City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College [Paperback]

James Traub (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1995

City College of New York is perhaps the longest-running, radical social experiment in American history. For one hundred and fifty years, City has been the bellwether of this nation's effort to bring the urban poor into the middle class. And as generations of immigrant children passed beneath its arched gateway and emerged as scientists, scholars, and teachers, City more than justified America's liberal faith in the transformative power of education. But over the last few generations the dynamics and the demographics of urban poverty have changed; the barriers to assimilation have grown. City on a Hill spans these eras, telling the story of the college's difficult present against the backdrop of its fabled past. The juxtaposition forces a fundamental question: How much power do America's institutions have in the face of the cultural and economic forces that now perpetuate inner-city poverty?

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

From 1847 through the 1960s, City College in Manhattan was renowned for the excellent education it provided free of charge (tuition was not imposed until 1976) to poor and middle-class urban students. Responding to student protests against the low number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans it enrolled, City College, in 1970, began a policy of open admissions. Traub (Too Good to Be True) recently spent a year on campus, interviewing students and faculty and attending classes. Although his detailed evaluation of the open-admissions experiment contains inspiring descriptions of idealistic teachers and hardworking students struggling to overcome poverty, racism and inadequate English-language skills, he concludes that open admissions shortchanges students. Because inner-city high school graduates often can barely read, City College has been forced, according to Traub, to provide remedial classes at the expense of academic excellence. A lively and compelling report.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

Before 1970, City College of New York was the most illustrious institution of higher learning serving impoverished urban students in America. Its conspicuous and so far unabated degradation since then is Traub's concern. He recounts CCNY history, explains CCNY today, and details the everyday life of representative undergraduates. Those students--roughly 50 percent black, 25 percent Latino, and 15 percent Asian--are academically unprepared (a typical sophomore English major Traub interviews had never read a book in his life) and convinced that affirmative action quotas should supplant what their professors call academic excellence as criteria for advancement. In 1970, CCNY instituted open enrollment, which swelled the remediation programs initially embraced by a liberal faculty. One faculty member now says of the remedial writing program he confidently fathered, "We are preparing our students to be the parents of college students, not to be students themselves." Traub, too, is willing to say such things; his integrity informs a book that should be read by anyone who wants to know what is going on in higher education outside Harvard and Stanford. Roland Wulbert --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 384 pages
• Publisher: Perseus Books (September 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0201489422
• ISBN-13: 978-0201489422
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.2 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #555,401 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars City College and all it's glory, September 28, 2000

By 

Walker E. Rowe III "Walker Elliott Rowe" (Santiago, CHILE) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (Paperback)

James's Traub "A City of a Hill Testing the American Dream at City College" has sadly gone out-of-print but you can find it an second-hand outlets or even here at amazon.com. Perhaps one reason for this is that it's theme, that affirmative action served to undermine a great institution, has gained a wide following and affirmative action is being knocked down all across the country. (Traub claims that his book takes no position on this debate but I believe it does.)

If for no other reason this book is great to read because it chronicles the City College of New York from it's heyday to it's decline. (The current mayor of New York, Rudolph Gulianni, has reversed the policies of City College and embraced meritocracy once again.) But before I describe that I need to say in all fairness that only the humanities part of the college suffered under affirmative action. The medical and engineering schools continue to be strong. After all, as Traub points out, you cannot relax standards in, say, civil engineering. If you did we would have bridges falling down.

In the 1930's through the 1960's the City College of New York was where young white Jews aspired to go to school Woody Allen went there. The student body became mainly Jewish. The main City College campus is located in Harlem which is, of course, neither Jewish nor white. It's geographical location is one reason that progressive educators and the community clamored for lowering standards. The result was the school accepted students who were not prepared so they start remedial education courses.

Anyway important Jewish scholars went to school there. Getrude Himmelfarb, Irving Kristol, and I believe Alfed Kazim and Irvin Howe are all alumni. Traub's book describes how these budding scholars gathered at a certain table in the cafeteria to discuss rarefied topics. Socialism was what these students believed. (Of course Himmelfarb and Kristol, husband and wife, later broke with the socialists and started the Neo-conservative movement.) The intellectual excitement described there is endearing and reminiscent of the movie "Yentel". O to be a part of a community that loved learning so.

I think this book says a lot about the Jewish community that I admire. In New York and in Easter Europe, they saw their means to advancement and a way to avoid persecution as education. Their rabbis were learned mean who often did not physical work but sat and pondered all day long. Their own Torah is a work of great intellectual import. Isn't that wonderful?

3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Enjoyed it very much., March 29, 1998

By 

Michael Charton - See all my reviews

This review is from: City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (Hardcover)

I read this for an important reason. I am a graduate of City College of New York. I attended in the years 1975-1979, right after Open Enrollment began. I remember then how shocked I was when I found out I was among a minority of students who would not need remedial help. My father attended CCNY as well, so he read the book too. Mr. Traub's portrayal was extremely accurate. I reread passages to see if there were areas I thought he was mistaken. There were none. It helps to have grown up in New York and have attended CCNY, for much of the book to have meaning, but for other parts of the book, the issues are important throughout the United States in examining education, and the American Dream.

2 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Can we educate our people and still maintain standards?, December 15, 2004

By 

Jill Malter ([e-mail]) - See all my reviews

This review is from: City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College (Paperback)

The question is simple. What does one do about the fact that many minority students simply are not qualified to go to college? As I see it, there are three solutions. One is to simply say "too bad." The second is to admit severely unqualified students and try to provide them with remedial education and get them to a point where they have accomplished something. The third choice, which I favor, is to help these students before they get to college, in grades 1 through 12, so that they can qualify legitimately. Of course, one can do a little of all three.

The City College of New York took the second choice in 1970, and not surprisingly, standards dropped. About half the students were either taking English as a second language or were in SEEK, a program which gave admission to otherwise unqualified students whose family incomes were below a poverty threshold. The graduation rate of the SEEK students was somewhere below 15%.

Hopefully, standards are going up again now. As a person with a love of academia, I sure hope so. We'll see what happens.

The author spent a year at the campus, attending classes, interviewing students, and interviewing faculty. We see a class teaching English as a second language. We see a few SEEK students who struggled and survived. But still, that means just getting by, maybe on track to graduate from college with the equivalent of a tenth-grade education in most fields (although having been trained to write papers that at least looked academic in form).

I don't know what has happened on the campus since this book was written ten years ago. But one hopeful sign was a proposal requiring incoming students to have college preparatory training in high school. The lack of high school college prep courses was making it too difficult for many students to accomplish anything in college.

The alternative would be to lower standards to nothing, but then one's degree would eventually be worthless.

Still, standards were high in some fields. More than one quarter of the school's graduates were in engineering. Engineering schools need to meet national standards, and this one does. Any student could enroll in engineering, but classes were difficult and had serious prerequisites. And many students were weeded out.

I think the most intriguing part of the book was the question of the teaching of racist ideologies on campus. And that meant dealing with the issue of Leonard Jeffries, a notorious teacher at the school, "who often implied, though rarely said outright, that blacks were superior to whites not only culturally and morally but biologically."

I agree with the implication by the author that the success of Jeffries at the school ought to be thought of not merely in political terms but also as one more instance of failure to meet academic standards.

This was an interesting book, and I recommend it.