CUNY DIGITAL HISTORY ARCHIVE

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Newt Davidson Parody: Memo to Gov. Rockefeller on CUNY Planning

This recently discovered (August 2017) document from the papers of historian Judith Stein, is the only extant example of what preceded the Crisis at CUNY brochure. As explained in the interview done with four members of the Newt Davidson Collective, a series of lengthy pamphlets were written anonymously and distributed across the university. They mocked the university administration for the direction it was taking, accusing them of corporatizing the university, automating teaching, and relying on adjunct labor, among other things. 

Crisis at CUNY and the documents that parodied CUNY administrators grew out of the research of the Newt Davidson Collective, an ad hoc group of faculty from several campuses who sought to understand reasons for this new climate of austerity in the 1970s. Their search for answers took them deep into the complex bureacracy of the City University and its links with other key institutions. The booklet and pamphlets produced by the Newt Davidson Collective would go on to circulate among CUNY faculty members and others.

Source | CCNY Archives & Special Collections
Creator | Newt Davidson Collective
Date Created | September 12, 1973
Rights | Copyright CCNY Archives & Special Collections Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Item Type | Text (Pamphlet / Petition)
Cite This document | Newt Davidson Collective , “Newt Davidson Parody: Memo to Gov. Rockefeller on CUNY Planning,” CUNY Digital History Archive, accessed March 19, 2024, https://cdha.cuny.edu/items/show/7592.

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