The college and the city: then and now

Public Interest, Summer, 1998 by Nathan Glazer

Below the Great Hall there was once a lunchroom, whose alcoves became famous because of some of the undergraduates who hung out in them. (Some of the alcove denizens, including the two founding editors of this journal, and the author of this article, also an editor of this journal, are the subjects of the recently released documentary, Arguing the World, which begins in the alcoves of City College.) The old lunchroom is now a large drafting room for the CCNY architecture school. The original buildings of City College remind us of the pride the city took in its college, and of its ambitions for it. It was not to be inferior in its facilities to the best colleges in the country. But in this celebratory year, City College, and the City University of New York (CUNY) of which it has become a part, is under sharp attack.

New college, new role

The complaints begin with the revolutionary program of "open enrollment" that was introduced in 1970 in response to a minority-student protest movement that closed City College. The program provided every graduate of a New York City high school with admission to one of the CUNY institutions - either a four-year senior college, such as City College is, or one of the many community colleges that had been created in the postwar period. Old graduates, current faculty, and the city's media, were not happy with the program of open enrollment. The senior city colleges, which include, beside City College, such well-known institutions as Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens colleges, had been very selective institutions. They became, in the wake of open enrollment, much less selective. Their fame was based on the quality of their students and the subsequent accomplishments of their graduates in many fields. What would be the effect of a sharp drop in the quality of entering students? American institutions are rated more by this factor than by anything they actually do for students. No matter that open enrollment was a tradition in most public college systems. For City College, it was seen as a disaster.

And this celebratory year of 1998 - it is also the 100th anniversary of the creation of Greater New York City out of Manhattan, Brooklyn, and many other communities - began with an assault on CUNY by the popular Mayor Rudolph Giuliani because of the poor quality of its students, its large investment in remedial courses for its underprepared students, and its low graduation rates. The City College of the past, the hope seems to run, must be and can be restored. But can it? Should it? Is the College of then, of a glorious past, really a possibility in the city of now? I think not. And I would argue that despite that, there is an important role for the college, and it is the role that it must take up in the city that New York has become.

Those of us who refer to the College of "then" can have only one "then" in mind, the College before the storm of open enrollment broke upon it in 1970, in the wake of the agonizing conflicts of 1969. For the city, there was also a "then," before 1970, very different from today. That point in time did not mark as sharp a break in the fortunes and character of the city as it did for the college, but an enormous change in the life of the city was being signaled.

Probably no one involved in the dramatic events of 1969 and 1970 thought much about the fact that our immigration laws were changed in 1965, and that the change came into effect in 1968. No one involved in that change in our immigration laws thought it would greatly affect the number and character of immigrants coming into the United States. The volume of immigration was then small, and was expected to remain small. European relatives of long-settled Americans were expected to be the beneficiaries of the new law. But the law, combining with changes in Europe, then basking in prosperity, and other changes in Mexico and Latin America and the Caribbean and East Asia, led to an unexpected increase in immigration. During the 1960s, and increasingly in the 1970s and 1980s, the immigrant stream rose, and changed, and New York again became a great city of immigration. New York had experienced a hiatus of 40 years during which immigration was low or nonexistent. We thought that hiatus was normal. No one expected New York City would again become a city of immigrants. It has.

Other changes also transformed the City. Inevitably, they were also to transform the College and its mission. Three changes strike me as most important: The change in the population of the city, owing to immigration; the change in its school system; and the change in our society. All of these have had enormous consequences for the college.

The new immigrants

What strikes us most sharply when we view the city of the late 1990s contrasted with the city of the late 1960s is the dominance of great waves of immigration from the Caribbean, Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe. The city of "then" was still a city predominantly of people of European origin. The census of 1960 showed that persons of European origin, "non-Hispanic whites" as the census now inelegantly dubs them, made up three-quarters of the city. And the rest were African-American and Puerto-Rican-American citizens, many of whom were recent migrants but not immigrants. The immigrant of the 1960s was typically old, someone who had migrated before the 1920s, The numbers of recent immigrants, even in the wake of World War II, and its devastating impact on so many European groups and countries, was quite small.