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"I took one kid out for ice cream," recalls one professor, "and when he ate it he clutched the side of his mouth in pain—his teeth were full of cavities." Violent headaches were common, until teachers realized that many students were too poor to buy needed eyeglasses. Even with glasses, they took a dim view of standard English courses rich in Henry James and Christina Rossetti, whose polished phrases merely provoked bored back-row obscenities.
The SEEK dropout rate was discouraging: roughly 60% during the first three years. Still, that was only 10% worse than the national rate for collegians with more conventional preparation. And gradually teachers found that they could stimulate deep intellectual curiosity with books and materials that illuminated the black experience. SEEK and College Discovery staffers are now convinced that their efforts have dramatically changed the several thousand students who have already entered the programs. When SEEK produced its first four college graduates last winter, two were cum laude and all were headed for graduate school, including a remarkable hustler turned scholar, Arnold Kemp (see box opposite). By the time of the campus eruptions last year, the question for Bowker was whether the university could expand SEEK still further.
Marathon negotiations between City College faculty and minority students produced a preliminary plan that would have admitted half of City's freshman class "without regard to grades." Politicians denounced the scheme as a "quota" that would elbow out normally qualified students. Blacks were skeptical because the quota had a specified limit—like those implicit in methods for admitting minority students at other U.S. colleges and universities. Bowker was secretly pleased when the tenured faculty and the board of higher education turned the plan down.
As an alternative, some faculty members favored the "open access" strategy pioneered by University of California President Clark Kerr ten years ago. California now has a three-tiered system of public campuses: state universities are limited to the top eighth of high school graduates; state colleges accept the top third, and community colleges are open to all. The U.S. already has more than 1,000 two-year colleges and is adding more at the rate of one per week. In his higher-education message to Congress last March, President Nixon endorsed this expansion strategy wholeheartedly. "A traditional four-year college program is not suited to everyone," he said.
Do It Now. Bowker found himself in a squeeze. For one thing, community colleges have the image of ranking at the bottom of the academic pecking order and thus tend to set low expectations for both students and teachers. As Bowker saw it, admitting disadvantaged students only to community colleges might have created de facto segregation, further inflamed black grievances against C.U.N.Y. and led to the very disorder that he was determined to avoid. Opening up all campuses seemed the only solution, and Bowker became convinced that if such a program was to work at all, the university would have to gamble on installing it voluntarily before social and political explosions installed it by force. "This had to be done now," says Bowker. "So we did it."