Being here at Convocation reminds you of the day you waited outside the New York State Board of Higher Education meeting with your peers to hear firsthand the outcome of the vote to push forward an accelerated and more robust Open Admissions policy for Fall 1969.

The following years were not easy for the survival of free admission to CUNY, as Ashley Dawson writes in a historical review of the subject in the Clarion, today’s newspaper of the CUNY Professional Staff Congress. Presidents Nixon and then Ford condemned both student campus movements and their resulting reforms at universities like CUNY. In 1975, President Ford vowed to withhold any federal aid to New York City until CUNY eliminated its open admissions and free tuition policies.

CUNY partially capitulated to Ford’s demands, amending and ending free tuition in 1976, with 3,000 faculty members fired that year, many originally there in response to enrollment increases associated with open admissions.