CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

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, among City University of New York (CUNY) students, faculty, and staff. The petition stated: "This statement was drafted in response to the Board of Trustee's consideration of a resolution to approve CUNY's contract renewal with Turnitin for Plagiarism Detection Software in 2020." The authors submitted the final version – signed by 1,065 members of the CUNY community – to the Board of Trustees on December 7, 2020, for consideration at their meeting on December 14, 2020.

This item is part of the City University of New York (CUNY) Distance Learning Archive, a group project developed as part of Prof. Matthew K. Gold's Spring 2020 Knowledge Infrastructures seminar in the Ph.D. Program in English at The Graduate Center, CUNY, in partnership with the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program. The project's goal was to resist or trouble the discourse of catastrophe around the shift to online learning caused by the COVID-19 pandemic by documenting the lived experiences of students, faculty, and staff across CUNY's 25 campuses. Further, the project wanted to document the moment of crisis response by taking a critical approach to educational technology.