Open Admissions

“Danica Savonick outlines how the open admissions period at City University of New York made an important impact on university education and provided a crucial template for the next moves in educational liberation. She models how to reactivate Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich as our teachers in a moment where an in-depth understanding of their pedagogical choices can impact how we teach today.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs, author of Survival Is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

“Danica Savonick traces the history of how the SEEK program at the City University of New York brought together a set of activist-teacher-poets whose intersecting careers were decisively shaped by the experience of teaching writing courses to working-class students of color during an era of open admissions and student revolt. The fascinating story Savonick tells reanimates how these teachers developed their core pedagogical principles during an extraordinarily utopian, generative, and successful moment in higher education. Open Admissions makes a significant contribution to scholarship and public conversations about higher education and the cost of college today.” - Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, authors of, Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study

"Open Admissions will inspire writing teachers to engage students, connecting to the material conditions of their lives. Activists will find ideas for increasing student empowerment in programs for underserved populations, and educational leaders will gain inspiration from the groundbreaking 1965 SEEK college preparatory program and the resulting free college/open admissions CUNY policy. . . . Highly recommended." - J. C. Rossi, Choice

"Open Admissions doesn’t just establish precedent for the contestation of racial supremacy and colonialism in and around the classrooms where Bambara, Jordan, Rich, and Lorde taught. The book demonstrates that, though decades of austerity, debt, and corporatization eroded it, and demagogues now seek to destroy it, belief in the common good constitutes the recalcitrant infrastructure of institutions like City College. The dream of the open admissions era lives on in the constant reshaping of the democratic values that first motivated it." - Cole Adams, Critical Inquiry

"Open Admissions is a valuable contribution to literature on pedagogy and a timely celebration of the power of Black feminist scholarship, pedagogy, and literature to transform higher education for the benefit of all." - Naomi R Williams, History of Education Quarterly

"[Open Admissions] is also an argument for and about pedagogy: that we should see it as a body of thinking in itself and use it as a key analytic for understanding the more studied political thinking and poetry of these figures." - Dana Glaser, GLQ