The Struggle at CUNY: Open
Admissions and Civil Rights – by Ron
McGuire, 1992
From LeftSpot.com at http://leftspot.com/blog/?q=cunystruggle
The following article provides an excellent background and framework from which to understand the importance of the struggle at the City University of New York. It squarely puts the struggle at CUNY in the framework of a struggle against racism and national oppression. Though it was written in 1992 and therefore some of the data is outdated, it is still an accurate analysis of the struggle at CUNY. This article was printed as a mass newspaper by the CUNY Student Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!) in 1997. It is reprinted here from an old SLAM website. –LS
The Struggle at CUNY: Open Admissions and Civil Rights
By Ronald B. McGuire, 1992
The movement of the students of the City University of New York (“CUNY”) and their communities against the proposed budget cuts which would result in tuition increases, financial aid cuts and program cutbacks, is a civil rights struggle, not an argument over economics or fiscal policy. CUNY contains the largest number of Black and Latino scholars ever to attend a single university in the history of the United States. The importance of CUNY as a source of opportunity for non-white students and their communities is highlighted by the fact that CUNY traditionally awards the largest number of Master’s degrees to Black and Latino students of any institution in America. Last year CUNY conferred 1,011 Master’s degrees to Black and Latino students while the State University of New York (“SUNY”) awarded only 233. The integration of CUNY has been the most significant civil rights victory in higher education in the history of the United States.
CUNY’s unique policy of open admissions transformed the university from a virtually all-white enclave in the mid-1960’s, to an institution with over 200,000 students, the majority of whom are now Black and Latino. CUNY’s predecessor, the Free Academy, was founded in 1847 for the purpose of providing opportunity for higher education to the poor and disadvantaged of New York City. Ironically, despite the fact that successive generations of immigrants had availed themselves of the opportunity provided by CUNY, it was not until 1969 that the University undertook a commitment to open its doors to students from the Black and Latino communities who had until then been virtually excluded from the CUNY schools.1 In Spring 1969 a strike led by Black and Latino students at City College engendered tremendous community support in favor of the students’ main demand that the ethnic composition of CCNY reflect the ethnic composition of New York City’s high schools.
As a direct result of the open admissions strike, the Board of Higher Education adopted a plan providing for the immediate implementation of a policy of open admissions guaranteeing all graduates of New York City high schools a place in one of the CUNY colleges. Today, Black and Latino scholars comprise a large majority of CUNY’s student body.
CUNY is the third largest university in the United States. The State University of New York (SUNY) and the California State University are both larger. Together, SUNY and Cal State have almost four times as many students as CUNY, yet CUNY has more Black and Latino students than SUNY and Cal State combined. Overall, 63% of CUNY undergraduates are non-white, while 54% of all CUNY students are Black or Latino.
Consequently, the future of the CUNY students and their movement is inextricably bound up with the future of non-white people and their communities. The leadership being forged in the CUNY student struggle prefigures the shape of movements for social change in the coming decades. This is the legacy of open admissions and the reason why scholars, labor, community leaders and clergy have come together in a coalition to save CUNY.
The second salient fact about the demographics of CUNY is that its student body is overwhelmingly poor. Recent figures indicate that half of CUNY’s students come from families with incomes below $21,000, with 28% of CUNY students living in households with incomes less than $14,000. These average income levels are substantially lower when white students and graduate students are abstracted out. For example, at Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, a 1986 CUNY study showed that 42% of the student body came from households where the family income was less than $4,000 and 75% of the students had family incomes of less than $8,000 2 The same study showed that 96% of the students at Hostos were non-white. Id. Table III-A at 135. Another study showed that three times as many CUNY freshmen came from low income households than the national average for students at public colleges and a majority of CUNY students work during their first year, more than double the rate for college freshmen nationally.3 56% of CUNY students are self-supporting, 23% are supporting children and over 60% are women.4 At some CUNY colleges administrators estimate that between 10% and 15% of the students are homeless.
CUNY BUDGET CUTS AND TUITION INCREASES HAVE TARGETED NEW YORK’S NON-WHITE COMMUNITIES AND THREATEN THE INTEGRATION OF HIGHER EDUCATION IN NEW YORK AND IN THE NATION
Public financial support for higher education of the poor has been steadily withdrawn in New York since open admissions began to transform CUNY into a predominantly Black and Latino institution. Beginning with the founding of the Free Academy in New York City in 1847, tuition was free at New York City’s public colleges through world wars and financial crises, including the Great Depression, until 1976, when tuition was first imposed at CUNY. 1976 happened to be the first year that CUNY’s freshman class was predominantly non-white. The effect of tuition was catastrophic. Enrollment dropped from 250,000 to 180,000 in a year and the proportion of non-white students in the incoming class dropped by four percentage points.
The recent tuition hike was the largest increase since tuition was imposed and threatens the ability of tens of thousands of nonwhite students to continue their education. Tens of thousands of others will be forced to defer getting their degrees for years because the additional charges will force them to take reduced academic loads or to take time off in order to work to raise the money for college. Studies of student attrition have concluded that, even prior to the current cost increases, the major reason for student attrition at CUNY is financial hardship, not academic failure.5
One of the myths propagated concerning tuition increases at CUNY has been that the poorest students are insulated from the effects of drastic increases because of financial aid programs. However, even the poorest CUNY students are rarely eligible for tuition assistance for their entire college career. The two major financial aid program for which CUNY students are eligible have term limits which guarantee that very few CUNY students will qualify for aid during most of their careers. The New York State Tuition Assistance Program (TAP) limits recipients to four years of eligibility and the federal Pell Grant Program limits students to five years.6 Only 21% of CUNY baccalaureate students obtain their degrees within five years and the mean time for obtaining a four year degree at CUNY is approximately eight years. Most students have to rely on their own resources to pay tuition in the lent years before they get their degrees.
APARTHEID AT CUNY
CUNY AND SUNY: TWO SYSTEMS; SEPARATE AND UNEQUAL
A pattern of racially discriminatory funding to higher education has been established in New York State and acquiesced to by city officials and CUNY administrators. New York State extracted a high price in return for providing financial aid to CUNY during the New York City budget crisis of the 1970’s. In 1976 CUNY was forced to charge tuition for the first time since its founding in 1847 as a condition for qualifying for increased financial support from New York State. Three years later, New York State assumed financial responsibility for funding programs at CUNY senior colleges and the governor received authority to appoint a majority of CUNY’s Board of Trustees. The result of the assumption of state control over the financing of the senior colleges has been an increasing disparity between the financial support of CUNY schools, which are largely non-white, and equivalent schools and programs in SUNY, which has a student body which is over 83% white. Since the state assumption of financial responsibility in 1979, the disparity in funding equivalent schools in CUNY and SUNY has increased.
The net result of state financing of the CUNY senior colleges has been to produce a two tier system of higher education which is racially segregated and unequally funded. The SUNY schools are overwhelmingly white and are funded at consistently higher levels than equivalent CUNY senior colleges and graduate programs.
The disparity between CUNY and SUNY funding is not confined to four year colleges and graduate programs. The State Education Law7 provides a separate basis for funding SUNY community colleges, whose students are 83% white, and equivalent CUNY schools, which are over 70% non-white. Governmental sponsors of community colleges outside of New York City are required to fund their community colleges out of revenues which are set aside for the purpose of funding the community colleges and are not available for any other purpose. New York City Community Colleges, on the other hand, are funded by the City out of general revenues. In times of fiscal crisis, the predominantly non-white CUNY Community Colleges are required to compete with other city agencies for scarce resources while the overwhelmingly white SUNY community colleges have earmarked funds set aside for their support. Last year this resulted in the city slashing its support per community college FTE almost 50% while increasing tuition to cover some of the difference. Currently, tuition at CUNY community colleges is $1,750 per year, among the highest tuition in the nation for public two year colleges. Although SUNY community colleges charge the same tuition, state law allows the white community colleges of SUNY the option of establishing a two-tier tuition system whereby community college students from the sponsor’s home district may be charged a lower tuition rate and a number of SUNY community colleges charge lower tuition to students who live within the jurisdiction of the community college sponsor.8
Even within CUNY, budget cutting measures are distributed in a pattern which is racially discriminatory. When tuition was imposed in 1976 the Board of Higher Education was forced to adopt a plan to cut the CUNY budget. The Board rejected a proposal to drastically cut administrative expenses and instead voted to designate Medgar Evers College as a two community college so that it would qualify for a lower level of funding. Medgar Evers, which has a student body that is 99% nonwhite, was previously designated and funded as a senior college. The vice-chairman of the Board resigned in protest, calling the Board’s action a “rape of the Black and Puerto Rican communities”. New York Times, April 6, 1976, p.1.
For sixteen years the faculty and students at Medgar Evers College have refused to accept the community college designation and have operated Medgar Evers as a senior college. Today, three quarters of the degrees conferred on Medgar Evers graduates are baccalaureates despite the fact that Medgar Evers remains the only one of the eleven public college in New York State which awards Bachelor’s degrees but which is not designated and funded as a senior college.
Within CUNY there are four colleges which award Bachelor’s and Associate degrees. The state has enacted special legislation guaranteeing that the state will fully fund all the programs at the College of Staten Island, whose students are 78.9 percent white, while the state has refused to pay for the Associate degree programs at New York City Tech or John Jay Colleges. The undergraduate student body at City Tech is 87% non-white and the 68% of the students at John Jay are non-white.
NEW YORK STATE ATTACkS PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION FOR ALL
The racist policies which threaten to destroy CUNY also threaten public higher education for all in New York State. The Chronicle of Hiaher Education recently reported that New York State ranked 50th in a measure of “state budget priority” for higher education.9 New York State ranks 47th overall in the percentage of state and local tax revenues appropriated to public higher education. Id.
Some state political leaders have blamed the economic difficulties of recent years for declining support for higher education. However, the figures reveal an unmistakable pattern of invidious neglect for public higher education by New York State throughout the economic boom years of the 1980’s. Although the national average for appropriations per student attending public colleges dropped by 5.7% since 1977/1978, in New York, the funding per student has dropped 17.1% over the same period. Id. With 3.8% of state tax revenues appropriated to higher education, New York lags far behind the national average of 6.9%. Id.
Although New York State’s funding policies amount to a threat of educational genocide for people of color, the state budget cuts are a disaster for all the people of New York because they continue policies which will lead inevitably to the abandonment of accessible public education in the state.
EXCELLENCE AT CUNY
Since CUNY became a predominantly non-white institution it has faced years of unremitting attacks on its budget. Yet, despite the imposition and escalation of tuition charges, the cuts in funding in programs and financial aid, the students and faculty of CUNY have maintained CUNY’s historic commitment to excellence. A recent Standard and Poors survey ranked CUNY first in the nation as the source of high level executives (CUNY 1,288; Yale 1,258: Harvard 1,041). See New York Times, June 25, 1990. Since 1960, City College, which ranks 186th nationally in number of students, has been the third largest source of Bachelor’s degree recipients who have gone on to earn doctorates. Brooklyn College ranks 12th and Queens College is 22nd for the same period.10 Hunter College is the third largest source of women who earn doctorates. Id.
CUNY awards more Master’s degrees to Black and Latino candidates than any other institution in America. Id. 68 .
City College alone has graduated eight alumni who went on to win Nobel prizes, more than any other public college in America. Its Engineering school confers more Bachelor’s degrees to Black and Latino students than any other school in the nation. Id.
Six of CUNY’s 32 Ph.D. programs rank in the top 13 nationally and eleven are in the top 25. Id. 70 at 25. The success of CUNY’s graduate programs is remarkable because of the 33 leading graduate institutions in the nation, CUNY ranks 32nd in financial assistance per graduate student. Id. 68 at 24. For example, SUNY provides financial aid to 80% of its Ph.D. students, while CUNY only provides financial aid to 18. 5% of its Ph.D. candidates, due to insufficient funding. Id. 108 at 43.
Over the past eleven years CUNY’s faculty includes 178 recipients of National Endowment of the Humanities Fellowships, 51 who have received awards from the American Council of learned Societies as well as 34 Guggenheim Fellows. Id. 69 at 24-25. Three of the ten scholars holding New York State Einstein and Schweitzer Chairs are in residence at CUNY institutions and 93 members of CUNY’s faculty have achieved the rank of Distinguished Professor. Id.
The heroic efforts of the academic community at Medgar Evers College to maintain Medgar Evers as a four year college despite the 1976 decision by the State and the City to fund it as a two year community college epitomizes the struggle for academic excellence at CUNY against seemingly impossible obstacles. Today, three quarters of the degrees conferred by Medgar Evers College continue to be baccalaureates.
The success of the CUNY academic communities in continuing the university’s commitment to quality education has been achieved despite over fifteen years of budget cuts and tuition increases which have made it increasingly difficult for CUNY to maintain its tradition of academic excellence. If CUNY is to continue its mission of providing open access and first class education, then the State and City must recommit the resources needed to restore the damage wreaked by fifteen years of underfunding.
THE INTEGRATION OF CUNY
The integration of CUNY ranks as one of the greatest victories of the American civil rights movement. The integration of CUNY was as significant as the integration of the public schools and universities of the South and, like the enrollment of James Meredith at the University of Mississippi, or the decision in Brown v. Board of Education, the winning of open admissions at CUNY was the culmination of years of struggle. As late as the mid-1960’s CUNY was a virtually allwhite enclave. A study in the mid-1960’s revealed that City College, in the middle of Harlem, had a matriculated student body which was 92% white and 2% Black, leading the Amsterdam news to dub City College “the White Rhodesia in Harlem”. Black students comprised barely 1% of City College graduates from 1960 to 1965.11 The other units of CUNY were even more segregated than City College. Prior to that time, rigid academic admissions requirements barred most Black and Latino applicants to CUNY, as well as many other colleges.
It was not until September, 1965 that City College and several other units of CUNY initiated the SEEK Program (then called the “Pre-Baccalaureate Program”) designed to reach out to economically disadvantaged students who did not meet the standard CUNY academic criteria.12 The success of the early SEEK program is measured by the fact that it became the prototype for other affirmative action programs at public and private colleges throughout the nation. However, the integration of CUNY was not easy for the first several hundred students admitted to the SEEK program. Their struggle and commitment to transforming CUNY into an institution which would serve the needs of non-white students and their communities is one of the most significant stories in the integration in the history of American education.
The early SEEK students were confronted with a system of educational apartheid at CUNY. Classified as non-matriculated students, the SEEK students were not entitled to hold student government office or to participate in extra curricular activities.13 They were not allowed to vote in student government elections. Id. They did not receive college credit for any of their classes. In fact, a number of white professors would publicly express their displeasure at having SEEK students in their classes. Id. at 72-73. Despite the fact that approximately 95% of the SEEK students were non-white, all the counsellors assigned to the original SEEK program were white psychologists.
Rather than accept the segregated educational system they had been thrust into, the early SEEK students became a Trojan Horse inside the university as they fought to find a place for themselves and other non-white students at CUNY. Agitation by students succeeded in getting non-white counsellors hired for the SEEK program. At City College SEEK students organized a basketball team which regularly defeated the CCNY varsity, undermining the regulation banning SEEK students from extracurricular activities. Id. By the Fall of 1968, SEEK students won the right participate in extracurricular activities, as well as the right to vote and hold office in college student governments. Id.
On April 22, 1969, the SEEK students, along with other Black and Latino students at City College, commenced the Open Admissions Strike which would achieve the greatest integration of higher education outside of the South in the history of this country. On that day several hundred Black and Latino students, with tremendous support from their communities, chained the gates of City College’s South Campus shut and renamed it the University of Harlem. They presented five demands to the CUNY administration and the City leadership and their main demand called for admitting non-white students in the same proportion as non-white graduates from New York City high schools.
As a result of the tremendous support for the City College student strike from New York’s Black and Latino communities, CUNY agreed to immediately implement the policy of Open Admissions, which guarantees all graduates of New York City’s high schools an opportunity to attend CUNY. Today, open admissions has transformed CUNY into the university with the largest Black and Latino enrollment of any university in the history of America.
Yet open admissions was only part of what the Black and Latino students fought for in 1969. Ultimately the five demands encompassed three visions of what CUNY had to become to achieve its historic purpose of providing educational opportunity for all the people of New York.
The first vision was to integrate the university. Although this goal was achieved through open admissions, the university has suffered from a withdrawal of public funding and support since the complexion of CUNY students began to darken.
It is no small irony that tuition was first charged in the same year that the majority of the freshman class was non-white or that the funding disparity between CUNY and SUNY senior colleges and graduate programs has increased as more Black and Latino students came to CUNY.
The second vision of the Open Admissions Strike was to forge a permanent link between the schools of CUNY and the communities which their students come from. As the greatest urban university in America, CUNY has an opportunity and a mission to make its resources available to the urban community in which it exists.
Today, one of the glories of CUNY has been the extent to which many of its campuses have become open to non-curricular activities by organizations in the communities as well as the unparalleled opportunities CUNY offers its students and scholars to engage in work of direct relevance to the urban communities which CUNY serves. Ironically, CUNY’s openness to the community, which has historically been the source of CUNY’s commitment to its students and their education, is viewed with dismay by many state legislators and even some CUNY administrators. The estrangement of Chancellor Reynolds from the history and mission of CUNY is illustrated by her proposal to erect a fence to separate City College from the Harlem community. The Chancellor’s security director has also proposed guidelines which, if enacted, would severely curtail the tradition of many CUNY institutions which have provided access to CUNY facilities for community organizations.
In recent months, City College has required community groups to obtain million dollar liability policies as a condition for using college facilities. The result has been to virtually end the ability of grass roots groups to use City College for community functions.
The third vision of open admissions was to create at CUNY a place where scholars from non-white communities would have the opportunity to study independently, and to develop a critical scholarship which would raise questions relating to the history, culture, future, and continuing needs of the non-white urban communities which still are grossly under-represented in the ranks of American academia. It was anticipated that such scholars from the African and Latin diasporas would necessarily raise questions which were provocative and advance theses which would be counter-intuitive to the academic establishment in which their people were under-represented and their people’s experiences undervalued. However, the vision of those who fought for open admissions was that, just as the scholarship of the survivors of the Nazi genocide was indispensable to telling the story of the Nazi Holocaust, the scholarship arising from the ancestors of the survivors of the genocide resulting from the African Slave trade and the Columbus Encounter would be indispensable to understanding our society’s past and present states as well as necessary to planning for our future. The progenitors of open access recognized that the work of scholars of the African and Latin diasporas would be subject to political, as well as scholarly attack, and the part of CUNY’s mission as an open access institution was to support its scholars against such political attacks. In this context, the attacks on Leonard Jeffreys and the concomitant effort to dismember the City College Black Studies Department are nothing less than an a threat to the ability of non-white scholars to advocate controversial views in the examination of the history of their people.
CUNY was founded in 1847 with the mission of providing an opportunity for higher education to the poor who could not otherwise go to college. In 1969 New York’s Black and Latino communities acted to remove CUNY’s 123 year-old blind spot regarding its mission by opening CUNY’s doors to all the people of New York. The transfiguration of CUNY following the City College Open Admissions Strike has engendered a unique urban institution incorporating the values of democracy and multiculturalism to a degree unprecedented in American higher education. The legacy of the struggle for open access has transformed CUNY into the greatest university in America.
Today, that legacy is at risk because CUNY is being ravaged by shortsighted politicians and administrators who don’t appreciate or respect CUNY’s seminal importance to the future of our society.
CUNY’s ADMINISTRATION FAILS TO MEET THE CRISIS
The current CUNY administration has failed to provide effective leadership as CUNY faces the greatest crisis of its history. The racist policies reflected in state law and budget policy have been exacerbated by policies of the new CUNY central administration under Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds. The Chancellor’s policy initiatives call for imposing harsh new disciplinary codes, restrictive admissions standards, curtailing community access to university facilities and removing student control over student activity fees.
The Chancellor’s so-called College Preparatory Initiative (CPI) proposes increasing the number of college preparatory credits required by high school graduates for admission to CUNY. While the professed goal of strengthening high school academic offerings is laudatory, the New York City high schools have never replaced the thousands of math and science teachers lost since the budget cuts of the mid-1970’s. There is simply no way that the full range of courses required by the CPI can be made available to all New York city high school students planning to enroll at CUNY at the present time. Consequently, rather than improving the caliber of New York City high schools, the CPI will simply disqualify tens of thousands of mostly Black and Hispanic students from attending CUNY.
The Chancellor’s response to student protests is equally shortsighted. She has aligned herself and her administration squarely against students and community activists who are fighting to preserve open access at CUNY. She has repeatedly called for harsh penalties for those students who participated in non-violent civil disobedience in protest against proposed budget cuts and tuition increases. Student protests, such as those the Chancellor abhors, have played an integral role in the preservation of CUNY as an open access university for many decades. In the 1930’s through the 1960’s CUNY students regularly demonstrated in opposition to attempts to eliminate CUNY’s policy of free tuition. Open admissions was achieved as a direct result of the strike by the Black and Latino students at City College in 1969.
Chancellor Reynolds and her administration have aligned themselves squarely against student and community activists who are fighting to save open access at CUNY. She has repeatedly called for harsh penalties, including arrests, suspensions and expulsions for students who participated in peaceful protests aimed at preventing further budget cuts and tuition increases last year. Chancellor Reynolds has reportedly excoriated college presidents who refused to arrest or suspend student protectors during the April 1991 protests. In an attempt to insure such Draconian penalties for future student protectors, the Board of Trustees has enacted stringent new disciplinary procedures designed to forestall the ability of the students to mount an effective defense at future disciplinary proceedings.
The anti-student backlash by the CUNY trustees goes beyond the enactment of the new disciplinary code. In the past CUNY student governments have acted to vigorously defend CUNY as an open access university by supporting lobbying efforts independent of the CUNY administration. At times, student protests have had the support of elected student leaders. Chagrined by independent political activity by CUNY students, the trustees amended the by-laws and enacted several resolutions in March to remove student control over the allocation of student activity fees by requiring administrative approval of all student expenditures. Ironically, at SUNY, where the students are predominantly white, the administration exercises no control over the allocation of student fees by elected student representatives.
The Board has also approved a so-called “security initiative’ proposed by the Chancellor which has established a CUNY peace officer corps to replace the private security guards who heretofore have been contracted by the individual CUNY colleges. The “peace-officers”, unlike the private security guards, will be authorized to make arrests and to carry firearms. In conjunction with the security initiative, CUNY has created the position of university security director and hired Jose Elique, the former director of anti-terrorist operations at New York’s airports to fill that position.
Perhaps the most serious of the Chancellor’s recent attacks on the students and their communities is her attempt to sever the links between the CUNY colleges and the communities from which CUNY’s students come. Last summer the Chancellor was rebuffed when she proposed erecting a fence around City College. however, the December 28th tragedy at which nine young people died at a celebrity basketball game strengthened the Chancellor’s hand in demanding a review of policies relating to community access to CUNY facilities. The result of the review has been to greatly restrict the access of community organizations to CUNY facilities, although evidence indicates that the requirement that outside groups obtain million dollar insurance policies has been selectively enforced against non-white student and community groups.
For example, administrators of City College ordered a room in the student center padlocked after the Graduate Student Council reserved it to conduct a meeting regarding the removal of Professor Jeffreys as chair of the Black Studies Department. At Lehman College, students had to go to court to after college officials canceled a teach-in the students were planning to conduct on the proposed state budget cuts. In court, attorneys representing CUNY vainly tried to convince the judge that the cancellation was justified on security grounds because the students would not promise that they would not invite Professor Jeffries to participate in the event.
Student protests, such as those the Chancellor abhors, have been an inteigral part of the preservation of CUNY as an open access university Since the imposition of tuition, CUNY students have militantly opposed further increases and those demonstrations have ameliorated proposed budget cuts which would have necessitated even greater tuition increases than those which have occurred.
In fact, even before Open Access was won as a result of the 1969 strike by Black and Latino students at City College, students at CUNY had a long history of demonstrating to protest against annual attempts by conservative state legislators to impose tuition at CUNY. After open admissions was won, CUNY students continued to resort to demonstrations to oppose the imposition of tuition or increases in tuition after 1976. A proposed $500 tuition increase was averted in 1989 when thousands of CUNY students took part in civil disobedience by non-violently occupying buildings on their campuses. The 1989 student strikers received amnesty, as had the Black and Puerto Rican students who won open admissions twenty years earlier. Indeed, there has bee a tradition in CUNY of recognizing the necessity of students to act in opposition to political forces aligned against the fulfillment of CUNY’s mission.
Last year when CUNY students again resorted to civil disobedience after their lobbying and letter writing efforts had been unavailing, the Chancellor publicly called for arrest or suspension of the students involved. However, notwithstanding the Chancellor’s hard line, the academic communities throughout CUNY acted to protect the students whose protest was nothing other than a desperate attempt to saving the university. Faculty and community leaders came forward to demand amnesty for the student protectors. Ultimately, only one of the nearly 200 students facing disciplinary charges was suspended as a result of the 1991 protests.
THE FUTURE OF CUNY
The fundamental issue in the struggle to save open access at CUNY is racism, not fiscal policy. CUNY is a unique institution, which was won as a result of popular struggles in the 1960’s and which currently educates more Black and Latino students than any other institution in the United States. Furthermore, the students of CUNY are drawn from poor urban households on a scale which is not replicated in any other university in America.
The seminal importance of CUNY and its unique policy of open access has not been generally appreciated in scholarly circles. Ironically, even the CUNY administration seems to have lost sight of its role of stewarding the most far reaching experiment in democracy ever attempted in the history of higher education.
The progenitors of open access at CUNY deeply believed in the university as a transformational institution, capable of imparting skills and resources necessary to the development of third world communities in New York City. Beyond the obvious benefits of providing educational opportunities for individual students who could not otherwise afford access to higher education, success of open admissions will also be measured by the degree to which the skills CUNY imparts to individual students impact on their communities and the nation. The motivation for open admissions was the belief that the opening of CUNY to Black and Latino students from the poorest backgrounds would ultimately empower the communities those students came from by giving people from those communities access to the skills necessary to effectively participate in the political process, as well as the professions. In other words, the ultimate dividend of open access to the non-white communities will be that some of CUNY’s graduates will impart critical skills to the cause of the empowerment of those communities and bend the university to commit its resources to the communities from which its students come.
The potential impact of open access on the future of American society, as well as its Black and Latino communities, can be appreciated in the context of the effect of City College’prior commitment to providing access for Jewish students in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, at a time when American colleges denied or severely restricted access by Jewish scholars. That commitment literally transformed the intellectual landscape of twentieth century America by producing graduates of the caliber of Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, Jonas Salk and thousands of others who went on to prominence in their professions and public life.
Open access challenges the notion that only a small elite is capable of benefitting from higher education. This is more than a democratic ideal. The success of open access at CUNY will determine the contours of the political economy of twentyfirst century America. The sun is setting on low skilled manufacturing and construction jobs and it is clear that there will be little productive work in the emerging American economy for people without significant post-high school skills. In this context, it is ironic that educational policy makers are questioning the efficacy of providing accessible public higher education. It seems that educational policy is sandwiched between a Reaganite vision of a large pool of unskilled labor, who would presumably swell the ranks of the homeless, and a neo-liberal vision which would provide some form of public welfare, including make-work at low skilled jobs for such people. What unites the Reaganite and neo-liberal visions of the future is the belief in the uneducability of the majority of people.
This debate is not new. There was a time when conservatives sincerely held that secondary education was a waste of time because most people did not need it and were not capable of benefitting from it. Indeed, the founding of the Free Academy was surrounded by a controversy which persists to this day about the educability of poor people. Meaningful open access to four year and graduate14 education is the extension of the debate which has raged about CUNY’s mission since its inception.
In a time when most politicians of all persuasions are afflicted with a pathological aversion to raising taxes for any social program, advocates of open access have been challenged that funding for public education should-not be any more sacrosanct than other areas which are being cut, elementary and secondary education, public health and housing, libraries, etc. First, it is essential to oppose all of these cuts and to advocate a tax program which will provide for the social services necessary to live in a civilized society.
However, there is another reason that support for open access a CUNY must be at the core of any long term national or local strategy for reordering public fiscal priorities. The central fact about CUNY is that more Black and Latino students attend CUNY than have ever attended any university in the history of America. Further, these students are largely poor, one quarter support children, many are on public assistance, many are homeless. In other words, CUNY students have deep roots and are part of the communities which are feeling the brunt of the budget cuts. The second vision motivating open access was to forge links between CUNY and the communities from which its students come. CUNY students and graduates are acquiring the skills and access to resources which will enable them to be effective advocates for the communities from which they come. Even if only a minority of CUNY students and graduate recommit themselves to struggling on behalf of the communities they came from, the skills they will bring back with them will be essential in giving voice to demands which have largely been unheard.
Clearly, the ruin wrought by a decade of redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich can only be addressed on a national basis. However, the students who have benefitted from open access at CUNY collectively are uniquely qualified to provide leadership in the struggles to uplift their communities.
In conclusion, the integration of CUNY was a victory of historic proportions for the national civil rights movement. The demise of open admissions would be nothing less than a tragedy for non-white people and their communities, as well as economic democracy.
SOURCES & Endnotes
It is unfortunate that the literature regarding open access at CUNY is so sparse. Most of what has been produced are in-house CUNY documents. However, there is a book and a dissertation which I have utilized:
Conrad M. Dyer (Dissertation) The Politics of Open Admissions: The Impact of the Black and Puerto Rican Students’ Community (Of City College) (1990).
David Lavin, Richard Alba and Richard Silberstein, Right versus Privilege: The Open Admissions Experiment At The City University of New York (1981).
1. In the mid 1960’s the Amsterdam News dubbed City College “the White Rhodesia in Harlem” when a study disclosed that its student body was 92% white and less than 2% Black. Other CUNY schools were even more lily white.
2. The City University of New York Data Book 1986,Table VI-A at 139.
3. James Murtha et al. Update on Student Persistence: A Report on the 1978 and 1980 Cohorts, (CUNY Office of Instructional Research and Analysis, April 1989) at iv.
4. The 1992-93 Chancellor’s Budget Request (CUNY).
5. James Murtha et al., Report of the University Task Force on Student Retention and Academic Performance, (CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Analysis, Spring 1984) at 11.
6. SEEK and College Discovery students are eligible for an additional year of TAP assistance.
7. §§6304 and 6310.
8. N.Y. State Education Law §6304 (5)
9. Only Vermont ranked lower than New York in its ratio of state and local tax revenues allocated for public higher education to public enrollment per capita. Chronicle of Higher Education, November 6, 1991.
10. Based on research by members of CUNY Concerned Faculty and Staff as reported in Verified Complaint in Weinbaum et al. v. Cuomo, Index No, 5306-92 (Sup. Ct. N.Y. Cty.). 67 at 24.
11. Of 17,613 baccalaureate degrees awarded by City College between 1960 and 1965, only 196 (1.11) were awarded to Black students. Conrad M. Dyer, Protest and the Politics of Open Admissions: The Impact of the Black and Puerto Rican Students’ Community (Of City College) [dissertation] 1990 at 64.
12. The impetus for the SEEK program came largely from the great Black political scientist, Allen Ballard, who was an assistant dean at City College in the early 1960’s. Dyer, Dissertation at 71. One of Dr. Ballard’s colleagues at City College in the 1960’s was Kenneth Clark, the great Black educational psychologist whose empirical work proving that racially segregated education was inherently inferior was the underpinnings of Brown v. Board of Education.
13. Dyer, dissertation at 73.
14. Indeed, open access to graduate and professional education may be the final frontier of educational democracy. Approximately 70% of the graduate students at CUNY and almost 80% of the students at the Graduate Center are still white. The advent of a post-industrial economy will eliminate most opportunities for productive non-creative work. The viability of democracy in such a society ultimately hinges on the accessibility of training for professional and creative work.
About the author…
Ronald McGuire is a former City College student who participated in the open admissions strike in 1969. He was active in radical social movements throughout the 1970s and 80s, and is currently an activist lawyer who is dedicated to defending CUNY student activists and fighting the CUNY administration’s attempts to cut programs and dismantle open admissions. He is currently involved in lawsuits defending York College students who were not allowed to bring controversial speakers to campus for Black Solidarity Day; defending Hostos College students who’s graduation requirements were changed 5 days before graduation and were not allowed to graduate if they failed a writing test; defending the City College Black Studies Department against it’s slated dismantling; and more.
For further information, contact Ron directly.
What is SLAM?
SLAM! is a citywide radical student activist group, based at CUNY. SLAM’s main organizing has been to stop the budget cuts and tuition hikes at CUNY. We have also organized around welfare, Ethnic Studies, cops on campus, and more. SLAM! emerged out of the dissolution of the CUNY Coalition in 1995. The CUNY Coalition organized a mass demonstration of around 20,000 people in Spring 1995 in opposition to a proposed $750 tuition hike at CUNY. SLAM! was born in 1996, as a coalition of campus-based groups of activists. It continues to build campaigns on various campuses as well as to attempt to coordinate citywide actions. If you would like more information on SLAM!, or would like to start a SLAM! chapter, get in touch!
SLAM!
c/o Hunter SLAM!/USG
695 Park Ave, Room 121 North
New York, NY 10021
212-772-4261
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