Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership

In 2013, the City College of New York formally established the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. The Colin Powell School united CCNY’s Division of Social Sciences with the College’s Colin Powell Center for Leadership and Service.

The social sciences at City College have a history that goes back almost a century. For almost as long as the social sciences have existed as academic disciplines in the United States, CCNY has had outstanding academic and interdisciplinary programs.

The Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies was founded in 1997 to honor one of CCNY’s most distinguished alumni, General Colin L. Powell, USA (Ret), class of 1958. The Center was originally a small co-curricular program focused on guiding a group of outstanding students into careers in public service, and it was the home for the College’s initiatives focused on service learning and community-based research.

With the creation of the School, the Center’s mission around public service, community-focused work, and leadership development became fully integrated into the degree-granting programs of the social sciences.

The Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership is built upon an exceptionally strong tradition at CCNY. Nearly a third of all CCNY degrees are awarded in the social sciences. The merging of the Division’s excellent academic traditions with the innovative leadership and public service programs of the Center affirmed the new School’s founding values: to be a leading center for social, political, and economic research and education with a particular emphasis on addressing problems that impede equity, diversity, prosperity, stability, and peace in our society and across the world; and to maintain and support a faculty dedicated to the highest standards of research and to the university’s democratic and public obligations, including the responsibility to disseminate research in usable forms to concerned audiences, particularly to those striving to redress injustice or disparity.