July 17, 2013--Adjunct Professor General David Patraeus

Until the 1970s, the City University of New York was tuition free.

And for free, New Yorkers were able to avail themselves of about the finest college education available in America. One of CUNY's units, the City College of New York (CCNY) rightly boasted that it had graduated more Nobel Prize winners than Harvard, Yale, or Berkeley.

But then CUNY began to lose it's way. The city's finances plummeted and inexorably CUNY began to charge tuition. At the moment, full-time students are required to pay $4,200 a year at CUNY community colleges and $5,730 at four-year units. Still, admittedly a good deal, but far from free.

And as tuition and fees phased in, at the same time the 18 individual colleges that form CUNY (Brooklyn, Queens, John Jay, Hunter, Borough of Manhattan Community College, etc.) began to water down expectations for students. With few campus exceptions, very little remains that is academically noteworthy. There are pockets of quality but most of what is offered is second-rate. And there hasn't been a CUNY Nobelist since 1985 when a team of  chemists who graduated from CCNY in 1937 shared the prize.

While all this has been going on, CUNY, in certain ways, has been behaving like some of its local colleague institutions--Columbia and NYU.

Desperate to attract so-called "star" faculty, NYU and Columbia have been dangling some not-to-be-refused offers before current and potential faculty members and administrators--mega-million dollar lifetime golden parachutes, subsidies to buy penthouse apartments in Manhattan and summer homes on Fire Island and Connecticut, release from almost all teaching responsibilities, and extra-frequent sabbaticals.

As a public institution, CUNY hasn't yet gone this far, but they are getting close. For example, take the case of General David Patraeus. Yes, that General Patraeus.

He was recently hired, rather engaged by CUNY to teach one course, "Are We On the Threshold of the North American Decade," a course that was designed for him by three Harvard graduate students who were paid to do so by CUNY. In addition, the general was allowed to hire two graduate assistants, also paid by the City University, presumably to read and grade term papers from the 16, sixteen, students who enrolled.

And, I almost forgot, Patraeus was paid $200,000 a year.

For $200 I could teach that course.

It would need to meet only once for just half an hour, during which time I would offer a quick and certain answer to the question posed by the course title--

"No."