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Vietnam Era Ends at the City University of NYBy June Svetlovsky and Ben ChittyTwenty-two years ago, the last of over two and a half million American men and women sent to war in Vietnam came back to the world. Used by an imperial government, abused by a vindictive Pentagon, neglected by a corrupt and demoralized Veterans Administration, shunned by self-styled patriots among our fellow countrymen, we picked up our lives and carried on. Or at least tried. For a lot of us, that meant school. For most of us, trying to make do on the G.I. Bill, the schools were public. The largest single undergraduate institution in the country - then and now - was the City University of New York, with its 18 colleges scattered across the five boroughs. Like everywhere else, veterans' services were in a shambles. Vets at each college began organizing to demand improvement and uniformity in their services - Brooklyn College vets organized in 1970. Over the next two years, a university-wide Veterans Action Coalition developed: its main demand was the establishment of a central office, to elevate veterans' affairs to a central policy level, and to promote fairness and equality in treatment and access to services. CUNY Chancellor Robert Kibbe - himself a WW2 vet with a metal plate in his skull - finally saw the wisdom of the proposal, and authorized a central Office of Veterans Affairs, to coordinate the delivery of federal, state and city services to veterans enrolled as students, to recruit more veterans into the University, and to provide a CUNY presence in veterans' activities and campaigns. The Office opened in 1973. Over 17,000 veterans enrolled at CUNY that year. OVA's first director soon moved on; its second was Mike Gold, acting as director from the summer of 1974, and permanently appointed in February 1975. Drafted out of Brooklyn College in December 1965, Gold had served in the Army as an artillery officer until his discharge in March 1969. He had returned to Brooklyn College, where he became active in the college's veterans' group and in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (then the only national organization of Vietnam veterans). Taking over OVA, training campus counselors, coordinating with veterans' service agencies and organizations, Gold brought CUNY into the struggles to improve and extend the G.I. Bill; win amnesty and discharge upgrades; test, treat and compensate Agent Orange vets and their survivors; enforce and expand veterans' preference in job training programs and employment; treat post-traumatic stress disorder; and rehabilitate incarcerated vets. Meanwhile he recruited vets to enroll at CUNY, and counseled thousands over the years, helping them negotiate the labyrinthine application and certification procedures constructed by federal, state and city bureaucracies. Gold's years of service and hard-won expertise earned him the respect of veterans' organizations across the entire political spectrum, and the cooperation of veterans' service agencies at every level of government. He needed both: the University ran the Office on a shoestring - its total budget last fiscal year was less than $70,000, and the Office had no full-time permanent support staff, no online connection to the VA (or anywhere else), not even a word processor or microcomputer. Though the number of veteran students had declined over the years, in the last school year alone well over 3,000 vets enrolled at the University, drawing an estimated $9.9 million in benefits, and providing the CUNY colleges with about $40,000 in VA processing fees. Aside from his counseling and outreach work, Gold was busy planning how to cope with the 20,000 new veterans projected to be discharged to New York City by the end of 1997. Already a third of the men homeless on the City's streets were vets. In November 1994, promising to cut taxes and execute criminals, Republican George Pataki won the governor's race in New York. In late January 1995, he issued the "Executive Budget," his proposals for state taxing and spending in the next fiscal year. It included a 25% cut in funding for the City University (along with a tuition increase). Through a quirk in New York's civil service regulations, Gold was one of some forty people who could be dismissed from the University's central administration without cause, and at the end of February he was notified that after nineteen years in his position and more than twenty years service overall, he would not be reappointed July 1st. Scores of veterans' organizations and service agencies sent letters to University Chancellor Anne Reynolds, protesting Gold's dismissal and the consequent closure of the Office of Veterans Affairs, where he was the only permanent full-time staff person. The Chancellor handed off the issue to Elsa Nunez-Wormack, Vice-Chancellor for Student Services, who administered the division which included OVA. Vice-Chancellor Nunez replied to all queries with a form letter which promised that veterans would continue to be counseled at CUNY. Her reply betrayed an almost complete ignorance of the scope of work of the Office of Veterans Affairs. (Behind the lines: It is not clear just when Vice-Chancellor Nunez realized that firing Gold meant closing the Office. It is clear that she believed that counseling veterans consisted only of certifying enrollment to the Veterans Administration. Most of OVA's counseling activity consisted of establishing and appealing eligibility, and referrals to emergency housing, employment, and financial aid assistance. The closure of the Office has never been officially announced by the University, nor has there ever been a review of the Office's mission or of Gold's performance.) So an ad hoc group of veterans from Vietnam Veterans of America, Black Veterans for Social Justice, and Vietnam Veterans Against the War approached the University's Board of Trustees. Four vets - three from VVAW - waited one June afternoon and evening until after midnight to testify at an open hearing. Some trustees were sympathetic, and agreed to raise the issue at the next Board meeting. By then the state legislature had restored more than half the governor's cuts to the City University. When the Board of Trustees met June 26th to ratify a list of proposals to cut programs and reduce expenditures, the Chancellor graciously conceded that the University should and would maintain a central veterans' counseling service. Veterans' counseling, in fact, was pretty much her only concession to widespread and militant student and faculty protest, and she cited it to prove that the University administration had indeed listened to the criticism. (Behind the lines: Privately, several people suggested that the issue was not veterans' counseling or even cutting costs - but Mike Gold himself. Some CUNY administrators seemed to think he spent too much time on homeless veterans' issues. The charge had some truth to it. Gold had been elected chair of the Joint Veterans Civic Council's Stand Down committee, formed to stage the City's first Stand Down on Veterans Day 1994. He saw his election as recognition of his role in the veterans' community. Moreover, he saw education and training as key components in helping homeless vets help themselves. He cleared his participation with his own supervisor, and went to work: over 800 homeless vets were processed during the Stand Down. Gold was proud of the event: he even showed Vice-Chancellor Nunez around the Stand Down on Veterans Day.) Four days later, Vice-Chancellor Nunez closed the Office. Exactly one month later, she met with a committee of veterans representing the three veterans' organizations plus the Veterans Administration and the New York State Division of Veterans Affairs. She sketched a proposal that would reassign veterans' counseling to a regular admissions counselor, appoint an untrained graduate student as a part-time temporary veterans' benefits counselor, and expand in-service training for the staff assigned part-time responsibility for veterans' enrollment certification at the colleges. She asked the vets to endorse her plan. They argued with her for more than two hours, urging that the effective coordination of the delivery of services to veterans required the assignment of primary full-time responsibility to a single individual - preferably a veteran - on a permanent (not temporary) basis. They added that much of this person's time would necessarily be spent in recruitment and outreach to agencies and organizations. The discussion was not consistently polite: in the end the Vice-Chancellor conceded all but the permanent assignment, offering a temporary full-time position, and asked the vets again to endorse her plan, the best - she said - her superiors would let her do. The vets unanimously declined. On her part, the Vice-Chancellor declined to set up a meeting with her superiors, to let them make the case she had been unable to make. She did promise to convene a follow-up meeting in three weeks. (Behind the lines: Throughout this time, Vice-Chancellor Nunez has described herself as Gold's most ardent supporter. Other people in the administration have suggested that Gold's dismissal and the closing of the Office have all along been her decisions. This may seem a little unlikely: her father retired from the Navy and her brother served in Vietnam. At the meeting she posed as an unhappy and sympathetic low-level administrator; in fact she reports only to the Deputy Chancellor and the Chancellor, and occupies the third highest level in CUNY's billion-dollar bureaucracy. She never did schedule that follow-up meeting.) The fall semester starts at the City University just before Labor Day. There is no longer any counseling for veterans enrolled as students. There is no longer any coordination of enrollment certification, or any training; for some colleges no one has even been assigned the responsibility. There is no longer any central resource for veterans. The Office is closed, the copy machine removed, the telephones dead. The University denies that the Office is "closed." Speaking for the University, Vice-Chancellor Jay Hershenson describes the closure as the "retrenchment of the Veterans Affairs budget," an "unfortunate" situation "imposed" on the University despite its "deep and abiding interest in veterans' affairs." He promises that "from adversity we want to seize opportunity" to provide veterans counseling in a "creative" way, using "alternative sources" of funding and volunteers, with "better coordination of veterans' support on the campuses." How soon? "Early fall." How can better coordination be accomplished without any coordinator? "No comment." (Behind the lines: The City University may not see homeless veterans as potential students. Many of the budget cuts directed at the University and adopted by the Chancellor have been directed at "marginal" and "non-traditional" students - programs for people lacking some college-level skills, especially native-born fluency in English, programs for working students, programs for trade-unionists. Everyone knows the code words with which poor and working people, especially people of color, can be written out of the social contract. In New York City, a majority-minority metropolis, we have heard them all - welfare pathologies, the shiftless and criminal underclass, illegals, whatever. The CUNY cuts are just one aspect of a nation-wide game. But veterans are harder to write off, even when New York City's new veterans are mostly black and Latin. No one at CUNY wants to stand up and say that veterans are no longer welcome at the University, or that if a veteran needs help, he or she will just have to find it someplace else. Vice-Chancellors Nunez and Hershenson may know jackshit about counseling veterans, but they do know talk is cheap, and that pious promises can deflect criticism and confuse the issue, until the veterans and their supporters just go away.) So it looks like it's finally the end of the Vietnam Era at the City University of New York. Or, you might say, "this is where we came in..." (Behind the lines: Working out some karmic catastrophe, in March Mike Gold was diagnosed and hospitalized with a leaking valve in his heart. In May - still in the hospital - he was presented with the 1995 Angel Almadina Award for Service to Veterans, for "outstanding work in healing the wounds of war," by the 11th Annual PTSD "Conference on the Still Hidden Client" Committee. He finally underwent cardiac surgery in July, and is now recuperating at home.) Letters of protest may be directed to:
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