Remarks at the Stated Meeting of the Faculty

14 February 2006

As you came in, you saw a list of names and photographs of faces. That's our new faculty, which I will speak about in a moment. But first, I want to bring you up to date, as is my custom, on budget and enrollment -and on the projects we are undertaking this spring.

A month ago, the Governor released his proposed budget for the coming year. For the senior colleges, it proposes an allocation of $1.4 billion. That is, as the Chancellor says, "as strong a budget recommendation as we've seen in many years." Last year at this time, we faced a shortfall of $70 million. This year we start with about $62 million more than last year, intended to cover mandatory cost increases and part of what is known as the CUNY Compact.

The Compact represents a new approach to financing the University. It's an investment program supported by five partners -- the State, by means of additional funding; the University, by means of greater efficiencies and a redeployment of existing resources; the colleges, by means of increased enrollments; the students, by means of a modest and predictable tuition increase ($120 a year); and our alumni, by means of private philanthropy. Each partner contributes twenty cents toward each dollar's worth of services.

The share we derive from the Compact is estimated to be over two million. How will we spend it? Last fall, in consultation with faculty and students, my colleagues and I decided to direct the investment dollars to hiring new faculty, adding advisers and counselors, and expanding and supplementing various students services.

The news is not all good. Of the $62 million added to the CUNY budget, only $16 million comes in the form of State aid, $46 million is supposed to be tuition revenue. Effectively, $300 has been added to the $4,000 students pay now: more than double what the University proposed.

Financial aid does not look good either. The State is to pay out $800 million in financial aid to 370,000 college students. But by our calculations, that's about $190 million short of what higher education in New York needs. The state arrived at its lower figure by proposing changes in eligibility -- students may be required to carry 15 credits per semester and they may have to meet higher standards of academic progress. In some form or other, all this would affect over half of the almost 6,000 TAP recipients at the College.

This is an election year, and we know that election years yield benefits, such as on-time budgets, that we don't usually see. Already, the State Assembly has proposed to reject all tuition hikes, to fund the entire Compact, and to add needed funds to construction projects. We need to press our legislators to make good on these proposals. It's easy to do, via the Web, and I ask you again to help. Just this morning, I sent out the necessary information to the college community on e-mail.

Given the importance of tuition revenue, enrollment is crucial. As of this morning, enrollment for the spring is at 14,780 -- 11,285 undergraduates and 3,495 graduate students. We're up in undergraduates -- new, returning, and transfer students -- but down in the graduate division (some 7%), a decline that's also true at other colleges and that we need to work to correct. More serious, we will not meet our target figure of total enrollment, which of course determines the revenue we will generate.

That means we must be prudent this spring. While the budget outlook is not as dire as it was a few months ago, we need to be careful with our purchases and expenditures. Still, I remain optimistic that with your help, we will persevere with grace and good will.

This spring, our energies will be directed to several major projects, some of them programmatic, some in construction, all set out in the strategic plan we adopted five years ago.

Among the most important projects is the Core Curriculum. For much of the academic year, committees charged by Faculty Council have been working on the revised curriculum that emerged from faculty deliberations over the last few years. New courses have been developed; old courses have been revised; provisions are being made for students who have started with the old Core and are now facing the new. Important decisions are pending to enable us to implement the new curriculum this fall. We look forward to a curriculum that is as challenging and rigorous as we can make it; we owe our students no less. Many of you have worked diligently on this project, and I thank you.

We expect to break ground for the West Quad in April. You will see the excavation for the new building. Top soil from the excavation will be used to lay an expanse of lawn on the new quadrangle. The Roosevelt facade will be restored, and James will get a facade for the first time.

We will engage architects to do feasibility studies for our next major project -- a science complex consisting of Roosevelt and Ingersoll -- and for a Performing Arts Center. These studies will give us firm information on what exactly can be housed in these buildings, how they would be designed, and what it will cost. The architects will draw on ideas from the science and the arts faculties, so that what we build in fact reflects what we need for the future.

Among other projects: The modernization of the upper floors of the Student Center will begin this summer. The roof on James Hall will be replaced. Both these projects will be completed by next year. And we will continue to upgrade classrooms, offices, and public spaces we all know are long overdue.

I'm determined to proceed with our construction and renovation projects so as to make the campus ever more conducive to teaching and learning. We must make up for years of neglect, and we must assure a high quality of life in the setting where we work each day.

Also this spring, we will complete work on the strategic plan that will guide our decisions over the next five years. Two months ago, an initial draft was circulated for comment to department chairs and members of the college community who had contributed to the planning process. Comments and suggestions are now being incorporated into a revised draft, which will be distributed widely in a few weeks. Two town hall meetings will be scheduled in March -- one during the day and the other in the early evening -- to give us an opportunity to discuss the draft. Copies will also be available in the Library and posted on the Web. A final version will, I hope, be issued before the end of the semester. You will get specific information about all this shortly.

You will recall that one of our strategic goals these past years has been to maintain and enhance academic quality, particularly by strengthening and rebuilding our faculty. My commitment to hiring has yielded a splendid cohort of new faculty, whose names you saw on the screen behind me as you came in.

Which brings me to the topic I am eager to discuss: all of you.

I start with data.

Since fall 2000, Brooklyn College has added 156 new members to the faculty, making up for retirements in those years and bringing our total to 516. Put differently, about 30% of our faculty is new.

They come from every discipline; are in every division and every department; bring new ideas and new energies, strong scholarly and artistic interests; and have a commitment to teaching and to mentoring students.

The new faculty, in keeping with established tradition, has superb credentials. They received degrees from Harvard, Oxford, and Yale; taught at some of the best universities; won national awards such as the Pulitzer, Obie, Guggenheim, and Grammy. They come with publications from prestigious presses, significant research grants, solo art exhibitions, premieres of musical compositions. They hail from Europe, the Far East and India, from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.

Forty-three percent are women [Photo]. That compares with 39% of the entire faculty.

Twenty-seven percent are people of color. [Photo] That compares with 19% of the entire faculty.

The new faculty is also -- dare I say it -- younger. [Photo] That changes the faculty age structure, filling in the "missing middle," our legacy from the lean decades of the recent past. Forty-seven percent of the faculty today is between the ages of forty and sixty.

Correspondingly, [Photo] and commensurate with experience, the new faculty has been appointed at different ranks.

Consider some that were appointed as full professors.

A computer scientist who was trained in Turkey and in England, taught there and in this country, was employed in private industry as a researcher, holds various patents, helped develop international standards for networks and security, and organized international conferences on these subjects.

A member of the English department, educated at Yale and Stanford and with teaching experience at NYU and Columbia, a columnist for a national opinion journal, and author of several bestsellers.

An artist, renowned as a painter, muralist, graphic artist, illustrator, writer, and teacher, honored at Columbia with a presidential award for excellence in teaching, with more than a hundred solo exhibitions and works displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others.

And consider some who are launching their careers at Brooklyn College.

A member of the Conservatory of Music who, this spring, will have his Carnegie Hall debut conducting the New England Symphony Orchestra in a performance of Gabriel Faure's Requiem, with singers from throughout the country.

A biologist, trained in Germany and at Berkeley, at work on developing new strains of algae that can more efficiently absorb carbon dioxide from industrial smokestacks and, by combining insights drawn from genetics, biochemistry, and biotechnology, can make renewable energy production economically feasible, supported by research grants from the United States Department of Energy.

A classicist, educated at Oxford, where she taught and participated in a major research project with the Ashmolean Museum, who spent last summer in Turkey doing research and is about to see her first book published by the Oxford University Press.

Will all the new faculty who have joined us since fall 2000 please stand so that you may be recognized.

We welcome you into the college community. Taking up a suggestion by some of your colleagues, we intend, by fall, to distribute a booklet with photographs because we want to make sure that we recognize you as our paths cross on campus.

Let me draw particular attention to our new faculty's interest, in keeping with college tradition, in collaboration within and across disciplines. By collaborating, they leverage individual interests into collective interests, open the way into new fields, often using new technologies, and create fresh approaches.

Of a number of examples, let me cite four: the Performance and Interactive Media Arts program; the Science, Technology, and Research High School; the cognitive science colloquium; and the robotics group.

Collaboration is common among professional artists, who cross the boundaries between fine art and commercial art, between art and science. Computer technologies enable artists to create new art forms and embark on new art disciplines. The program in Performance and Interactive Media Arts (PIMA) is special because it trains its students to collaborate. [Photo] Students gain practical experience in different disciplines and techniques, with particular emphasis on computer technology, and are trained to conceptualize and produce collaborative, cross-disciplinary artworks in a performance setting. [Photo]

Not only does PIMA cut across disciplines, it also connects with another collaborative venture, that in robotics. Together, they have drawn funding from the National Science Foundation for Shared facilities, supplementing what PIMA has brought in on its own. We look forward to making PIMA a new MFA program.

PIMA brings together members of the departments of Television and Radio, [Photo] Film, Art, and Theater, and of the Conservatory of Music.

Three years ago, Brooklyn College and the City's Department of Education joined together to establish a new high school [Photo] -- the Science, Technology, and Research High School (STAR). Located in historic Erasmus Hall a short distance from here and funded, in part, by a substantial grant from the Gates Foundation, STAR is a highly competitive, science- and technology-centered college preparatory high school. [Photo]

Members of our faculty collaborate with teachers there to create an interdisciplinary curriculum. Once a week, students come to campus to take college classes. They also take specially designed seminars, taught by our faculty, on such topics as aquatic life, ecology, 3D modeling, human anatomy, and evolutionary biology. Last summer, [Photo] Arthur Bankoff took some twenty of these students to excavate the foundations of a private academy built in 1787 on the grounds of their present school.

This whole initiative is part of an effort to draw more students into the sciences, an effort that benefits also from our various federally-funded science education programs and a strong focus in science and math in the School of Education. It fits very well into our plans for the new science complex, mentioned earlier.

The faculty [Photo] involved come from the departments of Anthropology and Archaeology, Chemistry, Geology, English, Computer and Information Science, Mathematics, [Photo] Physical Education and Exercise Science, the School of Education, the Library, and the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center.

The cognitive science colloquium, [Photo] founded and coordinated by members of the departments of Computer and Information Science, Philosophy, and Psychology, [Photo] convenes experts in artificial intelligence, linguistics, cognitive psychology, and philosophy of mind, to discuss how the mind works and whether such processes can be replicated by computer. They mostly just talk but what they talk about is fascinating. [Photo] How does our environment affect mental processes? How do our social and cultural experiences affect our ability and willingness to explore? What role does biology play?

The Robotics group, which brings together members of the departments of Computer and Information Science [Photo] and of Psychology, wants to make robots that perform complex tasks, as in medicine and in emergency rescue, or robots that replicate human actions, in order to explore specific problems. [Photo] This program too fits into the planning we're doing for the new science complex.

Frank Grasso, for example, has been working on a flexible robot arm modeled on the octopus, which can "feel" its way through rubble and rescue victims of earthquakes and other disasters. [Photo]

How many of you knew that Brooklyn College placed fourth last year in the U.S. Open RoboCup Competition? Members of our faculty have been programming small robot dogs to work as a team and play soccer. [Photo] Their goal is to create a team of robots that can play against a team of human beings in the 2050 World Cup Competition.

We have arrived at the subject of competition and awards, and therefore at the subject of honors and awards won by members of the college community since last we met.

Let's start with students:

We have two Gates Millenium Scholars: Mamunur Rahman, '08, and Ayomide Bomide, '09, both of whom are preparing for careers in medicine. The Millenium Scholars Program supports undergraduate students of color across the country, helping them through college and graduate school.

A freshman, Olga Karmansky, a gymnast, won the 2005 Pan American Rhythmic Gymnastic Championship and the 2005 VISA National Championship.

We recognize and acknowledge members of the faculty who have won outside honors. Let us hold our applause until I've named everyone.

Roni Natov, English, received the 2005 Award for Outstanding Research at the Congress of the International Research Society for Children's Literature for her book The Poetics of Childhood, which appeared in 2003.

Margaret King, History, shared with Diana Robin the Modern Language Association's Scaglione Prize for translation of a scholarly study of literature, for their translation of Isotta Nogarola's Complete Writings.

Elizabeth Murray, Art, had a retrospective exhibit of her work on display at the Museum of Modern Art. The broadest survey of her work to date, it included more than seventy paintings and works on paper spanning more than 40 years.

Shlomo Silman, Presidential Professor of Speech Communications Arts and Sciences, together with Dr. David Arick, invented and went on the market with an ingenious, non-invasive device for treating hearing loss in children, which, hitherto, had to be remedied by surgery.

Major new grants have been awarded to:

Terry Dowd (Chemistry)
Ronald Eckhardt (Biology)
Dean Louise Hainline (Graduate Division)
Carol Korn-Bursztyn (School of Education)
Gertrud Lenzer (Children's Studies)
Virginia Sanchez Korrol (Puerto Rican and Latino Studies)
Nancy Romer and Diane Reiser (Brooklyn College Community Partnership).

You deserve our applause.

I am proud to recognize members of the faculty who have been appointed to named professorships. Please stand when I call your name and remain standing. Let us again hold our applause until all the names have been called.

Broeklundian Professor: Margaret King (History), Viraht Sahni (Physics), and Robert Viscusi (English and Wolfe Institute)

Tow Professor: Ray Gavin (Biology) and Craig Williams (Classics).

Jacques Edward Levy Professor in Analytical Chemistry: Malgorzata Ciszkowska (Chemistry)

Levy-Kosminsky Professor in Physical Chemistry: Richard Magliozzo (Chemistry)

Please welcome them to the ranks of those who hold or have held these prestigious titles. They deserve our applause.

Are there questions? If not, the Stated Meeting stands adjourned.