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CCNY'S INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER   MAY 2000 VOLUME 2, NUMBER 5

Mopping out Morales
It’s time for a housecleaning in the Office of Student Affairs. Part 1 of 3.
by Rob Wallace

A presidential search committee has been convened at City College (more next issue). By the end of this year a new president should be named.

Traditionally, new presidents reshape their predecessors’ administrations as they see fit. Some administrators are kept on, others dumped. While the Moses administration was characterized by incompetence and disrespect in many quarters, we at The Messenger think that if the next president wishes to retain any credibility with students, they must start their tenure by cleaning out the Office of Student Affairs currently presided over by Vice President Thomas Morales. Take a big sopping mop and swab the place right out.

First thing that needs to be done for sure is to fire Morales himself. Calling for someone’s head is a very serious matter, but Morales’s record clearly shows the sacking would be richly deserved.

In Part 1 of this Messenger series on Student Affairs, we’ll address Morales’s, uh, unique style of management.

Nasty Man

At a 1997 Council of Organizations (COO) meeting, where chartered student groups convene, student government Vice President for University Affairs Terrence Podolsky asked Vice President Morales a pointed question concerning administration policy. Morales responded by angrily calling Podolsky an “asshole” in front of a room full of student organization representatives.

As the Podolsky incident exemplifies, Morales has a talent for completely turning people off, even people who have no political interest in disliking him. In any room the gruff and pompous Morales enters and speaks in he can turn a room of students or staff or faculty into a seething pot of disdain. Even fellow administrators have openly voiced their antipathy toward the man.

USG president Rafael Domiguez characterized Morales as “stubborn and pretentious.” Before his City College stint, as director of EOP and assistant VP for Student Affairs at SUNY New Paltz, Morales earned a reputation, according to one former New Paltz student, as “arrogant.”

Some have kinder words for Morales. USG VP for University Affairs Cristina Cocheo called Morales “accessible and supportive of my initiatives.” “He called me worried that I was alone in putting together an immigration forum,” Coceho told the Messenger.

But the portrayals tend to be as vitriolic as they are ubiquitous. One faculty member mistreated by Morales called him “a sexist.” Perhaps mimicking the VP’s potty mouth or else bidding for an award in Associate Dean Paul Bobb’s Civil City contest, a newly elected student official called Morales “a flaming asshole.” Ouch.

Though we’ll explore some more classic Morales moments later in this series, it isn’t just a matter of style that earns Morales a pink slip. If any person can be blamed outside of budget butchers Cuomo and Pataki and President Moses for the destruction of student life at City College, it’s Morales.

As VP for Student Affairs, Morales is in a position to affect very significant aspects of students’ extracurricular life. He oversees Career Services, the Child Development Center, Disabled Students Services, the Finley Student Center, Athletics, and Student Health Services. The Office of Student Affairs also has significant representation on the Student Services Corporation and the Auxiliary Enterprise Corporation, two major CCNY allocating bodies. Student Affairs is the administration’s interface with the student governments. The Office is also responsible for disciplinary procedures against students.

Want to join a team or work out? You’re affected by Student Affairs. Need immunization? Affected by Student Affairs. Want to start and run a student club? Affected by Student Affairs. Your club needs money? Student Affairs. Want to table in the NAC Rotunda? Student Affairs. Looking for a job? Student Affairs. Need to blow your nose? Dean Bobb will be there to count the toilet paper squares. The last one’s an exaggeration, let’s hope, but Student Affairs is involved in just about everything students do outside the classroom.

The Vice-presidency, then, is an important position, currently filled by someone who is disdainful of the students he’s supposed to serve and who has acted viciously against their interests.

Duh Enforcer

In 1995, a vibrant CUNY student movement against a proposed $1000 tuition increase manifested itself at City College as a hunger strike held in the NAC Rotunda near the Cohen Library. Morales spearheaded administrative efforts to destroy CCNY student organizing to block the proposed cuts. SAME-TV has video of Morales shouting hysterical commands through a bullhorn at chanting students in the Rotunda on the night President Yolanda Moses had the NYPD arrest the students.

Morales and Associate Dean Bobb later requested and used an “Enemies List” of these arrested student activists compiled by CUNY Central. The lists included the names, races, birth dates, Social Security numbers, home addresses, and arrest records of CUNY student activists.

In helping block student efforts to roll back the cuts and tuition increases, Morales helped assure that City College’s student body would be decimated. In four years, CCNY’s undergrad student body decreased from 15,000 to 10,000 undergrads.

In the face of such defeats, students still fought back, organizing against further tuition increases, against the arming of Security, against CUNYCard, against Security harassment, and in defense of remediation. The NAC Rotunda arrests left Moses with publicity egg in her face. So a different strategy was pursued. Specific student organizers would be marked in a low-level war of attrition. Morales played the administration’s enforcer, targeting organizers.
In 1996 Morales helped suspend Graduate Student Council chair David Suker for his effective student activism.

The penalty was so egregious that an appeals committee at CUNY Central, with no love for Suker, rolled back Suker’s one-year suspension to a semester. In 1998, Morales again went after Suker when the single parent Suker brought his two-year old daughter on a CCNY bus that was to take student leaders to a weekend leadership retreat. Never mind that other student leaders, and Vice President Morales himself, had brought their children to the retreat in years past.

At Suker’s 1998 hearing in front of the Faculty-Student Disciplinary Committee, a kangaroo court stacked with Student Affairs appointees, Morales, acting as prosecutor, was allowed to give committee members copies of Suker’s past disciplinary record and to verbally malign Suker’s character. Meanwhile, all testimony by Suker’s witnesses about the pattern of administration harassment against him or Suker’s good character was ruled out of order. The subsequent and unsurprising judgement brought against Suker—prohibiting him from participating in student government or clubs for five semesters—was tailored precisely to silence Suker’s activism.

Morales took a particular personal pleasure at targeting Suker, who was especially adept at foiling the VP’s nefarious plans. After Suker had been suspended a second time, Morales crowed, “I hope you have some tissue for David” for the upset Suker.

Ironically, Suker made Morales’s job easier as Suker made daily efforts for five years to invigorate student activities. For example, Suker helped organize the wildly popular Student Talent and Fashion Show. He also helped his fellow students wade through the paperwork necessary to found and run numerous clubs including, but not limited to, such disparate clubs as The CCNY Coalition against the Cuts, African Dance, SLAM! and the Hip Hop Club.

Threats Galore

In classic form, the day he had Suker suspended the second time, Morales went on to threaten GSC member and Messenger editor Brad Sigal. When Sigal asked Morales what the next step in Suker’s “judicial” process was, Morales replied, “I hope you never have to find out.”

In 1998, Morales threatened student activist David Thurston of the International Socialist Organization (and a Messenger contributor) with suspension if he continued the dangerous practice of placing ISO posters around the NAC Building (more on this and other student group issues next month).

The Messenger is aware that twice in the past few years Morales, has cornered USG officials who blocked his initiatives to whisper in their ears, “I’m going to get you.”

Morales’s Godfather III antics have been a major part of his standard mode of operation as VP of Student Affairs, particularly with male students. But since the professional demise of his major client, Yolanda Moses, Morales has attempted to cloak his rubout persona. As one student put it to The Messenger, “Morales is not walking around campus like the Big Man anymore.”

The student puffed his chest, then deflated it. “Now he and Dean [Paul] Bobb are really, really quiet,” the student continued.

It seems each Student Affairs administrator is lying low in an effort to buy time and win new allies with some meticulous brownnosing. They are in a fight for their professional lives. But neither can hide from their records, more sordid details of which we will reveal in Parts 2 and 3—details that do not belong in a family newspaper.

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