Talk:Hostos Community College

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Higher education

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First Bilingual University??[edit]

The article makes a dubious assertion that it is the first bilingual university in the U.S. This very, very difficult to believe. There is NO citation for this dubious claim. The university was only created in 1970. There were hundreds and hundreds of universities in existence long before 1970. For example, Haskell Indian Nations University is a university that serves American Indian students and it was created in the 1800's. There are other universities of Haskell's nature. Unless someone provides some support for this dubious claim about Hostos then I will remove the dubious claim.--Getaway 14:01, 9 October 2006 (UTC)[reply]

First off, Hostos is not a university, but a community college. I have seen the claim you criticized elsewhere, but that of course does not mean that it is true. On the other hand, nothing at Haskell's wiki page or at its own Web page indicates that it is a "bilingual" school. Since students from dozens of different American Indian tribes attend Haskell, that would militate against it using any specific Indian language.

Hostos was founded only two years after the passing of the Bilingual Education Act, and the Act and Hostos were both sponsored by Bronx Cong. Herman Badillo. In practice, "bilingual" means -- at Hostos, where I worked, as well as among the Hispanic nationalists who dominate the "bilingual" movement -- the refusal to use or teach English. In other words, bilingual means variously, "Spanish," monolingual," and "anti-English."

The politics of so-called bilingualism aside, you are probably right to remove the qualifier "first" from the article, until it can be determined with some reliability, which bilingual college really came first.

70.23.199.239 22:00, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

FURTHER CLARIFICATION: I think this assertion can be clarified by reading the college's mission statement. The college does not say that it is a bilingual institution, but does affirm that its mission is to educate "students from diverse ethnic, racial, cultural and linguistic backgrounds." The statement goes further to say that, "An integral part of fulfilling its mission is to provide transitional language instruction for all English-as-a-Second-Language learners along with Spanish/English bilingual education offerings to foster a multicultural environment for all students (http://www.hostos.cuny.edu/about/mission.html)." It makes no assertion that it is the first college to do so, therefore I agree that the statement should be clarified by citing its mission statement. luciolefirefly 21:16, 10 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Blatant Dishonesty[edit]

The above issue is, however, the least of the problems with this article. The common strategy used in wiki sophistry is to say that such an article “lacks an NPOV.” I eschew that strategy, because it usually means simply that the critic crying, "POV!" seeks to impose his or her own POV. The problem with this article is its blatant dishonesty. Consider the following issues:

1. CUNY did not seek to retroactively impose a "new" graduation requirement on Hostos students. Rather, it was Hostos that secretly introduced a new requirement that violated not only CUNY-wide standards, but Hostos' own published graduation requirements (which said that it required that all students pass the CUNY WAT, in order to graduate);

2. Hostos had a tradition of institutionalized test fraud on lower-level English tests, a tradition which has never been publicly reformed;

3. At the time, Hostos, a two-year school, had a two-year graduation rate of less than one-half of one percent (four out of 1,000 students); and

4. The Daily News did not "target" Hostos. In fact, it ignored many Hostos abuses uncovered elsewhere. The editor is angry that the Daily News refused to lie on behalf of Hostos officials. (Although it did uncritically report the claim by Hostos officials that students found with copies of an English final exam had stolen it, rather than that their teachers had given it to them.) For instance, the Daily News did not report on Hostos' tradition of institutionalized test fraud on lower-level English tests, or its violation of its own published standards.

Still, what the News did report made Hostos students look unwittingly laughable. Consider the student who insisted that (she?) knew English, just not how to write or speak it, or the students who had flunked the English examination, but who insisted to Daily News reporters that they had gotten “A’s” and “B’s” for all of their class work.

I’m not going to make any edits, until I find the old articles on Hostos.

70.23.199.239 22:35, 18 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A Marginal Place of No Legitimate Academic Consequence[edit]

Hostos has no impact on anything. All of it revenue comes from the Federal and State government in the form of aid in tuition. It is a government make-work project in theform of a college, etc. Since it is serves the Spanish speaking population, how is it helping people remain sub-class people who have earned 12 credits in Puerto Rican Culture? Sorry, it should not even be. 67.87.92.56 04:23, 15 June 2007 (UTC)[reply]