CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

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

We found 49 items that match your search.

Email Chain with Students

In this email exchange from early March 2020, an adjunct instructor discussed student needs and concerns with their Latinx Studies class regarding converting the course to an online format. These frank dialogues revealed how much course design [...]

Initial Survey for Students Switching to Distance Learning

The instructor in a seminar on the works of Audre Lorde distributed this copy of a survey from March 2020 during the instructional transition. Though simple in style (only seven questions/three pages in length), the form revealed what concerns [...]

Cuomo's First Announcement

Posted on March 11, 2020, this landmark tweet was the first official notice from Governor Andrew Cuomo and the State of New York that the City University of New York (CUNY) and the State University of New York (SUNY) would be transitioning to remote [...]

"An Important Message on Coronavirus"

This email was from City University of New York (CUNY) Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodriguez, was issued only a few hours after Gov. Cuomo's closure tweet. In this email, Chancellor Matos Rodriguez provided formal clarification regarding CUNY's [...]

Professional Staff Congress (PSC) Response to CUNY Coronavirus Plan

This March 2020 statement from the Professional Staff Congress (PSC) – the union representing 30,000 faculty, staff, and graduate students at the City University of New York (CUNY) – outlined the ambiguities in Chancellor Matos Rodriguez's [...]

Tweet: Student Complaint

This tweet questioned the ethical determination behind the City University of New York's (CUNY) continuance of in-person operations at the beginning of the pandemic. Like other artifacts in this section, this tweet expressed the broader CUNY [...]

Tweet: Defense of CUNY by Student

This tweet expressed a counter-narrative to the antagonism against City University of New York (CUNY) administration seen in other items in this collection, pointing out that the nature of CUNY's student body forced questions of equity to guide its [...]

Tweet: #CloseCUNY Nationwide

This tweet pointed out that the #CloseCUNY hashtag had received national circulation among Twitter's userbase during the early days of the pandemic. This hashtag expressed a growing desire for CUNY to cease in-person instruction, begun early in the [...]

Tweet: Lehman President Explanation

This series of tweets from the president of Lehman College, Daniel Lemons, provided an official response to demands for CUNY's closure, explaining that the logistics facing CUNY's transition to distance learning were markedly different from other [...]

Tweet: School is still open?

This tweet from a City University of New York (CUNY) student pointed out the discrepancy between faculty preparation for online teaching and the continued operation of CUNY campuses. As expressed in other tweets (see the series "Tweet: Lehman [...]

Tweet: CUNY/SUNY Pandemic Response & Student Wellbeing

Posted on March 11, 2020, this tweet echoed related Twitter artifacts from this collection in scrutinizing the perceived lack of preparedness and administrative indifference of the City University of New York (CUNY) toward the health and safety of [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]


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