Open Admissions at City University of New York (CUNY)

In 1970 the state of New York Board of Higher Education accelerated its plan to implement an Open Enrollment Policy at the City University of New York. Its Fall entering class was 75% larger than the previous year, with a 24% increase in Black and Puerto Rican students and also increased numbers of working-class Irish and Italian students (CUNY Digital History Archive). Opposition to the program was immediate.

In 1971 Shaughnessy attended a conference in York, England with workshops and lectures centered around the teaching of English in “an increasingly test-driven culture”. They grappled with topics such as how to teach writing, literature, speaking and listening, and developing curriculum for an increasingly diverse student body (Summerfield 6). Shaughnessy gravitated toward the sessions that focused on the latest research about classifying student writings with the explicit aim of changing the expectations about students’ abilities, and therefore changing the way writing was taught in schools. Shaughnessy was already deeply engaged with the social and political implications of confronting the inequities related to teaching English in a system designed by academics for academics.  

Speaking at a 1975 conference on Improvement of Student Writing Skills in California she pointed out that it was the teachers at the Open Admission schools that were making the greatest commitment by dedicating themselves to “the education of men and women all along the continuum," rather than merely "identifying the students at the upper end of this scale and extending their education by four more years" (Maher 192).

Reflecting on the persistent resistance toward the open admissions policies, the SEEK program, its students, and its faculty, Shaughnessy wrote the essay “Open Admissions and the Disadvantaged Teacher” in 1973. In this essay she pushes back against academic scholars who perpetuated their view that “programs designed to help the poor do not succeed” (Shaughnessy 401). In her essay, she calls their conclusions a “literature of pessimism” written in their own language based on specifically selected indicators that ignore the real lives and the real successes of the students who just want to learn, and the teachers who just want to teach. She writes from the perspective of her peers who are feeling the heavy weight of their disadvantage; students viewed as inferior by other students, and faculty viewed as inferior by other faculty. 

As an example that shows what educational evaluators can't see, Shaughnessy provides writing samples from a student named “Cora” who at the beginning of her time in the program responds to a writing prompt on George Washington that is full of grammatical errors and only superficial information about the nation’s first president. Three years later, though, Cora submitted another passage showing substantial growth both grammatically and intellectually. In it, Cora takes issue with a common misconception by many around her that Americans in Puerto Rico are lucky that they are not required to pay federal taxes. She points out that the reality of this system is that it was initially designed for the benefit of wealthy mainland investors and is actually harmful to the Puerto Rican people who would rather pay taxes to receive more support and funding for infrastructure. Shaughnessy writes that a blind evaluator of Cora’s second passage would have no appreciation for her growth over the course of her three years in the program, especially considering that Cora’s GPA was mediocre because of the struggle of balancing two part time jobs and a full course load. Shaughnessy points out that an academic social scientist would likely only note the final data point  on Cora’s record showing her as a “drop out;” merely another negative tick against the attrition rate, but what he can’t see is that Cora left the program because she earned a better-paying full-time job, and that she chose to continue taking classes part time at night to complete a degree. Cora’s experience through the program was actually a huge success.

In “Open Admissions and the Disadvantaged Teacher” Shaughnessy writes:

Open Admissions has reached out beyond traditional sources for its students, bringing to our campuses young men and women whose needs and interests and styles of learning differ from those we built our colleges around, and if the social scientists ignoring these differences continue to evaluate the performance of these new students with statistics based on old criteria, then it falls upon us to formulate new criteria. (403)