My unpublished manuscript, ‘Guttersnipes’& ‘Eliterates’: City College in the American Imagination, is a cultural history of the City College of New York, one of the great icons of American striving and possibility, the erstwhile “cheder on the hill,” “subway college,” “little red schoolhouse,” “poor man’s Harvard” and “Harlem University.”

Long before becoming the birthplace of affirmative action and open admissions in higher education, before all the nostalgia for its mythic golden age, City College was the focus of spirited national debates over campus radicals, gambling in intercollegiate sports, declining standards, slashed budgets, tuition hikes and academic freedom.

‘Guttersnipes’ & ‘Eliterates’  charts the college’s emergence as a battleground. Its stories are populated by communist professors, crooked basketball players, and the semi-literate, undeserving poor. They play out through a succession of tabloid scandals over violent campus takeovers, fatal stampedes, and ideological circuses in which the ringmasters are press barons, politicians, bishops, student radicals, black nationalists, and right-wing intellectuals. Together they all do battle over this one school and shape it into a symbol at once of the extraordinary promise of our public institutions and of their excesses and failures.

Drawing on the popular press, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty, the book examines turf wars among different ethnic groups and sweeping campaigns to gut the public sector and secure taxpayer dollars for private and parochial schools that have kept this one institution in the headlines for over a century and continue to this day.

The following is an excerpt from the manuscript.