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Cora Maloney College weathers change
By KEVIN FRYLING
Reporter Staff Writer
Cora P. Maloney College (CPMC), a unique unit at UB that provides residential and academic support and programs to students underrepresented in higher education, marked a major milestone with the celebration of its 30th anniversary recently.
The development and achievements of CPMC, which received its official charter in 1976, are all the more impressive in light of the frequently forgotten fact that the college is the sole survivor of an entire system of experimental colleges at UB that trace their roots back to the late 1960s.
"We have survived," says John Staley, assistant vice provost for faculty affairs and headmaster of CPMC from 1984-99, "because we did a very interesting job of increasing the graduation rates of undergraduate minority students, women and disadvantaged students."
The numerous core services CPMC provides also have been an important key to survival, says Letitia Thomas, director of CPMC.
"There's always been a place for the sort of things that we're doing," she says. "We provide students services, scholarships and advisement, as well as a small academic division."
The earliest incarnation of CPMC was known as "College E" and came almost 10 years before the official charter in 1976, says Staley. College E was one of the first of many experimental colleges that appeared at UB after the inauguration of President Martin M. Meyerson in 1966.
The colleges, which did not grant academic degrees, sought to provide integrated "living-and-learning environments" in which students and faculty lived together and focused on a specific theme. A number of colleges chose to lose their original letter designations in favor of names to reflect their unique characteristics. College E considered "Cassirer College" in honor of the philosopher Ernst Cassirer, as well as "College of the Poor" in recognition of its interest in public service in disadvantaged neighborhoods, says Staley.
The colleges, several of which were little more than a flash in the pan, were founded at a rapid pace in the late '60s and early '70s. Most moved into storefronts on Main Street or residences on Winspear Avenue near the South Campus—the colleges relocated to the Ellicott Complex after the construction of the North Campus—and at the time, Staley says, "they really became quite divergent from what the institution wanted to do, in some cases." Subjects studied in College F—later renamed Leo Tolstoy College—were seen as controversial. Tensions were reported over policies in the Women's Studies College, which barred men from certain classes and governance activities. College A came under the greatest fire from the public in 1970 after a series of editorials in the Buffalo Courier-Express newspaper implicated its students in the unrest on South Campus, which prompted petitioners to march before the college's storefront on Main Street.
In the mid-1970s, under the leadership of President Robert L. Ketter, the colleges were subjected to a chartering process to formalize their purposes, goals and philosophies. College E—which documents from the time show taught courses on "media studies, alternative symbolic forms, parapsychological phenomena and mystical experiences and minority interests"—abandoned the most unconventional topics to focus on public engagement and academic achievement of underrepresented minorities. The college also settled upon a name in honor of Cora P. Maloney, the first African-American woman on the Buffalo Common Council.
The choice of name reflected a hope to "bring the community to campus and teach some courses you couldn't find in other places," says Thomas. "It was of the time," she notes, "when a lot of civil-rights changes were coming to the fore and black studies programs were starting to take hold."
In the years after the chartering process, Staley says, the volunteer activities that students in CPMC always had performed in Buffalo neighborhoods and agencies formed the basis of the college's current Public Service Internship Program (PSIP). Classes on practical subjects, such as the postgraduation job hunt, and services, such as advisement and tutors, also were created. These additions, Thomas notes, remain popular with students involved in CPMC today.
About the same time these changes were implemented in CPMC, however, the colleges struggled beneath annual budget cuts, beginning in 1976. "De-evolution" of the system was official by 1983, says Staley. Many courses from the colleges were absorbed into the curriculums of the mainstream academic departments. Colleges that survival into the late '80s—such as the Black Mountain Program (formerly College B), Clifford Furnas Center for Leadership (formerly College D) and Rachel Carson College—required academic sponsorship and turned into residential programs in the Ellicott Complex. But none besides CPMC exist today.
"Being able to adapt and respond to the various changes that come...and still innovate and create," Thomas says, "is another reason we have survived."
As decline continued in the other colleges, officials in CPMC secured funding for two grant-sponsored scholarship programs, says Staley: the Minority Academic Achievement Program (MAAP), which benefits about 160 UB students in underrepresented minorities, and the Collegiate Science and Technology Entry Program (CSTEP), which benefits more than 200 interested in scientific, technical and health-related licensed professions. The SUNY Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation (LSAMP), a summer internship program for students interested in science, technology, engineering and math, joined the programs available through CPMC at a later date.
In 2005-06, Thomas notes, MAAP was renamed the Daniel Acker Scholars Program to honor a former CPMC instructor and president of the Buffalo Chapter of the NAACP—as well as herald the wider definition of underrepresented minorities the college will start to embrace in 2007-08.
"Traditionally," she says, "[underrepresented minorities] were African-American, Native and Latino students, but the program this year is going to be opened up to students that are otherwise underrepresented," such as students from disadvantaged economic backgrounds. The academic component, she continues, also has started offering courses on such subjects as Islam and Muslim culture.
In a tradition reminiscent of the residential programs that were the last to remain of the colleges, Thomas notes a number of Daniel Acker Scholars live together in the Governors Complex through a preferred housing option available to interested students.
"We wanted our program housed over there because we wanted a sense of community," she says. "It's a living-learning community, which I think universities are re-discovering.
"It's something we've been doing a long time," she adds.