UP FROM CUNY

UP FROM CUNY

Mar 9, 1998, Vol. 3, No. 25 • By ROBERT BERMAN

http://www.weeklystandard.com/author/robert-berman

[See also my new VDARE column: "My John Podhoretz Problem—and Ours."] 

 

"THERE WAS A PERFERVID SENSE of intellectualism," muses the sociologist Daniel Bell in the recent documentary Arguing the World. He was recalling his contentious student days at City College of New York. The film lovingly profiles not only Bell (CCNY, 1938) but his fellow classmates and intellectuals Irving Kristol (1940), Nathan Glazer (1944), and the late Irving Howe (1940).

 

The old CCNY was harder to gain admission to and graduate from than any other undergraduate institution in America. It also produced the most Nobel laureates. The school's honor roll includes Jonas Salk, Felix Frankfurter, Ira Gershwin, Bernard Baruch, Sidney Hook, A. Philip Randolph, Upton Sinclair, Ed Koch, Colin Powell, and Andrew Grove (the CEO of Intel). All of that ended, however, in 1970, with the advent of open admissions, aka "access to higher education."

 

This policy decreed that every graduate of a New York City public school had a right to attend a City University of New York campus -- for free. Thus, CCNY was flooded with students who before would have been lucky to gain entry to a community college, and the community colleges were taken over by persons who had little reason to pursue higher education at all. A $ 4-billion-a-year patronage mill, today's CUNY -- a term referring to the city's entire, sprawling system of post-secondary schools, funded by the taxpayers -- functions as a welfare agency rather than an educational institution.

 

Since that fateful year of 1970, CUNY's administrators and professors have devoted themselves to feeding the system's students -- 80 percent of whom are black or Hispanic -- the fiction that white racism is responsible for life's woes. Sixty-eight percent of CUNY's four-year students require remedial classes; in its community colleges, 86 percent. These figures, the worst in the state, derive from the students' inability to pass tests at the 11th- grade level in reading, writing, and mathematics. Only 1.3 percent of community-college students graduate with associate degrees in two years, and fewer than 9 percent of four-year-college students earn bachelor's degrees in four years. Meanwhile, CUNY professional-school graduates have the state's lowest teacher-certification and law-board-passing rates. Education-school graduates of the State University of New York system have a 95 percent passing rate on the teacher-certification exam, but CUNY graduates pass at a rate of only 62 percent -- and at CCNY and the Afrocentric Medgar Evers College, the rate is a sad 40 percent.

 

The stakes here are considerable. According to the United Federation of Teachers, over 80 percent of New York City's public-school teachers (including those who have flunked the certification test but have been hired anyway) are CUNY alumni. Among these teachers, illiteracy is widespread, as among the CUNY graduates who staff the city's social-service agencies. (These latter jobs were once held by persons who had no more than a high-school education, who performed better.) No wonder the parents of promising black and Hispanic students -- whom CUNY's chieftains claim to embrace -- avoid the system like the plague.

 

Two recent developments, however, have provided a ray of hope. In September, after a miserable tenure, CUNY's chancellor left to afflict a university in the South. And in January, the president of the scandal-plagued, "bilingual" (meaning, Spanish-only) Hostos Community College was induced to leave after receiving a $ 200,000 buyout. Yet these small victories in personnel are no substitute for structural reform.

 

Consider Hostos, whose English as a Second Language program routinely violates testing secrecy, distributing lower-level final examinations to students in advance. Despite intensive coaching last summer, 215 out of 226 upper-level students (95 percent) failed the school's own, radically dumbed- down English Writing Assessment Test. Rather than reform Hostos, CUNY's radical multiculturalists would prefer to remake the entire system in the Hostos image. They propose giving college credit for English as a Second Language classes, abolishing all grading in favor of "portfolios" of work, and allowing students to take CUNY's already-dumbed-down, experimental Academic Certification Exam in Spanish.

 

So far, worthwhile reform has only a few allies. Fortunately, one of them is Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who has called for the elimination of open admissions and the privatization of all community-college remedial programs. For his troubles, the mayor has been roundly attacked by local politicians like Peter Vallone, speaker of the City Council. Even so, Giuliani's proposals are far too modest.

 

Here are some proposals that would do some good: All applicants to four- year schools should be required to score 1100, and community-college applicants 1000, on the combined math and verbal sections of the SAT. (Thanks to the recent "norming" of the SAT, those scores are the equivalent of 960 and 860 on the previous test.) All English as a Second Language courses, remedial courses, and ethnic-ghetto courses (black studies, women's studies, gay studies, Puerto Rican studies, Judaic studies, etc.) should be abolished. By agreement with the state, education schools should be closed and academic requirements for teachers increased, so that teachers may be truer scholars in their fields. Negotiations among the city, state, and federal governments could allow the city to return to the cheaper, simpler (pre-1976) policy of neither charging tuition nor dispensing financial aid. New York might once again have the nation's best-educated public-school teachers and civil servants.

 

No matter what CUNY's self-styled advocates say, the giants of the black pedagogical tradition, including W. E. B. Du Bois, had nothing but contempt for those who would condemn black persons to a second-class education. Du Bois wrote, "If the standards of a great Negro college are to be set by schools of lower and different object, whither are the ideals of this University falling? If you find that you cannot give technical courses of college grade, then give high-school courses or kindergarten courses and call them by their right names. There may often be an excuse for doing things poorly in this world, but there is never any excuse for calling a poorly done thing, well done."