With This Tuition Rise, Quieter CUNY Reaction

By Anemona Hartocollis and Colin Moynihan

New York Times
December 19, 2010
(http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/20/nyregion/20cuny.html)

Above: City University students at Federal Hall in 1989 protesting a proposed tuition increase.

Faced with a 5 percent tuition rise and the likelihood of future increases, students at the City
University of New York did not take over a building. They did not try to roll over a black SUV with
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg inside. Instead, a half-dozen of them trooped down to State Supreme
Court in Manhattan on Friday and filed a lawsuit.

Still, even the most eloquent legal brief lacks the visceral power of May 1969, when 200 Brooklyn
College students broke into the president’s office. Fired up by the civil rights movement and
demands for open admission at CUNY, the students protested by throwing a lampshade from the

second-floor balcony, setting mail on fire, smashing an end table and ripping out phone wires. They
escaped before the police arrived.
CUNY colleges once were known as theaters of unrest. In 1970, students shut off elevator service at
Hunter College and liberated the cafeteria by serving free food. Helmeted police officers were
called, and classes were suspended. In 1976, as CUNY finally faced an end to free tuition, students
marched in the streets of Harlem and boycotted classes for three days, while 13 members of the
English faculty started a hunger strike.

In 1989, the possibility of tuition increases led students at City College to pour glue and stick
toothpicks into the locks of 400 classrooms. Students seized administration buildings and blocked
traffic across the city. In 1991, another series of protests prompted classes to be canceled and
commencement to be delayed.

More recently, students have organized marches and rallies and shouted at meetings, but have
mostly stayed within the confines of law and order.

Frances Fox Piven, a professor of political science and sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center,
said it could be that students of today were just discovering their inner militancy. “I think they are
more militant than in ’75-’76,” the years of fiscal crisis when CUNY finally went from being a free
university to charging tuition, Dr. Piven said.

But compared with 1969, “I think not yet, not yet,” she said. “But movements have a very

distinctive dynamic. They can escalate very quickly. It’s not as if all the ideas that are associated
with protesters are in place when the protest starts. It’s the protest itself that changes people’s ideas,
that engages them and that in a sense educates them.”

CUNY traces its history to Victorian times, when its precursor was founded with the mission of
extending a free education to the sons of working men. In the early and middle 20th century, it was
a beacon for immigrant children, and City College, the flagship school, was often seen as an Ivy for

the poor, who were largely shut out of the real Ivy League. Some CUNY schools were also known
for strong undercurrents of leftist dissent, and as such were perfect laboratories for the kind of

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protest that could summon a battalion of police officers.

Dr. Piven was touched to hear that several of the students involved in the lawsuit were seniors, who
would not, perhaps, bear the brunt of later tuition increases. All good protests are rooted in idealism,
she said. “They have a lot of hope,” she said, “and that’s important to protest.”

Neither she nor a younger colleague, Immanuel Ness, a professor of political science at Brooklyn
College, was advocating violent clashes. But Dr. Ness said he had wondered why there had not been
more protests at CUNY, considering how this month students in England had protested rising
university fees by vandalizing buildings, clashing with the police and attacking a car carrying Prince
Charles and his wife, Camilla. And last year in California, students occupied buildings on several
campuses after the University of California system approved a 32 percent increase in fees.

“I just came back from England,” Dr. Ness said. “If they’re so militant and California is so militant,
how come not City University or State University students?”

He suggested that a reason for today’s relative calm might be that the CUNY tuition increases had
been incremental. Tuition is going up by 5 percent for undergraduate and graduate students in the
spring. For an undergraduate at one of the four-year colleges, this means an increase of $115 per
semester, to $2,415. The trustees have also approved a 2 percent increase for the fall and have
authorized the chancellor to raise tuition further if conditions require it.

The city and the world also have changed. Even in the age of Facebook and Twitter, it seems harder
than ever to get a good protest going, with police sentries shielding City Hall as though it were the
Green Zone in Baghdad, and even ordinary office buildings requiring photo identification.

And the protests of yore, while certainly attention-grabbing, were not always successful. Open
admission — guaranteed spots for city high school graduates — did come to pass, but so did the
imposition of tuition and subsequent increases.

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So perhaps using the system — by filing a lawsuit — might be more productive. The lawsuit argues
that giving the chancellor the option to raise tuition later is illegal, because the trustees cannot
delegate to someone else the authority to raise tuition.

Jay Hershenson, the senior vice chancellor for university relations at CUNY, said, “We believe the
case is without merit,” and that even if the students prevailed, the board could simply revote to raise
tuition in the spring.

Ronald B. McGuire, the lawyer for the students, said he was expelled from City College in 1969
over striking for open admissions. His expulsion was “a 10-year sentence to hard labor,” he said,
because he could not afford to go to private college. He graduated from the University of California,
Berkeley, in 1983, and then attended law school.

He has a theory for why the students of today may not be as militant as he was. CUNY — like the
rest of society — has become less tolerant of protest. “The risks for black and Latino students
committing civil disobedience are much greater than they were for the predominantly white students
at City College in the ’60s, or for the students at the University of California,” Mr. McGuire said.
“They are often arrested summarily by campus peace officers. Protest at CUNY is a very, very
high-stakes activity.”

At the courthouse on Friday, three CUNY students stood on the bottom steps of 60 Centre Street
with their court papers. Francisca Villar, a plaintiff, a single mother and a student at Lehman
College, said the tuition increase would come out of the mouths of her two children. “We’re tired of
rallying,” she said. “We’re tired of writing letters. We’re tired of going to Albany. We’re tired of
going to City Hall.”

Their lawsuit, she said, spoke the language that the CUNY trustees would understand. As she spoke,
a court officer came outside and asked the students to clear the steps. They did.