CUNY’s Remedial Runaround

By Nicholas Stix
CampusReports
(Late 1999, or early 2000)

The rumors of the death of remediation at the City University of New York (CUNY) have been greatly exaggerated.

On November 22, 1999, the New York State Board of Regents approved, 9-6, with one abstention, a plan by the CUNY Board of Trustees to gradually eliminate remediation at CUNY’s eight senior colleges between now and 2002. Remediation would still be available at the system’s seven community colleges at all times, and at its ten senior colleges between semesters.

With 19 campuses and 200,000 students, CUNY is the nation’s largest, and was once its finest, system of urban higher education. In 1970, however, the remedial revolution established a beachhead at CUNY, from where it stormed the country.

The current remediation reform plan was originally to have been implemented beginning in Fall 1998 (and was then implemented at Baruch College), but was held up by racial demagoguery, lawsuits, and bureaucratic ploys.

On one side of the conflict are those who, in the name of “civil rights,” publicly demand the continuation of the policy of “open admissions”—and accompanying mass remediation at all undergraduate CUNY campuses—which since 1970 has guaranteed every New York City high school graduate admission to a CUNY campus. On the other side are those who, in the name of “standards,” seek to limit remediation to CUNY’s two-year campuses.

Radical remediationists have shouted down (“Racist!” “Fascist!”) the few CUNY professors who had the nerve to criticize remediation in public testimony.

And then there were the lies. In an op-ed essay in the March 24, 1998 New York Daily News, Dennis M. Walcott, the president and CEO of the Urban League, a social welfare organization, claimed that only 20 percent of CUNY’s students overall, and only 10 percent of its senior college students, required remediation. In fact, over 70 percent of CUNY’s 200,000-strong student body, including 68 percent at senior colleges and 89 percent at community colleges, then required remediation in writing, reading, math, or a combination of the three.

According to City College’s Mina Shaughnessy (1924-1978), the patron saint of the “basic (remedial) writing” movement, “basic writers’” compositions, while seemingly illiterate, really are literate, at a certain level. In her 1977 book, Errors and Expectations, Shaughnessy gave examples of typical basic writing essays, such as the following:

“But many colleges have night classes so you could have worked and gone to college also pay for your education although some other programs to help pay on some where you don’t pay or some where you don’t pay at all so you were lazy.”

That was back in the good ol’ days.

The following example is a complete essay from one of my own CUNY students, in 1995:

“I am going to college, to learn a profession for my future, My major is computer Science.

“In this moments is difficult, to someone get a good job.

“it is Important. you go to school to learn, because you finish major. After that do you get a good job, in Important company. They pay a lot money, do you could a position in the society and every do you Want. for that I am going to college.”

That was in a “college-level” Phonetics class at Bronx Community College. CUNY has for a generation routinely placed remedial students in “college-level” courses, causing the phenomenon that Charles Landesman has called “leakage.” A recently retired CUNY Hunter College philosophy professor and co-founder of the CUNY Association of Scholars, in his article in the Fall 1999 issue of the journal, Academic Questions, Landesman argues that leakage “creates pressures upon the faculty to make their courses easier, to reduce course requirements, to lessen the amount of required reading, to inflate grades.”

Despite a lack of evidence, Mina Shaughnessy believed that remediation could produce educational miracles. Shaughnessy’s successors publicly demand unlimited remediation—today, tomorrow, and forever. And yet, in private, they are morally and politically opposed to remediation. They support the Marxist “language rights” movement, which claims—in private “scholarship” —that pidgin languages such as “ebonics” and “spanglish” are equal, if not superior to, standard English, and that children should be taught in these substandard language forms. The language rights movement’s foundational document is the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s 1974 resolution,

“Students’ Right to Their Own Language”:

“We affirm the students’ right to their own patterns and varieties of language -- the dialects of their nurture or whatever dialects in which they find their own identity and style. Language scholars long ago denied that the myth of a standard American dialect has any validity. The claim that any one dialect is unacceptable amounts to an attempt of one social group to exert its dominance over another.... We affirm strongly that teachers must have the experience and training that will enable them to respect diversity and uphold the right of students to their own language.”

If all dialects and manners of speech are equally valid, the distinction between “English teacher” and “English student” is invalid. Accordingly, there is then no reason why anyone should pay one thin dime to support English teachers, professors, or remedial writing programs.

(In case you are wondering whether the CCCC still stands by its 1974 resolution, in a 1999 article in its journal, College Composition and Communication, Afrocentric Michigan State University professor, Geneva Smitherman, reprinted and reaffirmed the resolution. Smitherman met with neither criticism nor resistance.)

CUNY’s new chancellor, Matthew Goldstein (City College, ‘63), apparently also opposes remediation reform. Goldstein’s program, Prelude to Success, has been smuggling remedial students registered at community colleges into college-level courses at senior colleges. And according to a report commissioned by the Board of Regents, last fall, CUNY denied admission to only one percent (150) of the 14,603 applicants to senior colleges, even though only 33.1 percent (4,836) of the applicants had passed all three requisite basic skills examinations. Thus, failing to eliminate all remediation has resulted in its stealthy return to the senior campuses.

Despite reformist pronouncements, remediation is alive and well at CUNY. The “civil rights” advocates are winning. And that is neither civil nor right.


[Also by this writer:

“Smoking Guns: Grade Inflation in Higher Ed Part V”;

“Protecting CUNY Reform”;

“Q: Should colleges offer remedial-education programs for students?”;

“The CUNY Remedial Education Debate”;

“Experiment of Open Admissions Comes Back to Haunt CUNY”;

“The Asphalt League of Public Higher Education”;

“New York Times: We Can Improve Blacks’ IQ! We Just Have to be Willing to Spend about $1 Quintillion, and a Million Years on It (No Comments Allowed!)”;

“Scholar Blasts Myth of Underfunded Minority Schools”; and

“Poor Whites are Smarter than Even Well-to-Do Blacks, So Columbus Dispatch ‘Reporter’ Lies About It, in Order to Help Racist Black Hustlers Shake Down Whitey for Even More Billions of Dollars!”]