Hostos Students Hear an Unusual Sound: Praise

After a week of being criticized by politicians and university trustees, students at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York were praised yesterday at a commencement ceremony that at times resembled a political rally.

Three Bronx politicians — a Congressman, an Assemblyman and the Borough President — all hailed the students for overcoming poverty and language barriers to pursue their education.

Referring to the dispute over academic standards that threatened to keep some students from graduating, the Bronx Borough President, Fernando Ferrer, said, “There are those who want to politicize this argument about standards,” and he told the students that their class had become “a political Ping Pong ball.”

“I believe in high standards,” he said, adding that there was no higher standard than when a mother on welfare or a young immigrant enrolls in college.

Hostos, a bilingual college in the South Bronx where more than three-fourths of the students are Hispanic, draws many single mothers on welfare and many immigrants who speak little or no English. Because so many of its students had difficulty passing a university-wide English writing exam, Hostos replaced it with its own writing test last year.

But last week, after final exams were over and students were making plans to graduate, City University trustees, saying standards were being lowered, voted to restore the university-wide test and make it a condition of graduation.

University auditors found that 137 of the more than 400 Hostos students planning to graduate had never passed that exam, and many of them hurriedly took the 50-minute test on Friday and Saturday.

Late Friday evening a New York State Supreme Court Appellate Division judge ruled that all of the students could participate in the graduation ceremony, but scheduled a hearing Tuesday on whether students who do not pass the test can get a diploma.

Hostos officials estimated that 440 students participated in the ceremony in a barricaded portion of the Grand Concourse in the Bronx yesterday. The officials said they did not know how many had passed the exam.

At the commencement ceremony yesterday, the politicians told the students that attacks on Hostos were nothing new.

Congressman Jose Serrano said that keeping the college alive was the first big battle he fought when he was elected an assemblyman in 1974. “And here I am, still talking about it,” he said.

Bronx Assemblyman Roberto Ramirez, a Hostos graduate himself, said, “You tell them that you are not afraid of tests, that you are not afraid of standards — just double standards.”

Then, in an apparent reference to Herman Badillo, the university trustee and former Bronx borough president and Congressman who has become a leading critic of Hostos, Mr. Ramirez said: “And I’ll tell him not to forget where he came from. I’ll tell him not to forget that as we study English, we must honor our Spanish, too.”

Long Island University

In her address as the class valedictorian yesterday, Liesel Schumacher, 49, described her struggle to reach an educational goal she had let pass her by in younger years.

Miss Schumacher delayed her college education for 20 years, first marrying, getting a job, and raising five children before returning to school full-time.

“You and I were not students of privilege, but we are privileged students,” she said. “We come from working-class homes. Some have come from faraway places and began new lives here.”

She said many others like herself in school were also trying to reclaim a chance “we let slip by at an earlier age.”

A total of 1,546 graduate and undergraduate students received degrees at the ceremony at the school’s Brooklyn campus, while honorary doctorates were given to a distinguished group, including the feminist Bella Abzug and the musician Wynton Marsalis.

The chief commencement speaker, Robert P. Moses, recounted his role in the civil rights movement in the 1960’s and recalled its violence.

“They were my teachers and I was their disciple,” he said. “They showed me how powerful it is to surrender your life to this freedom struggle.”

Aloysius Barkley, 76, was the oldest graduate. “This is a journey that has lasted over 50 years,” he said in an interview. “There have been some pitfalls but there’s also been some joy. I was determined to get this. I wanted it so badly.”

Those receiving honorary degrees, in addition to Mr. Moses, included the African American studies scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. and the former Brooklyn Dodgers pitcher Ralph Branca.

Polytechnic University

It took Edward Coppola 56 years to finish the work for the diploma he received yesterday from Polytechnic University. Mr. Coppola completed more than three years when he left to join the Navy as a fighter pilot in 1941. After the war came a career as a supervising engineer, and finally he returned to Polytechnic, in Brooklyn, to get a bachelor’s degree in civil engineering.

He was among 1,019 graduates at Avery Fisher Hall receiving a degree in engineering and science.

Robert Catell, the chairman and chief executive of Brooklyn Union Gas, spoke to the graduates of the connection between Polytechnic and his company.

“Speaking for myself, I would paraphrase the popular philosopher Robert Fulghum,” he said. “Most of what I need to know in life, I learned in engineering school. I set out as a young man to be the best engineer that I could be.”

In addition to Mr. Catell, recipients of honorary degrees included Dr. Gian Carlo Rota, professor of mathematics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Dr. Sogo Okmaura, the president of Tokyo Denki University.



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