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Title: Students Fight Educational Apartheid Author: Suzy Subways Date: 1998 Language: en Topics: apartheid, Love and Rage Revolutionary Anarchist Federation, New York City Source: Fall 1998 issue of L&R. Retrieved on 2016-06-13 from https://web.archive.org/web/20160613044919/http://loveandrage.org/?q=node/15
On January 14, New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani attacked the City
University of New York’s open admissions policy in his State of the City
address, claiming that the University has no “standards.” Within weeks,
several CUNY Trustees and college presidents made proposals to limit
remedial education and impose stricter entrance requirements on students
at CUNY’s 17 colleges. These proposals sparked a series of student and
faculty protests, but barely three months passed before the Trustees
voted on May 26 to end all remedial classes at the senior colleges.
CUNY’s open admissions policy was won by radical Black and Latino
students in 1969, with a long struggle culminating in a student strike
at City College that had tremendous support from the surrounding Harlem
community. At the time, the student body of City College was 94% white;
it was called the “pearl of Harlem.” To open the door to higher
education to all New Yorkers, the open admissions policy guaranteed a
place at CUNY for everyone who has graduated from high school or earned
a G.E.D. Now the majority of CUNY students are people of color and many
are single mothers, immigrants, and poor people.
Advocates of open admissions at CUNY also pressured the NYC Board of
Education to improve the city’s neglected public school system so that
all high school graduates would be prepared for college. Instead, the
quality of public education has consistently declined due to
overcrowding and budget cuts. As a result, 63% of freshmen entering CUNY
fail one or more of three placement tests in math, writing, and reading.
These students take remedial classes to bring them up to the college
level. This way the more challenging and interesting classes can be
taken alongside remediaton, which can motivate and inspire a student to
patiently work through the drudgery of making up for what is often 12
years of wasted classroom time.
The call to “raise standards” has nothing to do with actually improving
education at CUNY. If they wanted to do that, they would restore the
departments and faculty that have been eliminated over the years of deep
budget cuts. But the call for “standards” resonates with some students
who would actually benefit from a shift by CUNY towards elitism.
If CUNY’s 4-year colleges stopped offering remedial classes, two thirds
of the Black, Latino and Asian students who apply for admission would be
turned away, re-establishing educational apartheid at CUNY. Since CUNY
has been the primary route out of poverty and into the middle-class for
New York City’s Black, Latino, and immigrant populations, shutting out
thousands of people of these communities will effectively preserve any
jobs with decent pay, benefits, and working conditions for white,
middle-class graduates.
Student activists started meeting in February to rebuild the movement at
CUNY. So far it has been a slow but steady process of growth, based on a
conscious effort to learn from the mistakes of past years. At Brooklyn
College, for example, this has meant that activists are beginning to
understand the need to spend time getting to know the people in clubs on
campus and planning events with these clubs instead of expecting
individuals to come join some isolated and culturally alienating
activist group. At all the colleges, activists need to be more open and
welcoming to new people, instead of creating a dynamic of “honcho-ism,”
where a few individuals enjoy a sense of importance by dominating all
the leadership positions. This dynamic is usually related to an abuse of
male or white privilege.
Every spring, a new coalition is born in reaction to the latest attack
on CUNY. A few years ago, when it was called SLAM! (Student Liberation
Action Movement), members proposed a structure to make the coalition
more democratic and efficient. Each campus would elect four delegates
who could vote in the city-wide meetings. Each delegation had to have at
least two women, and at least two people of color. The delegate
structure was meant to cut down on honcho-ism and make the city-wide
group accountable to the people actually doing work on the campuses. It
was hoped that this would also limit the influence of the various
opportunist sectarian organizations.
The SLAM! structure passed, but it never actually functioned, because
most campuses couldn’t get four people to a meeting, and decisions
always ended up being made by one-person-one-vote like before. And on
top of that, the sectarian left groups kept starting arguments opposing
the idea of the structure which had been passed but not put into effect,
calling it undemocratic. In a similar self-serving fashion, these same
groups would argue that SLAM! was no longer a coalition but an
organization of its own, because it had highly developed radical
politics that went beyond the immediate crisis and built for struggles
against workfare, police brutality, and in support of political
prisoners. SLAM’s politics already offered a vision of an alternative to
the present oppressive system, so an organization (like the ISO or other
Trotskyite groups) that hadn’t proved itself through good, principled
organizing work couldn’t easily recruit people who were interested in
revolutionary politics and saw no other option.
This year, activists who identify with SLAM! have decided to build a
broader coalition with SLAM! as a group within that coalition. SLAM! is
now a radical multi-racial caucus of predominantly women that is looking
to recruit newer activists and further develop its revolutionary
politics. The coalition has passed a proposal by SLAM! activists for a
coordinating committee which now functions under a delegate structure
similar to the original SLAM! structure. It is made up of two delegates
from each college, which means that the meetings are relatively small,
so that new activists from under-represented campuses find it easier to
participate, and decisions are made more efficiently.
The CUNY Coalition for Open Admissions has held five demonstrations this
semester, in addition to educational events on various campuses. The
first protest, on February 23, brought approximately a hundred people to
CUNY Central Headquarters, where the Board of Trustees was meeting.
Although it was cold and the rain poured down, students kept up an
energetic spirit and made rousing speeches. About twenty students got
inside, and several denounced the Board members for dismantling open
admissions. Two activists were arrested for leaping onto the Board table
and shouting “No educational apartheid!” They were both tackled and
dragged out. The meeting was then illegally closed to the public by
Board Chair Anne Paolucci.
On March 19, students picketed Board Vice Chair Herman Badillo’s law
office. Badillo is the mayor’s mouthpiece on “standards” at CUNY, and he
has been criticizing open admissions for years. About 100 students
demonstrated and then marched to Hunter College, after enjoying some
fiery speeches, call-and-response chants, and shouts of “Shut ‘em down!”
whenever the next Board of Trustees meeting was mentioned. Needless to
say, the police were not thrilled with the level of passionate anger and
unity that they were seeing. On the way to Hunter, they attacked the
marching students, claiming that the sound permit had been violated.
Cops shoved protesters into the glass doors of a ritzy Upper East Side
boutique and arrested five students. The rest of us reached Hunter
College only to discover that a horde of police were waiting for the
students to come outside, and that undercover officers had found their
way onto campus to look for students who had been targetted for arrest
during the march. Students managed to round up the undercover cops and
kick them off campus.
Almost two hundred students gathered outside the Board of Trustees
meeting on March 23. Many newly active students came to the rally and
shared the spirit of united fury by making lots of noise for open
admissions. Protesters celebrated our first victory when it was
announced that a milder version of the proposal to end all remedial
classes at the senior colleges had been defeated by the Board.
One month later, on April 27, over 800 students, faculty and community
members protested outside the Trustees’ meeting. Student leaders who had
been recently trained in demonstration security by two former members of
the Young Lords (a 1960’s Puerto Rican revolutionary organization)
maintained a high level of organization and kept the police from
attacking the lively crowd. Inside, the Trustees voted to postpone the
decision.
On Tuesday May 26, students, faculty, and community members crowded into
the Board room and heckled Trustee Badillo as he announced his proposal,
shouting, “Harvard has remediation!” “Yale has remediation!” The
Trustees were still split on the issue, but Badillo knew that he now had
enough votes to pass the proposal. As Chairwoman Paolucci closed the
meeting to the public, police arrested 20 demonstrators outside for
blocking traffic: students crying with frustration and loss, professors
in academic dress robes, and one state asemblymember.
By the time protesters returned from the precinct, the Board had voted
to wipe out remediation at all of CUNY’s four-year colleges. Students
tried to get into the Board room; four more were arrested. Defenders of
CUNY are now planning the next stage of the struggle to block the
dismantling of open admissions.
One of the most valuable lessons that CUNY student activists have
learned over the past three years is that we need to build a real base
of support on each campus — a base of students from diverse backgrounds
who enjoy working together and are committed to the struggle at CUNY in
the long-term. Campus groups will only lose by trying to cut corners and
focusing all their energy on getting people out to one off-campus rally
each year. It is vital to ask ourselves how we are using each rally to
build the group on campus itself, instead of thinking our end goal is
simply to get a high turnout for the rally.
As tuition rises and financial aid is cut, students have to work longer
hours to stay in school. We need to build a movement that is worth
people’s time — a movement that is rich in culture, both in the many
musical, artistic, and historical traditions and languages that people
bring with them to the movement, but also in the culture of resistence
that we build. If we can create a student movement at CUNY that fulfills
these human needs for people and inspires us to stick together and grow
in the years to come, we will be much harder to defeat.