Reynolds Wrapped
By Rob Wallace
After seven years as chancellor of the City University of New York,
W. Anne Reynolds resigned in mid July. Ostensibly Reynolds bailed under
pressure from a CUNY Board of Trustees newly comprised of Giuliani
and Pataki appointees.
Led by new chair Anne Paolucci and vice chair Herman Badillio, the Board admonished Reynolds for, among other things, withholding information, virtually lying about graduation requirements at the system’s community colleges, and CUNY’s grade inflation. Reynolds also suffered public attacks from Giuliani himself on CUNY standards, hardly tenable terrain for a mayor who has starved New York City’s high schools.
The Times and Newsday fell over themselves to defend the Chancellor. Upon Reynolds’ departure, Newsday editorialized, “Reynolds often seemed happier as an advocate for her students than as someone intent on holding them to a higher level performance” - as erroneous a commentary as anyone can hack up.
Reynolds did not advocate for her students beyond the lip service expected during the state’s budget process. Never did she, nor any other CUNY administrator, denounce the butchery administered by Cuomo and Pataki year in and year out.
Reynolds and her flunkies feared students, often gearing their bureaucracies toward spying on, jailing, and harassing student activists attempting to organize against the budget cuts. The disagreements between the Cuomo-appointed Reynolds and the Board stemmed from a Democratic-Republican turf war. They were not philosophical. “I think the Mayor and I, on the issues he is talking about, are more cut from the same cloth than he may realize,” Reynolds defended. Her record supports that contention to her disgrace.
Upon assuming the chancellor ship, Reynolds was greeted by student takeovers. In protest against yet another $90 million cut proposed by Cuomo, students across CUNY occupied buildings for over two weeks.
Reynolds called for campus presidents to discipline students. According to Ron McGuire, an attorney who defended many of the students at the disciplinary hearings that followed, not one student suffered expulsion or even suspension. Humiliated, Reynolds proposed the state legislature to fund a new security squad to operate directly under the Chancellor’s control. The legislature rejected the proposal.
Despite the massive cuts, CUNY, in the years subsequent, somehow increased its annual funding for security from $21,8 million to $40 million on salary and benefits alone. According to CUNY’s own 1995-6 adopted, 160 new security positions were created by raiding Other Than Personnel Services, a CUNY funding line used for, among other things, student financial aid. Although campus stats showed decreases in crime, in 95-96 City College, for example, spent $3.27 million, 5% of its budget, on security salaries alone, up from the $1.49 million spent in 90-91.
With the OPTS money, Reynolds established her own squad too. Given the Orwellian name “The SAFE Team”, the group acted as the Chancellor’s political hit squad. A 1995 memo from Captain Raymond McDermott of the NYPD’s Disorder Control Unit to CUNY Director of Security Jose Elique indicates the Team’s prime purpose was to stop student activism.
CUNY security requested the Disorder Unity provide suggestions concerning situations “that would necessitate the possible need of a substantial police response to a specific campus for a non-emergency event, student protest, etc.”
McDermott’s stunning memo sums up, “As a platoon of three squads, these.... Teams become a formidable deterrent” to activism. The Disorder Unit provided the SAFE Team training for “Conduct of Safety Personnel at a Student Protest, Sit-In” and “Building Clearing Techniques”.
The Team put its training to use. It maintained an enemies list of student activists and barred them from campus events. Though off campus, at a March ‘95 City Hall rally at which 20,000 CUNY students protested cuts, SAFE Team members monitored students. In April ‘95, the SAFE Team, with NYPD assistance and at administration insistence, jailed 47 City College students hunger striking against budget cuts. In November 95, the SAFE Team kept Nation of Islam speaker Khalid Muhammad from entering York College to speak during Black Solidarity Day although he was invited by students. Part of the Team’s larger plan, according to a resignation letter from York’s security director, was “to deny students... their constitutional right of free speech.”
And speak out the students should. The Chancellor used the budget cuts to pursue a destructive agenda. Although the state legislature restored CUNY funding in 1995, the Chancellor a declared “a state of fiscal exigency”, the only time the faculty contract allows tenured to be fired. Although the money was there, the false state of exigency allowed the campuses to dump whole departments and fire 174 professors thought unsuitable to Reynolds’ racist, downsizing agenda. City College trashed 10 departments including its ethnic studies department. Over the next two years, City College saw a subsequent 23.7% reduction in enrollment, 2,168 students left City, no longer a bastion of access of excellence. Toward the end of her regime, with the Board on her ass, Reynolds attempted to cobble together student support, guarding her flank. She convened a forum at John Jay College with “selected” student leaders allowed in by invitation only. A description of the meeting by Chris Day of the Envoy encapsulates Reynolds’ reign:
Despite all of the Chancellor’s preparations, the March 10 meeting was a complete fiasco... The meeting hadn’t even started when the trouble began. David Suker, a vice-president of City College’s Graduate Student Council and long-time CUNY activist, had not received an invitation to the meeting, but showed up anyway and demanded admission. Several beefy security guards prevented Suker from getting into the meeting...
As soon as the meeting began, I stood up and demanded that Suker be allowed in. The assembled administrators made no attempt to answer except by turning up the volume on the lectern to try and drown me out. At this point, we denounced the meeting as a fraud, and all but two students walked out. The president of the BMCC student government was asked to introduce the Chancellor to the now almost empty room, but he was on his way out the door as well. The Chancellor and the administrators tried to save face by continuing with the meeting...
Out of 200,000 students, the Chancellor was able to find only one willing to sit and listen to her for the whole meeting.
Trapped, the jig was up. Yeah! Ding-Dong, the liberal’s dead.
