CUNY in the News
An analysis of reporting on the humanities at the people’s university, from its founding to today.
This project is a timeline that tracks local media reporting on CUNY, specifically related to liberal arts education and the humanities. It explores the evolution of both rhetoric and aesthetics in the news from different time periods, looking through how local publications have responded to changes at the City University of New York.
The archival research of this project explores four distinct eras, grouped around major events in the history of the university: 1961-1971, for the founding of the university and open admissions struggle; 1980-1990, for the response to the ‘70s fiscal crisis and introduction of the Board of Trustees; 2000-2010 for the post-open admissions era and the centralization of CUNY; and 2020-present, for COVID and a new fight for racial equity.
Examining these “snapshots” of reporting will provide insights into how major events such as protests, financial struggle, and various other crises corresponded with shifting representations of the place of the humanities at the university. The aim of this project is to use the archive to better understand how the work of the humanities at the university has been perceived and presented historically, so that it may be used to advocate for the humanities at CUNY today, during an era of extreme cutbacks in higher education and general hostility towards public schools.
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“SEARCH FOR TRUTH” – Letters to the Editor
Debates concerning the place of liberal arts and the humanities at CUNY sometimes play out in the “letters to the editor” section of the New York Times. They would have been part of the public discourse, not just confined to academic spaces. This particular piece from CCNY Professor Arnold J. Bornfriend is a rebuttal against…
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C.C.N.Y Plans to Expand
This point is the beginning around what will become the Open Admissions debate. What appears in the papers at this point is mostly debate between various members of the campus, rather than external reporting.
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“A YOUNG COLLEGE INSTALLS LEADER: Community College’s Role Cited at Kingsborough”
Kingsborough Community College gets its first president, and the announcement emphasizes both issues of access to education for primarily Black students in the Brooklyn neighborhood of the campus and a subheading emphasizes that most students on the campus are in the arts. Issues of access and enrollment in the arts are frequently presented together in…
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“A Kind Of Proletarian Harvard: A Kind of Proletarian Harvard”
This is a long, detailed piece from the New York Times about the history and evolution of CCNY. It argues that the school has become significantly less politically radical since free speech and anti-fascist demonstrations that took place during the 1930s. There is also a recollection of a time during the Depression where liberal arts…
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“STORK OUTRACED, A PH.D. IS EARNED: Woman Will Be First to Get City University Degree”
An article about the first recipient of a Ph.D. from a CUNY campus. Her degree was in English Literature. The article is celebratory and lighthearted in tone, sympathetic to the nontraditional gender roles that the couple occupies, with Dr. Stern’s husband proofreading her writing and being excited about taking care of the baby when she…
