Eliminating remedial writing at Highland College

In one of our classes we had to role-play where each student was put into a group that represented a different group or interest in a community college setting. Our group represented the administrators of a remedial college that wants to transition to a four year college. This comes with two choices: one is to mainstream all the existing basic writing students and expand all of the credit-bearing writing courses in order to absorb all the new incoming students that place into basic writing, or eliminate basic writing altogether. This ended up getting everyone into a heated discussion, which challenged what we had only read about in theory. Students were very much invested in their roles and this made for heated discussion on which priority should be considered first. Our group was the “administrators” and the choice we made depended on the context of each role. As the administrators, our job was to look at the issue from a managerial perspective and figure out what decision we would take if we were the administrators. We decided that the basic writing program at this fictional community college would be eliminated in order to facilitate the ease of many undergraduate traditional 4 year students into the college. This ended up being an easier action to take then anticipated, and I think sums up the power of the administrative forces in a system like CUNY. If the administrators can easily put into place a top-down decision that influences millions of students and yet makes decisions based purely on how they are going to expand and grow while at the same time cutting students from this process, doesn’t something have to give before enough is enough? Why aren’t the students involved in this process?