Rising to the Top in Sea of Turmoil : Yolanda Moses Welcomes Challenge of Presidency at City College of New York

Cities burned. Berkeley students rioted for the right to use four-letter words.

Young African-Americans touted black power as the path to equality. And across the country, people marched against a jungle war.

It was the ‘60s, and a young undergraduate at Cal State San Bernardino struggled to make sense of the turmoil. A visiting professor helped her put it in perspective.

The professor was Margaret Mead, iconoclastic thinker and anthropologist whose writings and commentary crossed from the academic to the popular level and made her an influential social critic for two generations of Americans.

The young woman student was Yolanda T. Moses, now vice president for academic affairs at Cal State Dominguez Hills. She also will soon become the first woman president of City College of New York--a school in turmoil over shrinking financial support, racial and cultural conflict and controversial faculty members.

Moses, though, sees the turmoil as a challenge, calling it one more example of how City College has always been on the cutting edge of social change.

Recalling Mead’s lectures some 25 years ago, Moses said, “She talked about how healthy it was that our society was going through what it was going through. . . . Periodically, we have to purge ourselves of old notions and . . . young people (need to) express themselves and their ideas. . . . She said in the long run it’s going to make us a better society.”

The idea that turmoil and change could be healthy resonated with Moses, now 46 and an anthropologist herself. It is an idea she will have to sell with vigor when she takes over Aug. 1 at City College, one of the nation’s oldest public colleges and proud of its reputation as the “Harvard of the poor.”

Some in New York reacted to the news of Moses’ appointment last week with skepticism, if not downright disappointment.

Turning City College around, said New York Daily News columnist Jim Sleeper, is going to take more than “rap sessions on diversity.” Moses, he lamented, has never published a book.

City College trustee Herman Badillo, a veteran New York politician, voted against Moses’ appointment and was quoted as saying he believed the board should have taken more time to check her credentials.

Sleeper and Badillo also complained about Moses’ advocacy of diversity and multiculturalism in higher education, an issue that has rocked the City College campus. “Here we go again,” Sleeper said.

If any of this has daunted Moses, she wasn’t letting on last week as calls flooded her office from well-wishers and the New York City press corps.

City College, she said, “is really a model institution . . . struggling with some issues and I think I just may be able to help clarify those issues and help folks understand that there’s a way to handle diversity and quality.”

An unpretentious woman who jogs, loves to read Tony Hillerman mysteries and collects antiques, Moses is one of four daughters born in Los Angeles to a mother who was a cafeteria worker and a father who was a shipping clerk. She is also an example of a woman who has combined academic and administrative careers with a family and an extensive resume of professional and community activities.

During an interview in her office overlooking the sprawling Carson campus, where she has headed academic affairs since 1988 after five years as dean of the School of Arts at Cal Poly Pomona, Moses talked about her work and her fascination with the nature of change.

“It’s incremental and people resist,” she said. “That’s normal.”

Responding to her critics, she said her work in anthropology, much of it printed in academic journals, will stand up to scrutiny. And she did not hesitate to defend her views on cultural diversity. It is an ideal that faculty members at Cal State Dominguez Hills have aggressively promoted on what they regard as a model multicultural campus.

Clashes between the traditional academic community and today’s typical inner-city student population at older public colleges such as City College, Moses said, rest on the inability of many to reconcile the notion of diversity with excellence.

To be a well-educated person today, Moses said, a person must be able to function “in the multicultural world, in the global world. . . . That’s part of what institutions should be doing . . . training people of all colors that this is a multicultural world and that we have to learn how to live together . . . and to think globally about issues, and not just from one perspective.”

Founded in 1847 in what later became Harlem’s Sugar Hill neighborhood, City College became a place of intellectual rigor where the children of working-class, immigrant Americans who deeply valued education could make their way into the middle class, often with stunning success.

The college has produced a string of Nobel Prize winners and so many alumni with doctoral degrees that only three other colleges in the country can boast of more.

Once a white enclave in Harlem, City College now draws much of its student body from the surrounding African-American and Caribbean immigrant communities. Some have charged that academic standards have been lowered to accommodate these students and that their high college dropout rate shows they should not have been admitted to the school.

Moses and other Cal State Dominguez Hills faculty and staff point to Dominguez Hills’ struggle with the same issues over the past 25 years. The university was opened at its present site shortly after the 1965 Watts riots. What Dominguez Hills’ research showed, Moses said, is that the key to cutting its high dropout rates is recognizing that the students are largely from families where no one has ever been to college.

Such students, Moses said, do not know what to expect. What they need in their college careers, she said, is “points along the way where (they) are monitored to see how well they’re doing or not doing. Advising is very, very important so that if students . . . get into trouble, that can be analyzed.”

With monitoring and good advising, she said, such students get over the inexperience “hump” in their first years and go on to do well academically.

Moses says her experience at Dominguez Hills, where the student body has always been overwhelmingly black, Latino and Asian and the faculty largely Anglo, will serve her well at City College. Dominguez Hills President Robert C. Detweiler agrees.

“It seems to me that what they need at City College right now,” Detweiler said, “is someone who is going to be sensitive to the need to match academic standards and programs with non-traditional students . . . and that characterizes the Dominguez Hills student body.”

Moses, he said, is used to consulting with all sides, works well with people and is effective. “She gets results,” Detweiler said.

Sam L. Wiley, a physics professor who is also associate vice president for academic resources and planning, says Moses “has a talent for making people behave decently.” People recognize, Wiley said, that they are dealing with a “good” person, not a self-promoter.

Part of the racial and cultural turmoil at City College has swirled around one of its professors, Leonard Jeffries. An African-American historian, he sued the college and recently won $400,000 in damages from a federal jury after being removed as the chairman of the black studies department for saying that Jews and the Mafia plotted to negatively depict blacks in Hollywood movies.

Moses carefully avoids the topic of Jeffries, saying she has not a “clue” about whether a federal judge will order the college to reinstate Jeffries as chairman.

Before Jeffries there was Michael Levin, a white philosophy professor who won a similar freedom of speech case against the college. He claimed that blacks were intellectually inferior and prone to crime, prompting the college to set up special classes for students who were offended by Levin’s views. The court said that was unconstitutional.

Despite the spotlight that these controversies have focused on City College, Moses says her biggest problem, one faced by all college presidents today, “is going to be resources, having enough dollars to maintain the excellence and the quality of the institution.”

City College is faced with the possibility that some of its degree programs may disappear for lack of financial support and enrollment, something Cal State Dominguez Hills recently wrestled with. Moses recently had to oversee the combining of three schools at the university into one in order to save $400,000 in administrative costs and reduce the number of deans from six to four.

Before she tackles City College’s problems, though, Moses has one closer to home. Her husband, James F. Bawek, a Claremont real estate investor and developer to whom she has been married almost 21 years, can easily transfer his work to New York City and is delighted about her new job, Moses says.

Their teen-age daughters, though, are much less enthusiastic about the change. As far as Shana, 16, and Toni, 13, are concerned, said their mother, “the jury is still out,” on whether native Californians can adjust to life in the Big Apple.