Providing a comprehensive history of the City University of New York, this book chronicles the evolution of the country's largest urban university from its inception in 1961 through the tumultuous events and policies that have shaped it character and community over the past fifty years. Reflecting on its uniqueness and broader place in U.S. higher education, Picciano and Jordan examine in depth the development of the CUNY system and all of its constituent colleges, with emphasis on its rapid expansion in the 1960s, and the end of its free tuition in the 1970s, and open admissions policies in the 1990s.

From the Free Academy to CUNY provides a generally accessible narrative of the development of the City University of New York from its inception in 1847 as the Free Academy to its present status as the largest urban university in the country. The book includes an extensive bibliography of books, articles, dissertations and major policy documents, as well as chapter notes and an index. The Free Academy was born in controversy and today the City University of New York is again in the midst of controversial changes. This book provides the background necessary to understand how the municipal college system emerged, developed and became a university. Over 120 annotated illustrations dramatize the 150 years in which it has been facing the challenge of educating "the children of the whole people." This book tells the story of an institution that, directly and indirectly has influenced the lives of innumerable New Yorkers, their families and New York City.

Chapters 2 and 3 are focused on CUNY history from 1847-1976.

Fabricant and Brier describe the extraordinary growth of public higher education after 1945, thanks largely to state investment, the alternative intellectual and political traditions that defined the 1960s, and the social and economic forces that produced austerity policies and inequality beginning in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In the 1960s and '70s—when Toni Cade Bambara, Samuel Delany, David Henderson, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Guillermo Morales, Adrienne Rich, and Assata Shakur all studied and taught at CUNY—New York City's classrooms and streets radiated as epicenters of Black, Puerto Rican, queer, and women's liberation. Highlighting the decolonial feminist metamorphosis that transformed our educational landscape, New York Liberation School explores how study and movement coalesced across classrooms and neighborhoods.

Lavin and Hyllegard evaluate the open-admissions experiment at the City University of New York, initiated in 1970, which defined college as a right for all who had completed high school.

Evaluation of the first five years (1970-75) of CUNY's open admissions program.