Ccny—And Me

By Theodore Gross

CCNYand Me describes the conflict between equal opportunity and academic excellence in American higher education. Once known as a proletarian Harvard, the City College of New York admitted the children of immigrants solely on the basis of achievement until a policy called Open Admissions was initiated in 1970, which offered a second chance to the disadvantaged of Harlem and other deprived neighborhoods.

Emerging from the cultural revolution of the 1960s, Open Admissions tested the very meaning of public education in our democracy. As chairman of the English department, dean of humanities, and vice president for development at CCNY, David Rosen is a central figure in this conflicttorn between a beautiful, charismatic woman who is committed to the policy and a brilliant president who intends to control it so that he can transform CCNY into an urban educational model for other cities. The arc of Rosens absolute commitment to reconciling Open Admissions and the Urban Educational Model and his growing skepticism of their efficacy provides a human drama that cuts to the core of American democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 28, 2017
• ISBN: 9781524580124

Book preview

1

I n my apartment at 9 rue Galilee, I stared at the letter with conflicted emotions, knowing that it meant my life could be changed forever. Ed Bartoli was asking me to succeed him as chairman of the large English department at CCNY after the college had experienced a year of revolutionary student protests, community conflicts, and the burning of buildings on a century-old campus. The City College of New York overlooked Harlem, a black community it had neglected for too long and had yielded reluctantly to the educational and social experiment called Open Admissions.

CCNY was the proletarian Harvard, as alumni were fond of calling it, a haven for the children of immigrants who were admitted on merit alone. Now, in 1970, the college was lowering its standards to include more of the underprivileged and unprepared. The English department would need a leader who could navigate between preserving the past --what Matthew Arnold once called the best that has been thought and said—and the urgent needs of the present. You’ve been on vacation long enough, my mentor teased me, stoking my guilt. Come home to where the action is. This may be the most important turning point in the history of American higher education. Don’t miss the moment.

Ten months earlier, Debra and I had returned to Paris for the academic year, just after the French had gone through a student revolution of their own. Our American version seemed more fundamental—it cut to the core of what we mean when we speak of democratic education. The country was in a racial frenzy that resembled a divided nation during the Civil War as well as a rebellion against the conflagration in Vietnam, even as my private life was bright and promising. I could easily have escaped the turmoil that Open Admissions would pose. I was tenured; I was a full professor; I could write whatever I wished; I was the freest man in the western world. I had edited a number of profitable anthologies that culminated in what my editors were convinced would be a best-seller, Dark Symphony: Negro Literature in America, a collaboration with a black colleague. Debra was also secure, although weary of the daily burden that teaching English in a Harlem high school entailed, and had taken a leave of absence to escape the tedium. We had come to Paris so that I could complete my study of post-war literature in America. This book, I hoped, would be my magnum opus and return me to my graduate school, Columbia, as a faculty member or help me secure an appointment at some other research university. CCNY was changing, forever. It was threatening to become Harlem College, with all the educational and social and moral baggage that epithet implied. Who needed the challenge?

We had accumulated enough money while living in a rental on West 116th Street, across from Columbia, and could now afford a much larger, more lavish co-op that we had adopted around the corner on Riverside Drive. It was Ed’s apartment, in fact, with a view of the Hudson and a huge, garish Spry sign on the Jersey shore that always reminded me to pull up my bootstraps, stand at attention, and salute. Ed was saving this spread for us as he prepared to escape to Richmond College on Staten Island, where he had just been appointed president.

The letter promised power, prestige, and prominence. It also demanded total commitment to an administrative career and a way of working that I had avoided. A celebrated physicist from the University of Rochester had just been named president of CCNY, and he was encouraging Ed to persuade me to stand for election in September. He would need a humanistic leader he could respect, and the English department of one hundred and twenty divided members was crucial to resolving the tension between academic standards and open access; he wanted someone to help him control the tsunami of Open Admissions. The English department had always been the vital center of the college of liberal arts and sciences and now would only be more so. I was flattered, despite my lifelong disdain for bureaucracy and authority, but I was also fearful of jeopardizing my personal future. Instead of a predictable, comfortable career of criticism and scholarship, of commentary rather than action; instead of leaving a beleaguered City College for a university with ample funds and returning every third year to the University of Nancy as a professeur associe; instead of continuing to travel throughout the world during summers and vacations; instead of enjoying conferences and colloquia and experiencing personal growth and prestige in what we used to call, a little snobbishly, a life of the mind, I’d be involved in the dilemmas of others who scarcely possessed the skills and knowledge I had always assumed of City College students.

As I deliberated, knowing full well what my decision would be, Debra burst into our pied-à-terre on the right bank, a few blocks from the Champs-Élysées. She was a dedicated student who was forever on the cusp of becoming bilingual and now was full of the French tutorial she had just taken.

My last lesson, she lamented, "but after a year’s struggle, at least I’ll be able to order my own meal—en français."

She chattered on about her lesson with Madame Danchin, who had created a farewell pomme de tarte for us and paired it with a bottle of champagne. As I prepared our drinks, I gazed upon my animated Debra with affection and was reminded of why I always felt better whenever she entered my line of vision. She was my affirmative anchor to the world, the pragmatic interpreter of all my decisions, and a perennial optimist at every stage of our lives. And she was stunning. Thirty-eight, she looked no more than thirty, with slightly disheveled auburn hair and hazel eyes that always carried the hint of a smile and invited a smile in return.

I showed her the letter.

So the Bartolis are abandoning us.

He’s been chairman for six years. He’s ready to be a college president.

On Staten Island. Across the Verrazano Bridge and into the wasteland. Staten Island is like a foreign country to me.

Not if you’re president of its only public college.

And you, my love? She returned the letter, tentatively. What track will you be on?

I’m not sure.

She came to me and cupped my face in her hands to see me better and kissed me on the lips.

Of course you’re sure. You’ve already decided to be anointed, haven’t you?

Elected, not anointed—by a range of Anglophiles who have personal, self-centered agendas.

Oh, you’ll be elected, all right. You’re too popular not to be—even by the troglodytes who live in some mythical CCNY of the past.

So tell me what I should do.

What you’ve already decided to do. I’m with you, Mr. Chairman. You’ve always been one for impossible challenges—and now you can afford to take them. The hint of her smile flowered as she stood before me. We’re rich, aren’t we? Moderately rich? Well, rich by academic standards. Your new book will be a great success and have wonderful reviews. Don’t shake that professorial head at me, Dave. It will happen, as night follows day. Of course, you have an alternative. You could go on to publish another book every third or fourth year and take me to the most exotic places in the world."

Sounds appealing.

But you won’t.

She reminded me of how closely I’d been following the skirmishes at CCNY that had led to Open Admissions: the outrageous demands of student radicals, the resignation of a besieged president and his replacement by this physicist from Rochester, the academic turmoil, the pressures of a Harlem community that had tolerated a college in its midst where 98 percent of the students were white and 2 percent blacks for decades and decades, and all the bellicose bulletins that had arrived from colleagues in the cross-fire of civil rights, which found their inevitable ideological battleground at the City College of New York. These faculty members feared that their predictable professions were now threatened by a racial revolution they hadn’t signed up for. Those who could flee to colleges where the issues wouldn’t threaten them would do so—the rest would remain and grumble at their fate. And the traditional students who came from across the city? Those who thought that CCNY hadn’t yet changed? They would feel utterly betrayed.

In your heart of hearts, you’re already home, aren’t you? Again, she pressed my lips to hers. And so am I. I don’t want to miss this moment either. Let’s celebrate tonight at the Bastide Odéon.

2

R obert Mercer stood six foot-three inches but seemed taller, the kind of self-confident, burly leader who has never failed or been thwarted in life. As he moved around his cluttered desk to greet me, he tendered a conspiratorial smile that suggested we’d known each other for a very long time. He was originally from the Bronx, I was nurtured in Brooklyn, and that made us New Yorkers who were joined at the hip. With thinning, disordered gray hair, broad shoulders, and a weathered face that was marked by a large knitted brow carrying the worries of the city and dark flashing eyes focused intensely on whoever he was addressing, this formidable president was clearly a man in a hurry. No one was going to get in the way of Robert Mercer.

I had researched his background and was prepared to be awed. Born of immigrant parents from Minsk who had fled the Russian pogroms and could scarcely scrape by in America, his father was a peddler, his mother a seamstress, both of them barely literate in English, and he was a brilliant fifteen-year-old graduate of the Bronx High School of Science and had already discovered physics as his passion and purpose in life. With no money in the family, he automatically veered toward CCNY like all of his friends, but before his freshman year was over, he was awarded a Pulitzer scholarship to Columbia and moved on a fast track to intellectual stardom. He studied under Nobel Prize winners I. I. Rabi at Columbia and Hans Bethe at Cornell, where he took his doctorate, and wrote a dissertation on energy production in white dwarf stars that almost earned him his own Nobel Prize years later. Don’t ask me what white dwarf stars are, but I knew I ought to be impressed. He began a long, illustrious career at the University of Rochester, which was interrupted by World War II and an association with the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos, where Oppenheimer and some of the most significant scientists in the world --Enrico Fermi, Niels Bohr, and others— were gathered to develop the atom bomb. His tenure at Rochester lasted thirty years and was marked by a growing concern about nuclear proliferation that led to his organizing international conferences devoted to healthy relationships with Soviet scientists.

Then the political sixties exploded. Along with other liberals, he ran into conflict with a conservative university president who didn’t want to hire any more left-leaning faculty. Drafted by his colleagues as the leader of the University Senate, he began to realize and relish his abilities as an administrator. When the City College Search Committee approached him to be a candidate for the presidency in the late sixties, he was ready to return to New York and improve the lives of the impoverished youths of a new generation. A better match between a man and a college at that moment in time could scarcely be imagined. If Emerson was right when he claimed that an institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man, Robert Mercer was the made-to-order hero for CCNY, a president who could have been selected from central casting.

He beckoned me to his leather couch and placed himself on an opposite chair that seemed too small for his massive frame. His secretary, a gray-haired, matronly black woman who had been the assistant to many previous presidents, brought in cups and a coffee pot on a tray and placed it on the low table that separated us. I watched her pour slowly and meticulously with a steady hand as she tilted her head toward me, smiling gently with approval, as if she had studied my résumé with care and was assuring me that this meeting would be favorable to my future.

And then she was gone.

Paris must seem very far away now, he started.

Indeed.

You were completing a book over there?

Yes. A four-year project—but it’s behind me now, waiting to be published by Macmillan.

He seemed, for a moment, genuinely interested in knowing about the book, which was an exploration of the heroic ideal in American culture and its waning force after the Second World War. I gave him a shorthand version of simmering postwar tensions between blacks and whites, blacks and Jews, men and women, and the impact that racism and sexism and commercialism were still having on all of us. Bellow, Mailer, Ellison, Baldwin, the confessional poets of the sixties, Plath and Rich and Lowell and Ginsberg— a generation of artists that had shaped my sensibility. But we both knew that this subject had little to do with my introductory interview. I was here as an administrator, not a literary critic, someone who could help him implement a grand vision that he had in mind.

He pointed to Dark Symphony on the coffee table between us. Thanks for sending me your anthology. It’s a considerable achievement. Your new book should be interesting, too. I’m a sucker for rebels—heroes with outsize ideals. We had the same racial issues at Rochester, but here in Harlem, they’re so intertwined with the immediate community and the campus, it’s hard to separate the two. The wrong combination can be toxic.

He straightened himself in his chair and got down to business.

Ed Bartoli tells me you were elected as chairman of that huge English department—almost unanimously.

Almost. A few hard-core conservatives resisted my liberal charm. They’re terrified of what Open Admissions might do to the department—to the college, to our proletarian Harvard. They’re worried that a whole way of learning is coming to an end.

It is. It’s changing. Are you terrified too?

Challenged, I said carefully. Right now, I’m simply trying to figure out where to find enough remedial classrooms for the avalanche of students that have come our way.

I can imagine. He shook his head mournfully. It does seem like an avalanche sometimes. There’s a lot to absorb.

I was indeed overwhelmed. Everything had changed about the college in my year abroad. Construction workers had thrown up a large jerry-built Quonset hut on the south campus for additional faculty I had just hired— twenty-one young graduate students, each absorbed in some narrowly defined doctoral thesis, who were preparing for what they once thought would be an orderly traditional entrance to a life of teaching and scholarship. For now they accepted the work that was available, eager to anchor permanent careers in the city. They had course loads of three remedial classes that were composed of twenty-five students in each section and another course called An Introduction to Literature. The adjacent, antiquated Mott Hall on Convent Avenue and 131st Street was reserved for classrooms and offices the permanent faculty used as little as possible. He apologized for the physical inconvenience, as if this tired domain embarrassed him because it now belonged to him personally.

Open Admissions had lowered standards imposed upon the college in the months since Mercer agreed to be president. He reassured me, a little too forcefully perhaps, that he completely understood the need for the new program since the earlier levels of education hadn’t been able to solve the problems that stemmed from a lack of basic skills in writing and mathematics. For whatever reasons, CCNY would now have to do the job.

We will, he assured me. It’s more than a hazardous educational problem. It’s a moral obligation. We’ll have to bridge Open Admissions and academic excellence at this campus, given our history and location and the moment we live in. The opportunity is simply enormous—but exciting as well.

He rose from his chair and began to pace the floor. He could have been alone in the room, lost as he was in his own conception of City College’s destiny. He intended to shape the future rather than be victimized by it—no challenge would be too difficult for Robert E. Mercer. He had tried to persuade the leaders of the City University, which included nineteen senior colleges and community colleges, that City College was still the flagship institution and should focus its attention on urban issues—education, health care, biomedicine, law, architecture, communications, and performing arts. But the other presidents were intent on imitating traditional colleges like Columbia, NYU, and Fordham rather than pursuing any attempt to differentiate themselves and confront the complex contemporary world.

Every president wants his college to be a pale imitation of either Harvard or Amherst or some Ivy League citadel rather than one that responds to the immediate needs of the community. It’s the mad pursuit of academic excellence, which takes years and millions of dollars to create, when the city is burning around them and crying out for attention.

He had another major complaint. In responding to Open Admissions, the CUNY leaders had unfairly burdened CCNY with the greatest number of remedial students.

Because of our location in Harlem. I know. I know what they’re up to. There’s pressure to shift the power and prestige of the university to Queens and Brooklyn where white middle-class kids live and thrive. CCNY has an unfair number of Open Admissions students. That’s simply the truth.

Open Admissions. He was not opposed to the new policy of taking all high school seniors with either a grade point average of over 80 percent or a place in the top half of their graduating class. He was not opposed to the policy, he assured me again and again, sensing doubt in my eyes, but it had come five years sooner than planned—"and accelerated three months after I accepted this presidency, he chuckled. Quite a gift to a particle physicist!" He believed in the idea of Open Admissions, he insisted, but would not allow himself to be controlled by the larger vision that he had in mind. He believed in the democratic principle of inclusion—oh, he was a card-carrying liberal, he repeated, don’t get him wrong, but he would not allow it to limit him. He was already developing a master plan and he wanted to share the outlines of it with me. His dark eyes grew narrow and intense as he described a projected university park in Harlem that included a science center, a performing arts building, and a student union among other centers, institutes, and programs that hovered just beyond the horizon. CCNY could become, it should become, it will become, he declaimed in a rising, combative voice, boxing as it were with an invisible enemy, the urban educational model for the country.

He needed my help, he confided, for he realized that Open Admissions, with all of its sudden demands on resources, was vital to his vision; but it could also become its one deterrent. It was not that he didn’t believe in the idea of Open Admissions; he did, he really did, but it was only one piece in the large project of creating a great urban public university. It had to be controlled and kept in check.

I wanted to speak to you about being a partner in this experiment—as the indispensable humanist I’ll need. I smiled at such an absurd phrase coming from so sophisticated a man, but he rolled on. Frankly, I never anticipated that Open Admissions would hit the college five years earlier than scheduled when I accepted this presidency. Now the numbers are even larger than I was led to believe—but these kids, unprepared as they are, can be helped too, can’t they? Even though the schools and their parents and society have failed them.

He leaned forward so that I could smell his hot breath. We can help them—but, Dave, it has to be within limits. I know you’re overwhelmed. I’m overwhelmed—some times. Together, you and I can help each other.

I couldn’t figure him out, but as I walked away from his office and across the tired campus of timeworn buildings, energized by the sheer force of his outsized personality, I knew he would change my career from scholar to activist forever. Personal scholarship seemed self-indulgent in his presence. Robert E. Mercer made my blood race.

So what’s he like? Debra asked that night as we poked away at spare ribs in our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Tall, brilliant, and ballsy.

Well, that’s descriptive.

An impatient man whose master plan was in his mind before he came here. Just don’t get in Robert Mercer’s way.

I won’t. I know that type. I think I’m married to that type.

Type AAA. Me? I’m a minor league player compared to this guy. He won’t be held back by Open Admissions or any other force of human nature.

Watch out, Dave. You sound as though he’s already converted you.

Not quite. But he is impressive—and frightening. You must start showing some respect for your husband. You’re looking at the man President Robert Mercer calls his indispensable humanist.

"His what? she laughed. Is that what he called you?"

He needs my help in making basic writing integral to his larger vision of an urban university.

Oh God, you sound like his press agent. Indispensable humanist, my eye. Good luck to you, Dave. You’re looking at your wife. You’re looking at someone who is teaching your future students.

No, no. He really does believe that academic excellence and Open Admissions can coexist.

And you’re just the one who will help him bridge that yawning gap, right? From his lips to God’s ears. You’re a humanist certainly, but scarcely indispensable— except to me. The moment you don’t do Mercer’s bidding, you’ll be gone with the wind. My kids will be in your classrooms just two years from now. I think I know them a little better than either Robert Mercer or you do.

Maybe so, maybe not. Maybe not their potential.

Don’t patronize me. You’re absolutely incorrigible. Mercer has certainly found his counterpart in you. I should send the two of you my last batch of compositions so that at least you’ll see what you’re up against.

I know what I’m up against.

Really?

I’ve been listening to you, haven’t I, for fifteen years? I’ve been watching you correct those papers until midnight.

And Robert Mercer? Who has he been watching?

He doesn’t have to. He’s from the Bronx. He has his own memories of poverty—and illiteracy. Maybe not his own, maybe his mother’s, his father’s, which can be even more powerful. It doesn’t matter. He has a vision that I find compelling.

A vision, she smiled. That sounds more ethereal than worldly… And slightly pretentious.

She was a pragmatic idealist, my Debra, who always had one foot hovering near the brake. She had been at her school in central Harlem for fifteen years after Barnard and Teachers College, and she was suffering from a bad case of burn out. Years ago, she could have found a position at one of the privileged private schools or some public school in the suburbs, but she had been a radical in the sixties who wanted to be where the action was; by now, she had become a chastened veteran who knew the difference between the promise of so many underprivileged minorities, their natural intelligence and talent, and the reality of all the familial and social disadvantages that limited them.

But I wasn’t listening. Not then. In my enthusiasm for Mercer’s vision, pretentious as it might be, I was irritated at her pragmatism, which bordered on cynicism. She could feel my mood and softened her attitude.

You’ll help to make Open Admissions as successful as it can be, she assured me. But --sorry, Dave— I never did think of you as ‘our indispensable humanist.’ She broke out smiling, then laughed us into love again. Hands holding hands. I’m just asking you to keep a distance to Robert Mercer and not expect miracles. This is not a book you’re beginning to write, where you’re the solitary author who’s in full control of his material.

Did I expect miracles? Of course I expected miracles. Why else would I have taken the chairmanship?

Debra had done wonders to our Riverside Drive apartment. The walls were repainted, and some of the new living-room furniture had already arrived— a handsome maroon sofa with matching armchairs, a Noguchi coffee table, and an oriental carpet. Newly bought curtains framed windows that provided a view of the Hudson River and the flickering lights of far-off Jersey City. We stood at the window, my arm cradling her waist, and gazed at the Spry sign in the distance, winking like a facetious friend.

We’re very lucky, Dave.

We were indeed. Our careers were thriving, our finances flourishing, and I was poised for a whole new career. She was right about all the books and essays I’d published. For the better part of fifteen years, ever since I returned from the Korean War, I’d been driven by a self-centered scholarship that made me feel omnipotent, as though my words and insights could carry me up whatever mountain I needed to climb. There had been a series of critical studies that had shaped my sensibility –F. O. Matthiessen’s American Renaissance, Lionel Trilling’s Liberal Imagination, among others— and I had wanted to write a brilliant treatise of my own. Well, I wrote my critical study, and I knew it wasn’t brilliant. The Heroic Ideal in American Literature made me realize my limitations, and though it was already receiving respectful reviews, it was never going to satisfy my insatiable hunger to be larger than myself, to be heroic in some form. It wasn’t even going to extricate me from CCNY.

We’re lucky, she repeated, as if she were tracing my thoughts, sorry that she hadn’t shared my enthusiasm uncritically. We’re lucky to be able to live in this lavish apartment, Dave. We’re lucky to have each other.

She didn’t have to elaborate— we both knew what she meant. It was our unspoken secret, the sad, insidious, silent subtext of our lives. For the better part of ten years, we had struggled to have a child and always assumed that the problem was in her body, in her infantile womb, as one gynecologist generously termed it; she had irregular, painful periods that sometimes lasted unbearable lengths of time. But years after her self-flagellation, I saw my doctor and discovered limitations in my own body that I could scarcely imagine.

You have a low sperm count, he told me, as if pronouncing a death sentence. Incredulous, I had myself retested, but of course, the original results were reaffirmed. For the first time in my life, my mind could not order my body to obey. Riddled with guilt and realizing how much Debra wanted a child, I prevailed upon us to adopt—from Russia, from China, from Korea, from anywhere in the world; but she insisted on having our own biological child, and no amount of persuasion from me could prevail. With time, her lingering sadness and my guilt were suppressed, but we both knew how close they hovered to the sunny surface of our lives.

I am worried about Robert Mercer, she jolted me into the present, especially his effect on you. He could change the pattern of our lives.

From predictability to the unknown.

Something like that.

Is that so bad?

She was my worrier, Debra. She worried for both of us. By now, she had reconciled herself to a childless marriage, and though that scar would never disappear, she was learning to live with it— although more than once, before she knew I was coming, I would find her awash in tears.

At this moment, silently, we let the unspoken memory pass, but both of us were aware of its presence somewhere in our minds, like a scar of disappointment early in life that occasions pain and reminds