November 1, 2018--Ivan ("Flash") Kronenfeld

We were an unlikely couple who met on Staten Island. 

Flash, a street person who had worked since childhood as a longshoreman on the fruit and vegetable piers on the Hudson River where high-rent Tribeca is now situated. Before dawn each day, with a hand truck, moving bushels of foodstuffs from freight cars to huge walk-in refrigerators and freezers. He was so good at this, he worked so hard and fast, that the other men dubbed him "Flash."

Me? Superficially, a smoother sort. Over-educated since high school in undergraduate and graduate programs at Ivy League Columbia, I was at the community college on Staten Island in large part to rebuild my resumé so that I could one day find my way back to the Ivy League, to get away from the stigma of being on the staff of a two-year college. Half a college of the type that someone once described as a high school with ashtrays. At the time, for me that about summed my situation.

In 1976, I wrote a book about this, Second Best. The title alone reveals in large part how initially I regarded my fallen circumstances. For a variety of reasons (among them that I didn't have the most developed academic chops) I found myself in collegiate purgatory.

But then I encountered Flash. 

We were initially unaware of each other. It was the tumultuous 1960s and we were working in separate orbits at Staten Island Community College (SICC). We had been hired and encouraged by the brilliant educator president, William (Bill) Birenbaum, to break the traditional molds that were hindering our largely first-generation students from either moving on to solid careers or transferring to four-year colleges where they could complete their undergraduate educations. The drop-out rate hovered near 50 percent.

Bill hired Flash to draw upon his street smarts in order to relate directly to the submerged, not fully embraced hopes and aspirations of the college's predominantly working-class students, to invent institutional ways to help them discover and make the most of their capacities.

Bill teamed me with Flash, thinking I could add my collegiate experiences to the mix so that together, for the students, from working with Flash, there would be a visceral and familiar connection while from me there would flow the possibility of their receiving help in making strategic academic choices.

Street and campus, our version of town and gown. As I said, we were an unlikely couple.

Birenbaum got to know the brilliant and accomplished Flash when he was chancellor of Long Island Universitiy's downtown Brooklyn campus. Bill was seeking ways to relate to the local Bed-Stuyvesant community and when he learned of and visited a remarkable day care center Flash had established in the neighborhood he lured him into joining his LIU team that was working to forge programmatic connections between the college and the Bed-Sty community. This also involved working with Bobby Kennedy's Bed-Sty Restoration Corporation, which was working to improve the local housing stock and attract businesses to locate plants there in the middle of then forgotten Brooklyn.

What happened next is a long story. 

In brief, Birenbaum was fired because the LIU board of trustees saw the college's future in building academic strength so it could compete for students with Brooklyn College, NYU, and Columbia and not get its hands dirty working directly with "the people." 

Students, largely led by Flash (Bill made him enroll in addition to having a job at the college), went on strike and shut the place down for weeks while Birenbaum ran the college from exile at the bar of Juniors Restaurant across Flatbush Avenue. The situation made all the papers and Birenbaum became such an attractive celebrity educational leader (it was the 1960s and charismatic Bill gave great quotes) that the City University hired him to serve as president of an unlikely place, Staten Island Community College. 

He accepted only if Flash agreed to move with him so that together they could seek ways to connect SICC to the local community. Bill said, including to me when he recruited me--"Community colleges are where the action is."

His charge to me (I was not given tenure at Queens College and thus was happy to get a phone call from Birenbaum) was to work with Flash and a few other "radical" educators he was hiring "to break all the windows and let the fresh air in."

We proceeded to do so. Not literally of course.

At SICC I became an educator with a lifelong devotion to working with so-called non-traditional students. This largely because of my association with Flash. Acknowledging him in Second Best, I wrote--

We've been through so much together it would take a chapter to sort out where his ideas begin and mine end. Suffice it to say I've learned more about learning from him than anyone else.

In endless conversations and long days and evenings of working together that lasted almost 10 years, we spoke about how most of the college's students arrived "cooled-out" by their families and previous schooling, effectively encouraged to lower their aspirations--"Don't overreach; be realistic; since you're not that smart, forget medical school; think about becoming a medical technician; forget law school; maybe think about becoming a paralegal, or (for the girls) working in a law office."

Flash said, "We need to be in the 'heating-up' business. In fact, part of the heating-up process is to talk with students about how they have been cooled-out. That the circumstances they find themselves in are not all their own fault." 

He called this a "political education" as it was about power--how one can come to lose it, yield it, and how gaining it--primarily over oneself--is necessary in order to come to be realistic in new ways--empowered, strategic, ambitious, mobilized. Anything then becomes possible.

To talk with students this way, to see them raise expectations for themselves, it was essential that Flash and I come to realize we needed to raise our own expectations--for ourselves as people and educators. He would always say personal change must proceed social change. We have to model that for our students if we are to be of transformative assistance to them.

As one example, since our heating-up students began to allow themselves to think about medical and law school as well as ambitious plans for themselves post SICC, almost all came to think about transferring to four-year colleges and universities.

To meet this increasing demand and to demonstrate what can be possible once mobilized, Flash and I travelled the country to strike transfer arrangements with more than two dozen highly selective institutions, including Amherst, Yale, Vassar, Mount Holyoke, UC Berkeley, Antioch, Oberlin, and my old Columbia as well as Brooklyn and Queens Colleges.

We told the receiving colleges that we would prepare our students for success--we would work on strengthening their academics as well help them deal with the inevitable cultural issues involved with leaving Staten Island to complete studies in otherwise alienating places such as New Haven or northern California.

The colleges would agree to hold up to 10 places for the students we would recommend and offer them full scholarships. As a consequence they would become more socio-economically diverse.

It worked! 

Over the years hundreds of our students transferred successfully and at most only half a dozen left the program. Everyone else graduated and we did in fact have a number who went on to law school. (None to medical school, but some did become psychotherapists!) 

Who I am, who I became is in large measure the blessed, magical result of encountering Flash (to know him is to have encountered him). His voice and ideas will forever be in my head. I know he has more to teach me.

Happy trails Flash, Ivan. Wherever you now are it is by definition a much more interesting place. 

April 5, 2018--My Martin Luther King Story

Fifty yeas ago last night I was a junior faculty member at Queens College in New York City and one of my classes scheduled for that evening was an interdisciplinary seminar in literature and the arts for a carefully selected group of community leaders, mainly adults from the black ghetto of Jamaica, Queens. This meant that all 25 of the students in the class were African American.

We were well into a discussion about Jonathan Swift when a late-arriving student, Alan Jenkins, burst into the classroom.

Struggling to catch his breath, he finally gasped, "He's been shot," as if we knew who the "he" was. Sensing this, he added, "Martin. Martin Luther King. In Memphis."

"Is he . . . ?"

"I don't know. I was driving here and on the radio heard the report about the shooting. But not about his condition."

By then many of the students were quietly sobbing.  From their experience they knew the news would turn out to be devastating. It would not be that he was "just" shot. They had lived too long with violence in their lives to not immediately sense the truth.

A number of the students held hands and, kneeling, prayed. Others, clinging to each other, softly began to sing, including psalms and the civil rights anthem, "We Shall Overcome."

Grieving, supporting myself on the lectern, feeling estranged, denying what was occurring, I tried to convince myself that if I behaved "normally," got us back to Swift, reality itself would revert to where it had been only minutes before when we had talked together, dispassionately, about Gulliver.  

Then slowly it occurred to me I was the only white person in the room. I am not sure from where that feeling originated. It was not quite from feeling danger, but something close to that. Some primal recidivism close to tribalism, some self-protective reflex wired in my DNA. 

"Do you think you might drive me home?" Whispering was the most academically promising of my students, Nellie McKay.

By then Alan had come back from listening to the radio in his car. He trembled as he told us that it was over. King was dead. Shot down on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel in Memphis. The news, he said, was now turning to reports from inner cities across the country. Dozens were already in flames, stores and houses were set on fire by rampaging street gangs crazed with rage and fear.

"I'm afraid," Nellie said, "And about you . . . I don't think it's safe for you . . . to be driving home alone . . . the only . . . person in the area."

She meant white person. She asked me to drive her home not so much because of her fear but because she was concerned about me. White people out and about, well after dark, on the evening Martin Luther King was assassinated, would, she felt, not be safe. Being in the car with me would give me a margin of safety. She knew from inner-city uprisings during the previous few years that some white car and truck drivers had been ripped from their vehicles, beaten and even killed, as the riots spiraled out of control.

Opting to think less about myself I tried to concentrate on how I might provide safety for her--she commuted to the college by local buses. 

By then all the other students in ones and twos had departed. Nellie and I were the only ones remaining and we walked to the parking lot, clinging to each other.

In my car, a conspicuously yellow Opal, we headed south, needing to drive through segregated Jamaica, out toward where she lived in an integrated neighborhood near the bay.

Buildings were on fire all along the way. As I slowed to stop for a red light Nellie told me to ignore it, to keep moving, as it would be unsafe if we stopped.

To distract me from the news crackling on the radio she told me about her dreams--for her teenage son, it meat helping him get though his adolescence intact. By that she meant alive, out of the clutches and demands of violent street gangs. He was very bright, she said, but was already showing signs of succumbing to the allure of street life.

"I'm thinking of sending him to live with my mother, in Mississippi. Believe it or not, it's safer there. Even with Jim Crow."

"And what about you? You're a terrific student. Especially of literature. Are you thinking . . . ? We heard gunshots and saw a car a block ahead of us burst into flames and explode when the fire reached the gas tank.

"Turn that way," Nellie instructed me. "Quickly. Down there," she pointed to a one-way street where we would have to drive into oncoming traffic. "I know it's a one-way against us but it takes us to what I'm sure will be a safer route."

I followed her directions and at the end of one block we came to a cross street of abandoned houses and undeveloped lots where there were no signs of life or disorder. I began to breath more normally. 

"I am thinking about graduate school," Nellie said, resuming her story as if nothing unusual was happening, "Perhaps even working on a PhD. I know I'm a little old for that, but it's my dream. To be like you. A college professor." She smiled.

"We're getting close," she continued. "You are welcome to stay with me. But I know you live in Brooklyn and are married. Your wife will be worried about you."

I almost told her our marriage was on the rocks and that I would prefer to stay with her. But those emotions, if we survived, were perhaps for another day. 

At her house I got out to open her car door and, on the sidewalk, sobbing, we embraced for what felt like not enough time. As if we would not see each other again. That we were saying goodbye forever.

"We'll be all right," she said. "America will recover and be all right. You will be all right. And so will I."

With that she ran to the steps that led to her house and disappeared behind her aluminum front door.

I got home safely and the following week classes resumed. We all knew we were living in a changed America. Two months later Bobby Kennedy was assassinated. Swift and Jane Austen lost some of their importance.

Nellie's son did well, eventually becoming a social worker, and after Queens College, Nellie pursued her dream. She was admitted to graduate school at Harvard where she eventually earned her doctorate. After Harvard, Nellie began a distinguished career as a professor of English and Women's Studies at the University of Wisconsin.

I reencountered her when she approached the Ford Foundation, seeking a grant to support her work. I was happy to be able to assist. 

Nellie McKay, at only 76, died in 2006.

August 19, 2014--Googling Oneself

A guilty pleasure that I confess to is occasionally googling myself. All right, checking at least once a month.

I rationalize this act of vanity as one way to see if my Web-presence has been contaminated by hackers. Actually, it's really to see how many times I am listed on Google (OK, how many pages it takes to list all my listings) and to check if anything interesting has been said about me via the Internet. All right, to see anything that's been added during the past month.

And also, less frequently (3 or 4 times a year), I check my virtual presence in the New York Times database. As a digital subscriber I am able to find any mention of me back to 1883, not the year of my birth announcement.

Being mentioned in the Times is a big deal to me. Read what I say about the NYT just to the right of this below my now out-of-date picture. The thing about my father and me and how the Times every morning was one of the few ways in which we communicated with each other. Etc.

Killing time Saturday morning I checked in with the New York Times. There were my occasional published letters to the editor and a quote or two from the days when I was responsible for education grant-making at the Ford Foundation.

But for some reason, via the TimesMachine, I thought to look up reports from early 1969 when I was a young administrator at Queens College, during the time when a coalition of black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus, demanding that administrators of the SEEK program, a special admissions and scholarship program for minority students, who were white (virtually all of us were) be fired and replaced by people of color.

In many ways I agreed with the demands, feeling, though, that I was an exception and should be the one white administrator to be retained since . . . . well, you know. I was that young and naive.

I seemed to remember that I was mentioned in at least one of the articles covering the months of events that eventually led to violence. And sure enough, on January 14, 1969, I indeed was. In an article about SEEK students invading the office of the director and in a symbolic act (at least at the time I thought it was symbolic), since the president and deans were was not agreeing to the students' demand that the SEEK director be fired, they moved all his office furniture and telephones out into the street.

I recall being there at the time and acting heroically, trying to talk them out of doing this and urging the students to seek to negotiate peacefully with the dean of the college to whom the SEEK program director reported. I even offered to help.

But, according to the Times, my behavior was a little more--how shall I put this--ambiguous.

Quoting--

When the intruders arrived and swarmed into the office, Steven Zwerling, assistant director, escorted three women assistants outside, foresaking any attempt to thwart the invasion. He noted that the demonstrators carefully avoided harming anyone in the office or even touching them.

As an old English major I did a little textual analysis--

Intruders first arrived, then swarmed, and after that morphed into invaders and eventually demonstrators. I failed to thwart the invasion, forsaking any attempt, but did step up to escort to safety three damsels in distress. Though, according to my New York Times, it appears that was unnecessary since, as I apparently told the reporter, no one was harmed much less touched.

Well, at least they spelled my name correctly.

And, yes, the director resigned a month later. A few weeks after that he was replaced by a black professor of psychology, and shortly thereafter I and all the other white administrators were fired.

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."