Nicholas Stix

I am an uprooted gypsy. But these are not the Balkans. Rather, I have been exiled from my alma mater, the City University of New York (CUNY), on whose campuses I served the past five years as an “adjunct lecturer.” One nickname for adjuncts is “gypsies,” because they are forced to wander from campus to campus. No matter how many classes an adjunct teaches, he gets paid at piece rates, like workers in the sweatshops his “progressive” bosses want banned. While CUNY’s pampered, tenured professors average over $60,000 per year plus benefits, often for two or three light, weekly lecture classes, full-time adjuncts average less than $20,000, though they may work two or three times as many hours teaching up to four intensive, remedial English classes per week.
Of CUNY’s 12,000 professors, over 7,000 (approx. 60 percent) are adjuncts with graduate degrees, as are over 80 percent of remedial instructors. Although the majority of the adjuncts are CUNY alumni, CUNY’s tenured professors virtually never consider their own graduates for tenure-track positions. So much for the value of public higher education.

Once upon a time, as “elite” universities have always done, CUNY routinely hired its own alumni. In 1970, fearing race riots, CUNY’s Board of Trustees changed policy to “open admissions,” guaranteeing admission to every New York City high school graduate. The trustees threw in the towel.

In 1970, CUNY admitted thousands of applicants who could not do college-level work; this necessitated massive remediation. CUNY’s oldest campus, the 1847-founded City College of New York (CCNY), was long America’s finest undergraduate institution. In his poignant, painstakingly researched 1994 book on CCNY, City on a Hill, James Traub notes that when it became apparent that no amount of remediation would close the gap between abilities and standards, standards gave way. He notes too the revisionist history open admissions’ defenders fabricated, in order to rationalize what they had wrought. And Traub is a liberal!

By 1997-98, 70 percent of CUNY’s 200,000 students required remediation in math, English, or both. As over 80 percent of New York’s largely semiliterate public school teachers—who are responsible for 1.2 million pupils—are CUNY graduates, the trustees sacrificed the schools as well. The public schools and CUNY thus comprise a unified system of failure.

Consider but a fraction of the honor roll alone: Felix Frankfurter; A. Philip Randolph; Ira Gershwin; Upton Sinclair; Bernard Malamud; Oscar Hijuelos; Jonas Salk; Ed Koch; and Colin Powell; not to mention eight Nobel laureates.

Today, CCNY is best known for black supremacist Leonard Jeffries. Hired in 1970 to run the Black Studies Department, Jeffries has never published anything. Reportedly, he teaches that the world is composed of virtuous “sun people” (non-whites) and evil “ice people” (whites). He never prepares for class, and routinely engages in professional misconduct. And yet, no colleagues have ever rebuked him.

Meanwhile, CUNY’s thousands of cushy, patronage staff and administrative jobs all are “full-time,” with some paying over $100,000. The patronage is doled out apartheid-style, based on race, sex, and ethnicity. On pain of “whitelisting,” adjuncts must slavishly support the racist, sexist, heterophobic status quo, the First Amendment be damned. Meanwhile, the apartheidchiks harass adjuncts, and encourage students to do the same.

In spring 1996, the union newsletter at “bilingual” Hostos Community College reported that numerous adjuncts had been barred entry by security guards, thus missing their classes. In fall 1995, I was hired at Hostos. When security guards sought to refuse my entry, I shook their supervisor’s hand, saying, “I respect the job you are trying to do, but you will not stop me from doing my job,” and I entered anyway.

The following semester at Hostos, a tardy troublemaker entered my English as a Second Language (ESL) class shouting in Spanish. He then complained to my ESL director, who told me to let the students (i.e., the thug) determine attendance and homework policies. I showed the thug the door.

Most classes at Hostos are given in Spanish. Its ESL bosses have traditionally engaged in test fraud, distributing low-level ESL finals to students in advance. The students, who mostly receive As and Bs for their class work, then virtually all flunk (95 percent in 1997) the higher level, CUNY-wide Writing Assessment Test, which is not available in advance.

I am a respected remediation scholar. At CUNY’s York and Baruch colleges, I explained to my college-level composition students the cycle of dumbing-down and diminution of opportunity that remediation causes. Perversely, the same tenured “experts” who publicly demand unlimited remediation and ESL classes, publish “scholarly” articles which oppose teaching students English, and call for eliminating all testing.

I have also published widely on Afrocentrism. Last fall, after CUNY’s Baruch College newspaper published two essays celebrating Khalid Muhammed’s Million Youth March in Harlem, I condemned the march in a September 30 essay. At the march, Muhammed, whom Minister Louis Farrakhan had thrown out of the Nation of Islam for being too extreme, exhorted his followers, “In self-defense, if [police] attack you, take their guns…Don’t let nobody get arrested.” Muhammed’s followers then assaulted 15 police officers. I argued that following black nationalism’s murderous tradition, Muhammed had sought to get young black men killed.

According to a Baruch student, my colleagues had denounced me as a “reactionary,” though none publicly rebutted my position. To my knowledge, I am the only CUNY faculty member to publicly condemn Muhammed.

Last October 19, a colleague, Michael Black, evaluated my college-level composition class, whose theme was education. I talked about neo-conservatism, the most influential movement opposing multiculturalism, and which is indelibly associated with CCNY graduates Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, and Nathan Glazer.

Although according to the First Amendment, my discussions needn’t be connected to the class material--and CUNY’s politically correct English instructors compulsively proselytize about everything--the factual discussion was necessary background to an article I would be assigning. The article, Nathan Glazer’s “The College and the City,” actually defends open admissions.

Michael Black, who admitted to having read my essay, directed me to cease and desist from discussing politics: “Mr. Stix seems to be fighting battles that have either been lost or which do not seem to have much relevance to his … students.” It’s payback time!

Baruch’s writing program director, George Otte, later informed me that due to reduced enrollment, he would not require my services in the spring. Right. Or any other time.

CUNY’s living-in-the-‘60s administrators, staffers, and tenured faculty see conflict in terms of black and white, and blacks in terms of American blacks. Ambitious black immigrants have left CUNY’s black American students in the dust. Resentment runs high. Myriad ethnic and racial conflicts pit black Americans vs. non-white immigrant groups, and each immigrant group against others.

Adjuncts occasionally criticize the party linežin secret. Last February, one man noted in private that, “It’s the teachers who care about education who always get raped.” Last fall, a second man closed an office door, and practically whispered, “I think it’s more racist here than in the rest of society.” Behind closed doors, a third man muttered last December, “They [students] think English is s—t, and they think we’re s—t.”

Recently, I ran into an old CUNY classmate. After a dozen years in graduate school, over $40,000 in pre-interest debts, and ten years as an adjunct, “Mark” had earned his Ph.D. in philosophy. He just started his first full-time job as a remedial school teacher in Bushwick, Brooklyn, one of the city’s most racist, underachieving districts. Last fall, black Bushwick parents drove off an idealistic young white teacher, Ruth Sherman, with death threats. While in graduate school, Sherman had taught the school’s children for free. Mark has not yet been cleansed, but I doubt he has found sanctuary.