The Children of the People
Writings by and about CUNY students on race and social justice
In 1849, Horace Webster, the first president of the Free Academy said of the radical social experiment that would eventually become the City University of New York (CUNY): “The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few, but by the privileged many.” More than 170 years after the founding of the Free Academy, we revisit Horace Webster’s statement to question the outcome of the experiment from the perspective of the students.
The Children of the People emerged from Autoethnographies of CUNY, a public humanities project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center; the seminar supports the institutionalization of public humanities practices and pedagogy at the City University New York and across New York City through community partnerships, public research projects, policy development, curriculum enhancement, and expansive creative, cultural, and collaborative works with a social justice thrust.
