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. Again taking a bold and controversial step, Cohen proceeded with the support of her Board of Trustees to dismiss most of the faculty, close down all but the few classes that were needed by the second-year students to graduate, and set up a small task force to engage in a restructuring process that would last for nearly a year. The task force included graduates from Princeton and Harvard, well-known community activists such as
Ruth Messinger (who later ran for Mayor of New York), and a project dean from the
National Training Laboratories who had a background in curriculum design. After months of meetings, the group came up with a unique curricular grid that has remained the model for all subsequent programs at the College. The curricular grid or matrix consisted of eight semesters, each of which focused on a specific "competency" crucial to human service practitioners. The sequence of competencies (later termed "Purposes") was intersected by the rows of five multidisciplinary "Dimensions" common to each semester's learning. To provide both coherence and a means of assessing field performance each semester, the model also included what Cohen called a "Constructive Action," a project undertaken in the field that relates to that semester's purpose and which, when documented, includes reference to the academic learning covered in all five dimension courses. The originality of the college's curricular model soon attracted the attention of educators nationwide. In 1976 the matrix was adapted by
Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where it remains today as the conceptual framework for a Masters in Human Services program. In the late 1970s the College for Human Service was the focus of an in-depth study by Gerald Grant and
David Riesman that was published in
Perpetual Dream: Reform and Experiment in the American College and in
On Competence: A Critical Analysis of Competency-Based Reforms in Higher Education. Over the next two decades the college that Cohen founded continued to grow, and she herself became renowned for her educational vision and leadership. By 1979, the CHS had become a tuition-charging institution and was offering bachelor's degrees in the human services. In 1983, CHS initiated a business degree program, and in 1988 it began offering a master's program in public administration. Also in 1983, the college's Purpose-Centered model began to be adapted for elementary and secondary education in several schools around the country. In 1992 the College was renamed
Audrey Cohen College after its founder. ==Audrey Cohen College==