OAA This Week: Thursday Edition

OAA THIS WEEK | Aug 27, 2020

A news update and community connection for the Office of Academic Affairs of The City University of New York

OAA NEWS

Guidelines for limited return to on-site work at the central office provided

In a memo on Monday to all Central Office staff, Executive Vice Chancellor and Chief Operating Officer Hector Batista provided guidelines for a limited return to on-site work at all central offices. The memo echoed much of what Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez had said during a webinar conducted for Central Office staff last week, stating that telecommuting would continue through the academic year for a large majority of central office staff. More information will be forthcoming.

______According to EVC Batista’s memo, prior to returning to Central Office locations, employees will be required to follow federal, State and City mandates to deter the spread of COVID-19 at the workplace. The first such employee requirement is the completion of the “Return to Work Training” course, now available on Blackboard and accessible to employees via their CUNYfirst account. Employees will also have to download the health screening application Safety Connection Pro/Contact Tracing and complete a health screening survey prior to entering the building. A reduced number of employees will be permitted entry on a daily basis and may be asked to work in staggered shifts; employees will be alerted when the building has reached capacity.

_____The layout and look of the office facilities will differ from the pre-COVID era, with revised floor plans that allow for social distancing. Employees will be required to wear a mask when working less than six feet apart from one another, and N95 masks, face shields, and gloves will be provided as needed. employees can also expect mandatory regular health screenings, as well as screenings for students and scheduled visitors.

Library Services revamps database for fall semester

In a major step forward for the CUNY library system, the Office of Library Services has completed a 3-year University-wide effort to migrate CUNY library data from the obsolete Aleph platform to the state-of-the-art ExLibris Alma platform. The transition was completed this summer, in time for the start of the new school year.

_____“The migration was a massive cross-CUNY library collective and collaborative effort over three years in preparation. The systems librarians and metadata experts in the Office of Library Services (OLS) took the administrative lead, and library staff from every CUNY campus contributed to the data clean-up and training that the migration required,” said Interim University Dean for Library Services Polly Thistlethwaite. Alma, as it is commonly known, works in conjunction with the Primo VE discovery interface, the primary mechanism that powers CUNY OneSearch.

_____“Alma and Primo VE together transform the way CUNY libraries manage our resources – from the ordering and cataloging of materials to researcher discovery and delivery of them, both in physical and in electronic formats,” according to Dean Thistlethwaite. “Alma handles lending, cataloging, acquiring, reporting, and managing resources in ways that were not possible before,” she added.

_____There are many new ways to search CUNY materials now, via OneSearch. The cross-database searching works for articles, books (both physical books, soon their Open Library digital surrogates and born-digital works), dissertations, and openly-posted scholarly works.

_____With this migration, CUNY user authentication runs through CUNYfirst. All of Central Office can use CUNYfirst login credentials to reach library resources, using the new links on the OLS web page, or links on local campus library web pages.

_____Dean Thistlethwaite noted that Allie Verbovetskaya, who has recently accepted the position of University director of Library Systems in OLS, led the project to completion. Verbovestskaya, a graduate of CUNY Brooklyn College, has been with OLS since 2012 and previously worked at Lehman and New York City Tech libraries. “The steerage and the project management, the difficult leadership in the final months during COVID-19, crossing all CUNY campuses, came from Allie,” Dean Thistlethwaite said.

Free Mindfulness Meditation offered to OAA

The wellness website 10 Minute Mind has been offering meditation courses to CUNY students, faculty, and staff. The 10 Minute Mind mindfulness course is a daily, mindfulness meditation exercise accessed online for stress and anxiety management. With over 25,000 CUNY users, the course is offered free to all students, faculty, and staff. Sign up here.

OAA HIGHLIGHTS

Editor's note: In this new section, OAA Highlights, we celebrate the accomplishments and milestones of the units that comprise the Office of Academic Affairs. We hope this news will serve as a weekly snapshot of the efforts of our colleagues throughout the past academic year. We believe OAA Highlights will prove a testament to our colleagues' dedication and impressive achievements outside of their continuing work combating the COVID-19 crisis.

Navigate system has kept students connected to CUNY throughout COVID-19 crisis

In 2019, CUNY launched a new student success management system, Navigate, for the 12 senior colleges. To date, CUNY OAA has worked with EAB and 11 of the colleges to build leadership teams, train users, customize student and staff systems and validate college data among other tasks. By mid-fall 2019, CUNY had completed the technical launch at the first four or “Wave 1” schools (CSI, Queens College, Medgar Evers, and SPS).

_____The “Wave 2” colleges (Brooklyn, City, Hunter, John Jay, and City Tech) launched in the fall and winter 2019. “Wave 3” (Baruch, Lehman, and York) was impacted by the onset of the coronavirus pandemic; Baruch and York moved forward remotely with minor delays and Lehman is preparing to commence.

_____Following each launch, EAB, CUNY and the college leadership teams have worked intensively to finalize student and staff applications. The Wave 1 and 2 colleges are now using the system. Early successes, particularly with student outreach and appointment-scheduling following the March 2020 pivot to remote operations, led to requests to expand the Navigate contract to include graduate students at the senior colleges.

_____The School of Urban and Labor Studies (SLUS) will also added to the contract and is expected to begin implementation in the Fall. Borough of Manhattan Community College separately procured the Navigate system and CUNY is helping to accelerate its implementation.

_____Over the past several months, Navigate has played a significant role in addressing challenges posed by the coronavirus: connecting thousands of students across CUNY to their colleges with a simple and effective communication tool on their phones and enabling administrators and advisors to reach students to schedule appointments and provide and gather key information, for example to learn about obstacles such as lack of laptops or internet access, which the colleges can then address.

CITY NEWS

Media Roundup: CUNY makes “best” lists, experts talk coronavirus testing and crime

CUNY colleges were included in “best” lists, released this week including Princeton Review’s annual survey, Business Insider’s colleges with best return on investment, and Money magazine’s “Best Colleges for Your Money” report. Brooklyn, Baruch, Hunter and Queens were amongst the dozen New York City colleges and 386 across the country Princeton Review included in its “nation’s best colleges,” list according to Yahoo! News; they were also amongst the eight CUNY colleges on Business Insider’s list of colleges with “the best return on investment.” The Business Insider list, of two dozen 4-year colleges around the country, also recognized York, Lehman, CSI and City. Baruch was named one of Money magazine’s top three colleges in the country for business majors and many in the CUNY system were highlighted in the category of lowest-cost schools for students to attend after grants, as featured in University Business Magazine.

_____Michael Fabricant, a professor at the Hunter College School of Social Work and Stephen Brier, a professor in the Urban Education Ph.D. program at the Graduate Center, argue for “A New Deal for CUNY” in a Gotham Gazette op-ed titled “Racialized Austerity: The Case of CUNY.” The pair propose significant new investment of State and City tax funds “to help to bring CUNY back from two decades of systematic erosion of public funding.” They call for a 5-year plan that would increase educational equity for CUNY’s 275,000 students, including approximately 70 percent students of color.

_____CUNY experts’ continued contributions to the understanding of COVID-19 were featured in several publications including Campus News, which reported on research projects around CUNY including a Queens College study monitoring the level of coronavirus in NYC sewage; studies by researchers at CUNY’s Advanced Science Research Center and John Jay were also featured. School of Public Health (SPH) professor of Health Policy and Management Bruce Lee wrote an article for Yahoo! News titled “Approval of a coronavirus vaccine would be just the beginning — huge production challenges could cause long delays” and SPH health epidemiology professor Denis Nash is one of the experts quoted by Gothamist in an article titled “NYC Releases Largest And Most Detailed Coronavirus Antibody Testing Data To Date.”

______Remote learning didn’t stop an ambitious investigation into police misconduct in the Bronx by a class of Lehman College journalism students this spring taught by professor Eileen Markey, published in a story in The Intercept titled “Lawsuits Show the High Cost of NYPD Abuse in the Bronx.” Public records show that New York City paid out more than $30 million in 2019 to plaintiffs in the Bronx who filed cases alleging police misconduct between 2015 and 2019, 45 percent of the approximately $67 million city taxpayers shelled out to cover such complaints against cops citywide in 2019. CUNY students Kayla Beltran, Marcus Diego, Ana Garcia, Fernando Murcia, Maya Persaud, Genesis Ramos, Johnny Reyes Castro, Lester Robinson, and Ruth Sandram contributed reporting.

City arts: Museums reopen doors to visitors today

As part of New York City's Phase 4 of reopening, some arts institutions reopen their doors to visitors beginning today and throughout next week. Visitors will find some changes in store for them, with timed entry and enforced social distancing policies, and, of course, masks must be worn when inside the buildings at all times.

_____Museums opening today include MoMa and Museum of the City of New York. Saturday, The Met reopens, and early next week The Whitney and The American Museum of Natural History are also back in the game. Museums such as The Bronx Museum of the Arts and El Museo Del Barrio will reopen later in September, and further institutions are slated to reopen throughout the month and into October.

COLLEAGUE CONNECTION

In each edition, OAA This Week asks our colleagues about the work their unit is up to...and how they’re personally faring in the era of COVID-19. If you would like to be featured as a Colleague Connection, please contact Duffie Cohen at Duffie.Cohen@cuny.edu.

Ryan Camire, University Director of Mental Health and Wellness

The Office of Mental Health and Wellness is set to launch two training courses on Blackboard to assist staff in dealing with the emotional challenges of the current times. Why did you choose "grief and bereavement" and "self-care and resilience" as the topics for the first set of Blackboard courses? What other course topics do you foresee in the pipeline? The topics of choice for these courses evolved naturally as our student services group met regularly throughout last semester. Talking to our colleagues, friends, and loved ones, it was abundantly clear that keeping day-to-day routines moving with Zoom Rooms and conference calls was insufficient to address the needs around us. Our focus on students did not inoculate us from the mental health effects of the pandemic as loss of life, certainty, and control grew steadily. Isolation, grief, and trauma are common responses during times of uncertainty, and we sought to help faculty, staff, and students alike through these difficult issues. Self-care is difficult at the best of times, especially for helping professionals who are notoriously bad at taking time for ourselves! The pandemic brought up new challenges, however, that shifted self-care routines and demanded creativity to keep up with personal resilience. We hope these courses will be useful in a number of ways – for professional development of staff and faculty, for assuring faculty and staff can respond to the needs of our students, and for each of us to use as we navigate our new reality. I would like to thank Rachel Stephenson, Ian James, and José Luis Cruz for the vision and support as we developed these courses.

Aside from your office's pandemic-related initiatives, what "business as usual" work is your team is excelling at? As expected, the Office of Mental Health and Wellness has been busy over the past several months. With counseling and health services moving online in the spring, services transitioned quickly to continue to serve students with the same capacity and expertise students enjoy. The complicated policies and procedures of online mental health treatment has kept me and College Assistant Jonathan Frias busy with executive orders, varied state laws around mental health, managing technology, and ethics and confidentiality of online treatment. A third Blackboard course is under review that will provide professional development to the mental health staff across the University on best practices in telemental health. Andrea Facey-Hutchinson, University coordinator for Student Health Services, has also kept up with immunization regulations, navigated the changing health needs of students, and focused on virtual wellness activities for the fall. With enormous support from Kevin Tucker, University director of Student Affairs, the office has thrived in this environment and we look forward to continuing to provide support for the CUNY Community.

Do you have your own self-care routine that you use to help you through these challenging times?

My self-care routine usually involves maintaining some semblance of order in my own space – even when the world is so chaotic outside. I think it helps to keep a work routine with times for breaks and meals to be sure that a work/life balance is maintained. I also advocate for some escapism, as the news and social media can be burdensome. “The Great British Bake Off” does nicely in that regard.

How have you been adapting to remote work and dealing with the disruptions remote work may entail? Remote work has been a relatively easy transition for me since I am comfortable in a virtual environment. Having taught online at CUNY School of Professional Studies and working with other online mental health platforms, I was able to transition to remote work without difficulty. That said, there are certain disruptions I did not anticipate when moving to remote work – namely the aforementioned felines demanding attention. Flexibility has been key to success, however, as the virtual environment comes with technological issues and unanticipated changes in workload. The rapid shifts in knowledge about COVID-19 have also necessitated some patience as we navigate the world together surrounded by unknowns.

Are there any other self-care and emotional wellness resources you would recommend to colleagues? There are many excellent resources available and I have curated a “useful links” list for students that colleagues may also find useful. Mindfulness is a module within the Self-Care and Resilience Course, and staff and faculty have access to 10 Minute Mind through CUNY. This daily mindfulness course requires 10 minutes and has been researched extensively for its efficacy in stress and anxiety management. New York City has also created a list of free online applications for use during the pandemic.

The Office of Mental Health and Wellness’ Blackboard courses on grief and bereavement and self-care and resilience will launch in early September 2020.