City University trustees made sure to cross the t’s and dot the i’s yesterday when they OK’d – for the second time – a plan to eliminate remedial reading and math courses.
They voted 10-5 to phase out the courses at CUNY’s senior colleges, making a legal end-run around a judge’s ruling that would have required CUNY to keep the courses.
Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani say the remedial courses have lowered CUNY standards – and they’ve been pressuring the trustees to eliminate them.
Giuliani said last night the vote will make sure all CUNY students “are assured a first-class public college education.”
The board originally voted last May to eliminate the remedial courses.
That decision was overturned by state Supreme Court Justice Elliott Wilk, who ruled in August that the trustees’ boardroom was too small to comply with New York’s open-meetings law.
But the trustees got around the open-meetings part of Wilk’s decision by holding yesterday’s meeting in an auditorium at La Guardia Community College in Long Island City.
The dispute is still before the courts, where backers of remedial courses hope for a permanent ruling restoring them.
La Guardia and other community colleges will be allowed to keep remedial courses.
But starting next January, the brush-up courses in high-school level math and English will be phased out at the senior colleges.