The college and the city: then and now

Public Interest, Summer, 1998 by Nathan Glazer

The immigrant then represented the past rather than the present or the future. We were a city of European ethnic groups, of the Irish and Germans and Jews and Italians. When we talked of the "balanced ticket" in the 1960s, what we thought of balancing were the Irish, the Italians, and the Jews, though the older white Protestant groups still had an important and honored role. In this balancing act our political system was trying, with some success, to make place for African Americans and Puerto Ricans, who had only recently become substantial groups in the city.

The ethnic and religious conflicts of the city of the 1960s are now in large part history. Those varied groups of Europeans are homogenized in most of our statistics and analyses and consciousness into one group, "non-Hispanic whites." Today, the proportion of non-Hispanic whites has dropped from the three-quarters of the 1960s to something like two-fifths. It will drop further, as immigration into the city continues at the rate of over 100,000 a year, primarily from the Caribbean, Asia, and Latin America, with only a small proportion from Europe. Nor can one see anything on the horizon - either changes in the countries that provide our immigrants or changes in our laws - that will alter that situation.

The impact of this change on the College has been profound. When I attended City College, about 15 years after the ending of the great wave of eastern and southern European immigration, everyone, as far as one could tell, was native born or had come to this country as young children. One did not hear foreign accents. (There were various forms of "New Yorkese," which the college's required speech courses tried to root out.) No foreign languages could be heard in the corridors. There were no programs for speakers of foreign languages. That condition prevailed until the great change of 1970 and after. The contrast with the college of today is overwhelming. Half of the students have been born abroad. Substantial resources are devoted to teaching English to those who do not speak it well and to improving the ability of students to read and write English, many of whom were born and raised in this country.

Many critics of the college find that deplorable. They envisage a college that remains in character with the traditions that prevailed before 1970. The predominance of immigration is one reason that the old college cannot be resuscitated. If the college ruled out new immigrants with serious problems in English - and those with the perhaps more serious educational weaknesses of our native city students, which I will discuss later - it would be a very small college indeed. Those who could fill it simply are not there anymore. Nor do I believe the college could survive as a publicly supported college if it insisted that it would devote no resources to those who could not manage English at the level of the pre-1970 entrant, or who could not perform academically at the level of the pre-1970 entrant.

Present-day immigration presents problems, for the city and the college, but it also presents opportunities - opportunities that the old European immigration did not offer. The immigration of today includes large numbers who have more education than the average American, as well as those who have considerably less. The first group is hardly a problem: It is often a solution. Immigrants who have achieved a high level of education abroad provide a good part of our hospital staffs, our doctors and nurses, our engineers and computer programmers. Even those who cannot get work in skilled professional occupations can use their education effectively in retail and wholesale trade and in services. Their children, even if they initially have deficiencies in English, are one of the strengths of the college today. They come from homes in which education is seen as the key to progress, and in which children are typically encouraged to compete academically. Indeed, these immigrants have often come to New York specifically because of the opportunities it offers in education for their children. For despite the disastrous character of our public schools, and the problems of our public colleges, the city provides educational opportunities far surpassing what is available in many of their native lands.