Eureka, I’ve discovered it!

You know, I think I finally have it. I have finally discovered what is wrong with the CUNY (City University of New York) system, and it’s been right under our noses the entire time. For years, educators, politicians, and students have been agonizing over what’s going wrong with the public university system in New York City, and here I am, discovering it.

City College, one of the bigger CUNY schools, has been running ads in the subway for about a year now. They all have some immigrant on them who overcame tremendous adversity and language barriers to become an unbelievable student; the assumption being that the subway is only populated with immigrants anyway I guess.

In one of the ads, we see a picture of a young blonde woman. We learn that her name is Anastassiya Andrianova, and that she’s a brilliant student, speaks four languages, and is from the Ukraine. This is the whole first four lines. A history of her, and what classes she’s taking and how brilliant she is. Yawn. Triumph over adversity. I SO get it and it’s so been done already.

But the very next line reads as follows. Now, bear in mind, this is the first introduction to the school that appears in the entire ad:

For more than 150 years, City College has been a landmark of diversity, opportunity, and academic fire.

Huh!?

Think about that!

The school is there selling itself as a serious academic institution, and the first qualities it mentions are diversity, opportunity, and then, thirdly, academic fire? I think this represents a larger trend in academia, colleges to elementary schools, of being more proud of the makeup of your student body than their performance or the academic qualifications and accomplishments of the school.

Problem solved.

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  • http://www.dogsnot.net gordon the magnificent

    At my site, I’d already be labeled a racist for suggesting such a thing.

  • Pam

    There you go! That is THE problem IMO. So now we see what is happening; we have all these people that are aware of diversity, hell they embrace it, because they went to school with people that in other circumstances, may not have gotten an education. And now you put those 2 together, and compare it to the actual achedemic teachings of 20 years ago, and you will be scared.

  • http://www.hauntedparsonage.us/blog/ Chuck

    Problems isn’t solved. It might be identified, but that doesn’t solve it.

    This was starting 30 years ago, or even earlier. After all, remember forced integration? That was supposed to improve the education of all, because no more would the poor inner-city students be stuck in the poorly-funded inner-city schools, and no longer would the great social divide keep the students of different “race” (actually we’re all human, so we’re all one race) and social strata apart. The black would learn alongside the white, the poor would learn alongside the rich, and would be well with the world. Right? Isn’t that what they were telling us in Memphis in 1973?

    You want to know the reality of forced diversity in the public schools, at least as it was practiced in Memphis TN in the 1970′s?

    I was in 5th grade, in a middle class elementary school in a predominantly (though definitely not exclusively) white neighborhood. My parents bought their home in 1966, partly because of its proximity to the elementary school (1/2 block), the proposed junior high (1/2 mile) and the high school (3/4 mile). They could have bought the house on the street behind Graceland, but the closest school was 1 1/2 miles.

    The Principal, Mrs. Strickland, was a friend of our family. In fall of my fifth grade year, she told my parents to pull me out of the public school system. With the impending force desegregation coming through the court system, several churches and other organizations were rush to start up private schools and get state accreditation for them. Now, she was old line, deep south, and I don’t doubt that there was an element of prejudice in her suggestion. But she had worked in some of the inner city schools 10 year earlier, and had seen what the student behavior was like. She honestly did not know if she would be able to maintain any sort of discipline in her school, at least at the level she was accustomed to. And this was in a state that still allowed corporal punishment, and she was not afraid to use the paddle that hung in her office.

    As a result, I was placed in a private school, operated by a local Baptist church. Scary but true: by the time I was in 8th grade, my brother was in college at a local state college. My private school tuition was greater than his public college tuition.

    In the first two years after forced integration started, our local elementary school saw the site of several fights, two stabbings, and a rape. Oh, under the integration system, that school only had kindergarten through third grade.

    Two stabbings and a rape.

    Kindergarten through third grade.

    Mrs. Strickland tried. She had devoted her life to education, and she wasn’t going to give up. Until the rape case. That drove her to a breakdown.

    Want another case study?

    The local high school was built in 1966 about the time we moved to Memphis. It was state of the art, including one of the larges auditoriums anywhere in Memphis, extensive science labs, a large main gymnasium with other, smaller athletic rooms. A courtyard that doubled as a greenhouse for biology lab work. Shop facilities that accomodated everything from drafting classes to woodworking to auto repair.

    My brother was in his senior year when bussing started. As a senior, he was allowed to finish out at his original school. As a result, he was able to witness the destruction of the shop facilities, which included the use of the school’s oxy-acetylene welding rig to seal the doors of the auto shop, with the teacher inside.

    He saw the gymnasium bleachers crash after a mob spent an hour jumping up and down on it for no reason, other than because they could.

    I was on the scene one Sunday morning when the pastor of our then-newly-formed Catholic parish unlocked the door to prepare to celebrate Mass in the auditorium, our temporary parish hall while our church was being built. Thankfully, he was an alert person. Even more thankfully, he wasn’t a smoker. Because had my father, or the regular school custodian, been the one to open that door, the cigar that both of them always had in their mouth would likely have ignited the gas that filled teh school after one or more persons went through all the science labs and opened the gas valves that normally fed the lab burners. That had apparently been done on Friday. This was Sunday. It took three days to safely clear the building of gas.

    By the time we left Memphis in 1976, after I completed 8th grade, the education system was in shambles. It was so bad that, had I remained in the public school system, I would have been required to repeat 8th grade by New York state. As it was, I was not allowed to enroll in any “A” track courses during my first year in New York, despite having carried a high A average throughout junior high.

    But they had their diversity, damn it!

    -cjb-
    (sorry for the long rant, Vinny)

  • http://www.dogsnot.net/ gordon the magnificent

    At my site, I’d already be labeled a racist for suggesting such a thing.

  • Pam

    There you go! That is THE problem IMO. So now we see what is happening; we have all these people that are aware of diversity, hell they embrace it, because they went to school with people that in other circumstances, may not have gotten an education. And now you put those 2 together, and compare it to the actual achedemic teachings of 20 years ago, and you will be scared.

  • http://www.hauntedparsonage.us/blog/ Chuck

    Problems isn’t solved. It might be identified, but that doesn’t solve it.

    This was starting 30 years ago, or even earlier. After all, remember forced integration? That was supposed to improve the education of all, because no more would the poor inner-city students be stuck in the poorly-funded inner-city schools, and no longer would the great social divide keep the students of different “race” (actually we’re all human, so we’re all one race) and social strata apart. The black would learn alongside the white, the poor would learn alongside the rich, and would be well with the world. Right? Isn’t that what they were telling us in Memphis in 1973?

    You want to know the reality of forced diversity in the public schools, at least as it was practiced in Memphis TN in the 1970′s?

    I was in 5th grade, in a middle class elementary school in a predominantly (though definitely not exclusively) white neighborhood. My parents bought their home in 1966, partly because of its proximity to the elementary school (1/2 block), the proposed junior high (1/2 mile) and the high school (3/4 mile). They could have bought the house on the street behind Graceland, but the closest school was 1 1/2 miles.

    The Principal, Mrs. Strickland, was a friend of our family. In fall of my fifth grade year, she told my parents to pull me out of the public school system. With the impending force desegregation coming through the court system, several churches and other organizations were rush to start up private schools and get state accreditation for them. Now, she was old line, deep south, and I don’t doubt that there was an element of prejudice in her suggestion. But she had worked in some of the inner city schools 10 year earlier, and had seen what the student behavior was like. She honestly did not know if she would be able to maintain any sort of discipline in her school, at least at the level she was accustomed to. And this was in a state that still allowed corporal punishment, and she was not afraid to use the paddle that hung in her office.

    As a result, I was placed in a private school, operated by a local Baptist church. Scary but true: by the time I was in 8th grade, my brother was in college at a local state college. My private school tuition was greater than his public college tuition.

    In the first two years after forced integration started, our local elementary school saw the site of several fights, two stabbings, and a rape. Oh, under the integration system, that school only had kindergarten through third grade.

    Two stabbings and a rape.

    Kindergarten through third grade.

    Mrs. Strickland tried. She had devoted her life to education, and she wasn’t going to give up. Until the rape case. That drove her to a breakdown.

    Want another case study?

    The local high school was built in 1966 about the time we moved to Memphis. It was state of the art, including one of the larges auditoriums anywhere in Memphis, extensive science labs, a large main gymnasium with other, smaller athletic rooms. A courtyard that doubled as a greenhouse for biology lab work. Shop facilities that accomodated everything from drafting classes to woodworking to auto repair.

    My brother was in his senior year when bussing started. As a senior, he was allowed to finish out at his original school. As a result, he was able to witness the destruction of the shop facilities, which included the use of the school’s oxy-acetylene welding rig to seal the doors of the auto shop, with the teacher inside.

    He saw the gymnasium bleachers crash after a mob spent an hour jumping up and down on it for no reason, other than because they could.

    I was on the scene one Sunday morning when the pastor of our then-newly-formed Catholic parish unlocked the door to prepare to celebrate Mass in the auditorium, our temporary parish hall while our church was being built. Thankfully, he was an alert person. Even more thankfully, he wasn’t a smoker. Because had my father, or the regular school custodian, been the one to open that door, the cigar that both of them always had in their mouth would likely have ignited the gas that filled teh school after one or more persons went through all the science labs and opened the gas valves that normally fed the lab burners. That had apparently been done on Friday. This was Sunday. It took three days to safely clear the building of gas.

    By the time we left Memphis in 1976, after I completed 8th grade, the education system was in shambles. It was so bad that, had I remained in the public school system, I would have been required to repeat 8th grade by New York state. As it was, I was not allowed to enroll in any “A” track courses during my first year in New York, despite having carried a high A average throughout junior high.

    But they had their diversity, damn it!

    -cjb-
    (sorry for the long rant, Vinny)