Asks why the eagerness to assault City University
Kasinitz, Philip
Public higher education is under attack, and nowhere is this more evident than at the City University of New York. Many of CUNY's 213,000 students are poor. Most are minority and more than a few...
...For many New Yorkers, including many CUNY alumni, today's students suffer from comparison to the largely Jewish students of the days before "open admissions.' The comparison is unfair, but given CUNY's history, it is also inevitable...
...The broad cultural literacy, intellectual flexibility and critical thinking skills that a liberal arts education is supposed to impart are needed now more than ever...
...Their class discussions tend to be better...
...Indeed, higher graduation rates could be easily achieved by simply giving college credit for remedial work, a politically easy response that, for the most part, CUNY has resisted...
...MacDonald cites CUNY's low graduation rates as evidence for the University's decline...
...Fewer classes will be offered, and the remaining faculty will teach more...
...Yet while he notes that the "relentless strivers" of the highly regarded engineering program "resembled, more than any other group at City College, the students of City's golden age," he affords them only fifteen pages...
...Unfortunately, cutting budgets accomplishes none of this...
...Yet immigrants—not the children of immigrants as in times past, but immigrants themselves—now account for almost half of all CUNY students...
...Further, despite considerable obstacles, many Hunter students strive for the transformative experience college is supposed to be...
...Heather MacDonald, in a major article in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal ("Downward Mobility: The Failure of Open Admission at City University," Summer 1994), attacked "open admissions," which she claims has flooded CUNY with ill-prepared students, most of whom would be better off in some sort of vocational training...
...New York needs the talents and energy of today's FALL • 1995 • 443 Comments and Opinions CUNY students...
...Of course, today's tuition paying students often face far more difficult circumstances than their predecessors did—how many students in 1940 worked full time or had children...
...The CUNY colleges of that era benefited from a great deal of "captive talent": highly qualified Jewish students barred from most of the nation's elite colleges by anti-Semitic quotas...
...In the Gingrich-PatakiGiuliani era, this leaves the university without many friends...
...It may not be alcove "one" versus alcove "two" at the CCNY of hallowed memory, but it is also not MacDonald's picture of intellectual stagnation...
...But in the next decade CUNY will certainly produce thousands of teachers and nurses, hundreds of accountants and executives, dozens of doctors and lawyers, and probably a future mayor or two...
...442 • DISSENT Comments and Opinions My own courses are largely the same as those I taught at Williams...
...The lion's share of remediation, for example, is likely to be shifted to the community colleges, where it probably always belonged...
...The taxpayers should provide them with this opportunity for selfish reasons...
...The faculty is largely liberal and far more used to looking to government than to the private sector and the alumni for support...
...Remediation hardly dominates college life...
...As almost all CUNY students already work, and about one-third work full time, some while supporting families, this seems either ignorant or cruel...
...Numbed by these students' lack of preparation, she argues, the faculty have become either condescending cheerleaders aiming only to boost students' "self-esteem," or time-servers so overcome by students' poor writing that they rely on multiple-choice exams (MacDonald's evidence for the last point, which does not square with my experience, comes from a handful of interviews, not from any systematic study of CUNY teaching...
...MacDonald also fails to acknowledge that, for all of the university's problems, many CUNY students continue to get a first-rate education...
...The lukewarm support middle-class New Yorkers now give CUNY in the face of assaults by tax-cutting Republicans reflects disillusion, and also some misunderstandings, about what the university has become...
...Today, with the fiscal gun to its head, CUNY is attempting to reinvent itself, and the work of these critics is taken seriously by those who will reshape the university...
...Somehow between their jobs and their classes they find the time to form clubs, play on teams, debate politics, and generally act like students...
...Although these cuts are primarily the result of the Republican commitment to cut taxes at all costs, both Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Governor Pataki have argued that austerity will actually be good for the troubled university...
...Although the story Traub tells is basically true in all of its parts, it comes together in a way that is oddly distorted and out of proportion...
...Many of the students come across as dedicated and hard working, and the faculty are presented as deeply caring if at times too willing to deceive themselves about their students' abilities...
...Not to mention that "release" is usually for administrative duties or for scholarly research...
...Where does this hostility come from...
...With transparent accounting tricks, CUNY faculty were accused of "only working twelve hours a week" ("I work twelve hours a day," Giuliani sniped...
...at Hunter, for example, remedial work accounts for only 6 percent of seats in undergraduate classes...
...We need these people to have as good an educational grounding as they can possibly get...
...Although these rates are a cause for concern, they also call into question her depiction of plummeting standards...
...The senior colleges should aspire to high standards, not because a leaner CUNY can help fmance tax cuts, but because today's students, like those who went before, deserve a shot at a real college education...
...In short, it means cutting the very things CUNY did well during the "glory days" and that the best colleges do today...
...Some of the proposals they have inspired make sense...
...Coming on top of a cut in the city's CUNY contribution (both the state and the city contribute to CUNY's budget, with most of the city share going to the community colleges) this cut of nearly 28 percent would have been a disastrous blow to campuses already beset with reduced library budgets, decaying physical facilities, and increasing class sizes...
...Even there he depicts the engineers as a marginal exception despite the fact that engineering typically accounts for three hundred to four hundred of City's twelve hundred annual graduates...
...That this is no longer true should be a cause for celebration, not complaint...
...Both minimized the significance of the tuition increase, telling reporters that students could always get part-time jobs and that a little struggle is good for young people...
...For a public unwilling to face the implications of this, it is easy to blame the students...
...CUNY colleges have produced twelve Nobel laureates and more CEOs than any other university in America, and in their midtwentiethcentury glory days they were central to the intellectual milieu that produced, among other things, this magazine...
...He devotes a full third of the book to the remedial programs and a long chapter to the struggle over the minuscule, if symbolically important, department of black studies...
...Most are minority and more than a few are on public assistance...
...if the standards for a CUNY degree were not considerably more rigorous than the standards for admission, many more students would finish...
...The fact remains that in higher education raising standards usually involves spending more money, as New York University's meteoric rise demonstrates...
...And CUNY must also bear some responsibility for its own poor public image...
...None have been as closely associated with traditions of working-class upward mobility...
...CUNY consists of a Graduate Center, ten senior colleges (four-year institutions granting bachelor's degrees), six community colleges, a technical college, a law school, a medical school, and an affiliated school of medicine...
...Similarly Traub frequently points to self-motivated enclaves of immigrant students as islands of excellence within a unprepared sea of native New Yorkers...
...Not surprisingly, most Hunter students write less well than their peers at Williams, but there are plenty of exceptions...
...Nor are the conditions that created the "glory days" anything we would want to bring back...
...However, FALL • 1995 • 441 Comments and Opinions students will still face a $750 annual tuition increase, and some faculty will be laid off...
...In some cases, such as the shameful accommodations made to the ludicrous Leonard Jeffries, it seems to have gone out of its way to alienate them...
...Against this background, two recent publications laid the groundwork for the current attack on CUNY...
...Larger classes and heavier teaching loads mean fewer seminars, less student-faculty contact, less student writing, and more multiplechoice tests...
...Yet on the whole Traub comes to the same conclusion as MacDonald...
...Few institutions have as distinguished a place in American intellectual history as the colleges of the City University...
...Traub's sensitive portrait of City's faculty and students is far more sympathetic than MacDonald's, or than is generally seen in the press...
...If we are very lucky CUNY will produce the next generation's Alfred Kazin or Irving Howe...
...Having taught at a hyper-publicityconscious elite private college (Williams) before taking my current job at Hunter, I am continually struck by how little CUNY works at its public image and by its lack of outreach to its distinguished alumni...
...They are told that they are poor substitutes for those who have gone before, that their inadequate high school educations are somehow their fault, and that a little more struggle will be good for them...
...Perhaps no university in this country plays so important a role for a major city, economically, but also symbolically...
...Indeed, if the current budget crisis forces CUNY to take a hard look at how to do remediation more effectively, today's dark clouds will have had a considerable silver lining...
...The week I read MacDonald's article I made a quick survey of the posters advertising student activities in the large hallway that functions as Hunter's main "quad:' That week's events included a talk by ex-Solidarity leader Jacek Kuron (sponsored by the Polish Club), a "teach-in" on Haiti, a Hillel Society-sponsored discussion of ritual in Jewish life, one theater group presenting a talk by Jonathan Kalb, and another performing The Taming of the Shrew...
...Although alumni involvement in university affairs is low, a huge number of New Yorkers take the real and imagined changes in the university personally...
...Yet however talented and admirable on their own terms, today's CUNY students are, in the minds of a large part of the public, the unworthy successors of a golden age...
...Never a plush institution, CUNY survived on lean budgets for nearly a decade before newly elected Governor George Pataki called for a cut of $158 million this year...
...The assault on public higher education is widening this gulf...
...One gets some sense of this vitality from James Traub's widely discussed City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College, published last year...
...Although accompanied by demands for faculty to "work harder" and for students to "produce," austerity measures will almost certainly hasten the slide into mediocrity...
...Many CUNY students (most of those I see) can now function in a rigorous college environment...
...He also acknowledges that City has moments of excellence: in a few fine departments and upper-level seminars students get an education equal to that at the best American colleges...
...Yet as author and remedial writing teacher Greg Donaldson recently noted, "criticism of City University remediation contains no such plans for improvement, only the familiar demand for higher standards...
...Perhaps not...
...Traub's pessimism is thus rooted in his strange notion of who is on the margin and what constitutes the core...
...He is sadly skeptical about the ability of most CCNY students to ever function at a college level...
...With more ESL (English as a Second Language) programs and more effective remediation, others could as well...
...Journalists repeated the notion that CUNY professors are underworked, focusing on the number of professors who are "released" from some teaching responsibilities without mentioning that the theoretical seven course annual teaching load from which they are being partially released is far heavier than is typical at American Universities...
...Indeed, preoccupied by comparisons to the 1940s, both he and MacDonald miss how much immigration has changed CUNY since the late 1970s...
...As Michael Lind notes in The Next American Nation, this country faces a growing social gulf not only between those who go to college and those who do not, but also between those who go to elite private institutions and those who attend underfunded public ones...
...As of this writing (June 1995) it appears that student and faculty opposition has managed to substantially reduce the size of these cuts...
Vol. 42 • September 1995 • No. 4
