Badillo Appointed to Chair CUNY's Board
NEW YORK — Herman Badillo, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's top education adviser, has been named the next chairman of the board of the City University of New York, the nation's largest urban university system. Gov. George Pataki appointed him late last month.
"Herman Badillo and the governor share a commitment to higher standards and to insuring that a CUNY diploma is respected and sought after by graduates and employers alike," says Michael McKeon, a spokesman for Pataki. "The governor is confident that Herman Badillo will challenge the defenders of the status quo to make the kind of changes necessary to improve CUNY."
Badillo, a native of Puerto Rico who was a Democratic congressman and aide to Mayor Edward Koch before he changed parties to become a Republican, is no stranger to CUNY. As one of its graduates, he led a charge last year to scale back the university's remedial education programs and remove low-performing students from its 11 senior colleges (see Black Issues, June 11, 1998). He has been vice chairman of the CUNY board of trustees since 1997.
"College should be for college work," Badillo told the Daily News. "We have to get back to having ... high standards."
 "There is no one who understands the need for higher standards and reforming the American educational system better than Herman Badillo," Giuliani says. "In fact, he was one of the first people to alert the public to the dangers of social promotion."
Badillo fills the post vacated by Anne Paolucci, who resigned as chairwoman of CUNY's board last week. He is expected to carry out the recommendations of a Giuliani-assembled taskforce's report on CUNY that was released earlier this month. That report recommends that CUNY's senior colleges be divided into three groups with progressively tougher admissions requirements, and that it reshape its open admissions policy in favor of requiring tests like the SAT.
But City Councilman Guillermo Linares warns that if the report's recommendations are implemented, they "will guarantee a permanent underclass in the city."