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City on a Hill: Testing the American Dream at City College

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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?

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.

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.