THE

YEARS

LAGUARDIA
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE
CUNY




&

Labuardia
Community College:
The First 25 Years

by
Terry Golway





CHAPTER ONE

A Sign of
lis Times

n the beginning there was only a number, and the number was nine.
On January 22, 1968, a dreary mid-winter’s afternoon, members of the Board of

Higher Education gathered for a routine session in the board’s meeting room on President Joseph Shenker

East 80th Street. There were several items on the agenda, most of them of the and Vice President Martin
housekeeping variety. One bit of business, however, promised to be far from routine, Moed devising course

for it eventually would affect the lives of thousands of young people, give birth to schedules in LaGuardia’s
dozens of educational innovations and become a focal point in the revival of a early years.

neighborhood. After running through the usual agenda, Board
members passed a resolution establishing something called
Community College Number Nine. In this anonymous fashion the
institution that became LaGuardia Community College was born.

The 1960s had witnessed the greatest expansion of publicly
funded higher education in New York’s history. The decade saw the
birth of several new senior colleges (John Jay, Richmond, York
and—in 1970—Medgar Evers) as well as three new community
colleges (Kingsborough, Borough of Manhattan and Hostos). In
addition, Lehman College had been split off from Hunter College and
Baruch from City College. Community College Number Nine was to
be the newest, but by no means the last, part of City University’s plan
to respond to and grow with a changing New York City. After
Community College Number Nine would come, naturally,
Community College Number Ten. Such were the expectations of a
heady era.



Martin Moed was among
the founders of the college
and later served as its
acting president.

While January 22, 1968, may be regarded as the moment of LaGuardia
Community College’s conception, the ideas and philosophy that would become the
school’s hallmarks had been a part of New York for well over a century. City
University itself has its roots in the establishment of an extraordinary and far-sighted
experiment in education known as the Free Academy, founded in the city in 1849 to
provide free higher education to graduates of New York’s public schools (or common
schools, as they were called at the time). The Free Academy was founded to allow “the
children of the rich and the poor [to] take their seats together and know of no
distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect.” The day the Free
Academy opened its doors for the first time, its president, Horace Webster, said:

The experiment is to be tried whether the highest
education can be given to the masses; whether the
children of the people, the children of the whole
people, can be educated; and whether an institution
of learning of the highest grade can be successfully
controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged
few, but by the privileged many.

When the Board of Higher Education approved the establishment of Community
College Number Nine, its members knew that “learning of the highest grade” was
about to be opened to the “privileged many” in a way Horace Webster might not have
envisioned in antebellum New York. City University was preparing to implement yet
another experiment in higher education—open admissions, the guarantee that any
graduate of the city’s public schools would have a place in higher
education. Those graduates indeed would be children “of the whole
people,” for they would come from households and families of the New
York that was emerging in the late 1960s, a New York that was
becoming more diverse than at any other time in its history. The nation
kept a close eye on New York’s experiment in higher education for the
masses. Time magazine noted that City University’s “switch from
elitism to egalitarianism represents the academic world’s most radical
response... to explosive changes in the nation’s cities... C.U.N.Y. and
other urban universities confront rising pressure from poor youths, often
members of minority groups, who yearn for the college degrees that
they look upon as a ticket to U.S. affluence and status.”

Concepts such as ethnic and racial pluralism were unheard of at the
time, but City University and the Board of Higher Education
understood the idea, even if it lacked a name. The Board’s master plan in 1972 noted
that while the non-white percentage of the city’s population grew from 9 percent to 14
percent from 1950 to 1960, City University’s percentage of non-white students
remained stagnant at 5 percent. During the 1960s, New York would lose nearly a
million whites, and they would be replaced by more than three-quarters of a million



African Americans, Latinos and other groups. If City University
were to be true to the mandate of Horace Webster, it would have
to reflect this emerging, new New York.

Not only was the city’s demographic and cultural landscape
changing, but likewise its economy. City University—many a
poor family’s port of entry into the middle class—understood that
it would have a key role in determining whether, and how, New
York’s work force adapted to new economic realities. As
Community College Number Nine reached the drawing board, the
city already had witnessed a sharp decline in manufacturing jobs,
a longtime staple of its economy. The trend would continue in the next quarter-century.
And the composition of the work force itself was changing, too. Well before the rest of

It all started here:

LaGuardia’s original

building, as seen in
the nation noticed, City University realized that a gender revolution was about to take the early 1970s.

place. “There are signs that the traditional division of labor along sexual lines will
undergo change,” a University report noted in the early 1970s.

Somebody was going to have to provide the new New York with an educated,
well-trained work force drawn from families and groups that higher education
traditionally overlooked. In another age, under other leaders, such a prospect might
have seemed daunting, and perhaps even hopeless. The 1960s, however, recognized
neither limits nor obstacles.

City University chose to take the Free Academy’s founding principle to its
ultimate expression. Open admissions was intended to be the vehicle by which City
University would respond to the changes in the city and in society. There would be a
place in the University for any New York City public school graduate with a dream,
regardless of socioeconomic class or racial background or cultural tradition. Cost was
not a matter for discussion. Tuition, in the century-old tradition, was free, and the
taxpayers considered such generosity to be part of what made New York a great city.

Open admissions meant there would be greater demand for seats in the University,
and the need for more community colleges was discussed as early as 1964, in the midst
of the University’s bold expansion. Community College Number Nine would be the
fourth of five new community colleges built with the demands of open admissions in
mind. The University anticipated that open admissions would require the number of
community college seats to increase from 22,000 in 1970 to 51,970 five years later.

The new college, according to a proposal drafted for the Board of Higher
Education, was to be “comprehensive ... in terms of its variety of program offerings
and its community
service mission.
Students will be able to
choose among courses
of study leading to the
A.A.S. degree and
immediate
employment, or those



Ann Marcus receives
an award in 1976 for

her work as dean of
continuing education.

Mary Ryan was the
college’s first personnel
and labor relations
director.

leading to the A.A. or A.S. degree which will guarantee automatic transfer to a four-
year baccalaureate program within City University. The college will be oriented to the
needs and interests of the community in which it is located, providing cultural
activities, special services, continuing education and skills training opportunities for
community residents of all ages.”

With this broad mission statement in mind, the Office of the Dean
for Community College Affairs began the work of converting a
bureaucratic resolution into the brick and mortar of reality. Taking
charge of the task was the Dean for Community College Affairs
himself, Dr. Joseph Shenker, already a top-level City University
administrator while in his mid-20s. Shenker was precociously well-
connected and enjoyed a close relationship with City University
Chancellor Albert Bowker. His quick rise to the highest levels of City
University’s leadership would serve him well in later years, for he
understood how the system—whether from the academic or the
political side—worked.

In its earliest days of gestation, Community College Number
Nine consisted of a file cabinet in a room at the Board of Higher
Education’s headquarters, where planning was underway. “That’s how I got my first
look at the college,” recalled Dr. Martin Moed, who was City University’s associate
dean for occupational programs at the time. “The college was a file cabinet with one
file in it, and it was labeled “Community College Number Nine.”

Early on, when the college consisted of little more than dreams written on paper,
the University’s planners (primarily Bowker and Shenker) decided that Community
College Number Nine’s signature program would be cooperative education. Each of
the new community colleges would specialize in a given theme, and co-op was to be
Community College Number Nine’s. “The idea came from Joe Shenker,” said Dr.
Harry Heinemann, LaGuardia’s Dean of Cooperative Education. Co-op, Heinemann
said, would serve as a way to encourage the sons and daughters of working-class
parents to consider extending their education while also receiving real, on-the-job
training for careers. The program would establish a link between school
and work, allaying the fears of struggling parents who were skeptical of
2 the need for higher education.

Thomas Triviano, a member of LaGuardia’s first graduating class,
knew that college was in his future while he was attending Monsignor
McClancy High School, near his family’s home in Maspeth. Unlike some
of his future classmates, his father had gone to college, so he was not a
family trailblazer. Even so, he “had no direction,” he said. “I wasn’t
certain about what I wanted to do.” He won admission to several private
colleges, and his family could have afforded the tuition, but he decided to
attend LaGuardia because of co-op. “It offered the experience to go out
into the work force and give you exposure to that part of life,” he said.
“That's what fascinated me about LaGuardia. I thought it would give me



an opportunity to find out something about myself.”

Generally speaking, the concept of co-op was not new, but no other two-year
college in the country had such a program, and no other institution of higher education
offered co-op for credit. The new college would require three for-credit internships,
and would fold the co-op concept into every facet of academic life. =
From the beginning, then, this as-yet nameless college was staking af
out a new path, regardless of the briars and brambles underfoot. The
rewards of exploration were well worth the risk (and possible pain) of
a missed step.

In the midst of the preliminary planning, Shenker was named
Acting President of Kingsborough Community College. The
appointment took effect on Sept. 8, 1969. The Board noted at the
time, however, that Shenker would not be a candidate for permanent
president of Kingsborough. Indeed, he served in Brooklyn just seven
months, and on April 29, 1970, Acting President Shenker of
Kingsborough became President Shenker of Community College
Number Nine. When he was serving as Dean for Community College
Affairs, Shenker had been the chief architect of the school’s still-
unfolding plans. Now, he would make those plans reality.

At the same time, the new president was presented with a new building, that is to
say, an old building that would serve as his new place of business. The Board of

Higher Education passed a resolution approving the purchase of a 50-year-old, five-
story Ford Instrument Company factory building on Thomson Avenue in Long Island
City to house the new college. The facility had been remodeled in 1940 and soon
afterwards was turned over to the production of material for the U.S. armed services in
World War II. The Board’s resolution noted, apparently without irony, that the building
was suited to its new purposes because it “could be readily adapted to college use and
in fact it would appear that the college could make immediate use of certain areas
within the building, thereby obviating the need to rent ‘start-up’ space elsewhere.”

Presumably the facilities judged to be ready-made for college use did not include
the acid vat that was rumored to lurk below the building’s first floor.

In any case, the fledgling college now had a president, a location and a building.
All it lacked was a name. That issue was resolved in October 1970, when the Board of
Higher Education approved a resolution to the effect that:

“... in proud recognition of Fiorello H. LaGuardia’s
lifelong public service to the people of the City of

New York and of the United States, and his ambitious
and successful leadership of good government campaigns
to provide decent living conditions and guarantee
democratic processes for all, the Board of Higher
Education names Community College Number Nine
Fiorello H. LaGuardia Community College.”



Harry Heinemann
presided over the
development of
LaGuardia’s
signature program,
cooperative
education.

Roy McLeod was the
first chair of the
Mathematics
Department and
helped mentor young
faculty members.

With his short, stocky frame, exuberance, charisma and sense of social justice,
Fiorello LaGuardia had been, and remained, one of New York’s best-loved politicians.
His reputation had survived the passing of the decades, so much so that every
successful Mayor since he left office in 1945 aspired to be thought of as the “next
LaGuardia.” He exuded New York attitude, and took it first to
Washington, where he was a successful Republican congressman who
spoke for reform as well as for a more-responsive, more-caring
government. After a short career in Congress, he was elected Mayor in
1933 in the midst of the Great Depression. During his three terms,
LaGuardia was a champion of ordinary people, thoroughly engaged in the
business of improving people’s lives and softening the free-market’s
blows. Even with a severely wounded city treasury, LaGuardia set out to
build bridges, tunnels, schools, hospitals and parks. He unified the city’s
mass transit system, built the city’s first public housing units in an effort
to dramatically improve the lives of the city’s poor, and provided
impoverished artists with government funds. He has gone down in 20th
Century New York history as the city’s foremost champion of the poor and
disenfranchised.

As a role model for a new college with a mission to bring higher education and
opportunity to those society traditionally had passed by, Fiorello LaGuardia was a
poetic choice. It also was one that required some political maneuvering and quiet
persuasion. Community colleges traditionally were named for a geographic location,
not for people. Administrators discussed naming the school Metropolitan Community
College or Triborough Community College, but finally decided to break precedent and
tradition by naming the school after LaGuardia. The state gave its approval, as did
members of the LaGuardia family.

The choice of Long Island City as the college’s home had a certain poetry, too.
Few communities in New York have a better view of midtown
Manhattan, one of the huge economic engines that had propelled the
city to its position as the globe’s financial capital. For several
generations of New Yorkers, the soaring skyscrapers of Manhattan
represented the dreams of economic opportunity and material
advancement. A school founded on the principle of cooperative
education could hardly have presented ambitious students with a more
tempting view of the world to which so many aspired.

There were other reasons, more prosaic but equally important, for
selecting Long Island City. A report to the Board of Higher Education
noted that the neighborhood, which for years served as a warehouse for
the disappearing, industry-based local economy, was in desperate need
of economic revitalization. The neighborhood had been named in government studies
as one of 11 pockets of poverty in New York. Residents on average earned $6,112 a
year in 1960, 15 percent below the median income of Queens.

Most of the neighborhood’s jobs were on their way elsewhere, to the South or



abroad, and the warehouses that served as storage for Manhattan’s great retail outlets—
Macy’s, Gimbels and others—were outliving their usefulness. Long Island City’s
economy seemed as outdated as the freight train that made its way, in all its ponderous
but faded glory, along a surface rail line located behind the old Ford

building. ———"

The region from which the new college figured to draw most of A
its students—the neighborhoods of western Queens—surely fit the
definition of underserved and excluded. There were no higher
education facilities in western Queens, and many of the area’s high
school students came from families that had never sent one of their
own on to higher education. A report on the neighborhood presented
to the Board of Higher Education noted that families in the vicinity
were “not oriented toward college.”

Another report noted that the college’s early attempts at
establishing positive relationships with the western Queens
community were frustrating. “Local leaders tended to accord the
College a lukewarm reception, for reasons they readily expressed: LaGuardia’s
prospective constituents were largely blue-collar families...with average family
incomes under $8,000, and they were struggling for economic survival,” the report
said. The children of such families, the report noted, “were expected to contribute
substantially to the resources of the household... A college education might be a luxury
for some time in the future; in the present, their children needed jobs, not more
schooling.” Combining jobs and schooling in the form of co-op, of course, clearly was
a selling point for such families.

Whatever the obstacles, the planners moved forward. Slowly, the new president
began assembling a small planning team that met in a rented office adjacent to the

Gil Muller helped to establish
the Division of Language
and Culture.

The late George Groman was

Board of Higher Education’s offices. Among those early planners were Ann Marcus, the first chair of the Division of
Sheila Gordon, Martin Moed and Mary Ryan. Freeman Sleeper was brought on as dean Language and Culture and was
of faculty. Eventually, the small group of planners grew as administrators and faculty a much-loved mentor to a

were brought on. Harry Heinemann was hired to supervise the all-important co-op generation of English

program. Irving Goldberg was hired as dean of administration. Janet Lieberman was professors at the college.

hired to develop a communication skills curriculum.

In the frenzy of planning a new institution, even individual
decisions seemed to be made on a seat-of-the-pants intuition. Almost as
an after thought, a young dean at Cleveland State University named Dr.
Raymond Bowen took a plane east at the invitation of Freeman Sleeper,
who was recruiting administrators and faculty for the new school.
Bowen was well-situated at Cleveland State and was not particularly
eager to change positions, uproot his family and sell the house he and his
wife had just bought in the Cleveland vicinity. “But I told my wife that
this was a way to get a free trip to the East Coast,” he said. He told his
wife he’d “just go for the interview.” He met with Shenker and other
LaGuardia founders at their offices on East 80th Street, and then



John Cato chaired the
Division of Social
Science.

10

ventured out to the factory in Long Island City. “There was oil all over the floor,” he
recalled. It was hardly inviting. Still, he was impressed with the spirit and enthusiasm.
“It stimulated me. And walking around the city, with the restaurants and theaters, it
wasn’t like Cleveland,” he said. Finally, almost despite himself, he accepted Shenker’s
offer to become associate dean of faculty. “But when | got on the plane, | realized I had
made a commitment,” he said. “When I got home, I waited a
week before I had the courage to tell my wife.”

The small core that would become the school’s founders
soon moved their base of operations from 80th Street to
Thomson Avenue, and when the work day ended in the old
factory, administrators and staff continued their deliberations
at Brook’s restaurant in Courthouse Square. There, decisions
were made and plans hatched over saloon food and the
occasional libation.

With the college preparing for a September, 1971,
opening, prospective faculty members were being
interviewed in the primitive space—the word “office” would imply far too much
dignity to conditions—carved out amid the industrial debris. If the working atmosphere
offended some of the would-be faculty members, accustomed as many were to the
bucolic splendor of traditional universities, the spirit of the place soon eased their
doubts. Dr. Roy McLeod, a mathematics professor who came to the new school from
Nassau Community College, noted that the absence of offices for faculty was strange.
“But soon, you got caught up in the excitement and didn’t worry about it. If you had a
desk and a chair, that was foremost,” he said. When Dr. Gilbert Muller, an English
professor, traveled to New York from Berkeley, California, for a Modern Language
Association Convention, he arranged an interview with George Groman, chair of the
Division of Language and Culture. He found himself being asked questions that
sounded like a dream come true. “If you could create any course in the world, what
would it be?” Dr. Groman asked.

The query caught Muller off guard, for he was prepared for the traditional
discussions of Faulkner, Chaucer and Shakespeare. After a moment’s thought, he
suggested a course in the social currents of American literature, taking into account
political and cultural trends. His second suggestion was a course on the
literature of the city. Both would become early course offerings at
LaGuardia — a clear sign that faculty would be permitted to build
academic programs from the grass roots.

He got the job, even managing to survive a faux pas during an
interview with Shenker. The exile from the West Coast made the
mistake of asking the President if he were related to Albert Shanker,
the controversial and famous head of the New York teachers’ union.

The scholars and administrators who were given the rare task of
building and designing a college from scratch hailed from diverse
backgrounds and experiences, which was hardly an accident. Shenker



and the team he built were intent on creating a faculty and staff that reflected the
school’s broad commitment to serving all communities and groups. Whatever their
differences, however, the faculty had, for the most part, one characteristic in common:
They were young, almost ostentatiously so. “Collectively, we were
pretty inexperienced people,” Dr. Marcus, currently the dean of the
School of Education at New York University, recalled. “That was the
good thing about the late 1960s. People were open to new ideas, and
there was a sense of confidence. If you were a bright young person, you
were given a lot of responsibilities.”

The core of people that would become LaGuardia’s founders
continued to grow during the planning year that preceded the college’s
opening. The spirit of the 1960s helped in recruitment, for the legacy of
idealism continued to flourish even if the decade itself had concluded.
“There was a cultural threshold,” said Dr. George Hamada, who was
hired as a science professor and later served as department chairman and
provost. “Coming out of the 1960s, there was a sense of more power to
the people.” That, he said, was the “social environment of the time.”
LaGuardia, then, “attracted administrators and faculty who believed in power to the

Professor Michael Hoban of
the Mathematics Department
was the first chair of the
Division of Natural
Environment.

people. The old system didn’t provide access to outsiders.” So scholars who had the
credentials and the opportunities to teach at some of the nation’s most famous
universities found themselves working instead in an old factory building in Long
Island City with the intent of bringing something special to a new and underserved
population.

As more faculty were added, the college’s founders embarked on an innovative
approach to organization that Shenker would later acknowledge to be utopian. Rather
than build a traditional departmental structure, the young administrators decided on

5 noe : Rose Palmer, the first chair of
group courses together in four divisions: Language and Culture, chaired by Dr. George

the Business Division, put

Groman; Social Sciences, chaired by Dr. John Cato; Natural Environment, chaired by together a team that made the
Dr. Michael Hoban, and Business Education, chaired by Rose Palmer. First-year Division one of the college’s
students would be able to take advantage of interdisciplinary core programs that drew strongest areas.

on all four divisions, allowing faculty members to experiment
with programs and courses while students were exposed to a
broad range of fields of study before committing themselves to a
major or a career path. In addition, an urban core curriculum was
developed to emphasize the college’s setting. The program
consisted of three courses designed to give students a sense of the
urban environment they shared with the college.

To assist in the scheduling of each student’s three co-op
internships, the administration settled on a unique quarter-system
calendar, dividing the academic year into four, 13-week parts.
Such a system, it was thought, would better lend itself to the
school’s rigorous work requirements.

Another innovation was a series of week-long, six-hour-a-

ll


Dorrie Williams
brought expertise from
the private sector and
helped arrange for
some of LaGuardia’s
first co-op internships.

Fern Khan was director of

the Education Associates
program during
LaGuardia’s first year. She
later served the college in
a number of capacities.

12

day classes conducted at the beginning of each quarter. Called intensives, these classes
immersed students in a variety of topics that often crossed disciplines and fields of
study. “By breaking with a uniform pattern of learning, (intensives) permit and
encourage a student to explore different ways of analyzing and comprehending
material which may already be familiar,” LaGuardia’s first course bulletin
explained. “They encourage multi-disciplinary approaches ... (and) will
create a distinctive educational atmosphere for the entire College.” Given
the huge blocks of time they demanded, intensives were to be a challenge to
faculty and students alike. Professors found that intensives lent themselves
to field trips, which would lead to many memorable experiences for the
school’s mostly city-bred students. Sarah Barber, a professor in the Division
of Language and Culture, brought students to the Catskill Mountains for a
week of experiencing, and reading about, nature and the environment—a
collaboration between literature and science. Closer to home, other students
enrolled in an intensive team-taught by Gil Muller and Dr. Judy Gomez, a
sociologist, which took them to the five boroughs in search of utopian
societies.

Another critical facet of LaGuardia’s mission was made plain during the intense,
pre-opening preparations. Community outreach and continuing education, programs
that would grow to become vital to both the school and the neighborhood, received a
great deal of attention from the founders. The first of what would become scores of
special programs based on community needs was an Education Associate Degree
program, designed to enhance the careers of paraprofessionals in the city Board of
Education. Eventually, the school’s key link to the community, the Office of Grants
and Continuing Education, was upgraded to divisional status as the Division of
Continuing Education and Extension Services and would prove to be one of
the college’s biggest successes.

The combination of innovative instruction, creative curricula,
sensitivity to the wider world the college inhabited, and community
outreach was a distinguishing characteristic of LaGuardia before the first
student was enrolled. The challenge to the founders and those who would
come later, of course, would be to keep that spirit alive.

The planning process was not without its bumps. Ann Marcus, who
helped plan the college’s adult education component, pointed out that while
there was a great deal to be said about youthful enthusiasm, the lack of grey
hair and crow’s feet among the LaGuardia’s founders led to some
difficulties. “We had not been faculty ourselves, so we were hiring people
to do something we ourselves didn’t know how to do,” she said. If the college’s top
leaders had been more experienced, she added, they would have been more cautious.

Caution, however, was a word not heard much on Thomson Avenue. Then again, it
was hard to hear anything above the din of the workers who were assiduously laboring
to get at least 70,000 square feet of the building’s total of 230,000 in shape for Opening
Day. Nothing in the limited experience of the young faculty that was assembling on



Thomson Avenue had prepared them for the conditions they faced as they frantically
went about the business of designing curricula, getting to know their colleagues and
learning about the students they soon would face. Dorrie Williams had just left IBM’s
staff development when he showed up at the Ford plant for a job
interview. “I thought I had the wrong address,” he said. “It was a
warehouse with no windows. It looked like an abandoned building. I
thought I made a mistake.” He walked up a dusty stairwell to his
appointment “in a state of shock.” Nevertheless, he accepted the job of
associate dean for co-op education when it was offered.

Amid the chaos and the excitement, LaGuardia’s new faculty and
staff, 49 strong, assembled for a month-long orientation session on
August 2, just weeks before the school officially opened its doors.
Actually, the doors already were open. A group of more than 100
paraprofessionals from the Board of Education began attending classes

in the spring of *71 as part of the Education Associates program run by

Fern Khan. The paraprofessionals tended to be older than traditional college students
and many didn’t believe they could handle the work required of them, even though
some had done some college course work years before. “They were all extremely
motivated, but they underestimated their talents and skills,” Ms. Khan, now the dean

From its beginning,
LaGuardia made a
commitment to music
and fine arts.

for Continuing Education at Bank Street College of Education, recalled. To overcome
the lack of confidence, Ms. Khan and a small staff sought to break down the mystery
called higher education. “In a sociology class, for example, they didn’t know the
technical language, so if we were talking about social interaction, we explained that
that was something they did all the time. What we did was break down the unfamiliar
to make it familiar, and suddenly it was no great mystery.”

A similar task awaited the rest of LaGuardia’s faculty. Janet Lieberman had
studied the composition of the prospective student body, and understood that many of
LaGuardia’s faculty “knew little of New York City high school students.” She led the
summer orientation seminar, sponsored by a training grant from the National Tom French was the college's
Endowment for the Humanities. It was designed to accomplish first history professor.
for faculty what similar sessions traditionally seek to do for new
students: answer questions, shatter illusions and prepare for the
coming year.

“There was an emphasis on identifying with students, to
make it student-friendly,” she said. There were many ways to
accomplish that goal, and several already were being
institutionalized. For example, the college’s extended-day
session would allow students to enroll in a limited number of
courses at night, making the college accessible to students’
needs and schedules.

Equally important to the forty faculty members was a sense
that from the outset they could be innovative and engage in
academic risk-taking. LaGuardia was to be a place where



14

Marvin Surkin helped to

plan the curriculum of

the Division of Social
Science.

experimentation, innovation and creativity were paramount. Inevitably there would be
failures, but such was the price for original thinking. “We were told to be as innovative
as we could be,” said Roy McLeod.

Having so inculcated the earnest intellectual go-getters with the spirit of
LaGuardia, Lieberman then put risk-taking into immediate operation. She arranged for
faculty, in groups of two or three, to take helicopter rides over Long
Island City and its environs on August 11. From the air, the new
faculty members would view New York and its urban sociology in a
decidedly untraditional way, and, from a decidedly unusual
perspective, would get to see their students’ environment. The
experience also provided faculty with the sort of intense bonding that
only mutually experienced anxiety can provide. For numerous
members of the founding faculty—Dr. Tom French, Dr. Marvin
Surkin, Professor Donald Davidson, Dr. John Hyland and others—
the helicopter flights revealed to them the world below and the
academic world they would have to create.

Having gotten so vivid a glimpse of the big picture, the faculty
and administrators got back to the details of curriculum and program development.
There was no pretense that all would be finished by the time students arrived. This was
going to be a work in progress, and there was no telling how it would turn out.

On September 22, 1971, President Shenker, his top administrators and faculty
members assembled at the Thomson Avenue entrances to greet the new students as
they crossed an important threshold. They were about to become college students, and
an old building was about to become a college.


The Co-op
College That's
10 Minutes From
Times Square



CHAPTER TWO

Urientation

hat there was no college in the nation quite like LaGuardia Community College

was evident on Day 1. Where else, after all, were faculty members competing

with jackhammers to make themselves heard? Where else was there anything
like the new college’s Great Hall, a huge room in the back of the former factory in
which recreational activities, lectures and meetings were held, sometimes at the same
time? Where else did the aroma of black cherry chewing gum from the nearby Chicle
factory waft through campus windows? And where else were the president,
administrators and faculty at the door, personally greeting each student?

LaGuardia’s first freshman class consisted of 537 students, of whom 312 were
women and 225 were men. Seventy-two percent of the class was white, 19 percent
black, six percent were Puerto Rican, 0.8 percent Asian, ().2 percent Native American
and three percent were recorded as “other.” Forty-four students were born in other
countries. An internal report noted that the ethnic
distribution was not “highly diversified” and that “new
recruiting efforts” would be made to “attract more Black
and Puerto Rican students.” The college already had a
strong track record in hiring people from diverse
backgrounds: At a time long before the concepts of
diversity and multiculturalism entered into the
mainstream, about a third of the college’s faculty were
women, and about a quarter were members of American

minority groups. Both numbers would increase in coming
years.

17


The late Robert O’ Pray
taught secretarial
science during
LaGuardia’s

early years.

Herman Washington
(standing) and Don
Davidson were early
members of the
Business Division.

18

As expected, most students were from low-income or lower-middle-income
families from Queens. Most freshmen came from nearby public high schools such as
Newtown, Bryant and Long Island City, but 116 came from the parochial schools of
western Queens: Christ the King, Mater Christi and others. A majority
of the students chose LaGuardia because of its its signature program,
co-operative education.

While LaGuardia’s first freshman class was not as ethnically
diverse as its founders wished, it nevertheless was very much a part of
the socioeconomic constituency the school’s eager young educators
were looking to reach. Most students were from families with no
tradition of higher education, and some of them already had tried other
branches of City University but were unhappy with their experiences.
They came to LaGuardia hoping to find answers to their often-
complex questions. A study of the college’s first class showed that “a
surprising number (of students), particularly among the female
students, are attending college despite strong resistance from their
parents.” The students’ fathers tended to be foremen, truck drivers,
laborers, civil servants and mechanics, while their mothers were factory workers,
salespeople, secretaries and homemakers. At a time when critics of open admissions
were suggesting that students from such backgrounds somehow were not deserving of
a college education, City University’s vice chancellor Timothy Healy saw something
remarkable. These students, at LaGuardia and elsewhere at CUNY, were “the original
American revolutionaries,” he said. “They want a piece of the action.”

In that first year, students wishing to claim their “piece of the action” had a choice
of five programs in the Business Division: Business Administration, Accounting,
Secretarial Science, Business Management and Data Processing. Students with other
interests and talents could pursue a degree in Liberal Arts, and fully 35 percent of the
initial class did so, making Liberal Arts another popular program.

At the outset, the Business Division had some of the college’s strongest programs.
Rose Palmer put together a team of instructors with strong backgrounds in business,
not teaching. “My theory at the time was that I wanted people who were practitioners,”
Palmer recalled. “I knew enough about teaching, so I could handle that part of the
program.”

The team she put together created what Palmer called “the
best business division in the city” despite the difficulty of having
to compete with the business world itself. Among those who
created such an exciting and innovative atmosphere was
Professor Ron Miller, who taught accounting. Palmer described
him as a “teaching virtuoso.” Tragically, Miller later died of
AIDS, as did another founding member of the business faculty,
Dr. Bob O’ Pray, who taught secretarial science.

The formula for the Division’s success was simple,
according to its founding chair. “We had people who were good



practitioners and good teachers,” she said. “The programs at that point were pretty
standard. They were being taught in every other community college. But it was the
excellence of the faculty that made it all come alive.” In addition to Miller and O’ Pray,
some of the faculty members in the early years were Don Davidson, Herman
Washington, Avis Anderson, Jim Cernigliaro, Ted Demetriou and David Wertheimer.

Wertheimer recalled that he taught a little bit of everything in
those early years, although his speciality was law. “There was a real
collegial spirit in the division, and Rose Palmer was an inspiration
to me, as was Ron Miller,” he said.

Wertheimer later founded LaGuardia’s Law Club, and named
it in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Raoul Wallenberg, the
Swedish diplomat who saved hundreds of Jews during the
Holocaust. Club members of European descent often were assigned
to write papers on King, while those of African, Asian or South
American ancestry wrote papers on Wallenberg. “King and
Wallenberg were very much the same in the sense that they reached
out to people of other ethnic groups and built bridges in the name
of humanity,” Wertheimer said.

The energy and excitement of the Business Division attracted
to LaGuardia students who were intent on improving themselves, intellectually as well Jim Cernigliaro came from a
as financially. Maxine Lance was among the students who chose data processing as a Big Eight firm to help develop
major. She hadn’t thought much about attending college, but when so many of her high — the accounting curriculum.
school friends said they were going to further their education, she decided to join them.

At LaGuardia, she found a faculty and staff prepared to help her through this entirely
new, and, in her case, unplanned experience. With assistance from several professors,
she found her way through the inevitable trouble spots. “It was one on one,” she said of
the attention faculty members were able to give students. “If you had a problem with a

class, you made an appointment, and they would tutor you.”
Another young student was Rudy Washington, who lived in South Jamaica with
his parents and six brothers and sisters. He made $35 a week working at Times Square Jerry Minter served as a
Stores while majoring in business and psychology at LaGuardia. “LaGuardia was dean in the Student Services
Opportunity to me,” he said. “It was new. It was based upon a vision of what CUNY Division.
could be.” Active in clubs and president of the student government,
Washington started a day care center as part of a class project that still
exists. “I remember Professor Herman Washington who was in the
computer science program and Professor Leo Newbold and Dean
Jerrylyn Minter and Dean William Hamilton,” Washington said.
“They were people who rallied around me and helped me to really
take life seriously.” In the caption beneath his 1974 yearbook photo,
he wrote that his career goal was to be mayor. Today Rudy
Washington is the Deputy Mayor for Community Development, part
of Mayor Rudolph Giuliani’s management team.
A well-prepared support system was in place to assist those who

19


Dean Bill Hamilton was
instrumental in
developing a strong
Student Services
Division.

LaVergne Trawick was
one of several faculty
members hired to
expand LaGuardia’s
counseling staff.

needed help with the transition from high school to higher education. With
open admissions in place, LaGuardia, like every other branch of City
University, received students with divergent needs and skills and with
uneven preparation for the work that would be required of them. Few
within CUNY held many illusions about the education many poor, inner-
city students were receiving in the city’s embattled public school system.
(For example, more than 40 percent of LaGuardia’s first class read below
10th-grade level.) A student-centered faculty, counseling and remediation
would combine to serve as a critical bridges for ambitious students whose
skills required improvement and encouragement. Remedial programs in
particular were considered vital to the success of the open admissions
experiment. Those who wished to attach a stigma to such programs had
not yet made their complaints known, and the University’s administrators
generously supported remediation, understanding it to be the linchpin of
open admissions and the promise of higher education to the underserved.

The Student Services Division offered counseling to prospective students even
before LaGuardia opened its doors, and these counselors, along with other
administrators and staff, continued to counsel and monitor students until graduation.
Each student was assigned to a counseling team consisting of a classroom instructor, a
counselor from Student Services and a coordinator from the Division of Cooperative
Education. The teams met once a week with groups of 20 to 25 students. The
counselors, including Winston Davidson, Rick Holmes, Leo Newball, LaVergne
Trawick, Bob Durfey and Pia Andritsi, operating outside the teams, dealt individually
with students “in short-term and crisis counseling of a personal, social or academic
nature” and identified students in need of more help. It was this close attention to
student needs, made possible by the school’s intimate setting, that many
founding faculty and students found immensely satisfying and enriching.

LaGuardia offered its original students remediation programs in
mathematics and language through two carefully designed courses:
Symbolic Communication 101 and Interpersonal Communication 101. The
three-credit classes were required of those students who scored below
certain levels in an exam called the California Achievement Test given to
all incoming freshmen.

Symbolic Communication was an innovative mathematics course
administered by the Division of Natural Environment. Roy McLeod, who
would later become the first chairman of LaGuardia’s Mathematics
Department when the divisional system was scrapped, was one of the
course’s instructors, and he noted that the course’s very name made it stand
out from ordinary remedial mathematics classes. “People would ask what
department you belonged to and when you said “Division of Natural Environment,’
they stared at you,” McLeod recalled. “And then when you said that you were teaching
math as symbolic communication, it threw them for a loop.” The course combined, in
McLeod’s words, “a little art, nature and math that applied to real life. It had the



students thinking across disciplines.” It was just one example of the sort of cross-
pollination that LaGuardia would encourage and nurture through the years.

Interpersonal Communication, offered under the auspices of the Division of
Language and Culture, was designed to assist students with writing and reading
deficiencies. The importance of both remedial courses was clear: Of the school’s first
freshman class of 540, all but 97 were required to take Symbolic Communication and
all but 120 were required to take Interpersonal Communication.

Financial support from the university allowed the college to contemplate
such a huge endeavor.

Another important challenge awaiting the new students was, of
course, cooperative education, the school’s signature theme and its
drawing card. In the weeks leading to Opening Day, LaGuardia’s co-op
staff spent long hours with private-sector leaders in an effort to persuade
them that this new school that they had not heard of was serious about
co-op, and that the student interns would provide a needed service for
sponsoring businesses—that this was not simply charity work. “We knew
from the beginning that this concept needed the total interest of the larger
community,” said Dorrie Williams, who served as associate dean for

cooperative education. “We had to develop a strategy to solicit participation.” It was a Ted Demetriou brought a
challenging task: Early planning documents figured that LaGuardia would have to find successful corporate
15,000 13-week job placements between 1971 and 1976. background to

Considerable time and energy were expended on a careful deliberation over business instruction
exactly what kind of co-op this program would be. Among the models studied was a at the college.

co-op program at Northeastern University in Boston, which had a work-based, career
focus (for example, a student majoring in chemical engineering would be placed in
chemical engineering internships) and one at Antioch College in Ohio, a liberal arts
school where co-op gave greater emphasis to learning through experience. Eventually,

LaGuardia tried to forge a middle ground, more pedagogical than the Northeastern Raymond Schoenberg of the

program, but more pragmatic and focused than Antioch’s. The program, according to Registrar's Office recalled
the school’s master plan, had four objectives in mind: to provide work experience; aid days when GPAs were
students in refining marketable skills; help liberal arts students in developing career calculated on primitive
plans, and involve students and faculty in relevant issues in the city environment. It and noisy computers.

was an ambitious task, and LaGuardia was the only community
college in the nation with this sort of mission.

The fledgling co-op staff spent weeks researching
companies, writing brochures to sent to prospective employers
and talking about the college and the program to business leaders
and personnel managers in an attempt to find what Dean
Heinemann called “real jobs.” The college enlisted a member of
the Queens Chamber of Commerce in an effort to reach out to the
private sector. “The message was: This service, this product
would be a cost benefit to them,” Dorrie Williams said. “We
didn’t want corporations to think of it as a social responsibility.”

21


Counselor Rick Holmes
advising a student during
LaGuardia’s early years.

Harvey Wiener, an
English professor, was
among the guiding
lights of LaGuardia’s
writing program.

24

While LaGuardia’s slap-dash facilities imposed inconveniences, rarely did they
rise to the level of obstacles. The sound of jackhammers punctuated some lectures,
which, if nothing else, impressed on faculty members the importance of voice
projection. One English class was interrupted when a wall came down in mid-lecture.
On one hot autumn’s day, George Hamada and his science class found themselves
trapped in a small classroom with windows that refused to open. Eventually, with
everybody sweating profusely, workers arrived and proceeded to chisel 40 years of
paint off the window frame; otherwise Professor Hamada might
have been forced to change his lecture to a discussion of the
greenhouse effect. Nearly everybody in the school had a similar
story.

“But we were having so much fun, I don’t remember being
bothered,” Sheila Gordon, one of the college’s original planners
and faculty members, said of the inconveniences that came with
so nontraditional a campus. “It wasn’t the most comfortable place
in the world, but we were all so young and energetic that it was
not a problem.”

With 540 students and slightly fewer than 50 faculty
members, LaGuardia’s scale that first year was small and intimate.
Class sizes ranged from eight to twenty, which allowed for an
extraordinary amount of personal contact between a young faculty and a not-much-
younger student body. In addition to the intimacy of small numbers, faculty and
students alike had the shared experience of teaching and learning under extraordinary
startup conditions, which went a long way towards breaking down the barriers of
authority. Faculty and students knew each other’s names, and faculty
knew what other classes their students were taking and who their other
instructors were. An informal camaraderie between student and faculty
marked LaGuardia as special for many years, until its sheer size and
physical expansion (along with larger class sizes) made the old intimacy
seem quaint. Even as late as 1980, when John H. Williams joined
LaGuardia as an adjunct in music instruction, he was surprised to hear
students addressing faculty members by their first name. “The
informality didn’t disturb the relationship between faculty and student,”
he said. “It just was different.” So was the college’s grading system,
which was similarly shorn of old, authoritarian formulas. There were
three passing grades: E for excellent, G for good, and P for passing. The
one non-passing grade was NC, for no credit. The college did not use a
grade point average on student transcripts, at least for the time being.

The creative spirit clearly had an enormous impact on the founding
student body and its immediate successors. The first in a series of student-produced
literary journals and magazines began to appear, some under the auspices of various
faculty members and divisions, others distinctly independent of any authority figures.
Among the early entries in the student literary field were Genesis (which modestly



announced that there was “no purpose to this magazine beyond that of EL 1,
gaining insight into our own lives and adding meaning to our
existence”), Harvest, which was published by the Division of
Language and Culture; Babel, a quarterly magazine produced by
LaGuardia’s language students; /ndigo, a literary publication for
students, and the Humanist, perhaps the most ambitious periodical at
least in terms of appearance, for it hoped to publish every other week.
The Humanist’s stated goal was to “foster and promote the human
philosophy.”

Not all the college’s extracurricular activities had such lofty goals.
LaGuardia’s first basketball team, coached by Peter Demetriou and
nicknamed the Flyers, made its debut during the 1972-73 season,
though it had no facilities for home games. For the team’s second
season, the school rented a gym at the Lexington School for the Deaf in Jackson
Heights. The college also sponsored a bowling team under coach Donald Davidson.

Author John Williams served
as City University’s first
distinguished professor at
the community college level.
He was at LaGuardia in

the mid-1970s.

It was a slightly retooled and a growing college to which some 374 students from
LaGuardia’s initial class returned in September, 1972. The changes to the facility itself
were dramatic: In the colorful words of an observer from the Middle States Roberta Matthews, first chair
Association, “unexplored reaches of the ... basement floor have yielded to the plow, of the English Department,
and now are settled by the missionaries and farmers of LaGuardia. The transformation, — would become Associate
through judicious use of color, lighting and life, is extraordinary, and becomes in itself | Dean for Academic Affairs.
eloquent testimony to the bright vitality of this college.”

A total renovation of what would be the college’s Main Building at
31-10 Thomson Avenue was well underway, although only about
104,000 square feet of the building’s total of 250,000 had been made
usable so far. Eventually, the ambitious, $9-million project would
include new laboratories, lecture halls, lounges, classrooms, a theater
and a gymnasium.

Lack of space was to become a recurring theme at LaGuardia—
some professors tell stories of having been moved a half-dozen times or
more. In the summer of 1972, though, a plan was put into place that
would have changed the physical layout of LaGuardia. On September
22, 1972, LaGuardia formally received title to a 5.2-acre site in Astoria
that had been the location of an Army Pictorial Center. The Department
of Health, Education and Welfare, which owned the site, turned it over to
the college for a dollar, and the administration planned to make the
location LaGuardia’s permanent campus, perhaps as soon as the 1974-75 academic
year.

The returning students found changed circumstances, and at least one of the
changes had not been accounted for when the college’s founders were putting together

25


the school’s

first master plan. The second freshman class was budgeted at 500, roughly

the same size as the first class. But with students pouring into the system under open

admissions,

Th

4

the university asked LaGuardia to find room for more than 500 additional

freshmen, tripling the student body from its number on Opening Day.
The new students were more diverse than LaGuardia’s original

freshman class, suggesting that the college’s efforts to recruit more non-
white students, under the leadership of Alice Adesman, the Director of
Admissions, was a success. Whites made up 58 percent of the second
class, down from 72 percent in the first. Twenty-six percent of the class
was black, an increase from 18 percent. More dramatically, however, the
September 1972 students were a great deal poorer. A study showed a
“sharp rise in the proportion of students reporting a family income of
less than $3,000” per year. In addition, the new class was found to be in
greater need of remediation in basic reading, language and mathematics
skills. The faculty prepared to adjust accordingly. In the Division of
Language and Culture, for example, greater emphasis would be placed

on basic writing.

In the academic quarter that began in September, 1972, some 160 course sections
were offered, roughly triple the number that had been offered during the summer
quarter of the same year. The Business Division set up a program with the American
Institute of Banking to allow LaGuardia students to receive credit for courses taken at

the AIB. Th

e division also introduced a new intensive in mass marketing for students

interested in food merchandising. It was, at the time, the only course of its kind in the

nation.
The art

Marian Arkin, an early emphasized

s have long been an important part of life at LaGuardia, and have been
from the very beginning. For the school’s second year, the Division of

English faculty member, — Language and Culture, under the dynamic leadership of George Groman, introduced
created LaGuardia’s _ several courses in painting as well as an intensive in art and society. And, in an early

writing center. example of

the importance of multiculturalism and the role it would play in the
American academy, the Division offered a courses in Hispanic culture
taught by Max Rodriguez and Dr. Flora Mancuso Edwards (who later
moved from LaGuardia to the presidencies of Hostos Community College
and Middlesex Community College) as well as a course in Hebrew and an
intensive on the Haitian community — long before the great wave of
Haitian immigration to New York.

The Language and Culture faculty also had a clear and practical
understanding of the challenges it would face, especially in light of the
poorer, more need-intensive student who came to LaGuardia in Year Two.
One faculty member was helping the University to develop what was, for
the times, state-of-the-art techniques to teach basic English writing skills
using audio-visual equipment. Subtly, too, faculty members adjusted their
mission from teaching literature to composition. Early English faculty
members like Harvey Wiener, Gil Muller, Marian Arkin, Alan Berman and

26


Roberta Matthews broke new pedagogical ground in developing instructional materials
designed to meet the needs of basic writers. That did not mean, however, a dilution in
course work or a less-challenging curriculum. In spring, 1973, the novelist John A.
Williams was appointed to LaGuardia’s faculty as a distinguished professor in the
Division of Language and Culture—the first time in City University history that an
instructor with such a title was appointed to a community college faculty. (Williams
was no stranger to LaGuardia. He had participated in an intensive
entitled “Art, Politics and Protest” in December, 1972.)

The Division of Natural Environment added six new courses in
science and mathematics to go along with the opening of a new
mathematics laboratory. An intensive that proved popular with faculty
and students alike brought classes to the urban coastline. At such
places as Orchard Beach and Plumb Beach, students armed with nets
and collection bottles brought back samples of marine life to Long
Island City. The science lab that George Hamada envisioned when he
found a room with a sink, however, remained elusive, one of the first
year’s disappointments.

It wasn’t long, however, before lab-building began in earnest, and John Bihn, chair of the
the faculty member who oversaw the construction of these vital facilities was Dr. John Natural and Applied Sciences
Bihn. Bihn had been hired as a lab technician, but he soon became as familiar with the Department, oversaw the
fine points of cabinetry as any general contractor. From a sink and a few extension development of LaGuardia’s
cords, LaGuardia’s science facilities grew to include biology, chemistry and physics science laboratories.
labs. In later years, Bihn would be involved in the construction of labs for occupational
therapy, physical therapy, nursing, veterinary technology and dietetics, often working
with colleagues such as John Melick and William Pan.

In other area, adjustments started to be put in place in response to student
demands and the anticipated needs of the labor market. A faculty
committee was empaneled to establish a broad new curriculum in Human
Services, a field that also was at the heart of LaGuardia’s mission and was
a natural outgrowth of the spirit of service which motivated the school’s
faculty and administrators. Included in the new core curriculum would be
courses in mental health, child care, and narcotics addiction services.
LaGuardia’s planners had anticipated by at least a decade many of the
needs of New Yorkers who were unknowingly hurtling towards a global
economy and enormous changes in family and social relationships. The
college’s planning documents noted that “in the human and public services
there has already been extensive job development and training ... to meet
the rapidly increasing demands for services. Fields for possible curriculum

development are child care, education, social service, geriatrics...” An

intensive in Understanding Social Welfare Institutions was added, as well .
The sciences became

increasingly important at
LaGuardia in the 1980s. The
college's labs were an
important part of that growth.

as a seminar in human services and a course in the sociology of the family. In
November, 1974, Augusta Kappner was appointed chairperson of the school’s Division
of Human Services.

27


Naomi Greenberg
working with science
students.

President Shenker
awards a student his
diploma at LaGuardia’s
first commencement.

28

Changes and adjustments were underway in other divisions as well. In the
Division of Natural Environment, George Hamada and Raymond Bowen saw an
opportunity to respond to labor-market needs and student demand by proposing the
introduction of programs in the allied health field. Hamada brought Naomi
Greenberg, an occupational therapist, to LaGuardia to serve as a consultant in
setting up an occupational therapy program—the school’s first health career
program. The plan met with some resistance at first, in the main because it
appeared to deviate from the school’s master plan and its concentration on
business and human services. Eventually, however, the master plan was
revised to include development of an allied health curriculum, and 25
students were admitted into the program when it began in the fall of 1973.
The addition of an allied health program produced a change that would have
a dramatic impact on LaGuardia in the 1980s, when demand for health and
medical careers exploded.

LaGuardia’s ability to move quickly in response to changing needs and
circumstances was rooted in its commitment to the city, borough and
neighborhood. A major component of the school’s outreach was, and is, its Division of
Continuing Education and Extension Services, an outgrowth of what originally was the
Office of Grants and Continuing Education. The Division’s mission was to bring non-
credit instruction and learning to places where even a non-traditional college like
LaGuardia could not go on its own. When the program started, it served 125 students.
The number eventually would grow to more than 20,000, with a broad selection of
courses chosen carefully after assessing the community’s needs. “From the beginning,
we were interested in providing entry (into higher education) for adults who wouldn’t
think of going to college,” said Ann Marcus, who served as the Division’s chair.

The Division’s ability to reach underserved populations was exemplified in
several early initiatives. From the beginning, it recognized the importance of
language a potential barrier to student achievement, so it sponsored summer
courses in English as a Second Language at City University’s Center for Graduate
Education in midtown Manhattan. In an attempt to reach out to a neighbor,
LaGuardia established a non-credit program in the Queens House of Detention,
introducing a high school equivalency program as well as courses in basic
education, English as a Second Language and in ethnic cultures and literature.

One of the Division’s earliest initiatives was the establishment of a Veterans
Education Center, which opened in January, 1972. It was aimed at Vietnam-era
veterans at a time when soldiers returning from the battlefields of Mekong and
Danang were shunted aside from mainstream society. Initially, the center charged
a fee for its programs, but when LaGuardia’s administrators realized that many of
the vets had little money, the school’s assiduous grant-writers were sent into action,
leading to the abolition of the fee and greater opportunity for the veterans. (The Middle
States Association later noted that LaGuardia had “an amazing batting average in
funding proposals.”)

Other outreach programs included establishment of senior citizen’s centers in the



Queensbridge and Woodside neighborhoods of western Queens. Queensbridge opened
first, and offered classes in Drama, Folk Dancing and Conversational Spanish, but,
after consultation with the seniors, the curriculum for both centers changed, and classes
in Public Speaking, History, Spanish and English Writing were organized.

Two milestones in the college’s development took place in December, 1972. On
December 5, the Commission on Higher Education of the Middle States Association
informed President Shenker that LaGuardia had been accepted as a “recognized
candidate for accreditation.” Several days later, LaGuardia graduated its first
students—a class consisting of four women who were enrolled in the Education
Associate Program for Board of Education paraprofessionals that had started six
months before LaGuardia officially opened. The graduates—Diane Faison, Joyce
Heron, Lottie Spriggs and Margaret Madden—took on extra course loads to finish their
degree requirements in about eighteen months. At a small ceremony, Fern Khan,
director of the Education Associates program, presented the graduates with their
diplomas, and President Shenker was on hand to congratulate them.

As much as the occasion was a milestone, it was not without a bit of comedy.
When the registrar’s office attempted to run off copies of the new graduates’ transcripts
(after a clunky, primitive calculator managed to figure out everybody’s grade point
average), there was no paper in the house. Raymond Schoenberg and others in the
registrar’s office searched high and low, and even asked other colleges if they had any
paper to spare. Fortunately, Staten Island Community College did, so LaGuardia’s first
transcripts were printed on paper bearing the name and logo of S.LC.C. “For years we
had to reassure people that yes, they had taken the courses at LaGuardia and not on
Staten Island,” Schoenberg recalled.

The mini-commencement was but a prelude to the historic occasion of
LaGuardia’s first full commencement exercises, which were
held on Sunday, September 16, in Colden Auditorium on the
campus of Queens College. The keynote speaker was Brooklyn
Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, a Democrat who was a year
removed from becoming the first African-American woman to
run for a major party’s presidential nomination.

As the members of the Class of 1973 celebrated (and
administrators and faculty quietly exulted in this rite of
passage), LaGuardia’s future seemed limitless. The promise of
opportunity was being delivered in the old factory building in
Long Island City. The school, and the university itself, had
embarked on a radical journey to bring higher education to the
excluded and underserved, and, on that Sunday afternoon in
1973, everything seemed to be in working order.

The spirit of the age, however, was about to change.

Commencement Day.

29


a Abe, Carey
Rip Stand



CHAPTER THREE

crowing
Pains

here was little reason to believe that anything was amiss as LaGuardia’s students

assembled for the academic year of 1973-74. A few weeks after the fall semester

began, New York voters chose Abe Beame as their new Mayor after a campaign
that exhibited no particular sense of urgency. Beame was the city’s first Jewish Mayor,
born in London of Polish immigrants and reared on the streets of Brooklyn. He seized
the freedoms New York gave him, earning an accounting degree from City College—
he was the first (and thus far, only) City University graduate to hold the city’s highest
elective office.

Nobody, not even the new Mayor himself, knew that a fiscal crisis of historic
proportions, one that would profoundly affect LaGuardia and the university itself, was
lurking around the corner.

To the administrators, faculty, staff and students at
LaGuardia, the only crisis on campus involved, as always,
space. But the eternal displacement of offices and classes
did nothing to dampen the enthusiasm and spirit of
adventure as the college grew out of its infancy. A Middle
States observer noted that among LaGuardia’s immediate
challenges was finding a way to innovate, experiment and,
'n general, stay young once the excitement of the first years
wore off.

Meeting such a challenge required an administration
willing to take risks, and under President Shenker and the
‘cam of special assistants, deans and chairs he assembled,

The film studio in Astoria,
Queens, that was the
prospective new site for
LaGuardia’s campus.

eat

31


President Shenker with
Queens Borough
President Claire

Shulman.

Mary Abkemeier helped
establish the Natural
and Applied Science
Department.

32

innovation continued to be one of LaGuardia’s hallmarks. One such experiment was
entitled Satellite College, which was intended to formalize LaGuardia’s commitment to
ground-breaking interdisciplinary studies. Though short-lived, Satellite College
succeeded in breaking down rigid divisions among fields, and it
served as a precursor to LaGuardia’s highly regarded experiments

in learning communities. “Everything was thematic,” recalled
Raymond Bowen, who headed the program during its short
existence. “There were a lot of experiments going on.” One such
experiment combined writing, sociology and psychology by asking
students to write news articles for three disparate newspapers based
on a hypothetical race riot in Queens. “Understanding the
philosophies of the different ethnic groups in New York, I wanted
them to write an article as they thought it would appear in the New
York Times, another article as it might appear in the New York Post
or Daily News and another as it might appear in the Amsterdam
News,” Bowen recalled. “So you would have to know the
psychology and sociology of the different ethnic groups to write
these reports. In this way, we brought those three fields together in a
collaboration.”

Such was the spirit on campus even as a municipal drama was unfolding in
Manhattan’s world of politics and municipal finance. As word spread of LaGuardia’s
fresh approach and its commitment to the underserved, people who never thought
they'd see the inside of a college classroom suddenly found themselves passing
through the Great Hall with notebooks in hand. One such student was a 43-year-old
former gang member and prisoner named Theodore Toler, who began his studies at
LaGuardia in the fall of 1973. Already plagued with doubts about his
abilities, Toler also was extremely self-conscious about his age. When he
walked into his first mathematics class, a student already in the classroom
said, in a stage whisper, “There’s the teacher!” Toler was embarrassed, but he
resolved not to let the incident discourage him. Eventually, he won the first
writing contest in the school’s history for a story he entitled “The Cisco Kid,”
which was based on his experiences in New York’s gang life.

Like so many other students, Toler received encouragement and attention
from a faculty whose mission was designed to be student-centered. “The
support we received from faculty was unbelievable,” said Peter Maturro,
Class of 1973. “I don’t think you'd have found such support anywhere in the
country. When I look back on it, I realize it was a lucky deal for me.”
Maturro, who lived in Corona, Queens, had come to LaGuardia after barely
making it through Newtown High School. He chose to major in business
administration for no particular reason. “I really had no direction when I came to
LaGuardia,” he said. That began to change almost right away as individual professors,
especially Sarah Barber, Sheila Gordon and Gilbert Muller, and advisers such as Ben
Baim and Steven Brown, introduced him to a world he never knew. And that



introduction was taken to another level when he signed up for Professor Barber’s
week-long intensive exploring art upstate in the mountains. “I really had never been
away from home, aside from vacations in the Rockaways,” he said. “This was a
different world. We talked to artists who lived there and with towns-
people, and we all kept diaries and afterwards we all contributed to a
journal. I have to say that it was one of the highlights of my
experience at LaGuardia. Professor Barber made me look at things in
a different way, and was interested not only in my writing, but in
helping me develop as a person.”

Later, during his first two co-op internships, Maturro realized that
he wasn’t cut out for the business world. His third and last internship
was in an alternative high school for trouble students. There, he said,

he found his calling. He went on to become a social worker, and—

ironically enough, given LaGuardia’s urban setting and mission— ‘

thanks to his unforgettable week in the mountains, he eventually } ‘ Z ral

moved to the foothills of the Catskills, where he is raising his own — :

family. “We do a lot of camping together,” he said. “Thanks to LaGuardia, doors Ruth Lebovitz was an

opened to a new experience.” early member of the
Daniel Magngan came to LaGuardia in the late 1970s, when he was 28. An counseling faculty.

average student at John Adams High School, he blossomed at LaGuardia because, he
said, faculty members encouraged him to set his sights high. Early in his first year, he
was assigned to write a term paper about his neighborhood, Ozone Park. “I went to the
central library in Queens for the first time in my life,” he said. “I spent hours there.”
Several faculty members complimented him on his writing and research, “which told
me that they would go the extra mile for students.... Without the faculty, I probably
would have been mentally defeated. Instead I was a straight-A student.” Years later,
Magngan said he still regarded his years at LaGuardia as “the big achievement of my
life.”

Of course, student life wasn’t confined to the classroom, although how much time

U.S. Senator Daniel Patrick
Moynihan and President
Shenker.

students spent on campus depended on their often-hectic off-campus lives. Many
students from the early years took full course loads—including their co-op
internships—while working part-time or taking care of family
responsibilities. Others, like Maxine Lance, found their lives
intertwining with LaGuardia’s. Lance, another member of the
college’s first graduating class, spent long hours in the Great Hall,
where courtships developed and friendships formed. She met other
‘riends through the school’s Black American Club, one of 26 clubs
that came into existence during the college’s first few years. There
were clubs for a variety of interest areas, including Accounting,
Asian, Music, Greek, Literary, Haitian, Italian, Spiritual Awareness,
rheater and Law and Justice. The feeling on campus among students,
she said, “was more like family. Everybody mingled together.” She
and her friends often gathered for breakfast in the Great Hall, where,

33


Congresswoman
Elizabeth Holtzman
at LaGuardia’s 1976
commencement.

Dan Lynch became
chair of the English
Department in

the 1980s.

34

she said, students paid as little as $1 for a hearty meal of fresh pancakes.

A portion of the Great Hall was given the name Sangria Junction, a place where
students congregated between classes to relax, play pool, ping pong or frisbee football,
or simply soak up the atmosphere of college life. A campus radio
station, WLGC, piped in music from its studio in the college’s
rented facilities in the nearby Sony building. A student newspaper,
Fiorello’s Flute, kept students informed of the latest developments
on campus and stirred up discussion with lively coverage of
student government elections. Soon, the college instituted dances
on Friday and Saturday nights, giving students a further chance to
mingle and solidifying LaGuardia’s place in their lives.

Later in 1974, the college embarked on what would become
one of its most successful and nationally recognized innovations
when Middle College High School opened its doors for the first
time. The high school had been in the planning stages since 1971,
when Janet Lieberman and other educators began designing an
alternative high school designed to suit the needs of the city’s
young people and help reduce the city’s high dropout rate. As a
collaborative effort between LaGuardia and the Board of Education, Middle College
quickly gained a reputation as a national leader in educating at-risk high school
students, and it enhanced LaGuardia’s reputation for creativity and innovation.

By the time the college graduated its second class in September, 1974, the
school’s future still seemed limitless. But limits were about to be realized, for New
York City was broke. There were civic leaders, financial mavens and politicians who
would soon be saying that the city could no longer afford such luxuries as free tuition
at City University. There were even some who thought the city could no longer afford
its commitment to its newest and most vulnerable institution of higher learning—
LaGuardia Community College.

On July 17, 1975, several bankers and politicians, including Mayor
Beame, met to discuss the city’s deteriorating financial condition. The
Mayor agreed that dramatic action was called for. There was talk of
wage freezes for city workers and drastic service cuts. But that was not
enough. Then the unmentionable was mentioned. Felix Rohatyn, an
investment banker and chairman of the Municipal Assistance
Corporation, formally proposed that New York end its long tradition of
providing free higher education.

Mayor Beame protested, pointing out that 71 percent of City
University’s 275,000 students came from families with incomes of less
than $14,000 per year. At the time, City University’s only charge was
$105 per year for senior college and $60 for community colleges. While
no decision was made at that fateful July 17 meeting, Mayor Beame’s
protests would be in vain.

Several weeks later, City University Chancellor Robert Kibbee



imposed a stunning 20 percent cut to the university’s operating
budget. The plan also called for elimination of the very philosophy
that was part of LaGuardia’s reason for being—open admissions.

The crisis was taking hold on LaGuardia’s campus. The overall
budget cuts were trickling down, and President Shenker was
preparing for a $1.8 million cut to the college’s budget. Suddenly, the
main topic of discussion at LaGuardia was not innovation but
survival. In the fall of 1975, the president ordered a 15 percent
increase in class size, cuts to LaGuardia’s immensely effective
counseling program and a layoff of part-time secretarial staff. The
college’s equipment budget also was drastically reduced. A headline
in Fiorello’s Flute read: “LaGuardia Gets Cut, Students Get
Shafted.”

By the spring of 1976, the Board of Higher Education—City
University’s governing body—was $70 million in the red. Soon, faculty members
throughout the University were placed on furlough for two weeks without pay and the
system was shut down. The city was in no position to help, for it was on the verge of
bankruptcy. It was around this time that Dr. Roberta Matthews, who would go on to
become an associate dean for academic affairs, received a telephone call one morning
from her husband. He said he had heard a report that the city would be out of money
by the afternoon, so she ought to cash her paycheck as soon as possible.

Not surprisingly, at a time when even police officers were being laid off—putting
an end to the notion that such civil service jobs were guaranteed for life—there was
talk of folding LaGuardia and allowing its students to be absorbed by Queensborough
Community College. In fact, that exact proposal was floated for a short
time. “At the time, we were the new kids on the block, and there were
serious proposals for downsizing the entire university,” said Harry
Heinemann. “There actually were hit lists (of college closings), and
whenever you saw one, LaGuardia was at the top.” Fearing such a
possibility, the many friends and allies LaGuardia already had made in
the community responded with testimonials praising the college’s
efforts. The Clergy Council of Northwest Queens sent letters to all 10
members of the Board of Higher Education, telling them that
LaGuardia’s “unique cooperative education program combined with
the many diverse community programs the college offers our residents
makes it essential that LaGuardia continue to function and expand in
Western Queens.” The business community, which understood the
critical role LaGuardia was playing in training the city’s future work
force, also rallied to the school’s support.

In truth LaGuardia was never in any real danger, thanks in part to the strategy it
followed and the knowledge President Shenker had of the Board of Higher Education’s
methods and philosophy, having spent the late 1960s as the Board’s director of
community colleges. He also was well-placed politically, with a vast array of contacts

From the beginning,
LaGuardia has been a work in
progress. Here, President
Shenker and City Comptroller
Harrison J. Goldin view
renovations underway in 1980.

Barbara Muir contributed
to the development of the
mathematics curriculum.


Artist Peter Brown
of the Humanities
Department practiced
what he taught.

Umoja Kwanguvu
coordinated program
operations for
student activities.

throughout the educational and political establishment. “Joe brought an uncanny
knowledge of the inner workings of the University and the political system,”
Heinemann recalled. “That was important, not only in getting us through the fiscal
crisis, but also in getting us the money we needed to grow and expand once the crisis
was over. If there had been somebody less skilled at the helm, we might have been in
trouble.” LaGuardia could not have had a more forceful or better-
connected advocate.

That is not to say, however, that the impact of the crisis went
unnoticed in Long Island City. Money became so short that the
college didn’t publish a bulletin for the 1976-77 academic year.
“The whole planning process stopped in the fiscal crisis,” President
Shenker recalled. “We had started renovations (to the Main
Building) but everything had to be put on hold.” And some things
had to be scrapped. The huge site in Astoria that the college
acquired from the Department of Health and Human Services in
1974 was sacrificed in the name of austerity, thus canceling the
college’s long-term plan to move either some or all of its
operations there. “Just guarding the complex ... and heating it was
a huge cost,” President Shenker said. So it was sold off.

The college also embarked on an aggressive strategy to ward off the arguments of
those who believed that LaGuardia, with its small student population and work-in-
progress facilities, could be closed with minimal impact on students. At a time of
shrinking budgets, LaGuardia’s enrollment grew enormously through the years of
crisis. The growth was not an accident. From his years at the Board of Higher
Education, President Shenker knew that within the University, the number that
commanded the most respect was the full-time student population (or, in the language
of City University, full-time equivalents, known as FTE’s). City University’s funding
was doled out by a formula dictated by the number of FTE’s on campus. “The name of
the game in City University is the number of FTE’s,” said Janet Lieberman, one of the
school’s founders. “Prestige and power within the University come with the amount of
dollars you command.” By increasing its FTE population from 3,303 in 1973-74 to
7,569 in 1978-79, LaGuardia strengthened its hand and made it harder
to argue that it was a luxury City University could not afford.

The strategy, Shenker said, was designed “to get LaGuardia’s name
off the list of possible mergers and closures. It was a baseline decision to
grow very rapidly, with the idea being that if we achieved a certain size,
we no longer would be so small that we could easily be absorbed. Our
dollars went down and growth went up.”

Understanding that faculty morale was vital during such hard times,
particularly in light of unpaid furloughs and persistent rumors of the
city’s impending financial collapse, President Shenker expedited the
tenure process with key faculty members. Nineteen faculty and staff
members attended a reception on January 20, 1976, in honor of being



granted tenure, and the President moved to grant early tenure to two other faculty
members, Harvey Wiener and Gilbert Muller, both associate professors in the Division
of Language and Culture. Tenure relieved senior faculty members from the real fear
that layoffs might have thrown them out of work. As it turned out, no faculty were laid
off at LaGuardia, a startling contrast with some older schools where, all told, 1,000
untenured faculty members were dismissed.

Meanwhile, a reconstituted Board of Higher Education ended a tradition of free
higher education that had its roots in the Free Academy of pre-Civil War New York.
Beginning in September, 1976, LaGuardia’s students would have to pay $650 a year.
The impact of the decision was brought home to LaGuardia’s
students in an edition of Fiorello’s Flute devoted almost
exclusively to questions about financial aid.

When classes began in September, enrollment throughout City
University was down by 35,000. LaGuardia experienced its first
fall-to-fall decrease in raw headcount, from 4,676 students enrolled
in September, 1975, to 4,540 students in September, 1976. As if to
make a statement about the turn of events, LaGuardia chose
Congresswomen Elizabeth Holtzman to deliver the keynote address
at its fourth commencement exercises in September, 1976. She was
a stalwart defender of free tuition, and she accused the city of
caving in to “a hostile federal government and an envious country.”

Two months after LaGuardia and the university itself began
charging tuition, with the city still mired in crisis and gloom, an
explosion rocked the Chicle factory on 31st Street, adjacent to
LaGuardia’s Main Building. The blast was terrifying, shattering windows and
damaging the school’s day care center. Worse, six people were killed, and among the

Professor Joanne Reitano
of the Social Science
Department assisted in the

seriously injured was a LaGuardia student and Chicle employee, Jerry Podhajecki, a developing LaGuardia’s
data processing major who was in the plant at the time of the blast. His brother also Teaching Application
was seriously injured. The explosion set back some of the already delayed renovations Reinforcement Program
to the Main Building. and has been active in
Despite the hardships, LaGuardia was making progress, remarkable progress, developing urban studies.

considering the depth of the crisis. While many plans were put on hold or, as in the
case of the Astoria campus, dropped entirely, the school’s creative spirit remained in
evidence. So did the physical manifestations of the college’s growth and permanence.
In the midst of the fiscal crisis, the renovation of the Main Building continued, and in
June, 1976, a portion of the renovated facility opened, with 88,000 square feet of
gleaming new offices and classrooms. The library, bookstore, day care center and an
assortment of other offices moved into the new space, and 18 months of
inconvenience, of shifting classrooms and extended use of leased facilities, came to an
end—to an extent, that is. Because of the city’s perilous finances, the renovation was
not completed in one piece: Work still had to be done on 44,000 square feet fronting
Thomson Avenue. It was, though, a milestone all the same, and a bit of much-needed
good news.

37


Professor Joseph
McPhee working with
science students.

Even in the face of the city’s financial crisis, LaGuardia’s mission was intact, its
commitment to its students unchanged. Faculty members continued to develop
programs, explore new areas and dare to experiment as they had done before. New
programs, such as development of an office for institutional research under the
direction of Dan Ehrlich, came into existence. With the college’s growth, new
professors were hired, many of them coming from the ranks of adjuncts who had
helped with the college’s course load during the first few years. Among the adjuncts
hired for full-time work were Dr. Denise Carter, in mathematics, and Dr. Brian
Gallagher, in English. Carter taught part-time for two years
before joining LaGuardia full-time in 1978. By then, the
system of academic divisions had given way to traditional
departments, and the Mathematics Department was chaired by
Roy McLeod. “I was new to teaching, and fortunately, our
Chair gave us direction,” Carter said.

New faculty, of course, had their eyes on winning tenure,
and each department chair helped shepherd along the junior
faculty towards that goal. Carter recalled that McLeod was
particularly helpful, moving young professors along a five-
year, step-by-step plan: “The first year we spent getting to
know the college and the department,” she said. “In the
second year, we branched out to college-wide committees, the
third year we spent presenting papers, working on
professional development and getting on outside committees.
By the fourth year, we were doing what we could to improve in all areas.” Year Five
was the magic year.

From a faculty and administrative perspective, one of the most important changes
at LaGuardia in the mid-1970s had nothing to do with fiscal crisis and budgetary
constraints. It was the elimination of LaGuardia’s unique divisional system and its
replacement by more traditional academic departments. Some faculty and
administrators, such as Rose Palmer, were firm believers in the divisional system;
others found it unwieldy for an ambitious college that was growing and intended to
grow even bigger. Professors such as David Wertheimer said the change didn’t affect
the classroom experience, although he believed that the breakup of the Business
Division into three departments allowed for an even greater degree of intimacy among
faculty members.

The change meant the creation of an assortment of new academic departments that
had no separate identity under the old system. To cite just two examples, the English
and Humanities Departments were the offspring of the Division of Language and
Culture, and the Mathematics Department broke free of the Division of Natural
Environment. New departments required the appointment of chairs and a major
reorganization of the way in which academic programs were developed. They also
created some creative tension between onetime partners. Peter Brown, a sculptor and
professor in the new Humanities Department, noted that he and his colleagues “always



had a slight chip on our shoulders because we were always the elective department.”
At the time of the breakup, none of the department’s courses was attached to a core
requirement. Even still, he and other faculty found the new arrangement liberating,
allowing for more innovation and program development.

“We were creative even in naming the courses,” recalled Max
Rodriguez, a humanities professor. “We developed a series of survey
courses in culture and history that we named French Life and
Institutions, Italian Life and Institutions, Hispanic Life and Institutions,
and so on.” But creativity sometimes brings unintended consequences:
LaGuardia’s students had a hard time transferring the “Life and
Institutions” credits when admissions offices in other colleges found the
course description too creative. “So eventually we had to rename the
courses as general surveys of particular civilizations. We had to comply
with the nomenclature despite our best judgment.”

The college also took advantage of its urban setting to develop a
series of classes in urban studies, focusing on the arts, on music, literature, history and Joel Millonzi chaired the
other aspects of city life. One course that made a particularly memorable impression on — Social Science Department
students was a history of New York City, taught by Richard Lieberman, Joanne Reitano —_for several years.
and several adjuncts. Margaret Hunte, a student in her mid-40s whose children already
had gone to college, recalled signing up for the course and thinking, “This is going to
be a cinch. I’ve been in New York all my life.” She was amazed to discover what she
didn’t know. Field trips to several historic sites taught her “about the era of Boss
Tweed, about Robert Moses, about all the things you didn’t learn elsewhere.” She also
learned something about the future of New York when she and the class studied the
city’s demographic trends. “At the time areas like Flushing
were Italian and Irish, but even back in the late 1970s we could
see how it was going to become largely Asia. It was
enlightening.” Hunte went on to York College, was graduated
summa cum laude, and then went on to get a master’s degree in

social work.

Other departments and faculty members similarly moved
ahead even as news reports portrayed the city, and its university,
in a relentless crisis. In the sciences, Dr. Joseph McPhee and
other faculty members successfully applied for a series of grants
that allowed the new Department of Natural and Applied
Sciences to expand its curriculum without having to depend on
non-existent city and state funds. The grant was a milestone for
the department, for it allowed for growth on the eve of an
explosion of interest in the allied health field. Courses in
occupational therapy, physical therapy, nursing, dietetics and similar fields eventually
made the department one of LaGuardia’s strongest.

“The fiscal crisis wiped out money for course and program development,”
McPhee recalled. “The grants turned us around.” First came a grant for $750,000 from

39


40

the Veterans Administration to set up a veterans retraining program, money which
helped fund courses in dietetics. McPhee then applied for a grant for $200,000 from
the National Science Foundation to develop courses in basic sciences, such as
microbiology and bio-chemistry, to run in coordination with the applied science
programs. The grants were critical because of the tricky nature of
course development, McPhee noted. “The biggest problem in
public colleges is this Catch-22: When you develop a new course,
in order to have it implemented, you have to have a minimum
number of students signed up. But students sometimes are
reluctant to sign up for courses that they’re not sure about.” The
grants, however, allowed for experimentation without affecting
the college’s bottom line. McPhee also helped get the college a
grant from the Minority Institutional Science Improvement
Program to improve instructional support for science students.

The Program for Deaf Adults was another initiative
undertaken even as budget dollars grew more scarce. The
program was devised under the auspices of the Division of
Continuing Education, part of what the program’s founder, Fern
Khan, called “our mission to reach out to all sectors of society.”
The program initially served only a handful of students when it started in 1975, but it
would go on to serve 700 students a year and gain LaGuardia a reputation for being on
the cutting edge of providing accessible higher education to deaf people. By the time
the program celebrated its 20th anniversary, LaGuardia had the highest enrollment of
deaf and hearing-impaired people in the entire City University system. Indeed, when
Congresswoman Holtzman gave the college’s commencement address in 1976, it was
simultaneously translated into sign language so that 52-year-old Dorothy Pakula,
LaGuardia’s first deaf graduate, could fully participate in the ceremony. Mrs. Pakula,
who had been deaf since birth, received both a degree and a special award for her
achievement. She said the 10 other deaf students studying for degrees at LaGuardia
and the several hundred enrolled in non-credit courses were “lucky” to have such a
program.

The college’s grant writers continued to find success during the city’s hard times,
allowing LaGuardia to develop new programs despite the volatile budget problems.
The college received nearly $1 million in grants in 1976 and 1977 for programs on and
off campus, earning LaGuardia the distinction of receiving more grant dollars per
enrolled student than any other City University institution. The money allowed
LaGuardia to bring its message of empowerment and spirit of innovation well beyond
the borders of Long Island City.

For example, a federal grant of $147,000 allowed the college to establish an adult
learning center at the Queens House of Detention in Kew Gardens. Another federal
grant, this one for $62,000, led to the establishment of a program called IMPACT,
which offered courses in human services, social sciences, reading and writing to
mostly middle-aged students who had never gone to college before. Based in Long



Island City and in Astoria, the program was designed not only to 3 aa
provide the beginnings of a college education, but also to help
groom future community leaders.

It was this sort of outreach to communities at their most basic
level that characterized LaGuardia’s off-campus activities and
demonstrated that the passage of time and the burdens of fiscal
uncertainty had not dampened the enthusiasms of the school’s
founders. It seemed only natural that a college that offered courses in
the nitty-gritty of New York’s political, cultural and social life would
also extend its mission to communities in hopes of reaching new
people.

That spirit was obvious in one of the college’s earliest off-
campus outreach endeavors, a program run in conjunction with a
group of neighborhood women in the Greenpoint section of
Brooklyn. While short-lived, the program reflected LaGuardia’s willingness to
experiment wherever there might be an interest in higher education and training—the
women in Greenpoint had visions of having their own degree programs in their
community.

Another successful outreach program in Brooklyn came about in 1978 after years
of discussion. With the help of $630,000 in grants, LaGuardia launched a formal
affiliation with the Red Hook Family Day Care Training Center, bringing the college to
another struggling industrial neighborhood whose residents were trying desperately to
cope with a changed economy and culture. Under the direction of Augusta Kappner,
then Dean of Continuing Education, the program provided day care providers with a
chance to earn college credit as part of their training. It was a far-sighted program,
anticipating the last big push of women baby boomers into the job market, a
development that led to greater demands for quality day care. The
program also sought to help parents themselves, and in its first year of
operation held more than 700 workshops for parents. In a display of
its commitment to the program, LaGuardia hosted a two-day learning
fair in 1979 for 136 newly licensed day care providers and observers
from various government agencies.

No doubt one of the most satisfying moments in what was a
difficult time for the college came in 1976 when the federal
Department of Health, Education and Welfare chose LaGuardia to
develop a national model for career education. LaGuardia was the
only community college in the country chosen.

With a federal grant of $208,000, LaGuardia was offered a
chance to restructure its liberal arts offerings to reflect work-related concerns, develop
an exchange program that would allow faculty members a chance to participate in
private-sector internships, and host two national conferences on career education. The
national recognition was a morale-booster for everyone at LaGuardia, particularly
when the media began to take notice. New York magazine published an article on

41


Augusta Kappner served
as dean of Continuing
Education.

Diane Ducat, long-time
faculty member, was on
the team that developed
Teaching Application
Reinforcement.

42

cooperative education that featured LaGuardia’s achievements, noting that students
who entered the work force immediately upon graduation earned an average salary of
$8,100 a year—while their families’ median income was $8,000. The federal
recognition and the publicity were a sign that something of great
importance was building, brick by brick, on Thomson Avenue, even at a
time when people were wondering about the future of City University
and the city itself.

In conjunction with the co-op internships, LaGuardia faculty
developed a program called Teaching Application Reinforcement,
known by its acronym, TAR. Founded by Irwin Feifer and implemented
by various faculty members, including Dr. Joanne Reitano and
Professors Cathy Farrell and Diane Ducat, it was a groundbreaking
attempt to link the classroom and work experience in the belief that
students could learn better if they could apply classroom knowledge to
their workplace experiences. In many ways, the TAR program served as
a bridge between traditional vocational education and non-traditional
pedagogical approaches to learning.

Students who were working at their internships would attend seminars in various
fields designed to build on what they were learning in the workplace. Social Sciences
faculty developed a seminar that reinforced concepts taught in the Introduction to
Social Science course. It included exploring the theme of power in the workplace.
“One student I had was working in a health facility and her colleagues wouldn’t give
her a key to the office, so she couldn’t get in until they showed up,” recalled Professor
Reitano. “We talked about power, how it manifested itself in the control of the key, and
a light went off in her head: Now she understood what was going on. And instead of
feeling bitter about it, she was better equipped to handle it.” In the Social Science-
based TAR seminars, students discussed the culture of their
workplaces, from accepted styles of dress to something as prosaic as
whether or not employees chewed gum on the job. In doing so, faculty
helped them identify the cultural keys that would be critical in their
future success in the workplace. Other TAR seminars were developed
in English, the Humanities, Communication Skills, and Business.

The TAR seminars were a national model in the field, and the
program’s manuals were published and sought after by other colleges.

As the pall of crisis lifted slowly from the city and the university
in the late 1970s, LaGuardia’s growth continued. In 1977, for the first
time since the fiscal crisis began, LaGuardia’s budget was increased,
by $800,000. Some $2 million in capital funds that had been frozen
during the crisis were thawed out and delivered, allowing the college to purchase badly
needed supplies of books and equipment. Thanks to an aggressive recruiting campaign,
LaGuardia’s enrollment in the fall of 1977 topped 6,000, an increase from the 4,540
who enrolled in the fall of 1976. The impressive enrollment figures came despite the
imposition of tuition and the ensuing decline in enrollment throughout the University.



With a federal grant of nearly a half-million dollars, the college established an
associate degree program in Dietary Technician Education to educate and train food
service managers, particularly veterans. The program was part of what would become a
significant commitment to the allied health field as jobs and student interest expanded
in the 1980s.

Further expansion was evident as the decade neared a close, as LaGuardia
established an alternative degree program designed for adult students, allowing them to
earn an associate degree by designing an individualized program in consultation with a
faculty adviser.

Meanwhile, at a time when homelessness, domestic abuse and other critical issues
were not part of the mainstream national dialogue, LaGuardia under the leadership of
Professor Larry Long was revamping its Human Services program to develop co-op
internships in fields dealing with what were, at the time, hidden or ignored problems.
(In fact, a bulletin announcing the initiative referred, in language that might seem
quaint today, to the problems of “shopping bag ladies.”)

As the college approached its 10th anniversary, the excitement of its beginnings
and the trauma of the fiscal crisis were over. The college was moving forward with
plans for physical expansion as and well
as program development. Yet with the
accelerated growth and posh new offices
and more defined roles for faculty, staff
and administrators, there was a feeling
among some that perhaps the college
had slowed down a step. Gone were the
days of ad-hoc decisions and nightly
planning sessions at Brook’s restaurant.
As LaGuardia was nearing its 10th
anniversary, it now had, of all things, a
bureaucracy.

Julian Bond (right) marches
with LaGuardia and CUNY
administrators and faculty
at the college’s second

commencement.

43


Building New York,
One Mind ata Time.



CHAPTER FOUR

Malurily

n the evening of November 16, 1981, a crowd of dignitaries, politicians,

administrators, faculty and staff filed into LaGuardia Community College’s Marie LaGuardia with

theater for what promised to be a memorable ceremony. After people found their |= Mayor Edward Koch at
seats and dispensed with their chatter, a vaguely familiar voice resounded through the LaGuardia’s tenth
theater: “And now, on with the show!” anniversary ceremony.

It was the recorded voice of none other than Fiorello LaGuardia
himself, and the show to which the recording referred was the gala
celebration of LaGuardia Community College’s 10th anniversary.

Among those gathered to mark the occasion was LaGuardia’s
widow, Marie, still active at the age of 86. She had outlived her husband
by more than 35 years, but remained very much a part of the college’s
family and of the city’s political life. John Lindsay, the first Republican
elected Mayor since LaGuardia, was among those who regarded Mrs.
LaGuardia as a close friend. The spirit of her husband was invoked
throughout the ceremonies; indeed, among the rituals that marked the
occasion was the unveiling of a sculpture showing the beloved three-
time Mayor in a characteristically feisty pose (and in a characteristically
rumpled suit), his mouth open as if in passionate argument, one hand
poised over the other to drive home the point. Eventually, the sculpture
served as a model for a much larger version that was executed by Neil
Estern, who had received his high school diploma from the Mayor’s
hands.

45


Lynne Hayden, Sheila
Gordon and Alexandria
Lupo of the college’s
Development Office.

Professor John Chaffee
of the Humanties
Department helped
develop the college's
critical thinking

skills program.

46

Another honored guest at the anniversary celebration was a man who had begun to
inspire favorable comparisons with LaGuardia, thanks to a similar personal (and, some
would say, sartorial) style. Mayor Edward Koch, fresh from winning a second term in
an unprecedented style—running on both the Democratic and
Republican lines—was one of the evening’s featured speakers, and he
took the occasion to label LaGuardia Community College as “the
youngest and perhaps the most special unit of the City University.”
After his speech, the Mayor joined Mrs. LaGuardia and President Joe
Shenker in cutting a ribbon to mark the official dedication of the
renovated Main Building.

The college’s 10th anniversary was an occasion for both reflection
and (as modestly as possible) self-congratulation. It had been, after all,
an experience all who were associated with it would never forget.
Tributes to the college’s excellence offered evidence that a decade’s
worth of work and innovation had brought forth something special. In declaring the
week beginning November 16 to be LaGuardia Community College Week in New
York, Mayor Koch noted that “the college’s partnership with business, industry and the
public sector has made a significant contribution to the economic development of our
city. It epitomizes a community college by its responsiveness to community needs.”

To be sure, the mood at LaGuardia was festive as the college staged a week-long
celebration to mark its 10th birthday, culminating in a 10K road race for the fit and
ambitious, and a one-mile run for the not-so fit and not-so ambitious. The tributes and
backslapping, however, were not confined to LaGuardia’s staff, faculty, administrators
and students. In recognition of the vital role that private business and public offices had
played in making co-op such a success, the Division of Cooperative Education held a
recognition ceremony for employers who had been affiliated with the college for more
than five years. Seven of the 50 companies represented had been with
LaGuardia since the beginning. City Comptroller Harrison J. Goldin,
himself a participant in the program, told the honorees that they “should
be emissaries to the larger business community, carrying the message that
it pays to hire LaGuardia students.”

It was with good reason that LaGuardia celebrated throughout the
1981-82 academic year. By any measure, it was as though the hard times
of the mid- to late-1970s had never happened, or, if they did, they
belonged to another age entirely. This more optimistic, forward-looking
era was symbolized in the long-awaited opening of the renovated Main
Building, which resulted in the year-long transfer of personnel and
equipment from leased facilities in the adjacent L&P Building. Even with
the grand ribbon-cutting and the shuffling of offices and people from old to brand-new
facilities, though, the Main Building remained unfinished—there was still some wrap-
up work to be done in the library, theater and music room.

Everywhere LaGuardia’s students, faculty and staff turned, there were signs that
the bad old days of budget reductions and stifled growth were over. As the college


completed its first decade and looked ahead to its second, LaGuardia was growing
faster than any public college in the state. Enrollment from fall of 1979 to fall of 1980
increased by 5 percent, to 6,600, at a time when City University as a whole continued
to lose students. This astonishing growth meant that even with the renovations to the
Main Building, LaGuardia had City University’s highest concentration of students per
square foot, making it necessary to lease additional space in the Executone Building
next door.

Among the students who were part of the college’s extraordinary
growth in the early 1980s was John Ribeiro, who was able to continue
his education thanks to the SEEK program, which provided financial
aid for low-income students. He, like so many other students, chose
LaGuardia because of its co-op program — and like so many other
students, he found a great deal more about his city, his world and
himself. “When I first went to LaGuardia it was for business
administration, but I didn’t feel comfortable with it,” he said. As his
interest in music grew, he and his teachers agreed that he ought to
switch his major to liberal arts, where he discovered poetry,
Shakespeare and Malcolm X. “I was inspired to read more books,

particularly stories about the black experience,” he said. “It helped me to be more Neil Rossman was the
compassionate and understanding of other people.” It also helped him avoid the call of founding faculty member of
the streets, where many of his friends met with trouble and tragedy. “Without my LaGuardia’s philosophy
getting that associate’s degree, I would have stayed on the street, and I would have program.

ended up in jail, too,” he said. He eventually served in the Navy and received a B.A. in
Fine Arts. LaGuardia, he said, had made it all possible.

In addition to more space and more students, LaGuardia was adding to its already
impressive portfolio of grants, receiving awards that were as impressive as the
college’s enrollment figures. In 1980, on the eve of LaGuardia’s 10th anniversary, the
college received an astounding $2.8 million in grants from a variety of public and
private sources. The figure was close to $2 million the following year—part of the
decrease owed to a change of administrations in Washington, with less money flowing The staff of LaGuardia’s
from such sources as the National Endowment for the Humanities. The grants ranged library in the 1980's.
from major initiatives—such as funding for programs for the
visually and hearing impaired, and money to help integrate
critical thought skills into the liberal arts—to smaller projects,
allowing professors to pursue subjects of individual interest. One
of the largest and most significant grants came from the Alfred P.
Sloan Foundation, which awarded the college a $200,000
unrestricted grant, which was used to create an Office of
Development and to create new courses. LaGuardia was the first
community college in the nation to receive a Sloan grant.

The larger grants helped LaGuardia solidify its reputation as
a leader in the education of non-traditional students, often by
employing non-traditional methods. The Division of Continuing

47


Members of the
Computer Information
Systems Department
in 1986.

Gilberto Arroyo, one-
time chair of the Social
Science Department,
helped develop courses
in Latin American
culture and history.

48

Education used grant money to establish a consortium of eight City University
colleges, with LaGuardia as coordinator, in reaching out to the visually and hearing
impaired, bringing training, education and opportunities to an often-neglected group. A
reminder of LaGuardia’s work with the hearing impaired took place during a basketball
clinic in the early 1980s, when a group of hearing-impaired
young people gathered around Mike Glenn of the New York
Knicks. Glenn was fluent in American Sign Language, and
used it to communicate the fine art of jump shots and defense
to an awestruck audience.

In the liberal arts, grant money funded a collaborative
project that demonstrated yet again LaGuardia’s willingness to
break down traditional barriers in pursuit of a broad-based
education. Courses in critical thinking were paired with other
liberal arts courses, allowing students and faculty alike to
share ideas and experiences with each other. “As people
develop their thinking skills—their ability to critically
understand and effectively solve problems—they increase their understanding of who
they are, where they are going, and what their goals are,” said Dr. John Chaffee, who
co-wrote the successful grant proposal with Dr. Neil Rossman, both professors of
philosophy. His summation of critical thought skills was a fair description of part of
LaGuardia’s founding and guiding ethos—to think, to understand, and to be inspired.

The early years of LaGuardia’s second decade were a time when individual
faculty members and deans began to set off on new directions with the confidence that
comes with success and achievement. Having seen the new college through its early
years and gotten through the fiscal crisis, they were ready for new challenges. They
believed there had to be something better than simply settling into a familiar, tenured
existence. They had not, after all, come to LaGuardia simply to serve their time in the
comfortable status quo—not when there was so much work to be had, and an
administration as willing as ever to encourage experimentation.

The search for something better resulted in a confederation of initiatives
throughout the 1980s. Unlike the carefully planned expansion of the college’s early
years, the second decade’s growth was decentralized, driven by
the vision and mission of individual professors and departments.

The development of options in various academic areas
allowed faculty members to be ever more creative in putting
together curricula, and gave students an opportunity to pick and
choose from a series of courses in a particular area of interest. For
example, business students were given a chance to develop an
option in business finance as part of the management curriculum,
while liberal arts students were able to put together an option in
Latin American studies.

Latin American studies, in fact, became a popular option as
an increasing number of Latino and Latina students —


immigrants and the children of immigrants — flocked to LaGuardia from
neighborhoods such as Jackson Heights. Dr. Ana Maria Hernandez in modern foreign
languages and Dr. Gilberto Arroyo, a social sciences professor and a onetime chair of
the Social Science Department, helped develop the program. “It was
a good fit with our student population,” Arroyo said.

One of the biggest challenges facing faculty in the fields of
accounting and management was the explosive growth of technology
in the workplace. The problem was two-fold: Many students entered
the classroom overly dependent on calculators and computers, while
faculty members sometimes found themselves in quite the opposite
dilemma. “When I first came to LaGuardia after working for an
accounting firm, many clients still did not have desktop computers,”
said Kathleen Forestieri, professor and now chair of the Accounting
and Management Department. “Years ago, | remember an accounting
student asking me if he should take a computer course, and I told him

that soon using a computer would be as commonplace as driving a

car.” Sure enough, the department soon was flooded with high school graduates fluent Susan Armiger was appointed
in the ways of the P.C., but, she recalled, “we [the faculty] had to learn about it the first dean of the Division
ourselves.” of External Affairs.

As the faculty did so, computers were incorporated into the department’s courses,
but always with a caveat. “Students had to be taught to think of the computer not as a
tool for doing work quicker, but as a way of giving them more information to analyze,”

Forestieri said. In addition, as technology gave birth to the Internet, faculty worked

with students to develop critical thinking skills about the wealth of information

available with the click of a mouse. “We had to show them how important it was to be Members of the Social
critical of what they found through the Internet, where anybody can say just about Science Department in 1988.
anything,” Forestieri said.

The Humanities Department continued its
development as an independent department, featuring six
academic disciplines — oral communications, visual arts,
performance art, philosophy, critical thinking and modern
language, each one with a coordinator reporting back to the
chair. The growth of the department was such that by the
mid-1990s, it was offering 200 sections during the college’s
12-week terms. “Our offerings have increased in variation,”
said Professor Sandra Dickinson, the department’s chair.
“For example, we now offer introduction to jazz and Latin
music and courses in Chinese and Hebrew.” The
department also developed a series of paired courses with the ESL department, and has
developed courses in speech and, in an example of LaGuardia’s spirit of innovation
and collaboration, performing arts. “Acting is another vehicle for speech, and uses

language in a non-threatening way,” Dickinson said.
Carol Montgomery joined LaGuardia’s faculty in the mid-1980s and went to work

49


Members of the
Humanities
Department in
the late 1980's.

Professor Brian
Gallagher of the English
Department instructs a
writing student with the
help of a computer.

in helping to develop course offerings and programs for students who were not native
English speakers—a category of student that grew rapidly through the 1980s. “The big
question is at what point can students succeed in courses taught in English,” she said.
To help the process along, the college built a speech lab in the C Building, where
students listened to tapes and had conversations with native English speakers. As the
program developed, courses were introduced for students
who spoke English in a dialect and for Spanish speakers
wishing to brush up on their native language after becoming
fluent in English.

A very popular addition to the Humanities Department
was the introduction of a degree program in commercial
photography. Now under the direction of Bruce Brooks, the
program is considered to be the best of its kind within City
University.

In the early 1980s, LaGuardia became one of the first
colleges in the nation to use computers to teach basic writing
skills. It began as an effort to help dyslexic students. “Our logic was that since
keyboarding had long been recognized as a ‘bypass strategy’ for certain learning
disabilities, writing on a computer would combine this advantage with others, like the
capacity to work on typical symptoms of learning disabled writing one at a time and
the ability to focus hyperactive students on their work,” said Dr. Brian Gallagher, one
of the founders of the program. But soon Gallagher, Daniel Lynch, Marian Arkin and
other instructors realized that the technology could be used to great effect in the
general student population. “Computers allowed students to produce three, four or five
drafts of a paper very easily,” Gallagher noted. “When they had written the drafts by
hand, faculty members were lucky to get one genuine draft. It allows you to spend a lot
more time fine-tuning a text, and a lot less time rewriting it by hand.”

During the program’s first two to three years, faculty and staff from other colleges
across the country stopped by Long Island City to see LaGuardia’s writing program in
person. “People were very interested, and wanted to know how to create an interface
between the classroom and the computer lab,” Gallagher said.

The success of these and other programs led to the college establishing a computer
lab for the exclusive use of the English Department beginning in
1986. Other professors were trained in the use of the computers,
managing to overcome the doubts of some who were somewhat
suspicious of those glowing cathode-ray tubes.

The program’s impact on dyslexic students was personified in
the experience of Ruth Enriquez, who enrolled as a part-time student
at LaGuardia in 1987. Her high school record was spotty, and she
suffered from very low esteem. She had inquired about attending
other colleges, but found they were “very cold,” she recalled. At one
private university, “I was told to forget it... the woman interviewing
me told me to take lesser courses. They made me feel so bad.”


The reception at LaGuardia was a great deal more encouraging. She began
studying physical therapy at LaGuardia, but soon had problems in her biology class. A
concerned professor recommended that she see a counselor, who asked to see her
notebooks. Sure enough, Enriquez had dyslexia. “I felt relief,” she said. “I felt, ‘Okay,
I’m not stupid.”” With her condition diagnosed and accounted for, her
grades began to climb. She began attending the college full time in
1988, and was graduated in 1991 with a 3.58 grade point average. She
went on to get her bachelor’s degree at Hunter College. Her success,
she said, “made me feel really great. All my life I thought something
was wrong with me. Now I have a goal to help people.” She credited
her professors for “pushing” her to work harder and realize her full
potential. She now works as a physical therapist with children.

Computers also allowed the implementation of a program called
English Express, an intensive, one-week version of a basic writing

course in which students spent eight hours a day for a week writing, thinking about Janet Lieberman: Richard

writing, talking about writing, and even writing about writing. The program was Lieberman and Joseph Shenker at
offered in the summer as part of a freshman summer immersion program, and was the opening of the Woodside
offered between terms to students who had nearly passed the college’s basic writing Subway exhibit, 1981.

class.

English Express has its counterpart in Math Express, and it similarly made use of
computers to assist faculty and students alike. In the late 1980s, thanks to a grant from
the state, LaGuardia’s faculty developed a thematically linked program of five-week
courses for students in need of remediation in writing, reading and mathematics. One
of the earliest themes was “Beauty,” which directed students to examine beauty in its
various manifestations — words, images, even (for basic math students) the beauty of
symmetry and ratios.

At first, the formation of what were called Superclusters was constructed around
combinations of basic writing, basic reading and basic math. Eventually, the college
offered a Supercluster in all three basic skills areas, along with an interdisciplinary
course in Liberal Arts and Sciences designed to foster intellectual skills. The latter

course brought together faculty members from various academic areas, and the course Members of the Accounting
work was tied to work the students were performing in the basic classes. On occasion, and Managerial Studies
the two sections of “Topics in the Liberal Arts and Sciences” were combined in order Department in 1988.

to take advantage of an individual faculty member’s
special expertise. Mathematics teachers sometimes led a
discussion on the differences and similarities of math and
science, or an English professor analyzed selections of
poetry. The attachment of a liberal arts and sciences course
to a cluster of basic courses allowed students in
developmental classes a chance to explore a world beyond
the writing and math lab. It was yet another example of the
faculty’s creativity and willingness to experiment.

Another innovative approach to basic skills was a

Sl


Members of the
Communications Skills
Department circa 1988.

Decades of New York
history were represented
at the college when Mrs.
Marie LaGuardia, joined

by President Shenker,
met with former Mayors

John Lindsay and Abe
Beame.

52

concept called Integrated Skills Reinforcement, or ISR, which was administered by
key LaGuardia faculty. Designed to integrate reading, writing and critical thinking into
all areas of the college’s curriculum, a number of faculty members participated in
weekly meetings to discuss how to implement the program in everything from
mathematics to accounting classes. Dr. Claire Sit, a
mathematics professor, was part of the team conducted by
Professor Gil Muller, and she recalled working closely with
the English Department on making the match between
focusing on basic communications skills as well as standard
mathematics lessons. (There was an echo of the past here, of
course. In the old days, the basic mathematics course had
been called Symbolic Communication.)

A number of veteran faculty members were involved
with the ISR program, including John Holland, Joanne
Anderson, Harvey Wiener, Eleanor Q. Tignor, Carol Rivera-
Kron, Gil Muller and Nora Eisenberg. “We recruited through
the department chairs and got people from all academic areas,” said John Holland, a
professor in the Communications Skills Department who helped coordinate reading
programs as part of ISR. Leaders in various areas would meet with faculty members by
themselves and in groups to “show how to work reading, writing, speaking, listening
and mathematics into a particular course,” Holland recalled.

The emphasis on communications skills made a profound impact on Yolanda
Cordero, who started at LaGuardia in 1988 as a 21-year-old part-time student. She
found the atmosphere extremely encouraging for students who had to work while
attending classes. “The professors were compassionate,” she said. “They weren’t
lenient, don’t get me wrong. But they understood your situation.” Cordero’s
breakthrough moment came in a communications class, when her professor “pushed”
her to speak in front of the class. “I was nervous,” she said, “but I did it anyway.”
Afterwards, her instructor told her that she would have to get used
to speaking in front of people, of asserting herself through spoken
words, if she wanted to succeed in the business world. Enough
said — “from that day on, I’ve never been afraid to speak in front
of people,” she said.

The Communication Skills Department, whose early
members included Ira Epstein, John Holland, Francine Brewer,
and Hannalyn Wilkens, in collaboration with colleagues from
other departments, founded a Basic Skills Task Force that created
a program which soon became a national leader. One of the task
force’s initiatives was a Basic Skills Articulation project, which
sought to coordinate reading instruction with writing and speech.

One vast and highly unusual undertaking had its beginnings
in the college’s philosophical commitment to the people and
communities of Queens. During the late 1970s, history professor


Richard Lieberman had begun a community history project, which itself was an
outgrowth of LaGuardia’s courses in the history of minority groups, neighborhoods,
immigration and the city itself. Funded with grants from the National Endowment for
the Humanities, Professor Lieberman organized a Public History
Program for Queens County that produced pamphlets, exhibitions
and discussion groups centered around the social history of
LaGuardia’s home borough. There were several similar projects
wholly or partially underwritten by NEH grants. “It was,” Professor
Lieberman recalled, “a way of enfranchising people into American
history.”

From LaGuardia’s students came the raw material of untold
history. They wrote papers about family history, conducted
interviews that served as oral histories, and produced photographs,
letters and diaries. A collaborative effort between LaGuardia and the
Greater Astoria Historical Society produced a community history
calendar entitled “Working People,” which won a certificate of
special merit in a competition sponsored by the Printing Industries of Cecilia Ciamingham,
New York. principal of Middle

The success of LaGuardia’s community history projects came at a time when College High School,
President Shenker was considering ways in which the college could build upon its in 1983.
namesake’s legacy during the centennial celebrations of Mayor LaGuardia’s birth in
1982. An answer soon presented itself: the collected papers of Mayor LaGuardia. What
better place to serve as a repository for the LaGuardia papers than LaGuardia
Community College?

The notion of a community college serving as home to a valuable archive certainly
was non-traditional, if not downright controversial. In a phrase, community colleges
simply weren’t in the archival game; that was left for better-known, four-year schools.

Indeed, according to Richard Lieberman, who would go on to serve as director of the

archives, the very idea received a cold reception in the archive
world. “They were against us,” Professor Lieberman recalled.
“And I think there was a racial undertone to their opposition.
At meetings, the buzz words were that we don’t need another
archive. They’d say: ‘What is an archive doing at a
community college?’ What they were saying was: “You have a
predominately minority student population, you shouldn’t be
doing this. You should be teaching these kids to be plumbers
and electricians.’ ”

Nevertheless, LaGuardia proceeded with its plan. When
Marie LaGuardia agreed to give the college her husband’s

vast collection of letters, photographs and artifacts, the archives became a reality. In Members of the Natural
the basement of her Riverdale home, Mrs. LaGuardia had stored hundreds of and Applied Science
undiscovered relics of her husband’s career covering some 40 years, including Department in 1988.

unpublished novels and plays, speeches, recordings of radio addresses and more than

53


54

Members of the
Mathematics
Department in
the 1980's.

Janet Lieberman was the
guiding force in the
development of many of
LaGuardia’s most
innovative initiatives,
including the LaGuardia
Archives and Middle
College High School.

4,000 photographs. It was a treasure trove of New York history. Janet Lieberman and
the first director of the archives, Thomas Kessner, personally visited Mrs. LaGuardia to
pick up the first batch of the Mayor’s papers. And on December 9, 1982, the college
celebrated both the Mayor’s 100th birthday and the opening of the Fiorello H.
LaGuardia Archives and Museum with a luncheon at the
Sheraton Center Hotel. Among the celebrants were Mrs.
LaGuardia and former Mayors John Lindsay and Abe Beame.

It was to be one of Mrs. LaGuardia’s last public
appearances. Less than two years after the centennial dinner,
Marie LaGuardia died of a heart attack at age 89. It was, quite
literally, a death in the college family. “Even with her failing
health and her many obligations, she was always available to
help in any way she could,” said President Shenker. “This
wonderful lady was truly part of the college community.”

Meanwhile, thanks to heavy media coverage and visits by
high-profile journalists, Mrs. LaGuardia’s last gift to the college, the LaGuardia
Archives, was an immediate success, attracting scholars interested in both LaGuardia
himself and the long era of New York history over which he presided. The archives
immediately began a cooperative effort with the Municipal Archives to microfilm the
LaGuardia collection, thus protecting them from the ravages of time and usage. And, in
an immensely satisfying development, the archives expanded to become a vital
repository of 20th Century New York history. Through the efforts of City University
historians Julius Edelstein and Richard Wade, the papers of New York’s Housing
Authority—an institution founded during the LaGuardia era —were delivered to the
archives. Richard Lieberman, thanks to his work in local history, brought the papers of
the Astoria-based Steinway Company, the world’s foremost piano-makers.

In yet another coup, the archives received the official papers of the city’s premier
political family, the Wagners, leading to an expansion of the archives. The papers of
Senator Robert Wagner and his son, three-term Mayor Robert Wagner, helped tell the
story of how New York came to be the capital of the American Century, and their new
home helped solidify a relationship between the college and
Mayor Wagner’s son, the third Robert Wagner to take a leadership
role in the life of his city. Robert Wagner Jr., known to nearly
everyone as Bobby, had developed a close friendship with
President Shenker, and he became one of the college’s most
influential supporters. It was through Bobby Wagner’s efforts that
the LaGuardia Archives expanded yet again, this time in the early
1990s, when Mayor Ed Koch donated his voluminous papers to
LaGuardia. The Koch donation, an immensely important guide
through 12 turbulent years of New York history, helped solidify
the LaGuardia-Wagner Archives as one of the most important
collections of 20th Century New York history. After Mayor
Koch’s donation, his predecessor, Abe Beame, also donated his


papers—with their valuable insights into the city’s fiscal crisis—to LaGuardia.

The possession of such valuable collections further enhanced LaGuardia’s prestige
and redefined yet again the role of an urban community college. Fifteen years after the
archives were established, they have become a must for any serious
scholar of recent New York history, or even of 20th Century
American history, for those papers tell an important story not only
about New York, but the country as well.

Offering challenges and new approaches to students deemed , dt J
unreachable or fit for only the most prosaic kind of education has sj i ha’
been, of course, a LaGuardia trademark. In the early 1980s, one of VASSAR” : (SSAR
LaGuardia’s boldest initiatives began to win national recognition as ASSMAN
a model for the education of urban teenagers long on potential but 3 VASSAF
short on motivation. In an otherwise gloomy report on the state of !
education in America, the National Commission on Excellence in
Education cited Middle College High School as a leader in innovation and creativity in LaGuardia’s partnership

~~

its famous report, A Nation at Risk, published in 1983. with Vassar College in the
Middle College was an integral part of LaGuardia Community College from the Exploring Transfer
moment of its inception in the fall of 1974, when it opened its doors for the first time. Program has been a

As a partnership between the college and the Board of Education, Middle College was tremendous success.

designed to suit the needs and talents of high school students who, based on the
evaluation of teachers and counselors, were at risk of leaving school before graduation.
Middle College was established in part to see if an alternative to a traditional high
school setting might help stem the tragic outflow of dropouts not only in New York,
but in most urban areas. The dropout rate, estimated at between 40 and 50 percent, not
only affected the lives and futures of the students, but it was a challenge to City
University’s ethos of open admissions. Timothy Healy, the University’s deputy
chancellor for academic affairs and one of the staunchest advocates of open
admissions, remarked that the city’s high dropout rate was translating into empty seats
throughout CUNY. Healy approached LaGuardia: “You’re the newest college,” he said.

“Do something about the dropout problem.” Members of the
LaGuardia established Middle College and set out on yet another innovative Veterans Center

mission: to recruit prospective students who had a high rate of absenteeism, three or in the 1980's.

more failing grades, and problems at home. Since “we couldn’t

change the high schools,” Janet Lieberman recalled, “my choice |

was to show it could be done differently. You take at-risk
students, bring them to the campus, get them ready and attract
them to higher education.”

Among the ways Middle College got students “ready” was
intensive, one-on-one counseling as part of the curriculum.
Another one of Middle College’s most innovative features was
its size. It was designed to serve about 450 students at a time
when the city Board of Education still was building factory-
model high schools. One of LaGuardia’s first students, Peter

55


The Cooperative
Education
Division

in 1988.

Governor Mario Cuomo
was the speaker at
International High

School’s graduation
ceremonies in 1988. With
him are International's
principal Eric Nadelstern
and Middle College
Principal Cecilia
Cunningham.

56

Matturro, attended nearby Newtown High School, among the city’s largest. “If you
weren’t already an excellent student, you got lost in a school that big,” he said. A
smaller school meant that nobody would get lost, at least not because of sheer
numbers, which meant that Middle College would have the perpetual atmosphere and
spirit of community that LaGuardia itself had during its
early years. Middle College was one of the earliest
examples of what later became a trend in high school
education: a move away from the impersonal toward a
smaller, more humanistic learning environment.

The culture of the school was a reflection of its close
ties with LaGuardia. “The school actually is a hybrid,”
noted Dr. Cecilia Cunningham, principal of Middle
College since the early 1980s. “It combines the culture of
a community college with that of a conventional high
school. The authoritarian structure in conventional high
schools doesn’t exist here. The structure is more like the
college.”

Another way in which Middle College replicated the LaGuardia experience was
its mandatory internship program, which contained many elements of the college’s
cooperative education program. Students were placed in a wide variety of positions,
mostly in community service work in government agencies or not-for-profit
institutions. A study of the internship program found that it was a “critically
significant” reason for Middle College’s success, noting that for many students, “the
work experience is the first school-related success” of their academic careers.

Through recruitment in local junior high schools, LaGuardia soon began receiving
600 applications a year, from which about 140 students were chosen for admission. To
be sure, the school was not designed for everybody—students with limited English
proficiency and special education needs were not accepted, nor were those who were
thought unlikely candidates for a high school in a college setting. No students,
however, were refused because of academic deficiencies. In fact, a study undertaken in
1979 showed that 53 percent of Middle College’s students were more than two years
behind in their mathematics skills and some 40 percent were two years behind in
reading skills. In addition, 40 percent of the student body came from families
receiving public assistance.

Yet these students, who might otherwise have opted out of education by
the age of 15 or so, soon proved that Middle College was onto something.
Hundreds took advantage of an option to take tuition-free college courses at
LaGuardia. The breaking down of yet another set of barriers, this one between
high school and college, also took place at a faculty level, with Middle
College faculty taking advantage of the college’s facilities and equipment,
while the college’s faculty had a chance to better understand high school
preparation of their future students. Some Middle School teachers served as
adjuncts at LaGuardia, while LaGuardia faculty taught Middle School



students who opted to take college-level classes. And the spirit of questioning the tried
and true, another hallmark at LaGuardia, guided the faculty at Middle College. To cite
but one example, an American History curriculum that traditionally
was taught as a chronological narrative was broken in component
parts (Foreign Policy, Government and the Constitution) and taught
in themes.

With a retention rate of 85 percent, a graduation rate of 90
percent and 78 percent of its seniors going on to college, Middle
College soon was receiving attention from school reformers across
the country. “The loud and clear message is not whether students are
going to go on college, but where,” said Dr. Cunningham. “The
message is that these students are important.” Newsday named
Middle College its High School of the Year in 1983, and a Carnegie
Report on high schools cited Middle College as a national model.
The New York Times cited the school as “one of the best examples of
a high school and a college merging their efforts,” and it won recognition from the
National Association of Secondary School Principals.

With recognition came requests to replicate Middle College’s success throughout
the country. And to oblige those requests, the Ford Foundation designated a grant of
$276,000 to LaGuardia to provide the funds the college needed to assist six other
colleges in developing collaborative high schools modeled after Middle College. The
grant was precedent-setting, for it was the first time the Foundation funded such an
effort. Dr. Cunningham noted that the grant put “a major stamp of approval on the
school.”

That the stamp of approval came from the prestigious Ford Foundation was
further evidence that LaGuardia had become a leader in innovative higher education.
The 1980s saw the Foundation take a special interest in LaGuardia—the Foundation’s
president, Franklin A. Thomas, was the college’s keynote speaker at its 12th annual
commencement exercises in 1984. In a rare appearance at such a gathering, Thomas
called LaGuardia “the model for a new generation of urban community colleges.” The

Mayor Koch attended
opening ceremonies for the
college’s Taxi Institute.

praise was no mere platitude, for shortly after Thomas’ speech, the Foundation Members of the Office
announced two major grants to LaGuardia. The first, for $225,000, was earmarked to Technology Department
develop a program to encourage minority students to transfer to four-year institutions in the 1980's.

upon their graduation from community colleges. The program
was conceived by Janet Lieberman. The second award, for
$50,000, was designed to help pay for the microfilming of
material in the LaGuardia Archives.

The transfer grant was the culmination for a long process for
which 360 urban community colleges were eligible. Seventy-one
were invited to submit grants, 24 received initial grants, and five,
including LaGuardia, received the major awards. The Foundation
called the program its “most comprehensive effort to date on
behalf of urban community colleges.” It came at a time when

57


New York Governor
Mario Cuomo with
President Shenker
during the 1980s.

Walter Mondale visited
the college during his
presidential campaign.

58

LaGuardia was beginning to work with Vassar College in upstate Poughkeepsie on a
transfer program of its own, a process that would culminate in the innovative program
known as “Exploring Transfer.” Once established in 1985, the program allowed 25 to
30 students to spend five weeks during the summer on the Vassar campus, taking
Vassar courses that were team taught by Vassar and LaGuardia
faculty.

The new emphasis on transfer forced LaGuardia to re-
examine itself and its basic mission. Was it a two-year
institution in the traditional sense, set up to serve students who
already had a foot in the labor market? Or was it a link in the
education chain between high school and four-year colleges?
Or could it be, in fact, both? A debate broke out among
administrators and faculty over exactly how the college saw
itself in light of the new push to increase the number of
students choosing more education over immediate entry into
the work force. Eventually, the debate was settled in a
compromise. “We could be a two-year institution and an
institution for transfer,” said Lieberman, who started the Vassar
program. Once that issue was settled, the Ford Foundation stepped in again with a
$100,000 grant awarded to Lieberman, Roy McLeod, Arthur Greenberg, Max
Rodriguez and Gilbert Muller in 1989 to expand the Vassar program and other transfer
opportunities.

Elsewhere on LaGuardia’s campus, the signs of growth were as ubiquitous as the
classroom and office changes that seemed so much a part of the college’s expansion. A
well-received advertising campaign designed by Bill Freeland helped spread
LaGuardia’s message across the region. “Building New York, One Mind at a Time,”
read one of the campaign’s slogans. Another indicated that LaGuardia’s had ambitions
beyond political borders: “Come to LaGuardia and See the World.” That was no idle
promise. LaGuardia’s vice president, Martin Moed, Dean of Continuing Education
Judith McGaughey and Professors Carol Montgomery and Fernando Santamaria
traveled to mainland China as part of an exchange program sponsored
by City University and Shanghai University. Students, too, set out to
see the world as part of their studies—LaGuardia set up an
international exchange program with colleges in Colombia, West
Germany, Paris and Dublin. Like LaGuardia itself, the schools in the
exchange program were career-oriented institutions.

Meanwhile, Dean McGaughey’s portfolio—the Department of
Continuing Education—was proving itself to be one of the college’s
biggest drawing cards, both on campus and off. The department’s
expansion was tailored to data collected from a massive needs-
assessment study that the college undertook in the early 1980s. From
the study, based on responses from people in the community, “we
found out what kind of career information the adults needed, and we


found out, for example, that many people didn’t have a general equivalency diploma
and that there was a need for extra-curricular activities for children in the area,” said
Fern Khan. Beginning in 1982, the Division began an expansion that took LaGuardia
into neighborhoods such as Astoria and Chinatown, with courses designed for the
needs and demands of individual communities.

The Astoria Center for Adult Education was LaGuardia’s first permanent off-
campus center, opening in June of 1982 with 120 students. Among
the classes offered were bookkeeping, aerobic dancing and home
repair. And, in a community home to thousands of immigrants, the
center offered three classes in English as a Second Language. All
were booked to capacity. The Astoria Center grew to serve 1,000
students annually.

A year after its incursion into Astoria, Continuing Education
established the Chinatown Center, which offered ESL classes as
well as bilingual classes in sociology, psychology and statistics.
“When we started the Chinatown Center, it was because students
and community people came to us,” said Dean McGaughey.
“They had heard about LaGuardia because of its co-op reputation,

and within the community there were workers from the garment district and in local President Shenker awards
restaurants who didn’t have the time to travel to Long Island City.” So Long Island the Presidential Medal
City, in the form of LaGuardia’s Chinatown Center, came to them. to Congresswoman

While the continuing education departments at most colleges and universities Geraldine Ferraro.

focus on adult learners, LaGuardia recognized no such limits. The College for Children
was founded in 1983 to provide learners as young as six with an assortment of cultural
and educational offerings on Saturdays. Among the most popular classes were those
given in computer instruction, this at a time when the personal computer industry was
just beginning to take hold. Under the direction of Ms. Khan, the College for Children
provided the youngest learners with an inexpensive introduction to learning,
LaGuardia style.

Not everything Continuing Education embarked on was the result
of a careful needs assessment. One particular need, in fact, made itself
known when Mayor Koch returned from a trip abroad and decided that
New York City needed to better prepare its taxi drivers. From that
pronouncement came a commission that recommended an institute be
established to train New York cabbies. LaGuardia volunteered the
services of Continuing Education, and the New York Taxi Institute at
the college was born in 1983, with a mission to provide a largely
immigrant work force with an introduction into the sometimes bumpy
profession of taxi-driving. A 20-hour course was developed as part of
the licensing process.

The Institute was an example, President Shenker said, of LaGuardia working in

cooperation with the needs of elected officials—who, in the end, decide things like
total budgets for taxpayer-supported institutions of higher learning. “This was

59


60

Folk singer Pete Seeger
during a performance in
the college theater.

The National Theater of

the Deaf performs at
LaGuardia.

LaGuardia responding to something the Mayor wanted,” Shenker recalled. “And the
next time LaGuardia needed something from the mayor, we wouldn’t go in cold. We
could say: ‘A year ago you had a problem, now we have a problem, can you help us?’”
That attitude was emblematic of LaGuardia’s relations with the political leadership of
Queens. “The agenda was not to seek out elected officials but to develop a relationship
with the ability of LaGuardia to serve them,” Shenker said.

Throughout the 1980s, as word spread of LaGuardia’s work,
prominent elected officials came to see for themselves. The parade
of visitors included a pair of nationally known politicians who also
happened to be LaGuardia’s neighbors: Queens Congresswoman
Geraldine Ferraro and Governor Mario Cuomo, a native and
longtime resident of the borough. Representative Ferraro received
the President’s Medal at the college’s commencement exercises in
1982, two years before she made history as the first woman
nominated for national office, while the Governor, who
skyrocketed to national attention at the same convention that
nominated Ms. Ferraro, dropped by to address an audience of 100
deaf students. As an interpreter translated his words into sign language, the Governor
said: “This college reflects education at its best. The college is doing the job of
removing impediments and doing it marvelously well.”

Given that Congresswoman Ferraro and Governor Cuomo visited LaGuardia, it
made for a certain kind of symmetry that former vice president Walter Mondale also
stopped by the campus during his unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1984.
LaGuardia could brag that the three leading figures at the Democratic National
Convention in 1984 had been on campus, with Mondale’s visit attracting the most
attention. With the national press corps recording every move, Mondale donned a
white smock and dropped by the school’s dietary technician’s lab—a picture of the
former vice president mixing it up with LaGuardia’s students appeared on the next
day’s front page of The New York Times. During a short presentation in the college’s
music room, Mondale told students and the national media that “I want to restore
America’s competitiveness. That’s why I wanted to stop at LaGuardia today. What you
are doing here is a model for what should be occurring all over this nation.”

Ketley Paul, a 25-year-old immigrant from Haiti who chose
LaGuardia because she heard it was a good college for working
women, was among the students who had a chance to see Mondale.
She recalled going from room to room, telling her friends that she had
seen the would-be President. Had Paul met the candidate, she might
have told him a story he could have used on the campaign trail: She
had come to America unable to speak English, and now LaGuardia
was giving her an opportunity to find out more about the world and
about herself. A course in African American studies made a deep
impression on her as she and her fellow students took field trips to
Harlem and other centers of African-American culture in New York.



“I didn’t know about the struggle of Black American people,” she said. Eventually,
Paul received her degree from LaGuardia and went on to get a bachelor’s degree from
Albany State. She is now a high school teacher in the city Board of
Education. “I tell the students about LaGuardia,” she said. “I tell
them they should never give up.”

It was fitting that Mondale’s visit included a stop at the dietary
technician’s lab, because the most explosive growth at the college
in the mid-1980s took place in the allied health field. Long before
the national dialogue focused on health care, LaGuardia anticipated
the emergence of a new, highly technical health-care industry that
would provide thousands of jobs. Though the sciences always were
a vital part of the school’s curriculum, LaGuardia’s traditional
emphasis had been on business and human services. With the labor
market about to change, however, LaGuardia moved quickly to
respond to new demands. Students with majors in applied science
leaped from 677 in 1983 to 1,610 in 1987. Franklin A. Thomas, president of

Programs in such fields as occupational therapy, mortuary science and animal the Ford Foundation, was keynote
health technology already had been put into place when the college announced the speaker at the 1984 graduation.
addition of a nutrition care program and a two-year nursing program. The latter
program would prove to be one of the college’s most popular additions as the nursing
shortage of the 1980s created a demand for a program that had been non-existent in the
1970s.

Kathleen Mulryan, a professor of nursing, noted that the program brought to
LaGuardia a new generation of students looking for a chance to step into the middle
class. “By the late 1980s, we had students who were on welfare, who had very
complicated home relationships, and they got through our program and went from John Bihn helps a student
having nothing but determination to having a $42,000-a-year job in two years,” in the science program.

Mulryan said. “We were taking people below the poverty
level and empowering them with the ability to enter a
profession.”

Indeed, the nursing program became so popular—
the number of pre-nursing students jumped from 171 to
387 from 1985 to 1987—that LaGuardia was left with
little choice but to set up admissions requirements,
something George Hamada, then chairman of the
Department of Natural and Applied Sciences, was loathe
to do. “We were being swamped (with admissions),” he

said. “We were oversubscribed by two or three times.
There was tremendous pressure to get into the program, so we had to set up an
admissions criteria. I was against it personally because it went against the fundamental
approach of open admissions. But it had to be done. There was nothing we could do
about it.”

In the case of the nursing program, whatever philosophical problems admissions

61


standards posed, they were overwhelmed by the simple fact that hospitals associations
were demanding a careful selection process for nursing students. Students were
required to take classes in four subject areas: Chemistry, Anatomy, English and
Psychology.

The demand for a nursing education ebbed as the health-care
industry changed in the 1990s, and with those changes came
adjustments for faculty members. Something as basic as teaching
students how to bathe a patient or dispose of items that come in
contact with blood required a change in instruction methodology.
“We used to teach these skills in a lab setting,” Mulryan noted.
“But now, with the expansion of visiting nurse services, we've
become more conscious that our students may be working
outside of a hospital setting. We have to have the experience and
content to help them get ready.”

The changes in health care also have led to a new emphasis

Professor Roberta On transfer in the nursing program. “We tell students that this should be the beginning
Matthews team teaching _ of their education,” Mulryan said.
in the American Social Additional programs were added throughout the 1980s as health sciences grew in
History Program. popularity. Programs in physical therapy and emergency medical technology were
added and new laboratories were built to suit the demands of new courses. Eventually,
LaGuardia gained a reputation as a major center for training in health-care fields,
becoming what Hamada called “the place” in New York for training in occupational
therapy, physical therapy and animal health technology. “We have a niche that is
unique in the city,” Hamada said.
The same could be said of any number of other programs. One of the most unique,
a symbol of LaGuardia’s continued commitment to bringing education to all sectors of
society, was a one-of-a-kind job training program specifically geared for homeless
adults living in hotel rooms, seemingly abandoned by society. LaGuardia took them in
and helped them rebuild their lives through a twice-a-week program that not only
taught the homeless job skills, but also provided free
child care and transportation. Like so many of the
college’s other initiatives, the homeless program was a
reflection of the spirit that had motivated LaGuardia’s
founders in those early years, when all they had was a
warehouse, a few desks and a world of idealism.

The college’s 225-seat theater also made its debut in
the 1980s, and among its earliest shows was an all-day
celebration of working people featuring folk singer Pete
Seeger. Within a few years after opening, the theater
became a major cultural asset not only to the college, but
the community at large. From student-acted dramatic productions to classical music
concerts to performances by the Little Theater for the Deaf, the theater served to enrich
the lives of students and neighbors alike. By the late 1980s, the theater was serving as

62


home to two student productions a year under the leadership of Humanities Professor
John H. Williams, a former church musician who also led the college’s choral society.
The growing importance of the arts at LaGuardia, Williams said, demonstrated the
college’s commitment to providing a well-rounded education that went beyond the
purely vocational. “Yes, there was co-op, but we wanted to give students a broader
experience,” he said.

Change, it seemed, was a permanent fixture at LaGuardia. The addition of new
programs, the expansion and renovation of campus facilities, and even the juggling of
classroom and office space gave the college the look and feel of a perpetual work in
progress.

In another setting, the constant changes and frequent expansions might have made
for chaos. But at LaGuardia, there was one important stabilizing factor. From
beginning to maturity, the college had known only one president: Joseph Shenker. He
took the college from drawing board to reality and beyond. But in 1988, he decided his
work at LaGuardia was done. He had been named president of the college in April
1970, and he resigned in July of 1988 to assume the presidency of Bank Street College
of Education. It was, by all accounts, a remarkable tenure.

Taking the reins as Acting President was Martin Moed, LaGuardia’s Vice
President and a founder of the school who had taken on key roles in overseeing the
college’s growth during the 1980s. During his year-long tenure, Acting President Moed
presided over two critical developments, only one of which was cause for celebration.

On November 16, 1988, he picked up a shovel and, amid pomp and ceremony,
broke ground to kick off an $87 million renovation of the Equitable Bag building
adjacent to the college’s Main Building. The new building, which eventually would
become the college’s E Building, would give the school 350,000 additional square feet, 4 cting President Martin Moed
along with a new, 800-seat theater, a new library and more classroom space. “With this and dignitaries break ground
new building, we will move into the next century with a building that can meet the for the E Building.
needs of many more people in our city,” he said.

Not long after the work began on
LaGuardia’s newest facility, the ghost of the
mid-1970s returned to campus. The acting
president found himself dealing with yet another
fiscal crisis, forcing a round of budget briefings
and meetings that had only slightly less urgency
than those of the suddenly not-so-distant past.
Hard times, it seemed clear, were here again.

It was in this atmosphere of renewed crisis,
and renewed growth, that LaGuardia
Community College started out on a new
beginning.



:
LAGUARDIA.
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE/CUNY |
1971-1996

Innovation



CHAPTER FIVE

New
Beginnings

f the many changes that Raymond Bowen noticed when he returned to

LaGuardia’s campus after an absence of more than a decade, one transformation

in particular leaped out at him. When he left LaGuardia in the mid-1970s, a
majority of students were white. Now, as he prepared to assume office as LaGuardia
Community College’s second president, he saw that a majority of the school’s students
were members of minority groups. In fact, in 1989, 37 percent of LaGuardia’s students
were Latino, 27 percent were African American, 17 percent were white and 13 percent
were Asian. These were, Dr. Bowen thought, the new kids on the block, and this school
had the look of America in the 21st Century.

It was an appropriate theme for the man who would take the school into that new
century. The journey that took him to Long Island City for the second time in his career
had begun in the projects of New Haven, Connecticut, where
he was a self-described “New Deal kid conditioned by the
rigors of the Depression era.” He saw in the faces of
LaGuardia’s students an image of himself as a young,
ambitious African-American student with an affinity for the
sciences. At an early age, he envisioned a career for himself
as a scientist. But when confessed his ambitions to his high
school biology teacher, he was informed, brutally, that he
would do better with a shoeshine box. “There are no Negro
scientists,” he was told. He proved his teacher wrong, but it
wasn’t easy. As an undergraduate at the University of

A new era in
LaGuardia’s history

began when Raymond
Bowen was
inaugurated as the
college’s second
president on
September 18, 1990.

65


President Bowen and
Governor Cuomo at
awards ceremony

in 1992.

John Hyland, who
chaired the Social
Science Department,
was part of the
college's founding
faculty.

66

Connecticut in the early 1950s, he was one of 20 African-Americans in a student body
of 13,000.

He came back to LaGuardia intent on doing what he could to rectify these sorts of
injustices, and to see to it that today’s ambitious students, so often burdened
with troubles that made his own and those of his friends seem innocent by
comparison, found the college a nurturing, familiar place. LaGuardia, of
course, always had a reputation for its diversity and its commitment to
minority students and all underserved learners. Now, however, that mission
was to take on a new urgency and importance. “My personal challenge,” he
wrote, “was not only to maintain LaGuardia’s reputation but to move the
college to even greater heights.”

LaGuardia’s traditional mission was not going to change. It was going
to expand.

To be sure, it seemed as though everything except LaGuardia’s mission
had changed since Bowen’s days as dean of academic affairs during
LaGuardia’s formative years. The college where he and other faculty members seemed
to know every student by name had grown to become a large and bureaucratic
institution of higher learning that served more than 9,000 full-time students and
thousands more who were enrolled in LaGuardia’s ever-growing Continuing Education
programs. The Main Building looked nothing like it had when Bowen left it in the mid-
1970s, and there were programs and majors nobody had thought of all those years ago.

By the same token, though, it would have been understandable if, even with all the
changes, Bowen experienced a sense of deja vu as he familiarized himself with the
LaGuardia that had taken shape since he left 14 years ago. Back then, the school was
on the verge of a fiscal crisis; now, one of his first duties was to deal with a new round
of budget cuts and dire fiscal predictions. When he left, the anarchy of construction
was very much a part of the LaGuardia experience. Now, as he walked the hallways of
the school he was to lead, he heard yet again the clatter of construction as work
continued on the former Equitable building next door to the Main Building.

Still, of all the changes Bowen saw, he could not get over the transformation of the
student body. The students not only were from diverse racial backgrounds; many were
part of the huge, new immigration that had transformed Queens into an astonishing
polyglot of cultures, races and nationalities. The Number 7 train that
rumbled by LaGuardia’s campus was nothing if not a journey into
multicultural America, a ride that could take you to bits of South Korea,
the Dominican Republic, Nigeria, Colombia, Poland, Greece, Guatemala
and dozens of other countries. Understandably, then, cultural pluralism
was to become a watchword for the new Bowen administration.

The new students were like Lily Yadegar, an Iranian immigrant who
saw LaGuardia as “an opportunity to start a new life — an opportunity
to learn.” Yadegar, who received her degree from the college in 1989,
had come to America when she was 17. Speaking of herself and many of
her fellow students, she said: “You don’t know the language, the culture.


You don’t know what to do and where to go. LaGuardia offered me the chance to learn
about American culture and about the city.”

Before the new president took over the assignment of leading the diverse
institution LaGuardia had become, there was a bit of history to record and
memorialize. Joseph Shenker returned to LaGuardia on August 28,
1989, just three days before Bowen took over. At a special ceremony,
the former president’s portrait was unveiled, and the man himself
received the gratitude of the staff and faculty. The ceremony marked
the official end of LaGuardia’s first administration.

On September 1, 1989, the college’s second administration
officially began. Bowen’s appointment and homecoming of sorts
came after he had served seven years as president of Shelby State
College in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had been honored in 1982
as the city’s outstanding educator. He won the praise of the chairman
of City University’s chairman of the Board of Trustees, James
Murphy, who said the new president would serve “with distinction

and purpose.”

Known as an affable man and a first-rate scientist, Bowen brought to LaGuardia George Hamada, a founding
not only a long career in scholarship and administration, but a clear vision of his role faculty member, became
as LaGuardia’s leader. Early on, he explained to a reporter why he chose a career in Vice President for Academic
education: “I think it’s imperative that minorities become part of the mainstream, and Affairs and Provost.

the way to do that is through education.” He also understood that in order for
LaGuardia to continue to prepare its students for jobs, it must adapt to an economy that
was very different from that of the early days in Long Island City.

Bowen’s inauguration in September, 1990 — a year after his appointment —
established the concerns he would emphasize as his chapter in LaGuardia’s history
unfolded. The themes of Opening Sessions in 1990 were cultural pluralism and

economic development. To help achieve the former, a task force on pluralism on Shirley Saulsbury was appointed
campus and a workshop on pluralism in the curriculum met the day after Bowen’s assistant dean and executive
official installation on Sept. 19, 1990. Bowen had made his intentions clear: Cultural associate to the president.

pluralism was to take a prominent place throughout the curriculum
and was to be an important part of restructuring the college’s
administration. “We decided to infuse cultural pluralism into
everything we do,” the new President said. “Diversity already was
here, now we wanted to make it part of the school’s mission.”

There certainly was no denying the diversity on campus. In a
paper they delivered on learning communities, LaGuardia’s Roberta
Matthews and Daniel Lynch recalled several scenarios from the
classroom: “Students introduce themselves on the first day of the new
semester: ‘My father is Dominican and my mother is from Haiti, but
they’re divorced, so sometimes I live with one and sometimes the
other. I’m thinking about moving in with my girlfriend and our son.
She’s from the Philippines.’ Again, one student might say she’s Greek,

67


and so might another, but the first is a just-arrived Cypriot young woman from a
hillside village and the other is third-generation from nearby Astoria into trash rock
with a buzz cut and some major tattoos.”

LaGuardia accomplished President Bowen’s mandate to implement cultural
pluralism in short order, adjusting the curriculum in a mere 18 months during
a time a severe budget cuts. Other colleges took years and spent millions of
dollars in pursuit of similar goals.

Bowen understood, however, that the college — and the neighborhood
— could not live on pluralism alone, not with the economy and the labor
force changing so rapidly. So a new, creative approach to training and career
preparation also was given an important priority as LaGuardia embarked on
a new beginning. “With the downsizing of all these corporations, we’ ve
really got to start emphasizing entrepreneurship,” Bowen said. “Why should
we be spending our time teaching students the corporate structure instead of
how to start your own business, or how to become a sub-contractor for a
larger business?” The corporate structure wasn’t what it used to be, and
LaGuardia’s students in the 21st Century very likely would not be spending

Richard Elliott was their careers with a single, large corporate entity, he explained. They would have to be
appointed Dean of flexible and should understand that the market might lead them in a dozen directions
Administration. _ during the course of their careers. Knowledge of the corporate structure would do them
no good in a world where such structures were breaking down.
In tandem with a change in LaGuardia’s approach to training, Bowen saw the
Larry Rushing of the college becoming an engine for economic development in the neighborhood, working
Social Science — with local business organizations to stimulate economic activity and create jobs. “Most
Department served as community colleges are set up in a particular area and they help existing businesses,”
director of the he said. “But what about having the college create new businesses?”
LaGuardia/Vassar The two goals for LaGuardia’s new beginning, then, would be pluralism and
Summer Program. economic development. The challenge he posed to the school was this: “How do you
infuse both of these goals? You talk about the global economy. Well, here we
have students from 100 countries, and we have ideas from the Pacific Rim and
Africa and Carribean. How do we take what they bring to us and amalgamate it
into the curriculum, and thus prepare these students for the 21st Century?”
In many ways, the questions he was asking and the challenges he was

posing were variations on the questions and challenges that had faced
LaGuardia in 1971 and that had faced the Free Academy in the 1840s. How do
you capitalize on the strengths of an underserved population and design a
curriculum that responds to their needs and their dreams? To be sure, the
challenge facing LaGuardia’s next quarter-century is the challenge of 21st
Century America, but such challenges would have resonated with the eager
young faculty who assembled at LaGuardia for the first time in the summer of
1971.

68


As the new president of a college that had received a great deal of attention in its
short history, Bowen quickly found himself enjoying the double-edged sword of New
York’s media spotlight. New Yorkers were informed that he drove a very
unpresidential 1985 Ford Escort and that his idea of getting away from it all, if only for
a few hours, was puttering around his basement with tools in hand, building furniture
and restoring antiques while listening to his favorite jazz musicians.

His onetime colleagues and co-workers soon learned that while
the man they knew as an innovative educator during LaGuardia’s first
few years remained committed to LaGuardia’s tradition of
experimentation and creativity, Bowen intended to uphold another
tradition: He left people alone to do their work. One tradition,
however, came to an end in September, 1992, when the college was
forced to scrap its innovative quarterly academic calendar and revert

to the traditional two-semester version. The change was enormous,
and it touched off a department-by-department evaluation of course

offerings. The change also had an enormous impact on the co-op program, which was The English Department
designed around the quarterly calendar. Co-op was forced to make another adjustment in the late 1980's.

in September, 1996, when the University, in a budget-cutting move, lowered the
number of credits required for an associate’s degree from 66 to 60. As a result
LaGuardia had to lower the number of required co-op credits from nine to six.

Before tackling the problems and challenges looming on the horizon, President
Bowen at least had the chance to preside over a happy occasion in one of his first
public functions as LaGuardia’s new leader. On October 20, 1989, Dr. Bowen and
others gathered at 45-35 Van Dam Street to dedicate the building housing Middle
College as the Marie LaGuardia Building. A remembrance of the Mayor’s widow was
delivered by Dr. Katherine LaGuardia, Fiorello and Marie’s grandchild. It was a fine
way to honor LaGuardia Community College’s new beginning.

Clearly, though, the immediate task at hand was not particularly joyful. With the Sandra Hanson chaired the
collapse of the stock market in October, 1987, the financial community began shedding — English Department
jobs by the tens of thousands, and those who remained saw their bonuses and perks in the 1990's.

cut. The go-go 1980s, a time when the city and state were
overflowing with cash thanks to a building boom and economic
revival, were over. By 1989, public higher education once again was
being led to the budgetary chopping block. While LaGuardia’s
continued success in grant-writing (grant money more than doubled,
from $2.4 million to $5 million, between 1985 and 1990) helped
cushion the blows, it was clear early on in Bowen’s administration
that hard times had come again.

ra i. fat
SG |

=

The cuts this time were not as vast and broad as those in the
mid-1970s, but they were particularly brutal in an area LaGuardia
had distinguished itself—remediation. Battered by budgetary
demands and a broader attack on the very idea of remediation in
higher education, City University began to withdraw funds for such

69


When Mathematics
Professor Assad
Thompson was in high
school, he used a slide
rule. Now he is using
computers as a learning
tool in the classroom.

Professor Jorge Perez
took over as chair of the
Mathematics Department
in the mid-1990s.

70

programs, and by the 90’s basic skills classes no longer counted for credit, which
affected students’ ability to receive financial aid.

The budget crisis cut severely into LaGuardia’s basic skills programs, a critical
component in reaching out to the large number of students who needed help in some
basic area of learning. The college’s Writing Center, which played a vital
role in preventing dropouts, was forced to absorb a 25 percent cut. Class
size in basic writing courses grew to 28 at a time when experts
recommended no more than 15 per class. Microcomputer labs for basic
writing also were slashed, as were labs for basic reading. (During the
1990-91 academic year, 54 students who requested individual help with
reading had to be turned away because of a lack of resources.) These
depressing developments led faculty members to point out that when
LaGuardia won national recognition for its basic skills program, the
school had a separate dean and task force for basic skills. The demands
of fiscal austerity, however, had changed all that, even if the needs were
just as compelling as ever.

Still, LaGuardia found room to grow and energy to revitalize its founding spirit. In
the Social Sciences Department chaired by Dr. Lily Shohat, faculty members
developed a pre-ed program with Queens College and also a new concentration in
community and labor organizing, an interdisciplinary program designed to link
students to careers as professional organizers for community groups and labor unions.
“There’s a recognition that part of the mission of City University is to develop the
city’s future leadership,” said Lorraine Cohen, a professor of social science. “There’s a
sense that the University and the college can make a positive change in society, and
we're trying to make that possible.”

The setting up gates, or, in the eyes of some, barriers, to any program in an
aggressively democratic institution such as City University was bound to touch off
controversy. There were similar misgivings when LaGuardia instituted an honors
program in the 1980s, with some faculty and administrators arguing that a separate
track for gifted students was antithetical to the college’s and the university’s egalitarian
tradition. Advocates, however, argued that ability and talent ought to be
recognized. As Professor Reitano stated in an article, “Articulation and
transfer have become major concerns for community colleges throughout
the country... The idea of honors now dovetailed with a desire to give both
our liberal arts and our career students more credibility in the academic
marketplace.”

The college’s branch of the Professional Staff Congress, the faculty
union, reflected the determination to re-capture the spirit of LaGuardia’s
founding principles, even (or especially) in the face of growing criticism
from a new generation of politicians and policymakers. The New Caucus
under the campus leadership of John Hyland, consisting of faculty union
activists who favored more aggressive tactics in preserving City
University’s traditional mission, dominated LaGuardia’s rank and file.


Meanwhile, the Humanities Department, under the leadership of Sandra
Dickinson, developed programs in fine arts and in bilingual education. The fine arts
program, which started in the Fall of 1996, started with 30 majors and is expected to
grow to 120. The interest level in the program is yet another indication of the wide
range of interest among LaGuardia students. “There’s also a shift in emphasis,” said
Professor Peter Brown. “Many more students are not getting arts training in high
school, so they are looking for it when they come here.”

The growth of such courses in art history and other liberal arts offerings
offered a counter-point to critics of public community colleges who
increasingly asserted that students ought to receive a narrow, vocation-based
education. To such critics, a fine arts program, to cite just one example, is a
frill community colleges could do without. At LaGuardia, however, faculty
members demonstrate on a daily basis the importance of programs that
broaden students’ horizons, that teach them how to think and that make
them better-informed citizens. “We want to make our students active
learners,” said Denise Carter, a mathematics professor.

LaGuardia also set out make teachers more active learners. The Teacher
Sabbatical Program was founded to re-energize the creativity and skills of

veteran New York City public school teachers during their sabbaticals. For Dean Judith McGaughey
LaGuardia’s faculty, the teacher-students represented yet another new challenge. Many = Pp esided over the rapid growth
came to LaGuardia in hopes of renewing their energy and enthusiasm for the often- of the Adult and Continuing
thankless task of educating the city’s public school students. Education Division.

They were not disappointed. The college’s faculty put together a 16-credit
program with a wide variety of course offerings, from visual arts to urban studies to
Spanish language and culture to computers. “The idea is to get the teachers reattached
to their creative instincts,” said Professor Peter Brown, one of LaGuardia’s faculty
members who instruct the public school teachers. “It’s not a therapy program, but we
hope they return to teaching with a new sense of mission.” Max Rodriguez, another
faculty member involved in the program, noted that public school teachers who work

with Hispanic students and their parents find the program’s courses in Spanish Professor Andrew Berry
language and culture especially valuable. Professor Rodriguez has led groups to Costa with LaGuardia’s

Rica to examine the culture and society of Latin America, the ancestral homeland or award-winning

actual birthplace of many of LaGuardia’s students. math team.

In January, 1998, a group of public school teachers will travel
to Venice under the auspices of LaGuardia’s program. The courses
they'll study in Italy — the city’s contributions to art, literature,
society and technology — will make the beginning of the college’s
“Cultures of the World” series.

Meanwhile, the Accounting and Managerial Studies
Department, which saw a leveling off of students majoring in
business fields, encouraged faculty to refine its pedagogical
techniques, something it hardly had time for during the rush of
students interest and technological change in the 1970s and *80s. “In

71


areas like accounting or principles of management, we had 50 years of pedagogy to
back us up,” said Professor Avis Anderson. “But no pedagogical techniques had been
developed to introduce students to computers.” The business faculty found itself
teaching students who were much more sophisticated in computer use than they had
been in the 1980s. “Back then,” Professor Anderson recalled, “when students were
beginning to learn word processing, they were fascinated. Now, of course, they come
to college expecting us to have the latest software and Internet management tools.” As
a result, she said, business faculty members were constantly looking for the next new
thing, the next big advance, that would keep them—and their students—ahead of the
field.

“Keeping up with the changes is a full-time job itself,” said Professor Donald
Davidson of the Computer Information Systems Department. “Between reading about
what’s new and teaching courses, I sleep about four hours a night.” Professor
Davidson, who was present at the creation of the college and has seen breathtaking
changes in technology and ways of doing business, spent nearly a dozen years as chair
of City University’s Computer Policy Committee, overseeing computer
curricula throughout the University. And for most of those years, it seems
fair to suggest that he was one of the few computer wizards in CUNY who
came to work every day on a motorcycle.

In the 1990s, LaGuardia is renewing its commitment to its urban
studies curriculum. The timing was appropriate as thousands of immigrants
and the children of immigrants came to LaGuardia. These new New
Yorkers were hungry for information and context about their adopted home
town, and the college was committed to providing both. Eventually, 25
urban studies classes were sprinkled throughout the curriculum, and all are
designed to accommodate field trips to historic sites and civic centers. In

NASA students with recent years, students have visited the Empire State Building, Ellis Island, Theodore
Professor James Frost. — Roosevelt’s home in midtown Manhattan and a variety of other sites rich in New York
history. For example, Professor Lawrence Rushing of the Social Science Department,
who also has been active in the Vassar transfer program and the college’s honor
programs, has taken students on tours of Harlem. LaGuardia is the only community

college in the country to include an urban studies class as part of its graduation
requirement.

Of course, LaGuardia itself served as a laboratory in the realities confronting
urban institutions in the 1990s. Overall, LaGuardia adjusted to the fiscal limitations of
the 1990s in a number of ways. One popular and successful innovation was the
redesign of the “superclusters,” in which a basic writing course served as a common
thread binding together courses in basic reading and basic mathematics. The result was
an almost instant increase in the number of students passing each component course.
Thematic, multidisciplinary learning communities—an area in which LaGuardia had
been a pioneer—took on new importance as the school sought to allow students to take
college-level classes while working on their basic skills. For example, developmental
mathematics classes were linked with introductory computer classes.

72


One area that held out much promise for innovation in the face of fiscal adversity
was learning communities. In their study of LaGuardia’s emphasis on collaborative
learning, Professors Matthews and Lynch noted that such an approach can
“support and move forward the democratic agenda” and “help us forge
community out of difference.” Professor Matthews’ work on learning
communities had earned national recognition. Professor Lynch told a story
demonstrating how a collaborative approach allowed students and teacher
alike to appreciate the extraordinary diversity of background and culture at
LaGuardia:

One day, fumbling to illustrate some point I was making, I
used a tired cliche: “as certain as death and taxes.”
Who’s going to argue with that? Up shoots a hand.

One of my students, a very articulate African-American Students conducting research in
young man, caught me short by saying he wasn’t going Professor’s Clara Wu’s Bridges
to die. Say, what? I needed to get into this. to the Future Program.

“What do you mean you're not going to die?”

“Just that. It says in the New Testament: “There are
those in this generation who will not see death...’
He said these words as confidently as he might have
said: “There are those in this generation who will
collect Social Security.”

The exchange led to a class discussion, which prompted another student to assert
that she, too, believed she would not die. “This illustrates an important point,”
Professor Lynch wrote. “If I cannot assume a common ground with two of my students
even on our mutual mortality, all of my assumptions about shared perspective can at
best be asserted tentatively.”

Such a realization re-emphasized the importance of LaGuardia’s effort to
implement a strong Affirmative Action plan under the leadership of Dean Shirley
Saulsbury and to infuse all aspects of learning with cultural pluralism. Dr. Eleanor Q.
Tignor, who arrived at LaGuardia in 1978, has been heavily involved in the college’s Members of the
efforts to instill pluralism and diversity throughout the curriculum, and chaired the Counseling Department.
college’s task force on pluralism until 1997. “When each course
proposal was evaluated, we analyzed it to see if it was pluralistic
in content and approach,” she said. “For example, people in the
Computer Information Services area said, ‘We can’t teach
different kinds of authors, so what can we do to instill pluralism?’
And we said you can be more pluralistic in the classroom by
realizing that students learn in different ways. Pluralism has to be
built into the courses.”

To further address students’ needs in basic skills, LaGuardia
also undertook aggressive efforts to begin reinforcement as soon

73


President Bowen with
Rector Roberto Santana
Sanchez of Universidad

Autonoma de Santo
Domingo at the
inauguration of the

Dominican Republic’s

first community
college.

First Lady Donna
Hanover presents the
“Cool School” award

to International
High School.

74

as possible. A program called Quick Start offered entering students programs ranging
in length from one to six weeks in order to prepare them for college work. For the
increasing number of students requiring special attention to English proficiency, the
academic ESL program (under the direction of Paul Arcario and Jack Gantzer) began
working with the Humanities Department to pair ESL programs with drama and
computer classes. LaGuardia also began offering a six-week intensive
program in ESL. The overriding concern was, and continues to be, to

t

locked out of college because of changes in University-wide policy.

With the help of a state grant, the college instituted its New
Student House in 1992 for students in need of help in several areas of
basic skills. The project built on the concept of the supercluster and
built a program that brought together reading, writing, speech

aes | ensure that students in need of basic skills or ESL instruction are not

communication and counseling in a program that grew to serve as many
as 160 students per semester. Once again, LaGuardia’s grant writers
succeeding in getting money to help fund the college’s continued
commitment to students in need of assistance.

Faculty members, including Samuel Amoako, Will Koolsbergen,
Phyllis Van Slyck, Michael Horwitz, Brian Gallagher and Roberta
Matthews, set out to bring into the mainstream new students in need of developmental
work. At the time the New Student House was founded, 85 percent of incoming
students were taking at least one developmental course, and the 35 percent were taking
all four basic classes — reading, writing, mathematics and speech. As a multi-
disciplinary learning community, it drew on the work of Dean Matthews, with all
course worked linked together and students similarly linked to the same teachers in all
their courses.

In the words of the founders of New Student House, the program “is an attempt to
create a viable small community within the much larger community of the college.”
Each term it enrolls 75 students in three sections of 25 and then creates a program for
each section, using such techniques as team-teaching. Counseling also is a key
component of the program.

Through the program, students explore such themes as gender and identity, the
social consequences of cultural oppression and prejudice, and personal and cultural
identity. A sampling of the program’s assignments and reading material
indicates the scope of the instruction that takes place in New Student House.
Students are required to read diverse selections from such writers as Jamaica
Kincaid, James Baldwin and Mario Vargas Llosa, deliver speeches about
their own lives and prepare papers in conjunction with films they have
screened and analyzed for content as well as cultural biases. As a strategy in
stimulating the intellect of at-risk students, New Student House has won
praise from students and faculty alike.

The Office for Freshman Programs was yet another example of
LaGuardia reaching out to new generations and acclimating them quickly to



life on campus. The program has been administered under several different names
since it was founded in 1989. The office administers a variety of programs, most of
them funded by special grants through City University and the state, to help students
from the moment they have been identified as needing help in basic skills. The help
begins even before the students attend their first class at LaGuardia — they attend
special summer programs before the fall semester. “We look at their prospective
majors, look at the remediation they require, and select the skills that would have the
most impact on that major and home in on them,” said Mery! Sussman, who heads the
office. “For example, for a computer science major, we'd develop mathematics skills.
For a liberal arts major, we'd concentrate on language skills.” The program, including
books, is free, and it is expected to double in size as students in the College Discovery
program are required to attend remediation in the summer, rather than during the
regular school year. The summer program served 450 students in 1996.

A smaller version of the summer program, called Quick Start, runs during the
winter break for students admitted for spring semester. Another program administered
by the office is called First Step, an extensive orientation program for incoming
students who have filed all the necessary paperwork for admission to the college. The
program allows them to register for classes earlier than they might have.
“We give them the red-carpet treatment,” said Sussman, noting that the
program is designed to encourage students to commit to LaGuardia at the
earlier possible date.

Renewed hard times called on all departments, administrators and
faculty members to be creative in the face of changed circumstances. To
give new emphasis to the importance of transfer, the college, in an effort
coordinated by Dr. Larry Rushing of the Social Science Department,
worked out articulation agreements with Baruch College (in areas of
public policy) and Queens College (in education), meaning that those
colleges would automatically accept credits for classes taken at
LaGuardia.

In the English and Mathematics Departments, linked so closely with basic skills,
chairpersons and faculty responded quickly to new realities. “There’s a great deal of
emphasis on developing a variety of collaborative learning strategies for writing,” said
Dr. Sandra Hanson, chairperson of the English Department. “Now, a great deal more
writing is done in the classroom as opposed to explained in the classroom and
practiced outside. Writing classes have become workshops.” The English Department
also has been an important proving ground for cultural pluralism, leading to an
expansion of the canon taught at the school. “The list now included an incredible array
of writers,” Professor Hanson noted. (Students witnessed pluralism in action in their
English classes, taught by such diverse faculty as Professors Eleanor Q. Tignor, Terry
Cole, John Silva and Zhang Yu.)

A renewed emphasis on writing has led to the growth of an initiative called

President Bowen at the
inauguration of the E Building.

Writing Across the Curriculum. Faculty members from every academic area have been
encouraged to develop programs specific to their fields in which students will be given

75


The inauguration of the
High School of Arts
and Technology.

opportunities to write. Faculty training began in the fall of 1995, and a full year was
spent discussing and debating the ways in which writing could be incorporated
throughout the college.

In the Mathematics Department, the most dramatic change has come in the form
of a computer lab (named in honor of Professor Lenny Saremsky) that allows students
to work in multimedia. According to Assad Thompson, a mathematics professor,
“computers will revolutionize what we teach at the basic levels.” To an extent that is
unique to mathematics and the sciences, revolutionary change means a huge
adjustment for faculty, too. “When I was going to high school, we were using
a slide rule,” Dr. Thompson said. “That shows how much things have changed
in a short time. We tell students that many of them will be living 50 or 60
years from now, and the world is not going to be the same. But for some of us
older folks, keeping up with things takes some doing.”

Apparently, though, the older folks are getting results. In the early 1990s,
LaGuardia’s mathematics team, under the leadership of Professor Andrew
Berry, showed remarkable improvement in intercollegiate competitions,
placing third in a state contest and finishing first in the first part of a two-part
City University Math League contest.

The math faculty, with Dr. Jorge Perez serving as chair, has begun working on a
reform of teaching methods, inspired by math reformers at Harvard University. In
addition, individual faculty members are attempting to take some of the mystery out of
math by making it, in the words of Professor Denise Carter, more relevant to the real
world. “For example, in our algebra class, we want to have problems with more than
one correct answer, to get students more interested in the procedure than the answer,”
she said. The emphasis in the classroom is on making students more active learners, to
remind them that education is not something passive, something that is done to them. It
is active and adventurous.

And, at a time when City University has been accused of not adhering to the
rigorous standards of old, Professor Carter pointed out that students in her pre-calculus
classes are expected to know the material from the prerequisites, even if, as is often the
case with students who have hectic schedules, some time has passed between the
prerequisite and the more-advanced class. “The onus is on the student to review the
material from the prerequisite,” she said. “They know that if they’re rusty, there will be
no review. The idea is to make them responsible for their education.”

Mathematics faculty also are working with Clark Atlanta University
to develop an assortment of computer systems, including a program that
would serve as an electronic tutor for students and would allow them use
of computer software to review their homework. Another feature of the
system would allow students to be tested on-line. And Professor Kathirga
Nathan of the Mathematics Department has been working on computer
software that would simulate a classroom setting.

With a scientist at LaGuardia’s helm (and a scientist, George
Hamada, named as the college’s provost), the Department of Natural and


Applied Science naturally gained in prestige and influence in the 1990s. LaGuardia’s
programs in nursing, physical and occupational therapy and human services continued
to grow as the allied health field continued to produce jobs throughout the region. But
the emphasis on science took on a decidedly futuristic look when LaGuardia linked
forces with NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies,
allowing students to conduct research as far a field as the upper
regions of Jupiter’s atmosphere. The program came about when
President Bowen approached NASA and asked if the institute
were affiliated with any community colleges. It wasn’t, so
LaGuardia’s Dr. John Stevenson and Roy McLeod wrote a
proposal in hopes of bringing NASA to Long Island City. It was
accepted, and the program started in 1991. What is especially
poignant about the program is its emphasis on reaching out to
minority students with dreams not unlike those of LaGuardia’s

president.

Under President Bowen’s tenure LaGuardia initiated another program for groups Janet Lieberman and co-chair
traditionally underrepresented in the sciences. The Bridges to the Future program, run Julie Hungar with former
under the leadership of Professor Clara Wu, places LaGuardia students in research student at LaGuardia/Vassar

labs, where they work as fellows. In some cases, the lab research is done on campus; in “e#¢nion in 1996.
other cases, students work in medical and scientific facilities in the metropolitan area.
The program matches up to three students with a faculty mentor. Bridges to the Future
has won acclaim as one of LaGuardia’s best new programs.

The college’s strategy of dealing with a fast-changing world received a boost in
1995 when the U.S. Department of Education awarded the college a $140,000 grant to
develop a program called, appropriately, “LaGuardia Goes Global.” The grant, directed The Family College
by Professors Dehlly Porras, David Schoenberg, and Gil Muller, allowed LaGuardia to inauguration.
begin developing liberal arts and business programs in international
studies, with a particular focus on such regions as Latin America, the
Caribbean, Asia and Eastern Europe—the birthplaces of many of
LaGuardia’s students. The program captured the essence of LaGuardia’s
emphasis on diversity and economic development, for students from
diverse backgrounds with international studies experience very likely
would find their career paths enhanced in the emerging global
marketplace.

LaGuardia took its slogan about going global quite literally. Through
a partnership with the Universidad Autonoma de Santo Domingo,
LaGuardia helped found the first community college in the Dominican
Republic. The Centro de Carreras Technicas Superiores opened in 1994,
and immediately was hailed as a catalyst for economic development. In a
demonstration of LaGuardia’s leadership in cooperative education, the new community
college required its students to participate in two internships. In 1996, LaGuardia
further formalized its partnership with UASD in a seven-point agreement that called
for, among other things, an exchange program in the arts and the humanities.

vay


Audrey Harrigan
Lamont was a professor
in the Office
Technology Department
before taking over the
college’s COPE
program.

President Bowen confers
the Presidential Medal
on Carl McCall, New
York State Comptroller,
at the 1996
Commencement.

78

Meanwhile, as with the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, LaGuardia continued its
remarkable growth even as the University, and the city, entered a period of
retrenchment. Once again, the college celebrated physical expansion even while
budget-makers talked of contraction. On June 4, 1992, President Bowen and Carolyn
Cabell, Dean of Institutional Advancement, were joined by Queens
politicians including Borough President Claire Shulman,
Assemblywoman Catherine Nolan and City Councilmember Walter
McCaffrey for a ceremony to mark the opening of the E Building. And
just as the mid-1970s provided good news amid the fiscal wreckage,
the early 1990s provided further evidence that the nation’s educators
had their eyes on LaGuardia. On October 19, 1992, LaGuardia and
Middle College High School were presented with an “A-Plus For
Breaking the Mold” award from the federal Department of Education.

By this time, though, Middle College was not the only joint
venture with the Board of Education attracting attention to
LaGuardia’s campus. International High School, designed to serve the
needs of those Bowen described as “the new kids on the block,” had been founded in
1985 as a variation on the themes struck by Middle College. The immigration that had
changed Queens in the 1970s had produced, by the mid-1980s, thousands of students
with limited proficiency in English. Because of language difficulties, they, like their
peers in Middle College, were judged to be at-risk of dropping out. International High
School’s emphasis on small class size, individual attention, reinforcement of native
language skills and career education courses was designed to keep these vulnerable
teenagers in school and, hopefully, get them onto a college-bound track.

By the early 1990s, it was clear that International, under the dynamic leadership of
its principal, Eric Nadelstern, was replicating the success of its older cousin, Middle
College. Average daily attendance was over 90 percent, and 85 percent of its 400-plus
students received passing grades in all courses. The dropout rate was minuscule—less
than 5 percent. At the same time, International’s demographics suggested that the “new
kids on the block” were going to be around for some time. If International were any
sort of barometer, diversity was going to be a permanent fixture on LaGuardia’s
campus. In the early 1990s, International’s student body hailed from more
than 50 countries, and its students spoke 35 languages other than English.

In a scenario that would sound familiar to Middle College’s
administrators and faculty, journalists and educators soon took notice of
International’s achievements. The National Council of Teachers of English
honored the school as a “Center of Excellence,” while evaluators at City
University recommended that International’s approach to teaching English be
replicated in other high schools around the city.

In many ways, International High School offered LaGuardia a glimpse
into the college’s future, giving added emphasis to the school’s new emphasis

on a multicultural education.
In the winter of 1995, LaGuardia reaffirmed its commitment to serving the city’s


at-risk teenagers with the founding of a third alternative high school—the Robert F.
Wagner Institute for Arts and Technology. Like Middle College and International, the
Wagner Institute is a collaborative effort between the college and the Board of
Education. The school offers a traditional curriculum but has added electives such as
art, theater, journalism, creative writing and other art- and technology-related courses.

The college’s work with high school students extended even beyond the
boundaries of Long Island City. An extensive program of collaboration with local high
schools brought LaGuardia into the classrooms of juniors and seniors throughout
Queens. Two examples of LaGuardia’s College Now and College Connections
programs, administered by Dr. Arlene Kahn. In College Now, juniors and seniors in
seven high schools in Queens take college-level courses in their own schools, and are
instructed by high school teachers who meet LaGuardia’s qualifications to be an
adjunct. The classes are taught before or after the regular school day,
and serve about 1,000 students a year.

College Connection is similar, except that the high school
students actually attend classes at LaGuardia itself. Both programs
are tuition-free. The college’s determination to give students in their
mid-teens a taste of college extends to a program called Upward
Bound, a replication of LaGuardia’s highly successful Exploring
Transfer program. Upward Bound takes high school students from
Newtown, Bryant and Aviation and transports them to Vassar College
for five weeks every summer, immersing them in the college

experience.

The Exploring Transfer program itself continued to enjoy
success into the 1990s, sending students to Cornell, Yale, Smith and other four-year Presidents Raymond Bowen
institutions. The success of the program is no secret — colleges have contacted and Joseph Shenker at the

college’s 25th anniversary

LaGuardia, asking to be invited to the college to conduct recruitment. “The program
dinner dance in 1997.

has been around long enough now to have a history, so we can go to four-year
institutions and show them how well it works,” said Dr. Cecilia Macheski, who taught
in and directed the program. Administratively, the program has changed somewhat
over the years. It is now housed at Vassar, and from a high of 60 students per summer,
it now admits about 35. Recently the program was endowed with $500,000 in gifts
from Vassar graduates.

Meanwhile, LaGuardia was taking steps to ensure that the college remained on the
cutting edge of economic as well as cultural issues. On March 1, 1990, a new policy
statement outlining the college’s mission included a commitment to support
“entrepreneurship opportunities in a variety of industries in New York” and to forge
“collaborative relationships with business and labor, local development and
community agencies, and governmental agencies.”

As an outgrowth of President Bowen’s mandate, the LaGuardia Urban Center for
Economic Development (LUCED) became a critical part of the college’s outreach. The
Center was designed to develop and promote programs that would enhance economic
development in Queens and throughout the area while addressing the changing needs

79


80

Associate Dean
Yvette Urquhart
presiding at the
college’s 25th
anniversary
dinner dance.

of the labor market. One of the first programs put in place after President Bowen’s
mandate was designed to help local business owners, especially women and minorities,
obtain state funding for government projects. Modeled after a similar program
President Bowen had put into place when he was at Shelby State, the program came
about in conjunction with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the firm of
Coopers and Lybrand.

The success of the program was on display during the college’s 25th anniversary
academic year, when LaGuardia inducted the first member of its Million Dollar Club.
Percy Brice, president of Percon Computers in Lindenhurst, Long Island, attended the
prep program’s 32-hour course in the summer of 1991. Within a few years, he had won
$1.7 million worth of government contracts. In the first five years of the program’s
existence, 700 business owners took advantage of it, and they went on to win $8
million worth of contracts. It was understandable, then, that when President
Bowen spoke at the Million Dollar Club ceremonies, he said he was
“confident that each year we will be adding more and more names to the
club.”

“Contract training, in a nutshell, is what the center is all about today,”
said Will Saunders, LUCED’s director. “We’re working on a proposal to
create a manufacturers alliance with the Long Island City Business
Development Corporation to set up training for local companies so that they
can become more profitable.”

LUCED also expanded into other areas of economic development during
the 1990s. In 1993, the program received a grant to develop a program in
quality management, and, after convening a conference in the fall of 1993,
the program signed up 18 small to mid-sized companies eager to learn what
LaGuardia could teach them about quality production. One such company
began turning a profit for the first time after two years in the program. The
success of the quality management program led, in 1994, to the foundation of the
CUNY Quality Consortium consisting of 11 colleges and based at LaGuardia. The
consortium, founded with a $25,000 grant from the state Department of Economic
Development, set up a “one-stop” training network, allowing local businesses to call a
single, central office to refer them to the services and training they seek.

Off-campus entrepreneurs were not the only beneficiaries of LaGuardia’s
commitment to economic development. The 1990s also saw the establishment of a
student-run bookstore designed to give students a chance to run their own business and
experience a taste of being on their own—a position many of them will face in the new
economy where lifetime jobs have disappeared from corporate America.

The focus on business and economic development did not take away from
LaGuardia’s traditional concentration on human services and on reaching out to the
underserved. The Family Institute, headed by Sandra Watson as part of the Division of
Adult and Continuing Education, continued to develop its mission of working with
displaced homemakers, pregnant teenagers, high school dropouts, the unemployed and
non-English speakers. “We develop training programs for those populations, and we



have an entrepreneurship network and a family day-care network affiliated with us,”
Watson said. The Institute, supported with no tax-levy funds, has served 5,000 people
since its founding in 1982.

Like the Family Institute, the Family College program exhibited LaGuardia’s
ability to reach out to adults looking for a chance to improve their
prospects and those of their families. At a time when the federal
government is ending its historic commitment to poor and out-of-work
families, Family College serves a pressing need—it offers training,
counseling and child care to parents, most of them women, on welfare. The
program, directed by Jo Ann Oyenuga, has won recognition in the press as
an “ambitious program that has made a direct impact on the lives of ...
students. It attempts to be part of a solution to the question of how best to
reform welfare.” During a ceremony in September, 1996, marking the
official opening of the program, a 40-year-old student named Claire
Ericksson-May explained the program’s vital role: “Because of Family
College,” she said, “we have hope in our hearts. We have a dream that

some day we will not have to depend on others.” Dean of Administration
Similarly, LaGuardia initiated a degree-conferring program designed for parents Richard Elliott and Mrs.

on welfare. The College Opportunity to Prepare for Employment (COPE) program was Elliott at LaGuardia’s “Old

founded in 1993, several years after Congress appropriated funds to pay for the Timers” reunion in 1997.

training of parents, usually mothers, receiving federal Aid to Families with Dependent
Children (AFDC). The government paid for carfare, lunch expenses and child care; in
exchange, selected students enrolled in for-credit programs that would lead to jobs
upon completion of a degree.

At LaGuardia, COPE was structured around the concept of learning communities.
“We developed three houses, or learning communities,” said Audrey Harrigan, the
director of the COPE program. “They were in allied health, careers in business and
human services.” Within each community, students took an array of courses related to
their area of study, and like other learning communities, counselors and tutors were
available to students. The program’s first class took in nearly 200 students, and has

averaged about 70 to 80 students per semester ever since. Provost George Hamada
Students participate in the plan after an evaluation and interview process. Since its greets Susan Armiger at
inception, more than 200 students have gone on to fulltime jobs—in fields as diverse the “Old Timers” reunion.

as physical therapy, dietetics, nursing and business in such
places as Pfizer, Channel 13 and New York Hospital—or have
continued their education in a four-year institution. The figure
represents dozens of success stories. “When you hear what some
of the students are going through in their personal lives—and
it’s everything from A to Z—you realize that it’s mind-boggling
that they even get through the day,” Harrigan said. “I get peeved
when I hear people talk about welfare recipients as lazy or
shiftless—when you talk to these mothers, you wonder how
they survive.”

81



82

The college’s Hall of
Flags was opened during
ceremonies in 1997.

Burdened already, COPE students have become subject to even more stringent
standards. Changes in government policy now require COPE students to complete their
degrees in two years, rather than three, and have eliminated the probationary semester
that had been built into the old system. In addition, COPE students will
be required to work 20 hours a week in exchange for their welfare
assistance under the city’s Work Experience Program. Fortunately, the
college has some 50 jobs available to students enrolled in WEP, but
that still means about 350 students will be placed in jobs elsewhere.
“There are many outside forces working against us,” Harrigan said. To
counter those forces, LaGuardia has been attempting to develop
strategies to make sure it continues to attract students who might
otherwise give up on the idea of college and advancement.

Though the political atmosphere of the country and the city has
changed radically since LaGuardia’s founding, programs as diverse as
COPE, Family College, LUCED, New Student House, the NASA
initiative and many others clearly reflect the college’s mission
statement: to serve the underserved, to bring education to as many
people as possible, and to build community and citizenship out of a
diverse population. “With welfare under attack and tuition assistance
under attack, there are signs that it could be a bumpy road in the next
few years,” said Raymond Schoenberg, director of the registrar’s
office. “We'll have to work hard to hold our own.”

At the same time, LaGuardia continued to display its knack for responding
quickly, and even anticipating, changes in society and cylture. Months before President
Clinton joined some of his predecessors and some of America’s most distinguished
leaders (including retired General Colin Powell, a CUNY graduate) in calling for a
return to volunteerism, LaGuardia established its Center for Community Service
Learning, headed by Paul Saladino. The program, placed under the wing of the
Division of Cooperative Education, was designed to encourage students to participate
in the civic life of their communities. LaGuardia students who participate in the
program are placed in volunteer positions in four areas: public safety, the environment,
human services and education.

At a time when many commentators are bemoaning the loss of the nation’s sense
of community and civic spirit, LaGuardia is trying to provide solutions, to address the
needs of the students and the world in which they live, and to remain a force for
innovation and creativity in higher education.

As LaGuardia marked the 25th anniversary of its founding, President Bowen, his
staff and the college’s faculty and students found occasion to look back at a remarkable
history. From an old factory building and a student population just over 500,
LaGuardia had become a sprawling institution. Occupying all or part of four buildings,


a home to 37,000 students (counting the 11,000 full-time matriculated students as well
as part-timers and continuing education students), it was a vital part of the
neighborhood as well as the intellectual life of the city. In its 25th anniversary year, it
was ranked third in the nation in the number of associate’s degrees awarded to minority
students. The diversity of the college was astonishing; a portion of the Main Building’s
walkway was transformed into an International Hall of Flags, featuring the banners of
the 133 nations that are the birthplaces of LaGuardia’s students, staff and faculty.

As some of the college’s founders gathered to recall the early days, the prevailing
sentiment was not one of self-congratulation but of bewilderment: Had 25 years really
passed so quickly?

Was there a better indicator that the school remained as vital and energetic as
ever?

At Opening Sessions in September, 1996, 25 members of the college family were
recognized for their quarter-century of service. They were: Ngozi Agbim (Chief
Librarian), Cleveland DaCosta (Social Science), George Hamada (Provost), John
Holland (Communication Skills), Ann Trzcinski (Mathematics), Carolyn Mena
(Computer Services), Bill Pan (Planning and Design), Ray Schoenberg (Registrar),
Herman Washington (Computer Information Systems), John Bihn (Natural and
Applied Sciences), Don Davidson (Computer Information Systems), Debby Harrell
(Office Technology), Maxine Lance (College Discovery), Gil Muller (English), Max
Rodriguez (Humanities), Charles Stolze (Mathematics), John Weigel, (Cooperative
Education), Steve Brauch (Continuing Education), Dorrie Williams (Cooperative
Education) Harry Heinemann (Cooperative Education), Jeff Kleinberg (Social
Science), Roy McLeod (Institutional Advancement), Eileen Murray (Administrative
and Support Services), Nancy Santangelo (Admissions) and John Hyland (Social
Science).

The presence of so many founding faculty and staff came as a revelation to one of
the college’s founding students, Peter Maturro, who returned to the campus for the
commemoration. “It was amazing to see so many people who have been there since the
beginning,” he said. “I guess that tells you something about
LaGuardia. It’s a place you never want to leave.”

In their memories of lessons taught and learned, of
transforming experiences and personal enrichment, thousands of
students and hundreds of faculty and staff never have.

President Bowen congratulates
Provost Hamada on 25 years
of service to the college.

83




CHAPTER SIX

The hoad
Ahead

n the fall of 1996, as the college celebrated its tradition of innovation, work crews

assembled on Queens Boulevard and brought the next century to LaGuardia’s

doorstep. A long-awaited fiber optic cable was placed under the road’s surface, and
a piece of it was routed to the college’s campus. LaGuardia became the first college in
Queens to link up to a fiber-optic network.

The connection represented two aspects of the LaGuardia success story. The
administration was quick to grasp the network’s potential for growth, outreach and
service in the new world of telecommunications. And, in order to turn a vision into
reality, LaGuardia worked behind the scenes to make sure that all the right connections
were made. Under the leadership of John Kotowski, the college’s director of
Legislative and Community Affairs, the college worked with Borough President Claire
Shulman’s office and various other governmental agencies in a successful effort to
bring the technolgy on campus.

“There is no limit to the services that we can provide to the
citizens of Queens,” President Bowen announced. Provost
George Hamada pointed out that the new technology meant that
LaGuardia’s message and mission could be taken to even more
underserved households and neighborhoods. By working with
the city’s Crosswalks public-affairs television channels,
LaGuardia will be able to reach out to more high schools and
other colleges and government agencies. Through fiber optics,
classroom lectures could be brought to community centers and

85


86

Author William Julius
Wilson addressed the
college community
during a lecture that
was part of the

25th anniversary
celebration.

even living rooms. Businesses could tap into LaGuardia’s vast bank of knowledge and
training facilities. Senior citizens could participate in continuing education programs
without having to travel to Long Island City.

The fiber-optic connection is just one of the ways in which LaGuardia has
positioned itself for continued growth and innovation in the new century. The college
has been authorized to purchase the Center III Building at 29-10 Thomson Avenue, in
which it currently leases three stories and part of the basement. In
Phe, | addition, the college plans to acquire what is now a two-story

parking garage and parking lot on Skillman Avenue and a vacant
parcel on 30th Street, just south of Center 3. The college plans to
19 wm build a mixed-use facility, to be called Center IV, on the parking lot
: site. The new building would house a track and field house and a
— _ student center.

The acquisitions would create a mini-campus to the west of
the Main Building. Center III would be home to the English,
Humanities, Office Technology, ESL and Social Sciences
Departments, as well as Cooperative Education, International High
School, Family College and other administrative offices.
Meanwhile, the Main Building itself would be renovated to include
a Student Events Hall. The library, too, is scheduled for an
overhaul that will double its present size of 35,000 square feet. LaGuardia has come a
long way since the day President Joseph Shenker promised that there would be no
physical expansion beyond the college’s original building.

It is fair to ask of any institution celebrating its 25th anniversary whether the
enthusiasm and energy of the early years has waned, whether those charged with
keeping the tradition alive are now content to rest on well-deserved laurels. Those
questions, however, are answered effectively by the actions of faculty members, staff
and administrators, so many of whom have spent the better part, if not the whole part,
of their careers at LaGuardia. Such questions are answered by the words of one of
LaGuardia’s founding faculty members, David Wertheimer.

“When I started, I was a young man,” he said. “Now, I’m a grandfather. I’m 67
years old. But I want to keep doing this for as long as I’m able. The students inspire
me, keep me young. When I drive into work in the morning, I’m happy. I can’t wait for
the day to start.”

Eleanor Q. Tignor knows the feeling. After 20 years of commuting from her home
in New Haven, Connecticut to Long Island City, she continues to make the journey
with as much enthusiasm as ever. “I like to talk to students about their hopes and
dreams,” she said. But she also warns her students about the future. “You have to
remember,” she tells them, “that not every place you go to is going to be like
LaGuardia.”

They were given a similar reminder during the college’s 25th Anniversary
commemoration when Harvard University scholar William Julius Wilson addressed
students, faculty and staff on the disappearance of work in the inner city. Author of the


book, When Work Disappears, Wilson spoke of the world of the urban poor and the
limited prospects many poor people in America’s cities face.

It is a world, of course, that many of LaGuardia’s students know intimately, and it
is a world so many of them hope to escape—through hard work, perseverance and
knowledge. It is for them that City University and LaGuardia Community College
exist in the first place. And it is for them that LaGuardia’s faculty, staff and
administration continue to develop new programs, new courses, new strategies for
learning.

By the year 2004, LaGuardia’s student headcount is projected to reach nearly
13,000. Very few of those 21st Century students will resemble LaGuardia’s original
student population. They will have grown up in a world vastly changed from
September, 1971.

Their aspirations and their dreams, however, will be no different than the Class of
1973. They will be, as Timothy Healy said of the students of the 1970s, the original
American revolutionaries—bold in their ambition and eager to claim their piece of a
dream.

They will be different, and they will be the same. Likewise, LaGuardia
Community College.

4

LAGUARDIA
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE/CUNY
1971-1996

87


88

LAGUARDIA COMMUITY COLLEGE ADMINISTRATION

COLLEGE OFFICERS
Raymond C. Bowen, Ph.D.
President

Shirley J. Saulsbury, M.S.Ed.
Executive Associate to the President/
Assistant Dean/Affirmative Action Officer

George S. Hamada, Ph.D.
Provost/Vice President for Academic Affairs

Richard Elliott, M.B.A.

Dean of Administration

Harry N. Heinemann, Ph.D.
Dean of Cooperative Education (Interim)

Ruth Lugo, Ph.D.
Dean of Student Affairs

Kenneth McCollum, Ph.D.
Dean of Information Technology (Interim)

Judith L. McGaughey, M.Ed.
Dean of Adult and Continuing Education

ADMINISTRATORS
James L. Buckley, B.B.A.
Associate Dean of Administration

Sulema A. Ebrahim, M.A.

Associate Dean of Student Affairs

Catherine Farrell, M.A.

Associate Dean of Cooperative Education (Interim)

Linda Gilberto, Ph.D.

Associate Dean of Adult and Continuing Education

DEPARTMENT

CHAIRPERSONS

Ngozi Agbim, M.A.

Library

Paul Arcario, Ph.D.

Coordinator, English as a Second Language

Avis Anderson, Ph.D.
Office Technology

John Bihn, Ph.D.
Natural and Applied Sciences

Sandra Dickinson, Ph.D.

Humanities

Kathleen Forestieri, M.B.A.
Accounting/Managerial Studies

Sandra Hanson, Ph.D.
English

Gerald Meyer, Ph.D.
Computer Information Systems

Jorge Perez, Ed.D.

Mathematics
Lily Shohat, Ph.D.
Social Science

Hannalyn Wilkens, Ed.D.

Communication Skills

PRINCIPALS

Terry Born, MED

Co-Principal, The Robert F. Wagner Jr. Institute for
the Arts and Technology

Cecilia Cunningham, Ed.D.

Principal, Middle College High School

Juliana Rogers, MED

Co-Principal, The Robert F. Wagner Jr. Institute for
the Arts and Technology

Eric Nadelstern, M.A.

Principal, International High School

BOARD OF TRUSTEES
THE CITY UNIVERSITY
OF NEW YORK

Anne A. Paolucci
Chairwoman

Herman Badillo
Vice Chairman

Satish K. Babbar

John J. Calandra

Kenneth E. Cook

Rey. Michael C. Crimmins
Alfred B. Curtis, Jr.

Edith B. Everett

Ronald J. Marino

John Morning

Susan Moore Mouner
James P. Murphy

George J. Rios

Nilda Soto Ruiz

Richard B. Stone

Sandi E. Cooper, (ex-officio)

Chairperson, University Faculty Senate

Md. Mizanoor R. Biswas, (ex-officio)
Chairperson, University Student Senate

Genevieve Mullin
Secretary

Roy Moskowitz
Acting General Counsel and Acting Vice
Chancellor for Legal Affairs


The Cover:

The theme line, “LaGuardia Works,” and
the sculpted pencil were combined in
college promotional materials introduced
in the mid-1980s. The image was used

on posters as part of a city-wide subway
advertising campaign.


LAGUARDIA
COMMUNITY
COLLEGE/CUNY
1971-1996

31-10 THOMSON AVENUE
LONG ISLAND City, NY
11101