On May 27, five days before graduation, the Board of Trustees of the
City University of New York (CUNY) passed a resolution prohibiting
students at Hostos Community College from graduating unless they passed
a university-wide English proficiency test (the CUNY Writing Assessment
Test-CWAT).  A year earlier, Hostos stopped requiring the test as the
sole criterion of English proficiency.  Instead, they developed their
own writing test, and used that in combination with a number of other
criteria to determine whether students had learned enough English to
graduate.  The students who were scheduled to graduate on June 1 had
completed all the requirements that they were told they needed in order
to graduate.  The Trustees' decision singles out for attack the largely
Latino student body at Hostos, and CUNY students who speak English as a
second language in general.  It is only the latest episode of a
longer-term effort to drive large numbers of students of color out of
CUNY.

The Trustees' decision threw hundreds of students into turmoil by
changing their graduation requirements five days before graduation.  The
decision affected not only Hostos students, but students at five of
CUNY's six community colleges.  Such a shenanigan would be unspeakable
at a private college or even at most state and city universities.  But
this spring, Hostos students found out that in the effort by the
governor, mayor and trustees to roll back open admissions at CUNY,
anything goes.

Hostos: Born Out of the Open Admissions Struggle

Hostos opened in 1970 as a community college in the citywide CUNY
system.  It is a bilingual school, where 80% of the student body speaks
Spanish as their first language.  Many classes are taught in Spanish.
It is located in the South Bronx, an extremely poor and largely
immigrant neighborhood. CUNY students in general and Hostos students
particularly are not stereotypical American college students.  A 1986
CUNY study showed that 42% of the Hostos student body came from
households where the family income was less than $4,000 and 75% of the
students had family incomes of less than $8,000. The same study showed
that 96% of the students at Hostos were non-white. Another study showed
that three times as many CUNY freshmen came from low income households
as the national average for students at public colleges and a majority
of CUNY students work during their first year, more than double the rate
for college freshmen nationally. 56% of CUNY students are
self-supporting, 23% are supporting children and over 60% are women.

Hostos was born from the radical mass movement for open admissions that
reshaped CUNY in 1969.  Before open admissions, CUNY had an almost
totally white working class student body.  With support from the
community, the few Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College
campus in Harlem staged a strike for open admissions.  The
administration caved in, and opened up CUNY to all NYC high school
graduates. Overnight, CUNY's enrollment skyrocketed, the majority of
CUNY students were people of color, and CUNY developed much closer links
with community-based activists and institutions throughout New York.
New campuses opened with close links to impoverished neighborhoods:
Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn (named after the civil rights leader),
Hostos (named after Eugenio Maria de Hostos, a 19th Century Puerto Rican
anti-colonialist and educator) and York College.

While not able to stop open admissions in 1969, conservative forces put
forward quiet criticisms to lay the groundwork for a later attack.  Sure
enough, the current attack echoes the same themes that were floated
nearly thirty years ago. One of the first criticisms of open admissions,
before it even began, claimed that the "educational standards" of CUNY
would be compromised by allowing in all high school graduates.   These
criticisms were not really about "educational standards" but were about
trying to keep Black, Puerto Rican and other students of color out.  The
supporters of open admissions were the ones truly concerned about
raising the educational standards for all poor people in New York City
by giving everybody a chance at college. One way they did this was to
implement an extensive system of remedial classes.

The Attack on Remedial Classes and Community Colleges

This spring, both Mayor Giuliani and CUNY's Board of Trustees (and CUNY
Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds) made public attacks on CUNY's community
colleges,  focusing on the 30-year-old theme of "educational standards."
In March, Mayor Giuliani accused CUNY's six community colleges of "an
inability to educate young people," and said it was "a disaster" and
"absolutely pathetic" that only 5% of their students graduate in two
years.

Giuliani purposefully ignores that community colleges exist precisely to
educate students who are immigrants, high school dropouts, single
mothers and older students, students with full-time jobs and children to
support. It is not remarkable or bad that students take longer than two
years to finish. Most attend school only part-time. And in fact at the
Borough of Manhattan Community College (another CUNY campus), 20% of its
students graduate in five years, which is higher than the national rate
of 17% at community colleges. Additionally, many students who don't
graduate from community colleges transfer to a 4-year college and finish
there.

Anne Paolucci (whom Gov. Pataki recently appointed as Chair of CUNY's
Board of Trustees), and Board Vice Chair Herman Badillo have led the
attack on Hostos and on CUNY from within. Badillo was involved in
creating Hostos in 1969 as a bilingual community-based institution. Now,
he is leading the charge on Hostos. Badillo has pushed Giuliani and
Pataki's white supremacist and capitalist agenda through in a way they
would not have been able to do.

Gov. Pataki and Mayor Giuliani, both Republicans, have packed the board
with people who are opposed to CUNY's mission of educating the poor
people of New York City, and who intend to end that mission by
dismantling open admissions. Badillo advocates ending open admissions by
using an entrance exam for all incoming students, and turning away
"unqualified" applicants. He and Paolucci also want to completely close
some of CUNY's community colleges. Once they got a majority on the board
who support their agenda, Badillo joyfully stated, "I always wanted to
do this before, but couldn't." The ongoing attacks on remedial courses,
community colleges, and Hostos students most specifically, are a
milestone in the most serious attempt yet to end open admissions.

A Cynical and Racist Attack

Giuliani, Pataki, and now former-Chancellor Ann  Reynolds have
repeatedly condemned and repressed students (and sympathetic
administrators) protesting cuts to CUNY's budget. Giuliani's cops
attacked the 1995 student demonstration against the budget cuts, where
20,000 students rallied and dozens were arrested after cops attacked the
demonstration. Reynolds was brought in as chancellor in 1991 on the
heels of the historic building takeovers and successful student actions
against tuition hikes at CUNY in 1989 and 1991. Reynolds quickly fired
administrators who supported students, and created the SAFE team, a
CUNY-wide police force to spy on and bust up student protests. Paolucci
and Badillo, now heading a majority on the board, finally pushed out
Reynolds in July and will surely bring in a new chancellor who is even
more odious and compliant. They have grown impatient with Reynolds'
effective but slow piece-by-piece strategy of dismantling open
admissions.

Almost yearly since 1976, both Democrats and Republicans in the
statehouse and mayor's office have pushed through serious budget cuts,
cut remedial classes, and raised tuition. For Pataki and Guiliani to
then turn around and attack students for not being prepared and for
taking a long time to graduate is the ultimate in cynicism. They are now
using the supposedly "low educational standards" caused by their budget
cuts as a pretext to further cut CUNY's budget, and to decimate the
remedial classes and community colleges. The effect will be a stake
through the heart of open admissions at CUNY.

The only way to stop this from happening is to organize a mass student
movement to regain free tuition and open admissions for all New York
City residents. Since 1969 this has been dismembered piece by piece.
Today, CUNY students have an uphill battle to even win back what was won
before, let alone create a university system which truly serves the
people and is democratically controlled by the students, faculty and
workers.

The Student Response at Hostos

Student leaders at Hostos responded immediately when the Trustees
announced the 11th hour rule change. Yamille Mendez, president of the
Hostos Student Government Organization (SGO) immediately sent out
information to all other CUNY student governments to mobilize support.
Hostos SGO members met with other CUNY activists, including Student
Liberation Action Movement (SLAM!), CUNY's radical student activist
organization that primarily organized this spring's campaign against the
budget cuts and tuition increase.

Mendez, along with Hostos student Miguel Castillo (who did not pass the
CWAT test), filed a lawsuit on May 30 against CUNY, the Board of
Trustees, Chancellor Reynolds, Hostos, and Badillo and Paolucci. On July
14 the judge ruled in their favor, allowing the 129 students held in
limbo to graduate. The judge condemned CUNY's hasty efforts to impose
new graduation criteria retroactively as "arbitrary and capricious, and
in the present case must be held to be undertaken in bad faith ... The
obvious unfairness in changing the degree requirements immediately
before graduation is manifest."

Rather than letting it go at that, CUNY immediately appealed the ruling.
This means the students will still not get their degrees unless they win
again at the next level. And if the students lose that case, they will
have to come up with $20,000 to cover CUNY's legal costs. CUNY is
holding these students' future hostage for daring to challenge them.

The students' lawyer, Ron McGuire, is representing them for free.
McGuire, a graduate of City College, is an activist lawyer whose work in
court is a tremendous asset to the CUNY student movement. But as he
himself always emphasizes, students can't build a movement just through
lawsuits. We have to do broad outreach to make sure every student
understands what's going on, and then build large, creative and militant
student resistance. And we have to mobilize community support.

It is always difficult to mobilize students during the summer, so it is
understandable that the Hostos SGO chose to pursue a lawsuit rather than
mass activism at the end of the spring semester. Hopefully the incoming
student government will lead a mass campus and community mobilization in
the fall. The prospects for this look good: there are many activists in
Hostos incoming student government. As incoming SGO president Julio
Alcantrara was quoted in the May 29 New York Times, "We are definitely
very angry. We do not want to remain quiet and will do no matter what to
maintain Hostos's mission to be a college in the community serving
students like me who do not know English."

What Alcantrara articulated is what all CUNY students need to fight for
on our campuses and in our communities this fall. It is our only hope of
winning back CUNY to its mission to serve the people. *****