Fifty Years at the Center Book - CUNY Graduate Center

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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 8
MINA REES Heald Committee—named for its chairman, Henry Heald, the president of the Ford Foundation and former chancellor of New York University—emphasized the need for the state to enlarge its educational resources (it predicted, with astonishing accuracy, that registration in state educational institutions would double by 1970 and triple by 1985). It was in this atmosphere that, on April 11, 1961, Governor Nelson Rockefeller signed legislation creating the City University of New York; thus, CUNY was born. The legislature’s action also endorsed the Board of Higher Education’s recommendation that the new institution be given authority to grant doctoral and postgraduate professional degrees. The state Board of Regents took the next step in October when it authorized CUNY to confer the Ph.D. degree. The task of transforming these aspirations, grand but unfocused, into a functioning reality was placed in the very capable hands of a woman produced by the City College system whose administrative ability had won international respect. After all, she had become accustomed during World War II to being addressed as “sir.” Putting learning to work was the theme of Mina Rees’s long and distinguished career. Her special gift, as a colleague once said, was “giving life to the imagination”; she possessed a rare combination of rigorous intellect and cultivated sensibility that empowered her to function with equal ease as a scholar and as an administrator. In science, in government, and in education, she fulfilled the goal she proclaimed as student government president during her senior year at Hunter College: “to carry on the ideals of the past and enrich them a little by our endeavors, to realize a hope of worthwhile service.” 9
Page 1: FIFTY YEARS AT THE CENTER
Page 4 and 5: © 2011 The Graduate Center 365 Fif
Page 6 and 7: Introduction It is the fulfillment
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Page 12 and 13: Her unusual synergy of brains and c
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Page 16 and 17: universities had many colleges with
Page 18 and 19: THE FIRST FOUR It was an ambitious
Page 20 and 21: ALBERT BOWKER mind, intellectual hi
Page 22 and 23: With Bowker’s aggressive support,
Page 24 and 25: separate college in 1971, and she b
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Page 28 and 29: Survival For the Graduate Center, t
Page 30 and 31: discipline for doctoral study at th
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Page 34 and 35: austerity measures. City taxes were
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Page 50 and 51: 48 The elegant, landmarked building
Page 52 and 53: 50 Gracing the library with touches
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a composer—I frequently hear musi
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esurfacing. . . . Above a projectin
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SAVING BRYANT PARK covered with hun
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that the upcoming summer “is the
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Students suffered even more. They d
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including alertness, motor maturity
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verse. My hero is Emily Dickinson.
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case, the New York Public Library.
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Union Square to Fifth and 37th. The
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From historic department store to m
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Work is never finished when promise
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The Graduate Center Foundation Tax
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A New Century In 2002, the New York
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Pathfinder and of the Random House
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AN ERA OF INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVAT
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categories emerge, and how useful a
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Academic Programs and Initiatives D
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Centers and Institutes American Soc
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HONORARY MEMBERS Richard D. Parsons
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Fifty Years at the Center Book - CUNY Graduate Center

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