Review by Choice Review
During much of the 20th century, City College was known as the Harvard of New York City's lower middle class. In the early 1970s, however, during the City University of New York's switch to open admissions, it began to admit students more poorly prepared than previously and to revise its curriculum drastically to accommodate them. City on a Hill examines the new City College and frequently compares its present state with its supposed glory days earlier in the century. It concludes that the old days were by no means as glorious as some old grads remember them, and that today's institution is not so educationally undistinguished as many traditionalists consider it to be. Nonetheless, Traub finds that most of the new students--frequently academically ill prepared for college and often burdened by full-time jobs and child care responsibilities--are not well equipped, to put it mildly, to engage in the life of the mind. Based as it is almost entirely on personal observation and interviews with students, faculty, and administrators, the book would be better had the author relied more heavily on written materials and social science data. General through faculty. D. S. Webster; Oklahoma State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Before 1970, City College of New York was the most illustrious institution of higher learning serving impoverished urban students in America. Its conspicuous and so far unabated degradation since then is Traub's concern. He recounts CCNY history, explains CCNY today, and details the everyday life of representative undergraduates. Those students--roughly 50 percent black, 25 percent Latino, and 15 percent Asian--are academically unprepared (a typical sophomore English major Traub interviews had never read a book in his life) and convinced that affirmative action quotas should supplant what their professors call academic excellence as criteria for advancement. In 1970, CCNY instituted open enrollment, which swelled the remediation programs initially embraced by a liberal faculty. One faculty member now says of the remedial writing program he confidently fathered, "We are preparing our students to be the parents of college students, not to be students themselves." Traub, too, is willing to say such things; his integrity informs a book that should be read by anyone who wants to know what is going on in higher education outside Harvard and Stanford. ~--Roland Wulbert
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
From 1847 through the 1960s, City College in Manhattan was renowned for the excellent education it provided free of charge (tuition was not imposed until 1976) to poor and middle-class urban students. Responding to student protests against the low number of African Americans and Puerto Ricans it enrolled, City College, in 1970, began a policy of open admissions. Traub (Too Good to Be True) recently spent a year on campus, interviewing students and faculty and attending classes. Although his detailed evaluation of the open-admissions experiment contains inspiring descriptions of idealistic teachers and hardworking students struggling to overcome poverty, racism and inadequate English-language skills, he concludes that open admissions shortchanges students. Because inner-city high school graduates often can barely read, City College has been forced, according to Traub, to provide remedial classes at the expense of academic excellence. A lively and compelling report. (Oct.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Eschewing hand-wringing and political rhetoric for close, critical observation, freelance journalist Traub (Too Good to Be True, 1990) delineates a unique--and uniquely representative- -institution: New York's City College. Traub spent a year observing classes at City College's Gothic Revival campus, which sits atop a hill in Harlem. Founded in 1849 as an egalitarian experiment, tuition-free City College came into its own when the great turn-of-the-century tide of Jewish migration provided it with cohorts of driven students. Their legendary successes--a record number of Nobelists and intellectuals such as Irving Howe--made it a beacon of educational possibility for the nation. A confluence of social and political upheavals, however, brought radical changes in the 1960s, key among them guaranteed admission for graduates of New York City high schools to the City University of New York, of which City College is a part. An exploration of the drastic results of this ``open admissions'' policy constitutes the main part of Traub's book. After limning the ideological conflicts that still continue among the faculty and in the press, he introduces us to its ramifications in City College's classrooms. We meet a range of teachers, from dedicated idealists, struggling to reach woefully under-prepared students while maintaining some semblance of academic standards, to the controversial Afrocentrist professor Leonard Jeffries, whose authoritarian anti-intellectualism Traub exposes as he captures the human, even tragic dimension of Jeffries's sway over uninformed followers. Empathetic portraits of City College students stand at the book's center. Many flounder in remedial courses; difficult family situations and looming financial disaster burden most; the dedication of contemporary immigrants provides some hope. But Traub's ultimate accomplishment is to reveal the consequences for one legendary college of the inadequacy of our urban high schools and vocational training, and our general devaluation of learning. The crisis continues--and as goes New York's City on a hill, so goes the nation. Exemplary reportage, essential for all those debating the future of American college education.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
