Fifty Years at the Center Book - CUNY Graduate Center

Origins
The decision to offer doctoral education at CUNY was, as an
administrator once put it, “an exercise in possibility—perhaps
chutzpah.” It was the result of a fortuitous confluence of
historical circumstances and the accident of geography, driven
by the obligations of a country assuming world dominance in the
aftermath of World War II and by the desire of a city eager to
consolidate its national stature. It was something that could
have happened, as they say, “only in New York.”
In a century, the experiment in educational democracy created
by Townsend Harris in 1847 had grown from the Free Academy
to City College. City, combined with the three other municipal
colleges (Hunter, Brooklyn, and Queens) and three community
colleges (Bronx, Queensboro, and Staten Island) had developed
into a world-class educational system. By 1961, the four senior
colleges collectively produced the eighth-highest number of
master’s degrees in the country, and led the nation in graduating
students who went on to other schools to study for their Ph.D.s;
by 1963, the senior colleges produced more graduates in
chemistry than the combined total of the four largest chemistry
departments in the United States, and nearly 40 percent more in
physics than the runner-up, MIT.
But would that be enough, given the technological demands of
the brave new world that had emerged after the war, given the
demographic bulge of the baby boom, given the sudden
opportunities provided by the GI Bill and other incentives to
pursue advanced degrees? Throughout the 1960s, a series of
governmental studies emphasized that educational resources
needed to be expanded, rapidly and drastically. The most
significant of these was commissioned by Governor Nelson
Rockefeller to examine the need for higher education and offer
recommendations for planning. In its report, issued in 1960, the
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