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. 

July 5, 2016--Alison Bernstein

Alison Bernstein, my prodigious colleague and friend died last week. Below is a note I sent to her daughters--

Dear Emma & Julia

Here's a story about your mother from nearly 50 years ago.

It was 1969 or so and I was working at Staten Island Community College in the backwaters of higher education. The backwaters because in, traditional higher education terms, in status terms, it was doubly-challenged: it was a community college and located on very conservative Staten Island. In effect--nowhere and nothing special.

But, the president of SICC (SICK, students dubbed it), William Birenbaum, was an inspired and inspiring educator totally devoted to the purported mission of urban community colleges--for the disenfranchised to make access to a quality education welcoming and effective. 

On Staten Island, the local leadership saw the college as a version of a trade school where the male students should take business courses and the women study to be either nurses or secretaries--the college's two most popular programs.

Bill rounded up a crew of progressive educators to help him, as he put it, break some windows to enable new, more egalitarian ideas flourish. As you might imagine he was not a favorite of the Staten Island Italian Club who effectively ran the island. But Bill, if nothing else, was ambitious and persistent. So he hired "Flash" (a former dock worker and union organizer), a bunch of Vietnam veterans, one or two scholar-activists (Stanley Aronowitz and Colin Greer), diversity activists Joe Harris and Ernesto Loperena, me, and the very young Alison, a newly-minted Vassar graduate.

How did Bill find his unlikely way to Alison? How did she make her unlikely way to him and godforsaken Staten Island?

While at Vassar, Alison was involved in pressing the administration to place students on the board of trustees. She and her coconspirators wanted it to be 50-50, with 50 percent student members, but they settled for one seat, which Alsion of course occupied.

Alison being Alison, she immediately took the lead to establish a national organization for student trustees. In that era of social protest many colleges were adding students to their boards.

And with such an organization in place, again Alison being Alison, she organized a national conference of student trustees. To the second or third annual conference--during Alison's senior year--she invited Bill Birenbaum to be the keynote speaker.

He accepted in less than a heartbeat and showed up in Chicago, or wherever, roaring drunk. (We later learned we would find him in that condition by 4:30 every afternoon.)

Even when high, perhaps especially when inebriated, Bill was brilliant. In his speech, as he would put it, he did his thing. And after he was done--I wasn't there but heard he was at top of his game--he invited Alison and the rest of the organization's executive leadership to go out for drinks.

He carried on for hours over many glasses of Dewar's, his favorite. 

He was especially attracted to Alison (I feel certain in more ways than one.) Well past midnight, when all but Bill and Alison remained standing. Literally. To her he said something like the following--

"You say you want to participate in making a revolution. I respect that. In fact, I endorse it. But you can't do it at Vassar. That place is for rich kids. For the over-privileged, like you, who want to play at bringing about radical change. If you want to make a revolution in education there's no better place to do so than at two-year colleges. At mine. That's where the action in. So, if you're serious, it's time for you to shit or get off the pot."

"I want to, I want to," Alison said with her heart pounding in her chest.

"In that case, with you graduating soon, if you really are serious, which I doubt, I will hire you to be a secial presidential assistant and from that position you will be able to find things to do to help bring about social change."

"I'll be there," Alison said.

Bill said, "I will hold an office for you only until July 1st."

And the rest is history.

Not mentioned thus far in any of the many notes and testimonies or the president of the Ford Foundation's otherwise fine tribute, is Alsion's work with community colleges. 

After her time at SICC, when at the Fund For the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (also insufficiently mentioned), Alison began a nearly 30-year deep involvement with community colleges. First from her position at FIPSE in the Department of Education and later during her two assignments at the Ford Foundation. 

With the support and encouragement of Susan Berresford, The Urban Community College Transfer Opportunity Program, which Alison conceptualized and ran, was mold breaking. Thousands of students who didn't have a friend in philanthropy, benefitted mightily by the work that Alison pioneered, advocated, and protected. It wasn't sexy like a lot of other philanthropic work, but it made a measurable difference in the lives of many.

Back in 1969, she showed up at SICC before July 1st and got off that metaphorical pot. From then on, for decades she lived and thrived and inspired.

That was a magical time of great accomplishment.

I loved her very much.
In more ways than one.

Steven