The Eighty-Five Percent: Or, Why CUNY is New York's Best Kept Secret

By Cathy Davidson. On July 1, I left my friends, family, students, and neighbors at Duke University, where I had enjoyed as rich and fulfilling a career  for over two decades as any academic could aspire to, to take up a new position among the distinguished faculty at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  To people who haven’t been paying attention, this choice may seem eccentric.  Why leave two (!) distinguished chairs at a  top, private university to join the nation’s largest public urban university at this historical moment, when so much public education is under duress?  To people who keep track of these things, however, the Graduate Center is “trending.”   Not only does it have as distinguished a faculty as the city's fine, elite, private research universities, but, in the last few years, several of us have moved here to the GC from elite institutions—Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, to name only the ones I happen to know about. More...