It takes about an hour and a half in the City Council’s line of fire for Benno C. Schmidt Jr. to be called a racist – and by then, there’s an air of inevitability to it. The confrontation has been building for more than a year: When the mayor first recruited Schmidt in 1998 to look for ways to revamp the long-embattled and much-maligned City University of New York, leaders of the council – many of whom are staunch CUNY supporters – almost immediately pegged Schmidt’s mayoral task force as a pro-privatization, anti-open-admissions cabal, bent on perverting CUNY’s sacred mission as New York’s higher educator of last resort. And so, on this sunny Monday morning in June, at the first public hearing on Schmidt’s final report on CUNY, the stocky, broad-shouldered former president of Yale University sits dourly in City Hall’s committee chamber with CUNY chairman Herman Badillo by his side, ready for a fight.
Council members take their time chipping away at Schmidt’s report: They say it’s too negative, starting with the title, An Institution Adrift; that it unfairly compares CUNY test scores to more selective schools; that it soft-pedals the budget cuts that have crippled the university. But the moment finally arrives when Harlem council member Bill Perkins takes the floor. “There are too many things in this report that are offensive for me to ignore,” he says. “Perhaps most outrageous are the racist stereotypes and innuendos – “
Badillo – for all his years of bluster about CUNY’s shortcomings – remains silent. Schmidt is on his own. “There’s none of that in this report,” Schmidt says. “What’s offensive is for you to suggest …”
“Let me read from the report!” Perkins shouts. ” ‘We’ve found that being Asian or white was often associated with strong performance, while being black or Hispanic was often associated with weak performance.’ And then you go on to characterize the civil-rights movement, which resulted in CUNY’s open-admissions policy, as ‘policy by riot.’ Now, I guess for you that’s just witty?”
“You’re wrong about that,” Schmidt says.
“It’s in the report! Explain why that language is in the report!”
Incredibly, things get worse. Helen Marshall, the higher-education-committee chair, refers to the report as “ethnic cleansing.” Schmidt throws up his hands and cries, “Give me a break!”
Time and again, politics upstages pedagogy at CUNY. Ideology – the war over the underclass that CUNY has served for more than a century – invariably keeps the debate away from the students and the way they’re educated. A standoff – between those who believe public colleges should raise the bar to compete with private colleges and those who believe the university shouldn’t alienate students failed by the public schools – has polarized the place.
“Our relative income has dropped between 25 and 40 percent in the last fifteen years,” says Michael Kahan, a political-science professor. “Then to come in and say, ‘You guys are doing a rotten job’?”
But next Monday, only six months into Schmidt’s tenure as vice-chair of CUNY’s board of trustees, the State Board of Regents is voting on a policy that could change the university forever – a policy sanctified by Benno Schmidt. The immovable object has met the irresistible force.
He doesn’t mean to be incendiary; he never does. But Benno Schmidt is still new to the grave and sensitive identity politics of CUNY – and CUNY is new to the unself-consciously strident Benno Schmidt. When he isn’t being called a racist, his voice is tempered by breathy chuckles – a lofty tic that kicks in when he’s venting about the people he enrages. “I was kind of surprised,” he admits a few weeks after the City Hall episode. “But I’m not personally angry about them. I’m angry about the issue. There is a test-score gap. Black and Hispanic students, on the whole, do score lower than white students. And it’s very clear why that’s so. Their schools are worse.”
In the past three decades, a stigma has developed around CUNY: Where the academic culture used to be democratic and triumphant, now it is chaotic and dispirited. Politicians, most notably the mayor and the governor, have called a CUNY degree worthless, strangled the university’s funding, and tried to whittle away at open admissions. In this bombed-out landscape, Schmidt positions himself as above the fray: a no-nonsense reformer, untainted by CUNY’s troubled past. But he brings his own baggage with him. Since his time at Yale in the late eighties and early nineties – when he seized control of two different schools, declared a budget crisis, and triggered a faculty rebellion – Schmidt has worn his ambition on his sleeve. And as the architect of CUNY’s makeover, Schmidt also not insignificantly stands to profit from his new mission. By encouraging such concepts as vouchers and selective excellence, Schmidt could both vindicate his own conservative agenda and indirectly justify the work of the Edison Project, the struggling for-profit education venture he has worked on since 1992.
Schmidt supports the removal of remedial programs from the four-year baccalaureate programs, telling the State Board of Regents – which will deliver the final vote on the controversial policy on November 22 – that remediation was a “contributing factor” in CUNY’s decline. If the policy is passed, CUNY’s 200,000 students will face the biggest change since tuition was first charged in 1976. Unlike the students at close to 80 percent of the colleges in America, prospective CUNY students who fail even one of a series of skills tests won’t be able to enroll. Instead, they will be directed to CUNY’s community colleges – and, if Schmidt has his way, a selection of publicly subsidized private-education providers.
In pushing this agenda – now also the agenda of chancellor Matt Goldstein, the former president of Baruch College, who was lured back to CUNY based largely on the gospel of An Institution Adrift – Schmidt audaciously hangs his hat on the same causes that his opponents accuse him of betraying. “I really think education is the only source of opportunity that’s meaningful in our society,” Schmidt tells me. “It is the critical issue of freedom. This is what the civil-rights issue was to the previous generation.”
And yet CUNY’s real achievements cannot be easily dismissed. “There’s nothing to fix,” argues Bill Crain, a psychology professor at City College. “We’re accepting students who haven’t had the benefit of a good high-school education, we’re giving them remediation, and we’re helping them succeed. Other universities should be using us as a model. You’re taking education away from people of color and giving it to middle-class white people. This is a tremendous reversal of civil rights.”
In 1847, a Harlem school called the Free Academy first offered higher education free of charge to the working class, and a faction of politicians immediately moved to close it down. The Free Academy eventually became City College; the rest of the university bloomed early this century, defeating legislative attacks to curb student-body populations with petitions roughly every generation. This ushered in the era when a City College and a Harvard education could be mentioned in the same breath. Titans like Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer learned how to think great thoughts in Harlem. After World War II, the G.I. Bill and other federal money helped CUNY expand into the nation’s largest public urban university. But blacks and recent immigrants saw themselves locked out of what was nominally a public university. And so, in 1969, amid civil-rights demonstrations, CUNY became the first university system in the country to offer open admissions.
At first, administrators planned a gradual open-admissions phase-in, in which some campuses would be more selective than others. Demonstrations changed all that. Seymour Hyman, the deputy chancellor during the student shutdown of City College’s south campus, watched as the school’s Great Hall seemed on the verge of incineration. “When I saw that smoke coming out of that building,” he said later, “the only question in my mind was ‘How can we save City College?’ And the only answer was ‘Hell, let everybody in.’ “
This is what Schmidt’s CUNY report calls “policy by riot.” Schmidt sees this moment as the university’s fatal error – the moment CUNY allowed the quality of its student body to be held hostage by the secondary schools’ sinking standards. To a large segment of the city, however, it was a triumph – the only way to open CUNY’s doors. “Ivy League colleges were out of the question, we knew that, but the city colleges were cut off to us, too,” remembers council member Helen Marshall. “It was just as important to the black community as affirmative action. It was a whole new world for us.”
By 1972, CUNY’s black and Latino student population had leapt from 9 percent to 35 percent. Enrollment maxed out at 272,000. To handle the influx of students, the state built new community colleges – something Heather Mac Donald, the conservative pundit from the Manhattan Institute who sat on Schmidt’s CUNY task force, high-handedly dismisses as “racial pacification.”
” CUNY will be inundated with enrollment – not the first year, but as quickly as two to three years,” Schmidt predicts. “If you set clear standards, more people will meet them.”
And when some of the newcomers turned out to be unprepared for college, the faculty became pioneers again, coming up with remedial courses in reading, writing, and math. The CUNY system developed a dual mission, offering both colleges and second-chance high schools – a strategy Schmidt says never should have happened. Remediation, he argues, “is an unfortunate necessity, and a distraction from the main business of the university.”
When Rudy Giuliani called Schmidt two winters ago and asked him to investigate CUNY, Schmidt’s initial reaction was disbelief. “I told him that people are gonna say, ‘What does he know about CUNY? He comes from Yale,’ ” Schmidt recalls.
Today, 70 percent of CUNY’s students are nonwhite, and half the first-time freshmen were born outside the U.S. or in Puerto Rico – making CUNY’s fate inescapably intertwined with that of the city’s minorities. Schmidt, for his part, is the son of privilege: His father, Benno Schmidt Sr., was philanthropist Jock Whitney’s venture capitalist. Benno the younger sprung from an Upper East Side youth to Yale, Yale Law School, and then a clerkship with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. At Columbia, he became a First Amendment scholar and law-school dean; then, in 1986, he became Yale’s twentieth president.
But there the rapid rise halted. Instead of planting roots in New Haven, Schmidt shuttled to and from Manhattan, where his third wife, Helen Whitney (no relation to Jock), worked as a documentary filmmaker. Almost immediately, he put two troubled Yale colleges – the leaderless School of Organization and Management and the critically failing philosophy program – into what he called “receivership.” Students, who still barely knew him, started wearing T-shirts with the slogan WHERE’S BENNO? “When you’re a university president, a lot of people don’t know you – they only learn about you through symbolic interaction,” Schmidt now recalls. “I was slow to get that.”
Schmidt supports the removal of remedial programs from the four-year baccalaureate programs, telling the State Board of Regents – which will deliver the final vote on the controversial policy on November 22 – that remediation was a “contributing factor” in CUNY’s decline. If the policy is passed, CUNY’s 200,000 students will face the biggest change since tuition was first charged in 1976. Unlike the students at close to 80 percent of the colleges in America, prospective CUNY students who fail even one of a series of skills tests won’t be able to enroll. Instead, they will be directed to CUNY’s community colleges – and, if Schmidt has his way, a selection of publicly subsidized private-education providers.
In pushing this agenda – now also the agenda of chancellor Matt Goldstein, the former president of Baruch College, who was lured back to CUNY based largely on the gospel of An Institution Adrift – Schmidt audaciously hangs his hat on the same causes that his opponents accuse him of betraying. “I really think education is the only source of opportunity that’s meaningful in our society,” Schmidt tells me. “It is the critical issue of freedom. This is what the civil-rights issue was to the previous generation.”
And yet CUNY’s real achievements cannot be easily dismissed. “There’s nothing to fix,” argues Bill Crain, a psychology professor at City College. “We’re accepting students who haven’t had the benefit of a good high-school education, we’re giving them remediation, and we’re helping them succeed. Other universities should be using us as a model. You’re taking education away from people of color and giving it to middle-class white people. This is a tremendous reversal of civil rights.”
In 1847, a Harlem school called the Free Academy first offered higher education free of charge to the working class, and a faction of politicians immediately moved to close it down. The Free Academy eventually became City College; the rest of the university bloomed early this century, defeating legislative attacks to curb student-body populations with petitions roughly every generation. This ushered in the era when a City College and a Harvard education could be mentioned in the same breath. Titans like Alfred Kazin, Daniel Bell, Irving Kristol, and Nathan Glazer learned how to think great thoughts in Harlem. After World War II, the G.I. Bill and other federal money helped CUNY expand into the nation’s largest public urban university. But blacks and recent immigrants saw themselves locked out of what was nominally a public university. And so, in 1969, amid civil-rights demonstrations, CUNY became the first university system in the country to offer open admissions.
At first, administrators planned a gradual open-admissions phase-in, in which some campuses would be more selective than others. Demonstrations changed all that. Seymour Hyman, the deputy chancellor during the student shutdown of City College’s south campus, watched as the school’s Great Hall seemed on the verge of incineration. “When I saw that smoke coming out of that building,” he said later, “the only question in my mind was ‘How can we save City College?’ And the only answer was ‘Hell, let everybody in.’ “
This is what Schmidt’s CUNY report calls “policy by riot.” Schmidt sees this moment as the university’s fatal error – the moment CUNY allowed the quality of its student body to be held hostage by the secondary schools’ sinking standards. To a large segment of the city, however, it was a triumph – the only way to open CUNY’s doors. “Ivy League colleges were out of the question, we knew that, but the city colleges were cut off to us, too,” remembers council member Helen Marshall. “It was just as important to the black community as affirmative action. It was a whole new world for us.”
By 1972, CUNY’s black and Latino student population had leapt from 9 percent to 35 percent. Enrollment maxed out at 272,000. To handle the influx of students, the state built new community colleges – something Heather Mac Donald, the conservative pundit from the Manhattan Institute who sat on Schmidt’s CUNY task force, high-handedly dismisses as “racial pacification.”
” CUNY will be inundated with enrollment – not the first year, but as quickly as two to three years,” Schmidt predicts. “If you set clear standards, more people will meet them.”
And when some of the newcomers turned out to be unprepared for college, the faculty became pioneers again, coming up with remedial courses in reading, writing, and math. The CUNY system developed a dual mission, offering both colleges and second-chance high schools – a strategy Schmidt says never should have happened. Remediation, he argues, “is an unfortunate necessity, and a distraction from the main business of the university.”
When Rudy Giuliani called Schmidt two winters ago and asked him to investigate CUNY, Schmidt’s initial reaction was disbelief. “I told him that people are gonna say, ‘What does he know about CUNY? He comes from Yale,’ ” Schmidt recalls.
Today, 70 percent of CUNY’s students are nonwhite, and half the first-time freshmen were born outside the U.S. or in Puerto Rico – making CUNY’s fate inescapably intertwined with that of the city’s minorities. Schmidt, for his part, is the son of privilege: His father, Benno Schmidt Sr., was philanthropist Jock Whitney’s venture capitalist. Benno the younger sprung from an Upper East Side youth to Yale, Yale Law School, and then a clerkship with Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. At Columbia, he became a First Amendment scholar and law-school dean; then, in 1986, he became Yale’s twentieth president.
But there the rapid rise halted. Instead of planting roots in New Haven, Schmidt shuttled to and from Manhattan, where his third wife, Helen Whitney (no relation to Jock), worked as a documentary filmmaker. Almost immediately, he put two troubled Yale colleges – the leaderless School of Organization and Management and the critically failing philosophy program – into what he called “receivership.” Students, who still barely knew him, started wearing T-shirts with the slogan WHERE’S BENNO? “When you’re a university president, a lot of people don’t know you – they only learn about you through symbolic interaction,” Schmidt now recalls. “I was slow to get that.”
The stage was set for what the faculty still calls “the crisis at Yale.” Soon after his arrival, Schmidt learned that much of Yale’s physical infrastructure was failing: Buildings were sinking into the ground, and entire science facilities needed to be built from scratch. In response, he became a fund-raising powerhouse, building Yale’s endowment at record speed even after the ‘87 market crash – but he refused to dig into the endowment to pay for the capital improvements. Instead, he made national headlines by proposing 15 percent cuts to the arts-and-sciences faculty. After a mass faculty outcry in February 1992, Schmidt’s cuts dwindled to about 5 percent. Three months later, he resigned. “If things are so bad,” he sniffed on his way out of New Haven, “I wonder why alumni support is up 50 percent this year.”
When Schmidt announced he would join forces with Chris Whittle – the man who brought corporate sponsorship inside the classroom with the “Channel One” TV teaching aid – then-American Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker said, “I think that Chris has gained some credibility here, and that Benno has lost some.” Since then, the Edison Project has set up just 79 schools around the country, not nearly as many as Schmidt had planned, and the project has been losing about $20 million a year. But Edison continues to get investment from both J.P. Morgan and Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen – and Schmidt now stands to profit from a planned IPO.
Giuliani’s invitation to study CUNY represented an airlift out of the Whittle wilderness. If Schmidt can mutate CUNY into a more competitive university, then perhaps he can set the template for reforming all public higher education.
Tough love – or outsize ambition, depending on your view of the impasse – radiates from every page of the Schmidt report. It concludes that CUNY is “in a spiral of decline,” that “doubts fester about the value of a CUNY degree,” and that the university should bring some class into the field by turning a few of its colleges into selective “flagship” schools. Others, however, said CUNY already has flagship schools – Hunter, Baruch, and Queens College, which are raising standards and removing remedial classes from their curricula. They noted that CUNY still sends more students to nationally ranked graduate programs than all the Ivies combined. Above all, the faculty reaction was hurt feelings – the sense that Schmidt had deepened the university’s wounds more than healed them.
“We’ve been working under some pretty harsh conditions,” says Michael Kahan, a political-science professor from Brooklyn College. “Our relative income has dropped somewhere between 25 and 40 percent comparable to others in the last fifteen years, depending on where you were in the salary scale. In the whole decade of the nineties, we got raises of about 13 percent. Our collegial environment has fallen because of the high ratio of part-time faculty. And then to come in and say, ‘You guys are doing a rotten job’?”
Getting a credentialed educator to force change at CUNY without asking for more money took the mayor longer than his campaigns against most other New York institutions. In 1997, chancellor W. Ann Reynolds decamped to the University of Alabama after she unsuccessfully fought the mayor’s plan to make all of CUNY’s students on public assistance quit school and join his workfare program. “It’s no fun to take a subway all the way to Kingsborough Community College and stand in line all day for a class,” Reynolds now says from her perch in Birmingham. “These aren’t deadbeats. These are students for whom CUNY is the only higher-education option.”
Since Reynolds left, Giuliani has made a habit of holding the city’s $120 million share of CUNY’s budget hostage unless he has his way. In last January’s State of the City address, he mentioned that fewer than 8 percent of all CUNY students graduate after four years – a rate that is actually roughly on a par with those of other large urban universities – and said, “That’s a system we’d blow up, right? If we had the guts.” Like Giuliani, Schmidt likes to use the graduation rate as a straw man. “At every little gathering I’ve gone to in the last year,” he tells me, “I’ve said to people – often business leaders – ‘What do you think of the fact that the four-year graduation rate at CUNY senior colleges is about 7 percent?’ Their jaws drop. Then I say, ‘What do you think of the fact that the six-year graduation rate’s about 30 percent?’ Their jaws drop again. And then I say, ‘Well, you know, if you look at Chicago State or something, it’s about the same.’ And they say, ‘That doesn’t matter! This is CUNY! This is New York City! This should be the best public-university system!’ “
Looks good on paper. But more than half of CUNY’s undergraduates work at least a part-time job. More than 40 percent are over 24 years old. And one out of every four has children to support. “Of the 150 receiving degrees today, you hold only 191 jobs,” Jimmy Breslin cheekily told last spring’s graduating class of CUNY’s baccalaureate program at Borough of Manhattan Community College. “That is less than two jobs per student. What right, then, do you have to take five and six years and more to get a degree?”
In what might be the most far-reaching new initiative, CUNY’s trustees are now working to remove remedial classes from all of the four-year baccalaureate programs. Under the plan, students who don’t meet certain SAT scores or pass a second skills test will be barred from the eleven baccalaureate programs until they catch up at the community colleges. If the policy gets past the Regents this month, some CUNY advocates believe it will sound the death knell for open admissions. “Nobody should be denied a right to get an education at any of our CUNY campuses,” said C. Virginia Fields, the Manhattan borough president, at an activist teach-in in July. The policy is being fought in court by several groups, including the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Asian American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the American Jewish Congress, and the New York Civil Liberties Union.
Ideologically, Schmidt equates remediation to social promotion in the grade schools – a cure that’s turned into a disease. He views remediation’s exile from four-year colleges as both a practical and a philosophical imperative: He believes CUNY can speed up remediation for students once it’s separated, and his report also wants to give students “educational vouchers” to seek remediation in the private sector. A foreign-speaking student, for instance, could take English either at CUNY or at, say, Berlitz; a student who needs sharper math skills could take a class at Sylvan Learning Center.
But while Sylvan or Berlitz will certainly make a profit off of this, Schmidt’s report never says who should pay the bill. “We called for there to be a separate source of public funding, but we didn’t think we knew enough about the possible budgetary sources, so we left it at that,” Schmidt
admits.
As financing schemes go, it’s fuzzy at best – and it actually contains some echoes of the setup of the Edison Project. At Edison, Schmidt takes the worst-performing school in a given district, reforms it, and makes a profit from funds from local government. If, by chance, the per-pupil government outlay for the school isn’t enough to put Edison in the black, Edison turns to charitable contributions. It’s an astonishing arrangement: Donors give money to save their school, but Edison makes money from the deal.
Predicting how many students will be left out in the cold by the CUNY policy is as tricky as forecasting how many schoolkids will be held back once social promotion ends (as Rudy Crew so painfully found out over the summer). The projections are all over the place: Early this year, CUNY predicted that a whopping 43 percent of its 13,000 freshmen would be locked out of the senior colleges once remediation is cut out. That figure dropped to 12 percent once Badillo asked CUNY to come up with a “best case” scenario, factoring in rosy expectations for new, tougher high-school Regents requirements. Finally, in the fall, just as the State Board of Regents was looking over the proposal, new chancellor Matt Goldstein presented new data claiming the figure had dropped to 2 percent. “We’re dealing with a very dynamic environment of change, happening month by month,” Goldstein explains.
It sure looks like wishful thinking. More than half of CUNY’s first-year students currently fail more than one remedial exam. Two years ago, only 29 percent of City College freshmen passed all of CUNY’s skills-assessment tests. Almost all of City College’s students are minorities – making the policy seem almost intentionally targeted to lock out the very students it opened its doors to 30 years ago.
At the community colleges, where remediation will escalate, there’s no consensus on the policy. “For more than ten years, a third of my class hasn’t passed, and often these are people who are taking it the second time,” says Nahma Sandrow, who has taught remedial English at Bronx Community College for 30 years. “The best-prepared and the smartest students I see could be doing better. But we tell them this is college, and they take our word for it.”
But Sally Mettler, who has taught English as a second language at La Guardia Community College since 1985, worries that the policy will only alienate students further. “This articulation of standards is actually an anti-intellectual thing to do, because it ignores the diversity of the population,” she says. “I see the report as weeding out people who don’t fit in, and therefore giving yourself an easier task. To me, it’s like a fifties model – a factory model.”
” CUNY will be inundated with enrollment – not the first year, but as quickly as two to three years,” Schmidt predicts. “If you set clear standards, relatively more people will meet them.” He trumpets the increased enrollment at Baruch College, where standards were raised and remediation exiled. What’s missing from the forecast, though, is how harsh the transition period might be if this strategy is employed system-wide – and what kind of student body will be left once the dust settles.
Herman Badillo, perhaps, has the most invested in banishing remediation. He has been campaigning for open admissions’ downfall ever since it first arrived. And if and when the 70-year-old Republican runs for mayor in 2001, Badillo tells me, “I will be able to point to the establishment of standards at the City University of New York.”
Of course, Badillo couldn’t have done it alone. The remediation plan would never have gone through without Schmidt to carry the ball. “To get an Ivy League president involved was a real coup,” Badillo admits. “To have me head up the task force would be seen as biased. But since he was president of Yale, no one can say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”
Whether CUNY’s reputation paled over the years because its budget shrank, or its budget shrank because its reputation declined, is the essential chicken-or-egg question of the impasse. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have seen fit to slash CUNY’s budget: In the past twenty years, government funding dropped by 40 percent, and the proportion of CUNY’s budget funded by the government decreased 24 percent. While other big states like Texas, Georgia, and Illinois spent the nineties raising higher-education funding by 10 percent or more, Albany (still CUNY’s principal funding source, other than tuition) cut its per-student higher-education appropriations by more than a third.
By now, the damage is obvious. Between 1974 and 1998, full-time faculty dropped more than 50 percent, from 11,268 to 5,211, while enrollment decreased just 22 percent. And while half the student body is currently at or below the poverty line, the past decade of tuition increases has increased the student contribution to CUNY’s budget by more than 150 percent – more than anywhere else in the country. Even conservative thinkers like City College alum Nathan Glazer have cried out for more funding. “We are ‘adrift’ because the politicians haven’t given us the budget we need not to be adrift,” says Irwin Polishook, head of CUNY’s faculty union.
Faced with all this evidence, the Schmidt task force still downplayed the budget issue – so much so that some people concluded that Schmidt’s CUNY agenda is really about downsizing. Since the report, the most significant budget-request increases have been for new faculty in just four CUNY academic programs – Schmidt’s selective excellence in action. “We know that the agenda of their political masters is privatization,” says College of Staten Island history professor Sandi Cooper, a plaintiff in the remediation lawsuit. “I suspect that by shrinking enrollment by refusing to let students in who need remedial work, they’re going to try to close a couple colleges. Then they’ll have war on their hands.”
Schmidt, however, turns the equation on its head. “I am a pretty easy person to persuade about investing in education as a taxpayer,” he says with that breathy chuckle. “But would I invest in CUNY when it’s not a true system? That just strikes me as a nonstarter. How could anybody not say, ‘Come on! Get your act together!’? I mean, some people may argue that CUNY is about the same as Jersey City State or San Francisco State. That is total denial. They will never persuade political leaders or the business community – a major, major segment of the public from which they derive their support.”
This is Benno Schmidt’s real crusade. From Yale to Edison to CUNY, he’s yearned to be education’s agent of change. If CUNY follows just a few simple instructions, he may fully change the identity of the place – and, by extension, the whole world of public higher-education. In return, Schmidt may finally get the kind of pedagogical and social influence he has always wanted. And with for-profit players along for the ride, of course, he’ll be doing well by doing good.
“You know, it was the Harvard of the poor,” he tells me, leaning forward in his chair. “It wasn’t the Jersey City State of the poor.”