It’s 1969. Over the past decade, serious national tensions have flared over the struggle for civil rights, women’s equality, and the war in Vietnam. A year ago, over 500,000 people marched on Washington to oppose the war in Vietnam: the largest protest, to date, in the nation’s history. A series of devastating assassinations have rocked the nation: President John F. Kennedy’s in 1963, human rights activist Malcolm X’s in 1965, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr.’s just last year in April.
On April 4, 1968—the eve of King’s assassination—students at New York City’s City College and young people in the neighborhood of Harlem, where the college is located, took to the streets in protest. According to student-activist Khadija DeLoache, King’s death motivated students to meet, to organize, and to act.
“It was a catalyst for anybody who was displeased with anything in the world. [We’d] had enough now…they [had] killed the king of love.”
-Khadija DeLoache, co-founder of City College’s Black and Puerto Rican Student Community
CUNY at this moment in time is…
free and does not charge tuition for daytime students (though it does charge a fee to a significant minority of evening students). Indeed, since its inception, many young, mostly European immigrants and working class New Yorkers have taken advantage of this policy to get a free college degree and climb the class ladder. Many have become journalists, politicians, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and businessmen, adding to the city’s burgeoning white middle class. And a few have chosen to return to teach at CUNY either as part-time instructors, tenure-track, or tenured professors.
But now long-term and entrenched racial inequalities are being challenged by the Civil Rights Movement. Many see at CUNY much of the same segregation that has been widely critiqued and outlawed in K-12 public schools. Indeed, the majority of students at CUNY are white, while the 40% of Black and Puerto Rican students in the New York City public school system are commonly deemed ‘underprepared for college.’
Since 1966, a slightly larger group of Black and Puerto Rican students have joined the Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) program. Established by the New York State Assembly, the goal of this program is to provide more educational access to low-income students in the New York public school system by helping to prepare them for entering college. While SEEK has attracted an exciting group of faculty to campus who are dedicated to its educational mission, some have grown increasingly frustrated that it is only available to a limited amount of students. There is also a lack of job security and tenure for the SEEK instructors that is afforded to the rest of the faculty, and some students feel that some of the teachers, social workers, and psychologists hired to work in the program lack a fundamental understanding of their lives and experiences as low-income New Yorkers of color. It is a fledgling program in need of more resources, especially as CUNY begins to expand and considers admitting more students.
In 1964 (and then again in 1968) CUNY and New York State leaders agreed that the university should admit more Black and Puerto Rican students, through an ‘open admissions’ plan that would be implemented over the next 10 years. This would mean changing current admissions criteria, which effectively only admits students with high GPAs and test scores. There is a growing movement of students, community advocates, and politicians who want every student who graduates from a New York City high school to have a shot at attending CUNY.
Not everyone favors this plan, however. Some CUNY professors are concerned about lowering academic standards by admitting students with average or below-average scores. Others are worried about how CUNY will afford a radically larger incoming class when the state is not prepared to give more funding. This is exacerbated by a diminishing tax base, which has slowly eroded over time as wealthy and middle-income majority white residents have started leaving the city for suburban life (and are taking their tax dollars with them). Still, others do not want to teach students they consider to be academically inferior, even if this means that CUNY remains largely white.
On the other hand, some want to speed-up the timeline of the new plan – they are afraid that many young high school graduates of color are falling through the cracks, too poor to afford tuition at private colleges, and considered not academically ‘ready’ according to the admissions criteria at CUNY. Invigorated by the Civil Rights Movement’s activism and awareness of the importance of education, advocates of open admissions are increasingly making the connection between college education, the right to self-determination, and survival for people of color.
Click below to hear CCNY President Buell Gallagher talk about student activism and open admissions in his own words in 1968:
