💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › christopher-day-hunter-students-seek-justice.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 22:55:18. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

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

Christopher Day

Hunter Students SEEK Justice

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.