From the moment it was founded in 1847 as the Free Academy—which later became City College—CUNY was envisioned as a radical experiment in public education. As Dr. Horace Webster, the first president of the Free Academy, declared at its opening ceremony: “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 successfully controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few” (it should probably be noted, however, that the actual founder of the Free Academy was Townsend Harris, a wealthy businessman and politico). From the beginning, CUNY was tuition-free, thus seeming to live up to its mission of radical inclusiveness.

But CUNY was also, for more than a century, diversity-free: in other words, completely segregated. As late as 1969, CUNY’s flagship campus, City College, located in the heart of Harlem, was 97 percent white. Brooklyn College was 96 percent white, despite the fact that more than a third of the borough’s residents were Black or Hispanic. The subsequent desegregation of CUNY, which ushered in the diversity celebrated today by college administrators and enshrined in glossy ad campaigns, was in fact accomplished largely via the struggles of student movements.

In the spring of 1969, students at every CUNY campus rose up in protest; student activists occupied administrative buildings at Brooklyn College and Queens College, and a student strike shut down City College for two weeks. Student organizers, together with a handful of faculty and staff supporters, faced down institutional sanctions, police violence, attacks by racist right-wing thugs, and the hostility of “law and order” city politicians who called for even more violence to be brought against “disruptive” students—not to mention university administrators more ready to call in the cops than to address student demands.

These student movements—from the Third World Coalition at Hunter College, to the Black and Puerto Rican Student Community and the W. E. B. Du Bois Club at City College, to the Black League of Afro-American Collegians and the Puerto Rican Alliance at Brooklyn College, to the various chapters of Students for a Democratic Society that were active at campuses throughout the CUNY system—were deeply influenced and inspired by ongoing struggles for decolonization, which they linked to their anti-racist work within the university. As one student activist writes in his account of the history of struggle at CUNY: “The rapid decolonization of Africa, the Cuban Revolution and the appearance of armed national liberation movements across Latin America, the upheavals taking place in China, and the heroic resistance of the Vietnamese to the aggression of the mightiest military power in human history all contributed to a situation in which oppressed people everywhere imagined that they could make great gains through struggle.” Today’s CUNY, the diversity university, wouldn’t exist without these struggles to decolonize the “people’s university.”