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Title: Hunter Students SEEK Justice Author: Christopher Day Date: 1995 Language: en Topics: Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, New York, student movement Source: 1995 Mar/Apr issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160322154653/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/53
The crowd of several hundred students stood silently, with their backs
turned, as the provost of New York City’s Hunter College, Laura F.
Strumingher, tried to convince them that her plan to gut the SEEK
program was in their interests. Unconvinced, a chant of “Hands off
SEEK!” rose up from the students. Blanc began to storm off, restrained
only by her advisers, who had a better understanding of what this
protest meant. One by one, organizers of the protest took the microphone
and spelled out the implications of the plan, as Blanc sputtered “You’re
being manipulated” to the students.
What was most exciting about the protest and the ensuing organizing
activity is that it was all initiated by SEEK students themselves, and
not by the student government bureaucrats who dominate the political
life of Hunter. The main organizers were tutors, SEEK students who had
succeeded in college and were now assisting other students. Only a
handful of non-SEEK students came around for the organizing work.
Another exciting thing about this protest is how it has laid the
groundwork for a mass, militant response to the latest round of cuts in
financial aid, class closings, teacher layoffs, and tuition increases
under the budget proposed by New York governor George Pataki. Previous
budget cuts and tuition increases have resulted in city-wide student
strikes. In 1989 these strikes defeated a proposed tuition increase. In
1991 the strike movement did not succeed (see “Student Strike Rocks New
York,” Love and Rage Vol. 2 No. 5, May 1991).
The SEEK program is the main mechanism used by the City University of
New York (CUNY), of which Hunter College is a part, to guarantee open
admission to New York City high school graduates who do not meet the
ordinary entrance requirements. SEEK provides special remedial and
developmental courses through an independent Department of Academic
Skills, which allows SEEK students to receive financial aid without
taking a full credit load. SEEK also guarantees financial aid for five
years, provides tutoring, and generally assists students in surviving in
an often hostile environment. The vast majority of SEEK students are
students of color, often the first members of their families to go to
college.
The plan to gut SEEK is the result of a demand by CUNY that each college
“restructure” its SEEK program. Most CUNY schools have already done so,
but the director of the SEEK program at Hunter refused to go along with
these demands; he was replaced by a more compliant director, who
promptly produced the demanded “restructuring proposal.” The essence of
the proposal was to transfer all the faculty out of the Department of
Academic Skills into the English and Math Departments, and to force SEEK
students to take regular remedial courses. A regular remedial course
load does not qualify a student for financial aid, so SEEK students
would be effectively forced to take non-remedial courses, which they are
not prepared for, at the same time as their remedial courses. The
proposal is a one-two punch to the SEEK program that would make its
elimination during future budget cuts a virtual certainty. The proposal
simultaneously sets SEEK students up for failure and breaks up the
institutional weight of the SEEK faculty, also largely people of color,
by forcing them into overwhelmingly white departments.
The college administration has attempted to sell the plan as one
motivated by a desire to “desegregate” the two distinct remedial
programs and to diversify the English and Math Departments. But the plan
was developed in consultation with the English and Math faculty behind
the backs of the SEEK faculty. The administration argues that the
separate SEEK courses attach a stigma to the students who take them, and
that this (not the crappy educations they got in high school) accounts
for their high attrition rate. But the SEEK students themselves are
fiercely loyal to the program because they know that, for all of its
deficiencies, it is their best chance to escape lives of grinding
poverty.
The proposal was sprung on the SEEK students just two weeks before the
end of the fall semester, as students were preparing for finals. In
spite of this, there was a flurry of organizing activity, including the
protest and a later mass meeting in the middle of finals. It appears
that much of the implementation took place during winter break, and it
is unclear at this writing, in the first week of the spring semester, if
there will be any more resistance.
The fight to defend SEEK at Hunter may be over. If so, it is an
important preface to the coming battle against the budget cuts. In a few
short weeks, SEEK students demonstrated their capacity to organize a
defiant, democratic mass movement on campus. That experience will prove
to be of great value in building the sort of movement it will take to
defeat this next round of budget cuts in NY and everywhere else.