President’s Cabinet Meeting Minutes - September 8, 2020

Via Zoom Meeting

Agenda

1. Re-Opening
2. Winter Session Recruitment
   • Core Curriculum
   • Special Classes
   • Continuing Education
3. Enrollment Updates
4. Emsi Alumni Assessment Modeling Project
5. PMP Report 2020
6. Correlation between Tuition Targets and Budget Deficit

Attendees

• Alex Couzis, Interim Dean, Grove School of Engineering
• Diana Cuozzo, Chief Diversity Officer and Title IX Coordinator
• Daisy Dominquez, Interim Chief Librarian
• Teresa Flemming, Executive Associate to the President
• Erica Friedman, Interim Dean of the CUNY School of Medicine
• Ken Ihrer, Vice President of Operations and Coronavirus Coordinator
• David Jeruzalmi, Chair, The Faculty Senate
• Erec Koch, Dean, Division of Humanities and the Arts
• Felix Lam, Vice President, Finance and Administration
• Edwin Lamboy, Interim Dean, School of Education
• Tony Liss, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs
• Celia Lloyd, Vice President of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management
• Lesley Lokko, Dean, Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
• Juan Carlos Mercado, Dean, Division of Interdisciplinary Studies at CWE
• Pat Morena, Executive Director of Public Safety
• Dee Dee Mozeleski, Senior Advisor to the President and VP, Office of Institutional Advancement and Communications
• Geraldine Murphy, Director of the Honors Center
• 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
• David Robinson, Assistant Vice President, Office of Facilities Management
• Teresa Scala, Special Projects Administrator – Office of the Provost
• Mary Ruth Strzeszewski, Associate Provost and Chair, CCNY Graduate Constituent Council
• Johanna Urena, Special Project Manager for Presidential Initiatives, Office of the President
• Rose Marie Wesson, Interim Associate Provost for Research
• Karen Witherspoon, Vice President, Division of Government, Community & Cultural Affairs

Absent

• Rajan Menon, Chair, Committee on Personnel Matters

President Boudreau opened the meeting by welcoming Daisy Dominquez to Cabinet as the new Interim Chief Librarian after the retirement of Charles Stewart.  He reminded Cabinet that the state budget has not been finalized and therefore, we are still on a month-to-month system of having our budget allocated to us from CUNY.  We are still being advised to prepare for a 10% budget cut and the City just announced their budget cut is 9%, these numbers are on top of any structural budget deficits schools are already facing.  President Boudreau has made $.5 M available to shore up adjunct instruction, course delivery and, and encourages all academic units to look at classes that were being offered in a way that is economically efficient, and important for degree completion for our students. Most of the funds will be preserved for the winter and spring session.

Re-Opening

We are a few days into being reopened. President Boudreau did a walkthrough last week to ensure that we are adhering to the plans designed by the campus and CUNY and will be asking stakeholders to set up a tabletop exercise to run through potential emergency scenarios to fine-tune how we respond as a campus. Even with the 25% return of some essential staff and faculty categories, we are still encouraging people to continue their work from home routines. Supervisors should careful think about who is identified as ‘essential’ and know that the senior administration will be asking for justifications for any changes that bring more people back to campus.

Dean Rich stated that they’ve had additional request over the weekend from students who don’t have a safe place to take classes and feel they cannot study.  What is the state of thinking on this and is there a timeline for when the campus will have safe spaces available for students to gather.  

Vice President stated that students who don’t have technology can go into the tech center, we have about 20 spaces open that are marked off for social distancing. Provost Liss and Vice President Ihrer have discussed the potential of opening up the large lecture hall in the Marshak building for students who have their own laptops to go there and use WiFi to do their work.  They are discussing capacity levels that will allow us to adhere to mandated social distancing guidelines. They are set up for large classes, so going with a 25% occupancy rate will allow several people.  The campus will need to determine how to ensure that while students are in the space, social distancing is maintained and that only students studying are allowed in the rooms.

President Boudreau would like the Deans to pay attention on what the response rate is to these offers He stated, each time a space is open on campus, more staff has to be brought on to manage spaces, which can be dangerous as the virus is still prevalent. We should rely on Chairs, Deans and faculty to keep us posted on the demand.  The same message should be passed on to our students that has been passed on to faculty and staff; that preference and necessity are different things.   Every person who comes to campus raises the level of risk.

The re-opening plan is posted on the web, it includes rules, regulations and expectations around spaces (i.e. tech center, Food service space and library).

***President Boudreau moved the PMP Report 2020 down the agenda because it requires breakout sessions.

Winter Session Recruitment

• Core Curriculum – A real push for enrollment needs to be made; we are down about 4.5%, however, not across the board.  Some programs are up, some are down drastically and there was an due to an unfortunate drop in graduate enrollment in the School of Education due to declines in New York City grants and Teaching Fellows; this is a periodic fluxuation. This makes us an outlier amongst Senior CUNY campuses. Every percentage translates to about a $1M budget hole. We need to try to recover what we lost in the spring semester.  One way to remedy it is by making the winter session a real serious effort.  One way to elevate a teaching burden is to teach in the winter session, we need to start messaging, recruiting and talking to faculty about what it would look like to put together a dynamic  schedule and begin to advertise that schedule outside of CCNY since everyone will be online in the spring.
• Special Classes/Continuing Education – President Boudreau would like departments to develop a comprehensive waiting list of all students who could not get into a class, this would be useful data particularly since money has been made available to invest in expanding sections from philanthropy.

Enrollment Update

Associate Provost Strzeszewski stated she is looking at graduate enrollment.  Winter enrollment has been small for a graduate students, so the numbers can only go up.  There is not much difference between enrollment and revenue.
President Boudreau re-capped the discussion thus far asking everyone to:

• Work on a system that would give us as early as possible the most comprehensive waiting list that you can deliver to allow us with time to open up sections.
• Think about ways to put our best teachers in front of the most students possible and the kind of support needed to make it happen.
• Think about putting together a slate of winter sessions and then bringing into this equation an effort to suspend prerequisite requirements for non-matriculated students and try to identify other barriers for non-CCNY students taking these courses. These barriers need to be identified so that we don’t have problems as before. 

Emsi Alumni Assessment Modelling Project

Dee Dee Mozeleski, stated the project, which builds upon this year’s economic impact study, will look alumni outcomes over a 30 year period, and will allow departments (academic and non-academics) to look at exactly how their degrees are being utilized by alumni in the workforce. The project team includes OIAC, the Provost’s Office, Student Affairs, Institutional Research and will allow us to showcase, with public-facing materials, how important a CCNY degree is to our graduates.

PMP Report 2020

Seven breakout rooms were established where Cabinet members were assigned to various groups for forty-five minutes.  Each group has been asked to reflect on the PMP report of our accomplishments from last year, thinking about our strategic plan and knowing that this process that we do every year is the implementation process of our strategic plan.  Input from the group members was requested. 

Breakout Session Groups

• Institutional Research
• Electrification of our bureaucratic Processes
• Student success
• Diversity & Inclusion
• Community Engagement
• Graduate Education
• Research

Notes from each breakout session will be sent to Teresa Flemming.

Announcement from President Boudreau

We have received requests from the DOE to open up our building space to public schools.  They are looking for stand-alone buildings throughout NYC that might accommodate the DOEs plan for social distancing. VP Ihrer and VP Lam are in communication with CUNY as we do not have stand-alone buildings that can easily be converted for this request.

The meeting adjourned at 12:10 pm.