CUNY: Radical Institution or Knowledge Hut?

This issue covers a wider spectrum than usual for The Advocate, and reflects the contribution of students from a wide range of disciplines. We have news from as far away as the WTO meetings in Cancun, to which we were able to send a special correspondent, and as near as the scaffolding on the front of the building. Or, should I say, the “sidewalk shed?”

It’s interesting how economic and philosophical truths lie behind the most seemingly innocent facets of life at the Graduate Center, particularly as regards public education. For instance, some pieces of façade fell from the face of the building one night in January 2001, and in order to comply with City rules and regulations, the GC is shackled with scaffolding for three years to come. But that scaffolding, while perhaps detracting from the natural grandeur of the building, also offers our cash-strapped administration the opportunity to generate a quarter of a million dollars in advertising, largely through a single contract with Citibank.

The irony, of course, is that Citibank is a company well-known for regressive redlining, and has been targeted by groups such as National Peoples’ Action as one of the principal agents of predatory lending in America. Perhaps it’s naïve to expect good behavior from the largest bank in the world (perhaps it’s even impossible to become the largest bank in the world while behaving nicely). Even so, Citibank’s problematic activities range from being a principal sponsor of China’s Three Gorges Dam project, considered by many to be a humanitarian and environmental catastrophe, to the bankrolling of companies felling the forests of Indonesia.

Should lectures by David Harvey, Frances Fox Piven and Stanley Aronowitz be brought to you by Citibank? Of course not—to say yes is to risk institutional hypocrisy and to transform the CUNY into a corporate money-dependent “Knowledge Hut™.” This is not to posit a false or pure distinction between the actions of the market and the state. But when a 50-foot billboard on the front of the building makes our financial allegiance clear to every tourist, fashion model or cab driver on 5^th Avenue, it’s interesting to speculate what the implications could be.

CUNY has always been a radical institution. This was confirmed in Provost Kelly’s introduction to the David Harvey lecture on October 3, in which he described the CUNY mission as follows: “Our goal is, as always to educate the children of all people.” However, without a majority of representatives in the state or city government who truly support public education in general, and CUNY in particular, we have little choice but to lean on the beefy financial shoulders of the corporate world, the operations of which depend on mass inequality and poverty. The bone for debate, at this point, is whether the skills and habits of picking up money in this way can strengthen a radical institution, or whether they inevitably lead it down the path of domestication before capital.