About This Case Study

In April 1969, Black and Puerto Rican students occupied the campus of City College — a college over ninety percent white, in the heart of Harlem — renamed it the University of Harlem, and issued Five Demands. The strike helped force Open Admissions and remade the City University of New York into one of the most consequential experiments in democratic higher education. What makes the case unusual for this unit is not the movement but the memory: the takeover is documented in the movement's own words — the Five Demands flyer, Black and Puerto Rican Student Community press releases, strike photographs — and that record is now kept, exhibited, and taught by the university the takeover remade. The CUNY Digital History Archive holds the documents; a fiftieth-anniversary digital exhibit tells the story; a teaching project at Baruch builds assignments around it; a documentary gathers the participants' own telling.

Two of the unit's ideas organize the work. The first is self-documentation: movements make records as they move — demands, press releases, photographs — and those documents were instruments before they were sources, written to do something in 1969 before they were kept to say something now. The second is institutional memory: archives have owners, and when the keeper of a movement's record is the institution the movement confronted, the keeping itself needs reading. The analytical move is to read both layers as instruments: first what each document was made to do — demand, announce, record — and then what the archive that holds them does now: who assembled it, for whom, and what it includes, omits, and owes. You will reconstruct the demands from the flyer, build the occupation's timeline, trace Open Admissions to its rollback, and end on the question the unit is built for — asked from inside the institution the movement made.

Before You Begin

Have ready:

• The Five Demands in the CUNY Digital History Archive — the entry item, with related records (press releases, photographs) reachable from it and by browsing the archive. View the item.
• The Five Demands digital exhibit — the fiftieth-anniversary telling of the takeover, built at the CUNY Graduate Center. Explore the exhibit.
• The CUNY 1969 Project (Baruch College) — the teaching-materials hub assembled around the takeover's archive. Visit the project site.
• A note-taking surface — paper, a document, or a shared doc if you are working in a group.

A note on the film: The Five Demands, directed by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss (2023), gathers participants' interviews half a century on and makes a strong companion to this exercise. Watch the film (PBS). Streaming links can move or expire; if the link is unavailable, the film can be located by title through libraries and streaming services. The exercise does not require it.

Before you begin, write down, in a sentence or two each:

• What do you know about how your own college or university came to be what it is — and where does that knowledge come from: a tour, a website, a family story, a plaque?
• Can an institution keep an honest archive of a movement against itself? What would you look for to decide?

The Exercise

Phase 1: The Demands (10–12 minutes)

Start with the document itself. From the archive, read the Five Demands flyer and list all five demands in your notes, in the flyer's own words. Then establish the basics: who issued them — note the name the students organized under — to whom they are addressed, and what kind of document this is: petition, ultimatum, program? What does the language tell you about how the authors saw the university, and themselves? Resist outcomes for now; the flyer doesn't know them yet.

For groups: Read the flyer aloud once; each member takes one or two demands and restates exactly what is being demanded, and of whom.

Phase 2: The Occupation (12–15 minutes)

From the exhibit, the photographs, and the press releases, build a dated timeline in three entries:

1. The takeover. When the occupation began, what the students did with the campus — including the renaming to "University of Harlem" — and how long it held. What do the photographs show that the documents don't?
2. The response. How the administration, the city, and the press answered — and where the movement's own voice, in its press releases, answers back. Note one place the movement's account and the coverage diverge.
3. The settlement. How the occupation ended and what followed: track the path from the demands to Open Admissions, noting which demands map onto the policy and which don't.

Note where the exhibit's telling and the documents leave gaps or disagree — the gaps are part of what you are reading.

For groups: Each member takes one entry and briefs the others; assemble one shared timeline.

Phase 3: The Afterlife (12–15 minutes)

The demands had careers after 1969. Trace them:

• Open Admissions remade CUNY — and was later rolled back, ending at the senior colleges in 1999. From the exhibit and project materials, mark the arc in three dated points: the policy at its height, the turn against it, and what remains today.
• Pick one demand from your Phase 1 list and assess its afterlife on a campus you know: achievement, erosion, or unfinished business. Be specific — a program, an office, a number you would want, a silence.
• The participants have spent the anniversary years telling this story — in the exhibit, in interviews, on film. What does the tellers' memory add that the 1969 documents alone don't hold? (If you watched the film: name one moment where a participant's telling did work no document could.)

For groups: Each member assesses a different demand's afterlife; compare which demands aged best, and why.

Phase 4: The Archive's Keeper (8–10 minutes)

Close on the record itself:

• This movement's archive is kept, exhibited, and taught by the university the movement confronted and remade. Inventory the keeping: who made each of your three sources — the archive, the exhibit, the teaching hub — and what does each want from you as its reader?
• The strain test. What does the university's own archive include, omit, and owe? Name one thing you expected to find and didn't, and consider why. Can an institution keep an honest archive of a movement against itself — and what would "owing" mean here: acknowledgment, access, policy?
• You are studying this inside CUNY's own curriculum — this case study is itself part of the university's memory-keeping. Does that strengthen the record or curate it? Say how you would tell the difference.

For groups: Run the strain test as a structured split — half argues the archive honors the movement, half that it domesticates it — and record where the group lands.

Closing Reflection

In two or three sentences, complete this thought:

The demand that most stays with me is __________. Reading the movement through its own archive changed __________. The hardest thing to hold steady, after this exercise, is __________.

Write the most specific version you can; the value is in naming exactly what was demanded, exactly what the archive shows became of it, and exactly where the university's memory of itself needs watching.

A Note on Modes

Solo mode. Work the phases in order. The two artifacts to keep are your Phase 1 demands list and your Phase 3 afterlife assessment — together they are a record of what was demanded and what a half-century did with it.

Group mode (3–6 people). Designate a timekeeper. Phases 1 and 2 run as shared reading and split briefings; Phases 3 and 4 are collaborative, with the strain test as a structured split. The closing reflection works well as individual writing after the session ends.

After the Case Study

• The scholarly account of the win and the rollback: Okechukwu, Amaka. To Fulfill These Rights: Political Struggle Over Affirmative Action and Open Admissions. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Publisher page. The policy world the flyers made and lost, traced through four decades; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The same city, the same year, beyond the campus: Fernández, Johanna. The Young Lords: A Radical History. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Publisher page. The struggle the Five Demands named, carried into East Harlem and the South Bronx; it appears in the unit's Key Scholarship.
• The archive to keep exploring — or join: the CUNY Digital History Archive. Explore the archive. Participatory by design, built on contributions from CUNY's own students, faculty, and staff; it appears in the unit's Open Educational Resources.