Guttersnipes' and 'Eliterates': City College in the Popular Imagination
type: CreativeWork
description: Young people go to college not merely to equip themselves for competition in the workplace, but also to construct new identities and find a home in the world. This dissertation shows how, in the midst of wrenching social change, communities, too, use colleges in their struggle to reinvent and re-situate themselves in relation to other groups. As a case study of this symbolic process I focus on the City College of New York, the world's first tuition-free, publicly funded municipal college, erstwhile "Harvard of the Poor" and birthplace of affirmative action programs and "Open Admissions" in higher education. I examine five key moments between 1940 and 2000 when the college dominated the headlines and draw on journalistic accounts, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty to chart the institution's emergence as a cultural icon, a lightning rod, and the perennial focus of public controversy. In each instance a variety of actors from the Catholic Church to the New York Post mobilized popular perceptions in order to alternately shore up and erode support for City College and, in so doing, worked to reconfigure the larger New York public. The five episodes consist of the following: (1) In 1940 a state judge barred the philosopher Bertrand Russell from joining the faculty and a sweeping "investigation" followed that resulted in a purge of fifty allegedly Communist professors from the faculty. (2) Ten years later seven members of City College's national championship basketball team, all of them Jewish or black, were convicted of consorting with professional gamblers to fix games. (3) Then in 1969, in the midst of a mayoral primary, black and Puerto Rican students seeking greater access for members of the surrounding Harlem community seized control of City's South Campus and shut down the college for two tense weeks that were followed by a series of violent racial clashes. (4) Those events in turn ushered in the scho…
abstract: Young people go to college not merely to equip themselves for competition in the workplace, but also to construct new identities and find a home in the world. This dissertation shows how, in the midst of wrenching social change, communities, too, use colleges in their struggle to reinvent and re-situate themselves in relation to other groups. As a case study of this symbolic process I focus on the City College of New York, the world's first tuition-free, publicly funded municipal college, erstwhile "Harvard of the Poor" and birthplace of affirmative action programs and "Open Admissions" in higher education. I examine five key moments between 1940 and 2000 when the college dominated the headlines and draw on journalistic accounts, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty to chart the institution's emergence as a cultural icon, a lightning rod, and the perennial focus of public controversy. In each instance a variety of actors from the Catholic Church to the New York Post mobilized popular perceptions in order to alternately shore up and erode support for City College and, in so doing, worked to reconfigure the larger New York public. The five episodes consist of the following: (1) In 1940 a state judge barred the philosopher Bertrand Russell from joining the faculty and a sweeping "investigation" followed that resulted in a purge of fifty allegedly Communist professors from the faculty. (2) Ten years later seven members of City College's national championship basketball team, all of them Jewish or black, were convicted of consorting with professional gamblers to fix games. (3) Then in 1969, in the midst of a mayoral primary, black and Puerto Rican students seeking greater access for members of the surrounding Harlem community seized control of City's South Campus and shut down the college for two tense weeks that were followed by a series of violent racial clashes. (4) Those events in turn ushered in the scho…
author: Kay, Philip
language: English
keywords: Mass media, Americans, Education, History, City University of New York. City College
date published: 2011
date modified: 2026-07-24T01:44:32Z
provider: Columbia University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: Columbia University

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.7916/D8WH2XBP