Vincent Boudreau
Dear Members of the Campus community,
It is with deep sadness that I share the news that one of our students, Brent Renaud, was killed in Ukraine this morning. Brent was a student in the MFA program for creative writing, although he arrived on our campus with a fully realized career as a photojournalist and filmmaker. It was in that latter capacity that he traveled to Ukraine, specifically to cover the refugee crisis there. An account of his passing was published in the New York Times, and I include that story here:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/13/world/europe/brent-renaud-irpin.html
CCNY gathers a global community to its campus, and that means that we have, every day, people in our midst who are touched in a particular way by the human toll of some global tragedy that might, to others, seem distant. These days, especially because of the nuclear threat it poses, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is particularly salient in our conversations and in the news. We mourn the loss of Brent to our community both because we will miss his remarkable presence among us and for the reminder he represents of the deeply personal pain that every life lost, in any conflict, triggers.
As we mourn Brent’s loss, let us both pay particular respect to his life and work, and take a moment to reflect more generally on the toll that aggression and violence of all kinds take on people around the world, every day. Our work on this campus is, over all things, to construct a community of understanding and respect, underpinned by a search for reasonable solutions to the problems that may divide people. Let us rededicate ourselves to this mission with renewed urgency, spurred forward by the loss of this particular life, the horror that has unfolded in Ukraine, and the too pervasive occasion for violence and human suffering around the world.
Sincerely,
Vince Boudreau
President