The Five Demands: The Untold Story of the Tumultuous Two Weeks that Changed the Face of Higher Education

FAIN: FT-278572-21

Andrea Ruth Weiss
CUNY Research Foundation, City College (New York, NY 10031-9101)

Research for a documentary film on a 1969 strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at City College of New York.

This proposal is for a summer stipend to conduct research for a documentary on the 1969 campus strike by Black and Puerto Rican students at the City College of New York. This documentary will tell the dramatic story of this defining moment in the history of student protest, one that literally changed the face of American universities. One of the distinctive aspects of the takeover is that it was led not by white middle class rebels protesting government actions halfway around the world but by Black and Hispanic students in a public institution not serving the public of its surrounding environs. The ensuing policy of Open Admissions remains the longest, most ambitious attempt by any American institution to address inequalities in access to higher education. The challenges this policy presented led to profound changes in thinking about the role and purpose of higher education: what the university is, whom it serves, what is taught—questions that continue to confront us as a nation.