The 1999 grant funded SSRC’s Program on Higher Education conference "Lessons from CUNY: A Forum on Clashing Visions of Higher Education" held March 2000 in New York City.
The scholarly forum was convened primarily as a response to findings published in a 1999 report by the Mayor’s Advisory Task Force on CUNY, titled "The City University of New York: An Institution Adrift". As the title implies, the task force’s report presents a pessimistic view of the state of affairs within the CUNY (City University of New York) system and focuses on the broader societal implications. Ronald Kessimir, Program Director, for SSRC’s Program on Higher education coordinated the event. The forum was organized in sessions mainly along the same subject lines as the report. It was intended to be a balanced discourse of the issues raised in the report, to give the discussion of the report a fresh perspective, and also to ascertain what is and isn’t known about the problems and proposed solutions in higher education. A goal of the organizers is to publish a volume of the papers as listed below:
Remedial Education:
Dolores Perin, Associate Professor of the Psychology and Education Department at Teachers College, Columbia University presented her paper "Reforming Postsecondary Remediation in the Classroom
Robert Zemsky, Professor and Director of the Institute for Research in Higher Education, University of Pennsylvania, presented "New York State Education Department Review of CUNY’s Proposed Master Plan Amendment: Consultant Ream Report".
Standards, Standardized Tests, and Assessments
Julian Betts, Associate Professor of Economics, University of California, San Diego, and Senior Fellow at the Public Policy Institute of California, presented the paper "Educational Standards in America’s Public Schools: The Promise and the Challenges".
Governance, Accountability, and the Financing of Higher Education
Patricia Gumport, Stanford Institute for Higher Education Research and National Center for Postsecondary Improvement, presented "The Remedial Education Controversy at CUNY: Perspectives on System Design and Endemic Conflict, " which she co-authored with Michael N. Bastedo.
Morton Schapiro, Dean of Letters, Arts and Sciences and Economics Department, University of Southern California, and Michael McPherson, President, Macalester College, presented their paper "Stratification in American Higher Education, with Reflections on What National Trends in Financing and Affordability Imply for the Debate on the Future Direction of CUNY".
What’s the Mission?: The Quest for "Excellence" and a Market Niche
Thomas Bailey, community College Research Center, Teachers College, Columbia University, discussed his study "CUNY: Finding the Appropriate Market Niche."
Nathan Glazer, Professor of Sociology, Harvard University, presented his untitled paper and discussed CUNY from a market perspective.
Peer Effects: Student Interactions and Institutional Goals
George Goethals, Professor of Psychology, Williams College, presented "Social Comparison and Peer Effects at an Elite College
Gordon Winston, Professor of Economics, Williams College, discussed "Student Peer Effects in the Economics of Higher Education."
David Zimmerman, Department of Economics, Williams college, presented his paper "Peer Effects in Academic Outcomes: Evidence from a Natural Experiment."
