StudentNation | The Nation

There’s a radical “academic renaissance” underway at the City University of New York, but it’s cause for concern, not celebration. This fall, CUNY is scheduled to undertake the full implementation of its Pathways Initiative, a program Chancellor Matthew Goldstein insists will enable a smoother process for students seeking to transfer from junior to senior colleges within the system. While a more efficient scheme of credit transfer within CUNY is a goal few educators can oppose, Pathways introduces sweeping new measures that harm the interests of the student body.

Pathways will water down the mandatory core curriculum for CUNY students, reduce the number of classroom hours students receive in critical foundation courses, concentrate control of teaching and learning decisions in the chancellor’s office, and undertake further cost-saving measures that have already crippled the system. These goals undermine student progress, but fit securely within the chancellor’s austerity approach to public education.

Resistance to the Pathways project has originated with the university’s unionized faculty, who criticized the proposal process early on for violating principles of shared governance in curricular decision-making. Failing to consult sufficient objective experts in designing the initiative, university administrators relied instead on a handpicked crew of faculty, many politically pliant and happy to promote what the chancellor wanted to hear. Excluded from the initial planning stages, tenured and contingent faculty members and graduate students have since publicly pushed back against the proposal; thousands have signed petitions, testified at hearings, and protested at CUNY administrative meetings.

The tragic event that transpired one month ago in Newtown, Connecticut was deeply saddening. For us, it also incited anger. We think that there is perhaps no better time to express our sadness and our disgust; indeed, we feel that we have a responsibility to the victims of the sixteen mass shootings that took place in the United States in the past year and the eighty-eight people who die every day from gun violence in our streets. We owe them our voice. Our government needs to hear that we have had enough and demand action, now.

For this reason, we have decided to organize a student-run rally at City Hall to advocate for gun control. The event will take place on Monday, February 4th, from 2:00 to 5:00PM. We are hoping for significant participation by students from many New York schools, and we welcome anyone – student or adult – who wants to join: large numbers will make this rally really mean something and get the media coverage it deserves, and we know you are just as angry about gun violence as we are.

Each time a shooting of this caliber occurs, anger swells for a few days and promptly disappears. We won’t let this happen again. With your support, we can make this rally matter. We strongly encourage everyone to participate: this is a cause worth all the time and effort we can give.

In late November, a small crowd of Columbia University and New York University students organized by Students For Education Reform (SFER) marched from the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) building in downtown Manhattan to the steps of the Department of Education building, demanding that public school teachers reach an agreement with the Bloomberg administration over new evaluation standards. Hanging in the balance is $450 million worth of state aid that will be withheld from city public schools by Governor Cuomo if a deal is not reached by January 17. Students sporting red and green Christmas hats called on teachers to “Make a deal!” and “Compromise!” in a spectacular show of misplaced activist spirit.

The “compromise” would place teachers at the mercy of a counterproductive test-based system, allowing up to 40 percent of their evaluative ratings to come from the standardized test scores of their students. It's even worse than it sounds though, because New York state requires that “teachers rated ineffective on student performance based on objective assessments must be rated ineffective overall,” as education historian Diane Ravitch explains, “a teacher who does not raise test scores will be found ineffective overall, no matter how well he or she does with the remaining 60 percent. In other words, the 40 percent allocated to student performance actually counts for 100 percent.”

SFER, a student network that has exploded on more than 100 college campuses across the country since it was started by two students at Princeton in 2009, is an “education reform” front for a lobbying firm, exploiting college idealism for corporate profit. The group’s website declares: “We believe student voices matter. For too long, policymakers have not heard the voice of the stakeholders affected by education policy: students themselves.” But the pitch should replace stakeholders with stockholders, because the dollars behind the “grassroots” movement say more than the students themselves.

Determined to speak up about America’s crumbling higher education system, three students at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism rallied the voices of an indebted generation. The trio of aspiring journalists—Alex Lancial, Tara Molina and Jake Stein— produced a twenty-six-minute documentary examining the student debt crisis in the United States with a focus on local issues specific to Arizona.

Narrated by student debtors, Scholarslip explores five critical issues: increasing costs of tuition; deteriorating quality of higher education; diminishing value of a college degree in the job market; student dependence on state and federal financial assistance; and the effects on personal lives and aspirations.