CLASS OF 1953 WHO'S WHO & WHERE - The City College Fund

shook hands on the appointment, but it contained the proviso that I have my Ph.D. in hand. I hadalready defended my dissertation. There remained only the editorial changes and final submissionof copy. These I had delayed out of sheer poverty—no money for typing, degree fees, etc.—but Inow pushed as I should have before, and got the degree in hand so that I could be an Assistant Professorof English at York, with the glorious annual salary of $8,500, when it opened in 1967.My early York years were devoted to making a go of the college itself. I chaired committees, wrotethe bulletin, served as delegate to the newly formed University Senate, supervised a special alternativecurriculum for more venturesome students, and after five years, when, under University regulations,we had to create individual discipline departments, I was elected first Chair of English, aposition in which I remained through three-year re-elections for twenty years before giving it upand nominating my successor in 1992.By the end of the sixties, American colleges had changed. We had gone through the disillusionmentof Camelot, the rise of hard rock and Hugh Heffner and the pill—those virgins of 1962 would haveseemed quaint—the riots of Newark, Detroit and LA, the killings at Kent State and Jackson Mississippi,the Vietnam protests, and the 1969 Democratic Convention—all this had left students bothjaded and hard wired to push for change. York, after four years of piggy-backing on the QCC campus,moved to Jamaica. A CUNY-wide open admissions policy made it hard to group students byability levels; major attempts to do so came out of CCNY and the personality of Mina Shaughnessy,who died of cancer shortly thereafter; and from University-wide financial programs like SEEK,which helped get kids from destitute families through college. Criticism of open admissions, largelyfrom such now-seen-as-elite classes as ours of ’53, was often condemning. But students in whathad once been our circumstances were now suburban applicants for SUNY schools like Binghamton,Buffalo, Albany, and Stony Brook or private colleges. At CUNY, broken families were therule. Stay-at-home parents, like many of ours, were seldom to be found. We were no longer talkingabout the Harvard on the Hudson, or any other NYC waterways. Our undergraduate experience, ofexcellent students and some very good teachers (let’s be honest, how many great ones can youcount in your major that would require more than five fingers?) was now replaced by some verypoor students requiring great teaching. New York’s financial crises in the seventies—“Drop Dead”from Gerald Ford and receivership under Abe Beam and Ed Koch— produced drastic retrenchment—layingoff of non-tenured faculty—and rumors of campus closings. My own publishing wasmore in matters of administration than in literary scholarship (including op-ed pieces in the Timesand Newsday and debates with a CUNY chancellor in the Daily News).Now it seemed that my early talents for law were being given room for expression after all. Maybeit was in the blood. Two of my five children went into law, very successfully—until AIDS claimedone—(whose impending death and the need to spend precious time was the main reason for mygiving up the chairmanship). In the later battles over ending open enrollment, led partly in ignoranceby Herman Badillo and by Rudolph Giuliani, students at the senior colleges were to be declared,through testing, to be beyond the need of remediation. I served on a University-wide committee tocreate the process. Put bluntly, once the process was defined and our committee dismissed, theCUNY administration lowered the standard for passing the test, and floods of still under-preparedstudents were allowed in on the grounds that they could do whatever slight patchwork mending oftheir prose was needed by attending tutorial sessions (which within two years, lost much of theirfunding). Our current surge of good students, sitting alongside some ill-prepared, owes largely tothe recession, which has made CUNY comparatively attractive again. But what I describe as aCUNY problem is much wider. Ivy League students no longer read much or write that well either.A quick note about my life as a grammarian: in 1982 (before the computer age) I co-created a