The end of education
Geoffrey Wagner
New York 'flits constant cliff-hanging fiscal crisis New York has hit hardest, of all its city agencies, at higher education, This is listed as lowest Priority at City Hall in the event of default. Personnel cuts in city services at large have averaged 11 per cent, those in the City University 30 per cent—with more to come. This is New York's colossal City University, administered by the Board of Higher Education (BHE), which comprises four senior colleges, a graduate centre, and fourteen community colleges, enrolling in all over a quarter of a million students— free. Many of these are now scheduled to be amalgamated or abolished, and the first street protests to retain them have started. To see the problem in perspective, the English observer must realise we are witnessing the educational high point of American history. When Artemus Ward wrote more than a century ago, 'Dana can't make himself easy without he goes to Harvard College', he scarcely envisaged 35,000 doctorates awarded annually throughout the land, with half a million college professors drawing salaries, the majority today publicly financed. The US Office of Education has projected 60 per c,e. nt of Americans going to college by 1980 kin benighted France only 16 per cent now do so, in Sweden 18 per cent); moreover, the US Census Bureau has just revealed that blacks, who compose 11.4 per cent of the Population, comprised 12.3 per cent of the US freshman college class in October 1974. Such figures suggest the pressure for certification outside the gates of American academe. In New York City four civic universities or free academies' were set up in the last acentury, City College, Brooklyn, Queen's, i, s—uci Hunter, extending the local school ,--'stern upwards and educating, in a rather suroader sense than the British Technical kellool of the past, and without tuition Liarges, resident high school graduates. The rlatt.er were accepted into the colleges on a atla of available seats which moved a Percentile point up and down a qualifying 93(0anrunation between about 85 per cent and ad Per cent. Today, under a new open issions system, anyone who can show fg▪ uign school diploma or its equivalent (i.e. r esteournntrHieasiti, Cuba, or Colombia, to name of origin of many of my present roudento is allowed into the system without ;Mal examination. The result, not to z ince. words, is that it has broken down. t'..x.a.rnination is being re-introduced and fees are on the way.
, ' 0 try to get from one battered, firen a zard classroom to another at either City College or Hunter today is physically difficult and even dangerous—there were three rapes at Hunter the first month of this term and five at City last. A few appropriately if unconvincingly bearded young guerrillas with tenure in the form of professors struggle through the throngs of spastic junkies, clutching their copies of Eldridge Cleaver and J. R. R. Tolkien (a man whose Anglo-Saxon tutorials I hoped I had forgotten for ever, but who has returned to haunt my academic senility). It cannot be said to be an educational situation by the most generous of estimates.
'Good manners', wrote CCNY's exPresident Buell Gallagher, who masterminded the policy of open admissions, 'which had been the hall mark of the middle-class black bourgeoisie, were regarded by the newly arriving proletarian as signs of weakness and lack of race pride'. Politeness in these parts is servility.
It was essentially Gallagher, an ordained Presbyterian minister, who, when City College was taken over by hostile students in 1969, 'negotiated' with six of them (three not students at all) and accepted their 'demands', couched in the rhetoric of the day, as a taxpayers' mandate to 'open' the municipal universities of America's largest City. This juicy political plum was quickly seized by Albert Bowker, then BHE Chancellor, who put open admissions to CUNY into effect in September 1970. As both men departed to points west, the bemused faculty hung around waiting to pick up the pieces. Most of the senior among us (the 'pigs', the 'fuzz') knew perfectly well that CUNY had always been open, to anyone who could keep vertical in a high school seat for five years. All through the 'fifties and 'sixties our classes had had large proportions of blacks, though the majority were indeed at that time Jewish.
i Before our own 'bust', n fact, Gallagher cited a figure of 36 per cent of black attendance at the college, though such figures, then as now, must remain conjectural since no student can be compelled so to identify him or herself on the IBM card provided. But again, then as now (in the new Census Bureau report), the black dropout rate was far higher than that for whites. Suddenly made into a right by men like Gallagher and Bowker, higher education became undervalued. What are the facts?
The data are untrustworthy since the agency (BHE) emitting them is concerned to prove itself right. The box-score is of its own devising. And if the statistics persist in proving you wrong you resort to some comment like that of Professor Marilyn Gittel, head of CUNY's WAC (Women's Advisory Committee), that 'the depth of the problem won't be understood by statistics'. In fact, after four years of the programme the most optimistic retention rate tables showed a CUNY dropout rate of 47 per cent of open admission students. Even such retention meant little, given the ultra-lenient grading and total-forgiveness standards applied. Remediation of the underprtpared (now called compensation by a guilt-ridden technocracy), chiefly in Maths and English, became the crux, costing New York City $39 million in 1974.
Clearly this could not continue. Faced with draconian budget cuts, present BHE Chancellor Robert Kibbee is now requiring entrants to show that they are capable of eighth-grade English and Maths. In England this translates to the level of a twelve-yearold at a poorish secondary school (an illiterate by current UNESCO adult standards). Thus Kibbee openly impugns his own city's high school diploma.
The argument is repeatedly returned, however, that the undereducated ('disadvantaged' etc) are so by virtue of having gone to 'ghetto' schools. The irony in this term, originally sequestering Jews who, though only 3 per cent of the US population, have contributed so signally to its intellectual life that the Health, Education and Welfare Department has discerned them as 'over-represented' on Columbia University's faculty, cannot fail to have struck even New York's supermarketminded BHE. Most of us who have taught at the city colleges for a quarter of a century know that many of our most successful Jewish students came from similar 'ghetto' schools, to say nothing of the many brilliant Asiatics who, further impeded by language, and, unassisted in the way Spanish speakers are today in New York, had to fight their way through such 'ghetto' schools, and to Harvard and Yale PhDs thereafter. I can number former Chinese students in prominent positions in banks and medicine and one in a principal US Embassy in Europe.
Finally, one cannot resist feeling that the argument is somewhat circular: 'ghetto' schools are made by 'ghetto' kids and New York City today spends two million dollars a year simply repairing the broken windows of its high schools from which, on any given day, it is calculated that one-third of the denizens will be absent. To solve this dilemma CUNY hopes to lure SUNY (the State University of New York) into taking it over; yet, however devoutly to be desired, this consummation is faced with many obstacles. The situation at writing is that the state is requiring the CUNY fathers to cut its budget far more sharply than the latter politically want to. However, the former, through its financial board in New York City, will simply refuse to honour salary cheques this month or next. The word has gone out for further austerity but in this union-ridden city no one wants to be the one to impose it. We need our Stafford Cripps.
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