2020–2021
The Case for Credit/No Credit
As an advisor to the CUNY University Student Senate, Victor Kiani became a relentless voice for Credit/No Credit on its Academic Affairs Committee during the pandemic, and at Queensborough, where he had a vote, he cast it to adopt the policy.
A year into the pandemic, CUNY had let one of its few real protections for students lapse. Credit/No Credit, the option that lets a student take a passing grade without the number scarring their GPA, had carried the university through 2020 and then expired. With remote classes still grinding on, Victor Kiani made restoring it his fight.
Credit/No Credit is a small mercy with large consequences. A student drowning in a semester they never signed up for, a shared laptop, a sick parent, a job lost, can take the credit and keep the grade off their record. In an ordinary year it is paperwork. In 2021 it was the difference between a hard semester and a permanent mark.
Kiani advised the CUNY University Student Senate, the student government for the entire university, all 25 campuses and roughly 271,000 degree students. He had no vote there; advisors do not get one. What he had was the floor of its Academic Affairs Committee, and he was relentless with it, making the case for Credit/No Credit meeting after meeting. He pressed the committee's chair to secure it fast, and the answer matched the urgency:
Yes we can.
When the committee weighed surveying students across all 25 campuses before putting the policy forward, Kiani argued it down: the survey would only cost time the semester did not have. Credit/No Credit was not a contested idea, it was relief no one needed convincing of; a survey is how you pressure-test a radically new proposal, not how you deliver an obvious one.
The senate's officers came to rely on him for it. Its Chair of Fiscal Affairs, Joel De La Cruz, spoke highly of him; its Vice-Chair for Graduate Affairs asked him to keep doing on the committee exactly what he had become known for:
Please continue to be the fierce fighter you are at our AAC meetings.
And where Kiani did have a vote, he cast it. At Queensborough, as Executive Vice President of the student government, he voted for Credit/No Credit for the college's students, and it passed.
- Campuses in the CUNY system he advised
- 25
- Degree students across the system
- 271,000
Figures: CUNY enrollment, 2020–21.
Credit/No Credit had carried CUNY's students through the worst of the pandemic, and Kiani fought to keep it within their reach when it still mattered, on a committee where he could not vote and a campus where he could. It was the same instinct behind everything he did at CUNY: find the lever that reaches students where the year actually hurt them, and pull it before the moment closed.