Farewell, Moses

Thousands fewer CCNY students, departments and staff slashed, demoralized faculty, student rights trampled: Yolanda Moses's era of error ends. Thank God.

Part 1 of a 2-part series.  Click here for Part 2 of the series. (from Messenger December 1999)

By Rob Wallace

This is part one of a two-part series summing up the past six years at CCNY under ex-President Yolanda Moses.

On July 1 City College President Yolanda T. Moses resigned. Stanford Roman has been named interim president in her stead (see related article).

Moses ended her six-year tenure as City's president, according to her resignation letter, for "academic and personal reasons." But her resignation was clearly forced by CUNY's Board of Trustees and its new chair Herman Badillo who has often openly criticized Moses.

Many may consider antipathy from the racist Badillo a badge of honor, but the record shows Moses was truly a terrible president.

High Hopes

High hopes were had by many when Yolanda T. Moses was named City College's ninth president in 1993. Brought to CCNY by her friend from California Chancellor Ann Reynolds, Moses's resume sparkled-just the list of awards she's received run three pages.
Moses also seemed to have the activist credentials. In the late 1960s, she helped organize and run a Black Studies program in the Watts area of Los Angeles. She also organized a volunteer tutorial program for Los Angeles County inmates. Moses also served on a "Free Angela Davis" committee after the communist black activist was falsely jailed in the early 1970s. Later, as an Anthropology professor, Moses helped found a Department of Ethnic and Women's Studies at Cal State in the face of a backlash from "old-boy" anthropologists.

Moses appeared a great match for City College. But the realities of day-to-day management of a college comprised primarily of working class Black, Latino, and immigrant students and, therefore, perpetually attacked by City and State power structures, proved Moses's cultivated image as a good liberal false.

Instead of defending City and CUNY from general budget cuts from the State, or specified cuts demanded by "her good friend" Chancellor Reynolds, or verbal and fiscal attacks from Mayor Giuliani and his bureaucratic goons, Moses helped institute the cuts and detrimental policies, even to the point of having her own students arrested, over 50 faculty fired, whole departments jettisoned, student government elections rigged, newspapers shut down, and activists spied on.

The early days never hinted at what followed. Moses began her tenure full of vim and vigor. A September 1993 New York Times article characterizes Moses: "She is at once passionate and affable, irrepressible and combative. She makes her points patiently, as if she knows already that her vision departs from the traditional vision in higher education, and that it is going to take some explaining."

But the ceaseless, and often deservedly vitriolic, protest of her administrative and political decisions turned Moses bitter, impatient and isolated. One CCNY undergrad reminisced with the Messenger that protest by students, faculty and community members denouncing Moses's attacks on the Black Studies Department, including picketing at her college-provided duplex on West 87th Street, had "Moses tearing her own hair out." Remembered the student, "She had bags under her eyes."

One got the sense she came to resent a City College that popped her self-image as a conscientious liberal, as she would stay away from campus for weeks on end. It got so bad that at the end Moses was holding more open meetings with students, faculty, and staff at the University of New Mexico (UNM), where she was applying for the presidency, than she had at City College the last two and a half years of her tenure.
We follow here with some of the Messenger's most memorable Moses moments.

Nursing Cuts

In the Spring of 1995, with a $6 million budget deficit, Moses closed the School of Nursing that 300 full-time students attended, where 500 more students took pre-nursing classes, and which had a three-year waiting list for admission. Many of the school's alumni serve in traditionally poor and underserved areas of New York City. She also closed the theater, dance, and physical education departments. Moses let go 45 faculty that year. In comparison, Brooklyn College lost 2 faculty.

While applying for the presidency at UNM earlier this year, Moses told their school's newspaper that "I made those cuts with school-wide input. I spoke with faculty members who told me, 'We don't want to do this at all, but if we have to, here are the things we think you should cut.'"

Former CCNY faculty member Joan Johnston, who served on the retrenchment committee, posted a response on CUNYTALK-a CUNY-oriented email list. She wrote that Moses was reluctant to speak with either faculty or students during the retrenchment process. Moreover, she continued, "As a result of the closure of nursing, phys ed and theater, enrollment at City dropped about 10%, with the result that funding further decreased, offsetting some of the savings."

Indeed, Moses would continue this vicious cycle year-in and year-out without comment. She wielded the budget-cut ax as a political weapon, hacking the ethnic studies departments the next year (see below). City College has since seen one-third of its student body leave. From a high of about 15,000 in 1994, the CCNY campus is now home to about 10,000 students. With fewer students, CUNY Central continues to chop away at City's budget. Just this past spring, City saw another cut of $750,000 when it lost 6.1% more its student body. Future drops will likely be much worse if the Board of Trustees' decision to destroy remediation at senior colleges passes judicial muster come 2000.

Black Eye for Black Studies

When Moses arrived, Professor Leonard Jeffries of City College's Black Studies Department was in the midst of controversy. Since 1991 the professor had gotten into verbal fisticuffs with various New York politicos for his declarations that Jews played a major role in the slave trade and for his taxonomy of blacks and whites as "sun and ice people."

But Jeffries' take on the attacks on City College and Open Admissions were astute and deadly accurate as at various "Defend Open Admissions" forums the last few years, where Jeffries would skewer Moses, and "the little men" administrators who surround her, for implementing devastating budget cuts at CUNY's flagship campus.

Moses spent the earlier part of her tenure "de-Jeffriesizing" the campus. Jeffries' power extended beyond the class room and into Finley Student Center. The administration took over the Finley Center. By Spring of 1995 Jeffries was forced from his position as chair of the Black Studies Department. Jeffries was replaced with John Amoda, who had very close ties with the Nigerian military dictatorship and proposed City College sponsor a "peace school" for some Nigerian generals.

In the Spring of 1996, City College faced another huge budget deficit of $8 million. Instead of defending her college and fighting back against CUNY Central and the Governor Pataki, she implemented more cuts. In March 1996, Moses announced plans to close the Departments of Black Studies, Latino-Caribbean Studies, Jewish Studies, and Asian Studies, and downgrade them to "programs."

In response, a coalition of students and faculty produced a pamphlet denouncing her "lies and distortions." Moses declared the "restructuring" of ethnic studies would result in "more students" taking "more ethnic and area studies with more full-time faculty." But, the student-faculty pamphlet stated, permitting outside faculty to teach ethnic studies courses didn't require giving the ethnic studies departments the death penalty.

Moses claimed that the variety and "number of available courses" in ethnic studies "will actually increase" "because over three times as many faculty will join in teaching ethnic and area studies courses under the new structure." The students and faculty called this "patently false." Qualified full-time faculty from other departments already had full course loads with huge class sizes and couldn't take on bigger loads or else they were already teaching ethnic studies courses.

Moses declared her decision to "convert" the ethnic studies departments was based on "one of the recommendations of the College-Wide Retrenchment Committee, composed of 37 faculty, staff and students." But that committee didn't have any representatives from these ethnic studies departments to offer accurate assessments of ethnic studies' function at CCNY. Moreover, the committee's recommendations were vague, presenting Moses three options including maintaining the departments as is. Ultimately, Moses's attempts to pawn off blame onto a committee she convened and served on failed, as she made the final decision to snuff ethnic studies.

A Revealing Conference

A few days after her announcement, a group of forty students angry at Moses's plans to trash the ethnic studies departments bum-rushed one of Moses's monthly press conferences in the administration building.

Her interaction with the students at the press conference was emblematic of her tenure: distortions and bombast. After declaring the new programs would be "cost-effective" offering students "more choices," she stated no faculty would be cut. The gutted departments' faculty would be moved to remaining departments. The departments receiving the shipwrecked professors would expand their curricula to incorporate ethnic courses, Moses continued.

When the floor was opened to questions, students challenged the underpinnings of her decision.
• A hard fought struggle was undertaken to found these departments. Surely, Moses, an anthropologist who founded her own ethnic studies department, would understand the necessity for minorities to be able to represent their histories on their own terms?
• The claim that no faculty would be cut was inaccurate at best, manipulative at worst. No full-time faculty would be fired. But a then-unspecified number of adjuncts would be let go. Adjuncts teach more than half of CUNY's courses. Full-time faculty would be transferred to new departments where they would lose seniority and be open to losing their jobs during any subsequent retrenchments.
• "Cost-effectiveness" isn't intrinsically good. The most "cost-effective" structuring would be a faculty of one. Let the poor prof teach every single course at City. Cost-effective indeed, but education-ineffective.

One student pointed out the impropriety of spending $100,000 on new fences to separate the campus from the community while trashing whole departments. Moses replied the money for the gates was already allocated years ago from the a different fund. Hers was a wonk's argument. The absurd bungling of priorities remains: City College put up shining gates around a disappearing university.

In response to students Moses spoke of the "reality" of the state's financial situation foreclosed anything less than implementing the budget cuts. But if reality dictates that education must be cut at CUNY, why did CUNY Security's budget almost double on salaries and equipment alone about that time? Why did CUNY spend hundreds of millions on construction?

Although she tried to push off all blame onto Governor Pataki, students pointed out that Moses is part of a state hierarchy aiming to gut public education. CUNY college presidents are the Governor's shock troops micromanaging budget-cut implementation. Pataki doesn't go from campus to campus doing austerity's dirty work.

To that argument she replied, "Yes, I am a part of it! Yes, I am a part of it!" It was finally something accurate. And that was the problem.

NEXT ISSUE: Part 2 of the series on President Moses' era: How Moses responded when City College students did what she refused to do-fight back against the cuts.