Both the City University and the city in general faced a deeply destructive fiscal crisis during the 1970s. In response, the state of New York installed the CUNY Board of Trustees and took over the funding for CUNY’s four-year campuses; a model which still exists today. This effectively cancelled any progress made by the Open Admissions policy, as many Black and Latino students were increasingly shut out by the tuition costs. Cutbacks, austerity, and rising costs for students were the defining features of this decade.
Articles about the humanities at CUNY during this decade center around three major themes:
- The Jobs Crisis for Humanities Majors
- Teacher Training and Integration with Local Communities
- Rehabilitating CUNY’s Reputation
Teacher Training and Integration with Local Communities are most frequently talked about hand-in-hand, as both subjects are about better serving the student populations where schools are situated. They are tagged separately for the situations where that overlap does not exist.
Interestingly, a much larger portion of the reporting from this decade shifts away from the New York Times and into more working-class papers, such as The Daily News and the Amsterdam News.
To read more, please visit the CUNY Digital History Archive. The site draws especially from Austerity Blues: Fighting for the Soul of Public Higher Education, by Stephen Brier and Michael Fabricant.
“Upgrade of Humanities Courses”
“Hostos: At the Dawn of a New Decade”
“City U. Considering a Plan That Would Limit Tenure: Enrollment Decline Foreseen”
“Why Must English-as-a-Second-Language Be ‘Remedial’?”
“The Market for Ph.D.’s”
“An Experiment in Reschooling the Scholar”
“The National Writing Project”
“Black Studies at CUNY Tech looks to the future”
“City U. Graduate School Gains High Rank”
“City U. Profiles Its ’81 Graduates a Year Later”
“See ray of hope for Evers College”
“CUNY Tech Student Theatre Works Productions”
Ad: “Scholars Against the Escalating Danger of the Far Right”
“Medgar Evers College regains four year status”
“Writers Conference at Evers”
“CUNY Chancellor Blasts Administration Policies”
“College Meeting to Discuss Migration”
“Panel Proposes CUNY Abolish Education Major: End to Education Major Proposed In CUNY’s Training of Teachers”
“Queens College, 50 Years Old, Seeks to Rebound”
“New Role for CUNY: Big Brother to Public Schools”
“Don’t Shut Welfare Recipients Out of College”
“Cuts at Hunter”
“When Welfare and Schooling Don’t Mix”
“Lehman College to Open Satellite Campus in Japan”
“Minorities at Baruch College Charge Neglect of Ethnicity”
“Facing Budget Cuts, CUNY Turns Away Students”
“CUNY Head Weighs Requiring New General-Education Courses”
