February 8, 2019--Climate

The one thing I am incapable of reading and writing about is the planet's perilously changing climate.

I pride myself on my ability to identify and solve problems. I made a long career doing just that from the City University of New York to New York University to the Ford Foundation.

But about the climate I able to offer only a sense of hopeless despair. No solutions. Therefore, I run from the subject.

Not proud of myself, I have difficulty following or participating in global warming discussions. I confess this means I've given up hope that there are ways to bring about meaningful remediation. Though I know it is critical that we urgently do all we can to try.

What can one think, more, what can one do when greeted as readers were two days ago by a headline and story in the "New York Times" that the "'Climate Crisis' May Melt Most Himalayan Glaciers by 2100"?

I ignored my own practice of running from the subject and read how at least a third of these glaciers will melt by the end of the century, even "if the world's most ambitious climate change targets are met."

If these goals are not met (and most experts agree this seems likely) by 2100 the world's highest mountain range will lose two-thirds of its glaciers.

This would mean that the Himalayas could heat up by 8 degrees Fahrenheit by century's end, bringing "radical disruptions to the food and water supplies, and mass population displacement."

"Normal" Himalayan glacier melt, I read, provides water to about a quarter of the world's population.

And then yesterday, the "Times" in an above-the-fold front-page graph and story about rising global temperatures, reported that 2018 was the fourth hottest year since 1880.

Though I will be long gone, all I can think about is what kind of a world I am participating in bequeathing to my one-year-old niece. 

July 22, 2013--"No Jews. No Dogs"

When I applied to Columbia University, I had no idea. When I became a faulty member at the City University of New York, I had no idea. And years later when I became a dean at New York University, I had no idea.

I did know that by some NYU was called New York Jew, but I naively had no idea what that fully meant. Just that during the 1970s it felt as if there was a disproportionate percentage of Jewish students enrolled. But NYU, after all, is in New York City and at the time there were more Jews living in New York than in all of Israel.

But later I began to understand why NYU was very Jewish at its downtown location but more gentile at its University Heights campus and why Columbia College on its application required a passport-style photograph. When I asked my parents about this they said it was probably to see if I was a Negro. Having lived through the Holocaust and having seen No Jews. No Dogs signs at hotels in upstate New York, they knew discrimination when they saw it.

Once I arrived on campus on Morningside Heights I saw that by requiring a headshot Columbia was doing a pretty good job of screening some of us in and keeping others out--in my undergraduate class of about 600 there was only one Negro. And he was the star of our otherwise pathetic football team.

I was beginning to figure things out. But I thought these practices were all about people of color, not that Columbia's screening policy also very much pertained to me.

Then some years later, reading Thomas Bender's University and the City, I began to see the extent of the quota system colleges and universities were implementing to keep the number of Jewish students down to as bare a minimum as they could get away with.

And just this week, reading Leonard Dinnerstein's definitive Antisemitism In America many more details of this virulent system became even clearer.

As with so much in regard to higher education, in this too Harvard took the lead.

In the 1920s, Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell (a Lawrence and a Lowell), declared that his college had a "Jewish problem." He noted that Jewish enrollments had more than tripled from 6 percent in 1908 to 22 percent in 1922. To assure that students developed into "true Christians" (to Lowell, this was at the heart of Harvard's mission) one had to limit the number of Jewish students for fear that the institution would lose its "character."

The Board of Overseers agreed. One member, Jack Morgan (of J.P. Morgan) wrote to his colleagues--

I think I ought to say that I believe there is a strong feeling that [a potential new member of the Board] . . . should by no means be a Jew or a Roman Catholic, although, naturally, the feeling in regard to the latter is less than in regard to the former. I'm afraid you will think we are a narrow-minded lot, but I would base my personal objection to each of these two . . . on the fact that in both cases there is acknowledgement of interests of political control beyond, and in the minds of these people, superior to the Government of this country--a Jew is always a Jew first and an American second . . .

Other colleges seeking elite status rushed to follow Harvard's lead. In addition to establishing strict admission quotas for those Jewish students they felt compelled to admit, they established rules to socially restrict and even segregate "Hebrew" undergraduates.

At Syracuse University, where a Ku Klux Klan chapter existed, Jews were excluded from almost all campus organizations, including fraternities. Their Jewish students were also housed separately from Christians. At the Universities of Michigan and Nebraska, gentile students were advised against associating with Jewish males. And Harvard cleverly came up with the idea of geographic diversity in order not to have to handle too many Jewish applicants since most lived in a few big cities and states.

Ernest Hopkins, president of Dartmouth, summed up the reasons for these application procedures and quotas--

Any college which is going to base its admissions wholly on scholastic standing will find itself with an infinitesimal proportion of anything else than Jews eventually.

Beside the illiteracy of President Hopkins' statement (if he were a high school senior and had included it in his application to Dartmouth, if he had been accepted, he would have been placed in remedial English), in his statement he was unfortunately telling it like it was.

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."