Why is cuny bad

The Department of Educational Services at Brooklyn College has 39 faculty members; the history department, Despite its own large resources and the growth of remedial technologies generally, SEEK has not managed to improve the graduation rate of its students, which remains at just under 13 percent after eight years.

Nearly three out of four senior college freshmen and nine out of ten community college freshmen were enrolled in remedial classes in The bulk of remedial responsibility falls on English and math departments. In most math departments, high-school-level courses greatly outnumber college courses.

Many colleges have created separate departments of English as a Second Language to accommodate the growing number of students who come to CUNY with little or no experience in English.

City College is replicating the SEEK model-in which disproportionate resources are directed at the students least likely to succeed-for remedial students outside the SEEK program. An additional layer of bureaucracy oversees these broader remedial functions. It has its own dean and faculty. Gedamke is deeply committed to the idea that everyone deserves the chance to attend a liberal arts college.

But he is rapidly losing hope. On exams, he sometimes asks students to put the paragraphs of a rearranged essay back in the proper order. Many students cannot even recognize that the essay is out of order. On the other hand, all professors have stories of remedial students whose lives were transformed by the opportunity to attend CUNY.

Whereas most students simply sank into a sullen shell, Williams was bursting with frustration. Despite his bad luck with course placement, Williams stands a good chance of succeeding at City. This is a judgment that CUNY as an institution is unwilling to make, however-to the detriment of all involved. In practice, this requirement is often waived. For many students, remediation becomes an endless cycle of failure. At the College of Staten Island, which has a lower remedial burden than other CUNY campuses, approximately one-quarter of the students in remedial writing and reading fail their first time around.

These students end up at the bottom rung of remediation, where all evidence points to the utter futility of further pedagogical effort. To justify their labors, professors in such classes embrace a therapeutic mission. The remedial system at CUNY is not only open-ended; it is also extremely porous. The original notion that students without college skills would remain in an antechamber to the college until they were adequately prepared quickly collapsed under a variety of pressures.

Now, students who lack reading and writing skills are usually allowed to take regular courses at the same time as remedial ones. As a result, the distinctions between remedial and regular classes have blurred.

I would also tell him to do overlearning because the more you overlearn something you will be able to remembrance on a test. Student writing has become so bad that it defeats the impulse to improve it. So he tried to introduce a very modest writing requirement into all core curriculum courses.

He met with widespread faculty resistance. While CUNY pours money into remediation, the rest of the university is being decimated by budget cuts. Students are unable to graduate because the courses they need are oversubscribed. The number of professors has been cut by 17 per cent in recent years. Half of all courses are taught by adjuncts, who have few ties to the institution and sometimes fewer qualifications. In the spring semester, an adjunct teaching introductory political science at City College had herself graduated from the college just the previous year.

Library budgets have been sharply cut, forcing the curtailment of hours and acquisitions. That was destroyed almost immediately.

Nor is the remedial enterprise necessarily in the best interests of its intended beneficiaries. City College thus became one of the nation's great democratic experiments, and it remains today one of its great democratic achievements. Even in its early years, the Free Academy showed tolerance for diversity, especially in comparison to the private universities in New York City.

In the academic senate, the first student government in the nation, was formed. General Alexander S. Queens College, for example, possesses a rich program in the arts and humanities, led by a respected music scholar. The trustees should reward with extra faculty lines those campuses that strengthen their traditional humanities offerings.

In addition, they should try to revive those programs that once made a great contribution to the city's economy, such as City College's engineering program.

Performance measures. The trustees have laudably introduced performance measures into their future evaluation of CUNY. Schools that increase their graduation rates and cut administrative jobs will receive funding for additional faculty positions. Unfortunately, schools can manipulate their graduation rates by lowering academic standards. A better measure of performance might be a student achievement test in the core curricular areas, administered midway in a student's college career and graded on a university-wide basis.

Students who failed any of the core areas would have to take further courses in those areas while proceeding with their majors. With such a requirement in place, CUNY could issue an ironclad guarantee of cultural literacy to parents and future employers. Some parts of CUNY do not need further evaluation; existing evidence indicts them as irremediably rotten. CUNY's law school is the laughing-stock of the legal profession, with its rock-bottom bar pass rates and s-style curriculum in political organizing and consciousness-raising.

New York is racially polarized enough as it is; the last thing the city needs is colleges that specialize in ethnic separatism. CUNY's teacher education programs are also an embarrassment, lagging far behind New York State's other education schools in their teacher certification pass rates. Only 39 percent of Evers's teacher graduates passed the state licensing exam—small wonder, given the students' initial ignorance and the Afrocentric foolishness with which the school subsequently pumps them up.

The leading Afrocentric quack, Asa Hilliard, for example, was the honored guest at an all-day conference in the "curriculum of inclusion" several years ago; City College race agitator Leonard Jeffries also led a student discussion group. Evers also devotes inordinate resources to special education and "paraprofessional" education. Because CUNY supplies a huge percentage of the city's teachers, the trustees have rightly made improving teacher education a central priority.

Doing so will require focusing on basic knowledge and on how to maintain classroom discipline, rather than on nonsensical theories of post-colonial discourse and feminist epistemology. Bloated administration. CUNY's administration has swelled, even as its faculty ranks dwindle. In the president's office alone at Medgar Evers, for example, there is an executive assistant, a director of institutional advancement and public affairs, an executive director of institutional computing and system development, a coordinator of new initiatives, a special assistant, an affirmative action officer, and an executive secretary—not to mention the school's Office for Differently Abled Students.

All of CUNY's student affairs deans, student counselors, diversity monitors, and assistants to the aide to the provost are a diversion from the classroom and from libraries.

The trustees should require across-the-board cuts in administrative positions, targeting first the ubiquitous and wholly superfluous affirmative action departments that strangle every college. CUNY should renounce race- and gender-based hiring and admissions as an insult to the beneficiaries and an unfair penalty against those not favored by government's Byzantine race and gender classifications.

The university has created freestanding institutes, such as the sinecure Institute for Research on the African Diaspora in the Americas and the Caribbean, at a blinding rate. They perform little, if any, teaching and serve mainly as a haven for faculty desperate to escape the tedium of lecturing to unprepared students. The trustees should put a moratorium on all such future institutes and declare that the primary mission of the university is to be a superb undergraduate teaching institution.

Community colleges. There is a critical shortage of traditional skilled tradesmen in the city, as well as workers in the new technologies. New York manufacturers are unable to find skilled machinists; high-tech firms likewise struggle to find advanced programmers.

Employers complain that many of CUNY's community colleges, while well-intentioned, lag far behind the needs of industry. The community colleges should vigorously solicit and implement the advice of business leaders on how to function more effectively. CUNY could do much to stem the migration of business out of the city by guaranteeing a steady flow of technologically competent workers. Create An Account Please fill in below form to create an account with us Email. Country Country. Signup Back To Login.

Good Afternoon! Let's make today a great day! Remember Me. Login Forgot Your Password? Date: Thursday, January 21,