Taking a golden opportunity without the aid of a silver spoon
It is Fatima El Shibli’s story, too, only as the daughter of a Sudanese doctor and German accountant, she had a leg up on many of her poor predecessors. Still, that hill was not an easy climb, and the other day, the university rewarded Fatima and 66 other students with $1,000 scholarships in recognition of their talent and determination. Listening to Fatima’s story, the alumni -- mostly older Jewish men and black women -- who gathered in a Manhattan ballroom to honor these young people could not help misting up.
But what could have been a shopworn tale of the American dream sounded instead quite refreshing -- a salve for a hardened city that registered actual shock from another tale of striving and social mobility achieved through education but accomplished in the most unseemly of ways.
A recent criminal investigation of Wall Street analyst Jack Grubman has focused on allegations that he may have sold out AT&T; shareholders in 1999 to get his twins into an exclusive nursery school on the Upper East Side. Grubman is said to have upgraded Salomon Smith Barney’s rating on AT&T; from “dump” to “buy” to help his boss, Citigroup Chairman Sanford Weill, who, in what the Wall Street Journal called a “Kid Pro Quo,” apparently used his influence to get the Grubman twins into preschool. As shareholders must not have been thrilled to learn, Citigroup pledged a $1-million donation to the school.
Now, there are plenty of reasons to ridicule the New York City private school admission process. Ask any parents who have spent anxious nights worrying about how their 4-year-old was going to weather a 40-minute interview with a school admissions officer. Then there are the essays on school applications with questions like: “If your 4-year-old was a fruit, what would he/she be? Explain.” Or ask the admissions directors who get strong-armed by members of their haute boards of directors to take this moneybag’s son or that powerful real estate agent’s daughter.
In fact, Grubman may not be the best symbol of avarice and scheming in this city. He is, after all, not to-the-manner born. Raised in blue-collar Philadelphia, he had no real experience in uppity private schools and apparently even lied on his official Salomon biography, claiming he had graduated from MIT when Boston University was his alma mater. So it’s no surprise that once he became a $20-million-a-year man, he wanted his children to go the royal route.
What is bracing is the social fear embedded in the education part of this tale -- that Grubman’s children might suffer if he didn’t get them properly tracked to go from brand-name school to brand-name school and on to brand-name jobs. Still, just a few miles uptown in Harlem, there are dreamers like Fatima El Shibli who remind us of another kind of social ambition that has given City College a good name for most of 155 years, one that makes a room full of alumni swell with pride.
Unlike the early immigrant students at City College -- many shtetl Jews -- Shibli’s father had already made the great leap from poor to middle class when he left his religiously conservative family in Khartoum to become a doctor abroad. And before he died when Fatima was 10, her father surrounded her with Arabic music and African culture, instilling in her the desire for a world-class education.
In high school, she visited New York several times, once picking up a brochure for the prestigious Juilliard School of Music. “I sat down in Central Park with the brochure,” she told the alumni in the ballroom, “and cried. I wanted to pursue my dreams so much: to acquire a profound education in jazz and to perform in New York.”
But there was something else in New York she had to have: “In Germany I wasn’t that strong in my identity. I spoke German but I did not look German or have a German name. But I was also not Muslim really. My family in the Sudan would never approve of a woman who wanted to perform. In New York, I could be anything.”
Ten years ago, at 22, Fatima made it to New York with $1,000 in savings that she hoped would last her six months. One bagel became an entire day’s meal; a tiny room in the East Village became her home; catering gigs at jazz clubs where she would listen to the music were her new source of income. She also joined the African Gazelles, a traveling dance corps, and got gigs with her own small band, FaFa’s World of Music. But she wanted college: “If I gigged, the audience would shout its approval, ‘Yeah, great.’ But I wanted to get real feedback.”
A few years ago, when she found a one-bedroom apartment in Harlem, she also found City College with its $3,000 tuition, its stone buildings and spires and impressive jazz department. “I thought I knew a little about music but after the first year I realized how much I needed to learn.” She was not impressed, however, with basic English, science and philosophy courses.
“I had harder studies in the eighth grade in Germany,” she said. “The tests here are multiple choice. There, I took high school courses where we had three- and four-hour written exams.” The City College that between 1920 and 1970 produced more Nobel Laureates (nine) and more PhDs than any other public institution in America over the last 30 years has not been gathering up the best of the urban poor. The change to open admissions in the late 1960s was intended to make the school accessible to blacks and Latinos in the neighborhood with little money and few opportunities.
But the college couldn’t transform their lives because they often didn’t have the basic skills to survive freshman year. City, which used to be free, lost prestige. But in recent years it reinstituted admissions standards, and its reputation is improving.
Fatima will get her bachelor’s degree in February and is thinking about graduate school. A couple of days after the scholarship ceremony, she sat cross-legged on a wooden chair in the living room of her $600-a-month walk-up. The room, painted the cream color of the desert, is decorated sparely but lovingly with photos of African children and wooden sculptures. Behind her are stacks of demo tapes and an electronic piano. She played a tape for a visitor.
As she listened dreamily to herself sing “Summertime” in German accompanied by her band, she smiled. Here was a woman who had the confidence, without a push from anyone, to make her way in a brand-name city and it opened its arms to her.
