Giuliani: Willing to Play Hardball With Higher Education

As mayor, the Republican presidential candidate aggressively pushed for change at the City U. of New York

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By SARA HEBEL

Rudolph W. Giuliani had already begun to solidify his reputation as a tough-minded mayor, willing to weather criticism as he sought to cleanse New York's streets of litter and lawlessness, when he turned to overhauling the city's public university.

As Mr. Giuliani, a Republican, entered his second term as mayor, almost 10 years ago, he called for an end to open-enrollment policies at the City University of New York. Low entrance standards at the 23-institution system were "cruel," he argued, because they allowed for the admission of poorly prepared students, many of whom failed to graduate.

"The entire meaning and value of a college education has been put in jeopardy," he told the City Council.

The mayor convened a commission on the future of the university that called for higher academic standards. CUNY's leaders adopted many of the recommendations, putting in place policies that eliminated most remedial education at its four-year institutions and required applicants to those campuses to meet minimum scores on standardized tests.

To his supporters, the mayor's actions represented a bold move that has improved CUNY's rigor and brought new luster to the system, which enrolls more than 230,000 undergraduate and graduate students. To his critics, Mr. Giuliani's approach was bullheaded and threatened to undermine the urban university's historic mission to educate all New Yorkers, particularly students from low-income and minority groups, who are more likely than their peers to attend poorly performing elementary and secondary schools.

The debate illustrates the kind of leadership style — and controversy — that Mr. Giuliani might bring to the White House if he were elected. Both his supporters and his critics say his record on CUNY shows how he aggressively pursues his convictions, often without regard for public opinion or other opposition.

"He's a very determined man when he sees issues he believes in," says Matthew Goldstein, who, as CUNY's chancellor, has put in place many of the recommendations of the mayoral commission. "He takes a very strong posture."

As Mr. Giuliani seeks his party's nomination for president in 2008, he has not said much about the higher-education policies he would pursue, and his campaign declined a request for an interview with The Chronicle. His education platform deals mostly with elementary and secondary education. But he has focused on pressing for an expansion of work-force training, especially in mathematics and science, as a way to improve the country's global competitiveness.

College Politics

Mr. Giuliani, 63, is a product of private education. Born in Brooklyn, he attended a Roman Catholic high school and earned a bachelor's degree in political science in 1965 from Manhattan College, where he was a commuter student. At the time he attended the Catholic college, it was all male.

An only child and the grandson of Italian immigrants, Mr. Giuliani has described his family as middle class. "There was money, but it was tight," he recently told Hugh Hewitt, a conservative-leaning radio talk-show host and blogger. Scholarships, the candidate said, helped him pay for his undergraduate education and for his law degree, which he earned in 1968 at New York University.

In his youth, Mr. Giuliani considered becoming a priest or a doctor. But by college, his passion for politics was becoming clear. At Manhattan he was elected president of the sophomore class and of his fraternity, Phi Rho Pi. He also wrote a column, Ars Politica, for the Quadrangle, the student newspaper.

In his columns, Mr. Giuliani supported some Democratic candidates at the time, including Robert F. Kennedy, who was running for a Senate seat from New York. He criticized the Republican candidate, Kenneth B. Keating, for voting against federal aid to education, among other issues.

Mr. Giuliani also attacked Barry Goldwater, the Republican nominee for president in 1964, calling him an "incompetent, confused, and sometimes idiotic man." Mr. Giuliani challenged the wisdom of Mr. Goldwater's "conservative" philosophy of government, arguing that a "strong, large government is necessary" to deal with some of the nation's problems.

To explain his political views in college, Mr. Giuliani likes to paraphrase Winston Churchill by saying, "If you aren't a liberal in your 20s, you have no heart, and if you aren't a conservative by your 40s, you have no brain," according to a spokeswoman for the former mayor's presidential campaign.

Mixed Mayoral Legacy

After law school, Mr. Giuliani became a federal prosecutor and earned a reputation for busting drug dealers and reining in organized crime. He was elected mayor in 1993. In the last year of his administration, he gained accolades from around the world for his calm resolve after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

Despite the acclaim, which included being named Time magazine's man of the year in 2001, the reviews of his record as mayor are mixed. He was successful in reducing crime, for instance, but the tough tactics of his police force angered many members of minority and immigrant communities, who felt unfairly and rigidly monitored.

The divided, and often intense, reactions to Mr. Giuliani's leadership style and policies are evident in the debate over his legacy at City University.

Mr. Goldstein, the chancellor, credits the former mayor with selecting a strong leader, Benno C. Schmidt Jr., a former Yale University president, to lead the commission on the future of the university. The mayor's commission, Mr. Goldstein says, "was helpful in getting CUNY to take on some of the very serious issues people were loath to address."

The chancellor calls the panel's recommendations "bold." As a result of the proposed changes, such as moving most remedial work to community colleges, the quality of the university and its students has improved greatly, Mr. Goldstein says. This fall, he notes, CUNY's enrollment is at its highest in 32 years.

But critics of Mr. Giuliani say the former mayor's policies are still shutting the door on some students. Across the university system, black and Hispanic enrollments are up since 1999, when the new admissions standards were approved. But the proportion of black students has dropped significantly at some of the university's most-prestigious four-year institutions, says William Crain, a psychology professor at CUNY's City College. On his campus, the proportion of black students fell to just under 27 percent in 2006 from almost 38 percent in 1999.

The former mayor was "extremely disparaging" of the university and its students, Mr. Crain says, and put too much faith in standardized tests and their power to predict student success. "Don't expect poor students or students of color to get any breaks if former Mayor Giuliani becomes president," he says.

Thinking Globally

As Mr. Giuliani pursues the presidency, his campaign so far has not focused much on higher education. But he has praised the general quality of the nation's colleges as he argues for introducing more choice, through vouchers and others means, into elementary and secondary education.

"How is it that we have the best higher education in the world and a weaker K-12 system?" he asked in a recent town-hall meeting in New Hampshire. "What's the difference? Why does one operate so well and the other not nearly as well? American higher education is based on a quintessential American principle: choice."

On other fronts, Mr. Giuliani promotes more educational exchanges with Muslim populations as a way to strengthen the reputation of the United States around the world and to "connect more countries to the global marketplace of ideas."

To improve America's economic standing, he also proposes to expand enrollments in technical-certificate and associate-degree programs in science and mathematics, and to increase the number of visas available for foreign graduates of American colleges and other skilled workers who are qualified for jobs in key industries.

"Our success in this new century," Mr. Giuliani says, "depends on reinvigorating our historic mission with determined leadership that gives hard-working American families confidence their future will be better than their past."