Corey Robin, a professor of political science at Brooklyn Colege and the CUNY Graduate Center, argues that this is the time to resurrect public colleges and 7ni ersities.
Writing in The New Yorker, Robin points out that most commentary in the media pertains to elite institutions, and public universities are stepchildren or forgotten.
For decades, a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education. If they are not the focus of discussion, they are the subtext, shaping our assumptions about the typical campus experience. This has remained true during the pandemic. The question of reopening has produced dozens of proposals, but most of them are tenable only for schools like Brown; they don’t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College. The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the academy.
In academia, as in the rest of society, a combination of public and private actors directs wealth to those who need it least. While cuny struggles to survive decades of budget cuts—and faces, in the pandemic, the possibility of even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts of millions, even billions, of dollars. Sometimes these donations fund opportunities for low-income students, but mostly they serve as tax-deductible transfers to rich, private institutions, depriving the public of much-needed revenue. What taxes federal and state governments do collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty grants and contracts, which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn College can only dream of. This is the song of culture in our society. The bass line is wealth and profit; the melody is diversity and opportunity.
Yet, for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy League, the real institutions of mobility in the United States are underfunded public universities. Paxson [the president of Brown University] may believe that “a university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S.,” as she told NPR, but CUNY is no microcosm. With nearly two hundred and seventy-five thousand students and forty-five thousand staff—a population larger than that of many American cities—it is what the Latin root of the word “university” tells us higher education should be: the entire, the whole. More than seventy-five per cent of our undergraduate students are nonwhite. Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants, and the same percentage have parents who did not graduate from college. At City College and Baruch College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students, respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles. For hundreds of thousands of working-class students, in other words, a cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or upper-middle class.
Beyond opportunity, institutions like CUNY offer a vision of education that is less about credentials than about the deep contact—and conflict—between reading and experience that is the essence of culture. On most élite campuses, undergraduates are eighteen to twenty-two years old. At cuny, more than twenty-five per cent of undergraduates are twenty-five or older. Our campuses are not cloisters; they’re classrooms out of the pages of Plato and Huey Newton, where philosophy is set in motion in and by the street. Like other public colleges and universities, cuny is a mustard seed of intellectual life, a source of reinvention and renewal. If we are to endure this crisis—and, later, to learn from it—some of our most original thinkers and leaders will come from schools like City College…
During the Depression, the New York municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College gave Hannah Arendt her first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins of Totalitarianism.” In the decades that followed, cuny built more campuses. Until 1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill.
What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism of the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard Keynes wondered in 1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually do we can afford.” And “once done, it is there.”
Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence from one generation to the next. It is a promise to the future that it will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past. It is what we need, more than ever, today. Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.
Thank you, Diane.
This is so TRUE:
“Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.”
I can’t believe some people are so cavalier about COVID-19 and selfishly not think about the horrific outcome of people not being vigilant and spread this “smart” virus.
America needs a lot more testing (knowing that there are a lot of FALSE negatives) and put in place contact tracers.
America’s response to Covid-19 has been, in my opinion, DISMAL.
Public schools of higher education are hurting from the same disinvestment that our public education systems are facing. Elected representatives are refusing to deploy resources to support the common good. Unlike the Ivy League schools with rich endowments, public colleges and universities depend on public funding. This is another example of the further divide between the ultra-wealthy and everyone else.
Who knows from where the next big idea will emerge? All students deserve opportunities that will expand their knowledge and explore their passions. Kizzmekia Corbett, a black Covid-19 researcher, is a graduate of a public university. Other black doctors are working on Covid related research including Dr.Tameka Suber, Dr. Christopher Barnes and Dr. Michael Johnson. They are all researchers affiliated with public universities.
Many successful people are public university graduates. Bernie Sanders started his academic career at Brooklyn College. Joe Biden attended the University of Delaware. Warren Buffet attended the University of Nebraska. It is essential that we continue to invest in our public colleges and universities. We must provide working families with opportunities for their children. Our collective future depends on it. https://www.blackenterprise.com/meet-4-black-scientists-fighting-covid-19/
Now IS the time. I have a HS senior and the past year has been hell trying to make good choices for college at an “affordable” cost. Education should NOT be a ROI, but when colleges are charging (NYU)$80,000+ per year, it makes parents think of the financial future that the education can provide after graduation. I think the “boutique” college industry will be brought to it’s knees as more families aren’t able to or aren’t willing to pay this amount of money when there are many Community Colleges and smaller state schools that are offering similar programs at much reduced cost. The wealthy will still have the means to pay for the high priced schools, but the schools will likely have to pare down programs and perks to accommodate the “in crowd”. It’s a choice that the colleges will have to make.
We shouldn’t be saddling our young people with crushing college debt either, even though sharks like DeVos make money from it. College debt is a drag on the economy, and many young people do not have enough money to buy a starter home. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/real-college-crisis-student-debt-drags-down-economy-n984131
Correct! We are able to pay for one of the moderate (still costly) colleges, but still think that our daughter should take out some loans so that she feels a responsibility and ownership for her education. We had to sit her down and explain finances, banking/interest, costs and economy to her so that she could weigh how much money she thought she could afford after graduation. Of course she really wanted to go to NYU (I think it was more the acceptance than the want?), but she settled on a more affordable college with a much lower price tag, more scholarship $ offered and less loan money that she would need to repay in the end….her choice. She knows that if she isn’t happy there, she can transfer after the year OR decide on a different approach to life after the year. Life is a long journey to be enjoyed and not a race to the top of the social ladder (nowhere IMHO)….that’s how we have chosen to approach/structure our family life.
Even back in the ’60s when I applied to college, I got into U. Penn. My parents lived through the depression. They were very frugal working class people, and they were risk averse. They were very opposed to me taking out any loans. Instead, I attended an affordable commuter college, lived at home and got a good education there. When I look at #45, I have no regrets. LOL
I may even advise my own daughter to take a year off. Maybe do a study abroad in a country where you can rely on the government that they will do the right thing about going back to classes.
HS seniors? This may be the best time to take a gap year. Who knows? Higher may be free by the time they come back. 🙂
This says it all: “At City College and Baruch College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students, respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles.”
Also significant that 1976 was the last year CUNY was free.
Our country’s slide into upside-down rich-poor stats started in the late ’70’s with the rise of automation and then-third-world mfg capacity, and accelerated sharply with our govt’s response in & since ’80’s. Big cuts in state support for all tertiary ed– not just public institutions– hit during Reagan admin. I remember, because my little sis’s initially modest tuition at a small college in VA quadrupled between 1980-1984. Many of her friends at various colleges in the northeast dropped out & either never obtained degrees, or did so over a period of years while working FT.
Public colleges are avenues of access for the children of the working class.
and the word essential could be added in there
The post reflects high aspirations, but in an era when respect for expertise has been downplayed and experts with a public profile are likely to be viewed as nothing but political players. This loss of respect has accelerated with Trump and his supporters.
Unlike our parents, everyone in my family attended public universities. My brother attended on the GI Bill. I attended a state university on a loan plan that could be paid back in full by teaching in the public schools of the state for every year I held the scholarship. There was a teacher shortage. For reasons unknown to me and decades ago, I received a full tuition scholarship to NYU for another degree, but I also worked 35 hours a week and had to share digs with another student to afford living in the city. In my next round, I worked full time while pursuing studies.
Some non-profits and entrepreneurs are trying to provide support for students transitioning to college, but these programs are not the same as having school counselors. You will be lucky if your high school still has a counselor specializing in college advising and preferably more than one if your high school is large. Public community colleges are an option. As Mike Rose’s wonderful books tell us, these programs have a culture of support that may be missing from larger four-year colleges.
In the immediate future there will be more on-line courses in higher education. On-site offerings are at risk for many budgetary reasons. But the sleeper is legal liability. Colleges are unlikely to open unless Congress passes legislation that cancels legal liability for on-campus classes and all of the other business dimensions including food services, dormitory facilities, on-campus transportation, health care, gyms, and so on.
There is also the matter of testing students, faculty, staff for COVID-19. As many have noted, shielding higher education and all of their ancillary businesses from COVID-19-related lawsuits also means that the institution is saying that the safety of students, staff, and service providers is not their legal responsibility. And so it goes, another Catch-22. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/05/15/colleges-seek-protection-lawsuits-if-they-reopen
In all of this, it is unclear whether the Occupational Safety and Health Agency (OSHA) will have any role. In 2015, OSHA developed a list of Partially Exempt “Industries” not required to report workplace incidents unless these result in a fatality, in-patient hospitalization, amputation, or loss of an eye. For COVID-19 exposure, OSHA has identified schools and colleges as “medium risk” occupations in a four-level scheme. Occupations in all of these settings have OSHA reporting requirements on the provision of PPE, cleaning workspaces and the like, but some waivers and exemptions are now in place for: Elementary and Secondary Schools; Junior Colleges; Colleges, Universities, and Professional Schools; Business Schools and Computer and Management Training; Technical and Trade Schools; Other Schools and Instruction; and Educational Support Services. https://www.osha.gov/enforcement/covid-19-data
Yeah, I am not looking forward to teaching a regular class in the Fall. It would have be in mask—imagine that. Of course, teaching online is even more dreadful.
We can expect huge budget cuts from public universities, and some may be seemingly justified since enrollment will be down. Students want to wait a year or so to make sure, they don’t have to do online classes plus they have to work to make up for the financial losses during the pandemic.
I expect big shakeups and it will be fueled by ALEC. It would be great to hear what they are planning. Does anybody have any concrete info?
Education, particularly liberal arts are in trouble. The idea that education is only about getting a job is dangerous. How many remember cost of tuition in the 70s? What happens to a country where only a select few have an education?
Thanks for reposting this, Diane. I’m a high school senior, and while I’m not going to CUNY, I reached to a professor at Brooklyn, and I sat in on a bunch of political science classes when my high school let out in early March. I want to live in New York someday, and it would just be such a tragedy to see the CUNY system die or become academically atrophied and reduced to mere technical training for the “21st-Century Future (i.e. insecure, unfulfilling) of Work!”. The professor who invited me to take the classes remarked in a lecture once about his experience teaching at Hunter early in his career that when the working class kids of the City have to work long and miserable shifts at mindless jobs to provide for their families in such an expensive city, it is such a gift to have one place where your ideas actually matter and your mind is treated with some dignity, so to speak. Not to mention the dynamo of upward mobility that CUNY has been for the longest time.
Corey Robin writes elsewhere that CUNY was once known as the poor man’s Harvard. Shame on us if we, Cuomo, Albany, etc. let that go.
Thank you for this thoughtful comment.