Higher Education from Above and Below: The Case of Hostos Community College in New York City

This article traces the establishment and maintenance of Hostos Community College, located in the Borough of the Bronx in New York City, in connection with grassroots claims by Puerto Ricans and other minority groups during the '60s and '70s. This connection is unusual in the history of institutions of higher education which tend to be top down initiatives. The establishment of Hostos took place in close proximity to the adoption and initiation of a policy of open admissions by the City University of New York (CUNY). Afterwards, the struggle to stop the closing of the college, per a decision taken in 1976, was similar to the struggle to establish the college. The article concludes that initiatives and efforts "from the top" combined with indirect, direct, and mediated pressures from students, faculty, activists, and residents "from below" to get the college established and to preserve it, and it suggests that to be successful social mobilization depends in great part on being channeled through power as opposed to from the margins.