Deep Betrayal
CUNY abandons the promise of urban education
CIVIL-rights warrior Myrlie Evers says the situation at Brooklyn’s Medgar Evers College — named for her martyred activist husband — is an “embarrassment.”
She’s being too kind.
It’s also a humiliation, an enduring example of the hypocrisy that pervades race-related policy-making in New York — and Gov. Cuomo’s responsibility to fix. Fat chance of the latter.
The City University system has long been a passageway to the middle class for poor, often minority kids. It faltered badly in the 1980s, was largely reclaimed during the Giuliani and Pataki years, and now appears to be entering another nose dive.
Case in point: Ms. Evers is angry because the university board of trustees apparently wants to allow public-education vagabond Rudy Crew to stay on as Medgar Evers president after a job for him in Georgia fell through.
Cuomo, who controls the
CUNY board, can prevent this. But that could put the governor on the non-woke side of a major confrontation, and he is very rarely up for that.
The college has never been academically strong — it draws its students largely from heavily challenged Gotham schools — but it made respectable progress under former CUNY Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. And it has been in serial decline since 2013, when Goldstein left and Crew became president.
Crew, with the support of then-Mayor Rudy Giuliani, was appointed city schools chancellor in 1995. He tried Giuliani’s patience from the outset, left four years later for jobs in Miami and Oregon, then returned for the Medgar Evers presidency.
He has made few positive impressions anywhere, least of all at Medgar Evers, where student retention rates, and the college’s reputation, declined dramatically after he substantially abandoned competency testing for admissions.
It isn’t clear why the CUNY board wants to retain him now, but there is no doubt about Myrlie Evers’ views. “We, the family, strongly resent a decision that will continue to send the college in a downward spiral,” she wrote in a letter to the board. “In doing so, the university appears to be complicit in exacerbating a deteriorating situation in an institution that carries our family name.”
In America’s struggle for racial justice, few names carry greater weight. Medgar Evers was a World War II vet and a Mississippi voting-rights activist when a white racist assassinated him in the family driveway in 1963. His widow, now 87, has carried on the fight ever since. She has earned a right to be heard.
But the problem she has identified is by no means limited to one Brooklyn campus. The entire university, to varying degrees, is at risk now that New York’ political class has decided that the appearance of competence, easily achieved, is more important than actual competence, which is far more difficult.
CUNY has been there before. Once the gold standard of urban public education, hard times and diminished official interest had by the early ’80s reduced CUNY to near-irrelevance. The principal problem was admissions standards; virtually anybody who could walk into a classroom got a seat.
This worked once, but the declining performance of New York City’s public schools had by then carried over to CUNY, and so-called open-admissions policies were sinking the ship.
But by the late ’90s, a working alliance of Giuliani, then-Gov.
George Pataki, energetic university trustees and Goldstein had CUNY on the road to revival. It was a ferocious struggle. CUNY unions in particular hated all proposed reform, and racialized rhetoric poisoned the atmosphere from the outset.
Denying minority kids automatic placement was deemed racist, never mind that many of them couldn’t do university work, and admitting them severely impeded the prospects of minority kids who could.
The answer, brutally forged over many months, was a sophisticated, community-college-based remediation program that prepared committed kids for seats in the four-year colleges while allowing the latter to flourish.
It wasn’t a perfect solution, but it worked well enough — until entropy set in. Cuomo has displayed virtually no interest in CUNY, and City Hall hates the remediation process, because it illuminates specific failures by the Department of Education. Woke ideologues are now assailing the concept of remediation on the grounds of unspecified inequities.
Thus did current CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez decide to “move away from high-stakes testing” and “reduce reliance on placement tests students must take to determine whether they need remedial interventions.” In other words, deep-six remediation outright.
So Rudy Crew, it seems, was just a little bit ahead of the game.
But Myrlie Evers gets it — and she objects. Cuomo needs to listen.