Published Winter 2005
 
How to Win Your Argument In Higher Ed Without Spending One Red Cent
MEMO TO: Conservative Critics of Standards in Public Higher Education
FROM: A Colleague RE: How We Restratified a Municipal University in the 1990s (CUNY); OR, How to Win Your Argument in Higher Ed Without Spending One Red Cent
DATE: March 1, 2005
I have been examining the case of the City University of New York (CUNY), which has finally begun to restratify by putting into place reforms we and our neoliberal allies have advocated for so long. (See the list below of these specific reforms.) As of spring 2005, an 18-campus system which once refused to distinguish between tiers, needlessly duplicated programs, charged a sensible tuition, and let about anyone in its doors through remedial programs has radically increased its tuition and reasserted more selective boundaries within and between institutions. Indeed, even the hardy band of (mostly) tenured radicals who once opposed us must now accept that the 1960s are over. The largest public urban system in this great nation now also accepts that a university cannot right the wrongs of society and hope to move masses of the urban poor into the middle classes if they aren't bright enough to get there by themselves in the first place. Giving them a helping hand by creating remedial courses or generous admission policies will not help these students, but, like affirmative action (of which remediation is just another version), will actually harm these young people by giving them false hope that they can succeed.
However, because states like California might balk (they vowed to end remediation at Cal State in 2007, but haven't yet), I think it's wise to revisit the past—to look at how we achieved victory and crushed our opposition so effectively that now, in the early years of the new century, CUNY is again garnering praise from the New York Times. And the best news is that we did it all without spending one red cent!
How did we do it?
First, after nearly a decade of our devoted lobbying, the CUNY Board of Trustees did the right thing: they voted in 1999 to phase out all remediation in the four-year schools in CUNY and thus to put the final nail into the coffin of open admissions. Subsequently, CUNY showed its good faith and created an exclusive University Honors College, which provides tuition remission, stipends, computers (laptops!), and special classes to students who, in the spirit of meritocracy, qualify. CUNY has established a rising junior exam—a test in writing, reading, and quantitative reasoning given to juniors at senior colleges and to graduates in the community colleges. It's administered centrally, so that the faculty don't get too involved, and so that the colleges can¨ªt create too many loopholes. Also, CUNY is moving to reward particular programs with a "flagship" status—which means that lesser programs in the liberal arts spread out on the campuses won't all be able to hire new full-time faculty. These and similar reforms are pushing this system in the right direction.
And—the best part is that all of this has been done without, for instance, having to raise faculty and staff salaries to keep up with the Consumer Price Index which is now the highest in the nation in the NY metropolitan area.
As you may imagine, it was not easy to accomplish this. At one time open admissions at CUNY did have its supporters, some of whom tried to force us to talk about what they sneeringly call "privatization" of the university. They mean by this that, as states assume a greater share of health care and welfare costs once shouldered by the federal government, the cost of higher education is shifted to parents, students, and the private sector. States have also tended to increase tuition and shift from need-based to merit-based financial aid, while the federal government downsizes grant programs and offers more loans. Along with abolishing remediation or affirmative action, these structural changes in financing higher education help to ensure that ¨¬stratification? will result. Minorities will cluster in the less prestigious sectors, while working-class and some middle-class students of all colors find it increasingly difficult to enroll in four-year colleges. Our critics will trot out their data:
- In 1990-91, the number of minorities increased by 13.4% in community colleges but only by 5.9% in four-year colleges.
- Between 1989 and 1992, the percentage of students in four-year institutions from families earning $100,000 rose from 3 to 37%.
- Since 1988, students from families earning $150,000 rose from 17 to 22% at the most elite private schools in the nation.
- In 1994, the average tuition rate at four-year colleges rose 6%, or twice the rate of inflation.
- When compared to state appropriations for public higher education, the rate of increase in tuition increased by 30% between 1980 and 1987.
- Between 1981 and 1986, federal aid to public universities declined 14% in constant dollars, while in the early 1990s 30 states cut their higher education budgets, affecting two-thirds of all public institutions.
- CUNY's tuition increased 93% between 1988 and 1997; New York State¨ªs appropriation for the university in constant dollars has decreased 40% since 1980, while in 1997, the city's contribution decreased from 19 to 6%.
One way to deal with our critics when they quote these and similar numbers is to take a few cues from Heather Mac Donald's masterful critique of CUNY in her article "Downward Mobility." First: focus on graduation rates, graduation rates, graduation rates! Everybody knows that CUNY students spend years and years getting their degrees. (Luckily, fewer are aware of massive statistical studies like that of CUNY's David Lavin and his colleagues, that show that CUNY's rates are in line with peer institutions and strongly correlate with the numbers of hours students work outside school, unhappily a national figure that researchers like Alexander Astin at UCLA have also confirmed).
Alternatively, as Heather did in her article, cite the costs of remediation. One way to cite costs is to pick a department like philosophy and count up the number of faculty who teach there. Then, count the number of faculty who teach in a remedial math or writing program. If you compare the two, you can argue that the remedial enterprise has so swamped the liberal arts that traditional departments can't hire enough teachers to teach "real" subjects. The public doesn't know that when you count up the numbers of remedial teachers in writing programs, you're also counting teachers who are offering other courses outside that program as well. Nor does the public know the difference between full-time faculty in a department like philosophy and the legions of part-time faculty in a remedial program who are often earning about $3,000 per course. (NB: whatever you do, don't check these numbers again after the place is restratified, because some of those philosophy profs may have retired and the department is thus likely to be much, much smaller nowadays.) Along the same lines, you can talk boldly about hugely expensive tutorial programs for remedial students without mentioning that most of these are staffed by undergraduates earning a little over the minimum wage.
Generally speaking, though, I'd recommend that you stay away from the numbers game and play the culture card whenever possible. To get started with the culture issue, you first will need some really powerful politicians who can get instant press and who aren¨ªt afraid to bully the faculty (administrators in general will cave pretty quickly). In our case, we had Rudy Giuliani, deeply admired even before 9-11 by media outlets like the Daily News, to lambaste CUNY and call it "pathetic" at every turn. More quietly but still effectively because he holds the purse strings, we had Governor George Pataki, who at the time I am speaking of was busy attacking multiculturalism at the State University of New York (SUNY) and getting some good press doing it. If you get these politicians to go along, they can make useful appointments like they did to the CUNY Board of Trustees, and eventually create special commissions where favored journalists like Heather Mac Donald and former academics running for-profit educational companies like Benno Schmidt can write reports making the recommendations you've been pushing.
To get to that stage, though, you need the second thing: some attack dogs—journalists of the Ann Coulter variety who aren't afraid to call a spade a spade, or twist a fact or two. You can¨ªt really make the omelette without breaking the eggs first; this kind of journalist can set the stage for cooler analyses later and the seemingly neutral recommendations of advisory boards.
We had several hacks at our disposal, although no one was more effective than Heather Mac Donald. Besides toting up the numbers of faculty in remedial programs and all those peer undergraduate tutors, she was willing to go the distance and watch ¨¬compositionists? teach their classes. These faculty do things like ask students to read their work aloud in small groups and we know that isn't "teaching": as Rudy would say, it's "pathetic." (I also recommend Heather's denunciation of college composition in "Why Johnny Can't Write." This is a piece that tried to do for composition what Dinesh D¨ªSouza did for multiculturalism—though unfortunately, the national press didn't pick it up.)
Journalists like Mac Donald are also effective when they are allied with think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, which has sponsored the work of pioneers in education like Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve) and also supplied ideas about welfare reform to mayors like Rudy Giuliani. For example, its official organ, the City Journal, has printed articles about urban ills that can be linked to remedial students—the issue which ran Heather's article "Downward Mobility" also features on the inside a picture of a very pregnant welfare mom. As they say, a picture is sometimes worth a thousand words.
In New York City, conservatives just can't do it alone, so I come now to a most important piece of advice for any of you working in states with liberal constituencies: find yourself a neoliberal and build a coalition! By neoliberal, I mean those intellectuals and journalists who have really lost their faith in the Great Society programs of the 1960s of which open admissions, remediation, and affirmative action policies are pretty good examples. In New York, these people might be aging intellectuals who remember halcyon days in the city.
In this regard, James Traub's expose of remedial education in his award-winning book, City on a Hill, really helped us out. (In case you don't know, Traub writes on education for the New York Times Magazine. A Harvard graduate whose father was the former chairman of Bloomingdale's, he probably knows a thing or two about getting where you need to be without a helping hand.) Traub's book was well-received by the mainstream press because it appears to be the case that many intellectuals in New York view City College through their nostalgia for the immigrant past of their forefathers. Harvard sociologist and CCNY alum Nathan Glazer struck the right note in his response to Traub's book, when he explains why remedial students at CCNY can't be taught and how the city has changed:
New York City's population had changed from a largely stable working class in which fathers worked or looked for work, mothers stayed home, children came home for lunch or took sandwiches from home ... accepted the authority of teachers and assumed one had to be smart and work hard to go to college, to something very different. (41)
This sort of remark and many others like it helped us to stress how different the remedial students of today are from the fabled working-class "greenhorns" who attended City College in the past. Remarks like this one can stoke nostalgia for simpler times and help readers picture CUNY students as the products of urban wastelands inhabited by rapidly deteriorating families. Said readers won¨ªt think about whether it might not be better to offer a single mother a way out of her situation through an institution like CUNY. They'll be too busy recalling a golden age, when the schools disciplined kids, taught them to read Shakespeare and to speak good English.
The issue of speaking English is also important for you to stress in your campaign against remedial classes. See, for instance, the fracas we were able to create at Hostos Community College, a bilingual college for Hispanics: we made hay out of the fact that students there had not passed a writing assessment test and used it to foment our literacy panic. People tend to equate proper English with, among other things, their memories of a time when immigrants melted in the pot and didn¨ªt hang on to their cultures. The deluge of articles in the city media about the illiteracy of Hispanic and African American students helped us to center the debate about CUNY's future on a lack of the institution's standards, not on a lack of funds for hiring full-time faculty.
Traub's book, and the chapter he published earlier in the New Yorker, legitimized Mac Donald et al's claims that a literacy crisis was in full swing at CUNY. It's one thing for the New York Post to proclaim that City College students are illiterate—sympathetic liberals suspect the Post hates City College—but it's quite another for a thoughtful guy like James Traub to say, somewhat sorrowfully, that remedial students at City College should please just go to community colleges or vocational training schools.
Still, Traub's work would never have achieved resonance without his brilliant portrayals of the students. This is called othering, and it brings me to stress the main point of this memo: as in national politics, so in reforming higher education—you've got to manufacture an other when you want to win an argument!
Creating an other was crucial for us because we needed to shift the argument away from the topic of the affordability of college and towards the problems that remedial students have caused the University. We could not let the tenured radicals and their ilk argue that we should fund this university properly, or that severe budget crises and the dwindling of full-time faculty have caused its decline. We needed to shift the spotlight, and blame the students for the decline. Frankly, we needed to substitute a cultural analysis for an economic one. (Would it be too much to say that we pioneered this trick before Karl Rove and his allies started doing the same thing with the Christian right?)
Of course, I can't deny we had great material to work with. Afrocentrist Professor and former chair of Black Studies at City College, Leonard Jeffries, for instance, troubles even the leftists. Traub did a nice job of devoting the longest chapter in his book to this one professor out of hundreds at City College (a literary friend of mine calls this "a synecdoche," making the part stand for the whole). By the time Traub got done describing remedial students, their teachers and their classes, with Jeffries and a couple of militant young blacks thrown in for good measure, he had effectively refigured the whole system through this one "alarming" image.
Nowadays, no one wants to hear that inherited intelligence is responsible for social class differences. (We tried that one also in 1994 with the Bell Curve and it doesn't get much purchase.) But Traub gets around this problem by substituting culture for biology. He describes what he calls "the ethnic hierarchy" at City College (323; 109). By "discovering" the ethnic hierarchy, Traub tells readers in his book what many of us already know is true of New York City: the Hispanics and the native-born blacks are at the bottom, while the immigrants, whites and people of color, are moving on up to the top.
When he visits remedial and Black Studies courses at City, Traub meets those at the bottom of the "ethnic hierarchy": the students from "the street world" (235) who have been "shaped by the inner-city culture" (91). This culture is permissive and produces lazy, sometimes depressed people who are "barely socialized to school" (96). No surprise that these remedial courses are so horrible, when the students in them are "virtually illiterate" (153), struggling as they do with their "academic handicaps" (207) and "cognitive deficits" (136). Probably most important, these students have internalized the urban wasteland culture I referred to before: "an alienation and hostility" and an "ideology of repudiation and resistance" typical of the "intellectual and cultural isolation of the black community" (229-230). These students are so very different from the sturdy greenhorns of the past who brought their sandwiches from home to school, and they are different from the immigrants at the top of the hierarchy now: these students all share "immigrant drive and first-generation values" (13) and the "virtues of acculturation and assimilation ...almost without question" (84; see 41). (Never mind all those Communists who settled in at City in the 1920s and 30s—that would just cloud our argument.) Plus, let's face it, the immigrants of yesterday and today just look more like us: they don't favor sculpted hair or exotically painted fingernails; they were and are "well dressed, respectful, good natured" (71; 181).
By the time the discerning reader has finished Traub's book, you're well placed to answer the question that this writer poses in classic neoliberal terms:
Do the limits lie in the college or in the students? And this, in turn, begs one of the threshold questions of modern American liberalism: How powerful are our institutions in the face of the economic and cultural forces that now perpetuate inner-city poverty? (5)
To answer these questions properly, we need to follow the author's lead and ignore "economic" forces and focus as exclusively as possible on the "cultural" ones—after all, it's the cultural forces poor people create that keep them poor. As our reporter finds when he visits a Black Studies class at City College, most white folks will get a bit awkward when they mingle with uppity young black students, working class, poor, or whatever. And we can count on that feeling when we start talking about remedial students, who they are and what they look like.
Over the last ten years, we've been pretty darn successful in our restratifying efforts. We've got debates about standards and graduation rates going everywhere. We've closed down the remedial factories from Texas to Florida, and from Virginia to New York. We've got systems in states from Missouri to Louisiana and Massachusetts tightening up their admissions standards and those like Ohio are rethinking their open admissions policies. We helped to abolish affirmative action in higher education in Washington and California—and more states are considering following Georgia¨ªs lead in shifting from need-based to merit-based scholarships. And we've done all this while tuition is skyrocketing, so parents and students can pay the price instead of us.
We can't rest on our laurels, though. We need to remember: get your politicians and journalists; form your commission; build your coalition; and create your other. Above all, stay away from the issue of affordable education and stick to the cultural debates—they work every time.
Note
The CUNY Board of Trustees voted to abolish remediation on 25 Jan. 1999. (See also Lois Cronholm's "Why Baruch Ended Remedial Classes" in The Chronicle of Higher Education 14 Sept. 1999: B6.) Karen Arenson's "Plan Approved to Invigorate City University," New York Times 23 May 2000: B1 and CUNY's Masterplan for 2004-2008 outline the reforms. For Giuliani's favorite adjective used to describe CUNY and the role of New York State Republican politicians in debates about CUNY and SUNY more generally, see Patricia Gumport and Michael Bastedo, "Academic Stratification and Endemic Conflict: Remedial Education Policy at CUNY," The Review of Higher Education 24. 4 (2001): 333-49. For a close reading of the connections between the Manhattan Institute, Republican politicians, right-wing financial sponsors, and groups pushing for the privatization of higher education, see Alisa Solomon, with Deirdre Hussey, "Enemies of Public Education: Who is Behind the Attacks on CUNY and SUNY?" Village Voice Educational Supplement 21 April 1998: 1-5. Data for privatizing higher education is compiled from many sources cited in Mary Soliday, The Politics of Remediation (U Pittsburgh P, 2002), pp. 114-18. (The anaysis of Traub's City on a Hill is also developed there, pp 127-31.) The data for CUNY was contained in appendices compiled by the Rand Corporation and PricewaterhouseCoopers for Benno Schmidt et al, CUNY: An Institution Adrift, 1999. The CUNY University Faculty Senate analyzed the appendices in CUNY: An Institution Affirmed, 1999. Russ Buettner covered the Hostos "scandal:" "Few at Hostos Pass HS Level English Exam," Daily News 17 Sept. 1997: 8. For a taste of the othering of the CUNY student and the focus on standards, see John Leo's "A University's Sad Decline," U.S. News & World Report 15 Aug. 1994: 20; "CUNY's Opportunity" The New York Post 20 Feb. 1995: 20; and Ross Buettner, "CCNY's Fall From Grace" Daily News 23 Nov. 1997: 28-29. For examples of the sympathetic reviews of Traub's book by CCNY alumni, see A.M. Rosenthal, "An American Promise," New York Times Book Review 2 Oct. 1994: 7,9. For the current state of remedial programs, affirmative action, and so on, see Deborah Mutnick, "The Strategic Value of Basic Writing: An Analysis of the Current Moment," Journal of Basic Writing 19 (2000): 69-83 and essays in Gerri McNenny's collection, Mainstreaming Basic Writers (Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2001).
Works Cited
Astin, Alexander. "College Retention Rates Are Often Misleading." Chronicle of Higher Education 22 Sept. 1993.
Glazer, Nathan. "Unsentimental Education." New Republic 19 Dec. 1994: 38-41.
Herrnstein, Richard, and Charles Murray. The Bell Curve. NY: Free Press, 1994.
Lavin, David, and David Hyllegard. Changing the Odds. New Haven: Yale UP, 1996.
Mac Donald, Heather. "Downward Mobility: The Failure of Open Admissions at City University." City Journal (Summer 1994): 10-20.
—. "Why Johnny Can't Write." Public Interest 120 (1995): 3-13.
Traub, James. City on a Hill. Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1994.
—. "Class struggle." New Yorker 19 Sept. 1994: 76-90. |
