The Chancellor's university reports are up from the November CUNY board meeting and it looks like the following professors were granted tenure starting 9/2009.
Congrats to all the newly tenured professors!
(instructions for accessing reports) 
We all know that many student groups fundraise a great deal in order to maintain their programs, and a key source of funding is often alumni. Yet, the alumni office refuses to give student organizations contact information for their alumni, even when the student organization already has names of their former members. What is worse, the alumni office now seems to be mandating that all donations from alumni pass through their office before being deposited into student organization accounts in the business office. That way, the alumni office can keep track of our work, and send the alumni a thank you note. While it is nice of the alumni office to send thank you notes to those alumni who donate to students, the alumni office is also using that information as part of their own fundraising data, touting it as their own work to raise funds for the school. As an example, a number of individuals who donated to the PILA auction last year found themselves mentioned in the latest CUNY Law Magazine as having donated to the school, when they specifically intended solely to donate to PILA, a student-run organization.
Why does the alumni office get credit for the fundraising work of student organizations, when it won't help us do that fundraising?
Welcome to Clinic Review! The aim of these posts is to pass on to 2l's and 1l's information about the clinics and concentrations by being a vehicle for current and former students to post anonymous testimonials, information or evaluations of these classes.
Because of the overall awesomeness of our clinical offerings, a lot of 1Ls and 2Ls are fired up about their clinic choices because they love the subject matter. However, may people end up unprepared for the disparity between the available cases and what they thought they'd be doing, the emotional toll of the work or disorganization of supervision, and other factors that contribute significantly to the "experience" of clinic but aren't captured in the course catalog.
Each clinic and concentration will have its own post and we hope current and former students will share their experiences (both praise and critiques) and that future students will ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
also, when posting, don't forget about confidentiality!
Word on the street is that this might be the last year of the Battered Women's Rights Clinic.
Some say its because of low enrollment over the last couple of years, others attribute it to the creation of the CED clinic (in that we have more programs than students to fill it).
We hope that this is not true or that if it is, CUNY continues to use Professors Arias, Garcia and Lee in ways that allow future students to learn from them.
This would be a sad loss for the women who could be served by the clinic and for the school. The BWRC is a unique clinic in that students collaborate with social work students in providing comprehensive services to their clients. And the professors who lead the clinic are amazing.
http://www.law.cuny.edu/clinics/clinicalofferings/BatteredWomen.html
Mediation
Current and former students: please share your experiences in Mediation (both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
International Women's Human Rights
Current and former students: please share your experiences in IWHR(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Immigrant and Refugee Rights
Current and former students: please share your experiences in the IRRC(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Health Law
Current and former students: please share your experiences in the Health law concentration(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Equality Concentration
Current and former students: please share your experiences in the equality concentration (both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Elder Law
Current and former students: please share your experiences in Elder Law(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Economic Justice Project
Current and former students: please share your experiences in the EJP(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Criminal Defense
Current and former students: please share your experiences in Defenders(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Community and Economic Development
Current Students: please share your experiences in CED(both praise and critiques).
Future students: please ask questions.
Disclaimer: We think its fairly well accepted that CUNY's clinical program is unparalleled and is staffed with very talented practitioners. The purpose of this post is not to discourage people from taking a particular clinic or to encourage a bashing of the clinics or professors, but rather to prepare potential students for the realities of clinical experiences and allow them to make fully informed decisions as to which clinic to take.
Of the 109 CUNY Law grads who took the NY Bar exam for the first time in July, 90 passed!!!!! (82.6%)
26 grads too the CT and/or NJ bar and 24 passed!!! (92%)
Below is a copy of a proposal from the Promotions Committee and the Personnel and Budget Committee intended to clarify the standard for promotion to Professor.
Disclaimers:
-This has NOT been approved by the faculty.
-There is a lot of controversy about it, and part of that controversy revolves around the fact that several faculty are up for tenure now, and there's a perception that this policy would change the tenure process in the middle of those applications.
Promotion
We recently received conflicting information regarding our Student Evaluations post.
According to this new information, Professors Burton and Bratspies are not making a move to discount student evaluations. This however, is in direct contradiction to the original information we received. To account for this discrepancy between two faculty reports, we have updated the original post.
This serves as a good reminder that we are only as good as the information we receive. If you read something on the blog that you know or have heard is incorrect, please post the information in the comments or email us at cunylawblog@gmail.com.
Despite this information gap, we encourage people to continue to post on the original post (and the blog generally). The blog was started to encourage discussion and debate about the law school. In addition to these original goals, we are also (humbly) trying to facilitate a constructive dialogue that can lead to productive suggestions and changes for the school.
At the last faculty meeting Dean Gomez-Velez told the faculty that student retention is a problem at CUNY Law.
It is interesting that the Dean was raising this issue just past the middle of the semester, a point where there is little (other than grade inflation) that professors can do about how a class is going.
Is this an opportunity for CUNY to have a real discussion about the importance of good teaching and its effect on bar passage, the academic standing policy, retention and our commitment to public interest law?
Word on the street is that there is a push from some professors (led? by Dean Burton and Professor Bratspies) to not take student evaluations into account for any faculty determinations.
Update: We have received information that Professors Burton and Bratspies have not taken this position, instead it was Professor Edwards who talked about discounting student evaluations, maybe or maybe not on Burton and Bratspies behalf.
The push is to not use student evaluations for anything. Not for promotions, not for hiring, not for tenure, not for raises, nothing. Importantly, the professional development committee and tenure committees don't receive information on student complaints made to the Academic Dean about faculty members, even though they are supposed to do "fact-finding" for promotions and tenure.
The Professors are concerned that evaluations are based on nothing but racism, classism and sexism.
Is there way to acknowledge that racism, sexism and classism are real problems at CUNY but so is poor teaching?
Is discounting student evaluations the way to address either problem?
How do we hold professors accountable for bad teaching and make ourselves aware of our own prejudices?
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