Robert Rosen

For several years I've been working on a book about my experiences at a radical student newspaper, Observation Post, at the City College of New York, in the 1970s. I was a member of the first open admissions class, and I wouldn't have gotten into City if not for open admissions. My high school average and SAT scores weren't good enough for the "Harvard of the Proletariat." But after this experiment in higher education was implemented in September 1970, all you needed to get into CCNY was to graduate in the top half of your high school class. That much I'd done.

Open admissions wasn't meant for underachieving middle-class white kids. The student uprising that shut down City in the spring of 1969 came about because the school, in the middle of Harlem, was 97 percent white. The Black and Puerto Rican protest leaders wanted the student body to reflect the makeup of the neighborhood and New York City's public high schools.

Open admissions was a direct result of the protests.

The Five Demands, directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, is the story of the uprising told from a very different perspective than I tell it in a chapter titled "How I Got Into the Harvard of the Proletariat." In the spring of 1969 I had no idea what was going on at City College. But my free education, especially my tenure on Observation Post, was life-changing. That's why I spend my days writing about it, trying to make sense of what I now realize was a miracle.

You can stream The Five Demands here.

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