A Life in Motion

14. Moving into CUNY

— 370 — I remember how it felt to come so close to losing the press, not my life, but the press. Journal entry, August 31, 1986 When Vice Chancellor Marguerite Ross-Barnett described the Feminist Press as a perfect “match” for CUNY, she was thinking that our multicultural books were particularly appropriate for CUNY’s multicultural students, more than 50 percent of whom were women,a large proportion of them working class and the first in their families to attend college. If her invitation provoked debate about us inside CUNY, we heard nothing of it.Aspects of the move seemed magical, for the offer would allow us to move our offices but continue as board and staff. The move to CUNY in 1985, our fifteenth year, changed a great deal. We lost staff, simplicity, and solitude, but gained visibility and many new resources as we linked our fortunes to CUNY’s. Their name appeared henceforth on all our publications, our publicity, even our letterhead. And I had to change as well. CUNY saw me as “the” director, and soon I was, even if I continued for a time to refuse the title of “publisher.” With the move also came a financial crisis that could have closed us down or turned us into a CUNY dependent. At first, hearing of our move, and understanding what even a monthlong shutdown of a fragile nonprofit would mean, the AT&T Foundation,the Samuel Rubin Foundation,and the United 14 Moving into CUNY — 371 — Church Board for Homeland Ministries offered small grants to help us through the transition. Alberta Arthur at the Rockefeller Foundation for the first time expressed her interest in supporting us as a useful variety of university press that published to broaden the curriculum. These grants helped ease months in which we were packing up and waiting to move, without books moving out or cash coming in. But they were only slender Band-Aids. Had I been a CUNY“insider” or had I known someone knowledgeable and powerful within the system, perhaps the Feminist Press and I could have moved easily through CUNY’s shoals to an appropriate moor. Perhaps we would have been saved more than a year of preternaturally stormy weather. Understandably, but not wisely, I had depended on Vice Chancellor Ross-Barnett or members of her office to provide both space for the press and a professorial appointment for me, preferably in the same building. But almost as soon as our agreement had been confirmed, we were told that we had to do business directly with the chancellor’s office, since he and I would be signing our agreement. And within eleven months of our formally signing our CUNY agreement, the chancellor invited me to a farewell party for the vice chancellor, who was leaving for a position in Houston, Texas. Chancellor Joe Murphy was a lanky, handsome man, affable, charming, and agreeable. He told me that he had gained extra “points” with his Jewish mother for bringing the Feminist Press to CUNY. Murphy and I began to negotiate about where the press would settle within the CUNY system. When I suggested that we would like academic space so that we might organize an internship program for CUNY students, he thought that was a wonderful idea. As for the idea of a CUNY press, he said we’d talk about that in time. Only years later did I understand that what happened to us had happened many times. The chancellor, who liked to say“yes” to everyone, could, on occasion, seemingly support two requests that were mutually exclusive. For example, he thought we could use—from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.—the same relatively small area he had also offered to a new working-class evening program. When I said politely that that would be impossible, given the way we worked, — 372 — the chancellor sent me to Dave Fields, a staff attorney who often solved such dilemmas. While Dave was faultlessly affable, he was also businesslike. Through his efforts, Maxine and I saw several different spaces. One of them, an empty floor in a building also used by the Borough of Manhattan Community College, might have been ideal, but the necessary renovations proved too expensive. Nowhere was there academic space in an undergraduate institution. When we proposed delaying our move, we ran into Old Westbury’s plans for turning our house into a child-care center with...