on New York City’s working class, and the bloated student rosters at the six existing community colleges, Chancellor Goldstein lobbied the State Assembly’s Committee on Higher Education by emphasizing the need for increased access to a quality community college education. “Our students will face increasingly competitive pressures in an unforgiving economy,” Goldstein argued, “and getting a degree matters. It is therefore in their interest to attend community colleges where the focus is on high standards and degree completion.”

How will he ensure a focus on “high standards and degree completion”? Unfortunately not by hiring a fully tenured faculty of committed professors, it seems. According to Chancellor Goldstein’s public comments thus far, what will single out his “honors” community college from its forebears will be a restricted menu of course offerings, full-time enrollment demands, and a tighter admissions criteria, including face-to-face interviews of all applicants (which the CUNY honchos insist is not a weeding-out selection mechanism).

If the notion of expanding CUNY spending at the moment when Governor Paterson has waged his own shock and awe campaign against the state’s public education budget strikes you as strange, have no fear: our Chancellor is no dummy. According to sources, Goldstein has only wasted some of his time with city and state officials tasked with funding higher public education. Instead, his energies have been spent approaching a number of private foundations to fund his pet initiative, including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has indicated an eagerness to get involved.

No Cuts at Comm. Colleges

Social activism pays off. In a heartening victory for New York’s working class at the start of February, Governor David Paterson’s attempt to balance the state’s budget by slashing monies for community colleges was roundly rejected by state legislators. Had the budget bills passed, community college students would have been asked to shoulder the burden of $4.3 million in cuts to pay for the state’s fiscal irresponsibility.

According to the Professional Staff Congress, over 9,000 New Yorkers took the time to write to their representatives demanding that they slam the door in the face of Paterson’s proposals. Moreover, hundreds of activists organized demonstrations across CUNY campuses in opposition to the Governor’s projected cuts, the PSC itself marched on Albany to protect our schools, and they were met there by New York State United Teachers groups in a show of solidarity.

If CUNY—including all its students and teachers—is to weather the storm of future attempts to hijack the public education budget, this sort of unity will be of the greatest importance. 

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Worst Examples of CUNY Dissing Its Own Students: Carol Lang and Miguel Malo

The City University of New York does not take the most open view possible toward freedom of speech on campus, as demonstrated by the university’s unflagging hounding of two activists whose cases wound through the courts and the newspapers through 2005 and into 2006. Lang, the Theatre department secretary at City College, was involved in a March 2005 demonstration against military recruiters at CCNY. Two days after the incident she was arrested; but while the public case was resolved without conviction, the university nonetheless suspended her without pay for allegedly assaulting a peace officer. The arbitrator eventually ruled against Lang in August after months of hearings. But on one point where the arbitrator decided in her favor, involving a salary payment the arbitrator says was due her, the college administration still ignored the ruling and reportedly refused to shell out the eight hundred bucks. Meanwhile former Hostos Community College student Miguel Malo, convicted in October 2005 of the ridiculous charges of third-degree reckless assault and disorderly conduct for a one-man protest all the way back in 2001, was sentenced to probation and community service, but no jail time. Malo, Vice President of the Hostos Student Senate at the time of his arrest, was convicted of charges that stemmed from a protest against cuts in English as a Second Language funding at Hostos. The result of this lone voice calling attention to a vital question was one of the most overblown persecutions of speech in recent memory.

Worst Example of CUNY Dissing Other Schools’ Students: The Richman School Land Grab

Hunter College’s rabid hunger for science facilities has led President Jennifer Raab into a disgraceful deal that gains a few square feet of lab space at the cost of shortchanging thousands of children and giving CUNY another self-inflicted black eye. It was revealed last summer that Hunter College had been quietly developing a land swap for two years with the Julia Richman Educational Complex on East 67th Street. The JREC is a New York City schools success story, praised for its innovation and standards in New York City’s Best Public High Schools: A Parents’ Guide; it’s currently home to four flourishing high schools, a grade school, and an extraordinary special needs school for autistic students. Under the deal, the JREC would trade its prime Upper East Side location to Hunter in exchange for buildings owned by the college all the way down at 25th Street and First Avenue. Parents and friends of the school were outraged to hear about the secret deal that would force 1,900 students from six schools to abandon the recently renovated facilities and instead trek to the unsubwayed netherworld of Outer Gramercy, far from the museums, parks, and libraries of the UES. As Juan Gonzales sneered in the Daily News, “In other words, the need for Hunter’s adult college students to be within walking distance of all their facilities is a greater public good than any inconvenience that could result to autistic children and second-graders.” But who cares what happens to the children, as long as Hunter College can keep its test tubes all in one place? Way to go, Ebenezer Raab!

Worst Example of CUNY Dissing Its Own Faculty: The “Climate of Fear” at Hunter

More bad news for Hunter. The college’s select Committee on Academic Freedom, even limited as it was in its investigative powers, reported evidence last winter of “disturbing” and pervasive problems at Hunter contravening the “self-evident truth,” in the words of CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, that higher education cannot function without academic freedom. “Even the perception of limitations on academic freedom has a profound effect on an institution,” the committee reported, “and it was clear that many individuals perceived such problems.” Reported problems included administrative pressure to offer or not offer certain courses based not on student need or academic criteria but administrative preference; senior administrators modifying the academic direction of a department without full consultation with the faculty; pressure from above to make or reverse decisions on hiring, promotion, and tenure; bypassing of official procedures for routine matters like search committees and student grading; and worst of all, a widespread perception that “dissent could lead to retaliation.” This is serious stuff, striking at the core of Hunter’s integrity as an academic institution. On top of all of this, so far the university has shown no enthusiasm for rooting out these malignancies reported in the Hunter College infrastructure. Perhaps outside groups like the AAUP investigating CUNY will be able to light a fire under the higher-ups and wake them up to the danger to the collegiate reputations they seem to value so highly. Hey President Raab, what’s your damage, anyway? It’s your job to prevent this. And it’s certainly your job to fix it.

Worst Example of the CUNY Bureaucracy Feeding Itself: Baruch’s President Gets a Free House!

Kathleen Waldron, President of Baruch College, has reportedly raked in the dough for CUNY, and it seems the Board of Trustees knows how to give a little love back to its rainmakers. Waldron is the recipient of an especially nice perquisite: a new house to be purchased by the university. And not just any house. According to the April 2006 minutes from the CUNY Board of Trustees, the new residence will be a “condominium apartment on 27th St., between 5th and Madison Avenues, in Manhattan, at a cost of no more than $2,500,000.” Good thing they’re keeping it reasonable. It’s not like $2.5 million could buy anything useful to the students anyways. The purchase, say the minutes, is to be covered by “the proceeds of the sale of cooperative apartment 4A at 145 Central Park West,” a former residence for the president of the GC. If the GC president’s ex-address doesn’t ring a bell, you might know it as the San Remo — “the city’s most beautiful apartment building and one of its most prestigious addresses,” according to The Upper West Side Book. Nice to know that CUNY’s college presidents are ensconced in the most unaffordable apartments in Manhattan, with our tuition footing the bill.

Best Example of CUNY Respecting Its Students: The GC IT Turnaround

Remember last March when the Graduate Center’s IT people were actually telling students, “Don’t trust your U drive”? Some signs seemed to indicate a slow reversal of fortune for IT in 2006. Most intriguing is the promise of near-term wi-fi capacity in limited areas of the building — an amenity that’s already par for the course at other CUNY campuses like Brooklyn College. Demonstrating a commitment to the Apple platform, the GC also purchased ten new iMacs out of student tech fee funds and brought in an actual Mac specialist, Michael Oman-Reagan. The IT folks have also targeted software updates, which have long been lagging, and improved access to Mina Rees databases. Longer-range plans include gearing up to transition to the new Windows OS and the latest version of Office and over a hundred new PCs for faculty and staff. Robert D. Campbell, the new GC IT VP, admitted last fall that “a lot of needs were uncovered” and that they had “a significant amount of work to do to get the resources in line” with GC community needs. Given how heavily students depend on GC’s technology resources, more proactivity from IT can only be a good thing.

Most Promising Initiative by the DSC: What to Do About Student Health Insurance

Last fall the DSC started soliciting information from GC students about their health insurance needs. Considering how expensive the available GHI plan is, it’s a good bet a large swath of GC students is underinsured or uninsured. Let’s hope enough students back up the DSC’s Health Issues Committee that new alternatives materialize soon. To offer your suggestions, go to the forums at the DSC web site, cunydsc.org.

The 2006 “Win Some, Lose Some” Award: The New PSC Contract

Afterseveral years without a contract, the Professional Staff Congress (PSC)/CUNY reached a tentative agreement with CUNY in April. The PSC characterized the final contract as a pragmatic victory. Included were modest salary increases, increased pay for sabbaticals, and increased benefits (including dental) for full-time faculty and staff. There were also several provisions affecting part-time/adjunct faculty, including mild pay increases; a fund for professional development grants for adjuncts; 100 new full-time lecturer positions earmarked for experienced CUNY adjuncts; and paid sick days for non-teaching adjuncts and adjunct CLTs. That a contract with some basics but few goodies was such a Herculean achievement indicates both a willingness to work together on the part of the PSC and CUNY, and a vast need for CUNY labor relations to improve before the expiration of the new contract opens up the possibility of a new period without one.

The “Blink and You Missed It” Award: The Bar

For 22 days last spring, the GC had its own bar (recalling the more freewheeling days when the GC was back over by Bryant Park). Our beer-loving reviewer labeled the libations delicious and reasonably priced — evidently too reasonably for the profit-gouging bean counters at Restaurant Associates, which ran the saloon as an extension of the disturbingly overpriced 365 Café and which has an exclusive lock on GC catering. On March 17, Vice President of Student Affairs Matthew Schoengood sounded the death knell via an email: “Although we had hoped to provide this service on a trial basis through the end of Spring 2006 semester, it became apparent that this was not an economically feasible venture.” No further details were provided. So we’re all back to sneaking flasks into the classrooms like before.

Most Envelope-Pushing Advocate Article: The Plea to Stop Hovering

A March Advocate article about the GC’s commendable response to various toilet facility shortcomings was followed up with an excoriation in the May issue of women who hover over the seats in GC bathrooms. “The GC staff does an impeccable job of keeping this place far cleaner than many of our own homes,” explained writer Ellen Zitani; “there is certainly no need for you to go and pee all over it.” That’s the Advocate for you, always standing up for the needs of GC students — or rather, sitting down. All the way down.

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