The Travesty of Starving Our Best Public Universities

I have been teaching at Brooklyn College for more than 15 years. For nine of those, the ceiling of my shared office leaked, periodically causing the ceiling tiles to collapse onto my desk, ruining books, papers, and — once — my printer and computer. That happened at least 10 times, until they moved us out of our office to open the ceiling for major repair.

Our experience was not uncommon. As The New York Times powerfully reported last month on the eve of First Lady Michelle Obama’s commencement address at City College, the underfunding of the City University of New York has reached a crisis level. Bathrooms don’t work. Leaks and bugs are frequent. Class sizes and faculty workloads have soared. The ‘Harvard of the poor’ is now poor itself, imperiling the education it provides to the 270,000 students who attend its 24 campuses. While the number of administrators has grown, faculty have worked without a contract for six years. New York State has let its flagship of public higher education slowly sink.

But what the New York Times article did not capture was that the real travesty of such underfunding is that CUNY embodies the best of what this country professes to be — a radical experiment in democracy, and meritocracy, and a real pathway for opportunity — and yet is starved for resources. The article missed the magic of the CUNY classroom.

For the past few years, I have lectured at scores of universities — among them Princeton, UCLA, Notre Dame, the University of Michigan, University College London, Bowdoin College, Sewanee: The University of the South. As interesting as it is to visit those places and talk with students, what I most look forward to is coming back to my students at Brooklyn College. The kinds of conversations we have, the ways we talk about issues across differences of ethnicity, age, experience, and race, the caliber of questions they ask and the breadth of research they pursue, the ways they listen and imagine the best for one another models what this country could be.

The commitment of my Brooklyn College students to education can take my breath away. Over and over, they tell me how much the class means to them, how they share the readings with their parents and kids, friends and partners. Over and over, they face harrowing circumstances — homelessness, the death of loved ones, unsafe living situations — and still they show up with their readings done. Over and over, they work 30 or 40 or 50 hours outside of school and take care of families and make time for their homework in the early morning or late evening hours. Over and over, when I run into former students even after many years, they tell me they still cherish the coursepack of readings from our class and are still relating what we did in class to the world around them.

Belying the stereotype that college students are jaded and only in it for the degree, my students palpably understand the power of the word. They regularly affirm the stakes of what is learned or not learned — what histories are told and which are not. They carefully make connections between what we are learning and its broader implications in the world, informing my own scholarship in the process. My Rosa Parks biography is far better for having taught at CUNY while I wrote it.

My classes typically focus on racial politics and the history of race in the United States. These are difficult, at times painful and uncomfortable topics, and yet it is a rare day when a student interrupts another student, or when the difficult questions we explore become divisive. In this segregated country we live in, my classroom is a rainbow. African-Americans and West Indians, students from the Dominican Republic and Yemen and Israel, Russian immigrants and longtime white Brooklynites, Orthodox Jewish students, Muslim South Asian students and Catholic Nuyoricans, men and women, gay and straight, we talk and listen across boundaries that seem unbridgeable in other parts of U.S. society. We confront America’s past and present together.

In a political moment when our public culture is too often divided and anti-intellectual and mean-spirited, my students are regularly kind and careful with one another and committed to learning what they haven’t yet learned. Indeed, there is nothing in these dark days in this country that gives me more hope than going to class and watching the critical engagement, resolve, and generosity that my students embody.

It is a cliché to say that public higher education provides pathways of opportunities for working-class students — until you see it happening. And then it is not a cliché anymore. The student who told me while we were working on his law-school applications that he had never known anybody who was a lawyer is now practicing public-interest law. The student who got pregnant during college and lived in a squat with her newborn daughter is winning an award for her first book, which began as her independent study at Brooklyn College. The student who supported her sisters and mother through college because her mother was disabled is getting her Ph.D.

Over and over, students who stock shelves, work retail, and do home health care full time while attending Brooklyn College go on to graduate and head to law school or medical school or jobs in NGOs or city government. Over and over, students say their experience at CUNY changed what they thought was imaginable. “I feel like I have a future now,” one student told me a few weeks ago.

The real travesty of CUNY’s underfunding is not some abstract devolution of public education. The actual travesty is that it is possible to create genuine spaces of opportunity, rich intellectual inquiry, and desegregated conversation, and yet as a society we haven’t yet summoned the collective will to do so consistently.

The tragedy is that this spirit, this motivation, this robust inclusiveness receive much public lip service but little funding. If we can do all this with our ceilings leaking and our classrooms too crowded, imagine what we could do if CUNY got the funding it deserved.

Jeanne Theoharis is Distinguished Professor of Political Science at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and the author of The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks.