CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

A participatory project to collect and preserve the histories of the City University of New York

We found 1046 items that match your search.

Tweet: CUNY Announcement of COVID-19 Infection at Brooklyn College

On March 13, 2020, several days after Governor Andrew Cuomo declared a state of emergency across New York State, Brooklyn College, City University of New York (CUNY), reported its first positive case of COVID-19. Such a report offered two [...]

CUNY Guidance for Students Traveling Home to International Countries

Amidst discussions of precarity, a group often absent from the conversation were international students, members of the CUNY community resident in the United States under limited political visas far from home and family. Sent on March 13, 2020, by [...]

Coronavirus Update: CSI exposure

Staten Island, often considered NYC's "forgotten borough," the lesser child of the more famous boroughs of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, was not able to avoid the pandemic. CSI President William J. Fritz sent this email on March 13, [...]

Covid-19 Update (Lehman College campus)

This submission from a member of the CUNY community included an email from Lehman College's President sent the night of March 16, 2020, discussing the consequences of the official shutdown order. In this artifact, we encounter two concerns: [...]

Telecommuting Plans

Released on March 15, 2020, this email represented an official communication from City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Matos Rodriguez on university guidelines, expectations, and intent to set up telecommunications for CUNY's operations. In [...]

Update on Hunter's Response to Coronavirus

In the same vein as other official communiques, this email from Hunter College regarding available resources sought to strike a balance between logistical planning and human apathy. Of particular interest was the focus in this message on libraries. [...]

COVID-19 Update (Lehman College Campus COVID-19 Exposure)

Sent on March 16, 2020, this email provided official notice of COVID-19 exposure among the Lehman College student body. In conjunction with John Jay College, Brooklyn College, and the College of Staten Island, this announcement marked the spread of [...]

Semester Info: Update 6.5

This series of emails from March 17th, 2020, between department faculty at Queens Colleges' Department of Art provided a snapshot of the sheer administrative burden that instituting remote learning practices was for many faculty. Rather than provide [...]

Welcome to Distance Learning

The City University of New York (CUNY) traditionally has sent out regular newsletters to inform its community of significant events and accomplishments by its faculty and students. For the first week of remote learning, these newsletters would focus [...]

What to Do If You Are Asked to Report to Work on Campus Tomorrow

Sent on March 18, 2020, this artifact included a statement by the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) dictating terms for essential workers whose roles required continued in-person work during the official closure of CUNY. Despite its name, distance [...]

Recalibration Period for Educational Equity

As many artifacts in this collection have suggested, the switch to online learning was abrupt for faculty, administration, and students alike. A week to transfer an entire university system to a digital format, especially when many community members [...]

Selected Facebook Posts from CUNY Confessions

This item offered a curated selection of informally written Facebook posts documenting student life during the abrupt transition to distance learning in mid-March of 2020. Drawing from the "CUNY Confessions" Facebook group, these compiled posts [...]

Safety Measures at The Graduate Center

Taken by Charles Scott, Director of Facilities at the CUNY Graduate Center between March 2020 and May 2021, these pictures showed some of the ways in which administration and staff worked towards creating the conditions for a safe working and [...]

COVID University New York (Episode 5, "The Essential Workers")

Throughout the 2020-2021 academic year, COVID University New York (CVNY), a radio show co-produced by Racecar Radio and the Gotham Center for New York City History at the Graduate Center, discussed how the pandemic impacted vulnerable groups. In [...]

Close CUNY Change.org Petition

Started by "Concerned Student" on March 8, 2020, this petition calls on Chancellor Felix V. Matos Rodriguez to suspend the City University of New York (CUNY) schools one day after Governor Cuomo declared a formal state of emergency in New York State [...]

Covid-19 and the Escalating Mental Health Crisis among Bipoc and Immigrants

Created by Areeba Zanub in Fall 2020, this digital capstone project examined the COVID-19 pandemic relationship to the rising mental health crisis of BIPOC and immigrant communities. In it, Zanub investigated the role of the "essential worker" with [...]

#CancelRent And Eviction Blockades in Brooklyn: Black Queer Women and Femmes Fight for the Right to Housing

Written and submitted by Brooklyn College student Emily Batista over the summer of 2020, this autoethnography focused on the eviction defense of 1214 Dean Street in Crown Heights, Brooklyn. Batista framed this research project as a "vessel to [...]

College of Staten Island (CSI) COVID-19 News

This item was compiled by John Verzani and published on Github. It provided a multipurpose resource for the City University of New York (CUNY) community and the College of Staten Island (CSI) during the COVID-19 pandemic. This daily repository was a [...]

"An Open Letter to CUNY Admins"

Posted on July 7, 2020, this Reddit thread recorded one unnamed student's open letter to the City University of New York (CUNY) administration in the interest of drawing critical attention to the persistent mix of unclear, conflicting, or otherwise [...]

A Professor's Threat: Cameras during Testing Situations

Posted on May 5, 2020, this Reddit posts featured student dialogue around whether or not instructors can viably take action against CUNY students who refused to enable their cameras during testing situations. Responders then negotiated the classroom [...]

Directory of CUNY Online Social Platforms

Created in the form of an open-access Google Document on July 12, 2020, this public directory compiled a list of online social platforms associated with the City University of New York (CUNY) (e.g., Discord servers, Subreddits, Facebook groups, [...]

"Is anyone else finding this online semester to be more difficult than usual? I find it to be 3x more harder than regular in-person classes"

Posted on September 3, 2020, this Reddit thread featured discussion and critiques of the ways CUNY instructors have increased the workload for students in their classes and rendered classes far more difficult to pass during the pandemic. This item [...]

"Online classes = more work"

Posted on September 28, 2020, this Reddit thread featured a discussion among City University of New York (CUNY) students about how instructors have disproportionately compensated for the limitations of distance learning by increasing the rigor and [...]

"CUNY should cut the tuition."

Posted on July 24, 2020, this Reddit thread recorded conversations around students' desire for the City University of New York (CUNY) to reduce the cost of tuition given the pitfalls of online learning and the diminished return on investment [...]

"I really don't know if I can do another semester online"

Posted on November 2, 2020, this Reddit thread documented responses to one student's post on the mental and emotional toll that online learning had on them and how their needs have neither been met by their instructors nor the CUNY system. Ensuing [...]

John Jay College of Criminal Justice Law and Society Class Project: COVID-19 at CUNY

Developed at CUNY's John Jay College of Criminal Justice during the Spring 2020 semester, this Law and Society class project documented the ongoing relationship of student contributors and the broader City University of New York (CUNY) community to [...]

Open Pedagogy on the Open Lab

Published on March 21, 2020, this web guide discussed open pedagogy on New York City College of Technology's (City Tech) OpenLab blog, with two instructors providing tips and advice on distance learning techniques. The teachers focused on student [...]

Guidance from CUNY Regarding Classroom Observations, Office Hours, Annual Evaluations, Tenure/Promotion

Sent to faculty on March 25, 2020, from the Office of Academic Affairs at CUNY's College of Staten Island (CSI) to faculty, this email offered administrative responses to looming questions at the center of City University of New York's (CUNY) [...]

Together Alone

In this video, Tomo Imamichi, Associate Professor at CUNY's La Guardia Community College, described his experience of teaching and learning at CUNY during Covid-19 through the use of music. Imamichi's video was initially uploaded to YouTube and made [...]

Act as If You're Really There: What Learning to Speak Remotely Teaches Us about How to Compensate for the Coming Era of Social Distancing

Published on March 15, 2020, by Douglas Rushkoff, Media scholar and Professor of Media Studies at CUNY's Queens College, this Medium post focused on teaching and learning in online classrooms during the pandemic. It specifically covered issues [...]

CUNY From My Window

Led by the Teaching and Learning Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, this crowd-sourced initiative featured a sense-making project aimed at documenting at the embodied perspectives of CUNY community members during the pandemic, framed from the [...]

The Single Most Essential Requirement in Designing a Fall Online Course

Written by Cathy Davidson, Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center and published on the HASTAC blog on May 10, 2020, this piece reflected on pedagogical challenges brought on by the Covid-19 [...]

Interview with Baruch College Senior on the Distance Learning Experience

Recorded and transcribed by by Zach Muhlbauer, on April 21, 2020, this interview with an anonymous undergraduate student at CUNY's Baruch College who grappled with the abrupt transition to remote learning formats during the interviewee's final [...]

"Having a breakdown falling behind in online classes"

In this Reddit thread, posted on April 2, 2020, one student wrote about their experience of falling behind in their coursework, leading to "having a breakdown" during the Covid-19 pandemic. The student attributed their problem to the lack of [...]

"My professor has provided no contact, and tomorrow is the last day to drop without penalty. What should I do?"

Posted on March 18, 2020, this Reddit thread documented the perspective of a struggling student at CUNY's LaGuardia Community College during the Covid-19 pandemic. Unable to reach their professor via email ahead of the original deadline to drop [...]

Petition in Opposition to Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection Software

This petition – opposing the CUNY Central administration's resolution to approve a contract with Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection Software – was crafted by Lisa Rhody, Luke Waltzer, and Roxanne Shirazi and circulated on December 3, 2020, [...]

GC Online

GC Online was a resource developed in the summer of 2020 for Graduate Center faculty teaching online courses at the CUNY Graduate Center. It offered broad guidance on a range of pedagogical approaches via quick guides, overviews of digital platforms [...]

"im tired of these professors"

Posted on April 15, 2020, this Reddit thread featured a post by an "essential worker" at the City University of New York (CUNY) student who felt their professors were ignorant to the stresses and responsibilities of over-extended students employed [...]

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