SEEK (Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge) and College Discovery are two programs of crucial academic, institutional and historic importance to the City University. College Discovery was authorized in 1964 by the Board of Higher Education in and for the community colleges. SEEK was legislatively authorized in 1966, in and for the senior colleges.

Uniquely, the SEEK Program was not only authorized but also unprecedentedly mandated upon the University by the State Legislature. The legislative mandate was to recruit and admit into CUNY’s senior colleges a minimum of 1,000 students from “poverty areas”…“to advance the cause of equality and the educational opportunity at the City University.” This mandate was accompanied by a State grant of $1,000,000 to pay for special educational services and student stipends.
College Discovery (1966) served as a preliminary program of recruiting minority youth into the ranks of the City University. SEEK, building on the College
Discovery experience was the key, which opened the gates of the City University, leading shortly to the policy of open a admission.

In the months and years that followed the start of the SEEK Program in 1966, this innovation helped change the face of all higher education in America, and beyond our shores, too. It moved from the concept of equal opportunity to the practice of equal access. For the
*Written for the SEEK Commemorative Journal in the 1980s
City University, SEEK and College Discovery reaffirmed our historic mission, reopening the doors of the colleges to all people of our city.
The SEEK legislation was only one long paragraph in a multi-paged statute providing 50% State funding for CUNY’s senior colleges and establishing a Construction Fund to build new campuses and facilities for the University, utilizing the credit of New York State.
The Omnibus legislation was the conceptual creation of then-Chancellor Albert H. Bowker, the second Chancellor of CUNY, the man who transformed CUNY from four municipal colleges into a mighty university. (He was the author and father of open admission.)

The SEEK paragraph which was inserted into this legislation was drafted in the dead of night, in the final stages of the consideration of the omnibus construction and funding measure; this happened as a result of strenuous representations by minority and progressive members of the State Assembly and Senate, directed by then-Speaker Anthony J. Travia, who had undertaken the responsibility to sponsor and manage the overall legislation. Those representations were arduously pressed, particularly by two of the then members of the State Assembly, Percy Sutton and Shirley Chisholm. That night, late in the night, between supper and breakfast, while CUNY legislation was being processed, aides to Speaker Travia and Chancellor Bowker wrote the historic terms of the SEEK Program into statutory law.

Most unusually for the State legislation, the new statutory paragraph on SEEK spelled out the detailed specifics of the proposed CUNY project. Legislative language specified the particular education functions for which the special State funds could be expended for student recruitment, for counseling, for books and supplies, for remedial courses, for tutorial services, for summer classes and for student stipends. This provided the outline of the SEEK program.

* By Julilus C. C. Edelstein Senior Vice Chancellor Emeritus