In his closing arguments, Christopher Newfield is accusatory of the governing private-good paradigm that enables policy errors resulting in a devolutionary cycle. He writes, “one of the things being sacrificed…was the ability to expand intensive, personalized teaching from elite private colleges to mass-access publics where most of today’s multiracial majority get their bachelor’s degrees”. He argues that if we start a recovery cycle from a public good conception of higher education, we may be able to provide intensive, personalized teaching.

I’m provoked to ask that if a neoliberal agenda undermined the university’s ability to provide creative capabilities, what kind of agenda will nourish the university so that it can deliver them as an emerging private good the indirect, nonmarket, and social benefits? Newfield advocates strong public funding to create creative capabilities, such as miming at traffic stops. Fanciful as it may seem, be believes that a public investment of public universities creates a “virtuous” cycle that leads to high-quality instruction at a mass scale, and high levels of aggregate learning. These are the direct first steps, in Newfield’s purview, to the University being recognized as a public good.

If sponsored research is bad the public university, what measures outside of outright banning these organizations, would prevent private individuals and firms to externalize their cost onto the university? Newfield considers that if public universities sever ties with research sponsors, then the poverty of arts, humanities, and qualitative social science fields will cease. It would be interesting to see how it all plays out.

After suffering from a prolonged state of austerity, technology found public universities were ripe for the taking; Newfield discusses how public universities were “easy pickings for private firms that promised to use their technology to deliver more education for less money”. But what happened when that function worked too well? Newfield finds that core educational functions had been outsourced to private firms because their promise of more for less fit “so well into the privatization paradigm”. He also identifies that massive open online courses (MOOCs) are found to be a boon one type of vendor to the university. What other types of vendors existed as well to serve the privatizing needs of the university? Who else was in competition with MOOCs vendors for higher ed buzz?

MOOCs apparently had good intentions behind them, to reach global masses that had “been shortchanged, marginalized, or overlooked by their governments”, and it looked like they were assisting the public college in offering students a higher-quality, creativity oriented education by depending on its ability to help its millions of students actively learn. But I said “looked like”. Though the hope was that technology would allow mass specialization, the actual results were a far cry from that lofty goal.

Nevertheless, Newfield identifies that “the conditions were in place for MOOC firms to leverage public funds with relatively small amounts of private capital”, meaning that MOOC firms came at the right time to integrate themselves into the revenue streams of universities. Though they were able to take advantage of weakened universities, they didn’t necessarily reinvent the wheel. Apparently, most MOOCs were largely “digitalized broadcast lectures on conventional course topics”, “‘chunked’ into bite-sized pieces of four to eight minutes, with interactive quizzes and related features”. Did campus administrators know that MOOCs delivered the same content? Or were they too captivated by national media coverage, the promise of the mass market, the growing list of investors, and the interest in in-house certification results?

Was the culture of privatization so pernicious that university administrators ignored the information asymmetry between the engineers that founded MOOC companies and college learning, teaching practices in the contemporary university, the sociology of public colleges and the range of student and learning needs?

Newfield spends some time discussing the Udacity-Georgia Tech Research Corporation contract. He mentions that the only thing that Udacity brought to the table was its platform branding, that it being a first mover was somehow synonymous with Google’s driverless car. But if the promise of faster, better, and cheaper for higher education couldn’t be given, why did university administrators buy-in? If MOOC advocates were aware that hundreds of millions of people were not getting the education they needed, why were they wholly ignorant of how social, political, or historical obstacles to access would be require more than simply a sufficient use of technology to be addressed?

The chapter sees that the Department of Education sponsored a meta-analysis of studies of online education and found that “students in online learning conditions performed modestly better than those receiving face-to-face instruction”. Apparently this comes from the fact that blended or hybrid courses are better than purely online courses. This was the only source of online advantage. Further, according to Newfield, the MOOC model is ignorant of social differences, particularly ethnic and racial differences, dismisses working faculty, overlooks the history of pedagogical research, and was extremely selective in representing its findings—misrepresenting larger results.

Has anyone heard of Christopher Gunderson? In beginning my research for the memo, I found an old reader that circulated amongst those who were willing to inquire about CUNY and its history.

In Chapter 4 of City on a Hill, Traub elegantly outlines the argument lines of the academic left, a cast of characters who defend the Open Admissions experiment, and the academic right, the source of the collective bemoaning of the expansion of the SEEK program and the institution of remediation. I ask, if higher education remains partisan, what became of the ideological lines that touted their own respective visions? Who picks up for Robert Marshak, who angrily defended City College against columnist Howard Adelson? And for Adelson, who advised whites to seek Queens college instead? And for Stanley Page, who claimed a liberal socked him in the stomach? And Theodore Gross, who wrote ambivalently about the new City College? Who replaces his voice at CUNY?

When I read remarks like those of Leonard Krigel (“Anyone who says that the students I was teaching in 1974 were as good as the students I was teaching in 1964 is either a liar or is perpetuating an out-and-out illusion), I wonder if the senior colleges had begun playing around with the idea of alternative assessment by 1976. To say students were arbitrarily better than others is a subjective assessment. Krigel, and those who follow, had better heed the warning of Open admissions and see the merit in applying a culturally responsive pedagogy to their efforts.

Professor Brier’s discussion of the CUNY Digital History Archives (CDHA) is a succinct retelling of the history and development of CUNY, buttressed by three important references and uses of the archive: the founding of Medgar Evers College, the inception and legacy of SEEK, and the introduction of Open Admissions at CUNY. The piece was written to promote the work of the archive and invite pedagogues to use the archive within their courses when they are inclined to incorporate serious scholarship of the history of our university system.

I am immediately provoked to ask where my CUNY alma mater stands in the development of its own digital archive—Macaulay Honors College. Though the institution is barely legal, there is a story to tell of privilege, access, tension and reputable success. There was a student group who formed a Macaulay General Assembly, wrote on the quality of access that Macaulay students receive in context with their classmates, and presented at a conference. I wonder if that could be incorporated in the 2010 – Present time period.

The collections present on the CDHA present a wealth of archival work that I had not considered when thinking of the university, even critically. For one, the criteria for President of “Community College No. 7” aka Medgar Evers College, possessed a number of interestingly alarming physical and experiential traits (what in the world is urban-orientation?) used to secure its president. One that struck me was residence—that the president was willing to reside in community, meaning Bedford-Stuyvesant. Now that we are fifty years away from this, what would it mean for faculty and administration to live in close proximity to the university.

Another striking image from the Medgar Evers collection involves a demonstration in Albany in 1976. There’s an individual standing with a poster that reads, “Don’t let them assassinate Medgar Evers again! Keep alive the only four-year college in our community!!” This is a powerful illustration that complements Brier’s contributions to CUNY’s snuggles in light of the fiscal crisis.

The last image I will share is much lighter. It’s a letter addressed by former CLAGS president Martin Duberman to Audre Lorde. Now we read Lorde, Walker, and Rich as canonical, so it’s astounding to see them referenced here.