Dear Commons Community,

Manfred Phillip (Chemistry) has sent along the following email asking for our support in signing a petition started by the PSC to repeal CUNY’s  Pathways proposal.

Tony

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Dear Fellow Members of CUNY’s Doctoral Faculties,

Below is a message from PSC President Barbara Bowen about a petition drive against Pathways. I strongly urge you to look at the petition and, if you agree with it, sign it. I signed it this afternoon. It is an important way to deal with the Pathways issue. Click on the link to the on-line petition. Over 1000 have signed so far. After you sign, please, if you have no conflicting classes to teach, come to the Town Hall meeting on Pathways. That is at 6:00-8:30 pm on Thursday, March 8, at the Community Church of New York, 40 East 35th Street (Between Park and Madison Avenues).

This is a critical time for the university. Please show your support for CUNY in this tangible way.

All the best,

Manfred Philipp

(Biochemistry and Chemistry Doctoral Programs)

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Dear Colleague,

I invite you to sign the PSC petition to repeal Pathways. Sign by Thursday night to increase our strength for the Town Hall Meeting. The petition calls on the CUNY Trustees to repeal the Pathways resolution at their next meeting and replace it with a new planning process on student transfer—a process that upholds shared governance and academic freedom, and that produces a curriculum with academic integrity. Add your voice by signing the petition today.

Pathways is not inevitable. The other PSC officers and I have spent the last three weeks visiting the different CUNY campuses, and everywhere the story is the same: faculty are putting enormous effort into salvaging some intellectual integrity for Pathways even though they are convinced that the structure is wrong. There is an alternative. We do not have to be disempowered: if we act together we have the power to demand what’s right for CUNY.

How can we create that power? The clearest way to dispel 80^th Street’s myth of near-universal faculty support for Pathways is to come to the Town Hall Meeting on Thursday night and add your name to the petition. The text of the petition draws on the scores of resolutions against Pathways already passed; all faculty and professional staff represented by the PSC are invited to sign

(I have been asked about petitions for students and petitions that could be signed by scholars outside CUNY; both are possible in the future, but the current petition is designed just for faculty and professional staff.)

Sign now, and then confirm that you will come to the Town Hall Meeting by signing up here. We need to listen and speak to each other on Thursday night; we need to show by our numbers how serious we are about an alternative to Pathways. This may be our best chance to organize on Pathways; don’t miss it: