CUNY Academic Commons

Colleagues:

CUNY is proposing a policy on use of cloud services for the CUNY BOT to adopt.  In its current form it will restrict faculty ability to choose what applications they would use in the classrooms, with their students, in their research and in their creative work involving the relevant technologies.

You will want to take a careful look at the list of prohibited applications at the end in the appendix (and below) and all of section 6 which indicates penalties for faculty who use authorized applications.

Faculty presently do use all of the unauthorized applications on the current list but they use others as well that are probably not going to have the approval of the University.

The policy proposed makes faculty liable for penalties that might result from the use of an authorized applications and subjects faculty to disciplinary action.

The UFS is preparing a statement on behalf of CUNY faculty indicating why faculty whose professional responsibilities as scholars, artists and educators require them to explore and develop and create new research and new teaching modalities and instruments in the effort to improve on the efficacy of instruction and to further knowledge of pedagogic techniques, instrumentations and services. We shall develop such a statement much further with input from faculty throughout CUNY for presentation to those who make the decisions.  We are gathering responses from faculty throughout CUNY to the proposed language in this attached draft.  We will present the results as a document with the responses redacting the names of the authors and with a preface that indicates the principle points raised and the most frequent comments made to those in CUNY who are drafting this policy.

Please send me your comments and criticisms and suggestions, etc..  ppecorino@qcc.cuny.edu  Time is short on this however.

There is also the non-exclusive option for the CAT itself developing its own statement on this draft.

Phil

Philip A. Pecorino, Ph.D.
CUNY University Faculty Senate

APPENDIX to Attached DRAFT

The following cloud services and applications are NOT approved for University Activity.  This listing is meant to serve only as a partial list.  As noted in the CUNY Cloud Computing Policy, any application or service that has not been expressly approved in accordance with University procedures should be assumed to be not approved:

• Dropbox
• iCloud
• Amazon Cloud Drive
• Google Drive
• SurveyMonkey
• MailChimp