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City U. of New York Cancels Plan to Honor Tony Kushner

May 4, 2011, 10:34 pm

The Board of Trustees of the City University of New York has scuttled John Jay College’s plan to give an honorary degree to the playwright Tony Kushner at its June commencement ceremony, The Jewish Week reported. At the board’s meeting on Monday, Jeffrey S. Wiesenfeld, a trustee, condemned Mr. Kushner’s purported beliefs about Israel. (A podcast of the meeting is available here. The discussion occurred during the final 10 minutes.)  After Mr. Wiesenfeld’s remarks, the trustees tabled the proposal to honor Mr. Kushner—a move that effectively kills the plan for this year, because the trustees will not meet again before John Jay’s commencement. Mr. Kushner replied with an open letter to the trustees on Wednesday, arguing that Mr. Wiesenfeld had badly distorted his positions. In an interview with Salon, Mr. Kushner described the trustees’ behavior as “McCarthyite nonsense.”

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  • 22280998

    No idea who Kushner is or what his views are, but Trustees should have done a bit more due diligence here. Raises all kinds of questions as to how they make all their decisions. Kind of takes the trust out of trustee.

  • mmeisens

    The Trustees were right. It is not the time, if ever, to have the usual collection of anti-American and anti Semitic speakers at universities across the United States. These speakers have all been proven time and again to be on the wrong side of history and humanity and the still pop up at universities. No wonder the American academia is in a free fall down.

  • lenoreb

    Oh Please. Commenters should actually look up Tony Kushner, a distinguished playwright and co-editor of Wrestling with Zion, an anthology of thoughtful articles about Israel by fine writers.

    This episode is shameful for the rest of the board of trustees who allowed it to happen. Interested readers should consult the full article and comments in Inside Higher Ed.

  • wilkenslibrary

    I find it hard to believe that anyone who reads the Chronicle doesn’t know that Tony Kushner wrote, among many other things, Angels in America.

    How shameful for CUNY that they have fallen prey to the Andrew Breitbart syndrome of selectively slanting a person’s words. Certainly Tony Kushner does not need an honorary degree; equally certainly, the Board of Trustees of CUNY needs to rethink its policies and procedures.

  • anonytrans

    From other comments, it seems like some people disagree with the Trustees because Kushner isn’t actually anti-Israel, anti-semitic or whatever he is purported to be. But even if he was an extreme anti-Zionist, would that preclude him from getting an honorary degree on the basis of his writing? I’m troubled by the idea, because I would not want the sometimes extreme political views *I* believe in (which, in the interest of disclosure, do not include a strong stance on Israel or Zionism – I’m of two minds when it comes to that issue) to be the basis of denying someone a degree, honorary or otherwise. If an honorary degree is an endorsement of the recipient’s ideologies, we’re in trouble.

  • coco_rico

    Who cares? Kushner is famous and doesn’t need this degree. John Jay College should be busy helping its working-class students instead of kissing up to glitterati who will likely take their honorary degree and then never grace the campus with a visit again. I don’t believe in honorary degrees — you should get degrees by actually earning the degree, like the rest of us mortals.

    As for the issue of Mr. Kushner’s views on Israel, I read his letter to the Board of Trustees and found it wanting. He refers blithely to shallow interpretations of Jeffersonian democracy as if every nation on earth, no matter the situation, must follow the pattern of the United States Constitution. Do I think the Jewish State is a close approximation of what the US came up with in Philadelphia? No. But why is that the measure of the country’s right to exist as it was founded.

    Then Mr. Kushner goes on to talk about ethnic cleansing, giving us the Huffington Post/Reader’s Digest synopsis so recognizable among elitist people who consider themselves far more informed than they really are. And he throws in the barb, “I am proud of being Jewish.”

    Can we please stop misapplying the label of McCarthyism? Why does Mr. Kushner get to receive a degree he didn’t earn, while untold millions of people much smarter than he is, who simply haven’t had the luck of knowing the right people and getting produced on Broadway, have to attend class, pay tuition, and put up with annyoing professors to get little letters after their name?The Trustees have bylaws and Mr. Kushner did not get the requisite number of votes. Boohoo. Cry me a river. John Jay College should be more worried about producing criminologists and forensics experts than worrying about whether a wealthy playwright is getting adequate attention from sycophants. I don’t particularly like Angels in America anyway.

    Let’s move on.

  • electronicmuse

    The concept that students should be able ” . . . to reach the professor whenever” is ludicrous, and a pernicious notion that should be quashed with vigor by everybody (who should have) the intestinal fortitude to point out that classroom instruction is not the same thing as hiring a personal tutor.

    Education is not the same thing as “video on demand,” or anything else provided “on demand.” Classes, office hours, public lectures, publications of all stripes, and ad hoc meetings with students have worked for centuries, and they will continue to work for everybody except trendy profs who seek to placate bored, spoiled students with some ridiculous kind of 24//7 access.

    Gee, you Ph.D. doctors, does your Medical Doctor (physician) provide such services? Or any other professional you know of? Get real. And have your students make an appointment, like everybody else in the world.

  • garay

    Interesting, although nothing new that we didn’t know already :: multiple avenues of engagement, make yourself available, students like multimedia and asynchronous materials, and they don’t like instructors fumbling with technology.

    The easiest thing to do, from what the students suggested is for instructors to make themselves available, although not necessarily at random or all the time, but regularly, as in every day.

    Quite easy these days, with smartphones, LMS systems like Blackboard, instant messengers, email and social networking technology. In our Health Informatics class, I nurture our student’s participation every day on the discussion boards, I use my smartphone or iPad to check our class blogs, class email and discussion boards using Blackboard Mobile Learn, and I readily jump on an instant messenger audio/text chat if need be.

    The key is to let students know you will be available for a few minutes every morning and evening, even on weekends, …and to actually do it!

  • historymike

    In my online classes I set aside certain hours for phone conferences and/or live chat rooms, and for all my classes I have regular office hours, availability before and after class.  Furthermore, I quickly respond to all emails.  However, I also have a life outside of work, and I dislike students intruding on my personal time.  I once received a 5:00 am phone call from a student who wanted to know if class would be canceled since it was snowing.  In addition, for some unknown dynamic the students who called my cellular tended to be those who rarely attend class, or those who have incredibly screwed up personal lives seeking life advice. Other enterprising students have sought out my home phone number in the telephone directory!  Since these experiences, I stopped putting my cellular number on the syllabus, and I list my office number with the caveat that calls will only be answered when I am physically in the office.  Also, I changed my listing in the white pages to make it more difficult to disturb my limited private time.

    I completely agree with electronicmuse that many students think having a professor means they also have a 24/7 tutor and counselor.  I grit my teeth thinking of the countless unpaid hours I worked when I was a mere part-time adjunct making $2K a class and fielding 6-8 calls per week beyond the stated time parameters on the syllabus.  In the ensuing years I make it a point at the beginning of class to emphasize: a) email is the preferred method of contact; b) phone calls at designated times during office hours; and c) the university provides counseling, tutoring, and other institutional support for struggling students.

  • historymike

    Bravo, Danielle, for the “less is more” advice!  I use PowerPoint mainly for images (I teach history) and I strive to keep text under 15 words per slide.  I do post my PowerPoints, but if you skipped class, in most cases you wind up with an image, a slide title, and a minimalist outline.

  • rrowlett

    Hear, hear. One life skill srudents should learn is that other’s time is valuable, too. Many students don’t understand that faculty have several job responsibilities, only one of which is teaching. Faculty who have the time to be available to students 24/7 are likely shorting their commitment to scholarship and professional leadership, and are enabling poor behavior by their students. As one of my favorite student deans was wont to say, “poor planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.”

  • thais

    I am a retired teacher in speech communications and theater. Long ago I gave my students access to my lecture notes on my Apple II E first in dot matrix notes then to floppy disks and progressed as the technology progressed. Such notes became the springboard for further comments. During those years students called on the telephone but now they use a wider variety of communication to reach me.In my final semester admittedly I realized how much I depended on the power point but there were still times in the public speaking class were the system failed and I turned around and used the chalk board or asked a question. It became a teachable moment in the public speaking class. If an employer sends you to Japan to give a sales pitch and your power point fails what do you do? I always hoped those moments showed the students that you must know and care about your message,
    Dr. Michael Clark, Elmira College

  • henr3782

    I suspect students don’t actually expect 24/7 availability from their professors, despite the perhaps less-than-artful way Mr. Hausheer phrased his comment. If you watch the video, it is clear that he was delighted to be able to reach the professor during the evening, which may not be feasible for most professors, but holding a virtual office hours session via Skype or a similar tool during one evening a week would probably be extremely helpful to most undergraduates. If they’re carrying a full course load, they often have class schedule conflicts with office hours held during the day. It also tends to be when they do most of their homework, so it’s a natural time for questions to arise.

    That said, as others have commented, the key is to communicate up front with your students about what they can expect in terms of your availability. If you only answer email between 9 and 5 weekdays, tell them they can count on a response within 24 hours during the week but that late Friday or weekend queries probably won’t get answered until Monday. Only provide the phone numbers that you want students to have for you (i.e. not your personal cell) and tell them what hours are acceptable to call.

    The other thing that is worth considering here is that if you only offer office hours face to face and in your office, you might consider keeping the hours the same, but also offering to be available during Skype or a similar medium during that time as long as you don’t have another student in the office. Most such software will let you set an availability status so that you could simply show that you are unavailable virtually if another student is face-to-face.

  • gl

    Great student interviews. Here’s food for thought. Before you start teaching, you’re sure you know what to do, but you quickly discover you only knew what would work for dedicated people like yourself. You have a responsibility, though, to teach everybody in that classroom, including the people “at risk”. Save some souls. I originally tried letting people call me 24/7, and it was, as someone reports above, people who needed a shrink, not a prof, who called. I acquired a woman stalker, next. Too often, it was people demonstrating how much they LOVED this course… a week before telling me “You know I LOVE this course but I have to miss the midterm. My fiance’s mother is getting remarried in Vegas and I must go help!” I learned not to announce any assignments through email because the people most at risk said, “My backpack was stolen and my computer and I didn’t get your email so I shouldn’t take this test.”  Before you say, “Oh, screw that guy, you must teach in hell”– I don’t. Even when I taught at Yale we broke our backs bringing in a diverse population and we tried very hard to hang on to them. 
    So I tried teaching through email ten years ago and posting course materials online and that didn’t work out either. First, my office hours were empty, and it was typically the “diverse” people who most needed to see me in the office that were trying to get by with email. That was unexpected. Second, I can’t overlook that in two or three cases– where I worked very hard trying to update the student between classes using email– those students actually started attending class less. That was the very opposite of what email was expected to achieve! My most charitable guess is that some workingclass people are under such time pressure at their jobs, that if the professor seems to be willing to teach them the course through email, well, they’d much rather do that than commute to school. The truth is, though, email is a very poor substitute for personal face to face instruction. I can see confusion on a face, go back, and explain more simply. Not in email, though. They won’t really learn from it, and they could even fail. They must come to class. Yet you can’t legally single them out. It must be a general policy, or you give some people enough rope to hang themselves. If you’re working for social change, it’s very frustrating. My general moral to the sincere folks posting here is to remember we’ve got other kinds of people in the class, and they deserve to be taught too. 

    I do continue to use email to notify people of events or opportunities. Bright students can use email to alert me to an event, TV show, song or other object that I might want to share with the class that way. That has worked great! Email *is* good for something. Far fewer people got lost on the way to the museum last year, possibly because I was able to send the URL and use Google maps. 
    Best wishes to all. 

  • sarahurley

    I don’t really understand the anger towards these students in some of the comments.  They weren’t asking for 24/7 access to faculty, they were asking for access at times students might need it (like in the evening before a major exam) – which actually seems perfectly reasonable.

    If I have to go meet with MDs at my university and they want to meet at 7 a.m., I say “sounds good.” I don’t usually get to work until 9 a.m., but it’s okay to come in early under special circumstances.  I don’t make everyone who meets with me come to my office – sometimes I go to theirs.  Sometimes I have lunch meetings, though I prefer not to work over lunch – it happens.

    You get where I’m going with this, right? Inability to be flexible and meet the needs of the people you work with (in this case, students) makes absolutely no sense.  

    The same goes for forcing a specific style of learning.  I personally retain very little from note-taking and do *far better* actually highlighting and annotating text.  This isn’t actually strange, nor is it strange to have a student who learns better by reading than by lecture, who learns less if there isn’t an in-class discussion, etc.  There are reams of studies on these issues – disproving quite a bit of University-style academic “common sense.”

    And finally, if your students wouldn’t come to class if you posted your lectures online, maybe that’s a sign that you could be doing something more productive with that in-class time.  Discussions, group activities, etc. all reinforce content very, very well.  They even let you see what students are missing/not understanding before you get to a major exam/paper.

  • electronicmuse

    Yes, strange how much interest students show the night before a major exam . . . perhaps they need to understand that developing skills, understandings, etc. is a longitudinal process. It generally doesn’t happen the ” . . . evening before” some discrete event, and possibly the worst thing that teachers can do is to facilitate the notion that such cramming is legitimate. This seems like “common sense” to me . . . academic or otherwise.

    Also, I believe you will find that many profs who do use the kind of multi-modal teaching approach you (legitimately) espouse, still find that students don’t come to class when lectures are posted online.

    Finally, being emphatic is not being “angry.” Any of us should be able to identify an intellectual argument as “ridiculous,” or “ludicrous” without generating any heat at all. Of course, such emphatic language merely states an opinion; the validity of that opinion must be backed up by a counter-argument that is subsequently judged on its merits.

    One doesn’t strike steel against butter to put an edge on it-flint is required. I wish everybody would state their case(s) as plainly-and strongly as possible, sans ad hominem, of course. Thanks for your comments.

  • http://twitter.com/FuturEdTech FuturEdTech

    If technology is the answer, what was the question?  Certainly not: can I reach my professor 24/7?

  • http://twitter.com/Mareekah Mareekah Sun

    having just taken an educational technology class at AU I found this assessment of professors’ technology skills useful

  • http://twitter.com/nanorman Nancy Norman

    There is an art to using PowerPoint well. Even those of us who know better can fall into the trap of filling the slide with too much content. I think it is fair for students to point out to faculty the difficulties they have with certain slides (can’t read it, can’t absorb material so quickly). Faculty need to be able to accomodate student learning abilities. That being said, it seems both students and instructors need to show a bit more good will toward one another and trust the process. Teachers are there to help students learn, and students are there to learn. Surely the cynics will find my statement naive. However, but if didn’t believe this to be true, I’d find a different career.

  • rgsarkar

    Three main take-aways from this discussion:
    * Technology will make a crappy lecture/class/course worse. It may make a good class/lecture/course better.
    * Use power-point slides only as thought starters; lots of white space is good; give them away
    * Be prepared: go the classroom, do a dry run. Have a non-tech Plan B.

  • garay

    I also find the usual PowerPoint bashing uncalled for. PowerPoint is just another EdTech tool that we should try to use effectively, to organize our thoughts, outline our lectures, share some illustrations and even add interactivity in class.

    Over the years, I have used a number of presentation tools, from PowerPoint and Keynote, to Windows Journal, blogs, Flash presentations, Google Docs, Google Sites, Twitter, ad nauseum.

    For the most part I prefer and I recommend PowerPoint, …but for different reasons :: I like using PowerPoint because one can easily narrate PowerPoint presentations and easily compress/convert the narrated presentations for Web delivery. Whether it is a synthesized narrated lecture or a full narrated presentation, I am one of many who find making a narrated presentation available for asynchronous use an infinitely more valuable piece of educational content than an inert and muted bunch of slides.

    Lots of programs abound to convert/compress narrated PowerPoint presentations for Web delivery: Adobe Presenter, PointeCast Publisher, iSpring (inc. its basic/free version), Camtasia Studio, Articulate Publisher and Snap by Lectora. Students like listening and watching narrated presentations and jumping around to the slides of their interest. I also upload PowerPoint presentation handouts, three slides per page, in case students want to print them to take notes during class of while watching the narrated presentation, outside of class.

  • wacime

    Jeff et al:
    What an important topic and what a fine presentation! Thank you!
    While many old professors (I am of them) are weak in technology, those who are trying deserve some credit. And, like you, they have other responsibilities.  Let’s not act surprised that they put more effort into those things that reward them more. 
    Frankly, I am impressed with the way most students tolerate poor college-level teaching skills. Still, it is a pity that students suffer while we older guys continue to avoid computer lab.
    In general, responsibility for the problem lies with deans and department chairs rather than with the old guys and gals who probably have a lot to teach though they lack the skills to do it in the style students deserve. Things do seem to be getting better, but in the meantime it’s important to keep up the pressure on those deans and chairs. 
    Finally I have to ask (no disrespect intended): why would anyone imply that posting notes on line is asking too much?

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=12426169 Danelle Wilbraham

    See the previous reply.  My slides to not have a lot of information on them, so sharing them would not be much more helpful than the chapter outline in the textbook.  I do a lot of demonstrations in class that simply cannot be recreated online or would require a video/screencapture of the lecture to do so (I should know, I’ve taught online). 

    What I DO post online is a set of study questions for each topic, which cover everything I discussed in class, but are posed in such a way as to get students actually THINKING about the material (apply, analyze, synthesize) as opposed to simply reviewing it. I also post all announcements, handouts, readings, assignments, etc., and additional materials that the students can peruse on their own (videos, articles, etc.)

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=12426169 Danelle Wilbraham

    I can’t say I disagree with the sentiment, but as much as I’d like to tell students to take a number, it’s just not practical.  Last semester I had 2/3 of my seminar turn against me and blast me in their evaluations.  The catalyst?  I gently corrected a student who sent me an incredibly rude and bossy email by pointing out to her that while I wasn’t particularly bothered by it, there are a number of people, including some of my colleagues and potential employers, who would take offense.  She decided that since she was paying my salary, I had no right to speak to her that way, and convinced most of her classmates to submit poor evaluations.  Unfortunately for them, I know everything that happened because two of her classmates, who felt what had happened was unethical, told me. 

    The bottom line is, today’s students expect everything on their terms and their time.  If I don’t give them what they want, they can sabotage my career with bad teaching evaluations.  So, until I have tenure (a TT job would be a start, or even any job at all after next May), I’ll be kissing their entitled asses, like it or not.

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