Appendix A: The CUNY Lexicon

CUNY is a bustling university system stretching across five boroughs and twenty-five campuses, with more than 50,000 staff serving more than 275,000 students. As we mentioned earlier in the Teach@CUNY Handbook, 158 languages are spoken at CUNY. CUNY has a language of its own, learning it will help you navigate the system effectively.

In this section we offer a sampling of some key terms for understanding CUNY.

Chapter Outline

Words or Phrases That Describe a Course

Words or Phrases That Pertain to Labor Conditions

CUNY Technologies, Structures, Programs, and Designations

Words or Phrases That Describe a Course

• E-portfolio: An e-portfolio is a digital learning space that a student creates and maintains throughout a class, curriculum, or program. These portfolios and the technologies used to create them vary from campus to campus.

• HyFlex: A combination of the terms “hybrid” and “flexible,” Hyflex is a modality that mixes in-person and remote synchronous instruction. In most cases, students can attend a physical classroom, or participate remotely, in real-time, or engage with the course asynchronously. The faculty member is in person, usually managing complex technologies to accommodate students who are in different modes.

• Instructional Modes: the format in which a course will be taught. At CUNY, these are defined as:

• (P): In-Person. In an In-Person class, all required class meetings occur on campus, during scheduled class meeting times. Contact includes instruction, learning activities, and interactions (both student-student and student-instructor). An In-Person class where material is provided online, via a learning management system or website, does not displace any of the required contact hours that would normally occur in a scheduled In-Person class. Assignment deadlines and exams days/times are maintained and included on the class syllabus. All In-Person class meeting days/times must be listed in the schedule of classes.

• (H): Hybrid. In a Hybrid class, online contact hours (synchronous* or asynchronous**) displaces some portion of the required contact hours that would normally take place in a scheduled in-person (face-to-face) class. Contact includes instruction, learning activities, and interactions (both student-student and student-instructor). A hybrid class is designed to integrate face-to-face and online activities so that they reinforce, complement, and elaborate one another, instead of treating the online component as an add-on or duplicate of what is taught in the classroom. Assignment deadlines and exams days/times are maintained and included on the class syllabus. All In-person and synchronous online class meeting days/times must be listed in the schedule of classes for students.

• (O): Online. In an Online class (synchronous* or asynchronous**), all required contact hours are online. Contact includes instruction, learning activities, and interactions (both student-student and/or student-instructor). All the class work, examinations, quizzes, writing assignments, lab work, etc. are fully online. All Synchronous class meeting days/times must be listed in the schedule of classes for students.

• Asynchronous: Asynchronous class meetings do not require you to log in to your virtual classroom at a specified time. Students do not have to follow a strict schedule to engage in live classes or discussions, and the only requirement regarding when they turn in their work is the assignment deadline, not an arbitrary timeline. Assignment deadlines and exams days/times are maintained and included on the class syllabus. Per best practices, instructors should create nonmandatory opportunities for live interactions with and among students.

• Synchronous: Synchronous classes meetings resemble traditional on-campus In-Person classes in that students must be (virtually) present at the same time. Though they are conducted virtually, synchronous classes meet in realtime. Students must commit to scheduled class times and sign onto their virtual learning platform on schedule. During these classes, students will engage with the instruction during online lessons and presentations and even have virtual class discussions. Assignment deadlines and exams days/times are maintained and included on the class syllabus. All Synchronous class meeting days/times must be listed in the schedule of classes for students. Per best practices, instructors should make effective use of learning management systems for the posting of class materials and submission of class assignments.

• Instructor of Record: The person responsible for determining the content of the course and assigning final grades. Teaching Assistants serve under the Instructor of Record.

• Labs: A recitation section wherein students make practical connections to theoretical principles by exploring concepts from lectures and applying new methods for research in smaller learning groups.

• Lecture: A type of class where the primary structure is built around the professor presenting information to the students. Depending on the school and on the department, lectures are given by faculty, and may be followed by recitation/discussion sections that elaborate and facilitate reflection on the topic of the lecture.

• OER:  Open Education Resources are public, free, and openly licensed textbooks, syllabi, assignments, lecture notes, tests, projects, audio, video, and multimedia materials. Depending on the license, OER can be legally and freely used, remixed, and redistributed. Since 2018 New York State has invested significant resources to support the development and deployment of OER at CUNY. You can read more about this initiative at https://www.cuny.edu/libraries/open-educational-resources/.  

• Recitation/Discussion: Large undergraduate lectures also sometimes include once-a-week recitation sections (sometimes called discussion sections), led by a T.A., in which students meet in smaller groups to go over the material covered in lecture.

• Verification of Enrollment (VOE roster): A roster that provides/confirms status of enrollment and attendance information during the first couple weeks of class. It is submitted through CUNYFirst in the first few weeks of the semester.

• WAC/WID: An acronym for Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines, a collection of programs implemented across all CUNY campuses that support various approaches to writing as integral pedagogical tool in all disciplines.

• Writing-Intensive (WIC): A designation for courses that require a significant amount of writing, and where writing is consistently integrated into the activities of the course. Requirements vary, but writing-intensive courses tend to require students to produce 15-20 pages of formal writing submitted for evaluation over the course of the semester.

• ZTC: A CUNYFirst designation that denotes a “Zero Textbook Cost” course. A ZTC course will not require students to purchase a textbook, readings, online access codes, or other supplies.

Words or Phrases That Pertain to Labor Conditions

• Contact Hours: The hours spent interacting with students in the classroom (i.e. teaching). Non-contact hours, by contrast, are those spent preparing for a course, or interacting with students in office hours or virtually outside of class time.

• DC 37: New York City's largest public employee union. At CUNY DC 37 represents more than 10,000 employees, including College Assistants, custodians, and IT staff.

• DGSC: The Doctoral and Graduate Students’ Council is a representative body elected by students that represents Graduate Center students before the GC administration.

• EMPLID: This is an identification number, much like a social security number, associated with a person who is learning or teaching within the CUNY system and can be required when you log into particular online portals or other activities.

• Job Titles

• Assistant/Associate/Full professor: A job title for tenure-stream faculty who have a mix of research, teaching, and service responsibilities. Professors are promoted from Assistant to Associate to Full.
• Lecturer: A job title for faculty whose responsibilities are weighted towards teaching and service, without a research obligation. Typically but not always tenure stream.
• Adjunct: A job title for contingent faculty, who are not on the tenure stream and are hired to teach courses on a semesterly basis and without the protection of a long term contract.
• Non-Teaching Adjunct (NTA): A job title for a contingent, part-time employee or piece worker, represented by the PSC-CUNY union.
• College Assistant (CA): A job title for a contingent, part-time staff member, represented by the DC 37 union.
• Graduate Teaching Fellowships (GTFs): The teaching fellowships CUNY graduate students hold who teach one course per semester between the 2nd and 4th years of their doctoral programs.
• Teaching Assistants (TA): TAs are usually in charge of facilitating recitation or discussion sessions that follow the lecture taught by faculty. TAs can also be assigned the task of uploading texts, readings and other materials to online platforms, and can be responsible for grading students’ assignments. Faculty and/or departments define the specific tasks TA assume in each course.
• CLT: College Laboratory Technicians perform supervisory and/or complex technical functions in laboratories in support of coursework.
• Higher Education Officers (HEOs): Full-time staff members who work in a variety of academic support, advisement, library, technical, and service roles throughout CUNY. Like faculty, HEOs can be Assistant HEO, Associate HEO, and HEO.

• Office Hours: A set time when instructors will be available to students outside of class. Some instructors require students to sign up for office hours while others allow students to come for a walk-in. In recent years some instructors have renamed this “student hours” as a way of encouraging students to feel welcome. Adjunct and Graduate Teaching Fellows are contractually obligated to hold one hour of office hours per week during the semester.

• PSC-CUNY: The Professional Staff Congress is the union representing 30,000 or so faculty and staff at CUNY. The union negotiates the contract for faculty and staff (called a collective bargaining agreement, or CBA) and represents workers who have workplace issues (called grievances).

CUNY Technologies, Structures, Programs, and Designations

• Brightspace: Brightspace is the learning management system provided by CUNY for hosting classes and course materials online. Each course has an associated Brightspace “course shell” where an instructor can share class content and engage students online. Read more about educational technology in Chapter 7.

• Bursar: The official that manages the financial affairs of a college. You might go to the bursar to check on a tuition payment, for updates on scholarships, or to make inquiries about your paycheck, if you are employed at CUNY.

• Chair: The academic department chair constitutes the main directorate for department members and expresses the needs of department members to the administration. At the Graduate Center, chairs are called “Executive Officers.”

• Credit/no credit: Credit/no credit is a designation of course offering that separates classes between those that help build your requirements towards your degree and others which would not. Credit classes can have different numbers of credits, such as 1, 3 or 4, which eventually accumulate to the required number of credits students need to fulfill per semester (for financial aid reasons, for example) or towards completion of degree. No-credit classes, which can be professional development courses or other elective ones, do not count towards those requirements. During the COVID pandemic, students were given the chance to change letter grades into “for credit” ones that would not affect their GPA, it is always advised to consult with academic advisors before making these decisions.

• Cross-listed: When the same course is listed by different departments, with the result that students in different majors or disciplines may wind up in the same class.

• CUNY Academic Commons: An academic social network for members of the CUNY community. Some faculty build out course sites and develop other teaching resources on the Commons.

• CUNYFirst: CUNYFirst means “Fully Integrated Resources and Services Tool” and is a CUNY wide platform that includes your financial info, academic progress, and other administrative sections. It is also where you find your class roster and submit grades.

• Dean: The dean executes the academic policies of their department, college, or school. They are also responsible for their unit’s fiscal and managerial affairs.

• FAFSA: The Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) allows students to apply for federal grants, work-study, and loans to help with the costs of their tuition; the form helps determine their eligibility based on household income.
  
• INC/incomplete: An incomplete denotes a class for which you have not yet completed all of the requirements. Incompletes are given in consultation with the student and based on the expectation that the student will complete the work within a designated time after the end of the course, at which point the incomplete converts to a letter grade. Students who do not complete the work risk their incomplete turning into an F.

• Learning Management System: A learning management system is a software application for the administration, documentation, tracking, reporting, automation, and delivery of educational courses. Blackboard and Brightspace are examples of learning management systems.

• Major/Minor: Your major and minor denote your primary and secondary fields of study. Each will have set requirements you need to fulfill that are set by that department. Sometimes student combine subjects that complement each other—for example a major in Education and a minor in Spanish. Other times students combine fields that span disparate interests—for example a major in Biology and a minor in English.

• Manifold: Manifold is a free, open source publishing platform developed as a collaboration between the CUNY Graduate Center, the University of Minnesota Press, and Cast Iron Coding. CUNY’s instance of Manifold offers hundreds of projects, many of which were developed for the purpose of teaching at CUNY.
  
• Open Admissions: A policy that was created in 1966 and enacted in 1975 to open CUNY admissions to all high school graduates. This policy was advocated for by student groups and activism and vastly changed the demographic makeup of CUNY to reflect the diverse populations of NYC.  

• Pathways: CUNY’s General Education framework, initiated in 2013, which was intended to standardize general education requirements and ease student transfer between CUNY campuses. Pathways was met with criticism from the PSC when it was introduced, as it bypassed faculty governance and oversight of the curriculum.

• President: The president’s central responsibility is to provide leadership for the design and function of all facets of the college’s resources and programs in accordance with CUNY’s Board of Trustees and state law.

• Provost: The provost oversees the college’s academic affairs. The provost works with the president to set academic priorities and administers funds for the aforementioned priorities.

• Registrar: The official at a school who is responsible for keeping students’ records. The registrar is where you go to get a copy of your transcript and is the office that oversees course registration.

• SEEK: Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) is a program created in 1965 and  designed to provide access to four year colleges through academic, financial and social support. It is specifically for students who traditionally may not be able to access college to financial or educational barriers.

• TAP: The New York State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) offers grants to CUNY students residing in New York to help offset tuition costs.

• Transfer: The act of changing colleges; sometimes this means a student at one four-year college completes their degree at another four-year college. Another common transfer is a student who starts at a community college and goes on to receive a Bachelor’s degree from a four-year college. More than one-third of college students will transfer at least once, and transferring is particularly common at CUNY because of its mix of community colleges and four-year colleges and its comparatively low-cost tuition.

• WU: A WU is a letter grade that students get when they withdraw from a class “unofficially.” It is different than a W grade which means the student has chosen to withdraw from the class and should not receive any penalties for this, and different from a WN class which means the student enrolled for the class but never attended. A student with a WU grade may have attended classes but stopped attending or completing requirements after the period for withdrawal had passed. This grade may have an impact on financial aid or scholarships.