President's Cabinet Meeting Minutes - June 13, 2022

City College President’s Cabinet Meeting Minutes

June 13, 2022

Limited In-Person and Via Zoom Meeting

Attendees 

• Anthony Achille, Executive Director, Division of Government, Community & Cultural Affairs
• Doris Cintron, Senior Associate Provost
• Diana Cuozzo, Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Coordinator
• Teresa Flemming, Executive Associate to the President
• Carmen Green, Dean, CUNY School of Medicine
• Marta Gutman, Dean, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
• Ken Ihrer, Vice President of Operations and Coronavirus Coordinator
• David Jeruzalmi, Chairman, The Faculty Senate
• Lucas Koehler, CFO and Senior Finance Director, Foundations for City College
• Felix Lam, Vice President, Finance and Administration
• Edwin Lamboy, Dean, School of Education
• Tony Liss, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
• Celia Lloyd, Vice President, Student Affairs and Enrollment Management
• Lon Mendelsohn, Interim Chief Librarian
• Juan Carlos Mercado, Dean of Interdisciplinary Studies at CWE & Professional Continuing Studies
• Renata Miller, Interim Dean, Division of Humanities and the Arts
• Pat Morena, Executive Director of Public Safety
• Dee Dee Mozeleski, Senior Advisor to the President and VP & Executive Director, Office of Institutional Advancement, Communications and External Relations and The Foundation for City College
• Paul Occhiogrosso, Executive Counsel to the President
• Susan Perkins, Dean, Division of Science
• Andrew Rich, Dean, The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership
• Sherri Rings, Director of SEEK
• Teresa Scala, Special Projects Administrator, Office of the Provost
• Ruth Stark, Chairperson, Faculty Senate Committee on Personnel Matters
• Mary Ruth Strzeszewski, Associate Provost and Chair, CCNY Graduate Constituent Council
• Johanna Urena, Project Manager, Student Affairs and Enrollment Management
• Rose Marie Wesson, Associate Provost for Research
• Nikisha Williams, Executive Director, Office of Institutional Research
• Andrew L. Wooten, Senior Director of Innovation Management and Business Development

Absent:

• Alex Couzis, Dean, Grove School of Engineering
• David Robinson, Assistant Vice President, Office of Facilities Management

President Boudreau opened the meeting at 10:00 AM and called the meeting to order.

Updates and Announcements

President Boudreau shared information from his recent COPs meeting. He stated there was a significant allocation of money to hire new faculty lines in this year’s budget amounting close to $52 million. Those monies will be divided between hiring lecturers and hiring tenure track faculty lines.  The $52 million will also aid for the lecturers that were being searched for this year. President Boudreau stated this has authorized the search of 250 lecturers across the system. The lecturer lines are being allocated in $45,000 increments to represent the difference between adjunct salaries to teach nine courses and what it would cost for a lecturer.  He also stated that this is not an addition of teacher’s resources, it’s an addition of full-time faculty engagement with students.  Therefore, the 225 lines yet to be allocated will be lecturer lines.

President Boudreau mentioned that he asked CUNY specifically before the lines are allocated for an explicit and complete accounting for what the formula is going to be for the allocation. He stated last year the allocation was to get “the most bang for the bucks” in terms of converting contact with students from part-time to full time; if you had more full-time faculty, contact with students, you would get less of these lines.  He stated looking at the PMP Databook from last year, the allocations didn’t reflect those numbers although we do have more contact than others.

President Boudreau also mentioned that the other 125 positions will be allocated in four areas in response to an RFP. He stated CUNY is going to make an RFP for what we do in line with Health and Life Sciences, data including cybersecurity, climate change and ethnic studies.

President Boudreau announced that we were awarded the Life Sciences grant from EDC. He stated the college will begin an 18-month process to build out one floor of the Taystee Building specifically to develop a facility to commercialize innovation in the life sciences. President Boudreau stated that that can either be innovation where the focus will be on helping faculty and graduate students and postdocs on this campus do that work.  He stated, the plan is for the college to capture some of the revenue from successful commercialization as part of our revenue stream.  He also stated it will primarily begin as a real estate transaction where we're providing facilities but also eventually product development teams for people who want to use life sciences laboratories; there is enough space for over 30 laboratories in that area.  President Boudreau congratulated Andrew Wooten, Principal Author, Jeff Garanich and VP Mozeleski who also worked on this.

President Boudreau stated the news about the Life Sciences Grant is embargoed and not to be shared at this time. The grant was made by the EDC in the Mayor’s office; they will be doing a series of announcements probably at the end of June.

President Boudreau announced that the Rangel Project is now funded and we received $1.5M from the Federal government this year and a match from the governor’s office.  He also stated Councilman Espaillat’s office invited us to put in a $2.5M earmark for next year:  His promise that this would be continuous funding is being fulfilled.  President Boudreau stated that we are currently in the middle of the recruiting process for the first class which will be taught at the end of June.

President Boudreau informed the Cabinet that he will be reorganizing the Office of Government and Community Affairs. He stated after the retirement of Vice President Karen Witherspoon he has decided not to replace her, instead he will consolidate that office into the Office of Institutional Advancement and Communications.

President Boudreau also mentioned that he is working with a search firm to hire a Chief Operating Officer.  The position has been posted for a thirty-day search and am hoping to start the interview process at the end of June/early July in hopes of having the position filled at the beginning of the fall semester.

President Boudreau invited Dean Andrew Rich to speak about his Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice Institute.  Dean Rich shared that the Institute was formally approved by CUNY in March and is up and running.  He also shared that the Institute is about training early and mid-career social justice leaders and our students to be prepared to affect change; particularly here in the United States on the wide range of policy movement-based issues that matter.

VP Lam announced the hire of Ms. Kisha Shrouder as the new Executive Director of Human Resources.  He stated she has more than 20 years of experience in Human resources and Human Resources Management.

VP Lam also gave an update on the Finance Task Force. He stated that the Task Force is still reviewing the “All Funds Report” to get a better understanding of all the funds available to the college.

President Boudreau spoke about “Harlem Week” initiatives.  He stated the college has gotten more involved each year and that it's an important way to showcase what we have on campus and strengthen relationships with communities.  President Boudreau stated the events that would be important to the college; The Hackathon, The Percy Sutton 5K Run that will go through the campus and most importantly, the Walk Against Gun Violence.  In addition, he stated there will be a career fair in the Great Hall, and that this would be a great place for us to recruit for the Rangel Initiative, but also a place where academic departments and programs can put their information out.

In conclusion of the updates, President Boudreau spoke about the campaign.  He stated at the Gala we announced our campaign to $1B.  He then asked VP Mozeleski to give an update on the campaign.  VP Mozeleski stated they are working on updating the website so that the campaign FAQs are listed.  She also stated there are four searches in progress, three of these positions are specific to fundraising.

President Boudreau began the discussion on OKRs and Strategic Planning.  He mentioned that he’d spent some time going through the PMP goals we set for ourselves and received data from Provost Liss and VP Lloyd. He stated, he found that we are doing well on hitting the marks we set for ourselves with the OKRs, bearing in mind that some of the things we said we were going to do would be over a three-year period.  President Boudreau reminded the Cabinet that over the three-year period, we were going to bring our enrollment numbers up, we were going to increase the rate at which our students passed the basic math class and that we wanted to redress what had been a small slide in things like retention and graduation rates between African American, Latino and White students.  He stated that small slide of 1% - 2% this year was bigger; it was an 8% - 9% difference than white students, where white students were doing better than students of color. President Boudreau stated these were long-term goals.  He also stated the college “hit most of its marks” on the short-term goals.

President Boudreau informed the Cabinet that by June 20th he has to write a report to the Chancellor on our accomplishments against the goals we set for ourselves. He also stated by the end of September/early October is when he needs participation as we set our PMP goals for next year.  As a way of setting the stage, President Boudreau reminded the Cabinet that the Strategic Plan gives us five-year goals and that we are getting to the end of our Strategic Plan, which expires in 2024.  He stated, in the fall, we will be setting up a strategic planning process and getting that under way.

President Boudreau stated he would like our strategic planning process to be 1 - 1 ½ semesters rather than a couple of years.  He then stated within the five-year goal, the PMP sets chunks of things we want to accomplish within the year.  He expressed dissatisfaction with the extent to which our PMP goals are connected to the strategic plan.  He stated he would like a much more tightened coordination.  He then went on to mention OKRs are our implementing strategies and we will be doing OKRs on a semestral basis rather than quarterly or monthly. We’ll set OKRs for the fall and the spring and that’s how we’ll set PMP goals or how we at lower levels develop other plans that support, augment, contribute to what the major planning goals of the college are.

President Boudreau informed the Cabinet that at the August Cabinet meeting, he will begin a PMP conversation where we will start talking about specific goals that we would like to hit for next year.  He stated he will take notes from that conversation and write a draft PMP for the September meeting, then based on that meeting, he will submit PMP letters.  He also stated he feels a lot of the PMP will pick up from the PMP letter he wrote this year, therefore, if we set a three-year goal for changing recruitment in area schools or for changing graduation rates, then next year we should be figuring out what the next step is on that.

President Boudreau stated, sometimes we set a goal(s) on campus and then decide the goal isn’t worth pursuing.  He feels we should be saying three things to ourselves:

• It was a bad idea, so we should take it off our planning agenda.
• It’s a good idea, but we’re not there yet. So, it’s not next year’s PMP or maybe not the next year or three years.
• We should start working on it.

President Boudreau went through the list of things from the strategic plan that hasn’t come up in our plan.

Office of Undergraduate Research. 

(Associate Provost Wesson provided President Boudreau with a list of all the different opportunities we have across campus for undergraduate research).  In the Strategic Plan, Undergraduate Research and Experiential Learning are put together.

President Boudreau asked:  Is it time to start thinking about consolidating and centrally managing opportunities for undergraduate research? If so, to what end?

President Boudreau stated we currently have a list of unfair research programs.  He also stated that we don’t have a head count of how many students are involved in research programs and what the output might be and what the other metrics might be.  President Boudreau went on to state that figuring out what we want to do with undergraduate research is a good idea and that maybe next year's goal is to establish a baseline for some of the metrics.  He stated this is something we will come back to.

Career and Professional Development

President Boudreau stated we have all types of open-ended statements about what we want to do with Career and Professional Development.  He stated we scored pretty high with internships and paid internships compared to other CUNY campuses.  He stated that we “never cracked the nut” about the coordination of our internship program.  He asked, “Do we have five different programs coming to the same internship source? Are we sure we’re ensuring quality consistency across the internships?” “Is it time for us to build the capacity to track and standardize and assess internship input?”

President Boudreau stated this is a big priority, particularly as the definition of what a successful institution does has extended to career success after graduation.  President Boudreau stated we have to get more active in the field of managing, planning and strengthening our internship program.

One Stop

President Boudreau mentioned that he has been in conversation with VP Lloyd and Johanna Kucharski, Director of Admissions regarding One Stop which has been on the agenda for a long time.  He stated we are at a place where we won’t move forward until we have a new physical facility; this will be on the agenda for next year’s PMP.

President Boudreau continued stating that there is a lot of language that is vague around the role of entrepreneurship, it largely centers around the Zahn Center. He stated we’ve established a fair number of new things between then and now; the Life Sciences Grant, the Blackstone project, an emerging conversation around what has to happen on the curricular side of things, training students for internships, an Innovation Fund, the Maker Space Network. He stated figuring out how these things get pulled together and managed and embedded more broadly and deeply across the departments and schools make sense.

President Boudreau mentioned that there is a lot of language across the strategic plan about the college having to implement a communication strategy, so that people are better informed.  He stated it’s time to look at communications and see what we are lacking and what we need to do for next year.

President Boudreau stated there is a generalizable statement in the Strategic Plan saying we should expand our graduate education, primarily masters.  It shows up in our plan for stabilizing the finances of the college.  He stated, it’s time to think about this again to see where we are and identify the real problem.

Regarding the Four semester schedule and Degree Maps, these were a goal in the Strategic Plan.  President Boudreau stated he would like to see the four-semester schedule happen.  He understands there are some obstacles, but believes with better data and research about how many students we have and what classes they need, it can be done.

Lastly, President Boudreau stated an effort to investigate by some calculus what programs need and can grow if they have more resources and what programs can be downscaled or held steady.  President Boudreau shared that we are making an investment this year in the mental health counseling graduate program. The program had been capped at sixty students, however, with the investment of a couple of lines, the number of students in that program will grow so that we will make more money in tuition than we’ll invest in additional resources for the program.  He went on to say that bringing that kind of calculus to the campus and looking at where we should invest and why we think the program can grow with some investment is important.  President Boudreau doesn’t think it’s the work of one year.

President Boudreau informed the Cabinet that when we meet in August, he expects to have for the Cabinets consideration a kind of roughed out map of where these various issues fit together in conjunction with things, we said we would do for last year that we are halfway done with or in the process of doing, he stated this will allow us to rough out what our PMP process may look like.  He also stated we’ll have August to rough it out and he will write in September to validate what he’s written.  He stated it will be submitted late September or early October and then we will immediately start taking that conversation and mobilizing it into the planning and the beginning stages of the strategic planning operation.

Following President Boudreau’s discussion on the Strategic Plan, Presentations on Orientation and Admissions/Recruitment were given by Johanna Kucharski, Director of Admissions, Naomi Nwosu-Steward, Assistant VP of Enrollment Management and Celia Lloyd, VP of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management.

There were no Peer Introductions at this meeting.

Dean Marta Gutman and Interim Chief Librarian Lon Mendelsohn will share something about themselves at the August 29th Cabinet meeting.

The meeting adjourned at 12:02 pm.