Tempest in a Task Force

While mayor lauds critical report on the City University of New York, many politicians and academics call it blatantly political

By Jamilah Evelyn

NEW YORK — The City University of New York system is poised to serve as a national model for urban institutions. That's the good news. The bad news requires a considerably longer sentence; make that, paragraph; make that, report.
The university has " loose and confused" academic standards, an administration that spends resources with "virtually no strategy or planning," and is, in short, "adrift." That, according to a scathing new report released last month.
The report, which has been met here by some equally cutting ripostes from the political and academic communities, comes more than a year after New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani convened a special task force to study the CUNY system. Yale University's former president, Dr. Benno C. Schmidt Jr., headed the task force. Giuliani applauded the task force's 109-page report, but several city council members decried The City University of New York: An Institution Adrift as a thinly disguised attempt be the mayor to wrest control of the 200,000 student system.
"This is a blatant political statement made in the guise of educational reform," says council member Bill Perkins. The mayor, he says, "simply wants to undermine the system and not provide sufficient resources" to improve it.
Even those who agree with some of the task force's findings say that the panel's recommendations will mean nothing if the mayor and New York Gov. George E. Pataki — who also has been highly critical of the CUNY system — don't put their money where their mouths are.
"It's critical that they put some dollars where they have been talking and give the institution some time," says Dr. Joshua Smith, director of the Center for Urban Community College Leadership at New York University. "These kind of changes won't happen overnight."
Smith, also a former community college president and chancellor, adds that the analysis failed to take into account the short shrift CUNY's budget has received over the last several years, which many see as key to the system's numerous problems.