A View From Hostos
In lieu of reflecting on the Phillip-Fein piece, I’ll say a few words about Hostos. I work at Hostos, it’s in the Bronx where the average household income is $45,625 vs. Staten Island: $73,496. (Indulge me, I’m going to pick on Staten Island for a bit.) Hostos is specifically in the South Bronx, where the historical and economic debt owed to the workers that cement this city together sleeps at night. For our 2016 students the average household income was $20,937; roughly the earnings of one full-time minimum wage employee ($10.50-$12.00). This is to provide for a family living in New York City, in the 21st century. Even if economic debt is a feature of our students lives, the education debt, as Gloria Ladson-Billings coined, need not be.
Why indeed does there need to be a community college in the South Bronx? Truthfully, the academic needs of our students can be met at any of the CUNY colleges. I don’t know that the rationale has as much to do with need as it does with obligation. An institute of higher education in one of the poorest congressional districts in the country is what OUGHT to exist. This obligation is often ignored, but the socio-economic reality of the South Bronx (SoBro to gentrifiers and real estate developers) is urgent. Even the brief glory of a local college with free tuition and open admissions meant repeated struggle for those at Hostos, today with tuition and open enrollment the school is still vulnerable. The fight for space, physical and intellectual, continues to this day; my office is in the “old building” aka an abandoned-then-converted tire factory. The Bronx has three times as many people as Staten Island (1.5 million vs. 480K) but only one public senior college. Also, by my calculations, the Bronx has four times as many young adults as Staten Island but only 2.4 times as many undergraduate seats in their respective CUNY colleges. Most of Hostos’ students live within walking distance, and given the average household income (above) being able to get to school without paying for transportation is crucial.
Hostos is not a response to the intellectual leisure of the bourgeoisie, or to our Horatio Alger-esque fascination with exceptionalism. The school is a quietly subversive acknowledgement of the reality of the city’s poor. A college full of poor, minoritized scholars disrupts the stereotypes used to excuse the cursory dismissal of those born in the nexus of our Venn diagram of debt. Historical/social inequity has produced a legacy of racism; economic exploitation endures along the thin wall that separate decency from destitution. The existence of Hostos is an acknowledgement that education debt exists; that it needs to be redressed where it is found, not by removing “Ragged Dicks” to loftier circumstances elsewhere.
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