CUNY: THANKS TO HERMAN BADILLO
The decision of CUNY's trustees to eliminate high-school-level remedial
classes at City University's four-year colleges is a triumph of reason,
common sense and compassion. We congratulate the trustees in general and
the CUNY board's vice chairman, Herman Badillo, in particular.
Badillo, the former congressman and Bronx borough president, has single-mindedly
and determinedly fought for reform of the discredited CUNY system. It was
Badillo who played the key role in exposing and ending the scandal of CUNY's
Hostos Community College - the supposedly bilingual school that turned
out hundreds of graduates who couldn't even handle fifth-grade English.
Opponents of reform have made it sound like gradually getting rid of
remediation in CUNY's four-year colleges will somehow destroy civilization
as we know it. But all reasonable New Yorkers understand perfectly well
that students who attend the four-year colleges should first be able to
read, write and do basic math. This is college, after all.
For decades, CUNY was a brilliantly successful engine of social mobility,
educating generations of poor but bright New Yorkers. (CUNY graduates include
Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Gen. Colin Powell and a host of Nobel Prize-winners.)
But in 1970, in response to race-baiting activists, CUNY began the folly
of "open admissions." The policy was a disaster that turned much of the
school into an academic joke. This new reform is the first step in returning
CUNY to its traditional mission as "the poor man's Harvard."
Badillo's opponents have shrilly attacked this very modest reform, wailing
that minority students will somehow be victimized by the existence of even
very low basic standards of literacy and numeracy. This is bogus compassion.
It is patronizing. And it is deeply racist. No one understands this better
than Herman Badillo.
Badillo himself came here from Puerto Rico at the age of 11, unable
to speak English. But he graduated magna cum laude from CUNY's City College
before going on to Brooklyn Law School - where he was valedictorian of
his class. So Herman Badillo knows just how offensive it is to imply that
immigrants, minorities and poor people who want to go to CUNY are incapable
of performing at college levels.
Still, it took courage for him to go after the CUNY establishment and
risk the high-minded condemnation of The New York Times - even though he
did have the support of Mayor Giuliani and Gov. Pataki. The opposition
to CUNY reform has indeed fought any and all change tooth and nail. After
all, there is more at stake than just an elitist mission to provide underqualified,
mostly minority students with a fake, near-worthless "college education."
There is also the $40 million that CUNY receives every year for remedial
instruction.
But thanks to Herman Badillo and his fellow trustees, this is the beginning
of the end of a disastrous CUNY regime that gives public education a bad
name.