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) PRESIDENTIAL ROGUES SCHOLAR 58. (11/8/05) INSANITY RULES AGAIN Close on the heels of the incident in which Prof Gene Yao, a highly qualified and dedicated CIS educator, was denied promotions several years in a row at the whim of an unprincipled, power-crazed floozy, we now see adjuncts of proven ability under equally irrational attack in the English Dept. Veteran adjuncts Shyrlee Dallard (10 years), Sherland Preston-Ortiz and Geoffrey Elder have not been rehired. The transgendered distinguished writer Justine Nicholas, much beloved by her LaGuardia students, has been harassed and humiliated by goons and their cronies in that troubled Dept. Who’s next? Is this a college or an insane asylum? The fraud that passes as “The World’s Community College” (as if the World doesn’t have enough problems already) will continue to disrupt the lives of quality educators with impunity until the faculty breaks its decades-old silence. *************** 59. (11/8/05) LETTER FROM AN ENGLISH DEPT ADJUNCT The Friday before last, a member of another department e-mailed me a listing from "Rate My Professors." In it, a student claimed that Lynne Alston-Jackson, one of the profs who teaches the freshman seminar (If the fact that all students are required to take it isn't proof of corruption in this place, I don't know what is.) told her students--some of whom were in English classes I was teaching--to complain to English Department Chair Dr. Sandra Hanson about "my sexuality." I forwarded the listing to the affirmative action office, the labor relations office and Dr. Hanson. I had talked to the AA officer. The day after our appointment, the listing was removed. But, someone later posted another rating that said nearly the same thing and that Prof. Alston-Jackson maligned his/her heritage. Two years ago, when I first "came out" to the college community, she staged an incident in which she involved a campus security officer. Together, they made spurious and false complaints about me to Dr. Hanson. I was called on the carpet and Dr. Hanson told me that if I wrote a letter of apology to Prof. Alston-Jackson and the security officer, the incident would "go away." Prof. Alston-Jackson has been at LaGuardia for a long time and is one of Dr. Hanson's closest friends on this campus. At the time of the incident, I was an adjunct in only her second year at La Guardia. Guess whose side Dr. Hanson took. I wrote the letters, but of course the incident didn't fade away. Rather, Dr. Hanson has treated me with suspicion. Worse, however, is that ever since I "came out", students have told me that Prof.Alston-Jackson was looking for a way to drive me out of the college. "Watch your back" one of them told me. This student, like the others who warned me, were in Prof. Alston Jackson's seminar and claimed that she made derogatory comments about my "sexuality." (By the way, I'm transgendered. That identity does not determine my sexual orientation, any more than it does for any other transgender.) How's this for an example of "tolerance" at the "World's Community College." All the Best, Justine Nicholas *************** 60. (11/18/05) SOME POSITIVE RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REFORM AT LAGUARDIA FROM PROF M. MILLMAN For those few faculty and staff who haven’t yet taken notice, 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 nonsensical rhetoric should attempt to honestly answer this question: "Would you send your kid to LaGuardia"? There..., now you got it. With extremely low 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 a 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 worthless diplomas. This is indeed a painful moral dilemma faculty and staff must bear. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have been able to incinerate my bridges to the corrupt LaGuardia administration and to retain the freedom to express my thoughts openly while continuing in the teaching job I adore. I am no expert on philosophy of education, but the following recommendations for positive educational reform and restoration of faculty morale seem transparently clear to me: 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 his/her administrative career. 2. To counteract the tendency toward chairperson decade-long dynasties, 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 in positions such as labs and the like, where the damage they inflict will be minimized. 6. Place the results of student evaluations of the 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 procedure, which is based on cronyism and political expediency. *************** 61. (11/19/05) ADDITIONAL REFORM RECOMMENDATIONS FROM JUSTINE NICHOLAS, LAGUARDIA ENGLISH DEPT 1. Get rid of the twelve-week/six-week academic term system and implement the 15- or 16-week semesters that most schools have. Little meaningful education occurs during the six-week sessions, and for courses like English 101, which focus on building skills rather than accumulating knowledge or information, cramming it all into six weeks can be detrimental. 2. Get rid of the requirement for an internship. The majority of the students have to work at a paid job in order to go to school, or sometimes even to make ends meet. It's not right to force them to do unpaid labor--especially if the work has little or no meaningful relationship to the student's studies or intended career. (I've heard of students who worked in stockrooms for their internships!) 3. Require oral and written English proficiency examinations for all prospective faculty members. Students sometimes complain that they can't understand their instructors (in English, yet!) and I've seen handouts that were illegible and illiterate. 4. Require a minimum level of English proficiency from students. I've had students who couldn't understand the words "page one." How can they expect to learn any of the course material? 5. Stop subsidizing illegal immigrants. There are students who were born and raised in this country, and they and their families work hard--sometimes two or three jobs. Yet they don't qualify for financial aid, but an illegal immigrant does. *************** 62. (11/19/05) RECOMMENDATIONS FOR REFORM FROM A READER Institutional reform is difficult. Changing a culture that has been in place for a long time requires attitudinal change on the part of participants that have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. The entrenched holders of power want to focus on the processes that they implement as benefiting the students. Therefore, you have to hammer away at the outcomes of their processes and highlight their failure. Graduation rates, academic failure, incompetent cronies in leadership positions, wasting tax payer money, worthless diplomas in the work marketplace, all demand change at the top. Target Mellow as the instrument of a condescending white racist conspiracy to keep minorities at the bottom of the social spectrum. She is an overtly white liberal who at heart is a white racist attempting to preserve her own ass at the expense of minority students advancing into the middle class. Her looking the other way while students cheat on tests and copy term papers indicts her as thinking that minorities cannot compete on equal terms with white kids enrolled at other schools. Paint her as the George Wallace of Queens. Demand transparency in all academic statistical measures. Force her to defend the outcomes of her term of office. Appeal to the students and their parents to throw her out due to her failure to improve the lives of the student population. *************** 63. (11/22/05) E-MAIL FROM PRESIDENT MELLOW TO THE COLLEGE COMMUNITY ON 11/21/05 With all due respect to Big Sister and Doktor Levine, didn't this kind of stuff go out of style with the fall of fascism? Here is the e-mail: From: Gail O. Mellow Evelyn Maldonado (Evelyn Maldonado) To: Everyone Date: Monday - November 21, 2005 3:12 PM Subject: Press Calls Dear College Community, I want to remind the college community about how best to respond to calls from the press. Please work in close collaboration with Dr. Helen Levine, our new Chief External Affairs Officer. She can be reached at ext. 5006 or helen-levine@lagcc.cuny.edu. Dr. Levine should be notified whenever the press contacts you directly. This allows the college to coordinate all the aspects of a press contact. Remember that press includes radio, newspapers and web presence. In a crisis, remember that all communication should come from my office. This protects both individual members of the college community and the college as a whole. Thank you so much for your attention to this matter. Dr. Gail O. Mellow President LaGuardia Community College 31-10 Thomson Avenue Long Island City, NY 11101 ph: 718-482-5050 fax:718-609-2009 gmellow@lagcc.cuny.edu *************** 64. (11/22/05) MESSAGE POSTED ON THE LAGUARDIA "GROUPWISE" IN-HOUSE NETWORK BY JUSTINE NICHOLAS, LAGUARDIA ENGLISH DEPT More than twenty-four hours have passed since the gag order [see item #63 above] came from the President's office. In that time, Dr. Millman and I are the only employees of this college who've spoken up about it. Never before have I been more ashamed of, and disgusted with, my association with an organization than I am with the connection--however tenuous--I have with this college. How is it that you can denounce oppression when it's happening far away but not when the noose is being tightened right here? Quite frankly, I think that the rest of you don't deserve whatever freedoms you still have. Those of you who are tenured should lose that privilege. And those of you who have come from other nations should return. I mean, what other reason is there to be in this country--or to have the job security of a Supreme Court justice--but freedom? I'm reminded now of a bumper sticker I saw recently: "Take away my civil liberties. I wasn't using them anyway." Well, if you don't want them, I'll certainly take them--and run with them! *************** 65. (11/23/05) A LOVE LETTER TO JUSTINE Dear Justine, Your post of 11/22 is the most perceptive, heartfelt, poetic, honest and accurate appraisal of LaGuardia I have ever seen. Indeed, to paraphrase Churchill's exhortation, "It's not the treachery of our enemies we need fear so much as the silence of our friends". Although we’ve never met, I adore you and I’ll miss you terribly when your teaching contract goes into perpetual suspension at the end of this semester. M. Millman *************** 66. (11/28/05) BREAKING NEW WIND Here is the latest delusional hype issuing forth from Prez Mellow at http://www.lagcc.cuny.edu/about. We dare you to read it without gagging: BREAKING NEW GROUND LaGuardia Community College stands as an example of the power of ordinary individuals to make extraordinary things happen. Every college has something special to brag about. For LaGuardia Community College, it is the quality of our faculty and staff, and the diversity of our students. So many students come from so many different places to study together (over 160 different countries at last count) that we call ourselves The World’s Community College. Being The World’s Community College is not just a statement about who we are, it’s a statement about who we aspire to be. Our goal is to educate leaders for a global workforce and a global citizenry. That means education at LaGuardia Community College must maintain the highest quality. LaGuardia Community College is the best place to think globally and act locally. Whether it is in creating a piece of software or writing a play, understanding how to do calculus or understanding how to do physical therapy, students at LaGuardia Community College bring a world’s perspective to their studies. LaGuardia Community College is the doorway through which students pass to many more achievements. Whether students use their research experience in National Science Foundation labs to become scientists, their co-op internship in accounting to secure a great job while they complete their CPA, their musical experience to compose great jazz, or their work with a local high tech industry to become an entrepreneur, LaGuardia graduates are well prepared to face the challenges of our complex world. We hope for more from our students than achievement in the world of scholars and business, however. We intend to provide experiences for our students to continue to grow as human beings, whether that means enrolling their children in our day care center, or providing community service activities through the social organizations in Queens. LaGuardia Community College students enter the world prepared for life. The best part of LaGuardia Community College is you –our next student! As we build a great institution, we welcome great students who will challenge the faculty and staff. We use our outstanding alumni to inspire the next generation of students. We welcome immigrant students to use the College as a gateway to their family and friends so that they, too, can succeed in life. We welcome the returning adult student who never thought college was for them, as well as the student just graduating from high school. Together, the rich mix of people, ideas and projects makes LaGuardia Community College outstanding. We welcome you to the campus. Sincerely, Dr. Gail O. Mellow President *************** 67. (12/2/05) EXCERPT FROM THE GUESTBOOK We totally concur: Record: 178 Date: Fri Dec 2, 2005 10:52:34 AM Name: Justine Nicholas, again Email Address: jnicholas@lagcc.cuny.edu Site Rating: Excellent Comments: I may have gone from living as a man to being a woman. But recent events have shown me that I may just have more balls than this university's chapter of the PSC, or nearly any of this college's administrators or tenured professors. *************** 68. (12/6/05) E-MAIL FROM A READER Mayor Lindsay capitulated to militant minority activists in 1970 and offered the noble gesture of open admissions at CUNY. This was, in reality, an expiditious way of avoiding racial violence in NYC. It is now 35 years later and the noble gesture has devolved into today's CUNY. Goldstein and Pataki are smart guys. They know perfectly well CUNY is a fraud. They use the Compass exams, which can be passed by lower lifeforms, and other such crap, to continue to fulfill Lindsay's promise: diplomas for all. Why install real remedial exams? If it ain't broke why fix it? (It is broke, by nobody is complaining - yet). Real academic standards would only cut the graduation rate, which is currently miniscule anyway. It appears to have taken 35 years for minority leaders to begin to see that the education their folks are getting is bullshit and the diplomas worthless. When they become painfully aware of this, they will demand quality education at CUNY, and that's when the real fun will start - because you can't offer quality education to unprepared illiterates/innumerates, as amply demonstrated at LaGuardia. So the whole NYC Ed system would have to be redone, starting with kindergarten. But that's impossible because the NYC teacher's union is powerful enough to maintain the schools as they are forever - including tenure for the 50% of the workforce who are morons (Ed majors constitute the bottom 10% of the graduating class). There is as little hope for the City and CUNY as there is for the world in general. *************** 69. (12/24/05) PHONY FACULTY UNION "WIN" Bad enough that the LaGuardia Faculty behaves like a flock of obedient sheep represented by a union led by peeping mice. But it has now come to light that there may be a few rats among the mice. Last September’s Clarion (the union newspaper) headline trumpeted a great union victory over the contemptible liar Mellow in the case of Prof Gene Yao, who was denied several promotions by Mellow for ludicrous (and illegal) reasons (see item #56). The fanfare ("THIRD STRAIGHT PSC WIN") inspired confidence that union leaders actually do something. It turns out, in fact, that Mellow slithered away with less than a slap on the wrist and that Prof Yao is still without a promotion! How pathetic! With a union like this, who needs management? We retract our previous comparison of LaGuardia to an insane asylum. The circus that passes for a college apparently still has a way to go to rise to that level. *************** 70. (3/2/06) FAREWELL TO ANOTHER GREAT TEACHER True to their tradition of low tolerance for excellence in teaching and zero tolerance for differing political viewpoints, the LaGuardia English Dept. fired adjunct Prof Justine Nicholas at the end of the Spring1 semester. Ms. Nicholas is a gifted writer and teacher and was among the few instructors actually sought-after by students at LaGuardia. She is the latest in a long sequence of firings of high-quality people for far-less-than- ethical reasons. This demonstrates once again that the fools in power at LaGuardia have no interest in quality education, but seek only to maintain their grip on power. In the final analysis, it is these fools who are responsible for the miserable educational status of LaGuardia. *************** Please click on UPDATE CONTD 4 |
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