Harvard President Lawrence Summers is sunk. He’s catching a lot of hell from his faculty and students over some stupid remarks that he made, by way of explaining Harvard’s gender imbalance in the sciences, that suggested that women aren’t as good as men at math and science. The controversy hasn’t let up, and as Summer’s character has been debated in the national press have come repeated complaints of his bullying and autocratic style, and constant reminders of how he chased Cornell West away to Princeton. It’s over for Summers. I’ve seen this movie before.
In my Junior year at Queens College, we brought down our president. Allen Lee Sessoms was appointed in 1995. He was Queens College’s first black president, one of the minority administrators appointed by Giuliani and Pataki in order to dismantle the hallmarks of the CUNY system and kick out thousands of minority students.
Sessoms wanted to break Queens College away from CUNY and make the college its own university, catering to middle class students from Long Island and out of state. He wanted to build dormitories in order to attract these students. He staked his reputation on a state-of-the-art AIDS research center. And he was a vocal supporter of Guiliani’s campaign to repeal CUNY’s 150-year tradition of open admissions (which meant that high school graduates from New York City’s public schools were guaranteed admission to CUNY; if they didn’t meet academic standards, they would have to take remedial courses to catch up, but could study at the university anyway).
When the Bar Association released a study on the open admissions debate in October of 1999, it included this passage:
New York State Education Law 6201, of course, does place a limit on the mission autonomy of the constituent institutions of CUNY. We were,
therefore, somewhat surprised to hear Dr. Allen Lee Sessoms, the President of Queens College, say that Queens is really more of a SUNY college, a “regional” university, than a part of CUNY, with almost half of its undergraduate student body coming from Nassau and Suffolk Counties rather than from the City of New York. Indeed, Queens College draws more heavily from Long Island than from the four boroughs other than Queens. Whatever the merits such an institution might have, this clearly does not fit within the statutory mission of CUNY to serve the New York City urban community and to give access to those who might otherwise be denied a higher education. Dr. Sessoms, however, believes that the key to increased funding is to build a strong connection with the middle class. He said that “the only people who benefit from open admissions are poor people and poor people don’t vote.”With respect to raising standards, Dr. Sessoms was quite blunt in stating his view that excellence is largely to be measured by the achievement levels of the incoming students rather than a value added measure of raising the achievement of those less prepared at the outset: “[Expletive] in, [expletive] out. If you take in [expletive] and turnout [expletive] that is slightly more literate, you’re still left with [expletive].” He said that he was out to build Queens into a great University and the concept of “value-added” as a measure of excellence would not indicate to him that Queens is a great University. Dr. Sessoms has thus made explicit what may well be a large part of the unspoken reasoning behind the proposed Amendment, at least by some of its more vocal proponents in the political arena, i.e. , that standards and excellence can only be raised by reducing access to the urban population for whom CUNY was created and maintained.
The expletive was “shit.” He was calling us “shit.” It took a few weeks after the report’s publication for it to get circulated much on campus, but when it did, boy, was Sessoms in trouble. The teacher’s union was after him. The student groups were after him.
This is from a pamphlet that my own Young People’s Socialist League distributed:
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As the controversy raged, Sessoms sealed his fate by publicly guaranteeing that he had secured funding for his AIDS center. When the deadline for producing the money came and went, he had to admit that he was bluffing. His reputation couldn’t recover, and he announced that he would not seek re-appointment at the end of his first five-year term. Sessoms was gone by the end of the semester.
Summers, like Sessoms, is attempting to change the structure of the university he leads, seeking greater centralization of the university’s mostly-autonomous schools. This means that he came in to the university facing powerful, entrenched opposition. Such arrogance as he displayed is so unwise, it betrays a greater character flaw. Summers better start thinking of how he will finesse his exit, since it seems doubtful that he can change his ways and win back his campus. Allen Sessoms never tried to apologize for the “Shit in, shit out” controversy. He could read the writing on the wall. It was time to leave.
All those who took the time to remove Dr. Allen Sessoms from Queens College will be appauled to know that he is president of Delaware State University and repeating his shit in shit out philosophy there. He has recieved a “No Confidence” vote from the DSU Alumni but this has not stopped his madness. We welcome your prayers and support in our test of faith. Your comments about Dr. Sessoms’ lack of principled leadership should be addressed to Dr. Claiboure Smith the chairman of the board of DSU. Claibourne@usa.net
I wish we would have learned from your experience, It took a couple
of years but finally Sessoms is UDC’s problem now! (DSU ’84’)
Where can I go to find more about Dr. Sessoms? He is the new President at UDC and many people are concerned about his motives for the University.
Thanks to this wonderful website, we are now facing sort of same situation in the University of the District of Columbia by proposing 100% tution fee increase. This university is the cheapest among the area where minorities like me who wanted to better our lives are getting an education.
We the majority of student at UDC want Sessoms out!!! No if, ands’, or buts’ about it.
You can not imagine how happy I am to have found this article you have written. With the news of Sessoms and his outlandish money usage at UDC at the expense of students and tax payers, Its nice to see that when I write this article, we have more fuel to say this isn’t anything new.