Published in 1974 by the Newt Davidson Collective –named for the imaginary author of a satirical memo directed to Governor Nelson Rockefeller the previous fall– Crisis At CUNY offers a thorough accounting of the institution’s most immediate deficiencies, shortcomings, and outright failures. It diligently chronicles the history of American higher education with particular attention to the development of public universities as well as the very relevant (and recent) social and cultural activism on City University of New York’s own campuses. And, while quite obviously inspired by Marxism with respect to its distinctly anti-capitalist position and its repeated emphasis on racial and class inequity both on campus and within the city at large (not to mention the dedication to one “K.M”), it hardly aspires to be a manifesto. Instead, it largely operates as a well-researched and impassioned thesis, written in an acceptable academic vernacular.
Despite the absence of any definitive statements on future policy, which is perhaps intended given its criticism of the politicization of the university, it does culminate in a certain prescription, namely the elevation and integration of faculty and student unions and grassroots activism into those critical conversations concerning the evolution of the university. Moreover, it calls for analysis before action, affirming that financial necessity alone cannot (and should not) shape the future of the CUNY system, a conclusion that has been echoed time and again by educators and students alike.
That said, there are some very distinct formal and stylistic characteristics of Crisis at CUNY that warrant further reflection and investigation. While a response to the administration and not Academe itself, this text largely romanticizes the university’s history, citing eras in which institutions of higher learning were not ruled by administrators and their budget cuts or business and/or political relationships. Like Newfield and Veysey before him, it neglects to interrogate the challenges associated with an institution built on Western epistemologies and ways of knowing, namely Enlightenment ideologies, which wholly informed those economic policies and systems to which the Newt Davidson Collective was so resistant.
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