On the City College of New York’s handsome Gothic campus, leaking ceilings have turned hallways into obstacle courses of buckets. The bathrooms sometimes run out of toilet paper. The lectures are becoming uncomfortably overcrowded, and course selections are dwindling, because of steep budget cuts.
The faculty of the college’s well-regarded engineering school is so “disengaged and beaten,” an assessment last year warned, that if “serious shortcomings” were not rectified, the school could fail to earn reaccreditation…