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| MEMO FROM: M. Millman TO: Faculty and Staff RE: Reforms at LaGuardia DATE: 4/17/06 SOME RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REFORM AT LAGUARDIA For those few faculty and staff who haven’t yet noticed, an educational disaster has for many years been taking place right before our eyes while the blowing whistle seems to fall on deaf ears. Those who continue to be deluded by the Administration's duplicitous rhetoric should attempt to honestly answer this question: Would you send your kid to LaGuardia? There..., now you’ve got it. With practically nonexistent academic standards, LaGuardia regrettably earns its demeaning moniker of “Crayola U.” The two primary reasons why faculty and staff have not voiced their outrage are the following: 1. A significant fraction of the faculty are cronied-up incompetents who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. 2. Fear of reprisals from an unethical and vindictive Administration in the form of non-retention, non-tenure and non-promotion. Understandably, people need to pay the mortgage and feed the family and so must toe the fraudulent line. But meanwhile, the hoax is perpetuated, and a great many loveable, courageous and deserving students are swindled out of tuition they can ill-afford and handed either worthless diplomas or no diplomas at all (three out of every four students never receive a diploma). Although the moral eunuchs who run LaGuardia ignore it, this is indeed a painful ethical dilemma that faculty and staff must bear. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to incinerate my bridges to the corrupt LaGuardia "leadership" while retaining the freedom to express my thoughts openly and continuing in the teaching job I adore. I am no expert on philosophy of education, but the following recommendations for positive reform and restoration of faculty morale seem transparently clear to me. Only the re-animation of an intimidated, anaesthetized faculty and staff can make them a reality: 1. Throw the contemptible President out on her ample posterior. Replace her with someone who at least has the integrity not to insult our intelligence, indeed our sanity, with platitudinous drivel about LaGuardia being the third best community college on the planet, etc., etc. Preferably, this person should be an educator with proven leadership experience at a prestigious institution of higher education - someone whose interests extend beyond the mere advancement of their administrative career. 2. To counteract the tendency toward decade-long dynasties of chairpersons, with their attendant cronyism and well-known abuses of power, institute a policy (followed by many civilized colleges) of mandatory rotation of 3-year departmental chairpersonships. 3. The current Compass remedial exams are being passed by illiterate and innumerate students. They are just one more component of CUNY's pitiful attempt to camouflage the failure of an open-admissions scheme originally intended to benefit minority students, but which in fact victimizes them. Replace this fraud with exams of real substance. 4. Crack down on rampant grade inflation and the epidemic of student cheating and plagiarism. 5. Quarantine tenured documented nitwits (e.g., Math Profs with no knowledge of math beyond elementary algebra) in positions such as labs, workshops, and the like, where the damage they inflict will be minimized. 6. Place the results of student evaluations of faculty on the Internet to enable students to choose the best and avoid the worst instructors. 7. Institute a new tenure and promotion procedure based on merit to replace the current reprehensible procedure, which is based on cronyism, political expediency and the whims of a paranoid Administration. LaGuardia’s sordid history of firing instructors of extraordinary talent while tenuring and promoting mediocre and incompetent cronies is a major cause of its rock-bottom academic standing. |
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