From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject The Pandemic is the Time to Resurrect the Public University
Date May 10, 2020 1:04 PM
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[Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a
pandemic, because colleges and universities need the cash, is a
statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could
ever tally.] [[link removed]]

THE PANDEMIC IS THE TIME TO RESURRECT THE PUBLIC UNIVERSITY  
[[link removed]]


 

Corey Robin
May 7, 2020
New Yorker
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_ Sending students, professors, and workers back to campus, amid a
pandemic, because colleges and universities need the cash, is a
statement of bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could
ever tally. _

,

 

Since the coronavirus pandemic
[[link removed]] reached the East Coast,
at least twenty-three students, faculty, and staff of the City
University of New York have died. According to data compiled
by _cuny_ professor Michael Yarbrough and undergraduates in his
research colloquium, sixteen of these deaths were caused
by _covid_-19. They include William Helmreich
[[link removed]], a
distinguished sociologist who walked virtually every one of New York
City’s hundred and twenty-one thousand blocks; Anita Crumpton, a
graduate of City College, who was an office assistant at _CUNY_’s
Graduate Center for two decades; and Joseph Dellis and Yolanda Dellis,
a couple
[[link removed]] who
met at a bowling alley almost forty years ago and worked at
Kingsborough Community College. The cause of the remaining deaths has
not been announced.

_CUNY_ is the largest urban public-university system in the United
States. Its twenty-five campuses span the five boroughs. One of the
campuses, where five of the faculty and staff who died of the
coronavirus worked, is Brooklyn College. I teach there.

It seems likely that no other college or university in the United
States has suffered as many deaths as _cuny_. Yet, aside from
an op-ed
[[link removed]] by
Yarbrough in the _Daily News_, there has been little coverage of this
story. Once known proudly as “the poor man’s Harvard,”
_CUNY _has become a cemetery of uncertain dimensions, its deaths as
unremarked as the graves in a potter’s field.

The coronavirus has revealed to many the geography of class in
America, showing that where we live and work shapes whether we live or
die. Might it offer a similar lesson about where we learn?

Consider a recent opinion piece
[[link removed]] in
the _Times_, by the Brown University president, Christina Paxson.
Paxson, who’s also the deputy chair of the board of the Federal
Reserve Bank of Boston, argues that college campuses should reopen in
the fall. Her piece has generated wide and sympathetic discussion,
including an interview
[[link removed]] on
NPR’s “Morning Edition.”

Like many such articles, Paxson’s is a statement of universal
academic citizenship. Her concern is the “lower-income students who
may not have reliable internet access or private spaces in which to
study” and the students who depend on college for “upward
mobility.” It’s an important point. But the _Times’_ own
reporting shows
[[link removed]] that
more students at Brown come “from the top 1 percent of the income
scale than from the entire bottom 60 percent”—a feature Brown
shares with four other Ivy League universities. Just over four per
cent of Brown’s students
[[link removed]] come
from the bottom twenty per cent.

Meanwhile, _CUNY_’s campuses
[[link removed]] are
among the most powerful engines of upward mobility in the country,
drawing hundreds of thousands of students from the poor and the
working class.

The hidden force of those numbers is felt across Paxson’s prose.
Paxson insists that campuses can reopen this fall if there is
“rapid” and “regular” testing of all students throughout the
year. At _CUNY_, even in the best of times, we often don’t have soap
in our bathrooms. We also still have push faucets. To wash one hand, I
must use the other to twist and hold one of the sink’s two handles,
hard and continuously. This produces water of a single
temperature—cold—leaving me, always, with one hand that’s
touched a surface and must remain unwashed. It’s hard to
imagine coronavirus tests
[[link removed]] when
washing both hands is nearly impossible.

Paxson also envisions universities “collaborating with their state
health departments and rolling out tracing technology on their
campuses.” Yet there’s nowhere at _cuny_ that I could go simply
to find out the most basic statistics on coronavirus infections and
deaths. An article in _The Atlantic_
[[link removed]],
written by a lecturer at Yale, recommends that universities track and
trace students through their campus “touchless keycard entry”
systems. Brooklyn College can’t afford keycards. Instead, I must
deploy six keys—three for my office, two for the department office,
and one that does double duty for our smart classroom and the
bathroom—to make my way across campus.

Finally, Paxson worries about the virus spreading through college
dorms. She counsels that “we can’t simply send students home and
shift to remote learning every time this happens.” She recommends
that sick students be quarantined in hotel rooms—“costly,” she
acknowledges, “but necessary.” That certainly reflects the Brown
experience, in which undergraduates live
[[link removed]] on
campus for at least three of their four years, and money is plentiful.
But that experience is atypical. According to data
[[link removed]] compiled
by the Seton Hall professor Robert Kelchen, just under sixteen per
cent of undergraduates in the United States live on campus, and around
forty per cent of community-college students live with their parents.
From conversations I’ve had with students, I’d say that the latter
number is higher at _cuny_. A student who gets sick at Brooklyn
College will, in all likelihood, end her day where it began: at home
with her family.

For decades, a handful of boutique colleges and powerhouse
universities have served as emblems of our system of higher education
[[link removed]].
If they are not the focus of discussion, they are the subtext, shaping
our assumptions about the typical campus experience. This has remained
true during the pandemic. The question of reopening has produced
dozens of proposals, but most of them are tenable only for schools
like Brown; they don’t obtain in the context of Brooklyn College.
The coronavirus has seeded a much-needed conversation about building a
more equal society. It’s time for a similar conversation about the
academy.

In academia, as in the rest of society, a combination of public and
private actors directs wealth to those who need it least. While
_CUNY_ struggles to survive decades of budget cuts—and faces, in
the pandemic, the possibility
[[link removed]] of
even more—donors lavish elite colleges and universities with gifts
of millions, even billions, of dollars. Sometimes these
donations fund
[[link removed]] opportunities
for low-income students, but mostly they serve as tax-deductible
transfers to rich, private institutions, depriving the public of
much-needed revenue. What taxes federal and state governments do
collect may be returned to those institutions in the form of hefty
grants and contracts, which help fund operating budgets that Brooklyn
College can only dream of. This is the song of culture in our society.
The bass line is wealth and profit; the melody is diversity and
opportunity.

Yet, for all the talk of the poor and students of color at the Ivy
League, the real institutions of mobility in the United States are
underfunded public universities. Paxson may believe that “a
university campus is a microcosm of any major city in the U.S.,” as
she told NPR, but _CUNY_ is no microcosm. With nearly two hundred and
seventy-five thousand students
[[link removed]] and
forty-five thousand staff
[[link removed]]—a
population larger than that of many American cities—it is what the
Latin root of the word “university” tells us higher education
should be: the entire, the whole. More than seventy-five per cent of
our undergraduate students are nonwhite
[[link removed]].
Sixty-one per cent receive Pell Grants, and the same percentage have
parents who did not graduate from college. At City College and Baruch
College, seventy-six and seventy-nine per cent of students
[[link removed]],
respectively, start out in the bottom quintile of the income
distribution and wind up in one of the top three quintiles. For
hundreds of thousands of working-class students, in other words, a
cash-starved public university is their gateway to the middle or
upper-middle class.

Beyond opportunity, institutions like _cuny_ offer a vision of
education that is less about credentials than about the deep
contact—and conflict—between reading and experience that is the
essence of culture. On most élite campuses, undergraduates are
eighteen to twenty-two years old. At _cuny_, more than twenty-five
per cent of undergraduates are twenty-five or older. Our campuses are
not cloisters; they’re classrooms out of the pages of Plato
[[link removed]] and Huey
Newton
[[link removed]],
where philosophy is set in motion in and by the street. Like other
public colleges and universities, _cuny_ is a mustard seed of
intellectual life, a source of reinvention and renewal. If we are to
endure this crisis—and, later, to learn from it—some of our most
original thinkers and leaders will come from schools like City
College.

One of the reasons Paxson believes we need to open schools is that
many of them are heading toward financial disaster
[[link removed]].
Here the distinction between public and private—or Brown and
Brooklyn College—begins to collapse. Paxson describes the
possibilities as “catastrophic,” across the board, and she is not
exaggerating. Heavily dependent on tuition, and uncertain that online
courses will attract or retain students, many institutions anticipate
a loss of revenue so large and precipitous that they fear they may
have to close
[[link removed]].

Yet these choices are not dictates of nature and economics. They are
political and historical, arising from years of decision and
indecision, which have slowly, sometimes imperceptibly, shifted the
burden of higher education from public to private sources. The tax
subsidies for big gifts to Harvard and Yale find their counterpart in
the proportion of revenues that public colleges and universities now
derive from tuition. Though this shift has been going on for
decades, 2017
[[link removed]] was
a watershed: it was the first year that public colleges and
universities began to receive more revenue from tuition than from the
state.

If this is the funding model that has forced upon us the choice of
open or die—or open and die—we might heed the example of a
different catastrophe, which prompted American society to make a
different choice. During the Depression, the New York
municipal-college system opened two flagship campuses: Brooklyn
College and Queens College. These schools built the middle class, took
in refugees from Nazi Germany, remade higher education, and
transformed American arts and letters. In 1942, Brooklyn College
gave Hannah Arendt
[[link removed]] her
first teaching job in the United States; an adjunct, she lectured on
the Dreyfus affair, which would figure prominently in “The Origins
of Totalitarianism
[[link removed]].”
In the decades that followed, _cuny_ built more campuses. Until
1976, it was free to all students; the government footed the bill.

What prompted this public investment in higher education was neither
sentimentality about the poor nor a noblesse oblige of good works. It
was a vision of culture and social wealth, derived from the activism
[[link removed]] of
the working classes and defended by a member of Britain’s House of
Lords. “Why should we not set aside,” John Maynard
Keynes wondered
[[link removed]] in
1942, “fifty million pounds a year for the next twenty years to add
in every substantial city of the realm the dignity of an ancient
university.” Against those who disavowed such ambitions on the
grounds of expense, Keynes said, “Anything we can actually _do_ we
can afford.” And “once done, it is _there_.”

Public spending, for public universities, is a bequest of permanence
from one generation to the next. It is a promise to the future that it
will enjoy the learning of the present and the literature of the past.
It is what we need, more than ever, today. Sending students,
professors, and workers back to campus, amid a pandemic, simply
because colleges and universities need the cash, is a statement of
bankruptcy more profound than any balance sheet could ever tally.

IN MEMORY OF

Moshe Augenstein
Amelia Bahr
Joseph Bertorelli
Mark Blum
Joseph Brostek
Anita Crumpton
Javaney Daley
Joseph Dellis
Yolanda Dellis
Luis Diaz
William Tulio Divale
William Gerdts
William Helmreich
Donald Hoffman
Raymond Hoobler
Jay Jankelewicz
Juliet Manragh
Yves Roseus
Joel Shatzky
Paul Shelden
Michael Sorkin
Ralph Steinberg
Thomas Waters

_[Corey Robin is the author of “The Enigma of Clarence Thomas
[[link removed]],”
“The Reactionary Mind
[[link removed]],”
and “Fear
[[link removed]].”
He is a professor of political  He is a professor of political
science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center.]_

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