Go Big or Go Home: A Look Forward with President Boudreau
By Aspasia Celia Tsampas
The following article appeared in the October 2019 edition of The Campus.
With the 2019-2020 academic year infull swing, The Campus caught up with Vincent Boudreau, President of TheCity College of New York, to discuss his goals as he enters his third year asleader of our institution. Aware of the financial struggles City Collegecontinues to face, President Boudreau urges all faculty, staff, and students togo big. “Historically, when we are under economic pressure, we tend togo small,” he remarked, “We hunker down and hope that it will pass. And I thinkwe actually have to go big.”
After a slow and tumultuous start,the previous semester ended with City College firmly on top. While the uphillbattle presses on with much of the same economic fight still ahead, PresidentBoudreau is confident that our institution is well on its way to redemption. Heacknowledges that budgeting will always be an issue. However, rather than allowbudget cuts to tear City College down, President Boudreau is seeking out waysto supplement money from New York state. He commented, “The truth of the matteris that, since the late 1970s, we have never had adequate funding and we havenever actually set out to explore what we can do about that, instead of cuttingour budget.” He suggested that one way to accomplish this is by revamping theAdult and Continuing Education Program. Another way is by further developingCity College’s fundraising apparatus.
Over the course of the next tenyears, President Boudreau hopes to put City College in such a position where,even if the government slashes our budget, it will not bear any majorconsequences. “Now, we are getting less and less money from the state,” herevealed. “If this trend continues, by 2034, we will get no money from thestate at all. So, we have to start planning for 2034.”
All of the goals President Boudreauhas set for City College this year revolve around improving our institution’sfinancial independence. On this topic, he expressed, “We don’t have theresources to spend our way into a new day, but what we do have is the capacityto mobilize people.”
President Boudreau believes that thefirst step in making this all happen is by uniting everyone in and around theschool. Last year, his system of Objectives and Key Results (OKR) wasintroduced in order to motivate everyone at City College and push them tosucceed. At its core, this system is focused on setting goals and followingthrough on them exponentially. This year, President Boudreau wants to ensurethat everyone at the institution is internalizing this OKR management system, whilealtogether creating a more united and strategic environment here for all faculty,staff, and students.
Fundamentally, this process begunwith the people that keep our college’s infrastructure up and running—thefaculty and staff. In a “Welcome Back Message” sent out to the entire CityCollege community on August 26, President Boudreau addressed our faculty andstaff members with a heartfelt thank-you. “I know that you come to work everyday focused on making our institution better, on building a stronger and safercommunity for us all,” he observed. In this same message, he announced the formationof a working group, led by Professor Jorge Gonzales and Johanna Urena, to makerecommendations on improving our anti-discrimination and respect-for-allpolicies.
While the student body at CityCollege is ranked as one of the most diverse in the world, the same cannot be saidfor our faculty and staff. President Boudreau explained, “There is a pretty bigracial and gender divide in faculty and staff. Faculty tend to be more malethan female, more white than not. The further down you get into the staffhierarchy, the more likely you are to encounter women and people of color.”When asked about the reasons behind this disparity, President Boudreau cited ahuman resource issue. As such, his chief goals for our human resourcesdepartment is knowing who to hire, learning how to search for talent, and ensuringthat City College has the most diverse faculty and staff as possible.
President Boudreau acknowledgesthat City College must improve in these areas. He said, “One whole area dealswith how we manage our labor force and how we give opportunities to people. Weare still in a budget crisis so we are not going to be hiring a lot of newpeople, so we can’t bring in new people. The question remains how do we retainthe faculty you do have?”
In response to this question, PresidentBoudreau is taking initiatives to implement mentoring programs in eachdepartment for more experienced professors to help guide newer ones in theircareers. He also encourages all staff and faculty to take advantage of AnnualPerformance Evaluations by using them to discuss career advancement. Furthermore,he wishes for City College to be more efficient at developing the talent we alreadyhave in lower, more diverse positions in order to allow room for promotion.
Next, President Boudreau aims toimprove the lives of students and their experiences on campus. Today’s studentsare under much more stress than ever before. It is becoming increasingly harderfor them to finish school when they have other obligations to attend to. PresidentBoudreau is adamant about helping students achieve their degrees. “We did aproject when I was the Dean of the Colin Powell School, and we looked at alittle more than 700 records of students who had 110 credits or more but hadn’tregistered in the last three semesters,” he noted. “And what happens when theyare so close to graduating and then they don’t register? 50 percent of whathappened was them not being able to manage their schedules, financial aidproblems, or something else bureaucratic and not academic.”
His first solution in alleviatingthe added stress of navigating the daunting City College bureaucracy is todevelop a ‘One Stop, which is where, as a student, “you come in and talk to oneperson to help you through financial aid, bursar, and registrar troubles.”President Boudreau also urges students to take full advantage of what CityCollege does have to offer—namely its extracurricular activities. “The point ofgoing to college is going to a basketball game, and our basketball games areempty. We have a theater program that puts on plays all the time, and peoplefrom the neighborhood should be coming to City College plays. Figuring out howto make campus life more robust is a big deal for us,” he expounded.
A significant portion of CityCollege’s student population is currently in a state of vulnerability, whetherthat be economically, politically, or in terms of their immigration status. PresidentBoudreau wants it to be clear that they are not to feel vulnerable here oncampus. “This institution has to be a thing that grounds them, with a communitythat supports them,” he insisted. This thinking goes hand-in-hand with buildingprograms for students to utilize, such as the counseling and advising centers. Additionally,for students who are rendered vulnerable due to their immigration status, ourschool pledges to help in any way possible. For example, if an Immigration andCustoms Enforcement Agency (ICE) officer enters campus, there will be nocooperation whatsoever—public safety will not accommodate them, absolutely noone is to provide them with any student records, and none of their questionswill be answered.
In the past, City College has partnered withthe Northern Manhattan Coalition on Immigration to assist with any questionsabout immigration status, as well as renewals for the Deferred Action forChildhood Arrivals Program (DACA). President Boudreau proclaimed, “We are aplace that demonstrates every day how important immigrants are to the buildingof America. I think the most important thing we can do is continue to make aconnection between the wonderful markers we have on social mobility, thecontributions we make to society, and never shy away from the fact that themajority of our students weren’t born in the United States.”
Lastly, President Boudreau wishesfor all of these internal goals and objectives to transfer into public view. Hestated, “I’ve been at City College my whole career and I’ve never beensatisfied with the success in which we project out to the world.” President Boudreauwants people to ask, “Why are City College students so successful?” He alsowants the answer to be apparent and obvious: “I think that what makes Americandemocracy work is upward mobility, and what makes upward mobility work isavailable education. No one does it better than City College, that makes us afront-line democratic institution at a time when democracy is under attack.”Specifically, this refers to a 20 percent proliferation over the last year inthe number of positive stories and local media coverage on City College, aswell as an increase in public association between our institution and the term“social mobility” by 10 percent. City College already has gained nationalattention across various college ranking systems. Most notably, the school wasranked second in the Wall Street Journal/Times Higher Education list for “TheBest Value.”
Under President Boudreau’s guidance,this year is about mobilizing pride in City College, amongst the faculty,staff, and students, as well as in the public eye. Moving forward, the questionremains, “Whenever a student succeeds, a graduate does something great orwrites something beautiful, our message to the world has to be, who else areyou missing?”
