Grace G. Roosevelt. Creating a College That Works: Audrey Cohen and Metropolitan College of New York. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015. 364 pp. $29.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-4384-5588-4.
Reviewed by Steven Diner
Published on H-Socialisms (April, 2015)
Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark)
Education That Works
Metropolitan College of New York, an important higher education institution, has done innovative work providing education and employment opportunities for low-income adults, and especially for women. Audrey Cohen, an extraordinary feminist leader, founded and led the college until her death in 1996. In 1959, Cohen began her work by creating a program that enabled educated women to work part-time as research associates at a time when there were very few employment opportunities for married women with children. In 1964, in the midst of the War on Poverty, Cohen created a program to train poor women to work as paraprofessionals. This led to the establishment of the Women’s Talent Corp, funded by the Office of Economic Opportunity. It prepared low-income women to work as teacher assistants in public schools. In 1970, Cohen went further, establishing the College for Human Services offering associate degrees to students preparing for paraprofessional positions.
The college faced a variety of problems, including racial conflict and tension between Cohen and members of her faculty. In 1972, Cohen closed the college temporarily and substantially restructured it as a baccalaureate institution. In 1980, the college could no longer provide free education through grants and private fundraising, so it began charging tuition. It also launched a federally funded New American Schools Project to build ties between the College and public schools. In 1992, the college changed its name to Audrey Cohen College. Three years after Cohen’s death in 1996, the school’s trustees changed its name again to Metropolitan College of New York.
Grace G. Roosevelt, a faculty member at Metropolitan College, has written the first published history of the college. In introducing this detailed narrative, she notes that the book is both a biography of Cohen and an institutional history, which she acknowledges creates a “built-in tension” (p. 4). While Cohen’s life certainly cannot be ignored in a history of Metropolitan College, this coupling of personal life with institutional development is sometimes presented awkwardly. For example, chapter 9, which examines the college’s significant development in the 1980s, ends with a description of Audrey Cohen’s second marriage, the dress she wore at the wedding, and a photo that “shows Audrey grinning like a young bride.” Roosevelt then reports that “the minutes of the Board of Trustees meetings in the winter and spring of 1988 make no mention of President Cohen’s marriage” (p. 188). Chapter 11 discusses the leadership qualities of prominent female educators and how Cohen’s leadership compares with that of women who pioneered in K-12 education. But the final paragraph of the chapter digresses from this important issue to a summary of the author’s interview with Cohen’s daughter Dawn. Moving from the past to the present, Roosevelt explains that although “it was a struggle to be the daughter of someone who was always determined to make a difference in the world,” Dawn “has become reconciled with her mother’s shortcomings as a parent” (p. 235).
College and university institutional histories generally prove difficult to write. Typically, they are authored by a current or retired faculty member or administrator. Often such histories ignore the larger context of American higher education, focusing instead on celebrating the institution, its leaders, its faculty, and its alumni. Understandably, Roosevelt believes there is a great deal to celebrate. She presents portraits of successful students at various places in the book, but does not show that they represent the experience of the student body at the time they attended. After discussing the school’s Citizen Empowerment Chart, which enables entering students to set their educational, professional, and civic goals, she suggests that Metropolitan College solved the problem of measuring educational outcomes long before any other institution. “At a time when the desire to measure the ‘Value Added’ by educational experiences in schools today has baffled the expertise of statisticians and professional educators,” Roosevelt writes, “as early as the mid-1980s the College for Human Services had invented a practical method of quantifying empowerment” (p. 178). Indeed, the very title of the book, Creating a College That Works, implies that all other colleges, or at least all other colleges serving urban working-class people, do not work. She presents no data, however, comparing students at her institution with students from comparable social backgrounds at other urban colleges.
Roosevelt periodically shifts from past to present tense. In chapter 7 she examines Cohen’s founding of the College for Human Services in the early 1970s. Then, several pages later, she describes the curriculum developed at that time in the present tense, suggesting that today’s curriculum is identical to the one created some forty years earlier. She then returns to the past tense to show how Cohen and her colleagues developed the original curriculum. This mixing of a discussion of the school today with its history is problematic, implying that nothing has changed. But the book makes clear that a great deal has changed since the 1970s.
Like some other institutional histories, this book does not situate Metropolitan College’s story in the larger history of American higher education. Roosevelt echoes Cohen’s incorrect assertion that Metropolitan College was absolutely unique in combining liberal arts and professional education. She makes no reference to the considerable historical literature on the development of adult education. Nor does she mention the growth of free metropolitan colleges beginning in the late nineteenth century and the ways these institutions developed extension programs, night schools, and instruction for part-time students. Likewise, her discussion of Cohen’s decision to offer baccalaureate degrees instead of just associate degrees makes no reference to the history of junior colleges and community colleges.
Roosevelt also presents a somewhat simplistic analysis of the feminist movement. For example, she argues that Cohen and her collaborators present an “interesting paradox” in that “the educational institution they created was extremely radical, even for its time,” but “the women themselves in many ways exemplified the life-styles of the mid-twentieth-century suburban middle class” (p. 9). However, the same could be said about many feminist leaders of the 1960s. She also oversimplifies mainstream 1960s feminism, asserting that much of its energy “was devoted to demonstrations, consciousness-raising groups, and the fight for freedom of choice in terms of abortion rights,” in contrast to Cohen, who stressed “bringing women together to meet a specific need” (p. 37). This assertion ignores the wide range of feminist efforts in the 1960s to employ, educate, and unionize women.
These shortcomings notwithstanding, Creating a College That Works tells the important story of Metropolitan College, its founding and transformation over time, and its dynamic founder Audrey Cohen. It undoubtedly will interest scholars studying urban higher education in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
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Citation:
Steven Diner. Review of Roosevelt, Grace G., Creating a College That Works: Audrey Cohen and Metropolitan College of New York.
H-Socialisms, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2015.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=43521
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