Leading Growth and Change at CUNY

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning again, everyone. Later this hour, we will end today's show, we often end with a call in about things going on in our lives one way or the other. Today, it's going to be a call in about how you're managing your streaming service budget because there's more people who cut the cord from cable or even add to cable because you want to see things that are on Netflix or you want to see things that are on Hulu or whatever it is. The price structures, the features keep changing. Are you better off than when everything was all bundled together and you had to have these wires running through your house? We're going to talk about how you're managing your streaming service budget and watching time coming up later this hour.

Now, we'll talk about CUNY, and public college is generally through the lens of one of CUNY's longest-serving and, by many accounts, most creative leaders. He is John Mogulescu, now retired after nearly 50 years in teaching and leadership roles at CUNY. His reputation is very much that of an innovator who has tried to keep the system in touch with the needs of the New Yorkers who might attend in each generation. He is said to have created 22 new degree programs. It's no accident that the memoir he has just published is called The Dean of New Things. The Dean of New Things, subtitled Bringing Change to CUNY and New York City. Technically he's now the Dean Emeritus of the School of Professional Studies at CUNY. Dean Mogulescu, congratulations on your career and on your book release. Welcome to WNYC.

John Mogulescu: Thanks so much, Brian. It's a great introduction, delighted to be on the show.

Brian Lehrer: Let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?

John Mogulescu: I'm a Brooklyn kid. I grew up in Flatbush. I spent my whole life in Brooklyn other than going to college. My life revolved around sports. I was a good athlete. My parents and brother, who were-- my parents were kind of radicals. My father would come up from the South, believing in both civil rights, social justice, anti-fascism. I guess I was a red-diaper baby.

Brian Lehrer: Talk more about that, your parents as radicals, and how that influenced your early thinking.

John Mogulescu: Just quickly, my father was a businessman, obviously, and he was a successful businessman. My mother was a housewife but got very involved with things like Women Strike for Peace. The evening conversation around the dinner table was often about politics. My parents were part of a Brooklyn community of people who were trying to get peace in the world, get along with the Soviet Union at the time. We would have almost monthly forums in which a very distinguished professor by the name of Jack Foner would come to our house and give lectures and influenced my thinking to a degree about the world.

Brian Lehrer: Your father was a business owner, so he was sort of a capitalist and a socialist?

John Mogulescu: That is exactly right. You've got it right. We laugh about that, my brother and I and my family today, but yes, that is exactly-- he was more of a theoretician. My mother was the activist.

Brian Lehrer: Where did you go to college?

John Mogulescu: I went to Brown. I was not the greatest of students, but I was a really good athlete. I was a recruited athlete, and we're not going to get into that in terms of what kind of advantage that is. I was a tennis player and a basketball player in New York. Ultimately became the captain of the Brown tennis team, only played a year of basketball. I went to Brown and then came back to New York.

Brain: What was your major?

John Mogulescu: Psychology.

Brian Lehrer: How did you get interested in working in higher ed?

John Mogulescu: It was by accident. When I first got out of Brown, the Vietnam War was raging and I got a deferment by teaching elementary school in a poor neighborhood in Brooklyn. The hardest thing I ever did, just pushed me to the limits. I enjoyed the kids, but I didn't know what I was doing. After three years of teaching, I went back to graduate school and social work, and I was a community organizer major, which very few social work graduate schools even have at the moment.

My field placement put me at New York City Community College, which was a community college at CUNY. I walked in the door to meet my supervisor, didn't know where the community college was. I had gone to an elite college. I knew Brooklyn College because I went to Midwood High School, which was next door, but I didn't know CUNY.

An hour later, I came out and my life had been changed. The woman's name was Fannie Eisenstein. She was a brilliant, committed person who believed that non-credit programs could change lives. She said, "Your field placement as a graduate student in social work was to go into the Brooklyn House of Detention," which was a jail of 2,000 men on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, "and organize its first prison education program."

I did that for three years. The first year as a student, I then wrote a grant, got the grant application, and miraculously were approved by the State Ed Department. I stayed there for three years in that jail every day. Now, I'm going from the public schools to the jail, all Black and Brown inmates and detainees, basically, waiting for their trial. This framed my whole career, both of those early starts.

Brian Lehrer: You would say they taught you, at least as much as you taught them?

John Mogulescu: Without question, Brian. The kids in sixth grade, for sure, and the detainees as well. I learned a lot, and I learned a lot about myself and what I wanted to do with my career.

Brian Lehrer: It's interesting. I guess just as a side thought about the era of the draft during the Vietnam War, you could get out of the draft by faking an infirmity, like Donald Trump, or by going to work in an inner city public school like you.

John Mogulescu: I guess that's correct, yes. I chose the inner city school, but that's another story.

Brian Lehrer: You said New York City Community College. Is that what is now Borough of Manhattan Community College?

John Mogulescu: No, it is now New York City College of Technology. It's located in Downtown Brooklyn. It's one of CUNY's now-- it offers both associate and four-year degrees. In 1976, during the fiscal crisis, it changed from a community college to a state-funded, what you would call a senior college at CUNY.

Brian Lehrer: Can you talk about the importance of community colleges as you see them today and as you've seen them change during the course of your career?

John Mogulescu: Much of my career has been related to community college education. I've spent 13 years at that campus of New York City Community and then City Tech. Community colleges does a whole lot of things, and CUNY has seven of them. Actually, I founded one of them. I put the team together to found one of them called Guttman Community College.

It takes students who do not have the best academic record coming out of high school, but have a high school diploma or equivalency, and provide them with opportunity to either major in a career-related field like a nursing or a rad tech or hotel and restaurant or liberal arts as a pathway to a transfer degree in a baccalaureate as well. They're incredibly important.

In my work, and I started in continuing education, which was the non-credit side of the house. As I gained status at the university, I moved to the central office of the university in 1986. We were an office of six people in continuing education, but we began to build programs and we began to question why was it that so many community college students did not do as well as we would like them to do.

What framed a lot of my work, and this was already, I'm really up to now 2000, 2001, 2002 after being involved with literacy education, high school equivalency, workforce development. We had a new chancellor come in, Matthew Goldstein. He was a visionary. He came in in 1999. There had been a very critical report of CUNY by Rudy Giuliani called An Institution Adrift.

Goldstein had a vision, and one of the things that he had was to enhance what we were doing at community colleges. If I could give one quick example, because it turns out to be the most successful community college program, both at CUNY and also in the United States. In 2004, 2005, maybe a little bit later, Chancellor Goldstein went to see Mayor Bloomberg. It might even have been a bit earlier than that. He said that the graduation rates at our community colleges are unconsciously low. Urban community college graduation rates were 14%, 15%. That's a three-year graduation rate for a two-year degree.

CUNY was in that ballpark as well. He said to the mayor, "If you give me some money we can change that." The mayor said, "Well, but what are you going to do?" He gave the mayor the answer. He came back to campus and he called me in already at that time, I was part of his senior team. He said, "I just got $19 million to put a pilot program together to change the graduation rates at community colleges." Then he said, "The bad part is that I promised the mayor a 50% three-year graduation rate." We were in the low teens at the time.

We put a group of people together. I guess this goes to The Dean of New Things. They were not necessarily the traditional folks. We use common sense. We looked at why students were not succeeding. We said, "Well, for the most part, you're going to have to go full-time." People criticized us that we were not aware how our students work and they're poor and they're on public assistance.

Brian Lehrer: Have kids.

John Mogulescu: I'm sorry.

Brian Lehrer: Some have kids

John Mogulescu: Some have kids, all of which was true. Absolutely. When we looked at the data, 89% of the students at that time who started community colleges started full-time. Those that ultimately then went to part-time and took three credits, or six credits, rarely got to the finish line. We then did a lot of other things. We had got money for the project.

We started with a pilot program of 1,100 students. We gave them metro cards. We filled financial gaps. We put them in cohorts from the beginning. We had what we call intrusive advisement. If someone didn't come to class, we wanted to know why. We tried. We were accused of actually, by some folks, of treating them like high school students. We measured everything from day one. Three years later, we had about a 53% graduation rate.

Brian Lehrer: Wow. You went up from low teens to 53%.

John Mogulescu: Now, the first cohort, and I will be honest, we selected people who did not need remediation. The control group was probably in the 20s, and we got 53. We then loosened that as we went on. Then we got money from outside sources, from places like the Robin Hood Foundation and others, to expand to 4,000.

Then Mayor de Blasio comes in. Now, this is later. We are at 4,000 students. Every time a new mayor comes in, CUNY gives a laundry list of things where we would like funded. Almost rarely, or many of them funded, but you still do it. He threw everything out and gave us $77 million into our operating budget to expand that one program ASAP to 25,000 students. We have now done that. It took about eight or nine years from that time to do that. We're a little below 50% taking pretty much all folks in and have changed the way you think about community college education.

Long-winded answer, Brian, perhaps, but really important. Then Goldstein, almost at the same time, a year later, came to me as well, and said that we also need a new experimental community college. I put a team together and we had this incredible group of educators, some faculty, but many from the days of our literacy and GED programs. We spent a lot of time in taking a look at what a new college would look like.

Fast forward, that new college is now called Guttman Community College. We got money from the Guttman Foundation to name it. Equally terrific results with a bit of a different kind of sense of approaching community college education. Now, all is a long way of saying that what you said about having kids and work and being poor and relatively underprepared is all true. At the same time, and a lot of the blame, we would always put some folks from CUNY on the public school system.

One of the things I did at CUNY was oversee the work at public schools. We wanted to look at ourselves and see what we could do different. Fast forward, I think, the graduation rate is still not what we would like it to be, which is another reason. We can get to why we have to bring students back to CUNY who have some credit, but no degree. It's been now duplicated in 10 states. SUNY is going to put that same program in, I think, 23 of its campuses. The person who ran it for me is now the senior vice chancellor for student success at SUNY. She left CUNY a little less than a year ago.

Brian Lehrer: That would mean almost two dozen locations all around the state. Where's the Guttman Community College, by the way?

John Mogulescu: It's right across from Bryant Park. It's on 40th Street. It's a small college of about 1,000 students. We had hoped it was going to be larger, budget problems got in the way and finding space, but it's a small niche community college. Then you had mentioned Borough of Manhattan Community College, which is the largest community college, which is in Downtown Brooklyn. I'm sorry, Lower Manhattan.

Brian Lehrer: Lower Manhattan, near the World Trade Center and around there. Listeners, anybody recognize the voice? Anybody who had Mr. Mogulescu when you were in sixth grade a million years ago, or at one branch of CUNY or another, or new Dean Mogulescu and wants to either thank him or tell a story or ask a question, or, of course, I'm sure we have many CUNY students and faculty members listening right now, as well as CUNY alum of many kinds.

Many of the CUNY campuses want to talk about the issues which he's raising and focusing on his book and his memoir that really, as you've heard from what has been the heart of our conversation so far over the last few minutes, the challenge for any society in New York taking it on, more than many of trying to get a college degree and a leg up in the economy for as many first generation, I think we can say, in most cases, college students and people who come from marginalized backgrounds, low-income backgrounds, immigrant backgrounds of any kind as possible. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692. John Mogulescu's new book is called The Dean of New Things: Bringing Change to CUNY and New York City. Call or text 212-433-9692. Jim in Astoria, you're on WNYC. Hello, Jim.

Jim: Hi, Brian. How are you? First, Dean Mogulescu, thank you so much. I'm a CUNY alum. I did my first two years at LaGuardia Community College and used the 2+2 Program to transfer over to The Grove School of Engineering at City College. Really, I wouldn't have graduated college if it weren't for that program. The small class sizes really paid off. Now, I'm a licensed professional engineer. I practice in New York, most of the Northeast, and in Puerto Rico, but without that program, I wouldn't have my career today.

John Mogulescu: Well, congratulations on that. A lot of students do start at LaGuardia and go to-- you became an engineer. They go all over CUNY. I don't even know, Brian, that people realize that CUNY has 25 campuses and 25 schools. 7 community colleges, 11 senior colleges, and 7 professional schools.

I also had the privilege in 2002 of being asked to found a school for adults called the CUNY School of Professional Studies by Chancellor Goldstein, and was able to put together a team that, within months, had begun the school. The school now has over 4,000 degree students and serves 30,000 non-credit students.

I would want to just add, I know we don't have that much time, that the whole question of the mission of CUNY to serve New York City was crucial to my thinking. You had mentioned 22 degree programs. Well, the School of Professional Studies developed about 28 degree programs and became the first entity to do online degree programs for CUNY and for adult students.

We had huge undertakings in the K-12 area. We organized 20 early college high schools. We built three new specialized high schools. At the request of the mayor, we involved ourselves in police work in the city. We started a school for out-of-school youth in the Bronx called CUNY Prep. We brought culture, theater, and music to kids and things that you don't typically think a university does.

My view is that you can't have a great urban university, public university. It doesn't pay attention to the city that it resides in. We started with a staff of six. By 2006, we were at 350 staff, virtually all supported by grant and contract, outside money. It didn't cost the university money to support our staff, who became leaders all over CUNY and certainly in the system office and then in as well.

The question of a mission of a great urban university, really, to me, has to do with not only degree programs, but serving the city and trying to think creatively, and higher ed is filled with really smart people, and yet they are resistant to change. How do you get past that? That was the task of some incredibly gifted educators that I worked with who typically would not even necessarily get faculty jobs, but were on soft money, were on grants and contracts. Then, of course, you have a vision of a chancellor like Goldstein, who was there for 14 years to see that this happened. Let me stop and see if we take other questions.

Brian Lehrer: Janet in Brooklyn, you're on WNYC. Hi, Janet.

Janet: Good morning. I'd like to ask your guest, if you have a student who's really struggling to get through the CUNY system, what would you suggest for them to do?

John Mogulescu: Yes. I think that now, there are both tutoring centers, there are advisors, there are folks you can go to on each campus to try and change that equation. I don't know what campus that person is at, and it's hard to speak on it, but not to be quiet about it. Then it's the role of CUNY to get early alerts to understand that this student is in trouble, this student's midterm grades are not so good, and that it's our obligation to kind of figure out what we need to do to assist. I wish I knew more about the situation, but that's where I would start.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to go one step further, Janet?

Janet: Okay. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Okay, thank you very much. Lisa in New Rochelle. You're on WNYC. Hi, Lisa.

Lisa: Oh, hi. I wanted to call in because I am from a low-income family and I have a son who I tried to send to SUNY Buffalo for an engineering degree, and he can't get, even though we are very low income and he's a minority, we can't get this Excelsior Scholarship that's supposed to be amazing. Because of just a little loophole that he can't finish in four years because he had to transfer from another school. Buffalo didn't accept any of his credits besides the fact that it was an accredited four-year college. Now, they won't give him any money, which is the whole reason we transferred, because we couldn't pay for college anywhere outside of New York. Now, we can't get the money that we deserve.

It's intended to be for families exactly like ours, and we can't get any of it because of basically a little loophole that there's no reason Buffalo shouldn't have accepted Colorado's credits for the aerospace engineering program. Now, it's going to take him five years to finish because they took away a year from him and made him retake all the same classes. We have to pay full price, which we can't afford. I'm just really frustrated that I thought, "Oh, my God. Thank you, New York. This is going to meet the needs of our family." Now, it doesn't help us at all.

Brian Lehrer: That, of course, is SUNY, not CUNY, and you live in Westchester in New Rochelle, not in the city. Is there a moral of that story, based on your experience, that you can take away or maybe even help Lisa and her kid?

John Mogulescu: Yes. I don't know that I can help Lisa. I really don't. I think that's complicated. What I do know, Brian, is the whole question of transfer and credits accepted, and CUNY is now doing some new things to make sure that that happens is a huge issue and has been an issue for the last 30 or 40 years. As CUNY has lost enrollment, the biggest pool of people in New York City and Metropolitan New York are people who have some college and no degree. The question is, will their credits be accepted? Will their work experience be accepted?

My view is that if higher ed does not wake up to that they have to do more on that side, not only shame on them, but the decrease in student enrollment will continue because the number of students coming in from the public schools, particularly in a system like New York, in which we have 150,000 or 175,000 less students in this system, which has an impact, the adult population is a population that we should bring back, and there's just not enough being done.

Brian Lehrer: To her question about affordability and who's falling through the cracks, and Lisa, thank you for your call, and good luck with you and your family. Bernie Sanders ran for president on free public college for all, is that something you support or think would help CUNY and the students who could use it?

John Mogulescu: I think it would help everybody. I will say-- and that whether it could ever get passed is another question. At CUNY, if you are at one of our community colleges, the vast majority of students pay no tuition and do not wind up with debt because between the State Tuition Assistance Program, TAP, and the Federal Pell Grant, large numbers of students do not

Now, some do and some that are more middle class do. Excelsior is one answer, but CUNY students do not graduate with the kind of debt that are coming out of the private schools. In the best of all worlds, I would go back to when I started going to CUNY. Everything was free. Is that going to happen politically? Probably not, but it's not that I would be opposed to it.

Brian Lehrer: We're just about at the end of our time, and I'm going to shorten our next segment a little bit just so I can get a few of these other folks in here. I did say when I was inviting calls that if anybody wanted to thank you personally who came through your classes or your deanship, they could call in with that. We're going to keep these short. Joe in Brooklyn, what do you want to say to Dean Mogulescu in 15 seconds?

Joe: In 15 seconds, just thanks, John. This is just an honor to have worked with you. You're a role model and a mentor. Your two skill sets have always been dedicated to the students and the good of the students and bringing together a group of really great people. I was honored to serve on some of those groups, and I really appreciate all you've done, and also your deftness at manipulating the often complicated political situations at CUNY. You left me awestruck many times. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you, Joe. Thank you very much. One more. Margie in Midwood, you're on WNYC. Margie, 15 seconds for you.

Margie: John was my social work student supervisor. He was the best. I worked with him at the Brooklyn House of Detention in 1980, '79 and 1980, and I couldn't have asked for a better person. The best. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you very much. I'll read one text message that came in. I'll read part of it. "I'm a product of your guest's work. In the 2000s, I attended NYCCT. It wasn't easy as I was an immigrant with some language barriers, also a young single mother who struggled with mental health issues at the time. I quit college a couple of times because life was so overwhelming at the time, but I never forgot what made me come back was a letter from the dean stating that I was in good standing and they'd like me to come back. I felt cared for and came back both times."

With those testimonials, we leave it with John Mogulescu whose new memoir about all the things we've been talking about and more is called The Dean of New Things: Bringing Change to CUNY and New York City. Dean Mogulescu, again, congratulations on your career and the book. Thank you so much for joining us today.

John Mogulescu: Thank you so much, Brian. It's been a pleasure. Thanks very much.

 

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