Welcome to Save CPCS!

savecpcs — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 14:57:03 +0000

Don’t Believe the Hype. Believe the People.
This website is dedicated to providing useful information to the public about the ongoing crisis at the College of Public and Community Service (CPCS) at the University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, USA. For the past several months, faculty, staff and students have been fighting against the increasingly autocratic regime of CPCS Dean Adenrele Awotona. The Dean, backed by the higher UMass Boston administration, has been dismantling the long-standing democratic structures of CPCS piece-by-piece — eliminating key staff, ignoring the elected CPCS Policy Board, unilaterally appointing department heads, refusing to seat the elected Undergraduate Faculty Chair, refusing to raise money for CPCS, freezing and cutting parts of the CPCS budget, etc. The CPCS community would like these decisions reversed, and the Dean removed from office. For background documents and other important archival materials click here. For a gallery of photos from Save CPCS events click here. For testimonial statements by CPCS alumni click here. Stay tuned to these pages for all the latest news on the fight to Save CPCS!

9/22/06: Check out our new Press Coverage page. . .

9/12/06: Click here to sign the online petition demanding that the Boston Globe cover the Crisis at CPCS!

9/10/06 UPDATE: In early September 2006, the week before classes started, the CPCS Dean — with the full backing of UMass Boston Provost Paul Fonteyn and UMass Boston Chancellor Michael Collins — fired 11 CPCS non-tenure-track faculty members, which in addition to 2 other non-tenure-track faculty members fired over the summer, translates to cutting 1/3 of the CPCS faculty. See this Faculty Memo for more specifics on the background to the cuts. This act, plus the purposeful cancellation of numerous classes taught by CPCS tenured and tenure-track faculty, has led to a 40% cut in CPCS classes for the Fall 2006 semester. Since these actions were taken with no warning, large numbers of CPCS students showed up for classes the following week that simply did not exist, and many other CPCS students showed up for classes that were to be taught by CPCS faculty with no expertise in the subject matter in question. Meanwhile, core curricula like the CPCS Writing Program and large chunks of the Critical Learning Seminars have been wiped out. All Fall 2006 classes were eliminated for an entire major, the Community Media and Technology Program, and all students who were being advised by fired faculty are now in school without advisors. At the same time, the cutting of the CPCS Student Services office from 5 staff to effectively 1 staff person has meant that most CPCS students are having trouble getting advice of any kind from a university that claims that all these actions are being taken in THEIR BEST INTERESTS. CPSC Students are organizing in parrellel with CPCS faculty and staff organizing and held a Rally and Visibility Action at the UMass Boston main entrance last Friday morning, 9/8/06. More actions will be happening this week. The situation is dire, please help out however you can. Contact your MA State legislators and tell them to Save CPCS. Email or call UMass Boston Chancellor Michael Collins and ask him why UMB is trying to eliminate CPCS. More updates to come. If you’d like to join the CPCS community movement against the destruction of CPCS, please email info@savecpcs.org.

How You Can Help

savecpcs — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 02:52:03 +0000

If you’d like to join the movement to save CPCS, if you need more information, or if you represent a media outlet, please email us at info@savecpcs.org.

Be sure to include your name, affiliation, and your connection (if any) to the CPCS community.

This website looks ugly in Internet Explorer

savecpcs — Sat, 01 Apr 2006 05:45:22 +0000

To see savecpcs.org as it is meant to look, please use the Firefox browser. Internet Explorer makes our nice clean design look waaaaay ugly. . .

Switching to Firefox is easy, just clink on this link and follow the instructions.