Editorial:
Dr. Moses & Ms. Hyde

"Institutions of higher education in the United States are products of Western society in which masculine values like an orientation toward achievement and objectivity are valued over cooperation, connectedness and subjectivity." --Yolanda Moses, 1990

So wrote anthropologist Yolanda T. Moses in 1990, three years before she became president of City College in August 1993. Moses told the New York Times in September 1993 that she was only summarizing a pedagogical literature, but went on to defend many of the same principles of a multicultural education. In the past, educators assumed "that students are homogenous, that they come from the same kinds of backgrounds, that they have the same cultural backgrounds," she told the Times.

The Times article marked the opening salvo in what has become, so far, a 5-and-a-half-year public relations campaign aimed at cultivating Dr. Moses's image as a conscientious liberal. Indeed, last May she was conferred an honorary degree by Bloomfield College of New Jersey for "embracing human diversity in all it manifestations" and "making City College an international model for enhancing human potential." Over the winter break, Moses was named to the board of directors of Human Rights Watch, an organization that monitors human rights abuses around the world and whose aims include "to prevent discrimination" and "to uphold political freedom".                        

   But given Moses's record at CCNY, both honors bestowed on Moses appear ludicrous and reward an image that reality demolishes.

Liberal image: According to Shana Moses Bawek, Moses's daughter, Moses provided her this feminist life advice, "You can be the doctor, you don't have to be the nurse."
CCNY reality: In 1995, Moses closes down an entire School of Nursing. Many of its students are women and would have served in New York hospitals.

Liberal image: Moses served on a "Free Angela Davis" committee after the communist black activist was falsely jailed in the early 1970s.
CCNY reality: In 1995, Moses has the NYPD and the SAFE Team jail 47 CUNY student activists peacefully hunger striking against budget cuts in the NAC Rotunda. In 1998, she uses false accusations to shut down the elected Graduate Student Council and the Graduate Student Messenger newspaper, and kick out student activist David Suker, all of whom she disagreed with politically. She also permits CUNY Security to install a video camera in a smoke detector outside student activist office to spy on activist movements. Human Rights Watch needs to open a file on Moses, one of its own directors.

Liberal image: In 1968-69 Moses helped organize a Black Studies Program in Watts, Los Angeles. In 1980-82 she helped found and chaired a Department of Ethnic and Women's Studies at the California State Polytechnic University in the face of a backlash from "old-boy" anthropologists.
CCNY reality: In 1996, Moses shuts down four ethnic studies departments under the guise of a budget crunch and the departments' lack of student majors. When asked by the Amsterdam News why, following her reasoning, she wouldn't close the Physics department which had fewer than a dozen student majors, Moses, "the activist", responds, "What you fail to understand is that the physics department brings in over $4 million a year in grants."

Liberal image: Moses speaks at colleges across the country, pontificating on the virtues of a multicultural education and the fight against racism.
CCNY reality: Despite CUNY's own reports showing some 50% of Blacks, Latinos, and Asians entering CUNY under the old entrance criterion would be blocked by the Board of Trustees' decision to end remediation at senior colleges (see front page), Moses, afraid of the Board, remains completely silent save offering a plan that parrots the Board's proposal to end remediation.

In a chapter of a 1996 book, The Conversation Begins-Mothers and Daughters Talk About Living Feminism, Moses describes her mother's fight against America's racism, "When my mother learned that most black or Latino students were automatically placed on the noncollege track, her militancy kicked in. Taking on the entire school system, she said, 'My kids are going to be in college-prep classes because they are going to college.'" Moses's refusal to speak out against the Board of Trustees' attack on remediation, as the presidents of Brooklyn College and Medgar Evers College presidents have, directly contradicts her mother's admonitions to "[take]a stand when things are not right."

Moses continues, "When the school guidance counselor refused to recommend me for a college scholarship ('You'll be a good secretary'), my mother said, 'We don't need this,' and showed off my work to the PTA. In the fall of 1964 I entered San Jose State College on a four-year scholarship from the national PTA." During her tenure Moses has shown herself committed to pulling the educational opportunities she herself enjoyed out from under New York's own Black and Latino youth. Her cowardice will help force thousands of minority women-many without the support of their PTA or the nannies Moses hired to care for her children-into secretary-type positions. That is, if they're lucky. Already  13,000 CUNY students have been forced into Giuliani's workfare.

It's clear what City College needs is Moses's mother, a strong woman who fought back against a racist system in an attempt to increase educational opportunity, not Dr. Moses, the liberal mirage intent on sacrificing her students' futures for her own career ambitions.  

--ROB WALLACE