The Children of the People: Writings by and about CUNY students on race and social justice

By and

Friday, March 3, 2023 | 6pm to 7:30pm

25 West 43rd Street, 10th Floor, Room 1000
between 5th & 6th Avenues, Manhattan

In 1849, Horace Webster, the first president of the Free Academy said of the radical social experiment that would eventually become the City University of New York: “The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few, but by the privileged many.” More than 170 years later, The Children of the People, offers the perspective of past and present CUNY students–some, now faculty–on the success of this experiment.

Co-editor Rose Kim will discuss the origins of the book and read from her chapter, “Twenty Years at CUNY: A Political Coming-of-Age.” Prof. Kim will be joined by contributor Linda Luu who will read from their chapter, “Resistance Everywhere We Went: The Fight for Asian American Studies at CUNY.”

The Children of the People emerged from Autoethnographies of CUNY, a public humanities project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Seminar on Public Engagement and Collaborative Research at the Center for the Humanities at The Graduate Center; the seminar supports the institutionalization of public humanities practices and pedagogy at the City University New York and across New York City through community partnerships, public research projects, policy development, curriculum enhancement, and expansive creative, cultural, and collaborative works with a social justice thrust.

Purchase Book: https://www.diopress.com/the-children-of-the-people

Author Bio

Rose M. Kim is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY. She received her Ph.D. in sociology from The Graduate Center and her B.A. in Art and Design from The University of Chicago. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She co-edited Women on the Role of Public Higher Education: Personal Reflections from CUNY’s Graduate Center (2015) and Struggle for Ethnic Identity: Narratives by Asian American Professionals (1999). She has published in various journals, including Amerasia, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Qualitative Inquiry and Socialism and Democracy. Prior to graduate school she worked as a reporter at New York Newsday and the Los Angeles Times. She was part of a team of journalists and photographers that won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the 1992 L.A. riots/insurrection/saigu, an event she re-examines in her scholarly work. Her research areas include racialization, mass media discourse and public higher education.


Linda Luu is a Ph.D. student in American Studies at New York University and a graduate of Hunter College/CUNY. Luu organized with the Coalition for the Revitalization of Asian American Studies at Hunter (CRAASH) and is the curator of a CUNY digital history archive collection on the fight for Asian American studies at Hunter College.