Vincent Boudreau
I’m so pleased to be welcoming you back to a new academic year at The City College of New York. I hope that, if you’re a member of the faculty or staff, you’ve had a chance to recharge your battery over the summer, and are as excited as I am about the new academic year. To our students—both returning and new—please accept my heartfelt welcome back to campus. We’ve been waiting for you and are prepared to welcome you to an exciting new academic year.
As we embark on the 2024/25 season, I’d like to ask that we all take a moment to remind ourselves why we are on this campus, and what makes our time at CCNY so special. Together, our community constitutes one of the greatest engines of social change and mobility the United States has ever seen. For almost 180 years, students have come to CCNY freighted with ambition, creativity, and a vision for their future—and used their time on our campus to change the trajectory of their lives, and often the entire trajectory of their families. All of us on this campus are stewards of this tradition, and it no less describes our work today than at any earlier time in our history.
That status was recently reaffirmed by Degree Choice, which again ranked of CCNY America’s number one national university for producing change in the lives of its students. I hope if you’re a student this fact will be deeply encouraging, and if you’re on faculty or staff, you’ll appreciate your contribution to this accomplishment, and know how deeply that contribution is valued at every level of our college. Just this week, we announced the results of our new economic impact study, which estimates the annual impact of CCNY in the ten counties closest to campus at $3.2 billion dollars. Taken together the story is clear: we are demonstrating that the greatest possible economic dynamism comes when you concentrate on making sure that everyone has a chance to prosper.
A key element of our capacity to produce that social mobility is our open embrace of diversity. That means both that we draw in students together from every conceivable background and that the experience we cultivate on campus is enriched by widely divergent perspectives and life histories. For generations, an essential component of the City College experience has been that this diversity strengthens and expands the mindset of those who study among us. Diversity is important to us just not as an end in itself, but because it contributes to that profound intellectual dynamism. I hope you’ll all take this to heart—confident in the value of your own contribution to our debate and attentive to the gifts that your colleagues and classmates have to offer.
That also means, in the current political and social climate, that we are an increasingly rarified kind of place. Social mobility itself is a vanishingly rare state of affairs in America, but it flourishes among our graduates. Diversity and inclusion are increasingly and explicitly in the crosshairs of various political campaigns and policy initiatives, and across the nation institutions and corporations are caving. Our political and social discourse nationally has also grown so polarized that we seldom seem able to agree on basic empirical facts, let alone their interpretation in the crafting of something better. In each of these particulars, however, CCNY has been set up as an antidote—a place where our work together, underpinned by mutual respect and the quest for more inclusive understanding, can advance human progress.
Hence, and in addition to welcoming you back to campus, I’d like to take this opportunity to ask each of you to safeguard this community. Let us enter this year with a desire to more fully understand one another, and to preserve the space where we will all benefit from protecting the physical and intellectual safety of those around us. Let us be watchful of our companions in the understanding that we live in anxious times: anxiety, fear, and vulnerability often present as aggression or anger—but we all have an interest in recognizing vulnerability for what it is, and offering support and reassurance in that encounter.
This is work that we may all undertake individually, and I hope you do. But the college has also been assembling a menu of programs to help us all better support one another, engage in constructive conversation even when difficult, and identify and address anxiety in ourselves and those around us. In the coming days and weeks, be on the lookout for programmatic announcements and the launch of a webpage on our site curating these programs. I hope you’ll all avail yourself of one of these programs, and in so doing, help shoulder the responsibility of preserving our community.
Please allow me to wish each of you the very best for an engaging, exciting and productive year. I’m so happy to once more be with you on the verge of another chapter in the CCNY story, and I know that together, we will write a passage to be proud of for years to come.
Vincent Boudreau
President
The City College of New York