Annie Koshi:
So let’s hear what everybody was going to talk about.
Brian Schwartz:
I came at it from a research point of view, saying that there are a tremendous amount of funds out there. I come from a physics background. We just did it. A lot of people think that writing a proposal is very hard. So many people can’t get started. Get a budget when it comes and get a document that people can then help you with. If it’s all in your head then there’s nothing you can do. People think that…
Audience Member:
Do you do that research for anybody in the university?
Brian Schwartz:
Any faculty working with another faculty. They might have been working with somebody else. And it’s not that impressive. Then they have library subscriptions, and the Asian American Research Center, which has people to develop. People are surprised by the fact that you can get the money. The government actually shows you how…so you go down and bring back some things and show them. People say, they’ve got money for that? So if you see, in this field, it turns out that it’s easier than in physics.
In physics, one of the problems is that if you are doing research and someone else is doing the same research, you can’t partner. But here, there is a terrific Asian program. There are projects dealing with demographics and stuff like that. All you have to do is take the proposal, cut out Pittsburg, adjust it to New York and there’s no reason why they don’t want you to do that. We have education. We have social work. It’s actually a little bit easier.
So if you can get a colleague in another city who’s doing something, and you can find out what they did. It doesn’t have to be competing, because a lot of them seem to go both ways. So there are things like that, which I do to the faculty all the time. Then just do it. Get it out and we will help you. In fact, at times we find it is easier to assist. When somebody’s very anxious to do something, often they’ll hire someone to work with that person. So that was my advice.
Barbara Bowen:
My topic was “The Union as an Engine of Professional Development.” I wanted to talk about a couple things. One was what I had noticed as a non-Asian faculty member, a person of non-color, I had noticed the pressure on my colleagues, the few colleagues who are people of color. Because there’s so few (this is something we were talking about before) one thing that I’ve noticed is how often they’re called up to do structural things like committees – all kinds of committees, because they want to diversify and there are only five minority faculty members. And then there are hundreds of students who are from their same ethnic group.
I was going to talk a little bit about Queens College where our population has changed in very interesting ways. There’s a big South Asian population and other Asian population. We’re just starting – the English Department just hired a South Asian to teach English Literature. And we have a very prominent…she’s reading in this series here. She’s a very prominent Asian American poet. But it’s not enough.
One of the things I wanted to talk about is what I see as a problem, which is, as we were talking about before – CUNY ought to be way ahead of the national statistic in terms of diversity and in terms of the new Asian population in New York City. We should not just be average in terms of hiring, but matching or trying to match our student population. And when you do see that match, the whole campus feels very different. As a union president, I’ve been able to go around to a lot of different campuses, and you see at Medgar, where the population of the faculty and staff is closer to race and ethnicity of the student population. There’s a very different feeling from Queens College, where there’s not that match in the relations that they have in the community.
I’m not saying it in an essentialist way that you have African American to relate to an African American student. I, myself, teach African American Literature. That’s one of my topics. There are students that want to go into that field. But I still feel that CUNY should be way out there – a leader in terms of diversity. And it would be really powerful. I mean, it would really transform what we could do intellectually. Not just matching our students for the sake of making people feel good, but in fact the curriculum would change. We would be able to be powerful in certain ways. Anyway, I think that’s a goal. I wanted to talk about the union in terms of a recruiting board.
Then the other thing I wanted to say, besides that, is what an engine we would be intellectually too, if we had that population of faculty and staff, as well as students. Then I was just going to say very briefly that people don’t normally think of the union as a source of intellectual development. We have a chance to do that as a faculty/staff union. That’s one form of leadership that I think we’ve begun to do. We’ve done conferences; we’ve done series. And two things in the contract are specifically aimed at faculty development and have, I think, particular meaning for the Asian American faculty and people of color.
Once the faculty leaves, then we have a new addition in our contract, which gives 12 hours of free time a semester to incoming full time faculty, starting come September, which is a great thing. I think it’s something that we can identify with as a chance for CUNY to give people a breathing space. Because when you start with new faculty member, especially a person of color coming in, or you are going to be the only Asian in your department, you are going to have every Asian student on campus who has ever longed to have an Asian professor outside your door; you are going to have every committee that says we need to have an Asian person – you’re going to be there. And now you at least have a chunk of time to do your own work, because people have to do that. So that’s one thing. The other thing I was thinking about was our distribution contract equity.
One of the things we looked at was the matter of race and gender and different titles. We looked at which categories white women and women of color and men of color where the feeling was for the staff. Those were some of the titles in which we investigated. There was kind of a way that we looked for racial equity.
Those were some of the questions. Just a thing to have people think about as we’re going forward. You want to sit on a committee that’s very welcoming and you want to connect to the university as a whole. A lot of people are on activity programs or committees and you suddenly are out of your out of your own department and you get to have a perspective on the whole university. For me, I found it very interesting. Those are some of the things that I thought there was a connection between the unionize faculty, and of course the protection that the union gives essentially. It helps gives tenure. It might not be connected to development, but I think it is connected to development. Absolutely. We had a meeting yesterday, and one of the things was about how to increase diversity in the union.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Can I jump in now, because I picked a little bit from you and a little bit from you. When I was going to start on my topic, the thing as I started looking at it, I always start with the introduction, because that’s your hype line. When you look at the minorities higher education and the statistics, the most recent ones are really interesting. Spanish and Asians receiving PhD’s have leveled off in recent years.
In 1991, 20% of the PhD recipients were Asian and Hispanic. In 1996, it was 23.2%; in 2000, it was down to 19.6%. And there were decreases of more than 23% in physical sciences, and more than 15% in engineering. Asian American women earned 5.6% fewer doctorate degrees in 1998 than in 1997. The statistics are a little bit old because they’re just now doing an analysis of them. During that same year, men eared 13% fewer degrees. I thought this was interesting because all along, as I’ve been watching the trend, the production has been going up.
It’s starting to level off now, except in the field of education, which I’ve also found interesting. So when you add that to the fact that not all doctorate recipients choose to go into education, who is there that’s coming in? When you start looking at your assistant professors, who is there to come and be professors? So that was the first things that we just got. Then when I looked at the statistics nationally about Asians in faculty, 5.8% of the faculty in the nation in 1998 were Asian. In the Tri-State area, it’s closer to 6.1%. Then CUNY is 6.2% because they’re looking at 1998. I can look at 2001, and we’re up to 7%. So slowly, we’re gradually going up. But then the question becomes, how do you keep people here?
It’s interesting that over the past ten years, the number of Asian faculty has gone from 265 in 1991 to 363 in 1993. It’s still not a huge number. Small, small gain. The difference in rank – number of Asian women teaching in full time faculty increased by 22.7% between ’95 and ’97, however Asian women continue to account for less than 1% of school professionals and only 1.3 percent of associate professors. That’s a really small number. When it comes to tenure, Asian American faculty receive tenure at a rate of 66% in ’97. However, the rate for Asian American men was 70%, where the rate for Asian American women was only 54%.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
Let me comment on that though. Part of the reason why the Asian faculty get more tenure is because they generally gravitate to the areas where nobody else is looking for jobs – engineering. And there are no whites applying for that because they make any money in the corporate sector. They don’t have the interest to do it and so it’s a very distorting picture. If they are going to run those departments, they have no choice but to hire Asians, because they’re the only ones who are getting those degrees and PhD’s. Pure and simple. But if you look at Asians in other disciplines, it’s a completely opposite picture.
Dr. Brian Schwartz:
In the average you don’t get the complete picture. They’re concentrated in a few areas.
Audience Member:
What’s the overall tenure rate for faculty?
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
I didn’t put that into this, so I would have to go look it up. But I found it interesting with the women and the men, the differences there. And in CUNY it’s very similar. Two-hundred fifty Asian faculty are tenured, and of that number 181 are men. So that’s kind of setting the stage. In terms of faculty development, there are a couple of things that I wanted to point out. One is that I don’t think a lot of times Asian faculty think to go to affirmative action office to look for faculty development opportunities, so I wanted to point out a couple of things that were going on in the area of diversity.
The first is that my office, the university office for diversity, actually runs a program for faculty called [Patience Program]. And what it does is that it has faculty come to work on their first publication. There is a little bit of history to this. When we first got a grant to help faculty actually work on their dissertations when they didn’t have them, there was a pool of faculty at the school who didn’t have PhD’s. Well interestingly and rightly, that number increased.
Then the need became to help these people get their dissertations into their first publication, so that’s what we’re working on now. We actually have a group that met this winter intersession. We kind of changed the format, but we ran for the time a Math/Computer Science group as well as a Humanities group, and they have senior faculty work with them as mentors. They can work call them, help them, and they can ask them to critique – the same as we’re doing here – they sit and critique each others’ publications. They the mentors tell them where to go. It’s great. It’s small though. It’s a really small program.
Audience Member:
The problem though is when if you don’t mind, is that people would be suspicious of such a group where they would be seen …and their weaknesses would potentially be used against them. Most of the time people are intimidated coming to these mentoring sessions, which are seen as small incentives for setting them up. They’re telling a story and then it comes back to bite them. I’m living proof of it. Although I didn’t…I got a publication in the system. But that is the consensus.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
I didn’t think of that.
Audience Member:
Is there not a sense of confidentiality if you go into this program, that what’s discussed here stays here?
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Well it’s basically working on your publication. They’re not friendly.
Audience Member:
But if they find a flaw in it, it’s supposed to help me, but then it hurts me because I have a flaw in my dissertation.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Well I think that would be more of an issue if it was a mentoring program run at a campus. I could see where it would be a problem if this one won’t talk to this one. But the thing I like about this particular program is that people from all different campuses and mentors – you will be paired with mentors from a different campus. It will be in the same discipline, like the sciences. But it wouldn’t necessarily be in your department, so it does kind of have a buffer zone in that regard.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
Well again, there is a widespread perception, which I am myself acknowledge, whatever happens at college, they back it irregardless of what the evidence is. So there is this perception that if you have fallen out of faith to somebody at the college, even if you were talking about this mentoring group at 80th Street, wherever you meet…one day you might be able to deal with this problem if such a group contained multiple people. If it in itself was composed with some diversity in mind. It may help.
Dr. Brian Schwartz:
The theory would be that every new faculty member would get this service. The idea would be that how they use it might be different, but everyone gets this service. It could become the echoes of the university that the new faculty get somebody who worries about it and then that’s part of the service of the senior faculty. And that could be something that’s done for everybody and some may end up not using it, but everyone gets it.
Dr. Barbara Bowen
At certain city campuses they do that. New York City Tech does that. When new faculty come in, they’re assigned a mentor, they have a luncheon, welcome to faculty. There is a mentor, somebody who can help you.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
This is a little different because it’s really geared toward looking at that publication and it’s less about what’s in your file and all that stuff. It’s really about these are the journals you should be looking at, this is the way they like to see the publication crafted. A lot of the times the faculty members are just out of school and they’re taking their dissertations and turning it into their first real publication. So it’s really specifically and narrowly tailored. And because it is people from all over the place they are not necessarily people they run into ever day. So I think some of the concerns don’t really occur here. It’s not that they don’t occur at other environments or in other settings. I understand.
Audience Member:
I just wanted to refresh on the faculty publications, what are the requirements for that?
Dr. Brian Schwartz:
It varies from campus to campus.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Not here.
Audience Member:
I was a beneficiary at the college here. I just wanted to share my experience in the CUNY system, and I think it’s important to have a supportive environment for you to be able to adjust and I used to work in the central office and he was reading material to…the fashion officer in Kingsborough.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
So this is one program that we have. The other thing that we did this year for the first time was that we offered diversity grants. They were very small awards, $5000. Unfortunately we got notice of the funding late, so it was a very quick turnaround, but we were able to award 18 grants this year. I’m hoping to be able to continue this as well. I just brought in a summary of some of the things that did get funded. I want to do this on a broader scale. Next year we will be better prepared to do it.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
I applied as an individual, but I didn’t get it. I showed how what I was going to do was going to benefit the entire college community, in fact the entire CUNY system, but…
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Well let me tell you some of the ones that were funded. “Brooklyn’s Global Pathways: Tracing the Trails of Immigrants”; “Women Organizers’ Diversity Research Curriculum Project”; “Planting Seeds: Growing Diversity in Our Community”; Obtaining Qualitative and Quantitative Data Concerning Underrepresented Minority Males Enrolled in Education Programs on the Campuses”. It ran the gamut. Again, it was a first try; it was a pilot program. It was based on the Women’s Research and Development Fund Award that they produced such wonderful projects so we felt there was a need to do it again. I’m hoping to expand it. I’ll be giving a lot more turnaround time and be a lot more clear about the criteria and everything.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
One more thing that you from the topics that you have read. They all seem to be overlapping each other pretty much. They don’t seem to have diversity in terms of what they want to achieve.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
There are more.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
But what I’m saying is that it opened up possibilities for looking at diversity outside the box, rather than within the box within which it has always been viewed. That’s the understanding I had. I’ll talk about it when I apply.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Yeah, we can talk about it. The university affirmative action committee acted as the review board for this, and they had certain criteria that they were looking for when they were judging the proposals that they got. But it may be a question of educating the board on thinking outside of the box when it comes to this.
Audience Members:
Do you have copies of the projects that were funded?
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
I do, but I don’t have copies of it. I can send it out though. Do you want me to send it to you?
Audience Members:
Yeah, and a sample proposal.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
So those were the things I wanted to talk about. And then, I would be remiss if I didn’t talk about administration, even though I know it’s heresy. There are some faculty who would like to go into administrative ranks, so I did want to just touch on the fact that there were…there may be some. I just wanted to talk a little bit about how getting elected to chairs was a way to get started on that, and how working with the union and working with the faculty senate and all of those committees and things like that certainly give you experience.
Then, I actually wanted to talk a little bit about the fact that CUNY has recently developed a Executive Leadership Development Program. They’re actually having a graduation ceremony today. There’s Asian representation in that group. It’s helping people to develop their administrative skills. It was limited to people who were already in the executive rank this time but our goal is to expand it and start reaching down to give people the opportunities for some administrative development as well. So those are my points.
Audience Member:
I just heard about the award. We have to have representation from the union. The topic is survival and survival certainly has something to do with. Let me just ask one thing. If somebody has a problem with the union, if this person doesn’t get their rights and they have to go to the union, how are we going to change the ethnicity? And things like that.
For example I’ll give you a personal thing that happened to me two days ago. I usually am the Asian student advisor. I decided to recruit Asian students for what you wouldn’t think would have Asian students. I think it was very successful because at the beginning I got all these phone calls. I didn’t get one penny for any advertisement. I made friends with all the media and I was constantly calling Asian media for the union. So I joked about my next career would be a talk show host because I went on the radio to have people call in and ask about CUNY and I went on TV because I made those friends.
Then my boss told me now you are not professionally trained as a counselor. You have to not advise students. I said, I’m sorry. So I didn’t do it and I turn the students away. Now all the top three students who have passed the ACE, my students. I told them I’m not their English professor. But the writing you have to use critical thinking. You have to have the introduction, the body and the conclusion. Every language is the same. Don’t use one sentence here or there that doesn’t have to do with the whole thing. So they’re doing very well. Now so I don’t advise students. For this conference, I told the students that it’s no use that your GPA is 4.0, you have to have some activities so I can help you to get scholarships. I encourage them to participate, even though it’s their final examination time.
Brian Schwartz:
I’m going to talk about that.
Audience Member:
So the students come to give me their social security card to get paid. So on my lunch hour, I had my door closed. So now I’m being pushed a suit for sexual harassment because I had a student inside and I didn’t open my door. So I mean, this is the atmosphere. I’m saying, how are you going to change the whole atmosphere?
Brian Schwartz:
Let me basically start from where you let off. There are a few things that everybody has to do. If a student comes for counseling to me, technically I cannot give them counseling if I don’t have a counseling certificate. I’m putting myself and the institution in a bad place by doing that. I don’t do that. I mean personal problems – if they’re getting married, if somebody got pregnant out of wedlock or whatever those kinds of problems are; if they’re having boyfriend/girlfriend problems, financial problems. You could give them advice and direct them to where they can get advice. You can but you have to be very circumspect.
My experience teaches me that as much as I would like to, as a human being I really would like to help somebody. I had an ex-wife who drove a student and had an accident on the way and became liable. She was doing a very good intentioned thing. Her intentions were good, but the consequences were not good. I, personally, am hesitant to do something that doesn’t fit within my description of things. But let me come back to opening the door…there has been enough that I…
Audience Member:
But my office is inside the reference room. I cannot let students see that I’m eating in the reference room. You’re also talking about survival. If you want to do good for the organization.
Dr. Ravi Kalia
I will not argue with anything that Barbara has said or that you have said. Brian’s presentation was different, and I will definitely capitalize on your suggestion and come and knock at your door. I only express my concerns. I am not going to repeat the statistics. And you have decided that you were acting appropriately. I have some: 95% of the faculty in 1992 was white and it is now down to 83% in ’97. The Asians were 2.2% in ’92. They’re about 4.5% now. African Americans have stayed pretty much stagnant at 4.4%.
So it seems like you were correct in pointing out that there is a very high percentage of Asian faculty becoming tenured, but only in areas where there is a very strong demand and a very small supply. Those areas are applied sciences. That distorts the picture. Now all faculty of color is essentially clustered, and I hear that phase quite a bit. I essentially didn’t join this profession to stand apart from the rest. I joined this profession to part of everyone else, but unfortunately I have realized that I need to stand separately in order to protect my interests. That’s unfortunate.
Most faculty of color are low status and in low ranking positions. Faculty of color are also less likely to attain tenure. And I’m quoting from several reports done nationally. They are all essentially are doing the same things with those studies. Climbing up the academic ladder is not very good. In fact, they are treated differently. Now this is ironic in one sense. If you take the national survey, over 90% of Americans actually support diversity on campuses. There is a huge support for diversity because they feel this is going to be useful. This is ironic in one sense.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
Well if you leave, that’s kind of the same thing. It’s one thing to say that you support diversity in theory, but when it comes down to making a decision, when you’re sitting on that committee, person A, person B, and you look at the criteria and are they equally qualified? That to me, and I’m sure you see it too. You can talk about diversity, but when it really comes to making those decisions, that does not always translate into reality. I live this stuff. Of course I know exactly what you’re saying. But to support that.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
I was supposed to give you a narrative on my personal experience with that. Now there is one other very interesting thing that most of the people are saying is that they’re not included. They have limited opportunities to participate in departmental and institutional decision making. I can attest to that. They are teaching modes as compared to other people. They get token assignments on committees, if they get any assignments on committees. And they have little occasion to accept leadership positions. These are specifically the concerns of the diverted minority groups, and I’m talking about just about everybody and I don’t think that Asians are any exception to that. You can really look up the decision making ladder that exists and you can pretty much see the faces sitting there – the deans, the provosts, the chancellors and decision makers.
Dr. Gloriana Waters:
But what about that department chair, because I’ve been at that level as well.
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
At some point, you begin to get. Even if you’re faculty without going into the administrative department, you will find there is a clustering in the assistant professor level.
Dr. Brian Schwartz:
Let me just say, because I think we’re running out of time, my view on this, and I’ve been working for the Asian American community for years, is that I’ve been shocked at how low on the level we are. On the other hand, I’m also shocked at how ununified the Asian Americans are. They’re not exercising their power. The thing that really surprises me is that there are very weak in Asian scholarly topics, where the Asians could dominate.
In other words, if Asian Culture courses and Asian PhD courses…It’s weak compared to what it should be in terms of the 2nd city in the United States in terms of Asian community. It’s very weak. It’s very weak in scholarship. And there at least you could dominate and I would be pressing very hard to say we would have to strengthen the departments here and here and here. And so it’s not just engineering. It would really be culture. You mentioned someone came in for English. That’s not enough. I would rather hear we brought in a terrific historian on Chinese culture. But then that would be…
Dr. Ravi Kalia:
Yes, but let me finish what I was going to link it to. What I see from my perspective, what I see happening at national level, is very viable at a personal level with my own experience. I came to the CUNY system with a publication record. I’ve done two books after being here. I was denied tenure on false grounds. It took me over a year to resolve that through the union. Even then the arbitrator gave a decision which was an unprecedented decision and they’re turning me back by delaying it by another term. For a year and they are…let me finish. I have a strong emotions about this. Now, the other thing is that I would have imagined that I could put this behind me. I am involved.
The president has given me reasons that since my first strong action, I have not published anything. It had nothing to do with it. He has set up a standard and he has proceeded to violate that same standard himself. I have not been able to meet him. Then I get to see yesterday congratulating me for being a member of the team that won $30 million for the college and that they will be honoring me. And on the other hand I’m accused for not participating enough on the committees and contributing to the college community. These mixed messages are what I’m trying to say. We have real problems. It’s not a national problem.
We have a problem with the union also, which is why they have now…When I first came to them, they said you guys him them to take $30,000 and walk. The union told me take $30,000 and walk because you don’t have a chance at winning this battle. I said, I would rather be. I fought that. Since then, I have become a defacto reference person.
People call me throughout the CUNY system and ask me, is it worth going to the union? Is it worth fighting the CUNY fight? How corrupt is the system? The answer is that it’s a shot in the dark. Yes, the system is what Ronald Reagan said about Russia: it’s an evil empire. It’s an evil empire, not because people are immoral, but because the system has become one which has become so insensical, which is what we were talking about earlier. That nobody wants to really do the thing that will change things because it doesn’t have that in the individual professional book.
Annie Koshi:
Ok, I think we should stop there so we can go to the other sessions. That was very good though. Thank you.
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