On a prime site in Manhattan, a block from the lions guarding the New York Public Library, the City University of New York (CUNY) opened its newest community college in the fall of 2012. Designed to achieve greater student success, as measured through increased graduation rates, the New Community College at CUNY (NCC) is seen as a beacon of hope in the otherwise daunting picture of community-college education nationally. This article tells a cautionary tale, from two founding faculty members' perspectives, of the first two years of NCC and how its innovative educational design was undermined by CUNY's organizational imperatives. In practice, the absence of shared governance and the hiring of an entirely untenured founding faculty compromised the educational mission of the college and established harmful precedents for faculty and students at the largest urban public university in this country. The NCC instantiates a false dichotomy between desperately needed educational innovation and protection for faculty rights. The purpose here is to deconstruct this damaging dualism and advise readers to be wary of institutions that situate these two ideals as polar opposites--because the innovation may end up subordinated to and corrupted by the imposition of administrative priorities.