To the Editor:
Martin Mayer [“Higher Education for All? The Case of Open Admissions,” February] breezed into a Hunter College Urban Affairs freshman class for twenty minutes, saw part of a slide presentation, and reported it as fourth-grade “show-and-tell” and as exhibiting an all-too-casual acceptance of resulting student rhetoric. What really goes on in the freshman course? Why would a college course ask students to produce and screen color slides?
The course, “Urban Life: The Personal and Observational View,” was developed before the advent of Open Admissions. We felt that a freshman seminar in urban affairs that stresses the critical examination of personal observations might prove educationally exciting to student and instructor alike. To do this, we wanted to utilize the most efficient and absorbing methods to help students learn about the city. To be sure, we operated on an educational bias that questioned the traditional freshman diet of “integrated” social-science survey lectures, enriched, perhaps, by timid exposure of students to films and an occasional field trip. Instead, we felt students would be better served in a freshman seminar incorporating a series of first-hand exposures, in and outside of the classroom, to real here-and-now urban issues. We believed that skilled instructors could move students beyond the pablum of cocktail-party wisdom and street smartness about city life, its problems and solutions, and challenge students to think critically and deeply about them.
The coming of Open Admissions provided the propitious moment to introduce the course on an experimental basis and to secure some of the resources in staff and program funds necessary to launch it. Since then the course has become a regular part of the college’s curriculum.
One of the exercises in the course concerns “Observation of Visual Contrasts,” and contains the color slides mentioned by Mr. Mayer. Teams of two students each are asked to investigate contrasting aspects of city life and report findings in a slide presentation, including their own analysis of the reasons for the contrasts. One student team, for example, documented “Sunday Afternoon at 2:00” on a block in East Harlem and on another block in Staten Island. The contrasts were there to be seen in their obvious and subtle manifestations, and the resulting discussion tried to find reasons for this contrast and sought to define and understand the variety of life styles. Readings, analytical exercises, and lectures followed in subsequent sessions.
The course utilizes a text of readings and a workbook somewhat after the model of a lab manual in the natural sciences, containing a few dozen exercises. These exercises deal with tasks such as field interviews concerning specific urban issues, detecting urban themes in literature, analyzing children’s views of the city, investigating two census tracts, doing a simple land-use survey, analyzing a crisis situation, visiting a suburban new town, debating the need for public housing, exploring the variety of change strategies employed by ethnic organizations, etc. The course proceeds by lectures, small group discussions, field trips, video-taping, photography, taped cassette montages (yes, even the rock music that upset Mr. Mayer), guest appearances, role-playing, brief written assignments and longer papers. Our evidence indicates that students like the course, that they put forth amazing effort, and that they learn. Concepts such as “community,” “social change,” “population characteristics,” “life style,” “economy,” etc. become not merely dismembered definitions that some outside authority has cast into scholarly cement, but ideas associated with first-hand experiences.
No one familiar with urban youth, including Mr. Mayer, should be surprised that racial, ethnic, and social rhetoric enter these discussions. An East Harlem youth trying to explain why his block is different from that of his Staten Island colleague must abstract, must generalize, and frequently he will fall into the trap of the single-factor rhetoric. He may fervently represent a politically radical point of view, as have several of our students. The instructor’s role at this point is not to stop the rhetoric, but to help the class to examine the phenomenon under discussion. Rhetoric that is relevant to a given subject should not and cannot be banished at the classroom door; it must be welcomed as a legitimate datum worthy of articulation and examination. Mr. Mayer correctly quoted Professor Spiegel as saying, “Rhetoric is the first rung up the abstraction ladder,” but he dropped the final part of the thought, “It’s up to the instructor to help the class test the rhetoric.”
After two and a halt years teaching this course we have come to the following convictions: 1) a freshman course in urban affairs need not be the traditional rendition of lectures conveying basic concepts in political science, social psychology, sociology, and geography. A truly integrated course stressing experience-based learning can be exciting for student and instructor. 2) Such a course should not be designed “for Open Admissions only.” Some of our most enthusiastic students have been bright, advantaged middle-class kids finding unusual personal and academic challenge in the class. 3) The instructor in such a course is, of course, the crucial variable in its success. The instructor must have a thorough and broad-gauged intellectual grasp of his subject matter, but more, he must have an unusual degree of academic integrity and pedagogical skill.
Open Admissions, and specific courses such as Urban Life, should be critically examined, but not by the hit-and-run tactics that dismiss a whole course of studies, within the space of a brief paragraph, as Third-World gesturing and fourth-grade “show-and-tell.” We shudder to think what Mr. Mayer would say about some of our graduate courses in Urban Planning where we build models of city blocks, engage in simulated games, and give numerous field trips. He might well view such activities as belonging in kindergarten. If the substance of a course is not examined in relation to the form, a very distorted view results. We think Mr. Mayer missed the substance and caricatured the form of our freshman course.
Oliver J. Gray
Seymour Z. Mann
Hans B. C. Spiegel
Department of Urban Affairs
Hunter College, CUNY
New York City
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To the Editor:
Because of the serious nature of the false statements regarding City College in Martin Mayer’s article on Open Admissions and because the article has the appearance of careful research and accurate reporting, I feel compelled, as Associate Dean and Coordinator of the Open Admissions Program at City, to correct a few of the more glaring errors. Mr. Mayer’s conclusions rest, in part, on statements about City College—statements that are simply not true.
Mr. Mayer states that the City College administration “has forbidden the imposition of prerequisites.” In another context he refers to “City College removing all [emphasis his] prerequisites to courses in the humanities and social sciences. . . .” And he concludes: “With the elimination of all degree requirements other than numbers and the removal of prerequisites from all courses at places like City College, the chance to collect empty credits has been multiplied and so has the chance to collect empty diplomas.” These statements are simply not true. The administration of City College does not impose degree or course requirements; that is the faculty’s function and the faculties have not recommended such changes. Contrary to Mr. Mayer’s article, our basic courses in English composition, study skills, and mathematics carry few or no credits. Students earn only 2 credits for four semester hours in English. College Study Skills I carries only one credit for four semester hours. Three courses in mathematics for science students meeting four and five hours per week carry a total of only 3 credits—the credits are for those portions of the second and third courses that have been defined traditionally as college-level mathematics. And incidentally, contrary to Mr. Mayer’s allegations, the Board of Higher Education has brought no pressure at all on us in connection with remedial course credit policy.
Simply stated: There have been no changes in degree and curricular requirements at City College since Open Admissions. The distribution requirements for degrees continue. There continue to be graduation requirements with respect to mathematics, foreign languages, English proficiency, and speech proficiency, and we continue to have the additional and usual curricular requirements in our several degree programs. Mr. Mayer was badly misinformed and, unfortunately, he did not check his facts with the record or with college officials familiar with the facts.
Mr. Mayer seems to want to prove that university and college officials and faculties are quite willing to cheapen their degrees in order to produce a superficial success for Open Admissions. Mr. Mayer could easily have learned that this is contrary to the entire thrust at City College where we have solid, academically responsible programs for all our students—from those with substantial basic-skills problems to those who achieve advanced placement and enter into accelerated degree programs. There are difficult and complex educational problems. But we are responding to these problems as an institution with educational, not political, objectives. Mr. Mayer’s conclusion regarding “empty diplomas” would be true if his factual premises were true. But they are false. To offer to our students an easy degree without the education to which it attests would be a disservice to them.
Alan Fiellin
The City College, CUNY
New York City
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To the Editor:
Martin Mayer’s article is marred by inaccuracies that are bound to give a seriously distorted impression of City College, specifically. As chairman of City’s mathematics department for the last three years, I know two things first-hand: first, for his information about credit or no credit for remedial course work or about prerequisites, Mr. Mayer did not go directly to the department, which after all administers this work; second, he gives explicit misinformation concerning these matters at City College.
Specifically, he indicates that at City College (as opposed to, say, Hunter), college credit is given both for remedial and non-remedial course work. The facts: For our five remedial mathematics courses, each of which meets four hours per week, the credits are: 0, 0, 0, 1, 2. (The last course, a pre-calculus course, contains some college-level material.) Normally, a four-hour course would carry 4 (or 3, or 5) college credits.
Mr. Mayer also writes: “With the elimination of all degree requirements other than numbers and the removal of prerequisites from all courses at places like City College, . . .” How’s that again? Certainly there has been no change in requiring appropriate prerequisites for mathematics courses; and the degree requirements include a specific “distribution requirement” in basic courses in various stated areas (at least 12 credits in basic sciences, at least 21 in basic humanistic subjects, at least 9 in social sciences), plus specialization requirements of elective courses (e.g., at least 24 post-calculus credits for a mathematics major). See pp. 14-17 of the current college bulletin. . . .
Fritz Steinhardt
Mathematics Department
The City College, CUNY
New York City
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To the Editor:
. . . In his piece on Open Admissions at the City University of New York Martin Mayer finds that university standards will inevitably erode when we extend the citizen’s right to public education from the twelfth grade to college. The real reason, he advises us, is more fundamental than the few pedagogical and administrative errors he reports at City University. It is even more basic than the gross underfunding and incredible congestion of facilities that he acknowledges at CUNY. The crucial flaw is the raw material of Open Admissions—the students. “They are,” he concludes more in sadness than in rancor, “not very bright, most of them.” Either their manifestly inferior genetic endowment or the intellectual damage inflicted upon them over twelve years in the New York City public-school system renders them academically irreparable as far as Mr. Mayer is concerned.
Apart from the omnipresent intellectual sneer that inevitably distorted his view of what City University is about in its Open Admissions endeavor, Mr. Mayer also makes a shambles of the facts he reports. Thus:
He asserts: “For entrance to the city’s two-year junior colleges . . . requirements were generally much lower: a 70 average, which was earned by almost 90 per cent of all graduates from the high schools.”
Fact: Two years before Open Admissions the liberal-arts transfer programs at CUNY’s community colleges required a minimum high-school average of 80 for admission. In the technology majors the admission cut-off point was 73, some of the high-demand career programs requiring 81.
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He asserts: “In 1964 the Economic Opportunity Act made the recruitment of blacks a prime goal of the poverty program, and New York funded its first College Discovery venture. The federal government dropped the other shoe in 1965 in promulgating the Higher Education Act, and a year later the state funded the . . . SEEK program.”
Fact: No federal initiative or pressure was involved in either College Discovery or SEEK. In 1964, following publication by State Senator John J. Marchi of a report by Dr. Lester B. Granger which found a pattern of de facto discrimination against blacks and Puerto Ricans in CUNY’s admission policies, pressure mounted to impose tuition upon the university’s students on the grounds that they did not include the city’s most sorely (i.e., minority) disadvantaged population. Earlier the same year, the legislative leaders in Albany (notably Assembly Speaker Joseph F. Carlino) insisted upon initiation of the College Discovery program at CUNY as a condition of keeping the university tuition-free. In 1965, without pressure from Albany or Washington, City College launched its Pre-Baccalaureate Program. At the following session of the legislature, the black and Puerto Rican caucus, supported by the Republican as well as Democratic leadership, won enactment of SEEK as a state-mandated program.
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He asserts: In 1969 “the evidence turned up by these studies was discouraging: the centerpiece, an examination of the high-school senior class by Vice-Chancellor Birnbaum, produced a well-documented opinion that virtually every high-school graduate reasonably ready for an ordinary college program was already going to college.”
Fact: The study alluded to by Mr. Mayer was written by Dr. Birnbaum and Joseph Goldman in May 1971, a year and a half after Open Admissions was launched. They concluded that the high rate of college attendance in New York City was a direct consequence of Open Admissions at CUNY.
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He quotes Deputy Chancellor Seymour Hyman as having decided to support a CUNY move to Open Admissions with the expression, “Hell, let everybody in . . .” after a radio report that “the Great Hall of City College had been set on fire.”
Fact: Dr. Hyman, a City College alumnus and a member of the faculty there for many years, finds Mr. Mayer’s version of his (Dr. Hyman’s) reasoning in favor of Open Admissions “taken out of context at best. Not at all the development of my thinking on the subject which I described to him,”
The accuracy of Mr. Mayer’s quotation can be gauged by the fact that it was Aranow Auditorium, not the Great Hall of City College, that was set afire (by a private guard, as it later developed). It is highly unlikely that Seymour Hyman, the university official in overall charge of CUNY campus facilities, would have confused the names of major structures on his home campus.
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He identifies Allen Ballard as “then head of the SEEK program.”
Fact: Dr. Ballard was then university dean for academic development, having been succeeded as director of the City College SEEK program by Dean Robert Young the previous spring.
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He identifies Frederick L. Burkhardt as “president of the Board of Higher Education” at the time of the City College disruption.
Fact: The name is Frederick H. Burkhardt. There is no president of the Board of Higher Education; its chief officer is its chairman. At the time of the City College disruption the chairman was Porter R. Chandler. He was succeeded by Dr. Burkhardt the following fall, well after the violence had subsided and the decision had been made to implement Open Admissions.
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He asserts (in regard to CUNY’s Open Admissions allocation procedures): “The rest of the class is filled with students who did not achieve the cut-off grade but did achieve a rank in the graduating class of their own high school matching the citywide percentage of students who did achieve the cut-off grade.”
Fact: Admission to senior colleges, since the launching of Open Admissions at CUNY, is guaranteed to all students with an 80 or higher high-school average, or students in the top half of their high-school graduating class. Allocation preference is awarded by high-school average or rank in class, whichever is higher.
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He asserts: “At City College . . . the administration has forbidden the imposition of prerequisites.”
Fact: Prerequisites continue to be imposed upon students for admission to courses at City College. No prohibition has ever been ordered by the college administration. A glance through the college catalogue will document this statement with numerous examples.
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He asserts: “Until the fall of 1972 . . . no Open Admissions students were flunked out anywhere in the City University system, and the 50 per cent or so who left during the first two years did so on their own.”
Fact: Scores of students were flunked out of senior CUNY colleges during 1971. Mr. Mayer only cites two community colleges as exceptions. The Board of Higher Education’s guidelines only provided for a year of grace before academic separation from CUNY. It was long the practice at CUNY colleges, as at many other universities, not to flunk out students the first year except for outrageously deficient work.
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He asserts: “An effort was made to keep the scores on this test secret, but the figures leaked to the Times.”
Fact: In return for the city’s high schools administering these tests, City University agreed to a Board of Education proviso that the test scores not be released.
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He describes President Candido de Leon as “a man in his late forties but much younger in appearance.”
Fact: President de Leon is thirty-nine years of age; he was born in January 1934.
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He quotes Vice Chancellor Newton as saying: “As a reward for distinguished service in setting up the Open Admissions program and starting York College in Queens, I have been sent to Vietnam.”
Fact: Dr. Dumont Kenny was the first president of York College.
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He asserts: “Typically, these [remedial] courses did not in the first year [of Open Admissions] carry college credit; but today they do, almost everywhere in the City University system.”
Fact: No more than 8 college credits may be granted by a CUNY college for remedial courses. Significantly, CUNY colleges require 128 earned credits for a baccalaureate degree as opposed to 120 credits throughout most of U.S. higher education. Actually, far fewer than 8 is the maximum at most City University campuses. At City College, a student must pass through three remedial math courses—of four hours, four hours, and five hours, respectively—before receiving one credit. The course combines intermediate algebra with some college algebra. At Brooklyn College the remedial math courses carry no credit. At Queens there are three no credit math courses. At York a 3-credit English remedial course is actually three courses totaling twelve hours. York also offers one credit for an eight-hour reading course and John Jay offers one credit for an intensive three-hour reading course.
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He asserts: “Nearly three months into the academic year, a group at Hunter was offered a lecture in how to use the library, essentially an introduction into the arcana of the Dewey decimal system.”
Fact: The students were freshmen. Most institutions of higher education in the United States include course material in library usage as part of freshman orientation curricula. Some offer freshman credit courses exclusively in the uses of the library which include more than a single lecture devoted to the Dewey decimal system.
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He asserts: “As for black-studies courses, many of these are doubtless ‘revolutionary’ in tone; neither time nor patience permitted an investigation, and anyway, access is usually by invitation only.”
Fact: Access to most CUNY classes is by invitation only. If Mr. Mayer wanted to observe virtually any class in the university, college rules or common civility would have required his requesting the permission of the instructor. As for black-studies courses being “revolutionary” in tone, in academia one man’s revelation is often another’s revolution. The eye of the beholder shapes those judgments.
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He asserts: “The students themselves, of course, have been learning from the grapevine about teachers who pass everybody.”
Fact: The same phenomenon goes on at most undergraduate institutions and went on at CUNY long before Open Admissions.
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He asserts: “One can dismiss them with the curse that they should cross the river on a bridge designed by an engineer from an engineering school where students were admitted by lottery; and that their injuries should then be treated by a doctor from a medical school where students were admitted by lottery. . . .”
Fact: If ever there was a straw-man argument, this is it. The capabilities of certified professionals—be they engineers, physicians, dentists, etc. are not determined by the admission procedures of the institutions that certified them. They are determined by the qualifications for graduation. CUNY has not relaxed its standards for graduation. Degree holders continue to fare well in the leading graduate institutions. This includes substantial numbers of SEEK alumni, the forerunners of Open Admissions students.
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He asserts: “City University headquarters speaks of it [Hostos] as a college using programmed instruction and computer-assisted instruction as major elements, but in fact, students are using neither programs nor computers.”
Fact: President de Leon of Hostos told Mr. Mayer a number of times during his visit there that the use of computers and programmed instruction was the direction toward which Hostos was moving; that the college wanted to find out what worked and didn’t work before moving its modular-education design into costly mechanization. As Dr. de Leon has repeatedly told visitors to his campus, “There is no reason to mechanize poor practice.”
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Mr. Mayer accuses the City University administration of seeking “neat answers to difficult questions.” Throughout his interviews here at CUNY’s headquarters Mr. Mayer was advised that we do not have the kind of neat answers he was trying to put in the mouths of university administrators.
The lengthiest footnote purportedly describes a conversation that occurred at Brooklyn College between Mr. Mayer and staff members involved in a “Black English” research program. In it a staff member accuses Mr. Mayer of being “patronizing and hostile.” I was not present when that interview transpired, but, as director of the Office of University Relations, I was present when he discussed Open Admissions with other top CUNY officials. “Patronizing” would be a fairly accurate description of his tone throughout those discussions. . . .
Henry D. Paley
Office of University Relations
The City University of New York
New York City
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To the Editor:
I have been a reader of COMMENTARY for more than twenty years, during which time I have found the published articles to be of varying degrees of interest. At no time, however, did I suspect the integrity of the material published. The recent article by Martin Mayer has changed my perception of COMMENTARY. AS a member of the Board of Higher Education who voted for Open Admissions to the City University, I have followed the development of this program with scrupulous attention, and I found Mr. Mayer’s analysis replete with distortions, exaggerations, misrepresentations, and blatant misstatements of fact. . . .
Norman E. Henkin
New York City
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To the Editor:
I find myself in rather complete agreement with most of the conclusions reached by Martin Mayer. However, I should like to correct several misstatements of fact. Whereas the special sequence of three semesters (Chemistry 5, 6, and 7) for underprepared students yields 9 college credits, the regular two-semester chemistry sequence is, and always was, worth 8 credits rather than 6 credits as stated in the article.
It is not true that we have removed “prerequisites from all courses at City College.” Courses without prerequisites were approved by the Faculty Council for some programs, e.g., some ethnic-studies programs, over the objections of a minority, to which I belonged.
Finally, I am in disagreement with the inferred conclusion that a yield of seventeen students in Chem 7 out of a starting group of 120 students in Chem 5 is a disaster. Indeed, I am encouraged by these results in light of the fact that seventeen is not simply a number but represents seventeen people who now have a chance for advanced study but who would never have had such a chance in the past. Furthermore, since the third semester is not required for students in the nursing program (either at City College or at any other nursing program in the country), the actual yield of students in Chem 7 is considerably greater than the numbers would suggest.
Abraham Mazur
Department of Chemistry
The City College, CUNY
New York City
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To the Editor:
I was one of many members of the City College faculty who eagerly volunteered to teach classes in the Open Admissions program, and I find David Newton’s statement, quoted by Martin Mayer, that “the sense of commitment and dedication I had expected from my colleagues was nowhere to be found” simply incredible. I offer the following questions and comments on the article itself.
- Since the program was launched in September 1970 and since, to quote Chancellor Kibbee, “the first year, and the second year, were a hell of a mess,” is it quite fair to attempt an evaluation of the program in February 1973?
- If, as Mr. Mayer writes, “what is most objectionable in the promotion of Open Admissions is merely a natural outgrowth of the abuse of educational credentials by employers and, indeed, by the public at large,” does Mr. Mayer believe that a public institution like CUNY can (or should) resist pressures of this kind?
- Assuming that, despite such noble experiments as Higher Horizons, Headstart, decentralization, and now the Open Classroom, the elementary and secondary schools have failed to prepare adequately the thousands clamoring for admission to college, can CUNY ignore the problem so long as no other means of continuing formal education is available to them?
- In a society where Mr. Nixon proposes to increase military spending during the next peacetime year by five billion dollars, should we cavil over the “nearly half-a-billion dollars a year” spent on Open Admissions even if we measure the success of the program by the 30, 20, 10, or 5 per cent who may not only make it at CUNY but may go on to become productive professionals? Whatever the cost, can we afford not to “save” the remnant?
- Assuming with Mr. Mayer that failure for Open Admissions can be defined as “a decline in the respect accorded to a diploma from a branch of the City University,” does Mr. Mayer have any evidence of such a decline, especially in view of the fact that, to cite Mr. Mayer himself, “the numbers of able students entering the city colleges have not dropped seriously. . .”?
There is no question about the massive problems with which CUNY has been trying to cope as a result of Open Admissions. The sudden establishment of the program without any meaningful preparation for the flood of new students (in 1969 an entering class of 19,000, in 1970 a class of 35,000); the lack of personnel trained to deal with the desperate need for remedial instruction; the inadequacy of funding (remedial-class size was actually increased during the second year of the program!); the tacit expectation of an instant miracle to compensate for previous educational deprivation; the pathetic overcrowding in antiquated facilities—all these are factors, touched on by Mr. Mayer, which ought to be carefully weighed in considering the case of Open Admissions. But they do not in themselves constitute a case for or against the program unless they remain and are exacerbated. I continue to have faith, naive perhaps, that solutions to most of our problems can be found if we have the will to find them.
Irwin Stark
Department of English
The City College, CUNY
New York City
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To the Editor:
As a teacher, I was shocked to read in Martin Mayer’s article what two educators were quoted as saying with respect to their feelings about teaching students who are less than good or excellent—that is, the majority. Their opinion was, they said, that “performance of a given staff will depend on the presence of a certain number of really good students. . . . It’s much more fun to confront the student at something like your intellectual level.”
I disagree. It is more fun to be challenged by students who are at something unlike your own intellectual level.
Our job is to stimulate the students intellectually, not they us. What kind of surgeon would it be who pegged his performance as an M.D. to the alleged worthiness, or whatever, of his patients? While the “oath” taken by members of the teaching profession may not be Hippocratic, it definitely should not be hypocritical. Presumably, the self-sworn oath and dedication of teachers is to stimulate and lead students, all of them, to learn and to gain knowledge and understanding.
When some people speak of teaching as being “rewarding,” surely they must mean that it is challenging, that it is the “poor” and “average” students who need and deserve as much or more of the teacher’s endeavor than the A and B students, that when the teacher finishes a given class, he or she feels that the class went well not because the teacher was stimulated but because the students were.
There is, after all, a recognized difference between hedonism and enlightened self-interest, as all good Utilitarians know. The teacher who starts with his own intellectual stimulation and pleasure and who seeks intellectual exchange with people who are “almost” his peers is perhaps in the wrong profession. The expression “the pleasures of learning” was, I believe, never intended to be one-sided or an affair between some A and B students and their teacher. If the teaching profession ever lost its sense of dedication—to all students—a University Without Walls would become a University Without Sense.
Albert L. Weeks
Department of Continuing Education
New York University
New York City
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To the Editor:
It is obvious from Martin Mayer’s article, which is written with his customary good sense, mingled with logic, research, and intellectual honesty, that what the Open Admissions-ites are really doing, with minor exceptions, is calling an elementary or junior high school by another name, viz., college. This is just one more significant example of what is happening in our increasingly fraudulent society.
It is bad enough that the high schools have been pressured into graduating hordes of illiterate youngsters. And mind you, this is true not only of non-academic pupils but academic pupils as well; note, for example, the widespread doctoring of Regents marks as a means of raising passing percentages. (Having been president of the AFT, UFT, and the Association of Teachers of Social Studies in New York City, I am familiar with this situation.) How demoralizing, then, to all sense of academic integrity is this added pretense of admitting them all, lock, stock, and barrel, and thus watering down the college diploma as well. Not to mention the irreparable harm done to the pupils themselves, by way of raising—and then shattering—false hopes, and making them part and parcel of the dishonest charade.
Of course, it is possible to carry the Open Admissions “education” to its logical conclusion—and judging from Mr. Mayer’s account, we are pretty nearly there already. Why not do as the lower schools have been doing for some time—push the students through on the basis of classroom attendance?
Marvin Schick, a former Hunter political-science professor who is liaison between the Mayor’s office and CUNY, is quoted as asserting that “many state universities, including some famous ones, were giving diplomas for very low qualities of work for years, and the country was none the worse for it.” I have news for Mr. Schick. The country is in pretty bad shape—indeed, very bad. If there were a need and the space for it, I could document for Mr. Schick a tale of woe—ignorance, inefficiency, Philistinism, and what have you—throughout our society, that even he would have difficulty sweeping under the rug. Awarding the stamp of approval heretofore inherent, at least in some degree, in a college diploma to all comers is a sure way of making universally shoddy an already quite shoddy world.
I make a prediction: the next step will be Open Faculties. Anyone with a college degree or a community-college diploma will have the automatic right to a college teaching job—first come, first hired. Indeed, with the quota system we are almost there de facto.
Finally, Mr. Mayer makes a fine . . . point when he writes about the harmful effects of Open Admissions crowding on the campus amenities, and hence the “uncivilizing atmosphere.” To point the matter up, I call attention to the expansion plans of Cornell University which deliberately and significantly take account not only of future building needs but the preservation of vistas and other aesthetic features. . . .
By way of postscript, I comment on Norman Podhoretz’s “The Intellectuals & the Pursuit of Happiness” [February] in which he says that the “traditional American ideal. . ., equality of opportunity, . . . [is supported] through measures like Open Admissions.” I see no such connection, in principle or in practice. Equality of opportunity requires that every qualified person, regardless of socioeconomic status, should have equal access to education, as well as to a job, etc. It patently does not mean that everyone, regardless of qualifications, should have the same rights. In that direction lies social and intellectual anarchy. . . .
Charles Cogen
New York City
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To the Editor:
Some eight years ago, the late David Boroff wrote an incisive article about New York’s City College, which he characterized as “A Kind of Proletarian Harvard” (New York Times Magazine, March 28, 1965):
It has produced more embryonic Ph.D.’s than any other institution in the country. . . . Alumni provide a stunning roll call of the country’s talent. . . . The intellectuals who came out of City College . . . are among the nation’s leading academic community. By any estimate, the school has been an extraordinary forcing-ground of creativity.
There is guilt about the small proportion of Negro and Puerto Rican students, but there is also staunch resistance to lowering admission requirements. Instead, special coaching—the College Discovery Program—is provided for minority-group children who lack the grades but seem to have the aptitude for the arduous City College grind.
There were few if any dissenting opinions expressed at the time about Boroff’s laudatory presentation and evaluation. Today, of course, all this has changed. Both “the staunch resistance to lowering admission requirements” and “the arduous City College grind” have disappeared.
The overall scholastic evaluation of Open Admissions by Martin Mayer is not likely to be validly challenged. Open Admissions has proved a major calamity and disaster for higher education in New York City.
As a graduate of Townsend Harris Hall—the preparatory school for City College—and the College itself, I am especially embittered at the destruction of an institution which made it possible for me and other poor but qualified boys to receive an excellent education and attain professional status.
I would take issue only with one aspect of Martin Mayer’s analysis. I believe that he is mistaken, or at least that the evidence is inconclusive, regarding the role of business in creating the alleged inordinate demand for college graduates, thus indirectly promoting Open Admissions.
While business organizations cannot be faulted for trying to secure college-trained professional and managerial personnel, it does not seem factually correct to state that fewer and fewer positions are open to non-college graduates. . . . Also, I do not think it is accurate to state that the overwhelming number of freshmen, black and white, go to college simply “to get better jobs,” as they themselves say. This is their simple answer, which leaves much unexplained. Their real motives seem mixed and many. There is glamor, glory, and prestige in attending college, especially for those who believe they have been traditionally barred from so attending. The idea of idling for four years, holding “rap sessions,” “being involved,” and getting “educated” is a luxury few can resist. And when freshmen speak of getting jobs, many are probably thinking of jobs outside the business world: law, medicine, engineering, architecture, and teaching, professions in which a college education is no longer a debatable prerequisite.
Unlike the business community, those basically responsible for this major educational disaster are: Mayor John V. Lindsay, whose politically motivated desire to ingratiate himself with minority groups led him to support Open Admissions; most top college administrators—towers of jelly, all, spineless and gutless—who bowed to the disastrous politics of Lindsay because they were more concerned about their jobs than with the preservation of collegiate education; New Left teachers, eagerly seeking new disciples for their anti-Establishment beliefs and doctrines; the Alumni Association of City College, which yielded to the pressure of Lindsay and the college administration, despite the opposition of many of its members.
The tragedy, of course, goes far beyond the ultimate worthlessness of an Open Admissions diploma. Although some bright, capable, talented, disciplined young people will achieve, despite Open Admissions, the likelihood is that most will be deprived of a genuine college heritage. They will receive an uninspired, mediocre education, at best.
Demoralized teachers tend to become apathetic and indifferent. What enthusiasm and vitality can an English professor bring to a literature class if many of the students cannot read or spell? How does a math professor, accustomed to teach analytic geometry and calculus, deal in an elementary course with students who do not even know their arithmetic fundamentals?
Perhaps most tragic of all, it is extremely cruel to encourage young people to go to college who are not equipped by intelligence, aptitude, and temperament to endure the rigors and discipline of a meaningful college education. Either they are likely to destroy the college as an educational institution, or they will become frustrated, bitter, and angry drop-outs. . . .
William Isaacs
New York City
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To the Editor:
I should like to congratulate Martin Mayer on his excellent article. The impact of Open Admissions policies, however, reaches beyond the City University and other public universities to private educational institutions as well.
Under the impact of increasing costs and declining federal aid, any number of private colleges and universities have enacted Open Admissions policies in all but name. Furthermore, to enhance the “efficiency” of their personnel and facilities, administrations at these institutions have adopted the standard of class size to measure “productivity.” In consequence, course prerequisites have been dropped at many places, and academic standards lightened.
Better universities and colleges can perhaps withstand these changes; they still make their selections from a pool of relatively qualified and superior students. This is not the case at institutions of middling and lesser quality where larger numbers of poorer students are likely to overwhelm both professors and the few good students who remain. Thus here too, we are likely to see the same demoralization and meaninglessness of education that Mr. Mayer describes so vividly.
As Mr. Mayer concludes, “What is beating at all the universities . . . is involuntary education on the tertiary level, the forced prolongation of an outworn adolescence for purposes that are quite separate from the civilizing Idea of a university.”
(Dr.) Irene A. Gilbert
Cambridge, Massachusetts
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Martin Mayer writes:
Most of these letters do not seem to me to require reply, but some of them do, to wit:
Hans B. C. Spiegel, Seymour Z. Mann, and Oliver J. Gray: I visited the class for about seventy minutes, and spent the last twenty or thirty speaking with students. From that experience, and from conversation with other Hunter professors, I think fourth-grade show-and-tell a reasonable description of the enterprise. If the graduate students in urban planning are subject to similar fakery, I feel sorry for them.
Alan Fiellin and Fritz Steinhardt: I am sorry not to have investigated the question of credit for remedial mathematics. As it happens, I didn’t run into mathematics on the programs of any of the Open Admissions students whose work was discussed with me, and I assumed (as I should not have assumed) that the mathematics situation was parallel to that in English. I did not of course mean to imply that all prerequisites had been dropped in mathematics and science: you just can’t do that. But despite Dean Fiellin’s disclaimer, I continue to believe in the testimony of a number of City College professors that the registrar does not impose, and the professors are forcefully discouraged from suggesting, prerequisites for courses in the humanities and social sciences.
Henry D. Paley: I regret getting Frederick Burkhardt’s middle initial wrong, and the garbling of the hall that was on fire, and the error on Candido de Leon’s age (it shows my own age: the curriculum vitae said de Leon had been an artillery officer in the army in Germany, and to me that meant World War II. I was surprised, said he looked much younger; and of course should have checked further). I am not of course responsible for David Newton’s view of his role at York College, nor could I care a whit about CUNY’s reasons for trying to keep test scores secret. I do feel abused a little when I am accused of inaccuracy for pointing out that Mr. Paley’s statement that Hostos used programmed instruction and computers, which he had made to me at headquarters, was not borne out by a visit to the college. And it should probably be mentioned that the study by Dr. Birnbaum to which I alluded was not the one published in 1971 but a previous, unpublished study which Dr. Birnbaum discussed with me when we rode in a taxi back to 80th Street from a meeting of a Higher Education Seminar at Columbia in 1967.
For the rest, saving the question of exactly when in the chronology people changed job titles (where I may indeed have been a few months off), I will stand by what is in the piece. It is of course conceivable that of 15,000 Open Admissons students, “scores” were flunked out in their second year; I was told not, at CUNY headquarters, in Mr. Paley’s presence. The description of the admissions process, college by college, is correct as given, and Mr. Paley’s version is misleading, because City College in fact gave regular admission this year to students with grade averages as low as 77.5 (which meant Open Admissions to students ranking anywhere in the upper 60 per cent of their class). Dr. Joe L. Rempson’s article in City Almanac, recommended to me at CUNY, says that prior to Open Admissions “those with an average between 70 and 82 were guaranteed admission to a community college”; perhaps Mr. Paley’s “technology majors” is a weasel. The paragraph about the sequence of federal and state actions was also, in essence, a digest of material from the Rempson study, and clearly did not imply that CUNY had been pushed by the federal government.
On the more general question, Dr. Rempson, who profoundly supports Open Admissions, writes that “It is leaning more toward failing than succeeding regardless of what standards are used.” I don’t think I said more than that, myself. And I did not say failure was inevitable: I said CUNY was not handling its problems well. And I described what seemed to me the likely consequences.
The situation is as follows:
- Large numbers of students who would not historically have been considered ready for college work are being admitted.
- The success of the program is being judged, at City University headquarters and elsewhere, by the proportion who acquire diplomas.
- The standards for the diploma are to be maintained.
These three conditions are not, to my mind, inevitably contradictory; and I am not much happier with the letters from my friends than I am with the letters from my enemies. I do not think it is beyond the wit of man to devise programs that would in fact take increasing proportions of the population through the equivalent of a standard college program. I did find a few encouraging programs at CUNY (and I missed what may be the best, Mina Shaughnessy’s at City College), but it seemed to me entirely obvious that there wasn’t anywhere near enough program to keep the three conditions from becoming contradictory.
The first of them—Open Admissions—is now locked into the system. The second—the pressure for awarding degrees to increasing numbers of those invited to attend—seems to me a political necessity in the organization of this monster university. Which means that the third—the quality of the diploma—is going to suffer. What is especially sad is that the damage will be most severe to that fraction of the Open Admissions students who do in fact reach conventional levels of achievement for a college diploma: nobody will believe it.
The thrust of the article, of course, was that all this agitation for degrees is societal nonsense, caused by the plague of credentialism. In an article in the New Republic a year or so ago, I proposed that corporations with training programs be compelled by law to accept applicants without college degrees for a certain fraction of the places, and that efforts be made to restore apprenticeship as a route to the professions. An increasing fraction of the jobs for which academic credentials are required does not in fact demand the skills such credentials are supposed to certify. Pressure on the job market not to require meaningless credentials seems to me a much more sensible procedure than pressure on the colleges to expand the numbers of credentials given—better for the students, better for the colleges, better for the society. Nobody seems to be arguing with that point at all; but nobody seems to be doing anything about it, either.
