It looks like the administration at CUNY is already catching up to how stupid and rash Karen Steele, an anti-intellectual hater of learning and knowledge, has been in her threats to destroy the English department at Queensborough Community College:
The one big piece of news to emerge in the last few hours is a Sunday afternoon email from Queensborough president Diane Call which attempted to walk back Steele’s original message to the English department.
Where Steele had described the college’s plans to slash faculty as a done deal — job searches were to be terminated “immediately,” she wrote, and the rest of the cuts were described using phrases like “we can’t” and “we will,” with no conditionals — Call now characterizes the threats as “potential consequences,” “possible outcomes,” and “a worst case scenario … we are prepared to work mightily to avoid.”
Call even opened the door to the prospect of a resolution that did not involve capitulation by QCC’s English department to the administration’s initial proposal, saying that she hoped to achieve “a constructive resolution” to the crisis “through continued communication and collaboration with our faculty.”
This means that putting pressure on the administration works. And it works fast. Later tonight, I will find the email of Queensborough president Diane Call and start writing to her, too.
Let’s remember the name “Karen Steele”, people. This person should become a pariah in the academic circles. We have a great opportunity to teach all haughty, condescending, anti-intellectual administrators a lesson here. Karen Steele will not be able to pretend that none of this happened. This outrageous behavior on her part will not be forgotten.
Clarissa's Blog 
I was curious about the unusual push back from facility at the Queensborough Community College with regard to writing skills courses so I looked at the college website and saw:
“Queensborough proudly reflects the uniqueness of the local Queens community—the most diverse county in the United States. We distinguish ourselves from other higher education institutions in America with our diversity of cultures, including nearly equal populations of African Americans, Asians, Caucasians and Latinos. In fact, close to half of our students were born in another country, and 47% speak a language other than English at home.”
Of course, you would cut these classes here! We know how this is going to play out – a strategic withdrawal by the administration, a secret hit list of the faculty ringleaders and an exfoliation of them from the tree of learning followed by a doubling down on the original agenda in two years. There is no equilibrium point just an end result entailing a properly educated elite, job training for the masses and raw material from the bottom for the prison industrial complex.
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You might be interested as well in this aspect of the CUNY Pathways Initiative:
(1) a single semester of foreign language, which is the most that can be required, in the current proposal will not give students more than a passing acquaintance with a language;
(2) foreign language courses do not belong in the proposed core curriculum because a semester of language study is not a study of World Cultures;
(3) since it is envisioned that the one semester of foreign language will be a choice among several other kinds of courses, the majority of students are likely not to have the experience of studying a language in college
http://carceralnation.com/2012/09/17/queensborough-bloodbath/
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The rest of the faculty at CUNY chose to sit there quivering like scared little bunnies, so now they have to live with the consequences. When they lose tenure and see their departments disbanded, I will only say, good riddance. But the faculty at QCC made the brave choice to oppose the administrators, which is why I stand in solidarity with them. You cannot help people who are too weak and pathetic to try to help themselves. All those losers who accepted Pathways will soon get precisely what they subscribed to.
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Excellent attitude. I’ve always thought the same about those who choose not to fight.
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I see that this situation has made it to the New York Times.
Yelling does work sometimes.
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“Dr. Call said Dr. Steele’s original e-mail was not an ultimatum, but members of the department saw it differently. “I understood it as a threat,” Professor Humphries said. “As saying you have the right to vote however way you feel as long as it’s what we tell you. Honestly, I felt a little like I was being asked to vote for Raul Castro or Ahmedinijad.”
In Dr. Steele’s follow-up e-mail Monday, she said she regretted the earlier message, “primarily because it was needlessly hurtful to members of the English department and to other faculty as well.”
“It was an e-mail sent in haste, out of an over-dramatized fear of the possible impact on the department,” she said. Dr. Steele said that the college would work to make sure faculty members had “plenty of classes to teach.””
– What a disgusting hypocrite. She was fearing for the department that she herself was planning to destroy. And she would have destroyed it hadn’t people started raising a stink. I’m horrified at such people. Steele is a complete sell-out. She makes me want to barf.
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I kind of like that department, I find. If we close universities here, perhaps I shall apply to it. Or, actually, for Steele’s job — I would be very good at it and the professors would like me, although the Regents might not.
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I think you would rock at an administrative position. I’d suck completely but you would be amazing.
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I ought to just start applying. I don’t have the right resumé for it and they would never give me such a position here because they know I am AAUP and worse, but I ought to just start brazenly applying.
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On the subject of AAUP, “AAUP’s Robert Kreiser states,”Post-tenure review should be for the purposes of assisting faculty members in improving their performance. But the policy that has been proposed would effectively eviscerate tenure as it’s understood at most institutions of higher learning.” Read the story “Faculty-Review Proposal at Saint Louis U. Would ‘Eviscerate Tenure,’ AAUP Says.””
That’s exactly what I’m saying!
You should definitely start applying. Why should idiots have such jobs and not good people who will defend the rights of educators?
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I have figured out what the Pathways program really must intend, via a small sentence in this article. http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/Bridging-Differences/2012/03/the_pattern_on_the_rug.html
The reason for the move to uniform core curricula across systems is so that for profit outfits can compete to give these courses and have a guarantee ahead of time that their credit will transfer.
That is why this Steele individual was so willing to announce firing the English department — the plan was to outsource that course, anyway. After all, it could be taught online from Mumbai. Seriously.
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This Steele creature turns out to be even more disgusting than I imagined.
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It’s not Steele — she is just a messenger, although complicit. The plan comes from above. We have it here, too. I only just understood it. I wonder how many others do, and are just not saying.
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