Snip* To begin with it should be clear to everyone at CUNY by now that the BOT is an inherently anti-democratic institution. Composed almost exclusively of political hacks and corporate raiders — the great majority of whom received their appointments as awards for political loyalty from Republican Governor George Pataki and billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg — the board does not represent the interests of the electorate or of any of the university’s core stakeholders. Instead, it represents only the needs and ideological interests of the right-wing politicians who have made most of the appointments. Indeed, a quick survey of the board’s website reveals that of the fifteen current appointed members, nine were appointed by Pataki, and four were appointed by Bloomberg. Together, that means that thirteen of the sixteen voting members of the board were appointed by just those two. Allowing two ideologically right-wing white men to essentially choose the entire governing board of a university as economically and racially diverse as CUNY is an insult to any theory of democracy and cannot possibly be good for the institution or the many hundreds of thousands of people whom the university serves.
Perhaps worse than this lack of democratic representation, however, is the fact that the board’s members simply do not seem to care about the vitality or heath of CUNY and do not take their charge seriously. Indeed, most of the board members have little or no experience teaching or working within academia, and none of them seem to have any real understanding or appreciation of the value of the intellectual work that is done at the university. Their clear and continued negligence and their utter lack of vision, intellectual curiosity, and foresight is an insult to all of us who work, study, and teach at CUNY and who do our best to improve the university on a daily basis. From the several merely ignorant, to the many passively and actively apathetic, to the few downright malicious and venal, these board members have displayed an inordinate lack of leadership, and as the Kushner affair has made plain, are incapable of even holding a debate within their own ranks, much less capable of considering, debating, and acting upon the many pressing issues that impact the future of the university.
The CUNY Board of Trustees is not unique in this regard, however. It turns out — no surprise! — that boards across the country are packed — just like CUNY’s — with politically appointed corporate managers, who see the university as just another kind of corporation. Indeed, over the last three decades, university governing boards have played a vital and enabling role in the slow destruction of the American system of higher education. Rather than using their political influence and connections to fight for the institutions which they have been charged to defend, they have instead done what comes naturally to business elites and have used their skills to remake their respective universities into models of corporate efficiency.
By simultaneously increasing student tuition and drastically reducing the costs of instruction through the use and exploitation of low-paid, part-time instructors, these boards have helped their right-wing counterparts in government shift the costs of higher education from the public back to the individual students and employees of the universities they govern, effectively undermining, through this process of privatization, the very principles, and often the very charters, of the institutions they were tasked to uphold and honor. In part because of these boards, the once great promise of the American university system, which made it possible for so many underprivileged and economically disadvantaged Americans to better themselves through the pursuit of higher education, has been reduced to a mere shadow of its original self. From California to New York more and more students are being priced out of the chance to get a decent education, even as those who can are forced to take larger classes taught by increasingly underpaid and overworked adjuncts.
Clearly it is time that the students, faculty, and staff at CUNY, and indeed, at all the nation’s universities recognize that any struggle to improve their schools has to include a strategy to change the institutions that govern them. The students, faculty, and employees of CUNY should naturally have a voice in the decisions that directly affect their well-being and the future of the university. Towards this end the CUNY community, including the Professional Staff Congress and the student and faculty senates, must come together and begin to demand serious and extensive reform of the Board of Trustees. Such reform should, no doubt, involve a significant amount of discussion and debate, but should include at the very least a radical increase in the number of student, faculty, and staff representatives on the board. As I proposed back in February of 2010, in addition to the current seventeen members of the board, there should be at least one elected faculty member, one elected staff member, and one elected student representative from each of the University’s current seventeen campuses. This would significantly shift the balance of interests from the politicians to the stakeholders, while still allowing for a significant amount of public representation on the board in the form of some kind of reformed public appointment system — perhaps one in which trustees are chosen by the state legislature instead of the governor and the mayor. Such an expanded, democratic, and diverse board, representing all of the major stakeholders of the university, as well as the interests of the state taxpayers, would be much better prepared to find intelligent and creative solutions to the problems that face the university while still respecting and nurturing the true pursuit of intellectual excellence that defines any great university.
in full:
http://www.gcadvocate.com/2011/05/democracy-now-reinventing-the-cuny-board-of-trustees/
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