5/9 email

Dear Bill,

Thank you for a timely response. However, I must disagree with many things you have mentioned. This is a personal opinion, not that of the College Council or Faculty Senate Executive Committees.

In my view you have exercised very selective historical reading of the campus response to the RBAC. Save for those involved, no one on campus even remembers this committee, as it simply didn't have the outcry you mentioned. Perhaps, you may have personal opinions on it, but please don't manufacture outrage as rationalization.

You wish instead to stick to your existing plan of consultation. Might I ask – what is the plan? I am a member of several committees that naturally would be consulted and that you mentioned:

The IPC– it hasn't met even once this semester. Despite several scheduled meetings, all have been canceled. Finally, this Monday there will be one. But important things have happened and you have chosen not to have even regular consultation with the one group that has senior voices from both the administration and the faculty. When pressed on this at the most recent College Council meeting, you responded that we haven't had curricular issues. This was politely met with the response that IPC is not a curriculum committee, in fact its charge is quite broad and covers everything the college will have to navigate to come through this era. This is why our letter suggested substantial overlap with our proposed committee and the IPC.

The College Council Executive Committee. We met just 3 days prior to this most recent announcement of 35% cut to the adjunct budget from Fall 2019. There was no specific information as to this level of severity. In fact, after restating many widely known facts about the budget outlook, we moved on to sketch out ideas related to saving monies on the academic side of the college, no specific scale was mentioned, and certainly not a figure of 35% (which with cost increases is nearly half the adjunct population). You did not wish to engage in a discussion about finding savings outside of your usual targets, essentially the adjunct budget, temporary services, and OTPS. Even before the pandemic, this approach was failing to create a balanced budget (hence the mid-year requirement that 1M will be paid back to CUNY going forward) and was causing significant discontentment within the faculty. With this pending unprecendented funding cut, the usual approach will only fail on a bigger scale.

The college council budget committee. Despite being told we would be consulted, this consultation has not happened since recent news, nor has any meeting been scheduled. This committee has not had any details shared with it since April 16th, and this only included a summary of the April 3rd budget position and an interpretation of the CARES monies. To say it has been consulted in a meaningful way is an incorrect characterization.

Now, as the faculty enter a leave period, none of these committees has a scheduled meeting after the IPC meeting this Monday. That is your "plan" has no further consultation scheduled before the fall semester.

Your plan falls short. The plan proposed by the College Council and Faculty Senate gave a mechanism and a foundation to give the campus meaningful input into the campus response, which due to the scale, must be widespread. Now you have personally assumed ownership of the process, its results, and the inevitable fallout.

Rather, in my view, this "plan" is a disappointing continuation of ongoing efforts to stifle communication on campus, a topic or subtext of many of the conversations this academic year with the College Council Executive Committee. Examples of this are your refusal to allow elected governance leaders direct access to their representative bodies and your campus-wide message about "bullying" that was built on the wildly exaggerated claim that this was a major issue identified with the COACHE survey (wherein the only specific complaint with identifying circumstances involved deans bullying faculty).

Despite my disappointment in this most recent decision, I personally won't stop making suggestions which I view are in interests of the institution. This email is one. Please take it as a chance to re-assess this most recent decision, as it is a critical one for the college.

John