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Village Voice

April 21, 1998:

ENEMIES OF PUBLIC EDUCATION

BY Alisa Solomon with Deirdre Hussey

Reprinted with permission

In just a couple of weeks, one of the boldest experiments in American public education may come to an abrupt end. On April 27, the board of trustees of the City University of New York is slated to vote on a proposal that would effectively shut down the almost 30-year-old policy of open admissions at CUNY.

The plan—a Mayor Giuliani proposal—would cut out remedial education at CUNY's four-year colleges and would curtail it at the community colleges. The upshot? Incoming enrollments would plunge by 60 per cent, according to a study released last week by two CUNY sociologists.

Meanwhile, in the wake of an orchestrated scandal over conferences on women's sexuality held at SUNY-New Paltz in November, State University trustees appointed by Governor Pataki have stepped up efforts to impose variable tuition rates for the 64 different campuses and to slash numerous departments and programs. These efforts, upstate faculty organizations charge, threaten to fragment and downsize the university, leaving SUNY's small-town colleges to wither and die.

Public higher education has suddenly become the hottest conservative reform issue, topping the agenda of small-government, f ree-market agitators. In recent months, SUNY and CUNY have come under a barrage of attacks from anti-tax activists and right-wing think tanks—and from the Republican politicians whose budget-cutting frenzies they feed. Sensing blood, the tabloids have joined the hunt, with the Post and the News unleashing dozens of snarling editorials over the last several months. The Post has even gone as far as putting quotation marks around the word students when referring to those attending CUNY. But amid the fracas, little attention has been paid to the people sounding the charge. Even the Times and Newsday have failed to identify the players behind the scenes.

But that attention is crucial, because though these assaults on New York's public universities use the catchphrases ''academic standards,'' and ''bachelor's degrees of value,'' they aren't really motivated by educational concerns. Rather, says Ed Sullivan, chair of the state assembly's higher education committee, they are political offensives whose goal is not to improve access to higher education for the poor and the working and middle classes—CUNY and SUNY's historic missions—but to reduce public support for these expenditures.

Indeed, it turns out that the driving force behind the conservative onslaught is a fairly small and closely connected set of groups, who share a broader ideological agenda, institutional affiliations, and deep-pocketed right-wing financial sponsors. Truly a rogues' gallery of public enemies, they have as their larger goal the snuffing out of already ailing American dreams of expansive public life. Almost all graduates of private schools and recipients of corporate largesse, they want to do away with government support of—everything.

Rudy Giuliani set the current CUNY crisis in motion at his state-of-the-city address in January, offering a ''bold new initiative'': reneging on CUNY's promise to accept any city resident with a high school diploma into its community colleges. A few weeks later— with a nod to the influence of CUNY-bashing articles by Heather Mac Donald in the Manhattan Institute's City Journal that suggested that ''CUNY can cut its size by half''—the mayor charged the six community colleges with ''a total evisceration of standards,'' and threatened to withhold their city funding (about a quarter of their budget) if they refused to farm out remedial courses to private agencies. And several trustees played backup chorus, seizing the airwaves to denounce the institution it is their duty to protect.

The mayor's plan was railroaded onto the agenda, bypassing typical channels for faculty and student response. Indeed, a CUNY faculty task force was already reviewing remediation, but that nonpartisan, academic effort was brushed aside. By early March, CUNY trustees Herman Badillo and John Calandra were touting a plan to end remediation at the system's 17 four-year colleges and to limit it to one year at the community colleges.

Never mind that a majority of CUNY graduates had to do some remedial work. Or that at open hearings on the proposal in March, nearly 50 CUNY professors came to speak against it—citing numerous success stories of students starting out with remedial courses and ending up in Ivy League Ph.D. programs. Not a soul spoke in support of the plan.

''I can't imagine why the faculty, who are Ph.D.s and are supposed to be scholars and believe in standards, don't support the proposal,'' says a bewildered Badillo. But then how could he, when neither he nor Calandra—indeed, not half the trustees—bothered to attend those hearings? As far as the mayor is concerned, Badillo confides, the proposal doesn't go far enough. Eventually, he adds, ticking off the ''mayor's trustees'' who will do his bidding, Giuliani's program will win out.

Such talk makes Ed Sullivan wince. ''Trustees aren't supposed to be the mayor's or the governor's people, who vote the way they're told,'' he insists. ''They're supposed to be buffers between the political world, which necessarily must fund the institution, and the educational world, which should not be subject to the directives of politics.''

If the mayor's relentless strafing hasn't been enough, CUNY has taken a hit in the meantime from another direction. At the end of March, the Empire Foundation—the think tank of the Albany-based anti-tax group CHANGE-NY—along with the American Council of Alumni and Trustees, released a report blasting the university for failing to require a CUNY-wide core curriculum emphasizing Western Civilization.

The 40-page document tags as inappropriately ''narrow'' such courses as Sociology of Women, African Literature, The Third World in the Modern Era, and U.S. History: 1865-Present. ''Cutting out fluff and focusing on essentials would both improve the quality of education and save money,'' the report breathlessly assures, before issuing a threat to faculty governance and academic freedom: ''If individual campuses fail to meet this challenge...the CUNY Board of Trustees has the clear legal authority to establish high-quality curricular standards.''

In many respects, the report echoes one the Empire Foundation published in 1996, which lambasted SUNY for similar failings. Indeed, the CUNY report notes—citing a 1996 report by the National Association of Scholars—that ''the general-education curricula at the top 50 schools uniformly lack structure and offer an almost unlimited choice of cafeteria-style offerings to meet general-education requirements.'' That seems to leave CUNY and SUNY in reasonable company.

Though it plays out differently at the upstate and city schools, the strategy of those who would shrink both systems repeats the tactic that succeeded so well in the drive to eliminate welfare: The best way to reduce expenditures of tax-levied funds, the logic goes, is to demonize the beneficiaries of that spending.

In attacks on SUNY—where a majority of students are white and working- or middle-class—the rhetoric takes a page from the near obliteration of the National Endowment for the Arts. Searching out the salacious, it portrays campuses as scholastic Sodoms, where lesbians run amok, hell-bent on destroying Western civilization. SUNY trustee Candace de Russy, who ignited the controversy over the New Paltz conferences back in November, is still fanning the flames. Just last month on 60 Minutes, her eyebrows arching in indignation, de Russy decried the ''lurid'' conference that ''degenerated ed into a platform for lesbian sex, public sadomasochism, anal sex, bisexuality, and masturbation.'' At American universities today, she fumed, ''no subject is taboo.'' Meanwhile, in a move faculty describe as an intimidation tactic, CHANGE-NY—whose Westchester chapter de Russy founded—filed Freedom of Information requests for the course syllabi and curriculum vitae of New Paltz's women's studies and arts departments (which sponsored the conferences).

When it comes to the City University—where the students are African American, Latino, Asian American, immigrants, and working-class whites—pupils are painted as remedial recidivists. In Badillo's words, they are ''taking high school—level classes over and over and being passed whether they're working or not because the professors feel sorry for them.'' That description has a familiar rhetorical ring, suggests Queens College English professor Barbara Bowen. ''It reminds me of the discourse around the welfare queen,'' she explains. ''You choose an isolated example, you misrepresent that example as the whole, you tap into all the discourse of misogyny and racism, and that one example allows the gutting of the whole system.''

You don't have to believe in vast right-wing conspiracies to recognize that these assailants— the Manhattan Institute, CHANGE-NY and its Empire Foundation, the American Council of Alumni and Trustees, and the National Association of Scholars—are more than a little familiar with each other.

Members of their boards of directors must get tired of seeing each other at meetings, since so many of them serve several of the same organizations. These groups find financial support from the same sources, too—multimillion-dollar right-wing foundations—the Scaife Family Funds, the Olin Foundation, and the Harry and Lynde Bradley Fund, among others—which, together, pump some $20 million a year into fostering right-wing activism within and against universities across the country, according to a study by People for the American Way.

But it's more than a few board members and financial donors that these organizations have in common. They share an ideological fervor for the free market. But why go after education? Some critics suggest that they simply want to reduce all public spending, no matter how worthwhile the cause. Others suppose that the universities themselves have become more receptive to the corporate message as they have begun to operate—to think—more like businesses than institutions of higher learning. They speak of the degrees they grant as ''products'' and their students as ''customers'' and insist upon ''productivity'' measures that are more appropriate to widget manufacturing than to broadening students' knowledge and critical faculties. Still others see a more calculated scheme: a narrow job market that has few places for the college-educated breeds social unrest; better to reduce the number of graduates and convince those who don't make it that it's their own damn fault. Any which way, the impulse is the same: cut spending, downsize, privatize. Here are the agitators stirring up that impulse.

SUNY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

In the four years since George Pataki gained control of appointments to the SUNY board of trustees, he has presided over a conservative upheaval. Led by right-wing ideologue Candace de Russy and millionaire Harvey Wachsman, the Pataki board has been pushing for raising admissions standards, closing down campuses, and driving out campus presidents who aren't to their ideological liking, no matter the means. Wachsman, a malpractice lawyer, neurosurgeon, and graduate of Tulane, the Chicago Medical School, and Brooklyn Law, arrives at meetings for this public university in a chauffeur-driven limousine.

Pataki is meddling in SUNY business more than politicians are typically wont to do. In an unprecedented February move, he summoned all the campus presidents to a meeting—all but New Paltz's Roger Bowen, who was then added to the guest list at the last minute. Only a few days before, Chancellor John Ryan—another Pataki-era appointee—had denounced Bowen for the women's sexuality conferences on his campus in November. He did so despite the findings of an investigation ordered by the governor, which concluded that the events that got the tabloids' knickers in a twist had fallen well within the bounds of academic inquiry. But the board of trustees rejected the report. In addition to censuring Bowen, explained one more Pataki appointee, trustee Paul Perez, the board wanted to assert its absolute authority over faculty.

The driving force for downsizing SUNY—dubbed the university's ''cruel stepmother'' by an upstate paper—is the now infamous de Russy. Though she never managed a distinguished career as a teacher or scholar herself—de Russy's jejune, exceptionally thin dissertation from Tulane University in French literature would probably not pass muster at CUNY and SUNY—she has found her niche as an anti-tax, anti-sex, pro-God pundit. She swept onto the board of trustees in '95—probably a Pataki payoff for her support as a CHANGE-NY activist—and instantly sent around a memo recommending that SUNY ''reduce taxpayer subsidies,'' eliminate all English as a Second Language courses, do away with SUNY's schools of law and medicine, and even privatize some colleges. De Russy writes provoucher, anti- multiculti screeds for the Catholic magazine Crisis and is a frequent panelist at National Association of Scholars conferences. She is a contributor to the Manhattan Institute and a member of the trustees council of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni.

CUNY BOARD OF TRUSTEES

Three liberal stalwarts from the Cuomo years are being swamped by an increasingly politicized and conservative board. Three of Giuliani's additions are extremely unlikely ever to cross him: they work in jobs to which he appointed them. George Rios is commissioner of the city's department of records; Satish Babbar holds a post in the buildings department, and Alfred Curtis owes the mayor his position as head of the UN development corporation. Though a College of Staten Island graduate himself, Curtis is a particularly vociferous supporter of Giuliani's vision. But Giuliani's most faithful message bearer, as ever, is Herman Badillo, the mayor's official, unpaid education adviser—not a bad jumping-off point for building a flourishing law practice.

Like a lion that eats its own young, Badillo is one of CUNY's most famous graduates and its most vicious critic. Since his appointment to the board of trustees in 1980, Badillo has supported increasing tuition, narrowing admissions, and most recently, cutting out remediation. Once a grassroots Bronx liberal, Badillo has climbed the ladder and pulled it up behind him. ''When I came here from Puerto Rico at age 12, I couldn't speak English,'' he says, ''and at 25 I had passed the CPA and law exams. Students should get their education over with as quickly as possible, before they get married and have children. We should limit remediation at the community colleges to one year—at the most. Students have to make the extra effort.'' Never mind that tuition was free in his day.

Badillo's closest comrade on the board—and the man who brought forward the plan to end remediation—is a Pataki appointee, John Calandra. The son of the late Bronx Republican leader—whose name he shares—and a graduate of Columbia and Cornell Law, Calandra took a beating when he ran for state assembly in '96. Rumor has it that he's eyeing Guy Velella's state senate seat, should he step down, or contemplating a rematch against assemblymember Steve Kaufman in the Bronx. That might explain Calandra's out-front extremism on the remediation question, but the Republican lawyer says he has no plans to run for office at the moment—though he's not ruling it out.

Faculty charge that Calandra is inventing the very problem he claims to be trying to fix by creating the impression that CUNY degrees are worthless: He keeps going on TV announcing that no one wants to hire the school's graduates, but when pressed, he can't cite any studies or even name any anecdotal examples. Why does he think the faculty overwhelmingly oppose the plan to end remediation? ''I guess they're afraid of change,'' he suggests.

MANHATTAN INSTITUTE

A $7 million, pro-privatization propaganda machine, the Manhattan Institute has been churning out books and op-eds attacking welfare, public housing, and affirmative action since its founding in 1978 by Bush's CIA Director William Casey. The start-up money came from a who's who of right-wing funders. Giuliani has been tagged an MI ''disciple''—and he has not objected.

The mayor has especially harkened to MI's trashing of CUNY. He echoed Heather Mac Donald's latest hatchet job in City Journal in his January State of the City address.

Her first CUNY story for City Journal, in summer 1994, was an almost forlorn account of CUNY's ''vast remedial enterprise'' and its disastrously ''enthusiastic embrace of multiculturalism.'' (The article was funded by New York's conservative Brunie family—also a contributor to CHANGE-NY.) By winter '98, when Mac Donald took on CUNY in the magazine's pages again, her tone had turned testy—even mean. She started off by calling the university a ''bloated bureaucracy that jettisoned academic standards in the face of a flood of ill-prepared students,'' and blamed the 1969 administration for being ''unwilling to defend the idea of higher education as a privilege earned by hard work.'' She took swipes at the university's Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies on her way toward declaring that ''the current identity-based 'scholarship' is a fraud.''

But unlike some of the young, conservative pundits who have been groomed from early on by right-wing organizations, Mac Donald says she was once ''a standard liberal who believed in government spending as a badge of compassion.'' Then, ''seeing how welfare works out in practice,'' she saw the conservative light.

Graduating from Yale in 1978 with a major in English (and attending private schools before that), Mac Donald was a poststructuralist true believer, intellectually suckled by Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, and J. Hillis Miller. But once out from under their tutelage, she started to feel betrayed. ''I began to feel I had wasted my education on something so bizarre and anti-human. It was a total emotional crisis,'' she says, her voice trembling. ''Then when multiculturalism became dominant and I saw the Western classics being trashed, I felt the university had so betrayed itself.''

Since her conversion, Mac Donald has attacked programs for the homeless and the disabled. Her neo-con vehemence has become so great that it often overwhelms her logic. She blames CUNY's remediation programs, for instance, for the poor performance of the city's high schools: Under open admissions, ''CUNY guaranteed any level of mediocrity college admission. CUNY's entrance requirements—no skills or knowledge required—became the high schools' exit requirements.'' That's sort of like suggesting that all cancer treatment wards should be closed to smokers because they only encourage people to light up.

Another MI fellow, Peter Salins, was named as SUNY's provost at Candace de Russy's urging without a proper search, in what many university officials criticized as a flouting of hiring procedures. A graduate of Syracuse University, Salins is a conservative intellectual who has decried rent control and public housing, and has called bilingualism a ''revisionist ideology.''

CHANGE-NY (Citizens Helping Achieve New Growth and Employment in New York)/ EMPIRE FOUNDATION for Policy Research

Norman Adler, a political consultant for both Democrats and Republicans, puts CHANGE-NY ''as close to the screwball right as you're likely to get in what passes for politics in New York State.'' But that hasn't stopped elected officials from heeding the slash-and-burn recommendations of the anti-tax group and its think tank, the Empire Foundation. Pataki—whose election owes much to the group's early support—appointed two C-NY officers, Tom Carroll and Brian Backstrom, to his transition team and then to the commission on regulatory reform. These self-appointed protectors of the public purse strings defected less than two years later, and started needling Pataki for being too timid in his budget cuts. One of their first examples of the governor's excessive largesse was SUNY, a system, they argued in a series of Empire Foundation reports, that was too ''costly and elaborate.'' Downsize, downsize, downsize, they chanted. At the end of March, they fired a similar salvo against CUNY.

Founded in 1991 by a handful of multimillionaires—including erstwhile gubernatorial candidates Lewis Lehrman and Herbert London (also a founder of the National Association of Scholars)—the organization's primary goal has been to keep the rich guys' gazillions in their own pockets. If that means wiping out opportunities for higher education for the less economically endowed, so be it. Other leaders include Thomas ''Dusty'' Rhodes, a retired investment banker who is also president of the National Review as well as a trustee of the Manhattan Institute, and Richard Gilder, another Manhattan Institute benefactor.

The Empire Foundation will soon put out another report on SUNY, focusing on how money is allocated, promises Carroll, a graduate of SUNY-Albany. ''We want them to restructure funding to reward academic quality instead of subsidizing programs for weak performers,'' he says. Carroll is sanguine about these reports' potential influence. ''Clearly, we get a better hearing than if the CUNY or SUNY board were stacked with Dinkins and Cuomo appointees. Now there is a willingness to take on controversial issues.''

AMERICAN COUNCIL OF TRUSTEES AND ALUMNI (formerly the National Alumni Forum)

Coauthor with CHANGE-NY of the recent report denouncing CUNY, ACTA is led by Lynne Cheney, who stocked the National Endowment for the Humanities with neo-conservatives when she headed the agency during the Reagan and Bush administrations. A conservative alumni lobby established in 1994 by the Intercollegiate Studies Institute—a long-standing free-market group organizing some 40 academic conferences a year—ACTA points out that alumni giving, ''at $2.9 billion annually and growing, is the largest private source of financial support for higher education.'' ACTA promises to ''help alumni direct their giving to programs that will raise educational standards,'' as well as conservative causes like Western Civ. Candace de Russy is on its trustee council; Herbert London—of the National Association of Scholars and CHANGE-NY—is a member of its scholars' council.

NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF SCHOLARS

Masterminds of the myth of the ''PC'' takeover of American colleges, the NAS has spent the last 10 years—and an annual budget of more than $1 million—accusing multiculturalism of destroying higher education. The group was founded by Stephen Balch and Herbert London—also a founder of CHANGE-NY. London, the onetime New York Conservative Party gubernatorial candidate, has written that neighborhoods like Harlem are ''assailant farms,'' and that ''in two hours an unleashed police force could do the trick.'' NAS's purpose is to pry the university from the grubby clutches of ''tenured radicals.'' Through its annual conferences and its journal, Academic Questions, NAS creates the specter of relentless radicals hacking away at the classical canon and the capitalist ethic. Trouble is, they're tilting at a problem that barely exists. Recycling the same extreme examples over and over and ignoring what actually goes on in classrooms, NAS has led the way in manufacturing a crisis in the academy.

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

Behind the escalating attacks against CUNY and SUNY lie a remarkably interconnected group of conservative activists and institutions. They are funded by right-wing foundations and anti-tax millionaires. Below, a glance at this tangled web:

LYNDE AND HARRY BRADLEY FOUNDATION

With assets in excess of $420 million, the Bradley brothers control one of the country's largest supporters of right-wing causes. Harry was an active member of the John Birch Society and a supporter of the National Review. Primary sponsors of National Empowerment Television—which beams religious-right programming and plugs for the National Rifle Association and Phyllis Schlafly's Eagle Forum into millions of homes across America—the foundation has also provided generous support to Bell Curve author Charles Murray.

JOHN M. OLIN FOUNDATION

Olin is a mega-funder of conservative think tanks, such as the American Enterprise Institute and the Heritage Foundation (more than $500,000 each some years). Olin pours funds into academic fellowships, promoting private enterprise and challenging multiculturalism. Allan Bloom (The Closing of the American Mind) and Dinesh D'Souza (Illiberal Education) have been two of the foundation's most infamous grantees. Schlafly and Heritage founder Paul Weyrich have also reaped Olin bounty.

SCAIFE FAMILY FOUNDATIONS

Three nonprofit foundations owned by Richard Mellon Scaife together have given away some $400,000 a week in recent years. Lauded by Newt Gingrich, Scaife has been described by The Wall Street Journal as ''nothing less than the financial archangel for the conservative movement's intellectual underpinnings.'' Favored recipients include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute. Millions of Scaife dollars have gone into grooming a generation of conservative judges.

REMEDIATION: WHY RUDY IS WRONG

In his State of the City address in January, Mayor Giuliani called the city university system a ''failure'' and called for an end to open admissions. He railed against the plague of remedial courses in the city universities and decried the fact that only 9 per cent of students graduate from the city's senior colleges in four years and only 1 per cent from the city's community colleges in two years.

But Giuliani's calculations don't add up, say scholars who have studied the issue. On graduation rates, ''the mayor's assertion is absolutely preposterous,'' says Lehman College sociologist David Lavin. ''It doesn't touch on the reality of what college careers are like today.'' Data from the National Center for Educational Statistics show that across the U.S. a majority of people who earn bachelor's degrees take more than four years and most community college graduates require more than two. Adds Lavin, ''College is no longer a prologue to adult life. It is now embedded and intertwined with other adult statuses. Students are parents, they hold full-time jobs, they can only attend college on a part-time basis. That all makes it reasonable that graduation should take quite a long while.''

All the more so at CUNY, where half the students have household incomes of less than $22,000 and must work. As for remediation, in the words of CUNY faculty senate president Sandi Cooper, the mayor appears to be ''data-proof.'' The Giuliani proxies on the CUNY board of trustees even went so far as to shelve independent reports that they commissioned, which showed that CUNY's remedial courses have been successful over the last couple of decades. Indeed, since the beginning of open admissions in 1970, the majority of successful CUNY graduates have taken some remedial classes. Many of CUNY's most successful alumni—even those accepted, with fellowships, into Ph.D. programs at Harvard and Yale—started out with remedial courses. Conservative critics love to accuse faculty of racism when professors point out that ending remediation will shut out thousands of students of color. But it remains an incontrovertible fact. For instance, two-thirds of entering Asian students require remedial courses.

Reprinted with permission

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