BTtoP Case Study: Kingsborough Community College

The Brooklyn Public Scholars (BPS) Project

In 2012, Hurricane Sandy hit New York City, and the Kingsborough Community College campus, located in Brooklyn, New York, was dramatically impacted, disrupting classes and the lives of students, faculty, staff, and members of the surrounding community. The campus at once became a disaster area but also a sanctuary for nearby residents in trouble. Some students and faculty disappeared, and others became homeless. As the college community literally picked up the pieces from this disaster, administrators and faculty knew they were forever changed and thought differently about their teaching and their students. “Who really are the students we teach, and what resiliency enabled them to carry on?” they asked themselves. “How can we teach differently to tap the strengths of our students and the community around us?”

Centering on the experiences of students who not only survived Sandy, but also on their everyday lives in times of deepening structural disparities, the BPS Project places emphasis upon recognizing and valuing the knowledge that working class, immigrant, students of color bring with them to college, as a starting point for understanding the ways that they are already highly engaged in civic life.

Caitlin Cahill and Michelle Fine, co-PIs of the BPS, both at the Public Science Project, Graduate Center, CUNY, developed a proposal in consultation with faculty and administrators at Kingsborough Community College. Cahill’s unique position as a faculty member at both institutions supported the partnership. Associate Provost Reza Fakhari was a key member facilitating the project for KCC.

Cahill has a background in community development and urban studies and teaches urban geography and politics. She is a founding member of the Public Science Project at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in Manhattan, which encourages participatory action projects and research. In 2011, she helped launch the Charles and Stella Guttman Community College in Manhattan. That experience convinced her that faculty development could be used to strengthen community colleges. When she learned about the Bringing Theory to Practice (BTtoP) demonstration site grants, she realized Kingsborough would be a good place to launch a new project to rejuvenate the faculty. The CUNY Graduate Center (with the assistance of Distinguished Professor Michelle Fine) and Kingsborough Community College formed a partnership and with BTtoP funding created the Brooklyn Public Scholars Project.

A Call for Civic Engagement

Kingsborough Community College is located on a 71-acre campus that rests on a peninsula at the southern tip of Brooklyn, a spit of land that juts into the water and is surrounded by Sheepshead Bay, Jamaica Bay, and the Atlantic Ocean. The community college was founded in 1963 for the residents in the area. It offers credit classes for approximately 18,000 students, non-credit courses in the liberal arts, and career education for students with high school diplomas or GEDs. Fifty-eight percent of the students enroll full-time and pay $1,575 in tuition. Forty-two percent of students are part-time; per credit tuition ranges from $120 to $250. Seventy-five percent of students receive financial aid.

The student population represents 140 different countries and speaks 70 languages. Fifty-six percent of the students are female, 87 percent are 29 years old or younger, 27 percent are younger than twenty, and 48 percent are U.S. born. Matthew Goldstein, former chancellor of CUNY, once pr