suny new paltz: student's state of the college

The State of Our College 2013

Dear President Christian,

An international student movement is growing; from Mexico, to Montreal, to Chile and

Turkey. These students are drawing attention to the increasing commercialization and

privatization of public education, and fighting for free and emancipatory education.

We will not tolerate policies that diminish the potential of the many in exchange for

maintaining the prosperity of the privileged few. We will not be relegated to the margins

or labeled a small, vocal minority. We will rise up and seek out solutions to the daunting

challenges left unresolved by the previous generation.

Last semester, New York Students Rising recognized the ‘Global Day of Action to Reclaim

Education,’ in solidarity with campuses statewide and universities around the world.

We spent several hours outside the Humanities building talking to students and asking

them to write down anything that they wanted the administration to know. We received a

diverse set of responses from the student body; particularly from those who feel that

their concerns have not been incorporated into the campus’ existing systems of

representation.

We understand that the concerns of our campus community exist in the broader context

of state, federal and international politics. At a time when public higher education is under

attack, governments all over the world are shifting towards a model that favors corporate

interests over those of students.

In New York, this means that the responsibility of paying for rising tuition costs at public

universities falls disproportionately on the students and families least able to afford it. As

a result of this trend, the SUNY system functions more like a business and less like an

educational institution, leaving many of us with unmanageable debt after graduating.

While we realize that many of our struggles ultimately reside in Albany and Washington,

there are immediate steps that can be taken on this campus and by your administration to

address a number of pressing concerns.

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Women’s Studies:

One of the most popular courses on this campus is the introductory course, “Women:

Images and Realities,” which is taken mostly by non-Women Studies majors. Students from

all academic areas recognize the importance of this interdisciplinary study, and how it

affects them in understanding the social world around them. The popularity of this course

indicates that students are interested in the material and, therefore, the subject area

deserves to be given the utmost amount of support from our administration.

Unfortunately, Women’s Studies lacks the benefits of department status, rendering it

unstable. The program’s stability is put further at risk because the administration has

failed to replace the single full-time faculty position since the retirement of Amy

Kesselman.

Now, Women’s Studies majors and minors must cope with the fragility of the program by

having it overseen by someone in two different disciplines. Employing one individual from

two different disciplines to complete one position is not only more work for that

individual, but it also doesn’t give that person the opportunity or time to give their full

attention to a popular and vital program.

Employing at least one full time faculty member would improve the position of the

Women’s Studies Program. In order for Women’s Studies to reach its fullest potential of

educating, empowering and inspiring students to take action against social injustices, it is

imperative that Women’s Studies be granted department status.

In order to grow and develop rather than stagnate and decline, our non-traditional areas

of study need the autonomy to appoint and dismiss their own faculty, determine what

courses are to be taught and by whom, under the direction and guidance of a full-time

department chair. These are prerequisites for fostering a sustainable program that will

enrich students’ lives for decades to come, as well as facilitate the realization of the

discipline’s infinite possibilities.

Under the right conditions, Women’s Studies has the power to transform many of our

society’s ills. The granting of department status to the program will ensure the stability

and continuity of this critical area of study.

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Gender-Neutral Housing:

Gender neutral housing is necessary on campus if SUNY New Paltz wishes to be a

welcoming environment for transgender and gender nonconforming students. Currently,

we have a system of very few “co-ed” suites, in which each individual bedroom is still

divided up based on legal binary sex. This system is largely ineffective in accommodating

transgender students.

SUNY Albany has properly defined gender neutral housing on their website as follows:

“Students signing up for these areas will be permitted to have roommates and suitemates

from across the gender spectrum. Gender Inclusive Housing will allow for an environment

where student housing is not restricted by traditional limitations presented by our

current system, which is based on the gender binary.” Therefore there would be no living

restrictions based on gender(s) of students involved.

SUNY New Paltz students are autonomous adults capable of making their own decisions

about whether or not they want to live in dorms with members of the same gender or of

different genders. Many schools, including SUNY Albany and Vassar College, have effective

gender-neutral housing programs that have not led to conflict.

The transition to gender neutral housing will have little or no fiscal impact and will serve

only to affirm SUNY New Paltz as a progressive and inclusive environment that prioritizes

the safety and comfort of SUNY New Paltz’s most marginalized and disenfranchised

populations.

Transgender students who are forced into living situations that do not align with their

gender identities are at risk for harassment, discomfort, physical danger, and

psychological and emotional harm due to the constant invalidation of their identities.

There is currently no information about gender-neutral housing and bathrooms on our

website. With the college’s constant need to present our campus as attractive in recruiting

students, this lack of resources and subsequent lack of information can only paint SUNY

New Paltz in a negative light and reflect apathy towards an oppressed group. We call for a

specific section of the college website to be dedicated to making public the college’s

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involvement in fighting transphobic violence through providing safe housing options.

We are calling for the SUNY New Paltz administration to understand the urgency and

necessity of gender neutral housing and designate one full suite-style building to be

entirely gender neutral (as defined above) with priority given to transgender and gender

nonconforming students, including incoming freshmen, as a permanent fixture beginning

with the start of the Fall 2013 semester.

Admissions

According to the 2011 Middle States Self-study report, the number of entering freshmen

who identified as African-American in 2010 was down to 6 percent as compared to 12

percent in 2000.

This is an unacceptable and deplorable trend in first-year admissions and is reflective of a

culture that conflates college rankings and selectivity with educational success.

At the same time, 20 percent of students who are accepted to New Paltz but choose not to

attend cite lack of scholarships as the reason. 40 percent find it hard to afford tuition.

The SUNY New Paltz Foundation, tasked with administering scholarships, gave out fewer

than ten last year. This is the same Foundation that has taken the lead in developing the

Park Point housing complex, where rent will likely range from $600 to $1,400 per student

a month. Rather than seek to address the demographic and economic imbalances that

plague our student body, the Foundation and the college administration have forsaken the

students whom New Paltz is intended to serve.

These practices are shameful and do a disservice to the college and its students. We are a

public institution and must not further degrade the social responsibilities that define the

core of our mission.

Campus Marijuana Policy:

We are an outlier among similar SUNY colleges in the sense that SUNY New Paltz’s ‘No

Second Chance Policy’ marijuana policy is one of the harshest in the SUNY system. SUNY

New Paltz’s policy does not align with that of other SUNY colleges because expulsion is

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possible on the first strike, even for a student never before charged with marijuana

possession. Why are we subject to a more restrictive policy when other SUNY students

are not? Is this policy serving the interest of our students? Why are we being targeted for

the perceived reputation of previous generations of students, even though this reputation

is no longer representative of our current student body?

Administrators may use the excuse that our reputation is at stake, therefore we must keep

the current drug policy, specifically marijuana policy, intact. We cannot accept this

argument because it is subjective and not driven by facts, or data, and is not reflective of

present-day realities.

SUNY New Paltz also has a reputation as an open-minded, and progressive institution. Let

us not stifle our positive reputation in fear of progressive reform of outdated drug

policies.

In its 1977 Marijuana Reform Act, our state legislature wrote:

“The legislature finds that arrests, criminal prosecutions, and criminal penalties are

inappropriate for people who possess small quantities of marihuana (sic) for

personal use. Every year, this process needlessly scars thousands of lives and

wastes millions of dollars in law enforcement resources, while detracting from the

prosecution of serious crime.”

And yet today, on our campus, about 25 percent of the University Police Department’s

activities are marijuana enforcement-related, according to UPD logs available online.

Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that he wishes to legalize marijuana in New York

State. We may soon follow Washington and Colorado’s lead in. You must ask yourself as

an administrator, why would you wish to keep SUNY New Paltz stuck in the failed

marijuana policies of the past?

We call upon the SUNY New Paltz administration to understand the urgency and

importance of this situation and the failed logic of the current SUNY New Paltz policy.

SUNY New Paltz should emulate the marijuana and drug policies of the other SUNY

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colleges, in which a three strike system is in place as soon as possible.

Sustainability:

As a public university that has been an integral part of the Village of New Paltz community,

we have a responsibility to protect and sustain the surrounding environment.

This University is rapidly expanding to meet the demands of our modern society, but with

this expansion comes the need for conscious and sustainable planning. This means a

commitment to achieving carbon neutrality and improving the environmental curriculum.

In 2008 SUNY New Paltz signed on to the American College and University Presidents

Climate Commitment (ACUPCC). This agreement strives for the ultimate goal of carbon

neutrality through waste reduction, energy conservation, and the implementation of the

most sustainable building practices available. In accordance with this commitment every

new structure built or renovated on campus must be LEED Silver certified, however, as

demonstrated with the renovation of Crispell Hall we have the capacity to build to LEED

Gold standards.

It is important that our commitment to sustainability not be guided by convenience, but

instead demonstrate our capacity to be environmental innovators, surpassing even the

benchmarks set out by the ACUPCC.

As a large scale institution the amount of energy we consume is incredible. Although this

cannot be remedied immediately there are long term conservation efforts that can be

enforced. Simple steps such as installing lighting, heating, and cooling controls along with

reduced building use can mitigate energy waste. Steps towards these goals have been

made, but need to be further improved upon.

Our campus has also made significant progress in the areas of recycling and composting.

However, there is an inadequate commitment to making these processes as efficient as

possible. There is a lack of education about proper recycling and composting practices as

well as an unwillingness to commit to on-site composting by your administration.

Environmental Studies is one of the most potentially valuable programs at SUNY New

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Paltz. Many students are engaged in environmental clubs and internships to substitute for

the lack of an Environmental Studies major. Although the Environmental Geochemical

Science major offers environmentally focused curriculum, it is not a substitution for the

interdisciplinary depth of the Environmental Studies major.

Green jobs are in high demand and, as a university committed to preparing students for

the workforce, it is imperative that an inter-disciplinary environmental curriculum be

available to students. An Environmental Studies minor is clearly not sufficient to supply

students with the competitive expertise to enter this new sector of the economy.

Not only is environmental sustainability incredibly important to the student body, it is

clearly an image that the administration is looking to promote. However, superficially

branding ourselves as “green,” as demonstrated on the campus website, is not sufficient.

We hope that these suggestions, further addressed in the Sustainability Plan, become an

integral part of the SUNY New Paltz community’s future planning.

Local Foods:

Steps towards incorporating more local food options on campus have not gone unnoticed.

The campus Farmer’s Market and the completely sustainable and organic campus garden

have been incredibly successful student initiatives. However, the lack of administrative

support for these initiatives has deterred continued progress.

The greater Hudson Valley has displayed a commitment to promoting small agricultural

projects and, as a member of this community, SUNY New Paltz has the potential to become

a leader in the local food movement.

Local food is grown, processed and distributed within a 75-mile radius and supports local

economies. It also takes into consideration farming practices. Sustainably grown and

distributed foods factor into the idea of local food. Sustainable food mitigates the harmful

effects of agriculture on the environment, is humane for workers, respects animals,

provides a fair wage for the farmer, and supports and enhances struggling rural

communities.

SUNY New Paltz is situated in one of the most fertile farming regions in the Northeast,

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making it very feasible to incorporate a local food system. The Campus Auxiliary Service

Board has worked to incorporate local foods into the food system on campus, however

the standards, definitions and measurements of local food in the context of food services

is currently too broad and unrefined to be effective.

Misrepresentation of what actually constitutes local foods has allowed for Sodexo to claim

Pepsi products as local food product due to their distribution center being in Newburgh,

N.Y. Now that the contract with our current food provider is being renegotiated, we have

the opportunity and responsibility to take a firmer stance on this subject.

Much of the food supplied to students on campus is made up of mass produced,

genetically engineered, and pesticide laden produce, as well as processed foods. Such food

holds less nutritional content than organic and unaltered fruits and vegetables and greatly

contributes to the degradation of our dwindling stock of natural resources.

As meal plans are mandated for all students living on campus and a single corporation

holds a contractual monopoly on food service, SUNY New Paltz has an obligation to

provide a healthy and sustainable diet to its students.

Your administration must take it upon itself to create a more sustainable and regionally

engaged campus with regard to food policy. Let us take a leadership role among SUNY

institutions in purchasing and providing an abundant selection of local and sustainably

sourced foods.

Worker protection must also be a priority while transitioning providers and entering into

contract negotiations with vendors. You must make it clear to companies doing business

with New Paltz that we want living wages and adequate healthcare for all our workers,

who are themselves members of the New Paltz community.

Class Size and Adjuncts:

Last year, the Petition for Educational Quality, Fairness & Equity was widely distributed at

SUNY New Paltz, gathering over 2,000 signatures from faculty, students, and other staff.

To refresh your memory, it called on the administration to do the following:

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1. Recognize publicly the enormous contributions of contingent employees at

SUNY New Paltz.

2. Support the UUP’s efforts to ensure that part-time adjuncts have appropriate

working conditions and are compensated equitably, so that they receive

compensation comparable to lecturers per course.

3. Strengthen academic freedom, educational quality and stability of the faculty by

increasing job security.

4. Eliminate the arbitrary minimum and maximum number of courses that may be

taught by part-time adjunct and full-time contingent faculty.

5. Institute hiring practices that reward the competency and years of service of

contingent employees.

6. Establish class sizes that support quality teaching and learning for all teaching

faculty.

7. Preserve and protect existing personnel, programs and services at SUNY New

Paltz.

To date, the issues presented here have not been adequately addressed. We cite a letter

that you posted on December 16, 2011 to support this assertion. In this letter you

acknowledge the United University Professions’ petition, but you do not address all of its

points.

In the second paragraph, you express your appreciation of the contributions that adjunct

faculty bring to this school. However, after acknowledging these invaluable contributions,

you go on to downplay their importance by stating that adjunct presence here is

“substantially less than national averages,” and that this will be decreased further after.

After this, you spend the rest of your letter refuting claims made by a regional newspaper

and presenting facts and figures to support your denial of a pay raise for adjunct

professors. If this were going to fit under any of the demands made above, it would

probably be the second one. However, the language of the petition calls for fair and

equitable pay, which upon examining some statistics that you failed to mention in your

letter, is an important demand that needs to be met.

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Between 1970 and 2008, adjunct professors’ rate of pay rose from $1,000 for a

three-credit course to about $3,000. Adjusted for inflation, this is a 49 percent decrease,

according to the UUP. This means that a professor who may teach four 3-credit courses

would earn $12,000, or just ten percent above the federal poverty line.

The rest of UUP’s demands go virtually unacknowledged. Adjuncts do not have the job

security they deserve after giving years of their time, expertise and unique knowledge to

the campus community. Many have already lost their jobs and more positions may be cut.

We are already seeing the consequences of these actions.

When discussing adjunct pay, you emphasize that the administration makes their

decisions based on baseline and comparative data. Indeed, you draw statistics regarding

adjunct pay rates from multiple unnamed colleges in the area. Why then are decisions

regarding overall adjunct presence at this school not subject to the same scrutinous

consideration? You’ve already stated that adjunct presence is well below the national

average, and that it will decrease even further. In your letter, you state:

“As the College continues to move ahead in enhancing academic quality and

opportunity for students, it is essential that we invest resources in those initiatives

and programs that most clearly advance our goals and our vision points.”

In fact, the campus’ own self-study, conducted as part of the Middle States accreditation

process, states: “...continuing to hire new permanent faculty in lieu of adjuncts may not be

fiscally sustainable.” Cutting adjunct professors may not enhance academic quality and

opportunity for students if the number of full time professors can not be maintained at

adequate levels.

Over the last six years, the availability of smaller classes has decreased, while the number

of larger sections have increased, based on the Office of Institutional Research’s Common

Data Set. For example, there was a 12 percent increase in the number of sections

consisting of 20 to 29 students between 2009 and 2010, while sections of 2 to 19 students

declined over the same period. Using ‘average class size’ as a measure does not

adequately reflect this shift toward larger class sizes.

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You state that any arguments regarding adjunct compensation should be targeted

regionally, statewide, and nationally, and not specifically toward New Paltz. While we

agree with you on this point, we feel that it is necessary to simultaneously address these

issues at the campus level as many of the choices regarding faculty retention and

compensation are made at the discretion of your administration.

We call on you to acknowledge these issues and make a statement in support of the

contingent employees of SUNY New Paltz, specifically recognizing each of the seven

demands made in the UUP Petition for Educational Quality, Fairness & Equity.

Transparency:

SUNY New Paltz, a public institution of higher education, has an obligation to maintain a

spirit of transparency, especially when decisions are made with significant repercussions

on student’s lives.

Last semester, the Student Association introduced and approved legislation calling for

more transparency with Campus Auxiliary Services in its process of seeking vendors for

campus services. This semester, students were shut out of a set of presentations delivered

by the companies bidding on our food service contract by CAS’ Executive Director.

We acknowledge that transparency can sometimes be an uncomfortable thing, but would

like to emphasize how essential it is for there to be fluid communication between the

administration and the larger SUNY New Paltz community. Easily accessible, unbiased

information must be available to those who seek it.

For example, few students were aware of the fact that $300,000 was spent on the vending

machine that has been placed on the Student Union Building Concourse or that 70% of the

revenue from that machine will go to PepsiCo. It will take over ten years to pay back the

initial cost of the unit. Fifty students could have had their tuition paid for an entire year

with the $300,000 spent. To date, the machine has been out of order and inoperable for a

substantial period of time. Clearly this isn’t something that we can reverse now, however

we must point out the irresponsibility of this decision.

The Park Point housing development is another example of the lack of transparency on

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campus. The project itself causes a disturbance of 36 acres of land, including near

old-growth woodlands. It will be built directly adjacent to wetlands, threatening the local

ecosystem, including vernal pools that are part of our unique local character.

We are concerned about the potential health effects of herbicides and pesticides currently

in the ground at the proposed site and those that will be used on landscaping in the new

development.

No renewable energy systems will be included in the development. In fact, the heat and

hot water will rely on natural gas, directly contributing to demand for hydrofracking; a

process for extracting natural gas with documented detrimental effects to the well-being

of humans and the eco-system.

We call for increased communication between the administration and the larger student

body as well as more broad-based input from students at large in decision-making

processes. Such communication will benefit the decisions the administration carries out,

as well as meet the needs of the larger New Paltz community creating a stronger

administrative-student relationship.

We are calling on you to release a statement by March 13 outlining how your

administration plans to address each of the aforementioned issues.

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suny new paltz: student's state of the college

Documents

environmental studies major

gender neutral housing

gender nonconforming students

neutral housing

womens studies

local food

department status

student body