City University of New York
The City University of New York is the public university system of New York City, United States. It is the largest urban university system in the United States, comprising 26 campuses: eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, and eight professional institutions. The university enrolls more than 275,000 students. CUNY alumni include thirteen Nobel Prize winners and twenty-four MacArthur Fellows.
The oldest constituent college of CUNY, City College of New York, was originally founded in 1847 and became the first free public institution of higher learning in the United States. In 1960, John R. Everett became the first chancellor of the Municipal College System of New York City, later known as the City University of New York. CUNY, established by New York state legislation in 1961 and signed into law by Governor Nelson Rockefeller, was an amalgamation of existing institutions and a new graduate school.
The system was governed by the Board of Higher Education of the City of New York, created in 1926, and later renamed the Board of Trustees of CUNY in 1979. The institutions merged into CUNY included the Free Academy, the Female Normal and High School, Brooklyn College, and Queens College. CUNY has historically provided accessible education, especially to those excluded or unable to afford private universities. The first community college in New York City was established in 1955 with shared funding between the state and the city, but unlike the senior colleges, community college students had to pay tuition.
The integration of CUNY's colleges into a single university system took place in 1961, under a chancellor and with state funding. The Graduate Center, serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution, was also established that year. In 1964, Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. extended the senior colleges' free tuition policy to community colleges. The 1960s saw student protests demanding more racial diversity and academic representation in CUNY, leading to the establishment of Medgar Evers College and the implementation of the Open Admissions policy in 1970. This policy dramatically increased student diversity but also introduced challenges like low retention rates. The 1976 fiscal crisis ended the free tuition policy, leading to the introduction of tuition fees for all CUNY colleges.
History
19th century
Social context
Historians Willis Rudy and Harry Noble Wright identify "the growing democratization of American life," rapid urban development and increased immigration as the socio-cultural trends leading to the founding of the Free Academy. They note that "the birth of the Free Academy in the metropolis of the New World came at the very time that European revolutionists were struggling for freedom and democracy in the Old." In the mid-19th century, free elementary and high schools sprouted up all across the country in an educational renaissance borne of organized labor, the expansion of suffrage, and industrialization. New York City, a booming metropolis and predominant seaport in the Western hemisphere, was uniquely situated to forge ambitious educational initiatives. The first free denominational schools were established on Manhattan Island in 1633; a system of secular schools was established in 1805. From 1825 to 1860, New York City's population rose from 166,000 residents to 814,000, making it the third largest city in the Western world. A number of newcomers were mercantilists from New England drawn to the advantages of New York's harbor, while "in the decades prior to the Civil War the farms of Ireland and the villages of Germany were the chief sources of New York's newcomers." The shifting demographics of the city spurred new debates over the creation of public higher education.Debates on the Free Academy
On March 15, 1847, Townsend Harris, then president of the city's Board of Education, published a letter in The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer that proposed a free public school where the children of the poor would have the possibility of advancement:No, Sirs, the system now pursued by that excellent society and by our ward schools is the true one, and may be advantageously applied to higher seminaries of learning. Make them the property of the people - open the doors to all - let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct, and intellect. A large number of the children of the rich now attend our public schools, and the ratio is rapidly increasing.
This establishment of the Free Academy hailed "first municipal institution for free higher education to appear on this globe." This was not without debate, discussed in the newspapers of the day. Two of Harris's supporters, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, and William Cullen Bryant of the Evening Post, supported the idea in their editorial pages. Horace Greeley, founder and editor of the publication the New-York Tribune and later a member of the Board of Education opposed the use of public funds for the school, although he supported its overall mission. Well into its existence, Greeley would continue to call for the closing of the Free Academy and that it "should be sloughed off in the interests of retrenchment." The argument made by Harris and his supporters in response was that money drawn from what was called The Literature Fund, a state budget for public education, "ought to be apportioned on the principle of the greatest good to greatest number." They believed this would be best accomplished by the Free Academy.
The Free Academy received its charter from the New York State Legislature on May 7, 1847. Construction of The Free Academy began in November 1847. Harris was succeeded as President of the Board of Education by Robert Kelley in 1848. Dr. Horace Webster, a graduate of the United States Military Academy and professor of mathematics was chosen by Kelly and his committee as the school's first principal. At the formal opening on January 21, 1849, Webster outlined the intention of the academy:
The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated; and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few.The Free Academy was renamed the College of the City of New York in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, at the behest of students who felt that the name "Academy" did not carry the same prestige in the real world as the word "College." There was an acceleration of campus activity in the years following the war, especially in the realm of student organizing and government. Richard Rodgers Bowker published the first issue of The City College Collegian in November 1866. The paper only ran for one year, but in that time played an instrumental role in calling for the formation of the first student-led academic senate in the nation.
Founding of Hunter College
The next school to be established was the Normal College, later Hunter College. Normal schools, or institutions for teacher education, were first established in New York in 1834, with schools for white men, white women, and women of color. There were inequities; the women's schools were only open on Saturdays and there was a lack of attention to teaching skills with the female curriculum limited to mathematics. The first state normal school for teacher instruction was established in Albany, New York on May 7, 1844, now the University of Albany. This was followed by the establishment of a number of other normal schools. In 1851, the state legislature sought to "amend, consolidate, and reduce to one act, the various acts relative to the Common Schools of the city of New York," and formalized a board of education for the city with the mission of continuing to "furnish through the free academy, the benefit of education, gratuitously, to persons who have been pupils in the common schools of the said city and county, for a period of time to be regulated by the board of education not less than one year." This included a mandate for the formation of new schools, including evening schools. The call for the establishment of a normal school for women in New York City was reiterated in 1854, and once more tied directly to the founding of the Free Academy just five years prior. In 1854 the state legislature amended the act of 1851 to grant the Board of Education powerto continue the existing Free Academy, and organize a similar institution for females, and if any similar institution is organized by the board of education, all the provisions of this act, relative to the Free Academy, shall apply to each and every one of the said institutions, as fully, completely, and distinctly as they could or would if it was the only institution of the kind.In 1868 the Board of Education once more called for the establishment of a female institution of higher education, and on November 13, 1869, the Committee on Normal, Evening and Colored Schools adopted a resolution establishing a daily Female Normal and High School. The Female Normal and High School was opened on February 14, 1870, on the third floor of a building at the southeast corner of Broadway and Fourth Street. The school was established by Irish schoolmaster and exiled republican Thomas Hunter as a normal school, who "insisted on admitting students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds and teaching a combined curriculum of liberal arts, science, and education." The school's name was soon changed to Normal College and in September 1873 it moved into a Gothic revivalist building designed by Hunter himself, between 68th and 69th Street on Park Avenue. A broad curriculum encompassing both the humanities and the sciences was implemented, and in the following decades the school expanded its focus on teacher education, to include more academic departments and disciplines/fields.