African American Legends; Gregory Williams, president, City College of New York/CUNY; Gregory Williams, President, City College/Cuny

MUSIC The African-American legend series highlights the accomplishments of blacks and areas as varied as politics, sports, business, literature, education and religion. We will explore how African-Americans have succeeded in areas where they have been previously excluded because of segregation, racism and lack of opportunity. I'm your host, Dr. Oscar C. Brown Jr., and with us today is the President of the City College, President Gregory Williams.

How are you doing? How are you doing? The City College. Tell us about that. Well, when I arrived at City College four years ago, I thought there was really need to kind of create a greater morale and a sense of common purpose and I came here from Ohio State University, and I remember that Ohio State, of course, is renowned for its football programs. It's an academic program. And an academic, that makes it as well, but what struck me was that a lot of the Ohio State players in the professional leagues on Sunday afternoons, they would be interviewed and ask, where did you go to school? And they would say, I went to V. Ohio State University, and that really caused a very positive feeling, so I thought we need something like that at City College. Now the official name of City College is V. City College in New York, so I said, why don't we focus on V. And of course, when I did it, people were laughing and students were laughing and faculty weren't really too excited about initially. But now I have everyone going around saying, V. City College in New York. You have your P.M.A. as a kid?

The V is largely the city. Well, in fact, in fact, about three or four months ago, and Senator Clinton was at City College speaking, she came out on the podium and she said, I am so pleased to be at V. City College of New York. Well, you know, college president is a marketing genius when he functions, he or she functions right, education leader, fundraiser, but mainly one who sets them the tone of the college. And that's really a very classic example, V. City College of New York. Well, of course, you know more about setting tones of college and all of the work and the experience you've done is... From the Bronx. See Bronx, right? The Bronx. The Bronx is not just Bronx. It's the Bronx. Exactly. My feeling is, look, if the leader is not talking positive about a place, no one else is. So I think that's really important. And of course, it's easy to talk positive about a place that you feel positively about. And I certainly feel very positively about City College and all of the things we're trying to do, all the things we have done and all the things we want to do.

Now the City University was founded really with the first college in 1847. Right, 1847, the free academy was established, which really was the forerunner of the City College of New York. And so we are the flagship in many respects and the City University of course came substantially after City College was established. And we're actually the official forming of City University, I think it was in 1958-19th. I think that's right about whether they put all of the colleges, colleges used to be one in Brooklyn, one in Queens, one in the Bronx and there was Hunter College and so on. So they pull them together for this great university system we have, 230,000 students and 19 colleges in medical school or law school and the City College of New York. Well, it's an incredible university. There's no question about it and I certainly have enjoyed the time that I've been here and you're right when you think of this 200,000 students as part of the City University

of New York. And also think about like City College has been as really, I do believe the single most important ladder of upper mobility, not only in New York City but in fact in our entire nation. So there's really, it's pretty remarkable in terms of the history and you could go back and talk about some of the graduates at City College and other places. Young men and women who virtually had nothing came from families of incredibly limited resources but now are leading Fortune 500 companies, our Nobel Laureates served on the Supreme Court of the United States, they've done some pretty amazing things in a risen from incredibly humble roots. It's interesting that the population of City College served originally particularly in the late 19th century, early 20th century, but basically European immigrants, the Irish Jews, Italians, Russians. After World War II as the population began to change in complexion, City College now serves predominantly people of color from all over the world.

How many ethnic groups do you have in City College? What is the percentage of people of color at City College? Well I think we're running over 80% people of color at City College and of course you're right from all around the world, I think we have about 114 different countries represented in our student body and that's really, you're absolutely right, what it is, it's the richness of the demographics of New York City and City College and City University system will always reflect the city of New York and so that's what New York is and that's what City College and City University is and we're very proud of it because it allows us to have people from all over the world come together and talk about their own experiences and their backgrounds but their common desire to really build a foundation for the future and their lives and it's an amazing place. Well when in the turn of the century City College's curriculum is primarily the classic curriculum, rhetoric, Latin, Greek, mathematics, what does City College focus on now? What are the many, many programs the City College has?

Well we have seven different schools if you will, actually architecture, engineering, science, social science, arts and humanities, we have the Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education as well as the School of Education so we have a broad range of programs. We have really the only public schools of engineering and architecture in the New York metropolitan region and so for instance if you want to go to a public school and study engineering or architecture there's really only one place you're going and that's the City College and so that's really been a pipeline for a lot of students to be able to pursue those particular careers but we draw interestingly enough because of those specialized programs we draw really equally from all five boroughs in the part of New York City and that's also important for us as well. Now tell us about your classic campus, the campus at Langston who's wrote about in his poems, the castle on the hill looking down on Harlem, remember his classic poem was a theme for English A where he talked about the fact that he was from Harlem and his instructors

did not really respect him or reflect on him of course that's changed but these classic buildings were built around the turn of the century. Well that's right actually City College until the turn of the century of the last century was located downtown and they moved up to our campus on the West edge of Harlem around 1907 if I remember correctly and we are very fortunate to have the building and facility we have about 35 acres of land and Shepherd Hall for instance and the Great Hall in Shepherd Hall is just a magnificent place as you know you've been there several times it seats 1400 people and every time we have visiting dignitaries they are just our amaze. The campus we have we do have a true campus basically one of the few campuses in New York City and it's a students treasure it and love it and I think it's an important feature of who we are but actually I think important points you were making earlier we are trying

and have tried to reach out to the community and so we have a lot of connections with the community because I think that's important we are in that community we are part of Harlem and we're very pleased to be part of the greater Harlem community and I think our students really resonate to that as well and I think that's important I've I've been in higher education for about 30 years now and it's always been my feeling that you can't have an Ivy Tower that's really isolated from your surrounding community that's not the way I operate that's not what I value and so I do try to reach out. But of course one of the classic moments in City College history were the strikes in the protests in 1968 to open up the college to more minorities to the Sikh program and so on. How did the college respond to that and as you look back as the college looks back how do they reflect on those days? Well I wasn't here in those days and you're more of a historian of that period than I

am but I think to the extent that the effort was to open the campus to you know a broader population I eat really having a more substantial representation of people of color I think that is certainly a positive thing and we certainly are reflecting that today and we are very pleased with regard to that I think that's an important part of who we are. Well clearly if you walk around the campus of City College you see the mosaic of New York City. Absolutely. From Africa, from Asia, from the inner city, from the Midwest, you find a whole range of folks from all over actually that's one of the reasons why for instance for two years in a row City College has won the model United Nations competition where we send a team there and you represent a country and for instance this year we represented Barbados and we had students in our class from Barbados so when there are questions that arose as well what was the feeling in the country about this all we had to do was to turn to

our students who had some experience in that country, that country of their birth and so that has allowed us to have some expertise and knowledge that most schools we competed against 225 other colleges from around the United States and in fact from around the world 22 countries were represented there and for two years in a row City College walks home with the number one prize I told our students I said look if you do it once people can say well that's a fluke but if you do it twice that's something very special. It's very interesting, my grandson attended the University of Maryland, Baltimore County and they have a large number of minority students very similar to City College and five or six years ago they won the United Nations competition using the same thing people who knew about the third world and had some involved in investments so now many of your students allow income and tuition is low but sometimes they even have difficulty making intuition with the cutbacks in the various Pell and federal programs but what do you do to help

your students be able to jump that financial hurdle? Well you're absolutely right more than half of our students come from families or the family income is under $30,000 a year and of course you know trying to live in New York we're talking about families four or five or six people trying to live in New York City and $30,000 a year is very very difficult so a lot of our students do have difficulty that's one of the reasons in terms of my fundraising efforts I've spent a lot of time trying to raise money for scholarships to support the students to provide some assistance to them so that they can focus on the academic side of their work as opposed to trying to figure out how they're going to be able to get two or three part time jobs to support themselves and their families and it's a struggle for a lot of students tell us about your fundraising efforts well you're very proud of us I'm very proud of it and I'm very fortunate in terms of what has happened when I arrived at City College because of some of the past problems they've had at City College folks were telling me I would be lucky to raise $25 million

in a period of five years and in just under four years we have raised over $100 million now it's tell me how you did I'm a college president I know who it took I would have here it's really hard but what's really important is to have a good story to tell and we have a good story to tell we have raised academic standards so we have a very strong student body but at the same time we've maintained the diversity that you talked about earlier that is really part and parcel of City College and so we've been able to go out and talk to the graduates and most of this money is coming from graduates graduate to City College telling them what's happening at City College today and asking them don't you want to be part of something that's very special in fact not only special but incredibly unique because we are serving the population largely of New York City that diverse population we are supporting these students we have incredible ambition great ability but limited resources and so our graduates have just come back and wanted to be part of this incredible

enterprise this is an interesting interaction because when we opened the doors to new populations many of them did not have the academic skills and we had to have remedial and other support work and some people said that was lowering the standards as a community college president where we worked with those students I believe it was making opportunities available you don't lower the standards you may take a little bit longer you might have to take more courses and that's what you've done up at City College well right we don't have any remedial programs at City College we don't have any anywhere in the City University now but you have support programs we have some amazing support programs that are really working with students and helping them address whatever issues they may have but the students that we're getting and we get a lot of transfers from the community college where students have gone there we had needs certain skills developed and done that work and then come to City College and are able to be successful in our programs at City College and I think

that's been important and that's really made a huge difference in terms of the success of the students and of course we have support programs be they academic support be they scholarship assistants be they personal support because obviously a lot of folks have family difficulties or issues they're dealing with in their own lives and so we're trying to provide as much help and assistance as we can to students yeah the articulation of the community college is very important I know when I was president of Bronx Community College we had an articulation agreement with City College where students from our engineering technology program would be accepted into the City College engineering program is juniors and they've made all the requirements and they did very well some of the professors weren't overly happy with that but I assume that has passed now because first of all professors respect students when they can perform and even though they've made or had some misgivings at the beginning up they see these great students coming from the very community

college they say look we want them and we work with them well I'm not sure we've converted all the faculty members but we converted most of them and the articulation agreement you're talking about are important and something that we value and continue to develop because that's really a pipeline for us of getting outstanding students into City College and we're very pleased with the relationships we do have with the community colleges because it really has made a difference and we have with the BMCC, Maryland Head Community College, Bronx, as well as Hostos and a number of other schools. Well you have another program which is supported I think by the Transportation Authority it's like a Transportation Institute. I know when I was at Bronx we were involved with that as well. How is that coming along? That's coming along very well and we've got some great leaderships and great faculty members in there and actually that's also reaching out to the community at large as well and for instance we have even high school students that are coming in and being part of that and I have actually last couple years I've had an

opportunity to go and speak to them as they began their work at the beginning of the summer and it's really great. My feeling is the more students we get on our campus thinking about college and having that experience the greater likelihood it is that they are in fact going to enroll in college and hopefully they enroll in City College but whether they do or not at least they're on that path. So this is an interesting difference from the earlier City College. Many of those students at parents didn't even want them to go to college and they had to struggle and work and finally get through the college. Now we find more and more parents want their kids to go to college but may not have the resources and that's where the City University and the City College comes in and the proof of the pudding is in the awards that you get for your students and faculty tell us about some of those awards. Well the awards are great and you're right more and more students are coming really because the parents are generating a lot of interest and the parents of

course realize how important it is in this day and age that their child be able to secure a college education. You know I had a situation just last last week where we had a father Chinese immigrant who actually the family is living on $19,000 a year in New York City and the young man had an SAT score I think over 1500 but there had been some mistake in his high school about getting him in school and so we found out about this they called us and they said can I come to City College and they had a 95 point grape every inch and a 1500. We said of course we're going to take a City College. Actually the father was so excited about that the father broke down crying on the phone because we had really provided an opportunity for this family that otherwise was not going to be provided. And you got some financial aid for this college. We got some financial aid that we can use to help those students come in and of course the honors college has been an

amazing. Tell us about the honors college that's a new development at least at the City College. Right it's a new development it's about four years old I think it started in the entire city University of New York about four years ago and it's been a real opportunity to bring in truly outstanding students, New Yorkers who could go anywhere in the country they want to go but do want to stay in New York and want to have a quality education and so the honors college which is basically a true meritocracy because we're talking about students, our friends is the average GPA for the honors college class that comes in this fall at City College is going to be around 94 in an SAT score of 1347 that's the average and so we've got a couple perfect SAT scores in that group and so that's really a very strong group what's more important about that though yes that is an incredibly diverse group as well about 80% 85% of those students in our honors college at City College are students of color so we are showing that you can have academic excellence

and you can have diversity at the same time in the same place. Well what attracts the students why would these students decide to come to these City College rather than are going to some other schools offering them scholarships? Well we offer scholarships so we offer full tuition scholarships there's also that helps exactly that's the market out there they get a stipend that allows them to either use that for internship programs or study abroad they get a laptop computer and then of course we have some specialized honor courses that they have the opportunity to take and then we have some great programs I mean they're attracted by amazing faculty members for instance one of the persons that's joining this fall is a young man by the name of David Bauer you may have heard of him David won the Intel prize in fact I think the daily news characterized him as the smartest kid in America who won $100,000 as part of the Intel prize he could go to school anywhere in the country he wanted to go he said he wanted to come to City

College and he visited Harvard and he visited the schools on the west coast and people were asking why do you want to come to City College? He said because at City College it doesn't matter who you are as long as you can do the work and they have good programs so we have incredible programs and engineering and architecture and the humanities really across the board and the students are gravitating that give you one idea about one of our faculty members who teach his physics a woman by the name of Maryam Saracek who has committed her life to City College she's been in City College for about 30 years she's a former president of the American Physical Society which is the society of physicists former presidents include people like J. Robert Oppenheimer the founder of the father of the atomic bomb and she just this year went to Paris to receive the Laureal UNESCO prize for Women in Science which many people call the Women in Science Nobel Prize a hundred one hundred thousand dollar award she represents all of North America she teaches at City College she works with undergraduate students and even high school students that's the type

of thing that are drawing a lot of these students to City College what about your ethnic studies I know at one time it was some controversy about your ethnic studies your black studies with the tino studies age that how's that coming along now well interesting that you should ask because you know mention early about the connections to the past of City College and to our alums we have a Jewish studies program at City College that has something like 300 students in it less than 5% of those students are Jewish it is a really amazing we had Deborah Lipstadt who came who wrote the book on the book about the Holocaust deniers people who were denied came and spoke just this past week at a City College event and we had been able to send some of the students who were in the Jewish studies program on the march of the living they went to Auschwitz and then they went to Israel and all of these students were students of color who were not Jewish but that's something they wanted to find out about that they wanted to know about and it's

really resonated very positively at City College so we're certainly pleased about that in in terms of how those programs are developing now City College has always been known as a place of political activism I know in the recent generations many of our students have really become apathetic to politics or ideological discussions what's happening in City College now with regard to ideas politics interaction protest it's that well there's a lot there's always protests you know what it's City College on one issue or another that's certainly a history and part of City College that's part of college life really and we have a very we have we have over 100 different clubs at City College so an opportunity for folks to really talk about their particular areas of interest with like-minded folks and of course to engage in debates with one another

but in the main most of students these days are really focusing on getting that college degree because they realize that if they are going to be able to do the things they want to do in their lives they really need that education and they need to get through as quickly as they can to begin the work on their career has the Patriot Act affected your ability to bring in some international students I know there's some pretty draconian regulations in the Patriot Act that is that's been a concern but obviously it's concerned because it takes so long oftentimes now for this the visas to be processed and for students to be able to come in it's not been a major issue for us but it is a continuing concern what about minority faculty what's been your success in attracting minority faculty we've made a lot of efforts in that regard because while like I said we have really last year we were number one in the country in diversity where Hispanics were the largest group

the year before we were number one in the country where blacks were the largest group and my feeling has always been that we should have a faculty that reflects that student body at least to a certain extent and we've done pretty well in that regard but that's continuing effort because those numbers are fairly small but we we really find that a lot of folks come to City College because they want to work with our students they want to be part of a very diverse institution so it's been a major draw for us and something that we're going to continue to work on okay last word what is your goal for City College for the next five years well my goal for City College is to continue to make City College the best that it can be we're obviously going to continue we've we're in a major fundraising campaign right now so we're at 100 million dollars our goal is 150 million dollars my vice president for development keeps is very nervous that I'm going to raise that goal we're going to continue to bring in great students we've been very

fortunate to have outstanding students for instance this year we had the first Rhodes Scholar since 1939 City College's young man it's an incredible story he and his mother came to this country about 12 years ago they were homeless for about a year and a half and lived under the George Washington Bridge this young man is again to go from living under the George Washington Bridge to Rhodes Scholar great story that's about the City College that's about the president Greg Williams who we've been talking with today good luck when you work for City College thank you so much it's a pleasure to be here with you today