CUNY The Attack on Public Higher Education by Brian Edwards-Tiekert The City University of New York (CUNY) has been called a lot of things in the last 150 years. In the first half of this century it was "the working man's Harvard," laying claim to graduates like Gershwin, Colin Powell, and Jonas Salk. In 1969, when it opened admissions to let in any city resident with a high school diploma, it became "one of the boldest experiments in American public education," and a model for the rest of the country. Now, with 210,000 students enrolled at 19 campuses, it's still the largest city university in the country; but in today's political climate-with a mayor who's built a concrete security wall around the steps of City Hall and a governor who sent spies into a Women's Studies conference to launch a moral attack on the curriculum at state universities-a battalion of pundits, politicians, and conservative tabloids have accused CUNY of "a total evisceration of standards," labeled it a "second-chance high school" whose "bloated bureaucracy . . . jettisoned academic standards," and whose students are "taking high school-level classes over and over and being passed whether they're working or not because the professors feel sorry for them." Now that Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki have been in office long enough to replace most of the CUNY trustees with their own appointments, CUNY faces an attack that could take the 'public' out of 'public higher education.' Last May the Board of Trustees passed a Comprehensive Academic Plan (CAP) to eliminate remedial courses at the 11 four-year colleges and close admissions to anyone who can't pass entrance exams in reading, writing, and math. The plan would cut over 100,000 students out of the system, reducing CUNY to half its present size and making it the only city university in the country to deny entry to students with high school diplomas. What's at stake is the fate of open admissions-many suspect that if the right-wing foundations funding the attack succeed CUNY will only be the first of many city and community colleges to shut their doors to the public. And right now the only thing standing in their way is an injunction barring CUNY from implementing the plan until the Board of Trustees goes to trial for violating New York's open meetings laws. The political battleground is remediation: most colleges in the country offer remedial classes and fully one-third of this country's college freshmen take them, but conservatives-brandishing statistics about the number of CUNY students who can's pass a basic writing test (even though they'll be required to pass it before the graduate)-describe remediation at CUNY as a critical failing that lets academic delinquents into the system and drags the rest of the university down to their level. Remedial courses cover everything from classes on algebra and basic calculus to writing courses targeted at students learning English as a second language. Remediation is offered in college so students can work towards their degree in their strong areas while they catch up where they're weak. The point is not to keep students in dumbed-down classes, it's to get students to the point where they're ready to take high-level classes-a foreign student, for instance, might take a remedial writing course to improve her composition skills enough to get her through an upper-level literature course the next semester; a student who graduated from an alternative arts-oriented high school might take a remedial math course before moving on to macroeconomics; someone coming from an urban high school with forty students per teacher and not enough money for books might need remediation in a number of areas. Half the students at CUNY are foreign-born, and most of the rest come from the city's critically under-funded public schools-the number of students who need remedial course-work when they enter CUNY is, understandably, quite large: 60%. The Mayor, his trustees, and the tabloids latched onto this statistic to demonize the students and damn the colleges. Remedial students, so the rhetoric goes, are lazy kids who didn't work hard enough in high school and expect the state and city to subsidize a college degree anyway. The battle-cry is "standards"-CUNY, they say, is lowering its own to the point where the degrees it issues are worthless. Never mind the fact that at public schools you measure the worth of a degree by the caliber of the students who graduate, not the failings of those coming in. Never mind that recent CUNY graduates have earned more than their share of prestigious fellowships-including a Rhodes scholarship-and that CUNY graduates average $12,000 more income a year than those with nothing more than high school degrees. Take a look at the people involved in the crusade against CUNY, and you'll see the attempt to "raise standards" for what it really is: an all-out attack on public higher education. Giuliani and Pataki's appointees dominate the Board of Trustees, and they're out for blood. Three of Giuliani's appointees owe well-paying city jobs to him. Officially, they're supposed to be apolitical stewards of the university. In reality- Giuliani's appointees commissioned independent reports on remediation in CUNY; when the reports came in with the conclusion that remedial courses have been successful for the last 25 years, they shelved them. The $7 million Manhattan Institute churns out stacks of propaganda against CUNY, most notably Heather MacDonald's articles in their publication City Journal. She's taken swipes at the university's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies and gone so far as to say that CUNY's policy of open admissions encourages students to do worse in New York's high schools. CHANGE-NY (also known as the Empire Foundation for Policy Research), an organization that's criticized Gov. Pataki for being too lenient with New York's state universities, drafted a forty-page report with The National Association of Scholars that blasted CUNY's core curriculum for not including enough Western Civilization and tagged as too "narrow" courses like Sociology of Women, African Literature, The Third World in the Modern Era, and U.S. History: 1865-Present. The National Association of Scholars, which masterminded the myth of the "PC" takeover of American colleges and has spent the last ten years accusing multiculturalism of destroying higher education, was founded by a leader of CHANGE-NY, Herbert London. Among other things, London has written that neighborhoods like Harlem are "assailant farms," and that "in two hours an unleashed police force could do the trick." What will be the effects of the CAP? All told, the plan will keep at least 21,000 students from enrolling the first year it goes into effect, and will cut total enrollment in half by the time it's completely phased in. Proponents might argue that students still have the opportunity to take remedial courses at the two-year colleges-the plan allows for one year of remediation at CUNY's six two-year colleges-but students might wonder why they should have to go somewhere that they can't take the classes they are qualified for. The remediation that the plan does leave in place institutes the equivalent of grade-school tracking in higher education-students with one or two deficiencies are bound to a more limited, vocational curriculum. CUNY's budget is driven by per-student allocations from the city and state. Under CAP, CUNY would lose an estimated $80 million just from reduced admissions. What's more, remedial skills courses tend to cost less to run than college-level classes, so the tuition and allocations for students doing remedial work subsidizes the college-level courses that others take. The problem compounds itself: less students means less money, less money means cutting faculty, courses, and departments, and raising tuition; after you cut enough, you attract less of the students who can pass the admissions exams, and lose even more money. If Pataki and the state Republicans remain in power, it'll be easier for them to bully around a withered CUNY, to cut its budget further and privatize more and more of its services-CAP already mandates that what little remediation it leaves be outsourced to companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review. In one sense, this is just the most recent-and most brutal-blow CUNY has suffered over the last 25 years. New York's 1975 fiscal crisis kicked off twenty-five years of budget cuts in CUNY-in 1975, the school started charging tuition for the first time, now it's up to $3,200 a year. Over the last two decades, fully half of the faculty in CUNY have been cut, and class sizes and course-loads for teachers have risen tremendously. Professors at Wesleyan made a big huff over the prospect of having their course-load increased from four courses a year to five-and rightfully so; more courses means less time to spend with students. In CUNY, faculty have to teach at least seven courses a year, and there's talk of raising the number further. One of the most common responses to tight budgets is to replace full-time faculty with part-time adjuncts: they're paid less, don't get benefits, don't get reimbursed for office hours, and don't have union fees withheld from their paychecks-which means they have a financial incentive not to join the teachers' union, one of the only organizations presently defending public higher education. The state has limited TAP grants (financial aid for state residents) at four-year colleges to eight semesters-which means that students who need longer to graduate-either because they have other responsibilities (like a child) or because they have a lot of catching up to do-have the rug pulled out from under them. Most recently, welfare reform has pushed students out of the schools. It is often impossible for students to get workfare assignments anywhere close to campus, and they have to drop out. The state passed a measure mandating that workfare programs be developed near CUNY campuses, but Giuliani refused to release the funds. The number of welfare recipients at CUNY has dropped from 27,000 in 1995 to 12,000 in 1998. In another sense, the crusade to close admissions marks fundamental shift in the political discourse on public higher education. Politicians are treating 'public' higher education as a privilege rather than a right. Until this point, all the blows to CUNY have been justified on financial grounds: "Sorry, there's just not enough money." Now the city and state are running surpluses, and conservatives are publicly attacking the institutions themselves: "You don't deserve the money." They claim that CUNY has no "standards," that the degrees it issues are worthless, and that the students aren't even worthy of the name. Underlying everything are wistful references to what CUNY was before it opened admissions in 1969: the "working man's Harvard." Of course, the "working man's Harvard" was really "the white working man's Harvard." Nine out of ten students were white before the school opened admissions. Five years later, minorities constituted a majority of the student body. CUNY is not an elite private institution that has to compete with other schools to attract the best applicants and increase its 'selectivity' rating to move up a notch in the US News & World Report rankings. It's a public institution whose mission is to provide access to a college education; it should be evaluated according to the education it provides, not the level of its students when it admits them. What's important is how well-prepared students are when they graduate, and the fact that so many are under-prepared when they enroll is simply a testament to the hard work students and faculty put in to get to that point. Everything becomes more impressive when you consider the hurdles CUNY students have to jump just to stay in school. Tuition's up to $3200, and half of CUNY's students have household incomes of less than $22,000. Ask a professor at one of the schools, and he'll tell you: his students work-part-time if they're lucky, full-time if they're not, double shifts if they're supporting a child. Spending forty hours a week at a low-paying job makes it hard to take on a full courseload, but if students take less, they lose any aid they might be receiving. Ingrid Amorini, a native of Argentina, went through CUNY's York College as a single parent who was also caring for a severely retarded brother. She failed the English writing exam when she first took it, but she graduated as valedictorian. At her graduation last spring, she said: "York College gave me the necessary remedial course, which allowed me to pass the written English exam the second time I took it. I got straight A's that first semester and all the subsequent 148 credits. All I needed was a chance." That's a chance she wouldn't get if conservatives have their way.