Bending Standards

"Get an education" is the traditional U.S. answer to poverty and inequality. As a result, thousands of Negro youngsters are trying to enter public colleges across the country. But if they fail to qualify, often because they went to poor high schools, how can the colleges admit them without diluting their own academic standards? More deeply, how can the colleges give blacks a break without suffering a white backlash?

Last week those questions were painfully dramatized at City College of New York, a longtime symbol of salvation for bright, needy students. In recent years, rising applications have forced tuition-free C.C.N.Y. to raise its admission standards ever higher. Meantime, poor Negroes and Puerto Ricans (now a majority in New York's public schools) have filled the slum high schools that once helped to feed the college. Lacking the stimulus of middle-class whites, who have moved elsewhere, the feeder schools have deteriorated. Despite huge enrollments, some of them now graduate as few as 15 college-qualified students a year. As a result of the population shift, C.C.N.Y. has become a white enclave in a black area. Of its 20,000 students, 87% are white; only 7% are Negroes.

Into the System. The obvious solution is a vast upgrading of the city's public schools, but New York is too broke for that. As an alternative, New York's 15-unit City University (C.C.N.Y.'s parent) has an ambitious plan to enlarge community colleges and guarantee a crack at higher education for all comers by 1975. To that end, C.C.N.Y. has already admitted 732 less qualified students, who get special tutoring and then enter the regular undergraduate program if and when they qualify. Unfortunately, lack of money threatens both the long-range plan and the tutoring program. Assorted protests and racial fights have reached such a pitch at C.C.N.Y. that President Buell Gallagher recently resigned (TIME, May 16). For the moment, Gallagher has been succeeded by Joseph J. Copeland, a 61-year-old professor of biology, who is now serving as acting president.

At issue last week was the supposed way out: a "dual admission" plan hammered out during 37 hours of nonstop negotiations between a faculty committee and minority-group students. Under the plan, which would start in the fall of 1970, half of the freshmen class (including slum whites) would be admitted from ghetto areas "without regard to grades." After tutoring, they could go on to earn degrees in perhaps six or eight years. A key goal: promoting hope and incentive in slum high schools. Arthur Bierman, a physics professor and faculty negotiator, who initially opposed the whole idea, was eventually sold by the student negotiators' sincerity. "Unlike the white radicals," he said, "they are trying to get into the system, not destroy it."

Even so, the plan incensed almost everyone else. Many white students feared that it would lower the quality of education at the college and debase their diplomas; some charged that unqualified blacks would displace qualified whites. Numerous alumni and professors were deeply alarmed. The plan's defenders pointed out that earlier in its history C.C.N.Y. admitted any high school graduate; they also argued that only about 100 more Negroes and .Puerto Ricans would matriculate in 1970 than have been admitted for next fall. Given the white-majority reaction, however, the plan was hotly attacked by every candidate (except Norman Mailer) in New York's mayoralty primary campaign. Incumbent John Lindsay called it a "quota system" and implied that he might use his funding leverage against it.

At week's end, the C.C.N.Y. faculty senate voted tentatively to reject the plan. In the light of Lindsay's position, New York's politically sensitive Board of Higher Education is expected to modify it considerably and perhaps provide some expanded tutoring. Such a result would avoid the plan's obvious risks for C.C.N.Y. It would also maintain the college as a mostly white bastion surrounded by resentful minorities.

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