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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“The Market for Ph.D.’s”
A female philosophy professor from the Graduate Center rebuts a claim in a previous letter that all unemployed philosophers are male. I include this brief and eloquent reply to illustrate how the dialogues around the humanities Ph.D. are changing just over two decades later; while the university was scrambling to increase capacity to provide Ph.D.’s…
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“An Experiment in Reschooling the Scholar”
This article is one of many concerning retraining teachers to better serve the current needs of students in a changing job market. For example, the article discusses the potential for retraining humanists in fields like computer science. It describes the English major as an “endangered species.” Read more.
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“The National Writing Project”
A longform article on the need for writing instruction and how it has progressed in the post-1960s era that pushed for universal higher education. CUNY’s Basic Writing program is featured along with the work of CUNY professor Mina Shaughnessy. The movement at CUNY is taken as a jumping off point for a national dialogue around…
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“Black Studies at CUNY Tech looks to the future”
As in other Amsterdam News articles on CUNY and the arts and humanities, an emphasis is made on the connection between the newly robust programming and the local community that it is meant to serve. This is one of the earliest articles from the decade in this narrative thread. Read more.
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“City U. Graduate School Gains High Rank”
A celebratory piece on the Graduate Center’s programs in the humanities ranking nationally for the first time. The content of the article reflects the blow to reputation that CUNY faced in the 70s, after its rocky implementation of Open Admissions and the broader fiscal crisis in NYC. It suggests that the GC wasn’t able to…
