I think I got it figured out. (Still grappling with narcissism and paternalism…so please pardon me, especially during this difficult finals period.)<\/p>\n
First, it\u2019s a happy accident that I’m here. It\u2019s a happy accident that we’re all here, more or less. As accomplished as we are, in the back of our minds, we should know that there were so many variables in admissions that there was no absolute way that we are THE CHOSEN<\/strong>. From that understanding, I tried to remain extremely grateful as a student at the Macaulay Honors College.<\/p>\n But something\u2019s been nagging me all this time. I can’t enjoy a two-hour meeting with my honors advisor \u2014 green tea and giggles, every time<\/strong> \u2014 on a regular basis when there’s a flood of students sitting outside of Advising Services waiting in line for a 15-minute consultation in the East Building at Hunter. The inequality of resources here is simply too great.<\/p>\n Some of what I have is at the expense of other students \u2014 and that’s a tough pill to swallow. But it\u2019s true; Macaulay is funded through public and private sources. So, while I have so many organizations to thank for my fellowships, Opportunities Fund and programs as a Macaulay student, I have New York City to thank for my tuition (and my precious purple laptop).<\/p>\n Every Macaulay student has a choice to address the inequalities present on campus. By no means are we obligated to act on it (whatever that means), but we are obligated insofar as we are at the receiving end of a very tense and difficult dynamic at CUNY. Let’s not delude ourselves into ignoring the separation that exists within our university system. All of our benefits do not come from some magical Louis Vuitton clutch bag. Our school is built on a combination of public funding and private donations, and while I don’t even want to think about the implications of privatization at the moment, this tension exists and we engage with it on a daily basis. It is in the Mac Laptop that you\u2019re using to read this article. It is in the secret hope we usually confirm, that doors on campus open for us because we’re Macaulay students.<\/p>\n But this is not the Ivory Tower. This isn’t even another run-of-the-mill school. Macaulay is specifically unique in the way that we are honors students at a public institution. By its very nature, our school places us in a tough position because we have when others don’t. I could assuage my guilt and say that it\u2019s only a drop in the bucket. But it\u2019s a drop that carries deep anxiety and discontent amongst students, staff, professors and administrators at school.<\/p>\n I often tell my friends that if they didn’t want to think about students outside of Macaulay, they should’ve gone elsewhere. Whether we want to accept it or not, Macaulay is not the place to separate ourselves and hold ourselves high based on status. The climate, the discussion and the tension of student debt and resource inequality would not exist in this form at Harvard, Columbia nor at SUNY Stony Brook because unlike them, our success is partly informed by resources taken from others. Granted, there are other honors scholarships on campus, other schools with honors programs, and other students who receive scholarships to go anywhere. But the success of non-Macaulay scholars at CUNY is a great reminder that we are privileged and not entirely on our merits alone.<\/p>\n That means, we aren’t just a group of high-achieving scholarship recipients, programmed to win prestigious fellowships, scholarships and post-graduate posts. Our identity should mean more than the distance we place between others and ourselves at CUNY.<\/p>\n Much of what is missing from CUNY is the fault of a long string of decisions that drained resources from students attending our university. From the “temporary” requirement of tuition to the ending of open admissions, CUNY has since recovered much of what it lost forty years ago by investing in certain populations and initiatives, including us.<\/p>\n What\u2019s worse is that we aren\u2019t helping our image at all. We\u2019ve all done it; it\u2019s no secret that we share a common identity crisis when we appear standoffish to the frustrated non-Macaulay scholar. It feels uncomfortable knowing we have much when others don’t. It feels uncomfortable when we introduce our school whenever we\u2019re off campus. It\u2019s just easier to talk to people who are in the same boat as we are. That\u2019s the whole point of a community. But if you don\u2019t feel anything for the student who needs to register one more class and they can\u2019t because it\u2019s closed, then you have mastered something that I\u2019ve yet to fully grasp.<\/p>\n The political and educational administrations in power should be horrified at the crumbling infrastructure of the CUNY system. I wouldn’t be as bothered about priority registration if students had enough sections to take. I wouldn’t feel as badly about the Macaulay Advising Program if students outside of the Honors College could have the opportunity to consult advisors more frequently than once every six weeks. I wouldn’t worry all that much about my lion’s share of CUNY resources if my classmates didn\u2019t need to fight for scraps of what\u2019s left.<\/p>\n How does CUNY plan on accommodating post-secondary education in the next five, ten or twenty years? By raising tuition? How does New York plan on building an educated, informed population with a fantastic background in primary, secondary and post-secondary education if the system is on its last leg?<\/p>\n At this point, I might as well throw my hands up and continue to succeed unaffected within the system of inequality presented to me. I can try and put myself at ease knowing that the chips fell in my favor and that it isn’t my concern that others are suffering. I could try and rationalize my successful endeavors as door openers for other CUNY students. Hey, maybe one day, a student at Hunter would be able to attend the Clinton Global Initiative University as a participant or could receive a scholarship from the Point Foundation too, because I was here.<\/p>\n But I’m not Beyonc\u00e9. I’m just some narcissistic Macaulay diva from the Bronx. And it\u2019s hitting me hard that my presence actually is not a presence that students at CUNY can find immediately useful. Am I here to make the school look better, or am I here to get an education?<\/p>\n The least we can do is learn about where our money comes from. We can do slightly better if we actively think about the image problem we may perpetuate when we actively choose not to interact with other CUNY students in class. The best we can do is pursue local, state and federal authorities to prioritize public education, so that we don’t feel as bad for having nice things. But once again, we don\u2019t have to do anything.<\/p>\n However, it will never be as easy as taking our scholarship and doing whatever we want without considering the institution and other students within CUNY. Why? Because at one point or another, the structure of Macaulay reminded us of what we have and what others don\u2019t. If we can appeal to the foundations of accessible education for all at CUNY and the benefits of our school, it would be a fine start to putting this anxiety at ease. <\/p>\n Either that, or a new therapist for Macaulay students \u2014 whichever is cheaper.<\/p>\n — I think I got it figured out. (Still grappling with narcissism and paternalism…so please pardon me, especially during this difficult finals period.) First, it\u2019s a happy accident that I’m here. It\u2019s a happy accident that we’re all here, more or less. As accomplished as we are, in the back of our minds, we should know…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":703,"featured_media":3449,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"portfolio_post_id":0,"portfolio_citation":"","portfolio_annotation":"","openlab_post_visibility":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[94,369,484,494,576,694,714,794,972,1019,1036,1266,1299,1523,1595,1596,1745,1770,1772,1934,2080,2296],"class_list":["post-3375","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-mhc-central","tag-advising","tag-campus-news","tag-college","tag-columbia","tag-cuny","tag-dynamic","tag-education","tag-federal","tag-harvard","tag-honors-programs","tag-hunter-2","tag-local","tag-macaulay-identity","tag-new-york-city","tag-opinion","tag-opinions","tag-private","tag-public","tag-public-education","tag-scholarship","tag-state","tag-tuition"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3375","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/703"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3375"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3375\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3449"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3375"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3375"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/openlab.macaulay.cuny.edu\/messenger\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3375"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nKwame Ocran was part of the four-person team that wrote and presented the paper “‘Deconstructing the Ivory Tower’: A Conversation About Macaulay Identity” at the National Collegiate Honors Council Conference in Boston last month. For more information on this discussion, the Macaulay General Assembly, or to read their research paper, click here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"