April email to City College

This has been an extraordinary, entirely unique month, no less on a college campus than in the general society. We entered this crisis with three goals in mind: that we would, first and foremost, protect and support our campus community, keeping everyone as safe as possible for the duration of the outbreak. We would, second, attempt as much as possible, to continue to deliver a CCNY education to students on our campus. Whatever comes after these long dark months, our young people will be immeasurably better equipped to survive and to contribute with a CCNY education than without one, and we’d like for nobody to have their momentum to graduation slowed by the virus. Finally, we wanted to make sure that, on an institutional level, we were contributing to the public effort—that we were making our facilities available, that we were using our skill and expertise, and that we were communicating what we know as robustly as possible to public audiences.

We started by making immediate adjustments so we could empty out the campus. We moved all of our classes, even our labs and studios, to a distance learning format. While we normally have more than 1,500 staff and faculty on campus on any given day, we’re now closer to 50. We transferred all of our dormitory students out to make room for a national guard detachment—either helping them move home or getting them settled in a dormitory in Queens. We’ve cancelled events and moved meetings, advising, even mental health counseling to on-line and video chat formats. As the campus emptied out, we were able to close more and more of our buildings, thus allowing more custodians, public safety officers and facilities crew members to stay home and protect themselves. Each of these steps allowed us to depopulate the campus, so that our normally crowded grounds, which could have been a transmission belt for the virus, could instead act as a circuit breaker.

As these measures have taken hold, as distance teaching and learning have become more routine, we’ve been able to turn our attention more and more to our public mission. I’ve always believed that CCNY should be more than a school. Rather, we have always been a vital, irreplaceable New York institution, a place that apprehends and works to resolve some of the most pressing problems facing our city and society. We have expertise, insight, human power and powerful facilities. and when the City needs us, we should step forward, and we have. When a crisis hits, we must do everything in our power to meet the needs of the moment, using all of our capacities to dive in and help out. I’d like to tell you about those efforts.

This year, we are graduating our first class of doctors from our new medical school. Normally at this time of year, medical students would be finishing up their clinical requirements. New guidance from the state will allow us to graduate our new doctors early, and have them complete those final clinical requirements in the field, working to mitigate the coronavirus outbreak. It’s a great opportunity for them to execute on the medical school’s prime mission: to train a corps of doctors who will specialize in delivering primary health care in underserved populations.

We have responded to a call from our state to make lab technicians available who can help with virus testing activity. Similarly, the governor’s coronavirus task force has asked for the names of faculty and graduating civil engineering students to help set up field hospitals to prepare for the coming surge. A group of three faculty—an engineer, a scientist and an architect—have been using our 3-D printing machinery to manufacture roughly 300 face shields a day. Another faculty member in our biomedical engineering program has invented a device that will retrofit old fashion, manual bag ventilators to be smart devices, automatically delivering breathing support to patients. Our radio station is being converted into a site with intensive public service programming designed to help people in the community meet the challenges of the moment.

And, most recently, we began discussions to open a drive-up/walk-up testing site on campus. (The walk up site may be the first in Manhattan, and it’s an important innovation: why, especially in our neighborhood, should someone need access to a car to get a test?) Last week, after provisioning our own facilities and public safety crew, we were able to donate hundreds of boxes of PPE goods to one of our partner hospitals, St. Barnabas, and yesterday we were able to donate face shields and masks to Harlem Hospital, all designed by our faculty with a small cohort of volunteers.

We are, in short, figuring out how to serve, despite the difficulties we all face. It’s a difficult time for us all—made more difficult, I’m sure you know, by the fact that we’ve already lost some of our treasured faculty to this virus. But, even as it’s become commonplace for people to say that we are in unprecedented circumstances, I think it’s important to underscore the ways in which they are so. It has been eighty years since we were called, as a nation, to mobilize for the national interest. Since then, we have mainly shifted the burden of our most strategic national struggles onto the shoulders of a subset of the population—the volunteer armies, the foreign service officers, the scientists tapped for special projects. Today, we are once more called to harness a collective national effort of “the whole people”—that ringing phrase from our own, CCNY founding. As in the past, when we built a film program to counter Nazi propaganda, when students traveled to Spain to fight fascism, or to Selma to fight racism, or when our scientists developed cures to diseases like polio, your alma mater is stepping forward to take care of our CCNY community, and to play its role in the public arena. Sincerely,

Vince Boudreau President