The period since Feburary 18, 2021 and now has been a busy one for the College Council Executive Committee.
On March 2nd, President Fritz sent an email "CSI Governance" to the college community with a proposed wholesale replacement for the College's governance plan. In his email he cited:
To that end, I am proposing a new and more refined governance plan.
The proposed plan provides opportunity for broad participation. It is intended to be flexible and dynamic, give voices to the unheard, and enable CSI to respond to rapidly changing internal and external opportunities and challenges. In addition, it promotes four key elements; trust, respect, collegiality and accountability.
Within two days, a substantial number of individuals had requested a special session of the College Council. The governance plan allows for a petitioning of a special session with a purpose, in this instance more the 20 members asked to have a session to discuss this proposed wholesale replacement.
The College Council Executive Committee held its regularly scheduled meeting with the President, the Provost and the President's Chief of Staff.
The first 25 minutes of the meeting covered a review of the budget and the status of repopening plans. The budget committee had a more detailed discussion on the former. As for reopening, we heard that
the college has a plan for 25% reopening in fall (measured somehow); other CUNY units have different plans, as they have different circumstances;
the impact of widepsread vaccination has not entered into the plans
for faculty eager to return to their offices to get back to work, we are currently under the cap on persons per day, and so there is some room to entertain requests.
The conversation then turned to the proposed wholesale replacement plan. The defense made by the president was similar what he has expressed elswhere. The many points raised by the College Council Executive Committee similar to those expressed elsewhere. Despite the stated desire to hear new voices through this new plan, there was no indication that familar voices were to be listened to.
The special session of the College Council was held from 2:30 - 4:15.
There were 279 unique zoom participants.
A link to the zoom meeting in whole has been shared. A 20-minute version, nuetrally edited by Susan Imberman, is available and is linked to from https://csi-covid19.github.io/CCFS/Mar21Meeting.
Two powerpoint presentations were reviewed. They can be seen at the same website.
Then a long discussion ensued. Though many different points were raised, a strong consensus was shown at the end.
In a straw poll held at 4:15:
Motion: We ask the President to withdraw his proposal and engage in collaborative work through the existing governance plan, working with the Bylaws Committee to recommend and discuss changes that he would like to see in the Governance Plan.
At the time of the poll fewer than 5% of the remaining participants (~190) raised their hands to vote "no" or "abstain".
Though I try to remain neutral here as chair, I will repeat a request I made at the March 9th meeting:
The president should just drop this proposal altogether
As a followup to the meeting, a compilation of statements made by various campus constituencies has been compled at https://csi-covid19.github.io/CCFS/Mar-SpecialMeeting/. As of writing there are 13.