There is a small sub-genre of higher education books that I call “University Procedurals.” The are microscopically detailed accounts detailing how institution X accomplished Y in mind-numbing committee-meeting-by-committee-meeting detail.  A good example of this genre is Mary Emison’s Degrees for a New Generation, which details the emergence of a new curriculum at the University of Melbourne in the mid-2000s, which I detailed back here.  Alexandra Logue, the former Provost of the City University of New York, has now written what may be the genre-defining book, called Pathways to Reform.

At one level, the book is a total horror-show.  It’s about a four-year journey at CUNY to enact a rational internal credit transfer policy.  FOUR YEARS.  For transfer credit.  In a minority-serving institution with low graduation rates with desperate need for systemic change.  And while a lot of it is about the complexities of managing change across a nineteen-institution system (CUNY has 25 institutions, but six of them are graduate or professional schools, which don’t enter into this story), fully half of it is basically just a tale of Faculty Behaving Badly.  It is the kind of book you want to keep away from anyone not involved in higher ed, because it absolutely fills you with despair with respect to reforming anything at all, ever.

Now, to be fair, CUNY seems like an exceptionally difficult system to manage.  It contains both 2-year and 4-year institutions, and as everywhere else the 4-years look down their noses at 2-years, making co-operation difficult.  Many of these institutions came into existence not as CUNY campuses but as independent organizations which later federated.  Until the late 1990s, individual campus presidents reported independently to the board of trustees, not to the CUNY chancellor.  As a result, they developed some wildly different curriculum requirements for what were ostensibly the same degrees, especially when it came to what the Americans call “General Education”, or “gen ed” requirements.

A small diversion is probably needed here: gen ed is a specifically American educational practice.  It’s basically the equivalent of our first-year breadth requirements only more prescriptive (the prescriptivist degree varies from one institution to another).  Basically, it is how institutions maintain the idea of a core curriculum in the liberal arts even as students move to more applied fields. It’s also – since dollars tend to follow students – a major source of dollars for beleaguered humanities departments, assuming they are politically adept enough to get the gen ed requirements to include a couple of courses they teach.

Anyways, prior to Pathways, CUNY colleges had completely incompatible gen ed requirements and were completely inconsistent (or just plain obstructionist) in recognizing one another’s gen ed credits, which made transfer difficult and costly for students as they frequently had to re-do courses.  This was troublesome for CUNY’s mostly minority and low-income student body, and so Logue decided to do something about it.  Broadly speaking, the two options were 1) dump a lot of money into individual college-to-college articulation projects and invest in large numbers of student advisers or 2) simplify the damn curriculum by creating a common, CUNY-wide set of gen ed requirements.  In keeping with major trends across the big US systems, the administration decided on option 2 and called it the “Pathways” program.  Unfortunately, this created a lot of friction with a significant number of faculty members who believed that any deviation from whatever they were currently doing to be either annoying or ipso facto a case of “dumbing down” (or both). 

If the book were just about the process of change at a large multi-campus institution, that would be one thing.  But the Faculty Behaving Badly portion of the book is what distinguishes it from other books in the genre.  Occasionally, when Logue takes to describing key players’ wardrobe choices at critical committee meetings, it feels like she is writing an initial treatment for a limited series on HBO or Netflix.  In fact, the whole book kind of feels a little like David Simon’s Show Me A Hero, with Logue as Oscar Isaacs and Professor Sandi Cooper as Alf Molina, the grandstanding, dead-against-change-at-all costs antagonist.  I am not sure I would have made the story quite so personal – a skeptical reader naturally wonders how Cooper’s side of the story would read and the text sometimes veers into tedious self-justification – but you can sure see how someone might want to take a flyer on a movie treatment.

University procedurals clearly are only for those with a hardcore commitment to higher education management.  And even then, there are some train-wreck elements of the book that really make you want to look away.  But if you find yourself in that category of people who are consumed by negotiating change in post-secondary, and you are in a minority that is prepared to accept that four years is not an insanely long time to deal with what seems like a simple problem (fwiw, I’d argue that, given the insane complexities of running any system of 25 semi-autonomous tertiary institutions, it’s actually not unreasonable to expect four years), then Pathways to Reform might be for you.