Battle Over Pathways Intensifies

The controversial CUNY initiative continues to be met with severe blowback from faculty. by Daniel Friedman

Pathways is coming. But not without a fight.

While CUNY administration believes that the initiative will create a "core curriculum" to ease the process of transferring credits between two and four-year CUNY institutions, it has caused a stir among faculty. Last semester, the union for CUNY faculty responded to Pathways by filing a lawsuit against the City University of New York and the Board of Trustees for breaching previous agreements. The changes are currently scheduled to go into effect next year.Frustrations boiled over at Queensborough Community College last month when Karen B. Steele, the interim vice president for academic affairs, presented an ultimatum to faculty who disagree with Pathways: accept the changes or face “serious repercussions.” The consequences would include firing all adjunct faculty, cancelling all writing courses, which would force students to go to other colleges for credits, and suspending hiring indefinitely.Steele's comments created a media firestorm that seeped into the pages of the New York Times and the Daily News.  Steele followed her ultimatum with an apology saying, “It was an e-mail sent in haste.”

Why are professors so angry about a proposal that CUNY Chancellor, Matthew Goldstein believes is a “logical and well-reasoned approach” to improving degree completion?

Sandi Cooper, a professor of history at the College of Staten Island and chairwoman of the university’s Faculty Senate, believes that Pathways' changes will devalue the CUNY degree. “We have struggled to tighten up requirements and standards, and spent years revising general education," she says. "We are trying to defend the quality of the degree.”At City College (CCNY), Pathways hasn’t become reality just yet. The mood here, according to the Office of Public Relations, has “been positive and cordial” regarding the implementation of Pathways. When questioned about the possibility of all adjunct faculty being terminated, as is the case at Queensborough Community College, CCNY officials only said they would not comment on “activities at other institutions or on pending litigation.”  But, some faculty here have begun voicing their outrage at what they call the step back in educational integrity.Alan Feigenberg, a professor of architecture at CCNY, recently submitted testimony before the Board of Trustees criticizing Pathways as “an affront to all of us as critical educators, and to our students who are treated as faceless quantifiable statistics, reinforcing the image of education as an assembly-line process to produce predetermined results with predetermined efficiency.”For students like recent CCNY graduate Michele Buchholz, there’s a concern over the implications an initiative like this may have. “By eliminating these core curriculum classes, CUNY is aiding in the dumbing down of the masses and diminishing the value of my degree,” she says.Other CCNY faculty members share these views. One adjunct lecturer revealed most students enter her class without the proper educational prerequisites to begin with. She fears the current Pathways proposal would result in students going into the workplace “without knowing how to write.” She believes more cuts in general education requirements would eventually leave the United States with a population of students prepared only for lower-level employment.Feigenberg, also the chair of the CCNY chapter of PSC-CUNY, ended his testimony with this sentiment:“The pathway being proposed is a pathway to conformity, to mediocrity. It is a pathway that is unidirectional, that leads us further and further away from the embellishment and the realization of human intellectual potential and the creative spirit that we as educators seek to nourish.”