The City College of New York (CCNY), now the City University of New York (CUNY), for decades has been put forward by proponents of free higher education in this country as a golden center of learning. "The poor man's Harvard," it was considered. The myth held that a distinguished, unappreciated, poorly paid faculty served a brilliant, impoverished, discriminated against undergraduate body, to the glory of all, and that a great decline took place in recent years with the introduction of an open admissions policy, the result of major demographic changes in the city.

As with all myths, some truth may be found in this one, but the larger fact is that the good old days were never all that intellectually golden, either for students or faculty. The decline, not sudden at all, has been steady and inevitable and perhaps the result only of the nature of public higher education itself anywhere. What any institution does with and for its students is determined ultimately in the classroom, by the teachers. City was never as good as its myth simply because its faculty was never as good as its student body.

Heavily subsidized public higher education can ultimately be supported only in terms of its results in relation to costs, on what kind of teaching and learning actually goes on. The example of CCNY during its legendary decades must be cautionary in any determination of continued support for public colleges and universities. I speak from some distance, with sadness and sobriety, on the basis of my time as a student there from 1938 to 1941, and, more to the point, as a member of its faculty from 1946 to 1953.