New York Liberation School

“City University of New York has a very long history of making revolutionaries. It was a magnet for students and some faculty who recognized the indivisibility of the campus and the street, study and struggle. New York Liberation School turns to CUNY’s insurgent history to offer lessons for how we might remake higher education and the world.”—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

“This exciting telling of the City University of New York’s radical history inspires us to imagine its future. Despite endless givebacks by administration and pushbacks from the state, CUNY professors and students contribute to and are influenced by the larger popular movements at home and around the world. By centering such professors as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Cade Bambara; students like Samuel Delaney and Assata Shakur; and grassroots activists in movements from Puerto Rican Independence to Palestine Liberation; Conor Tomás Reed makes record of what a university for poor and working-class people can give to the world. New York Liberation School is a necessary study that enriches our understanding and imagining.”—Sarah Schulman, former CUNY student and faculty, and author of Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York

“New York Liberation School recovers the political organizing led by coalitions of students and educators to decolonize CUNY, the heart of NYC public education. Moving seamlessly between campus and streets, and foregrounding CUNY leaders like June Jordan and Audre Lorde, this book offers a rich archive of radical experimentation, creativity, and institution-building to a new generation fighting for justice.”—Robyn C. Spencer, professor of history at Lehman College, CUNY, and author of The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party

“Conor Tomás Reed has gifted us with words that narrate the meaning of struggle of and for the university. Ranging from early twentieth movements around the university and militarism, to student and faculty struggles for Black and Puerto Rican Studies, to the most recent assaults against the neoliberal turn and Occupy, the story of the many reimaginations of City College, New York are not only a reminder of what the people’s university might be, this book arranges itself as a demand for what it must be. This is a book for students and organizers, for committed scholars, and for our surrounding communities. Reed shows us that these are the people who must determine the future of these spaces. This book listens to the past for instruction, for these forebears have much to offer. We must thank Reed for allowing their voices space to be heard again. Now our choices for the future, the future of the university, will be conscious ones.”—Joshua Myers, author of Of Black Study

“If you don’t want to join CUNY in heart and mind after reading this book, check your pulse. The university re-visioned here as a site of coalitional struggle is, simultaneously, our world in the act of being re-made. To use the author’s metaphor, New York Liberation School is a boomerang. Hold on tight to this living history.”—Matt Brim, professor of queer studies at the College of Staten Island, CUNY, and author of Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University

“An electrifying account of social ferment and educational experimentation. Reed constructs a living archive of the campus and street insurgencies that aimed to fulfill the democratic promise of a people’s university. From antiracist, feminist, and queer student mobilizations to the emancipatory pedagogies of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, and Adrienne Rich, New York Liberation School illuminates the visions of City College radicals who strove to democratize both the production of knowledge and the organization of society. In the age of neoliberal education, we desperately need this history of grassroots efforts to revolutionize learning. New York Liberation School is a gift to current and future campus rebels who wish to resist conformity and corporatization, reconstruct social relations, and reimagine what it means to be human.”—Russell Rickford, author of We Are an African People: Independent Education, Black Power, and the Radical Imagination

“Reed delivers an excellent guidebook for resisting the university from within. This is a story about how we create, with each other, the new worlds we seek; how we write, discuss, teach, and dream collectively in the service of our liberation. By sitting with the groundbreaking written work of intellectuals, cultural workers, students, and activists, and contextualizing it within the movements and political struggles that they were engaged in, Reed illustrates how the production of community organizing and artistic compositions go hand-in-hand to fuel the creation of new social and political possibilities. A must-read for those inside the academy, disillusioned with its limitations, as well as those outside of the academy, curious about its possibilities. Reed makes clear that a learning process occurs through political struggle and that it can transform people, communities, and institutions.”—Amaka Okechukwu, author of To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions

“New York Liberation School takes readers on an emotional and fascinating journey through the history of CUNY from the perspective of the world’s damned—where social movement and student struggle merge against class society, Eurocentrism, sexism, and the status quo in the production of knowledge. Offering a powerful history of the struggles for a free university with significant content for racialized and impoverished populations, Reed helps us to see clearly the strategies, alliances, internal disputes, achievements, and setbacks in resistance to the consolidation of racial capitalism.”—Yuderkys Espinosa-Miñoso, coeditor of Decolonial Feminism in Abya Yala: Caribbean, Meso, and South American Contributions and Challenges

“With New York Liberation School, Conor Tomás Reed tells a fresh story of the revolution that shook college campuses in the late 1960s and 1970s. A deep history of the struggle at CUNY that unfolds through Reed’s careful, tender prose, this book chronicles the making of ‘Harlem University’ in 1969. Reed reveals the startling ways that educators like June Jordan, Toni Cade Bambara, and Audre Lorde; and students like Assata Shakur and Sekou Sundiata; desegregated and decolonized the largest public urban university in the United States. This is an inspiring and thrilling story of radicalism in a time of retrenchment, a story we need now more than ever.”—Erica R. Edwards, author of The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of U.S. Empire

“If you want to make a more liberatory university, city, and world, you need to read this book! New York Liberation School dives into the oceanic depths of social upheaval at CUNY, inviting us to ride the waves of struggles with intersecting movements that rippled across generations and between the campus and wider city. Rather than abandoning the university as a site of power, students and educators built coalitional power to transform the institution while grappling with counter-insurgencies and recomposing themselves.”—Eli Meyerhoff, author of Beyond Education: Radical Studying for Another World

“Conor Tomás Reed reminds us that education is profoundly liberatory because its best traditions ask the existential questions: who am I and what is my relationship to the nation and world? The protagonists of New York Liberation School asked and answered these questions in the largest public university in the country and discovered that who we are, what we’re made of, and what we might become, must be answered in conversation with each other and our forebears—in the streets, in the classroom and in our neighborhoods. At a moment of book banning and educational silencing in the United States, this book introduces us to giant teachers like June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Toni Cade Bambara—and their students who understood that a truly liberatory education travels beyond the university, is dynamic, and is found in poetry, a novel, a song, or a protest that dares to both resist and dream up the best and most egalitarian world imaginable. Reed shows us how New York Liberation School came into being and how its revolutionary seeds might blossom in the face of neoliberal adversity.”—Johanna Fernández, professor of history at Baruch College, CUNY and author of The Young Lords: A Radical History

Praise for previous work

“This brief, stimulating selection of education-focused writings from poet and activist Jordan (1936–2002) demonstrates her brilliance, compassion, and ceaseless engagement with the world... [T]hese eight pieces collectively delineate structural inequities that constrain the life choices of young people of color while also persuasively arguing, in the words of the editors, “that poetry can provide a route to a radical reconfiguration of consciousness.”—Publisher's Weekly (April 2018)