BY AARON BARLOW

City Tech’s New Academic Building

The City University of New York is quietly floating the idea of consolidating majors across its campuses. Rather than a Physics major at City College, Hunter, Baruch, my own New York City College of Technology and all the rest, students would be funneled into one CUNY campus. This, I suspect, is seen as the logical extension of the system’s Pathways initiative, a 30-credit first-year program common to all CUNY campuses meant to facilitate transfer.

The problem, of course, is that the idea flies in the face of long cherished beliefs in the importance of a generalist undergraduate experience, ones that see college as something more than a channel into a particular career.

Advocates of this new and tentative idea, though I doubt any would yet speak publicly, would counter by saying that the system as a whole retains the tradition of wide-spread exposure, that what they would be doing is simply breaking down other barriers, making the experience at CUNY more efficient (especially in terms of money, though they would never say that) and giving students contact with the best teacher/scholars that all of CUNY can offer in any one field in a particular place.

Sounds terrific. Well….

CUNY Central, the administrative hub of the system, doesn’t have a strong track record on sweeping educational change. The administrators there seem to feel that they know better than faculty (or local-campus administrators) and pay only lip-service to shared governance, as happened with Pathways, which was sprung on the system without much participation by anyone outside of Central’s offices (though administrators constantly crowed that it was based on faculty participation). The local campuses have managed to make Pathways work, but to what purpose? It doesn’t really seem to help students all that much, though it adds hours each semester to administrator and faculty workload.

Because it doesn’t radically transfigure basic college operations, Pathways has not been tremendously disruptive. We who work and teach at CUNY have learned to live with it, though we still ask “why?” when, for the umpteenth time, we face its byzantine administrative requirements. Our students continue to get the level of instruction they had before, go into majors as they did before, switch majors as they did before, and transfer as they did before. For that, we are grateful. The level of the educational experience has not been adversely affected.

Now, it is true that, for well over a century, there have been institutions of higher education with varieties of focus. Schools of technology have contained majors not found, for example, on most liberal-arts campuses. City Tech, where I teach, has quite a number of majors not available anywhere else in CUNY—and we don’t offer majors in a number of areas where I think we should (including English, my own field). The justification is that, by charter, we are not allowed to have more than ten-percent liberal-arts students. So, we don’t offer BA degrees, only an AA (though a senior college, we are a comprehensive college, offering both two-year and four-year degrees). All of our other degrees are BS, BTech or specialized Associate programs generally with certifications along with a generalized STEM-preparatory AS.

CUNY Central, looking at the turnaround of City Tech over the last decade, sees no problem with this restrictive and focused model and wants to apply it, writ large, to the system as a whole.

That would be a disaster. Though CUNY Central doesn’t know it, the improvements at City Tech would have been much amplified if restrictions on us had been lifted. Already, and to the detriment of the system as a whole, each school has a say when another in the system wants to add a major that school already offers, keeping competition and innovation down in the long term and forcing schools to project almost fictional differences when proposing new degrees.

If CUNY were to move toward consolidating majors onto specific campuses, the initial competition for majors would be fierce, and not in a good way. People, especially faculty, would be fearful for their jobs and status (few of us don’t feel demeaned by being in a “support department”  for lower-level students) and it’s unlikely there would be wholesale transfers of faculty. The newly strengthened and emboldened departments would want the freedom to hire on their own, after all. Thus, CUNY would likely see the cutting of even tenured lines as programs are dissolved (one of the few advantages of being in a “support department”: my job would not likely be threatened; the First Year Composition courses that are our bread-and-butter would still be needed across CUNY) in one place in favor of another. Even if encouragement were given to hire from within, few faculty members would feel comfortable that they would be among those chosen.

The real problem, however, would be for the students. Not only would it now be even more difficult to change major, but students would have only minimal exposure to those working with real enthusiasm in fields other than their own, never gaining the opportunity to consider those alternatives or understanding the value to their own education of exposure broader than the small group of majors at their institutions would offer.

That would only be the start of it. The new departments, in a system that includes eleven senior colleges (the schools that would house them), would be massive compared with what they are now. At City Tech, with around 19,000 students, we have 41 permanent English faculty members and around 100 adjuncts—and, as I said, we don’t even have an English major. If, by some strange twist of fate, we were chosen to house the system’s English major, our numbers would have to more than double. They would probably have to triple or quadruple—or more. That would not help students.

Given the nature of what happens on campuses everywhere, the nature of the new departments would shift in ways that would discourage contact between students and the “top” members of each department. Adjuncts,lecturers and assistant professors would do the bulk of the teaching and sheer size making substantive interaction with “name” professors unlikely. In smaller departments, students are able to work a substantial percentage of members of their departments. Though fewer of them might be famous, at least they can nod in recognition in the halls and, perhaps, chat—important parts of the college (as opposed to factory) experience.

Though the prestige of the new departments would likely grow, the educations students would receive in them would certainly suffer. The departments could be broken into sub-departments, but that runs the risk of even further channeling students into specific lines without their having experienced the breadth of possibilities.

Though there would likely be unintended consequences of such a consolidation that I cannot imagine—some of them possibly positive—I cannot think of any reason for making, or even suggesting, this change. Personally, I hope that the administrators at CUNY Central can reclaim their minds and this tentatively floated idea will be pulled back in and placed in the drawer where all their other quickly deflated ideas are kept.

Currently, City Tech is being held back by the limitations on what we can offer our students. Rather than expanding such restrictions system-wide, they should be lifted off of all campuses, letting the colleges themselves decide what they offer and allowing students to vote on the success of all programs with their feet. That might be a little more expensive, but the boost in value to a CUNY education would make it worth it.