802: Keys to Longevity in Higher Ed Leadership - with Dr. Vince Boudreau, President, City College (CUNY)

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Welcome back, everybody. It's your time to up on the EdUp Experience podcast, where we continue to make education your business by providing you this amazing platform to talk about the great work leaders in higher education are doing to serve students today. There's so much conversation about what the value is of higher education today. That's why I think it's such a great honor to be able to interview these leaders in higher ed who are at the front lines of, I would say, rebranding, remarketing, reimagining what value of higher education means. And what does it mean? Well, we know statistically it means a better life for people to go through higher education. We know we need to get more people into post-secondary education. And I don't know that there's a group of schools that is more prepared to do that than today's community colleges who are really serving students of diverse backgrounds all across the nation, particularly in New York. There's a big system called CUNY. It's a group of colleges. You probably know this because we've interviewed, let's see, who have we interviewed? Felix Matos Rodriguez, I think we had him on. We've had my guest co-host on. We've had Claudia Schrader on. And the list goes on and on. We've had so many amazing people from the CUNY system. So we're going to keep it going today. But first, I want to bring in my guest co-host.

She's back. I can't remember what episode she was on, but it seems like it's been a couple of years since we came and ran into each other. In fact, if memory serves, I think my guest was like right at the beginning of COVID, she started as president. The name of the episode was something like two-dimensional leadership because she had to meet everybody through Zoom for the first however many months. I'm going to go and check my memory, but I'm pretty sure that's what we talked about. Here she is, ladies and gentlemen. Her name is Dr. Mangino and she is back. She of course is the president of Queensborough Community College. What's going on, Christine? How are you?

Dr. Christine Mangino: I'm thrilled to be back. And it was, I think it was episode 300. It's definitely talking about my first six months of being in Zoom and getting to know the campus in a bunch of boxes. So I'm thrilled to be back and very happy to be in person with everybody on campus now.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yes, I'm going to go back and check my memory, but I remember talking about you transitioning into a presidential role, having to go through your listening tour with everybody on screen. We were right kind of post COVID, maybe in the middle of COVID when we were... was August of 2020. So it was really trying to figure out how do you build trust on campus when they don't really get to know you well? How do you do that?

Dr. Christine Mangino: Yeah, building trust on campus, even when you get to see people is still something that we have to work on, isn't it?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: What one person that I think that has done that effectively in his career and is this guest who we have with us... In fact I think he's been at this college for quite some time now in various roles. We're gonna have to find out about that pedigree. Ladies and gentlemen, he's your guest today. His name is Dr. Vincent Boudreau. He is the president of the City College of New York. Vince, what's going on? How are you?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Thank you, Joe. And thank you to all the members of the audience for that enthusiastic welcome. I really appreciate that. It's a large audience. In fact, I just recorded myself clapping about 50 times and then spliced it all together.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No, no, no. Hey, you know, before we jump in, I just literally just hit me. I had the founder and CEO of Urban Arts on my podcast. And he was talking about, I think it was your school, City College of New York, where they're doing some kind of urban arts program that they have. Does that ring a bell?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: We have an urban arts program. Urban Arts is also involved in a relatively new, I'd say like two years, a gaming program that we have.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's it. That was it. Yeah.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: So this is, you know, the mayor has decided to kind of jumpstart the gaming industry in New York City. You know, gaming is responsible for six times the GDP as the movie industry. It's huge. And so we bring in students from high school as competitors in gaming competition. But we also have the graphic design and the computer design to then bring them into a degree program that gets them ready and capable of actually building games. And I mean, you know, recreational games, but also games that are being used in training and education as well. So, you know, very excited about that program and Urban Arts.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: And he was saying, we haven't even released the episode yet. That's why it's so fresh in my mind. But when it comes out, he was saying there just wasn't, the schools in the New York area that were offering a degree in gaming and you guys teamed up to do something like that. So tell us more about City College of New York. What do you do? How do you do it? How long you've been there? Give us a story.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: So me, so I, I personally, this is my 33rd year at City College. I came out of graduate school into the CCNY political science department as an assistant professor. And I've, you know, I've never left. I came in at a time when, you know, I was about, I think I was 26 years old when I came in. CCNY had not hired in numbers since the late 1970s when we fired everyone who didn't have tenure because of the crisis of New York. So I come into the college at a point where there's almost nobody my age, and the people that had been around for 25 years really didn't want to run a lot of things. So I was, you know in my second semester, I was running a master's program, pretty quickly moved from that into, you know, associate dean of social sciences and I was chair of the political science department. And that's where I was when our Colin Powell Center, which had been organized in 1997, but never really got off the ground. They came to me in 2002 and asked me if I wanted to run it and said that I, actually I said no three times. And then it turned out that they had accepted funding for that center but hadn't done anything with it. And the funding agency was coming to kind of check out what the full Colin Powell Center was doing. And it wasn't doing very much. And so what I said in accepting it, I said, I want to change the profile of the center to a student leadership and support. We had at that time virtually no substantial scholarships on campus. And so working on that project and with some great people in the college and General Powell was involved as well. We took that little center, our original scholarship cohort had eight students and eventually that became the Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. I was the first dean of that school. It has 4,000 CCNY students and about 15 different scholarship lines. And it's one of the things we're really proud of at the college. And so I was running the school as dean when the presidency opened up. So I've just had the chance to kind of pay attention to City College from every angle. And so didn't have Christine's problem when I came into the job as president. Everybody knew me and knew me through the COVID period as well. So in that sense, I've had in some ways an easier run of it than a lot of my colleagues who came in during COVID.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So you've been there for 33 years.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, don't say it like that.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: 33 years, which is impossible because you look like you're, you know, 27 years old. I mean, look at this guy's in great shape. What do you...

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: The portrait, it's aging badly.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: How many years as president?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: This is my seventh year, if you count 13 months of interim.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So the fascinating part and the question I have for you, I mean, when you've been somewhere for so long, you know, they talk about leadership is something that comes in stages, right? You've seen it from so many angles, probably complained about some of the leadership or thought perhaps things might change, maybe didn't complain, but thought maybe things could be done differently or you were unchallenging the status quo. So you've seen it from that angle. Now you step into a presidency, you've been there for seven years. What's the secret to longevity in higher ed in all your various roles? And the reason I ask is because you know it's hard to find good people in higher ed, to bring them in the higher ed, and many of our colleagues are leaving higher education. And many don't want to work at the highest level. Presidency is under fire right now. What's your secret?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Well, OK, so City College, you know, had been known as the Harvard of the working class, right? That was our moniker, you know, back in the 30s and 40s and 50s. In my first months on campus, you know, every one of my senior colleagues, one way or another, would work into their conversation. You know, we have more CCNY graduates that are on the board of Fortune 500 companies than any other college in the country, except for, I think the Wharton School was ahead of us by one. And there was no evidence of it on campus at all. There was no, you know, no name buildings, no scholarship programs. Philanthropy was a weak part of our profile. And I just thought from early, early on that we had lost our sense of ambition for the place. So coming in at every stage of the game, I thought we could be better. And I thought that being able to convey that message, particularly, as I said, I was one of the very first people hired in what became a new wave of hires through the late 1990s and into the 2000s. So I was in a position to sit down with applicants and say, you know, if you're going to work here, here's what you have to understand about this place and our ambitions for this place. And, you know, what I expect of you. And, you know, one of those ambitions was to be, one of those requirements was to be absolutely ambitious for what the college could be. So this is why I, you know, going back to the Colin Powell Center that had been more about four years, I thought, boy, if we can't create something with a high public profile with the support and the association of Colin Powell, then, you know, then we can't do it. And so this was a shot at saying, let's turn this quiet program into something with a real profile. And I think I started that work, the current Dean Andy Rich has carried it on. So coming into the presidency, I came in at a moment, it was before COVID, but my college was in a little bit of a leadership crisis and there was a fair amount of discouragement among the faculty. And I thought, boy, this vision of mobilizing the energies of people behind the original mission of City College, the founding mission of educating the working class and propelling social mobility and saying to people, whether they would have said it or not, you're not at CCNY just to have a job. You're in this specific campus in our Harlem neighborhood, working with our specific demographic because that mission matters to you. And I think when I said that, some people said, yeah, that's exactly what I think and I think some people thought, huh, well, maybe that is what I think. But, you know, mobilizing that was made everything else possible.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Tell it like it is. When somebody says, what do you do every day? From now on, I'm going to say I mobilize the energies of people because that literally that's what you said. And that is what we do every day, isn't it? If you're a leader, it is so true. Christine, over to you.

Dr. Christine Mangino: Yeah, so building off of what Joe just said, by being there for seven years, research shows that it takes a college president at least 10 years to transform an institution, right? So where would you hope to be three or four years from now?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: You know, it's funny. I came in and I set a vision of doing a lot of things that and then we had, you know, then we have the pandemic and now Christine knows we're pulling the pieces together of a pretty serious budget shortfall. And so you've got all of these headwinds that you're working against. My original vision was, number one, build a philanthropic operation that will stabilize the college, whatever the ups and downs of state funding is. And that started with, you know, can we combine... I don't want to get too far into the weeds on this one, but we had two foundations that needed to be combined. We had donor files that were a total mess. We didn't have the apparatus to build that operation. It took about four or five years to get just the back end operation to where we needed it to be. It's where we need it to be right now. And so that's good.

We had an adult education and workforce development program that was more abundant. And so what that meant was, as an institution, we weren't focused enough on the needs of the workforce. And City College is a school with advanced science, engineering, architecture. So there are very, very skilled positions that the local economy needs us to provide and I just thought we weren't really in alignment with them and we needed closer relationships with industry and so I'd say we're about halfway there and then the other thing that was a real big part of my original vision was you know we had an engineering school that was a hundred years old and had never commercialized anything that was developed in the engineering school. And I thought we needed to build a commercialization apparatus. And as you see, every one of these things that I've talked about so far does two things. It focuses the work of the college on the needs of our society, but it also provides for an alternative revenue stream. And I thought both of those things were absolutely crucial. And then the final element of it was I thought we were insufficiently connected to our Harlem community. And I thought, you know, we're a stone's throw away from Columbia. And I think at City College, we always kind of comforted ourselves by saying Columbia is up in the clouds and we're kind of, you know, we're down at the same level of the people. We've got dirt under our fingernails and all of that. But that's not what our community thought. I mean, we were as inaccessible to many of the people that live down the hill from us in Harlem as any other institution. And so building those relationships has been really important to me. So I think to get back to the question, we've built the apparatus for our philanthropic operation. Now we've got to establish a track record and just thicken up the networks that we're working with. We're about halfway through that commercialization effort. We've got a really good, mostly funded project to build a facility just off campus and flesh that out.

We have now the Charles Rangel Workforce Development and Infrastructure Initiative, which is kind of the tip of the spear of our workforce development program. That's about three years old and gathering momentum and really great relationships with our community that I think are providing more and more opportunities for members of our campus, students, faculty, and staff to do meaningful work off campus. So that feels good. You know, we're six years in, I should say I'm 60% towards those goals. I don't think we are. I think we're more like a good 50% there. But I think the feeling that people have, and I mean particularly our alumni about City College has gotten better. I think we spent a lot of time really thinking about what our external messaging is and gathering the data to tell our story. That feels like the best part of what we've done because we were in a little bit of a public relations freefall in 2016.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: So a lot of that is all external, right? So one of my questions that I had for you, you just led into it is like, do you balance the off-campus and the on-campus parts of the job, right? That's something I struggle with.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, I think, well, I think I have something that you didn't have, which is coming into the job 27 years, everybody knew me. And I had gone from a pretty isolated position as a young faculty member in a department. By the time I was working in the Colin Powell Center, our remit was campus wide. So I was kind of unique, right? Everyone complains about how siloed academic institutions were. And here I was working with engineering and architecture and science. And it was, it was really cool because, you know, as a young guy, I was interested in science and I was interested in, you know, how things got built and what architecture looked like, but in your professional life as an academic, you narrow down and you narrow down and you narrow down. So I wasn't even as a, as a faculty member, I wasn't even involved in like 75% of the things that my colleagues were teaching in my discipline. And then all of a sudden you get to tie what you know about political science to engineering and astrophysics and all this other stuff. So that was really cool. And so coming in, I think people knew me, I knew them. There's always a suspicion that as a political scientist on a school that's really known for its STEM fields that I was going to turn away from the engineers and from the scientists and, you know, some of my early meetings that was kind of explicit on the table. 

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Incredible.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Exactly. I spent lots of time in their laboratories and going to their lectures and using some of the connections I made off campus to elevate their work. I mean, I actually today I came into this conversation from a meeting I had out at Stony Brook with ArcTech, which is the Advanced Energy Research and Technology Center. I'm on the board there. And that helps me open doors for our scientists and our engineers as well. So that was really important. 

And then I think the other thing was, as I said, I came into the college at a time when there was a fair amount of turmoil. And because of that turmoil, suspicion about where the money was and who's getting paid a stipend that they shouldn't get. And we just opened up all the books. We opened up everything. And that was really important. I remember also early on in my first three or four months, there were these white papers that would circulate. Why isn't the president doing this? Or so and so in this department is involved in some sketchy stuff. And why doesn't the president look into this? So finally, I wrote a note to the campus. And I said, this is the last time I'm going to respond to a blind item. And I'm committed to an administration where you're not punished for speaking your mind at Faculty Senate. And so that's where you get to talk to me about these things. And I never saw another one of those. They just were not circulated after that.

And so I think it's a combination of, well, I guess the other thing I should say is if you think about what a president's job is in comparison to a provost's job or a dean's job, in a lot of places, the president's job really is oriented towards external relations. And for my first five years, it just simply wasn't possible. There were so many fires to put out that I was deeply involved in all manner of decisions. And that meant I got to know a lot of people and they got to figure out how I did my work. I'm at a stage right now where I think I'm gonna start readjusting that to concentrate on the stuff that's in the remaining 50% of my original agenda. And that requires me to be sort of off campus. But I couldn't have done that in the first five years. The first five years was all about establishing trust, building programs. So it's, it's, as you know, Christine, it's what keeps us up all the time. Like, what is it that's going on under our noses that we don't know about that, you know, when it comes to light, people are going to say, you know, why didn't Vince know or why didn't Christine understand that this was a problem?

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Yeah, I you know, I want to ask follow up there because it's a... You know the old saying like you got to get your house in order before you have people over for dinner, right? So you as a president, you're looking, you see operational problems. You know that you need to focus on it. But you also know hanging over you, there is this community piece of what you do. So you talked about it a little bit. But go back to what you were saying about, and I wrote it down, the community relationships and the external messaging. So you've got, at the point where you have internal operations that need to be fixed and an external messaging and a rebranding, so to speak. That's the true balance, right? Because it's almost like you have to figure out what you are so that you can communicate it effectively. Is there a point in which you go, who are we? Who are we really trying to serve? Did we have mission creep in here somehow? Do we entrench? When did that happen where you said, we need to sit down and think about this?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, you know, that actually happened for me years before I came into the presidency. Right. And, you know, going back to the Colin Powell Center and then the Colin Powell School, you know, we had this fantastic board of advisors, mostly people that General Powell brought, you know. So at one point we had Barbara Walters and Tom Brokaw and Elie Wiesel and Henry Kissinger and then finance guys like Steve Schwarzman and David Rubenstein. And so at that stage, when someone said, what would you like the Colin Powell School to be or the Colin Powell Center to be? My answer, you know, as early as 2008 was when anybody in New York City thinks about public service leadership development, I want them to kind of look north and see the Colin Powell Center. And I wasn't thinking that I was going to be president. So I wasn't concerned as much about City College. I was concerned about my thing. But that's absolutely transferable to the vision of the college and the things that we had to do.

Be more ambitious about telling our story, be really strategic about thinking about who should be interested in the work that we do beyond our alumni. I think we get constrained into thinking the people that graduated from here are the people that are gonna understand us and support us. But anyone who's interested in democracy in New York City or beyond has to be interested in CCNY and all the CUNY schools. We're all doing the same work. We've all got some version of our nation leading social mobility numbers and we just weren't telling that story. So I brought all of that into the presidency. And so on day one, my very first job as interim president, I spent 12 o'clock talking to the faculty council, a meeting that was already scheduled, laying out my vision. An hour after that, I had to meet the board of our foundation, previously scheduled meeting, vision for the foundation. And then that night was the annual gala of our alumni association and where the former president was to speak and then it was up to me to speak. And so on day one, I was in all these different, those are like in some ways your three most important stakeholders, right? Your campus community, your alumni base and your philanthropists, and just laid out the vision of what we were gonna do.

Operationally though, what was really important, at the Colin Powell Center, we had done a lot of fundraising. So we worked a lot with the college's communication apparatus and the college's development apparatus. And so I knew that they were both rotten and they were also not communicating with one another. So I changed the leadership of those two offices almost on day one. And then I took the person that had been working with me on external relations at the Colin Powell School, somebody that Christine knows pretty really well, a woman named DeGee Mosaleski. And I said, I want to unite these two offices, right? You're not going to be able to raise money unless you're telling a story. And you've got to be able to target the stories you tell the people that are interested in supporting the college. So make those offices the same office. And so we did that early, early on. And that was really important. It matters that this person is an extraordinary talent with great experience and a real feel for the kind of work that we do at CUNY and at City College.

The other part of the answer, if you permit me to go on a little bit longer on this is, Harlem is a very mobilized politicized place. And when I was named as permanent, named it kind of leaked out before the official announcement. The Harlem community got together and said, we don't like this guy. We don't know anything about him. They say he's been at City College for 25 years. How come he hasn't come down the hill and talked to Harlem? Even though as running the Colin Powell School, a lot of the projects I were doing were community based. It didn't necessarily filter up to their consciousness. So, so CUNY actually delayed my appointment for about two months while I went around and met sat with, you know, the leadership of Harlem, elected officials, members of civic organizations, members of the chamber of commerce and... It was really funny. There was panic on this campus. You know, people saying, how dare they? It's not their purview to do this. And I kind of shushed them and said, you know, if you give me two months with these people, they're going to be our best friends. And, you know, and sure enough, you know, in fact, just before getting on this call, I hung up with them at three minutes before I logged on. Congressman Rangel called me up because, you know, he has been one of the moving forces in provoking us to build this workforce program and infrastructure and then going around and getting the funds to support it. And that's just one of about 10 things I could name that have come from closer relationships with the community. And all it really required was for me to say, we're doing the same work. And if you felt like you weren't a presence on this campus, that's going to change.

So I've got an executive advisory board made up of community leaders. When we program our theater, we're in consultation with the arts community in Harlem. It's really just kind of over time. And so those are two different answers. One about the operational positioning of the college and where communications feeds in. And the other, which is kind of more on my shoulders, how we cultivate the kind of interpersonal relationships with the community that turned into programmatic collaboration.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You're telling your story. Do you have a favorite student story?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, I do. I do. In fact, I forget we're not... I was going to show you something for the video.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Does it start with 32 years ago?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: No, it does start with about 25 years ago. Wow. I used to, when I was teaching in the political science department, I very soon became aware that everyone who taught our evening classes was an adjunct. And I thought, we have no idea who's taking our night classes. We just don't, you know everybody in my, and again, remember these were people that had been at City College for 25 or 30 years. They just weren't interested in leaving the campus after five o'clock. And so I thought every second semester I would teach a night course. And so right around that time, still as a professor, Congressman Rangel initiated a fellowship program that would train graduates in international relations to prepare them for the Foreign Service for their graduate program. So I'm teaching this class in international relations in the evening, and there's a woman who's really smart, who I'd never seen during the day. And so I asked her to stay after class so I could tell her about this fellowship. And so she does, and I'm talking to her. And right next to her is a guy who is asleep. And he would fall asleep about 50% of the time. And when he was awake, he said really smart things, but when he was bad, he was horrid. And so I go through the whole thing with Kerry, who by the way, wound up going to the Maxwell School and having a great career in the Foreign Service. And when I'm done, he opens one of his eyes and says, why don't you have that conversation with me? And I said, because you got to stay awake, man. And so he said, like, what would it take for us to have this conversation? I said, well, here's what you do. Show me what you've got for the rest of the semester. I had at the time, all of the money we had to allocate was graduation prizes. So once you graduated, you would get $500 or a thousand dollars or whatever. And so I went to a couple of donors right around that same time. And I said, I want to use this money to make it possible for a good night student to be a daytime student and to absorb the full experience. And so I allocated that money to Brad, to this guy, and really, really quickly, he was a little bit older. I didn't know it at the time. He's just about my age. And he was sleeping all the time because this was the mid 1990s. He was doing AIDS outreach to underserved communities all through the South Bronx, mostly at night, going to clubs and that kind of stuff. So he was exhausted. But he very quickly sort of installed himself... there was a little lounge for students outside my door as I was, I guess I was chair of the department at that time. So he installed himself out there and every day I would hear him talking to 18 year olds and 19 year olds about the life of the mind and how you gotta take this professor and that professor and you know, doing, like having the kind of conversations that our students didn't always have because they were commuters and they'd come in, take classes and go home. So he built this whole kind of community around his charisma and his excitement about education.

And then he graduated and he got a full ride into a PhD program at Columbia University. That is amazing. And this is a guy who had no idea, you know, even why he was in my class. I mean, that was the first conversation I had when it was, wait, why are you falling asleep and all this? He just said, I don't know where this is going for me. And I could, like, I could fill, I could fill two hours with similar stories.

And part of the takeaway of the story is in our classrooms, you have no idea who's talented and who's not talented. The guy in back who's folding his arms and acting like he's there under protest is probably shy and doesn't know whether he belongs in your class. The guy who's asleep is probably working 30 hours sometime. And so the necessity of us as classroom teachers and people running institutions to figure out how you pay attention to people who on the page or even at first encounter don't read as young people on the road to success. Colin Powell used to all the time talk about how he almost didn't graduate from City College. He didn't have the GPA to graduate, he was below 2.0. And then they took his ROTC grades, which were not supposed to be counted academically. They averaged in and he got just over the line and he graduated. And that's half of our student body. So that's something I've really carried with me through my whole educational career is how careful you have to be to pay attention and how easy it is actually to pull a student aside who hasn't really put themselves forward and say, hey, you're a really good writer. Did you know that about yourself? And most of them don't. Most of them have no idea what their potential is, what their talents are. 

I used to teach summer school at Cornell University for my first five years here. And every student in those classes who was smart came in the door knowing they were smart. And they would tell you that they were smart. And we just have the flip side of that. And that means that our institutions have this huge potential to develop that talent, but we've got to pay attention.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: I like your style, dude. You know, you're in a hub. New York City is a hub, right? I mean, you know, there's lots of people. And I started that episode by talking about the value conversation that we have in higher ed now. What's the vibe amongst the students' potential of City College, is higher education still worthwhile? Am I on the fence? Am I dipping my toe in the water at community college with a class here, class there, because I'm not sold on it? What are you hearing in the hub in New York City?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: You know, our students, our students are absolutely unconflicted about the value of an education. Right. They are struggling. They are struggling to make ends meet, to be able to pay for it. Right now as we speak, we have 800 students who have registered for classes who haven't been able to pay last semester's bill.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: No way!

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: We're trying to figure out how many of these can we keep, bring along and put on a payment plan for how many of them? Is their bill so big that it's out of reach? But it's funny what happens so much and you see it in food and you see it in opportunity, right? Some kind of food that was available to poor people, and you know, because it was discarded by rich people gets discovered and all of a sudden it's priced out of the range of poor people. You see it with neighborhoods, gentrification is basically a neighborhood being priced out of the reach of the original inhabitants. And you see it with opportunity, right? All of a sudden, when we're opening up opportunities in places like CUNY and other state schools over the last 20 or 30 years, whatever it would be, now all of a sudden people who've got other resources are like, college isn't really that important, but it's crucial for our students. They don't have a pathway. They don't have a plan B alternative to education. They don't have the kind of networks that get you into jobs. They don't have the life experience where an employer looks at them and says, I'm gonna take a chance on this kid. So, you know, what was true for our students 80 years ago remains true. This is their chance. And what's nice about our university system is that there's lots of different ways you can enter. We've got community colleges, you know, CCNY is a senior college. So we grant up to the PhD. We've got comprehensives and students can actually move within the system as they develop stronger and stronger capacities. And that's really essential. And it doesn't change just the student. It changes the whole student's family.

Dr. Christine Mangino: It's life changing for the family.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah. I say that at freshman convocation. I say, by your presence here, you're changing the entire history of your family. The recently resigned president of Harvard University, Claudine Gay, daughter of two City College graduates. The guy that just stepped down as the president of Yale University, son of a City College graduate. And in both of their cases, the parents that graduated from City College were the children of people that didn't go to college at all. And we see this time and time again where a City College alum will come in and say, I'll say, where are your kids going to school? They're going to Yale and Dartmouth and Princeton. And I said, where'd your parents go to school? My parents didn't go to school. My parents worked in the garment district, or my parents were immigrants. So all of us exist in this moment in a family's progress where their children will grow up in the expectation that education is part of their birthright and a stable future is theirs if only they work for it. And it's not true for huge portions of our society.

Dr. Christine Mangino: Go ahead, Christine, you got another one for him before we start to wrap up.

Dr. Christine Mangino: So, I mean, at the beginning, we started off and you didn't answer it. Right. What keeps you up at night besides the budget? Right. Presidents are losing their jobs across the country. Yeah. Not necessarily for anything that we do. Yeah.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: So, if you would ask me this question six months ago, I probably wouldn't have said the relationship between freedom of speech and the academic mission and the safety of our community. That's a huge issue. In fact, I spent the weekend writing something for our alumnus magazine as a way of responding to alumni writing in and saying, what are you doing to protect Muslim students or Jewish students? And what's your stand on hate speech? That's a big one. But I think it's a big one that's having a bit of a current moment here.

I worry sometimes about, you know, I talk about mobilizing the energies of people. If you don't have resources, you mobilize them with enthusiasm and the promise that something better is coming. And so I always worry about like how long are they willing to wait for the good things, right? Which usually means resources, hopefully, right?

Dr. Christine Mangino: You mobilize them with energy and then hopefully resources come later.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Well, but it also means the thing you're promising them, which may not be state funding or tuition, it could be something else. When is that going to come into play so that they say, yeah, he said this was going to happen and now it's happened? My faculty and staff have shown themselves to be more patient than I could have hoped. And I will say, we can now point to some things that are moving in the direction of, you know, where I hope they and where I promised they would go. So, so that's been enough to kind of keep things going. But it's a kind of, it's a constant struggle of, you know, I'm doing things because you said things would be better. And are they better enough to keep me doing them? So there's, so there's that.

Dr. Christine Mangino: And then the other thing - And I keep saying, I started the job in the middle of COVID, we weren't on campus and then enrollment and budget. And I love my job every day, but I just can't wait till I can tell people yes.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, you know, there's a hallway, our biggest building is Shepherd Hall. And in the hallway that you enter is all of the portraits of all the 13 presidents. And I walked down that hallway some, and some of them were president for like 30 years back in the 1800s. I walk down that hallway and I look at them and sometimes I think, like you all must have had normal years. I haven't gotten my normal year yet. Every...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's a fact. That's a fact.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: And then the final thing that keeps me up at night, it kind of gets to what I was just talking about as far as talent. I worry all the time about who we're missing and who we're leaving behind and who's out there. Our alumni include, you know, Jonas Salk and Felix Frankfurter and Colin Powell and Andrew Grove. And not one of them came to college with success tattooed on their chests. Right. And, and, and I just, I, there's so much talent in our city. There's so much talent in sort of new Americans coming to the country. And every one of our students to one degree or another comes to college with, with imposter syndrome. And that will keep them out of opportunities because they don't believe they're good enough to put themselves forward. So I worry about that a lot.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Yeah, because you have to self-confidence build along the way, right? That's a prerequisite.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: All the time. You've got to keep telling students, you've got to keep telling, you read that litany of alumni, then you've got to say, you've got to say, number one, they're exactly the way you are right now and you've got to really internalize that not one of them came to college with their trajectory mapped out for them and they would probably be surprised as first-year students where they eventually wound up and then you've got to say and I know some of you think I'm talking about the person sitting next to you but I'm not I'm talking about you and then they have to hear it like time and time again.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Surprise, yeah, yeah, it's a, it's a, it's I find it to be one of the hardest parts of, of the job of working in higher ed. You hope that a student is just motivated. They're just going to sail on through, get good grades. And the reality is you're continually building confidence because it is that lack of confidence, not a lack of ability. It's a lack of confidence that somebody buys into that makes them exit, right? Because then they use a justification. Like, I have no confidence that I could do this. So I can't afford it anymore. Or I have no confidence I can do this and the $50 bill that I have, I just, you know I can't afford it. So it turns into something else, but I find at the root, it's always this belief of whether I can do it or not, believe whether I can finish.

Dr. Christine Mangino: Learning is hard, right? And messy. I keep telling students all the time, if you're learning a hobby, right? You want to learn how to play the piano or how to go skiing, you know it's going to take you months and months and months, right? But if you sat through a class and you didn't get it the first time, you're like, you're dropping it because it's not good enough for you, right? That it takes just as much time. You have to give yourself that permission.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah. On campus, public safety officers, administrative assistant in office, a faculty member or a member of the upper admin, every one of us has the capacity with one interaction of driving a student out of college.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: It's so true.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: It's that fragile. You know I was in I was in my Ph.D. program in the second semester of my Ph.D. program in a class, an international relations class. And I asked a question and the professor who actually graduated with his PhD from CUNY, the professor looked at me and said, well, if you think that's an interesting question, you're probably in the wrong program. You know, he was kind of playing it for laughs, but I got to tell you with all of my confidence growing up in an academic community, that crushed me.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Outrageous.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: It was outrageous. And so if that was my experience of it, like what more are students who don't have any of those reserves?

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Good point. Well, like to, Vince, we like to end our episode with two, one not so much question and then one question. The first one, what else do you want to say about City College? Open mic, anything coming up, anything going on, anything you want to say, anything you forgot? You want to talk about your team, just giving you ideas. Take a couple of minutes, brag on City College.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: We are, two things. We are in the final stages of opening up this commercialization facility on 126th Street in a purpose built life science building. This is a place where our faculty, our students and entrepreneurs will be able to come to develop their technology for the market. It's, you know, we're out on a limb. We've never done anything like this before. CUNY has not at the level we're doing done this before, but it is absolutely the way forward for technology schools. And so this is a big, big deal for us. And then a fun thing, we are days away from signing a contract with the New York Knicks to make our gym the home court arena for their G-league team. The Harlem Knicks and everybody who cares about professional basketball at a level that they can afford will be on our campus paying attention to it.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That's cool.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, it's very cool.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That is cool. Well, what do you see for the future of higher education? Your last and final question today.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: We've got to figure out how to sort the difference between the state schools that are doing the lion's share of education in this country and the private schools that everybody knows where all the resources are going and they're educating a fraction of our students. The experience on our campuses at CUNY demonstrates that the utility of the people that graduate from our colleges is not in the least a step behind what happens in these private colleges. We're educating students at the senior college level for $7,000 a year. And Christina's Community College is, what is it? It's under 4,000, right?

Dr. Christine Mangino: Yeah.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: This is a revolution in provisioning our society to be competitive in the future. And the imbalance between the resources that go to places that are educating 80% of the nation's college-bound students and everybody else is just absolutely striking. And we're also getting to a kind of a breaking point, I think, in public higher education, where states have gotten out of the business of supporting public higher education. Not entirely, we're still grateful for every dime we get from the state, but in every single state of the union, the diminution in that funding is at an order of about 30 or 40% over the last 20 years. And economic development depends on us providing a trained workforce. And we can't continue on the road that we're going.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: You know, I do, I just want to say from my perspective, interviewing so many people across higher ed, there are people out there that are connected to this podcast or two degrees of separation, one degree that give to higher education institutions. Getting back to the New York vibe, I remember Bloomberg gave like 1.5 billion to Johns Hopkins and you just go what? Johns Hopkins doesn't need any of that. They've already got billions. Why not give it to an institution where that money or 10 institutions where that would have sustained them for the next hundred years? It's like having a small business, you know, where Jeff Bezos is selling something on Amazon and right next door, you've got a small business struggling to, that offers the same product at the same price, blah, blah, blah. Do you just go and give it to the big company because you... you buy from local, you, And that's just something that higher ed has to grapple with. It boggles the mind how Harvard takes in some of the donations that it does when other schools could benefit our population so much more.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yeah, and two responses to that. It just so happens we're recording this minutes after CUNY announced the biggest private donation to the university, a $75 million donation from the Simons Foundation that's going to...

Dr. Joe Sallustio: About time then, right? It's great.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Darn right. But the second thing is, a little bit of this is on us, right? Because I think we have, we're developing a voice to explain how essential we are in economic development and in the maintenance of our democracy, but we're not there yet. And we have to be better, more persistent, louder at making people understand that it's public state schools that are accessible to the vast majority of young people that maintain our democracy and hold our society together and keep the economy growing.

Dr. Christine Mangino: Well said.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: That they don't have the money, right? I tell people all the time, 85% of our students stop out if they have a balance for tuition between $500 and $1,000. Any one of us could take that money out of our pocket and help change the life of a student, right? But 85% of students stop out for that small amount of money.

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Yep.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, we're going to have to continue to work on it together. And you actually think about it in terms of we're talking about 75 million. What an accomplishment. But considering some of the donations you see in higher ed across the universe, more can be done. Big donors out there with lots of money. If you ever want to give CUNY is a good place for it. I would tell you because I know a lot of the leaders there and the work they're doing and blood, sweat and tears literally going into serving their students. One of those individuals is my guest co-host today. Now, first time guest co-host. We'll see if she wants to come back again, she knows she can anytime. Ladies and gentlemen, she's the one and only Dr. Christine Mangino and she is the president of Queensborough Community College. Thanks for coming back two years later.

Dr. Christine Mangino: Thank you for having me. It was great conversation.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Anytime. And when the guests have connections like you do with guest co-hosts and the guests have connections, obviously it makes for an incredible episode with our guest today. You know him, now you love him. His name is Dr. Vince Boudreau. He is the president of City College of New York. Vince, I have to ask you, did you have a good time on the podcast today?

Dr. Vincent Boudreau: Had a blast. It was such a pleasure to be here with my good friend, Christine. We've got 26 leaders of CUNY institutions and Christine is one of my absolute favorites. So was a real pleasure to be here with her and to meet you too.

Dr. Joe Sallustio: Well, ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here. You've just ed-upped.