CUNY Trustees Vote to End Remedial Classes

In a decision that threatens to slam closed the door on thousands of CUNY undergraduates, the University\u27s Board of Trustees voted on May 26 to eliminate remedial courses at the system\u27s eleven senior colleges. For people interested in CLAGS — which is not involved in remedial education and is based at the Graduate Center — the new policy may not seem momentous, relevant, or even objectionable. Nonetheless, it has far-reaching political, economic, and practical implications for CLAGS. What\u27s more, as hundreds of CUNY faculty, students, and community groups testified at public hearings over the last several months, it\u27s a pedagogically and morally indefensible policy that CLAGS, as a vibrant part of the CUNY family, opposes

Expanding Horizons

Happy New Year! Welcome to the new semester! Welcome to CLAGS\u27s second decade! Such greetings would be heartfelt under any circumstances, but the artifices of the calendar seem especially useful now as we seek new beginnings after the trauma of the Fall

Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

I’ve just finished teaching an undergraduate Shakespeare class at Baruch College—CUNY to a class of mostly business majors. For many of the students, English is not their first language, so predictably, they had some trouble parsing Shakespeare\u27s text. But they had no difficulty at all understanding what was going on between Patroclus and Achilles in Troilus and Cressida, or, arguably, between Antonio and Sebastian—or Olivia and Viola or Orsino and Cesario—in Twelfth Night. In general, they were not in the slightest surprised to find homoeroticism in the works of the Greatest Writer Ever. (Indeed, critically analyzing Bardolatry was a harder sell.) It had been some years since I had taught an undergraduate Shakespeare course, and I was astonished by the sea-change

Vigorous Debate and Rigorous Inquiry

Our newsletter goes to press on the eve of President Bush\u27s State of the Union address, in which he is expected to argue for going to war against Iraq. By the time this newsletter reaches you, the war may already have started. It\u27s a frightening moment, to say the least. Meanwhile free speech and civil liberties are being curtailed in the name of security and scholars and researchers have special reasons to be wary: Archives are shutting off access; the Freedom of Information Act is being gutted; new laws are demanding that when asked by government officials, librarians must turn over records of what books and websites their clients have perused without even allowing them to notify the client; and new websites -- which invite students to report on their professors -- are policing our classrooms and declaring dissent beyond the patriotic pale. For the current generation of students and faculty, and for scholars both inside and outside academia, the stakes for our labors -- and for universities\u27 roles as sites of vigorous debate and rigorous inquiry -- have never seemed higher

Insisting on Inquiry

This special CLAGS newsletter goes to press exactly one month after hijackers rammed jets into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and aimed for a third target before being brought down in the fields of Pennsylvania. In the days immediately following the attacks, pundits, politicians and plain folks asserted that our lives in America had been changed forever. Certainly all of us at CLAGS have been stunned and shaken. Gathering for our first board meeting of the year just days later, we expressed our grief, confusion, anxieties, and fears. Like everyone, no doubt, we questioned the meaning and purpose of our lives and our work, as we found ourselves swept into the emergency-parlance category of non-essential personnel

On the Agenda

This newsletter goes to press just as Millennium Mania is reaching its fever pitch. If my own dismissive attitude toward the doom-sayers turns out to be warranted, our computers have not collapsed, the sky has not fallen, and our newsletter has reached your address intact. Of course there\u27s been more to the millennial madness than apocalyptic anxieties and mega-marketing opportunities for products and services of all sorts and sizes. The obsession with Y2K— which represents only one of the world\u27s calendar systems, after all— has also marked the way in which a particular religious view increasingly passes for the secular in the US

Redefining \u27Institution\u27

I\u27m thrilled and honored to be succeeding Jill Dolan as Executive Director of CLAGS. Thanks to Jill and to Marty Duberman before her—and to all past and current Board members and to the miracle-working staff—CLAGS is a secure and solid institution. Let me quickly explain what I mean by \u27institution\u27 for it is a word I don\u27t always use comfortably as it tends to conjure in my bohemian brain images of stuffiness and caution, bureaucratic stasis and lumbering loss of purpose. That\u27s the last thing CLAGS has become. On the contrary, CLAGS remains lively, responsive, provocative, and ever self-critical

Standing Against Censorship—Again

Good afternoon. I\u27m Alisa Solomon, the executive director of the Center for Lesbian and Cay Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, and I\u27m glad to be here on behalf of CLAGS to voice our strong objection to Mayor Giuliani\u27s so-called Cultural Affairs Advisory Commission. We at CLAGS are not fooled by the Mayor\u27s disingenuous assertions that this committee is merely a group of concerned citizens exercising their free speech in offering him their advice, for we recognize many of the members as long-time activists in the effort to squelch dissident viewpoints and legislate their own narrow morality. Nor are we fooled by the mayor\u27s professions as an opera queen, even if he does like to put on a dress now and then, for we know his abysmal record on support for the arts, public space, and free expression, and we recognize the deep threats of his policies to the open exchange of ideas upon which democracy depends

Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Vivien Ng said something at a roundtable discussion CLAGS hosted in October that has been ringing in my ears ever since. The roundtable had brought together a range of Women\u27s Studies and LGTBQ Studies scholars, writers and teachers, to consider what lessons LGTBQ Studies might draw from its older sister as the younger field becomes further institutionalized at universities and colleges across the country. Was feminism still a motive force? we wondered. Did that field somehow speak to and from a vibrant movement, or at least to and from women\u27s communities? Was it still accountable to them in some way? Was it ever? And how could LGTBQ Studies replicate what worked and avoid what went amiss? Ng, a long-time professor of Women\u27s Studies, summed up the situation on her SUNY-Albany campus, and in general: Women\u27s Studies is no longer a center of change because the kind of feminism we came out of is no longer relevant

Changing of the Guard

After four gratifying years, i have decided to step down as the executive director of CLAGS to focus again on research, writing, and teaching. As much as I have enjoyed the position and as proud as I am of all we have accomplished, the truth is, I don\u27t have the temperament of an administrator. I\u27m yearning to teach graduate students again, to be more available to my undergraduate students at Baruch, and eager to jump back into the scholarship that I\u27ve had to put aside since 1999