Coming Soon to NCC: Curriculum and Degrees Designed by Private Companies

Nassau Community College
AAUP Advocacy Chapter

November 13, 2015

Dear Colleagues,

At Tuesday night’s Board of Trustees’ meeting NCC AAUP president Dr. Kimberley Reiser asked the Board, “What’s next?”

The answer arrived in Wednesday’s Newsday announcing a partnership between Hempstead Union Free School District, Nassau Community College, aerospace firm Lockheed Martin and a Massapequa-based video-surveillance company IntraLogic Solutions. What is the partnership about? It will give students a high school diploma, a free associates degree from NCC in information technology and electrical engineering, and (possibly) employment. This new education paradigm is called “P-Tech”: Pathways in Technology Early College High Schools. IBM, which has been involved in PTech for some time states, “Corporate partners, having helped shape the curriculum and interacted with these students for years will feel comfortable putting them at the head of the line when they apply for entry level jobs after graduation”. http://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/presskit/42300.wss

You should know that the Senate was not consulted or even informed of this. At the Board meeting in June, the Board and administration substituted their judgment regarding curriculum with the AA degree and now it appears that the administration is cutting deals with local industry and allowing industry to dictate our curriculum.

This is the “promised” new community college model hinted at in Governor Cuomo’s 2015 state of the state speech: “More and more the community college system, where successful, is turning into a training program, or almost an apprentice program for a specific industry.” The implied goal? To transform community colleges into mere purveyors of students to targeted industries that dictate the curriculum according to their perceived immediate needs.

We suspect that the reason neither our Senate nor CWCC has been informed is because this privately generated career program will permit NCC to side step the “inconvenience” of having to deal with its tenured, full-time faculty and our union. As NCC moves forward to shift us away from providing a Liberal Arts education and towards P-Tech, NCC will seamlessly transition to a “business model” for education, giving “teachers” long-term or short-term contracts, eventually shedding most of its tenured faculty. Oh, Brave New World!

Sincerely,
NCC AAUP, Executive Committee