Back in New York With the Same Passion, but to Less Fire and Smoke
By CLYDE HABERMAN
Published: December 1, 2013
Rudy Crew, little seen in these parts since the turn of the century, blew back into town a few months ago with a desire, he said, to “stay below the radar.”
Michael Kirby Smith for The New York Times
“There’s simply a quiet narrative. The drumbeat and suspicion and expectation and so forth are much more sublimated.”- Rudy Crew, president of Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn.
“I’m a quieter person,” Dr. Crew, the new president of Medgar Evers College in central Brooklyn, said recently over breakfast. “I don’t necessarily need all of the hoopla and fanfare that came with coming here in ’95.”
If hoopla and fanfare were a waterfall, the one that accompanied Dr. Crew in 1995 qualified as Niagara.
He arrived in New York City to run the public schools, with just about everyone wondering how he would get along with the other Rudy, the one in charge of City Hall,Rudolph W. Giuliani. Would they hit it off? Or would Dr. Crew become, as he put it, “another chancellor going to be run out of Dodge” by a my-way-or-the-highway mayor?
For a while, the two Rudys fared splendidly, sharing drinks and cigars. Then came the crash. The mayor Rudy avidly supported school vouchers. The chancellor Rudy found them an unwelcome diversion of public money. The split grew bitter, then irreparable. Just before Christmas 1999, Dr. Crew was sent packing.
It would not be his only brush with controversy. After leaving New York, he was the schools superintendent in Miami, from 2004 to 2008; there, he had successes but also
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