On Thursday, my daughter, who’s a high school senior, won first place for the best paper in the National History Day competition for all of New York City. The title of her paper is “Drop Dead University: The Fight for Free Education at the City University of New York.” She worked hard on it, dug deep into the municipal archives about the 1975 Fiscal Crisis and the decision to end free tuition at CUNY, read widely in the secondary literature, and, though I’m obviously not objective, did a good job. Now she goes on to the New York State competition, which will be at the end of April. Aside from proud-parent bragging, I’m posting about this tonight because I just […]