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May 10, 2006
President Raab,
We, the undersigned members of the Hunter community, are deeply concerned with the actions recently taken by the Hunter College High School administration regarding the Annals yearbook publication. The school has taken unprecedented steps to subvert the editorial process at Annals, and has sought to curtail the leadership roles of student editors. The administration’s lack of effective communication with student officials and its disregard for Hunter’s longstanding tradition of independent publications — which are essential to the school’s unique learning environment — compelled Annals editors to seek out help. Editors contacted and received support from the Student Press Law Center and the New York Civil Liberties Union, thus bringing the issue onto the front pages of The New York Sun under the headline “Hunter Students Threaten a Lawsuit Over Yearbook.”
This controversy should never have escalated enough to sully Hunter’s good name in the New York City press, but the fact that it has requires immediate attention and community dialogue. The administration’s recent actions threaten all students’ extracurricular privileges, and are indicative of a more general erosion of essential student freedoms at Hunter over the past few years. That restrictive trend is alarming, and helps explain why the Annals situation has fueled the passions of its current students and is helping mobilize its faithful alumni.
The current Annals controversy involve precedents of censorship, terrible communication, and the undisclosed assumption of content control in a student publication, all of which damage Hunter’s independent extracurricular atmosphere and could potentially be repeated. Most disturbing is the fact that administrators took steps to censor content and halt the publication of a student yearbook — funded independently through student sales and the Parent Teacher Association — without the knowledge and input of students.
Administrators can and should act (in good faith) to preserve the reputation and integrity of the high school. Ultimately, however, the relationship between editors and administrators must be a bilateral dialogue, with the administration treating students as full stakeholders in their extracurricular activities. By virtue of their labor over the course of the year, student editors become the primary owners of their work, and must to be consulted and informed when decisions are made that affect their publications.
Moreover, when student leaders are treated as adults, they take away invaluable lessons that are far more enduring than the direct product of their work. The minute you start treating high school editors like children, you deprive them of the opportunity to learn those lessons. When administrators and advisors start acting in an authoritarian manner, students are no longer full partners in their own extracurricular education. We cannot afford to impart this errant message to Hunter’s younger generations, to let them believe that their extracurricular freedoms are valid only so long as they comply with the school’s wishes.
Sadly, many of us have come to feel that the Annals situation is indicative of a much larger problem. While recent years have seen Hunter recognized for its academic and extracurricular achievements, we are concerned that the intellectual atmosphere that facilitated this success is waning. Hunter is considered successful because a large portion of each class is accepted to top-flight academic institutions. While Hunter’s faculty and curriculum helps prepare those student to achieve academic excellence, that alone is not enough to explain Hunter’s inordinately high elite college acceptance rates. Plenty of schools have outstanding academic programs, but few can boast Hunter students’ extraordinary extracurricular achievements, qualities and passions. Those are the characteristics that leap from the pages of college essays and blow admissions officials away in interviews, and they are what make Hunterites stand out from year to year; heavy-handed decisions by administrators are the most efficient way to stifle out that rich tradition.
The freedoms afforded to Hunter students are not obscene, they are merely uncommon, and they reflect a progressive atmosphere that cultivates experiment, experience, and learning independent of textbooks and teachers. During our time at Hunter, we learned as much through student-run newspapers, student-run musical productions, student-run athletic administrations, student-run math teams, student-run mock trials, and elective scheduling freedom as we did in many of our classes, and are far better off for it. All the freedoms that colleges provide their undergraduates and that the world provides its adults, Hunter normally does and always should provide to its students.
Surely, when students lack the respectfulness and conscientiousness required by their positions of responsibility, the freedoms granted them have the potential to backfire; more often than not, however, those privileges have made Hunter's students rise to the occasion and provide great examples for their classmates and their younger peers. We fear that those freedoms are no longer viewed as valuable for students.
This is about more than just a yearbook. It is about preserving the essence and excellence of a school that has helped shape our minds, and will always be dear to our hearts. Hunter is the unforgettably unique institution that it is because of its dynamic student body and the extracurricular and social freedoms that have always encouraged students to express their vibrancy, creativity and intelligence in a self-nourishing environment. Restraining those freedoms and damaging Hunter’s extraordinary atmosphere of independent thought and growth threatens the school’s very ethos. It is that ineffable culture of student freedom that has rendered generations of Hunter alumni incapable of describing their high school experience to outsiders, because we know they just simply would not understand. Hunter without its freedoms would be just another smart lab school among thousands; that cannot be allowed to happen.
Signed,
Daniel Gourvitch, HCHS ’03, Georgetown ’07
Nick Michlewicz, HCHS ’03, Amherst ’07
Michael Sarinsky, HCES ’97, HCHS ’03, Dartmouth ’07
Whitney Baxter, HCES ’97, HCHS ’03, Harvard ’07 |
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After you sign the letter ...
Check out the article about Annals in the New York Sun ... www.nysun.com/article/32455
Contact HCHS Principal Dr. John Mucciolo to express your support for student freedoms at Hunter by callingthe HCHS main office at 212-860-1267.
Tell President Raab how you feel by emailing her at President@hunter.cuny.edu or calling her office at 212-772-4242.
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