Cole Adams reviews Open Admissions

Danica Savonick. Open Admissions: The Poetics and Pedagogy of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne Rich in the Era of Free College. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2024. 264 pp.

Review by Cole Adams

11 July 2025

Vivian Gornick recalls in a recent essay that when she matriculated to The City College of New York in the ’50s, it was known as both the “Harvard of the Proletariat” and the “Cheder on the Hill.”[1] When mid-century quotas restricted admission to elite, private universities, the college embraced Jewish students. City College, the first tuition-free public institution of higher education in the United States, was founded on a mandate to “open the doors to all,” though who counted within that “all” was continually contested; by the ’60s, locals mobilized against racial exclusions that made City College seem like a “white citadel” in Harlem (p. 6).

Danica Savonick’s Open Admissions is largely set in the years that followed. In 1965, the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge (SEEK) program expanded recruitment of low-income, Black, and Puerto Rican students, and in 1970, acceding to the prior year’s student strike, the college began offering admission to every one of the city’s interested high school graduates. The institutional experiment was axed in 1975 when leaders exploited fiscal crisis to subject the college to the first of countless waves of austerity that have since immiserated the US public university system. Savonick’s examination of this moment and interpretation of four SEEK writing instructors who reconfigured American feminist letters reframes City College’s history as a crucible for a democratic educational ideal.

Savonick focuses on the campus essays, classroom lyrics, and student anthologies of Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde, with appearances by other notable SEEK instructors including Barbara Christian. That there is a historically significant relationship between the teaching and writing of literature is a truism the institutional turn in literary studies has brought under renewed scrutiny. Savonick gets more literal by theorizing through archival course materials. Open Admissions highlights redistributions of classroom authority that link contemplation to action and foreground the classroom’s permeability to its world: assignments where students critique their own schooling or develop their ideal summer course—Bambara’s students designed one on “Colonialism, Neocolonialism, and Liberation” (p. 31). Jordan, unique even among this group, pushed students and peers alike to grapple with the imbrication of US institutions in Israeli occupation and atrocities. Savonick’s return to the archives of a group of writers whose reception is clouded by a tendency to be treated as stand-ins for a feminist past whose radicality we long for—or which we imagine ourselves to know better than—in order to qualify anti-institutional impulses in fields that frequently invoke their names is a worthwhile corrective, especially as the institutions of feminist criticism and ethnic studies face a multipronged assault.

What Savonick calls “the dream of the open admissions era,” universal student-centered higher education, is an enduring political ideal with a target on its back (p. 176). The successes of the nineteenth-century German model or the 1960s student movements in the US and France, for example, were undercut by the same time-honored antagonists: erosion of intramural oversight, privatization, and disregard for public good in funding cuts; tuition hikes, debt burden, and dismissal of nonmarket principles. In a time of global far-right entrenchment when universities are again first in the line of fire, Open Admissions offers an encouraging reminder that the desire for what universal access to education could help enable—truly egalitarian opportunity—can’t be snuffed out, not when states leave universities behind or when strongmen assail them.

In 2025, familiar agents of the public university’s dismantling weaponize accusations of antisemitism to suppress student opposition to genocide, using the status of elite schools to excite populist anti-intellectualism and manufacture consent for autocracy. Students fight back, including many Jewish ones at institutions with historic ties like City College who demand: “Not in our name.” On May 27, a year after police razed their first encampments, a CUNY group began a hunger strike protesting the starvation of Palestinians in Gaza. When they ended their fast sixteen days later while I revised this review, they called for solidarity with mounting struggles against authoritarianism across the city. Open Admissions doesn’t just establish precedent for the contestation of racial supremacy and colonialism in and around the classrooms where Bambara, Jordan, Rich, and Lorde taught. The book demonstrates that, though decades of austerity, debt, and corporatization eroded it, and demagogues now seek to destroy it, belief in the common good constitutes the recalcitrant infrastructure of institutions like City College. The dream of the open admissions era lives on in the constant reshaping of the democratic values that first motivated it.

[1] Vivian Gornick, “The 176-Year Argument,” New York Review of Books, 24 April 2025.