Audrey Cohen

Audrey C. Cohen (May 14, 1931 – March 10, 1996) was the founding president of Metropolitan College of New York, a non-profit, private institution known for its unique curricular structure and commitment to experiential education.

An educational visionary, activist, and social entrepreneur, Cohen was convinced that people learn best when they approach their learning with an immediate, concrete purpose directed at improving the world.

The college she founded continues today to provide students with a "Purpose-Centered" education that enables them to work towards a degree while developing their skills as counselors, business managers, teachers, community organizers, and human service providers.

Audrey Cohen was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and attended Taylor Allderdice High School.

Diminutive in stature, smart, and energetic, she went on to the University of Pittsburgh where she majored in Political Science and Education.

During her summers off from college she did volunteer work in Washington with the Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA), the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) – experiences that she later said raised her awareness of social injustice and nurtured her commitment to civic activism.

Cohen graduated from college magna cum laude in 1953 and spent the next three years in Japan and Morocco with her husband, Mark Cohen, who was at the time an intelligence officer with the U.S. Navy.

The young couple then returned to Washington, D.C. and began raising a family.

In 1958 a desire to stay active in the workplace while still caring for her two young daughters prompted Audrey Cohen and another mother to launch Part-Time Research Associates (PTRA), an organization that enabled well-educated married women to work on specific part-time research projects contracted by businesses or government agencies.

When Audrey Cohen and her husband moved to New York City, her outreach work for Part-Time Research Associates expanded, and soon the organization was making a profit.

But by early 1964 Cohen began to sense that her focus on finding part-time jobs for well-educated women was insufficient.

Michael Harrington's exposé of The Other America, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech, and President Lyndon B. Johnson's announcement of a "War on Poverty" in his January 1964 inaugural address contributed to a new social consciousness, and Cohen was eager to become part of the era's efforts to create more just and equitable cities.

She and a small group of friends began to organize the Women's Talent Corps (WTC), an organization that would focus on jobs for low -income women who had been left behind in America's post-war economic boom.

For two and a half years Cohen and her associates worked to build support for the new venture.

Their aim was to develop an educational institution that would help create above-entry-level jobs in schools, health-care centers, and human service agencies and at the same time provide training for those jobs.

Cohen herself engaged in intensive community outreach, visiting low-income neighborhoods in Harlem, Bedford Stuyvesant, and the South Bronx.

Making the trips alone and often at night, Cohen spoke to groups of women in their homes, churches, or nearby school auditoriums.

She asked them about the kinds of jobs they themselves could imagine doing that would improve the services in their communities, and then she used this information to push city schools and agencies to open new lines of employment.

When the funding for her organization was eventually secured, these women became part of the WTC's first student cohort.

At first Cohen's project was met with resistance from many of New York City's social service bureaucracies, especially since it was specifically aimed at and directed by women.

But with the passage of the federal Economic Opportunity Act of 1964 and the establishment of the Office of Economic Opportunity (OEO), Cohen saw an opening for support.

In July, 1966, her fledgling organization received a Community Action Program grant from the OEO that enabled her to begin accepting students and training them for what are now termed "paraprofessional" jobs in schools, hospitals, and human service agencies throughout the city.

By 1969 the Women's Talent Corps had grown and was successfully improving the employment opportunities of hundreds of inner-city women, many of whom had previously been on public assistance.

But Cohen soon saw opportunities for further growth.

Building on the Corps Women's own requests for more formal training and wanting also to admit men, Cohen changed the organization's name to the College for Human Services.

In 1970, after an arduous struggle, the College succeeded in gaining the authority from the Board of Regents of New York State to grant the Associate degree.

From the outset, the College for Human Services was unique.

Federal funding required that the College could accept applicants only from families with incomes of less than $3,600, and students were paid a stipend for their fieldwork.

The curriculum required that students spent three days in the field assisting at city schools and human service agencies and two full days in the College's classrooms at 201 Varick Street in Lower Manhattan.

As a New York Times article pointed out at the time, the academic courses and the human service work were "coordinated."

Students' work in the field was informed by their study of social theoreticians such as Erik Erikson, B.F. Skinner, and Marshall McLuhan; in turn students could bring their first-hand knowledge of practices in the field to their reading of social theory.

Most faculty members had experience in education, social work, or community organizing and were responsible for classroom instruction and field guidance.

By mid-1970 the college was suffering growing pains, and both faculty members and students were complaining about their workload.

External rumblings from the student movement and the black power movement were echoed at College meetings and workshops.

When an African-American member of the administration was fired for mismanagement of funds in August 1970, the College for Human Services became one of 450 campuses to go on strike that year.

After nearly three weeks of picketing on the street in front of the building, a group of about 20 students and faculty members took over Audrey Cohen's office, demanding that she be replaced by a person of color.

Cohen stayed calm during the episode, even when, according to a New York Times article reporting on the event, one student called her a "blue-eyed devil."

At a meeting with the faculty and students the next day, the administration agreed to some of the protesters' demands, including their demands for more transparency in the administration's operations, and classes resumed.

For the next two years, however, the inadequacies of the two-year program became more apparent.

Cohen saw that with the increasing professionalization of the city's social service agencies, the College needed to become a fully accredited four-year institution.