Vincent Boudreau
Dear Campus Community,
In 2016 I wrote the message below with a hopefulness that we could rely on the vision set forth at our founding in 1847: to be a beacon for all who choose to make City College their home, whether as students or in their professions.
Since 2016, we have been repeatedly challenged as a community, and that vision has both been put to the test and proven itself to be a continuing source of resiliency. I believe that these tests, on balance, have made us stronger and expanded our capacity to defend our values.
This defense, however, is not an episodic thing, but a continuing responsibility and calling. And so we come to this moment, when so much of the rhetoric that marked our recently concluded campaign season seems overtly to threaten friends and colleagues on this campus. As I have cast around for words to frame our response, I consulted the note I composed eight years ago, and find it as fitting today as it may have been then. It reads as follows:
To many of you, the world today must feel a colder and more lonely place. Over the past months, we have watched the parameters of what is acceptable in our political and social life, and in the speech acts associated with that life, shift radically away from established norms of racial justice, gender fairness and basic equality before the law.
I write these lines not as a partisan in our political process, but as someone who has been asked to steward, for the time being, an institution that is not neutral on these questions, and that cannot remain neutral.
Our values demand, whatever the rhetoric outside our campus, that we embrace the possibility that there is a place for all of us, on this campus and in this society: wherever you were born, and however you came here. They demand that we embrace our differences as virtues rather than threats, and recognize and nurture the promise represented by each person moving across this earth. At the most fundamental level, they demand that we commit our private and public selves to the responsibility of taking care of one another: of recognizing pain, and want, and isolation when we see it in those around us, and offering such comfort as we can.
We are a campus of immigrants, and the advocacy for justice in the field of immigration will continue to be central to our educational efforts. We are a campus community that proclaims its diversity, and so we must be a refuge and a source of wisdom on questions of racial, religious and gender fairness. We are, as an institution, built on foundational beliefs about the necessary place of accessible education—and by implication the need for robust social and economic mobility—in any stable and democratic society. And all of this means that whenever and for whatever reason the climate shifts against these values outside our campus, we are obliged to reaffirm them within it.
I have always thought that CCNY has been, throughout its history, a step ahead of the country—that it has been our privilege and obligation to model, for the rest of the world, what a better and more perfect union should look like, to educate young people in a belief in that world, and send them out to help make it. That is our legacy, and I fervently hope that you feel its weight and honor, now more than ever.
Let’s be that place. Let’s look one another in the eye today. Let’s stick together, and in that basic act of community, continue the work we came to this campus to do.
We will, in the coming days, reissue a series of reminders of the many college-based opportunities we have to engage in constructive dialogue, to support the health and wellness needs of our community and to enhance the security of everyone in our orbit. And I’ll add the gentle reminder that however one identifies politically, City College represents more than 177 years of ensuring a place in society for all and we will do what is necessary to meet the demands of the moment in defense of that legacy.
Sincerely,
Vince Boudreau