The committee charged with designing a new core curriculum for the City University of New York released on Thursday its final recommendations, and faculty leaders quickly faulted both the substance of the proposal and the process used to produce it.
The proposed new structure will place a high priority on critical thinking and other fundamental skills, said Michelle J. Anderson, dean of CUNY’s law school and chair of the committee that developed the recommendations.
“I think it’s a rigorous program for general education for the first 30 credits here at CUNY,” she said.
The new structure was developed at the request of CUNY’s Board of Trustees to help streamline an unwieldy system for transferring academic credit among the system’s 23 campuses, in which some campuses readily accept transfer credits from the system’s community colleges, while others are less accommodating.
The proposed structure would also unify a set of general-education requirements that now vary widely from campus to campus, both in emphasis and in the number of credits required, which ranges from 39 to 63.
Under the new structure, CUNY’s students would take their first 30 credits in two categories. The first would be a 12-credit “required core” composed of six credits in English, and three each in mathematics and science. The division of those core credits reflects a revision, suggested by some faculty, to the original draft requirements.
The second category would be an 18-credit “flexible core,” in which students would take six three-credit classes encompassing five different areas: world cultures and global issues; U.S. experience in its diversity; creative expression; the individual and society; and the scientific world.
Students would be able to choose a class from a range of disciplines to satisfy each area. For example, a student could take a course in world literature, history, economics, sociology, or political science to meet the requirement for world cultures and global issues.
Each of the system’s four-year campuses will also develop requirements for an additional 12 “college option” credits, bringing to 42 the total number of core credits required under the new plan.
“This was a deliberative process that was about compromise on a set of very difficult issues,” said Ms. Anderson, adding that she and the committee considered general curricular recommendations advanced by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and the Lumina Foundation. They also looked closely at requirements put in place by university systems in California, Georgia, Kentucky, Maryland, and Michigan, and by the State University of New York.
“We tried to stick with our principles, with bolstering the basics, increasing rigor, focusing on critical thinking, and maximizing flexibility for the campuses,” she said.
Faculty Complaints
The looming changes to the core curriculum have sparked fierce debate among faculty members since the trustees began contemplating the restructuring, which they endorsed in a resolution approved last June.
Professors have complained that under the process set in motion by the board, their traditional role in shaping curricula has been usurped by administrators.
They were also rankled by what they saw as a hasty set of deadlines. Draft recommendations were released on November 1, with faculty input due two weeks later. The campuses produced 106 pages of critiques in response.
The day after their deadline, the head of University Faculty Senate and the faculty union asked the American Association of University Professors to investigate what they saw as violations of the charters of the college senates and the University Faculty Senate, and the bylaws of the Board of Trustees—an assertion that CUNY’s general counsel has rejected.
Faculty members have also had concerns with the substance of the recommendations.
Where members of the committee see the new structure as offering students flexibility and choice, critics perceive it as a patching together of intellectually incoherent courses into ill-fitting categories. Pairing such subjects as history, literature, and anthropology is “absurd,” said Sandi E. Cooper, a professor of history at CUNY’s College of Staten Island and the chair of the University Faculty Senate.
Under the new structure, students would be able to avoid taking foundational courses in poetry and literature, Ms. Cooper said, missing out on an experience that ultimately broadens students.
“The purpose of city colleges is to help idiots like me climb out of the provincial limitations of the borough and community we grew up in,” she said. “I see CUNY perpetuating a really serious class division.”
Several campuses expressed concern that students could graduate without taking a foreign language (under the existing structure, 85 percent of CUNY’s four-year colleges require at least two semesters), a history course (92 percent require one), or one in speech (about half of the campuses do).
But colleges within the CUNY system can elect to require such courses if they choose, Ms. Anderson said. “There is nothing about the core that prohibits a college from doing that.”
The overall decrease in the number of required general-education credits ultimately gives students the ability to avoid courses they think they do not want to take, said Emily S. Tai, an associate professor of history at Queensborough Community College. This change “empowers them in the short run, but not in the long run,” she said.
Requiring students to take a particular course is like a shotgun wedding, she said. “You have four months to show them it doesn’t have to be a shotgun wedding. It can be a genuine interest they didn’t know they have.”
