The Children of the People

In 1849, Horace Webster, the first president of the Free Academy said of the radical social experiment that would eventually become the City University of New York (CUNY): "The experiment is to be tried, whether the children of the people, the children of the whole people, can be educated, and whether an institution of the highest grade, can be controlled by the popular will, not by the privileged few, but by the privileged many." More than 170 years after the founding of the Free Academy, we revisit Horace Webster's statement to question the outcome of the experiment from the perspective of the students.