CCNY'S INDEPENDENT
STUDENT NEWSPAPER
NOV - DEC 2000 VOLUME
3, NUMBER 2
Messenger Nov - Dec 2000 Table of Contents | Messenger Home
|
CCNY'S INDEPENDENT
STUDENT NEWSPAPER |
Honors College: The Path of Least Resistance
As CUNY unveils its new Honors College (see CUNY Clipboard, page 8) furnished with generous resources and lavish perks, it appears that the brain trust at CUNY Central has finally figured out the recipe for academic success.
The CUNY-wide Honors College offers free tuition, smaller classes, and free laptop computers to every student, among other bonuses. The Honors College is an excellent idea-for the approximately 100 students, "University Scholars" in CUNYSpeak-who will be selected for the program.
What CUNY has discovered is hardly surprising: more support services and eliminating the tuition that has been imposed for the last quarter-century on a student body composed of (primarily) working class students of color are the tools needed to achieve academic success. Of course!
However, CUNY is stacking the deck by limiting the class to the best and brightest: the same ones who would be likely to succeed anyway. Thus, CUNY continues its march toward a tiered educational system in which students fight over artificially scarce resources imposed by racist government policies designed to hold back all working class students, but which hit immigrants and students of color the hardest.
It is the same thing we see happening everywhere in our society: A relative handful at the top of the ladder are climbing higher and higher, while the majority in the middle are barely holding on to their rungs (if they're lucky). And many on the bottom rungs are getting kicked off the ladder entirely. Maybe the Honors College is the Board of Trustees' cynical way of ensuring that CUNY really does prepare us for the real world.
By limiting reforms in this way, the politicians get to crow about their "turnaround" of CUNY when, predictably, the chosen few who make the cut for the Honors College succeed.
This is a sham and a smokescreen. The real solution is to ensure the right to free, quality education open to all, especially the students who need it most-those who are the victims of American apartheid and forced into the worst public schools.
Again, CUNY has decided to take the easy way out, selling out its own students in the process. Students throughout the CUNY system should put out the demand that all students in CUNY receive the same benefits that are now being reserved for the Honors College students.