The “CUNY for All” coalition rallied at City Hall to lobby the City Council to oppose heavy proposed cuts in the state Tuition Assistance Program (TAP). “What many students don’t know is that TAP, the last-semester-free program, and the Vallone Scholarship were created as ‘concessionary measures’ to cushion the blow of the institution of tuition in 1977,” says Hunter College student Daniel Tasriban, who faces both TAP cuts and a potential retraction of his Peter Vallone Scholarship, which pays half of his tuition. “Students barely know that CUNY was once free.”
Before 1977, CUNY offered free tuition, reflecting the unique mission of its precursor, the Free Academy, which was founded in 1847 to provide opportunities for the city’s underclass.
The NYC Board of Higher Education created open admissions in 1969, allowing all city high school students to automatically enter CUNY, after City College’s Black and Puerto Rican Student Coalition held protests that shut down the school for two weeks.
Students demanded that non-white students be admitted at the same proportion as whites. “Black and Latino communities... [had been historically] virtually excluded from CUNY,” said civil rights lawyer Ronald McGuire.
“CUNY’s unique policy of open admissions transformed the university from a virtually all-white enclave in the mid-1960s, to an institution with over 200,000 students, the majority of whom are now black and Latino,” says McGuire, achieving the greatest integration of higher education outside of the South in the history of the country. But public funding declined as “the complexion of CUNY students darken[ed]” over the past 30 years, according to McGuire.
Student battles against downsizing and underfunding have ultimately been battles for civil and democratic rights. After the free tuition policy was discontinued in 1977, enrollment dropped by 70,000. City College professor William Crain notes, in contrast, that even during the Great Depression, “the city never imposed tuition” on mostly white Free Academy students. The 1990s, characterized by increasing privatization of public resources, may have been the cruelest for CUNY students. During the last ten years, the Professional Staff Congress claims that CUNY funding has declined 30.5 percent. While student enrollment has remained constant, since 1975, the number of full-time faculty has declined almost 50 percent from 11,268 to 5,707 last year.
Changes in admissions criteria and standards have also wreaked havoc on CUNY’s overwhelmingly poor students. In 1993, the College Preparatory Initiative raised the number of college preparatory courses required to enter CUNY, making it harder for students from under-funded, overcrowded public high schools to attend.
In 1999, CUNY’s board voted to terminate remedial instruction at CUNY’s four-year colleges — a program offered at 81 percent of U.S. colleges, according to Crain. He said the decision is “sending New York back to an era of educational apartheid.” A 1999 CUNY report estimated that 55 percent of Latino, 51 percent of Asian, and 46 percent of black students would be barred from entering the senior colleges under the new admissions criteria.
The decision was met with angry protest. Crain reported in The Messenger how a black faculty member remarked, “I had this image of George Wallace standing in front of the school building to block kids from entering.”
The administration responded to the student protests against budget cuts by ironically boosting security measures and student surveillance.
A special SAFE (Special Assistance for Events) team — headed until 2000 by a former director of anti-terrorist operations at New York airports — was established in 1993, to mobilize for large gatherings (usually, student protests) at the express request of the college president.
While SAFE officers generally do not carry guns, the Hunter Envoy revealed in 1999 that CUNY security had purchased in “excess of 110,000 rounds of small arms ammunition” In 1995, SAFE officers in riot gear arrested 47 hunger-striking students protesting City College budget cuts. And, in 1998, Director of Public Safety Timothy Hubbard admitted he authorized placing a secret camera outside a CUNY student meeting room on a tip that students planned a building takeover to protest the drive to end remediation.
McGuire views CUNY’s policy changes as a racist attempt to disenfranchise already disadvantaged communities. “The motivation for open admissions was the belief that the opening of CUNY to black and Latino students from the poorest backgrounds would ultimately empower the communities’ access to skills necessary to effectively participate in the political process,” he states. Critics also note that the school’s honors program remains well-funded.
On April 30, CUNY students plan to demonstrate for the restoration of TAP, the repeal of “stealth tuition hikes” such as technology fees, a repeal of the post-9/11 doubling of tuition for immigrant and undocumented students — a policy also being fought in the State Assembly — and ultimately, free tuition and open admissions. Student activist Tasriban re-emphasized the need for students to understand CUNY’s historical mission and its struggles and to raise their expectations accordingly. “They shouldn’t be fighting for just hamburger,” he said, “They should be fighting for filet mignon.”
