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Film Looks at Open-Admissions Policy
As an adjunct professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) in the 1980s, Ellie Bernstein became interested in the university’s controversial open-admissions policy, which was to be eliminated in 1998. The policy guaranteed a place in one of CUNY’s two- or four-year colleges for every high school graduate in New York. Her interest led to research and, eventually, to a film, Closing the Open Door: The Fight for a College Education. In the film, which focuses on City College, the oldest of the eleven senior, or baccalaureate-granting, colleges in the system, Bernstein laments the demise of the open-admissions policy.
Closing the Open Door sketches the history of City College and of the policy, which was implemented in 1970 after massive student protests over the underrepresentation of minorities at CUNY. In 1968 minorities accounted for only 10 percent of City College’s students, although they composed close to 75 percent of New York City’s high school graduates. Two years later, the university system was radically changed by an influx of students admitted under the new policy. The poor state of most of the city’s public high schools meant that many graduates were not ready for college-level assignments, so remedial education was necessary to make open admissions work. Because of the large number of immigrants in New York, classes in English as a second language (ESL) were also important.
The film includes testimonials from several former City College students, including a New York civil court judge who grew up poor in the South Bronx and a Colombian immigrant who went on to receive a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The students discuss how the college’s open- admissions policy and remedial programs gave them a chance to overcome poverty. "It allowed me to start where I needed to start . . . and today I’m a social worker," says a formerly homeless Vietnam veteran. "That would have never happened if CUNY’s doors had been closed to me."
As the film’s title indicates, those doors are now closed; after years of decreases in funding for ESL and remedial programs, and after public attacks on open admissions by the media and politicians, CUNY’s board of trustees voted to end remedial courses in senior colleges, including City College, and to restrict admissions to the colleges. The film chronicles the board’s deliberations and the opposition to its decision and touches on related issues, such as the effect of welfare reform on City College students.
At the AAUP’s annual meeting in June, Bernstein will show Closing the Open Door and lead a discussion of open-admissions policies.
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