Tagged: CUNY

My Spring 2015 Classes at Queens College

The spring semester started yesterday at CUNY, and as luck would have it, it came just after a historic significant snowfall that receded in time for the first day of instruction. Also, as luck would have it, I teach two classes on Wednesday this semester at Queens College. This is a welcome relief from the past three semesters: I’ve either taught only one class or have had to make an hour-long, ten-mile slog on multiple days, at rush hour, and in peak-travel direction. It will be much more pleasant to have to only travel one day a week and at midday.

With the semester officially underway, I’m lifting my self-imposed embargo on publicizing the syllabi for my two Queens College classes.

Media Technologies

For the last five semesters, I’ve taught the evening section of this introductory course on the development of communications technologies. In it, we cover the technologies of writing and print, mass culture in the industrial age, electronic broadcast media, and, of course, digital media.

This semester, I changed the textbook from Crowley and Heyer’s Communication in History (retail price: $154.00) to Irving Fang’s Alphabet to Internet (retail price: $60). While the students should appreciate the economic relief, there is a significant trade-off in adopting the Fang textbook. Whereas the Crowley and Heyer book anthology is an collection of condensed writings on communication technologies, Fang writes a more traditional textbook. I usually prefer the former and to read a variety of different writings on a topic especially because it fascinates me how greatly scholarship can vary despite each author writing on the very same subject.

However, I sensed that most students weren’t reading the articles I assigned. With students enrolled in an evening section of an introductory course, almost all of whom are coming from day jobs and have pressing family responsibilities, it’s remarkable to me that they manage to attend class in the first place. Consequently, I have decided to lighten the weekly reading load by adopting a more condensed textbook, and I’ll use our class session to elaborate on each topic.

Media Criticism

To be honest, I always dreaded teaching this class. It used to be a 300-level class, and when I started teaching it, I upped the difficulty to meet my expectations for graduating students. I curated a collection of long, challenging readings; I assigned several writing assignments with a capstone; and I gave in-class exams with difficult essay questions. But after the first few weeks, I realized that I needed to do a lot of remedial work. Instead of having passionate in-class discussions about each reading, I had to teach students some fundamentals, such as how to outline an argument, how to compose a thesis statement, and the importance of opening each paragraph with a topic sentence. One semester, I even taught some research methods, such as searching catalogs and electronic journals, and I spent a whole week on citations and bibliographies. But I stopped doing that after one peer reviewer censured me for teaching so many nuts-and-bolts. After that critical evaluation, I became frustrated and gave up on figuring out how to teach this class. Thankfully, I was not asked to teach it again.

A few years have passed since I last taught the class, and both the class and I have changed in that time. Media Criticism has been reclassified as a 200-level class, presumably due to Pathways reform, and I am more experienced with teaching seminar-style courses, where I can let students talk. I’m now ready to retry teaching it as introductory media theory course: a course where we “criticize media criticism,” as I explained in class yesterday. This semester, instead of “curating” an overly ambitious collection of readings, I had the students buy one textbook, we’re comparing three or so readings each week based on themes that the anthology’s editor, Laurie Ouellette, presumably organized them and based on my own interests in media and cultural studies.

One of the reasons I chose Ouellette’s edited collection is because gender and race aren’t put into a “topical ghetto.” Instead, those are addressed in almost every reading throughout the book. When I explained to my students yesterday about the importance of “studying (or criticizing) media criticism,” I offered the following diatribe:

A few weeks ago, the Academy Awards nominated ten film actors and ten film actresses for best of the year. Not one of them is black, Latino, Asian, or any other American ethnic minority. Are you telling me that there’s not one such actor who was among the best last year, or was it that those in charge of making movies didn’t offer some one “different” an opportunity? Either way, as a country, we have failed when our most visible cultural form disregards our own people…those that make up this country.

It was a rare moment of seriousness for me, and I probably prattled on a bit longer than I should have. But I wanted to make a point about why it’s important for budding creative professionals to study theory. I attribute the representational failures of the commercial film and television industries, as evidenced by 2014’s films and the attendant nominations, to its anti-intellectualism. A little reading and critical thinking could do everyone some good.

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Alternatives to CUNYFirst

Remember how CUNYFirst, the maligned all-in-one information management system at the City University of New York, tends to fail at the worst possible times, such as the beginning of the semester? For example, last August, CUNYFirst was down as the fall semester was starting and made it difficult for students to access their course schedules and for faculty to access course rosters.

Outages at peak usage times suggest deep-seeded technical problems. Although I don’t have any information on the specific causes of last fall’s outage, I suspect that the hardware powering CUNYFirst, either the database, the web server, or both, were simply overwhelmed by the activity from students, faculty, and administrative staff.

Today, I learned of two alternative access points to CUNYFirst data.

  1. CUNYFirst MyInfo. This access point, requiring CUNY Portal login, allows faculty to view our teaching schedules and student rosters. Instead of requiring a live connection to the CUNYFirst database, which could potentially crash the system, this appears to use a cached data: MyInfo pulls data from CUNYFirst once a day, presumably in the middle of the night. While it might not be live enrollment data, once a day is “good enough.”
  2. QC Courses. This is specific to Queens College and allows anyone to quickly access basic course information without having to login.1 Since the system is essentially public, it does not contain student rosters, but it does list the enrollment count, the catalog and section numbers, and the time and location for each course.

I welcome these solutions because it spares CUNY from having to “glue jets on a bus“, and it spares me from having to use CUNYFirst for looking up course information. With these alternative access points in place, most of us won’t have to bother with CUNYFirst during peak usage time at the beginning of the semester. And I personally won’t have to use CUNYFirst until I need to report attendance in the second or third week of the semester and until I need to report grades in late May. These alternative access points will make the launching this semester significantly less painful than the previous one.


  1. I should note that, after talking to a few colleagues at other CUNY sites, the information management and registration functions at Queens College appear to run smoother than at some other colleges in the system. 

Heating Season Begins at Queens College

Not quite three years ago, I complained about the unbearable heat in a classroom at Queens College. Our union, PSC-CUNY, came across my blog post, which they interviewed me about. Although I can’t find the article with my interview, the incident has since become a rallying cry for our labor representatives.

Yesterday, the unbearable temperature returned to my large lecture hall at Kiely 264. At the beginning of class, I announced that the intense heat was due to it being October 1, and that university always turns on the heat in October, whether it is necessary or not. I didn’t have a thermometer to measure the heat, but it was enough for cause students to complain endlessly throughout the class. My guess is that it was well over 80° in the room.

Today, we received an email broadcast from the university. It looks like I was right: the cooling season ended in September. However, the heat was apparently turned on prematurely. Heating season is not scheduled to begin for another two weeks:

New York City Department of Citywide Administrative Services guidelines mandate the end of the 2014 cooling season on September 30. Per the NYC guidelines, which our department and staff are committed to adhering to, we have ceased air conditioning functions across the campus and are in the process of taking most of our air conditioning equipment off-line in order to start preparations for the heating season which officially begins on October 15.

The communication also offers some “helpful tips” for maintaining “personal comfort.”

At this time of year there may be unseasonably cool or warm days, but as the systems are being transitioned from cooling to heating, we will not be able to provide all areas with temperatures that will be comfortable (depending on the status of the building’s system). We will help to provide thermal comfort as much as we can by bringing in the maximum amount of outside air, but we recommend dressing in light layers to assist in maintaining your personal comfort.

My students were not prepared for the intense heat and despite shedding sweatshirts and jackets (it was about 60° and rainy the entire day), they were still very uncomfortable. During our class break, I asked the media tech staff what I could do. They suggested that I call security and explain that I am a professor and that my classroom was unbearably hot. I did that, and it appears that they did power down the boiler, which helped some.

However, the students were still distracted by the heat and could not concentrate on our class material. Neither could I, despite being glutton for hot temperatures. I adjourned our class early in hopes we can reconvene when the temperature is more conducive to learning.

CUNYFirst is Down

Cunyfirst outage

The beginning of the fall semester at CUNY is in three days, and the website that controls everything at CUNY is wreaking havoc yet again.

I tried to get my class roster for the one class I am teaching this semester at Queens College, but CUNYFirst has stymied me twice.

First, I had to change my password because it expires every few months. Since I use 1Password, that’s not that difficult. What takes a long time are two things:

  • remembering the password policy (it’s apparently limited to passwords shorter than 13 characters),
  • waiting over two minutes for the database to update and allow you to log in with your new credentials

Second, apparently CUNYFirst is completely unavailable to all users.

I can’t tell if the people in the above image are trying to fix the problem or whether they represent the CUNY population who cannot access this all-in-one piece of crapware that handles every single function we do at CUNY. Either way, the image is as uninspired as the software that controls one of the biggest public universities in the country.

Update: CUNYFirst appears to be working now.

Queens College Gets a Shuttle

After some kvetching on my part and a long-running petition drive, CUNY Queens College has launched a shuttle from Jamaica and Flushing. It will run on a pilot basis from from August 25 to 28. After August 28, students will ride for free, and faculty and staff can buy a sticker to ride the shuttle.

Routes and Schedule

The shuttle service operates weekdays 7 am-11 pm and weekends 7 am-7 pm, covering two routes.

From Jamaica

Starting at 7 am, buses will pick up riders every 20 minutes, and transport them to Queens Hall and the Student Union. Travel time to or from Jamaica is approximately 25-30 minutes.

From Flushing

Starting at 7 am, buses will pick up riders every 20 minutes, and will transport them to the Student Union and Queens Hall. Travel time to or from Flushing is approximately 15 minutes.

Cross campus – between Queens Hall and Student Union

Every 20 minutes, riders may go from Queens Hall to the Student Union by taking the Jamaica bus across campus; those who wish to go from the Student Union to Queens Hall may take the Flushing bus.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t help me all that much since I take the E or F train from Forest Hills and then ride the Q64. But because I am not sure where I will end up living in the next few weeks, this might be of some benefit if I have to go to Jamaica or Flushing. For example, if I end up staying in downtown Brooklyn, it might make sense to take the LIRR from Jamaica towards Atlantic Ave. But who knows what my life will be like in the next few weeks.

At least, I can start encouraging students to leave their cars at home and take mass transit to campus.

Spring Break Should Not Be Easter Break

My poor students need a break. We also need a smaller classroom than Kiely 264.

My poor students need a break. We also need a smaller classroom than Kiely 264.

Today, most New York City-area colleges return from spring break. Consequently, I had a lighter workload last week because I didn’t have to teach at Fordham and because my office at NYU was more in a spring-cleaning mode than in our usual panicked, fire-extinguishing mode.

But at CUNY, we didn’t have the renewing benefits of that break. Instead, students and faculty have to endure another three weeks before we get our break. Why? Because our break is tied to the Easter and Passover holidays.

Merging Easter and Passover break with Spring Break might make sense for primary and secondary schools because families schedule holiday travel around this break, although my family never did. But in college, where the workload is much more intensive on students and faculty, this break is more urgently needed: scheduling it at the half-way point of the semester makes a lot of sense.

Because Easter and Passover always fall on different days of the year, due to the incompatibilities of the solar and lunar calendars, the CUNY Spring Break can start as early as late-March or end as late as late April. This year, our break comes towards the latter end of this period. That means we have about eleven weeks of classes before we get the benefit of a break. Right now, I’m exhausted. My students are exhausted. We could really benefit from hitting the pause button for a week.

Moreover, because of this scheduling, my class will be on break for two weeks, not just one. We will have our last pre-break meeting on April 7, and then we won’t meet again until April 28. It’s going to hard to gear back up after two weeks off. When we return, we’re going to have only two weeks before final papers are due, and three weeks before the final exam. This isn’t a midterm break: it’s an intersession!

CUNY does a lot of things well for our students, but sometimes, we do things that disadvantage our students compared to other universities.

Petition to Bring a Shuttle Bus to Queens College

Of all the places I have to travel for work, getting to Queens College is the most grueling and time-consuming. It takes close to an hour to travel there by subway-bus-walking, which seems like a long time to make an eight-mile trip from my home in Long Island City, Queens. Biking there is not a great alternative as almost the entire trip is on Queens Boulevard and then on Jewel Avenue, both of which are basically byways for speeding cars, and despite the presence of a bike lane on Jewel Avenue, it’s not for the faint of heart.

I’m not alone. Getting to Queens College is difficult for everyone, even those who drive because of the demand for parking, and it’s not easy to travel there on a single-seat ride by mass transit. In a proactive move, the college is planning for a shuttle to travel to the major transit hubs at Main Street in Flushing and at Jamaica Center. Students just need to approve an increased activity fee:

Shuttle bus service to the campus could begin as early as next fall! For a Student Activity Fee increase of just $40 a semester, our students could get direct shuttle service to the campus from the Main Street Flushing and Jamaica Train Stations. The shuttle will also make a loop from the Main Campus to Queens Hall. Faculty and staff will be able to use the shuttle by purchasing a $40 bus pass.

I hope students approve this. It would help relieve the load on the overcrowded municipal buses.

The only missing link is between campus and the Forest Hills subway and railroad stations, which is my connecting point to Queens College. Although there is frequent bus service there, via the Q64, and it’s only about a ten-to-fifteen minute ride, the bus is overcrowded in the evening hours with the crunch of rush-hour commuters and evening-class crowd.

Update: Beginning Fall 2014, there is a shuttle between Queens College and Flushing-Main Street, Jamaica Center, and Queens Hall.

Thirteen Fewer Tips for Emailing Your Professor

My good friends at Queens College IT have started a blog on Tumblr with a series of well-meaning tips for students. The blog is a barely a few weeks old, but there are already a number of posts and links with titles heavy with clickbait-speak:

My favorite post on the blog is a link to “18 Tips for Emailing Your Professor,” an article on US News and World Report. Most of the tips are sound, but they should be considered guidelines for any professional correspondence, email or otherwise. For example, the article urges you to be mindful of your recipient: send it to the correct address, maintain a professional tone, check your spelling, avoid slang, use a proper salutation and closing, and keep it concise. Any boss, co-worker, or client will appreciate this as much as your professor.

But do we really need eighteen tips? Some of these tips unfairly caricature students and professors: not all students write in leetspeak and emoticons, and not all professors are technophobes. Most of my students are very cordial and professional with email. Likewise, even the oldest and stodgiest college professors have been using email for at least 20 years, and the younger ones have likely been using their entire professional lives. It’s 2014: most of us “get” email.

Aside from guidelines that apply to any professional correspondence, here are five tips for your professor when I’m your professor.

  1. Email me at the address I provided you. I use the university-issued address because I can ignore those accounts on weekends and after the semester ends. As part-time faculty, I should only correspond with you when the meter’s running.
  2. Email me from an address where I can identify you. AOL email addresses used to not include real names so I would see messages from greekchick69@aol.com. Make it easy to figure out who you are. If your email account doesn’t support real names, at least sign your message with your full name. Or get a different email provider.
  3. Use the subject line. I don’t understand why anyone wastes the subject line with “Hi Professor,” or “From Bryan.” Years ago, I read an article recommending you use the subject line as the message as much as possible. For example, ask me, “Can you meet on Wednesday at 5:30?” in the subject line and leave the message blank. That way, I can reply without even opening the message.
  4. Compose a New Message. Speaking of subject lines, it really bugs me when a message lands in my inbox with an old subject. That happens when someone replies to an old message instead of composing a new one. That not only messes with the threading feature of my email client, it also wastes the valuable subject line: the topic on this new message will be different than the old one. Composing a new email costs as much as replying to an old one, and who doesn’t prefer a shiny new message to an crusty old one?
  5. Don’t attach anything. Email attachments are the worst. But even worse are attachments in a proprietary format. The US News article pokes fun at .odt (Open Office) files, but those aren’t any worse than Word (.docx) or Pages files. It doesn’t matter because those files require specific programs to open. I’ll admit that with enough time and effort, I can open just about anything, but that’s a lot of wasted time. Sending a PDF will ensure that your document will look exactly as what you sent me. But instead of emailing me an attachment of any sort, print it and hand it to me. Or better yet, share it using a cloud service.

It’s possible that I’m asking too much. After all, I’m an unreasonable ogre. However, managing email is one of those things that has become less of a work tool than a obstacle to getting things done. Let’s all work to minimize its impact on our productivity.

Through Ice and Snow

Snow covers this corner of Washington Square Park

Another winter storm is upon us, and my schools of employment are again responding to the weather.

  1. Fordham announced this morning that they were closing all campuses on Monday. Too bad I don’t have a class there until Wednesday.
  2. Around 2:00 PM, Pratt announced that they were closing at 3:00 PM. Too bad I don’t teach there this semester.
  3. NYU insisted they were going to remain open today. Although I had a library shift there today, it didn’t bother me having to go: it’s a pretty easy trek since my entire trip is underground via subway.

Unfortunately, Queens College, where I teach an evening class on Mondays this semester, did not close for a few snowflakes, as their emergency webpage emphatically reminded us:

Queens College will be open on Monday, February 3. Please be careful when traveling to and from the college and when walking on campus as the pathways may be slippery.

It usually takes me an hour and a half to travel the eleven miles from NYU to Queens College. The subway portion of the trip is a slog in itself, as the E train starts relatively empty at West Fourth Street but picks up the rush-hour crowd along the way to Queens. And after arriving at Forest Hills, there’s a short but very slow bus ride: it takes about 15 minutes to travel two miles. And after that, there’s a five minute walk from the bus stop to campus.

Jefferson Hall at Queens College has some snow

After all my belly aching, it actually took less time than usual. An hour and ten minutes after leaving NYU, I arrived in the winter wonderland that was Queens College.

An Improvement to Connectivity But Not Security

Starting this Friday, Queens College will be “upgrading” how we connect to the campus-wide WiFi network.

In an effort to improve wireless connectivity and availability, we are making changes to the campus wireless infrastructure architecture that will affect the way you connect. The wireless network we have been using, which carries the network name (also called SSID) qclan, will no longer be available.

Currently, we all connect to the network named qclan. This is an open network and requires no password. After connecting, you arrive at a “landing page” where you authenticate with your QC username and password. In the past, I suspected that the traffic between my computer and the WiFi network was unencrypted, but after becoming more attuned to digital security in the last year, I began to worry that anyone could sniff my packets.

Maybe the new “wireless infrastructure architecture” will address the lack of security between my computer and the network.

Nope.

New networks corresponding to your affiliation with the college will replace qclan: qc-faculty, qc-staff, qc-student, and qc-guest.

To access your particular wireless network:

  1. Select the network associated with your affiliation (qc-faculty, qc-staff, qc-student, or qc-guest) and connect.
  2. Enter WEP Key (password) 12345.
  3. Open a web browser (Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Chrome).
  4. Queens College login screen will appear
  5. Log in using your Queens College ID (except guests, who should use their email address).

Wow, this is absolutely appalling. They haven’t made any real changes to the security of our network. They’ve only made it slightly more difficult to get connected. We now have to connect to the network that corresponds to our affiliation (no cheating, anyone) and then enter a “passcode” that everyone knows.

Introducing a shared key introduces some level of security but not much. First, WEP is a deprecated security algorithm: it was declared insecure by the WiFi Alliance in 2003. Second, if everyone knows the key, anyone can get in and someone can sniff the data between a computer and the network. This is the real-world equivalent of locking up your home but taping the keys to the front door. Third, that WEP key is #20 on the list of most popular, worst passwords and note that it’s not all that different from #1.

The only real authentication happens in the fourth and fifth steps outlined above. We open a webpage and enter our QC username and password to gain access to the wireless network. That would keep unaffiliated users from accessing the web, but it doesn’t keep our traffic secure: web authentication does not provide encryption. Instead, it acts like a firewall that blocks all ports except those necessary for DHCP, to get an IP address from the router, and DNS, to get establish a basic network connection.

If this seems like a familiar way for connecting to a wireless network, it’s because you’ve likely done that in a public place, like a Starbucks, a Marriott, or an airport lounge. These are places where you have little expectation of privacy because you’re usually just passing through, and it’s why so many road warriors use a VPN to secure their digital traffic.

But as faculty, staff, and students, we are not the public. This is our campus-only WiFi network. We regularly traffic in sensitive data, such as research documents and student records, but are relegated to the status of a guest, like customers at a coffee shop or transients at a hotel or an airport. What’s more appalling is that they’re not the only university that secures its network in a similar way.

I wrote the QC help desk with my concerns. I’ll update if I get a response.