The New Yorkers, Abe Beame and Hugh Carey, went down to Washington on a Tuesday — a windy morning in 1975 — for their appointment with the Republicans at the White House.
The mayor and governor, both Democrats from Brooklyn, were having an unusually troubled spring. They had come into office only months before to find the city and state governments in worse financial shape than anyone had imagined.
New York City’s debt, built up during more than a decade of overspending on city services, had reached a staggering $12-billion, and the city was within weeks of default because the banks refused to extend its credit any further. To coax the bankers back into the market, Mr. Beame and Mr. Carey hoped to get the federal government to provide a guarantee on the city’s notes.
So they went off to Washington to make their case — knowing that the Republicans might not be too sympathetic, if they reacted as Republicans normally do when Democrats are in trouble.
They met in the Oval Office, with all the key people: Gerald Ford — smalltown, a Midwesterner, conservative heir to the Nixon presidency; William Simon — one-time Wall Street broker, administration economic strategist, secretary of the treasury; and Nelson Rockefeller — millionaire, long-time governor of New York, now the vice-president.
The meeting, naturally, was private, but it was apparent from what leaked out that Mr. Beame and Mr. Carey did not get what they came for. There was no federal help promised, no matter how much they argued that New York’s money problems were at least partly tied to such national developments as the recession and the northern migration of thousands of poor blacks and Puerto Ricans. Instead, they got from the President a stern lecture about the fiscal waywardness of the nation’s largest city — a city that had been controlled by generations of free-spending liberals, something no Republican politician would be likely to forget.
At one point the rambling conversation in Mr. Ford’s office apparently came around to the City University of New York and its long-standing policy of not charging city residents any undergraduate tuition — at least that is how Mr. Rockefeller remembered the meeting later in a published interview.
The President was said to have been surprised that “free tuition,” a policy now abandoned by virtually all other public universities and one that Mr. Rockefeller had tried to end when he was governor, had lingered so long in New York City.
“Mr. Mayor,” the President said, “I understand you have free tuition in your city university, and you’re asking us to provide money for the city. We don’t have free tuition in Lansing, Michigan. Why should the federal government provide free tuition for the students in New York City and not in other cities of the nation?”
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Mr. Beame, the son of immigrant Jews who traced his rise to the city’s highest office from the start provided by tuition-free classes at City College in the 1920’s, reduced the issue to a personal level, apparently unconscious of the double-meaning the city’s critics would read into his response.
“If we hadn’t had free tuition,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here.”
The City University of New York, the country’s third-largest university system, is opening classes on its 19 campuses this month still shaken and weary from months of tumult and uncertainty. And it is beginning the process of accommodating itself to major changes in policy and scale forced on it by the parent city’s near-bankruptcy.
Reluctantly, under the enormous economic and political pressure of that crisis, C.U.N.Y. has:
- Ended its 126-year-old policy of free tuition for city residents and imposed charges that are among the highest for public colleges and universities in the country ($775 for freshmen and sophomores, $925 for juniors and seniors) — a change that is expected to drive several thousand students away.
- Altered its controversial and ambitious promise of open admissions for even the worst prepared of the city’s high-school graduates — introduced in 1970 to aid the social and economic rise of masses of New York’s new migrants (blacks and Puerto Ricans), much as the university had done for earlier waves of dispossessed newcomers.
- Absorbed over a two-year period a whopping 17-per-cent cut in its half-billion-dollar budget forcing it to cut its payroll by some 4,500 full-time employees, including 2,900 faculty members and administrators — figures that make it by far the severest academic retrenchment in anyone’s memory.
- Accepted a restructured governing board that subsequently increases the power of the state government and reduces the power of the city in university affairs — a change that may foreshadow a state takeover or some other major realignment of public higher education in New York.
These adjustments, however, do not fully measure the turmoil that has engulfed an institution already drained by 15 years of fatiguing fights with the Rockefeller administration over money, tuition, and control, by the tension of faculty unionization, by minority-student protests, and by the uneasy transition to open admissions.
At times during these last few months life at C.U.N.Y. seems to have taken on a sad, absurd, crazy-Gotham quality that is difficult for outsiders to grasp.
An English professor caught this quality in a letter to the editor of the Times. Noting the proximity of C.U.N.Y.’s remodeled, high-rise graduate center on 42nd Street to the Times Square pornography district, he poured out his frustration and disgust at the choice society seemed to be making between the mind and the flesh. “In the strange power equations that pass for representative government in New York these days,” he said, “it is easier to close an entire university than one massage parlor.”
Indeed, last spring, while most of the country’s universities were quietly going through commencement, C.U.N.Y. ran out of money and shut down, sending its unpaid faculty and staff into unemployment lines and its students into a pre-exam limbo. All this while waiting for Governor Carey, the city’s Democratic legislators, and upstate Republicans to reach the agreement that ended free tuition and mandated a much-reduced budget level for the current year.
Only weeks before, a proposal from the C.U.N.Y. administration to scale down and restructure the university set off sit-ins and demonstrations against the threatened merger or closing of five of its newest and smallest campuses.
Two senior colleges, Medgar Evers in Brooklyn and York in Queens, faced demotion to community-college status. Eugenio Maria de Hostos Community College, a bilingual institution in the Bronx, was to be merged into another two-year college. John Jay College, a special institution in Manhattan for educating policemen and other criminal-justice personnel, was to be merged into Bernard Baruch College. And Staten Island’s Richmond College, an institution with upper-division students only, was to be closed. (Many of these changes have since been rescinded by the state legislature.)
The budget cuts — the severest of which came over the past summer and included 30-day layoff notices to large numbers of faculty members in the junior ranks — created personal hardship and widespread anxiety.
“It’s been tough,” laments Robert Kibbee, the system’s chancellor. “We have a form of institutional cannibalism under way. The presidents fight each other. The departments battle each other. And the scraps keep getting smaller.”
Moving from campus to campus now, one finds signs everywhere of how the crisis has altered C.U.N.Y. — a university that has always been one of the country’s most urban in mission and style.
Even its physical appearance has always had that extraordinarily cramped quality typical of New York City. Hunter College, its Park Avenue branch, has a high-rise campus that occupies only a single city block. And last year the university enrolled 270,000 students without a single dormitory.
In the city’s subway trains, alongside the lavish graffiti and the placards plugging Broadway shows and Off-Track Betting, advertisements now urge C.U.N.Y. students to apply for financial aid to help offset the new tuition charges.
On the upper east side, where the university’s central administration is scattered in several old office buildings, secretaries laid off on various campuses meet to see if they have the seniority to claim jobs elsewhere in the system.
At City College, whose aging campus overlooks Harlem, a badly-needed, $90-million academic complex stands half-finished, abandoned by the hardhat crews, with surface rust spreading over it’s exposed steel beams. It is halted, as is much other C.U.N.Y. construction, because no one will touch the bonds of the state’s college construction agency.
At LaGuardia Community College in Brooklyn, all incoming freshman are being telephoned by faculty volunteers to reassure them that the campus will open on schedule, regardless of rumors or confusing newspaper stories to the contrary.
At Queens College, a promising young historian who has been let go in the retrenchment, solely because she lacked seniority in her department, is furious at the injustice of it all: “To be kicked out without an academic judgment — by a computer or something tantamount to that — is outrageous!”
Many people on the campuses and throughout the city are looking back on the crisis to find explanations and villains — viewing the events, naturally, through their own filters of political ideology, educational philosophy, or self-interest.
To many political conservatives, the outcome of the crisis is not regarded, at least in some respects, as any special tragedy for C.U.N.Y.
The imposition of tuition is seen as a long-overdue accommodation to fiscal realism that had been avoided for years by bleeding-heart liberals with no respect for the bottom-line and no stomach for political risk-taking. And the alteration in open admissions is viewed as a move away from a misguided and discredited policy that had threatened to destroy academic standards and turn the university into a welfare agency for illiterates.
Many liberals, however, see a great urban institution laid low and punished for creative social innovation, exemplified by free tuition and open admissions.
The City University and its working-class clientele seem abandoned by turncoat Democrats who sold out to the big banks, which were interested mainly in protecting profits during the city’s crisis, and to conservative, anti-urban politicians who played to Peoria rather than provide federal help.
The differences in interpretation are extremely sharp. It is possible for conservative columnist William F. Buckley, Jr., to argue that tuition is the kind of sacrifice that was needed to improve the concentration of “shiftless” open-admissions students, and for the left-leaning Village Voice to regard the same events as a “counter-revolution.”
City College, whose origins date from a “free academy” established by citywide referendum in 1847, is the oldest of the C.U.N.Y. campuses and the source of much of the mystique that surrounds free public higher education here.
In a part of the country historically dominated by socially exclusive private colleges, City College stood out as a kin of the more democratic public universities in the Midwest, South, and West. It is still spoken of with nostalgia, especially by its older alumni, as the “Harvard of the proletariat.”
City College — joined later by Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens — was the route into the professions for the working-class, particularly the children of Eastern European Jews who crowded into the Lower East Side by the thousands at the turn of this century. To these families, the garment trades and City College became the channels of upward mobility that ward politics and the police department were to the Irish.
A unique set of factors produced this situation. Not only were Jewish immigrants heavily concentrated in New York, but they were heir to a cultural tradition of extraordinary respect and hunger for learning. And because nearly all were poor, the lack of tuition at City College made the difference between getting a formal education and resigning oneself to a life in the manufacturers’ lofts.
A report to the New York legislature — summarized by S. Willis Rudy in the college’s official history — presents a profile of the college’s student body in the late 1930’s.
Four-fifths were Jewish, with parents born in Russia, Poland, and elsewhere in Eastern Europe. Some language other than English usually was spoken in their homes, and typically their apartments were crowded and inadequate. Health problems were common, and nearly half arrived needing eye glasses. (Twenty-five years later, a problem noted among some of C.U.N.Y.’s black and Puerto Rican students was malnutrition.)
They also were high-achievers in the public high schools, getting through an average of about a year and a half faster than other students, and they arrived at City with a ferocious drive to succeed and with strong attachment to intellectual values. All this reflected in part the fact that lack of space at the college had forced up admissions standards, so that those who got in were the brightest students culled from a huge pool of talent.
Going in bright, they came out bright, and they established a remarkable record of achievement.
Of the men who earned doctorates in this country between 1920 and 1973, one study has shown, more did their undergraduate work at City College than anywhere else except the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Wisconsin, both much larger institutions. (Among women, Hunter sent more on to doctorates than any other college.)
Many of the most visible contemporary American intellectuals started their careers at City. Although many of them started out as students on the political left in the 1930’s, some have since taken an interesting political journey to the right, particularly in the 1970’s. Although a few are still associated with the left-liberal ideas of such journals as Dissent, others now provide the neo-conservative firepower arrayed in publications like Commentary and The Public Interest.
Daniel Bell, Lewis Feuer, Nathan Glaser, Paul Goodman, Sidney Hook, Irving Howe, Alfred Kazin, Irving Kristol, Seymour Martin Lipset, Bernard Malamud, Lewis Mumford, Ernest Nagel — all went to City College. And what they accomplished in intellectual life was matched in other professions by Bernard Baruch, Felix Frankfurter, George Goethals, Zero Mostel, Edward G Robinson, Jonas Salk, Upton Sinclair, and many others. Four graduates went on to win Nobel Prizes — Julius Axelrod and Arthur Kronberg in medicine, Kenneth Arrow in economics, and Robert Hofstadter in physics.
New York and its suburbs are today filled with lesser-known, upwardly mobile City College alumni in law, medicine, dentistry, business, accounting, engineering, teaching, and other professions. And memories of their education at a free — but highly selective — City College were strong enough to play at least some role in the debate that surrounded the crisis-provoked struggle over free tuition and open admissions at C.U.N.Y.
There was more involved in the C.U.N.Y. struggle than the matter of free tuition, of course, but that was the policy that was most deeply engrained and whose demise attracted the most attention.
The City University stood out — as President Ford noted — as the last institution in the country to declare itself for free tuition. (There was some semantic confusion. In fact, C.U.N.Y. charged a mandatory “general fee” for resident undergraduates — $110 a year in senior colleges and $70 in community colleges — as well as relatively high fees for graduate students and nonresidents.)
The fight to save free tuition was carried on not only in the midst of a mind-boggling financial crisis but in a national atmosphere that had shifted subtly away from the old American consensus about the social value of low college tuition.
There was a time — say, in the late 1960’s, when Ronald Reagan imposed tuition on a resistant University of California — when low tuition in public universities was assumed to be the best (indeed, the only) device for opening higher education to the masses. But the emergence of a new set of circumstances in 1970’s has gradually made that assumption more vulnerable to attack.
One important change is the relatively recent introduction of major government programs providing low-income students with money to help offset tuition. Although these programs are not always adequate, they have done a good deal to alter the interests of various social classes in low tuition. They also have undercut the claim of low-tuition advocates that it is the only way to expand educational opportunity for the poor.
None of these aid programs was available for students who made it through City College in its free and glorious days in the 1930’s, although most surely would have qualified under today’s standards. The main source of federal aid for undergraduate education today, the “need-based” Basic Educational Opportunity Grants, dates only from 1972. New York State’s Tuition Assistance Program, which also bases awards on family income, came along in 1974.
The availability of these funds for low-income students — of which C.U.N.Y. has an unusually large number — was frequently used in the debate here to argue that the imposition of tuition would not be a severely regressive step. At one point, Ewald B. Nyquist, the state education commissioner, produced figures to show the cushioning effect that these funds would have for the poorest students if C.U.N.Y. installed tuition comparable to the State University.
Government money, he said, would completely cover tuition costs for all students from families with annual incomes of $11,000 and below (about 55 percent of C.U.N.Y.’s full-time undergraduates). The university’s own estimate was closer to 40 per cent, but Mr. Nyquist had made his point.
A second development undercutting low tuition is the end of major growth and the amount of tax money that states are willing to provide for higher education.
In New York, for instance, the State University now gets a smaller share of the state budget than it did in 1970-71 — a period in which inflation has wildly increased its costs. Faced with this situation, the university has doubled tuition in that period to the point where students are now the source of substantial revenue.
This gradual shift of the burden of higher education from state tax revenues to students was a trend C.U.N.Y. found it difficult to buck.
Another new factor bearing on the fate of low tuition is the aggressive entry of the financially beleaguered independent colleges into state politics. State governments, especially New York’s, have begun to assume some financial responsibility for the future of these colleges, in the belief the country needs a mixed system of higher education.
The Tuition Assistance Program in New York is structured to help the independent colleges by providing extra money to those students who elect to go there and pay the higher tuition, which is now about $2,000 a year above those at S.U.N.Y. This year about $73-million in state money will go to students to offset tuition at independent colleges, and the colleges themselves will get another $87-million in other state subsidies.
In this context — with the interests of the independent colleges to worry about, the state gradually shifting more costs to students in S.U.N.Y., and the impact of a tuition increase cushioned for the poorest students — the policy of free tuition at C.U.N.Y. was in a less secure position than it once had been. All of this, it is well to remember, was occurring at a time of severe financial constraint in both city and state.
Nonetheless, there were those in the city who strongly defended free tuition as wise social policy and well worth the cost to the public.
They argued that imposing tuition would mean real hardship for families that earn $11,000 to $20,000 a year — not that much in a city as expensive as New York, but too much to qualify their children for any substantial student aid. They reminisced about the personal and social payoffs of free education at City College in the old days. They argued that continuing public investment in free training for the city’s future work force was critical to its economic revival. And they argued that free tuition was as important a symbol of the city’s openness as the Statue of Liberty.
But, for others, free tuition at C.U.N.Y. stuck out as a symbol of another sort — as a symbol of well-meaning but misguided spending that had helped bring the city to fiscal crisis. Eventually, of course, events ran their way.
Larry Van Dyne was a national correspondent at The Chronicle from 1971 to 1980, when he left to take a one-year fellowship for journalists at Stanford University. He returned to Washington as a reporter for The Washingtonian, where he worked for 30 years.
