On behalf of the students we are privileged to serve, the faculty and staff who make our campuses extraordinary, and the millions of New Yorkers impacted by SUNY, we could not be more grateful to the Governor for her dedication to SUNY as an engine of a strong, prosperous, and trailblazing New York State.
I want to begin this morning by telling you a bit about one of my most important heroes and mentors: my Uncle Hal. Haldane King, born in 1921, was my father's youngest brother and the sixth of seven children. Raised by a widow in a harshly segregated New York City, he was a Tuskegee Airman—one of the first Black pilots in the U.S. military—fighting for our country during World War II in a military profoundly infected with racism. Those injustices did not sap his fierce patriotism or his dedication to duty—civic, military, and familial. Back from the war and, due to racism, unable to find work as an accountant despite his training, he became a firefighter, again risking his life for a society that often dismissed him. When the Korean War broke out, Uncle Hal returned to the military, made the Air Force his career, and rose to the rank of Lt. Colonel.
He was a tall man, a powerful voice, the family's unquestioned leader, the convener of reunions, the keeper of stories, and a relentless standard-setter for himself and for all of us. He voted; he performed jury duty; he treated all with respect; and he fervently believed this country would someday fulfill the promise of its Declaration of Independence and Constitution.
His patriotism allowed him to love a flawed nation as he fought to improve it—to risk his life for an imperfect country because he believed in its ultimate promise. He raised his flag every morning and chose to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery. He was clear-eyed about America's shortcomings, yet always hopeful we could be better.
When I reflect on SUNY's mission, I think of Uncle Hal and the life he led because—just as much as our purpose is to equip our students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed in their careers and lead fulfilling lives—the mission of public higher education has always been and must always be the preparation of citizens and securing the future health of our democracy.
It is with my Uncle Hal in mind and growing excitement in my heart that I come here today to share with you what we have done, what we are doing, and what we will do to create informed, engaged citizens equipped for success and to ensure we are the best public system of higher education in the world.
First, let me say that this past year was filled with triumphs, and I could fill hours with thanks. Nothing does more to justify and safeguard the mission SUNY is entrusted with than the extraordinary vision of our Board of Trustees and the superlative leadership of that Board's chair, Merryl Tisch, and its distinguished members.
Let me also be clear: Even as other public university systems around the country squeeze by with scant resources, Governor Kathy Hochul has been fierce in her advocacy for public higher education and unwavering in her ambitions for what we can and must achieve.
Senate Majority Leader Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Heastie, along with our Higher Education Committee Chairs, Toby Stavisky in the Senate and Pat Fahy in the Assembly, fought beside Governor Hochul for the resources we need to be the system the state deserves. Assemblymember Fahy will soon leave that body to scale new heights, but we know her support of SUNY will continue to advance the institution.
On the federal level, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer has spearheaded victory after victory for SUNY and New York, generating funding for our initiatives and planting seeds of future prosperity. We thank him, Senator Gillibrand, the Congressional delegation, and the federal agencies that make up the administration for all that they do for us and for New York.
That combined support—this robust partnership between local, state, and federal officials—fuels SUNY's momentum and our excellence. We have seen historic levels of investment, with the past two years of operating aid increases the largest in five decades. Add to that mix an endowment-matching fund that will unleash the research and innovation of our University Centers, the generous capital investment necessary to provide our campuses with the modern facilities and equipment they need, and Empire AI to fuel New York's leadership in artificial intelligence research for the public good, and it's certain our harvest of excellence, accomplishment, and scholarship will only increase.
As Senator Schumer's CHIPS & Science Act transforms the research landscape and with crucial support from the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Labor, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health, New York and SUNY are poised to achieve even greater advances.
With these investments, promises are being kept, programs planned are blossoming, lasting change and improvement are occurring every day, and the world is taking notice.
Today, SUNY is on the move. Our quest for excellence rests on four pillars—student success, research and scholarship, diversity, equity, and inclusion, and economic development and upward mobility—and it's through that structure that I'll speak about triumphs accomplished and a mapped-out path to greatness.
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Let me begin by sharing the extraordinary momentum of efforts to accelerate student success.
This past year, for the first time in more than a decade, SUNY grew enrollment in every sector of the system, from doctoral-granting institutions to comprehensive campuses to community colleges, and nowhere more than in our colleges of technology.
There is no greater vote of confidence a student or family can cast than simply choosing to attend one of our colleges.
How did SUNY do it? By helping New Yorkers understand a crucial truth: there is a place at SUNY for every New Yorker, that place is affordable and accessible, we provide the resources students need to succeed, and that success at SUNY leads to prosperous, responsible, caring, and full lives rich with opportunity.
And we did it by maintaining our commitment to being excellent stewards of the taxpayer and tuition funds we are entrusted with—because fiscal responsibility is another way of saying we will deliver the programs students seek and the support they need, and that we will do so in the most effective manner possible.
Among our most sacred commitments is ensuring that students who enroll earn their degree. Last year, I pledged to expand ASAP and ACE—the nation's most effective and most cost-effective leading programs for retention and completion. And this year, 25 of our campuses are fully using ASAP and ACE to drive student success.
Along with our triumphs come challenges. This year, our biggest roadblock to success is navigating the federal problems surrounding the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.
Filling out the FAFSA is the most important path to financial aid. For years, students and parents complained the form was too long and difficult to understand. As President Obama's United States Secretary of Education, I oversaw a prior successful effort to improve it.
Late last year, the U.S. Department of Education introduced a new, shorter, and less complicated FAFSA. In the long run, it will better lives by making it easier for students to garner aid.
But the federal rollout postponed the opening of the filing process, and crippling bugs created a mess. FAFSA completions cratered, and the potential reduction in attendance has higher education champions quaking nationwide.
At SUNY, we're mobilizing to help prospective and current college students complete the FAFSA. We established a FAFSA Corps of SUNY students helping high school seniors and their families. For FAFSA Corps member and Old Westbury student Fida Siddiqi, helping a high school student who's working full time and struggling financially to fill out the crucial form—her gateway to a better life—was deeply rewarding. So too was aiding a recently arrived family who ran into trouble with the form because the father had changed his name.
Fida, please stand to be recognized for your commitment to public service.
Fida answered the call, and so is SUNY.
This year, we launched robust training sessions, outreach, marketing and social media programs, and site visits to high schools statewide to spread the word that the form is crucial, and help is available.
We also—thanks once again to the leadership of Gov. Hochul and our allies in the Legislature—successfully advocated for a law making the FAFSA universal among graduating high school seniors starting next year.
New Yorkers leave $226 million in federal Pell grants on the table annually by failing to complete the FAFSA. This bold step will help students claim that aid and secure their futures.
And SUNY will continue to do our part. We will expand the FAFSA Corps to 12 SUNY campuses and 70 members. We will provide more training and technical assistance. And we will launch a virtual help desk to aid with the form.
In my first five months in this role, I visited all 64 SUNY campuses. Since then, I've again visited every one of our State-operated campuses and about half of our community colleges.
These visits always reinforce my sense that engendering student success includes fulfilling needs beyond books, assignments, tests, or labs.
With tremendous state support, we have invested in expanding campus mental health initiatives. On visits to SUNY Oswego in February and the University at Buffalo just last week, l heard firsthand from students, faculty, and providers about the benefits of expanded access to in-person counseling and tele-mental health. When we say there is a place at SUNY for every New Yorker, we mean everybody.
We are providing additional supports for students with disabilities—from tutors to assistive technology to professional development for faculty.
We're addressing the food insecurity that leaves students hungry even as they pursue degrees. Last year, we invested in our campus food pantries, and this year, we will work to enroll every eligible student in SNAP benefits and to build on those food pantries with refrigerated food lockers.
Today, student success is increasingly complicated and crucial. We address it holistically, understanding that when students face tough odds, we can and must act.
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It's our job to even those odds and help every student triumph; and triumph is just the right word to transition to research and scholarship, because there, SUNY enjoyed an extraordinary year, and because, through our research, we are serving New York State and society by helping to find answers to the greatest challenges we face.
New York built its fortune and reputation on innovation and industrialization, from railroads and canals to manufacturing to optics and finance, computers, skyscrapers, and every form of business. In the past two decades, early investments in nanotechnology, semiconductors, and advanced manufacturing paved the way for an economic rebirth from the Capital Region to Utica to Syracuse, with tens of thousands of good jobs already here or on the way from GlobalFoundries to Wolfspeed to Micron.
This year, we saw the Department of Defense Microelectronics Commons Hub awarded to a statewide partnership anchored by UAlbany. Binghamton University's battery innovation and manufacturing project was named one of 10 National Science Foundation Innovation Engines in the country and has attracted state and federal grants over the last two years that could translate into more than $250 million in new investment.
On Governors Island, Stony Brook University is leading the deployment of $700 million to build the New York Climate Exchange, a campus dedicated to finding solutions to the global climate crisis, and on Long Island, Stony Brook is leading the nation and the world in the development of quantum computing.
We're poised for even more—starting with artificial intelligence, and the biggest news, of course, is the Empire AI Research Center for the public good, based at the University at Buffalo and including researchers from all four of our University Centers.
Our progress this year was fueled by hundreds of faculty members, researchers, and administrators who came together to dream with us about the future. That expertise, that drive, that excellence is what will continue to make SUNY a national leader.
In the coming year, we'll bring together faculty across the system to break new ground in sustainability via a Climate Research Task Force and in quantum physics through our Quantum Task Force.
Ultimately, we WILL double research at SUNY, because of the expertise on our campuses, in partnership with a wide range of federal and state agencies, and with the help of our elected leaders constantly growing the reach and scope of our exploration.
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And we will do so with diversity, equity, and inclusion at the forefront.
At the heart of truly evolved diversity, equity, and inclusion is a truth too seldom discussed: underrepresentation and exclusion don't come in one color, speak with one accent, hail from one type of community, or belong in college at a set age.
It's that understanding that has led us this year to establish a dedicated team of specialists working to increase campus recruitment of veterans and military-connected students and of AmeriCorps alumni. It's that same perception leading us to identify high-adversity rural and other school districts whose students will be invited on free bus trips to SUNY campuses in much greater numbers.
Concentrating on such students and focusing on their needs, their recruitment, and their success matters, and pays dividends.
I think of Farmingdale State College's Director of Veteran Services, Eric Farina, who has served 18 years in the Army on active duty, as a reservist and as a National Guard member, and recently returned from a one-year deployment in Africa. He understands that veterans can have different needs, and strengths, and his passion for helping them enroll, persist, succeed and graduate makes an enormous difference.
I would ask Eric—joined by his wife Freda Melia—to stand to be recognized for setting the standard for veteran support across SUNY.
If we want New Yorkers to see that they all have a place at SUNY, we must show them that place, help them see how it fits their needs and ambitions, and make it work for them.
Successfully implementing our new general education requirement that ensures students experience diversity, equity, and inclusion content does that.
Announcing the creation of an Asian American Pacific Islander Leadership Institute to follow the inspiring triumphs of our established Hispanic Leadership Institute and the burgeoning success of our Black Leadership Institute does that.
Revamping our PRODiG+ program into PRODiG+-Plus to increase faculty diversity by creating a pipeline of diverse postdocs into tenure-track roles does that.
And launching more pre-professional extensions of our Educational Opportunity Program does that. Last summer, I visited SUNY Downstate to spend time with the first cohorts of our pre-med Educational Opportunity Program.
One student I met was Mardiya Yousiff Traore. Marda immigrated to the United States from Ghana, coming to New York in 2018 with her parents and four siblings. An EOP student at Binghamton, she always knew she wanted to be a health professional, and when she heard about pre-med EOP from her EOP counselor, Marda jumped at the chance.
Her exposure to the varieties of medical opportunity through pre-med EOP led to a winter break internship at SUNY Optometry and the decision to attend Pennsylvania's Salus University this fall to become an optometrist.
Marda is here today, and I would ask her to stand and be recognized.
Marda is—it became obvious to me as soon as we met—an extraordinary talent, and what she got out of the program is what drives us to build on the success of pre-med EOP and the unparalleled legacy of the program with additional pre-professional opportunities, starting with mental health and engineering.
This year, we've also faced a challenge that has required a renewed commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion. On October 7, Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli civilians.
From the moment of that attack, I and our Board of Trustees condemned the horrific terrorism and stood with Israel. And since the Israel-Hamas war began, I and the Board of Trustees have mourned the devastating loss of innocent lives in Gaza.
Let me be clear: there is no place for antisemitism at SUNY or in New York. Just as there is no place for racism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, and other forms of hatred and bigotry.
That is why we provide unprecedented training in the civil rights laws and campus responsibilities intended to prevent discrimination and harassment—and respond to them promptly and fully when they surface. And we will make this training mandatory for all faculty and staff across our campuses in the coming year.
Over the past few weeks, with campuses across the nation energized and paralyzed by protest, I have been thinking about my Uncle Hal, about the balance of rights and responsibilities, and about the purpose of the public university.
Indeed, core to our civic mission is ensuring an environment where free expression and the robust exchange of ideas are protected and cherished, yet where the exercise of the 1st Amendment never turns into harassment or discrimination, vandalism or violence, or impedes the right of others to their education.
That's why we have content-neutral time, place, and manner restrictions, but more than that, it is why we must teach civic dialogue: arguments informed by nuance, disagreements conducted respectfully, and questioning that probes not only our opponents' assumptions but our own as well.
That is why I'm so proud that American history, social sciences, humanities, Western Civilization, and other world civilizations are part of SUNY's general education requirements, helping to ensure the development of foundational civic knowledge and critical thinking. And that is why I'm so proud we named our first-ever Civic Education & Engagement and Civil Discourse fellows this year: ten faculty and staff members who are working with their peers across the system to build our civics muscles.
We're also helping our students apply their civic skills and knowledge. Just yesterday, I joined Lt. Gov. Antonio Delgado at Schenectady Community College to announce the founding of the Empire State Service Corps, which will create 500 service positions across our campuses. Our students are eager to be part of the solution to our most pressing problems as a nation, and it's our job to give them the tools to do so.
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Ultimately, helping our students and communities thrive is at the very core of our charge, and perhaps the most important way we do so is through economic development and upward mobility.
Helping students garner good-paying jobs in rewarding fields, helping communities get the workers they need to be healthy, stable, and dynamic, helping families move forward and soar upward: this is our promise to New York.
We deliver on that promise at Old Westbury, ranked 28th in the nation for social mobility on the Third Way Index and named a social mobility leader by U.S. News and World Report.
We deliver on that promise at SUNY's College of Environmental Science and Forestry, named the best public institution for making an impact by the Princeton Review.
We deliver on that promise at Stony Brook University, ranked first in social mobility among highly selective public universities, first in the Association of American Universities, and third nationally among all colleges and universities.
Westchester Community College, Columbia-Greene Community College, and Suffolk Community College have all received top rankings on social mobility as well, and, across the system, we know students graduating in nursing, advanced manufacturing, cybersecurity, mechatronics, and a dozen other courses of study are getting jobs before the ink even dries on their degrees.
Our Educational Opportunity Centers are providing gateways to better lives.
And our colleges are growing new programs that students want, meeting demands no one foresaw just a few years ago. At Potsdam, a new fully online politics major, the only one at SUNY, is inducing students to complete degrees across the state. At Fredonia, a new master's in clinical mental health counseling that launched just this semester is on track to exceed enrollment targets for the fall. And at SUNY Cortland, a new tourism and recreation major with a focus on sustainability is attracting buzz—and students—for its ingenuity and appeal.
Best of all, we're doing it with tuition among the lowest in the region, and, thanks to state and federal aid, that tuition cost falls to zero for 52% of our in-state undergraduate students.
That's a story that will only improve with this year's increases to the Tuition Assistance Program, which now provides more funding and reaches more students.
Last year, we set the ambitious goal that every SUNY student will complete an internship before graduation. To help meet that goal, we invested $10 million in expanding internships. We launched—then expanded—the Chancellor's Summer Research Excellence Fund. We created the SUNY Climate Corps with our partners in state government like DEC and NYSERDA. And we spearheaded the SUNY Veterans Enrollment and Support Internship Program.
This year, we will accelerate our commitment to internships even further, investing an additional $4.5 million and moving closer to universal internships for every graduate.
In addition, campuses with significant industry commitments for new semiconductor-related jobs will get help updating curriculum with faculty and employer partners, building on and expanding great work led by Onondaga Community College.
Campuses will get support to create and enhance degree programs, stackable credentials, and microcredentials that quickly address local employer needs for electrifying the building and automotive sectors.
We will launch the SUNY Health Care Educator Scholarship Program and the Clinician-Educator Exchange Pilot Program. With a massive projected shortage of health care workers, it's SUNY's charge to head that shortage off—including by expanding our own capacity to prepare the future health care workforce.
And we will continue to grow the list of SUNY's 500 microcredentials connecting students and workers with skill-boosting opportunities. One great example of how microcredentials can change lives is the direct support professional microcredential program that SUNY and the Office for People With Developmental Disabilities developed together. OPWDD Commissioner Kerri Neifeld and I recently visited Dutchess Community College to recognize the first students completing this powerful program and to announce an extraordinary $32 million expansion. As Kerri moves on to new opportunities, I want to salute her vision, her leadership, her passion for public service, and her partnership. I would ask Kerri to stand to be recognized.
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Let me close with this: Earlier this month, I was overjoyed to deliver the commencement address at Westchester Community College. I saw diplomas bestowed upon students who were the first in their families to matriculate and students new to the United States. I saw diplomas bestowed upon grandmothers and military veterans and single mothers.
I saw nurses pinned and understood what a profession like that can mean to a young person starting out or a parent seeking the stability a true career engenders.
And I saw what America means to do, what SUNY means to do, what my Uncle Hal believed this nation could do, and what he hoped we would all someday come together to help it do.
At SUNY, we will secure the future of the state's economy and the nation's democracy by helping students learn to channel their passion and purpose, becoming civically responsible, productive citizens fighting for a civil, prosperous, tolerant, and moral society.
The State University exists to teach and learn, to discover and remember, to embrace truth and discredit lies, to create opportunities and eliminate obstacles hampering access to those opportunities—and to be the place where we come together, where we begin to know one another, where we learn to hear each other with open hearts and minds, and where we speak to each other with tolerance and grace.
And because it does all those things, the state of the State University of New York is strong. I promised you last year that as we work together, it will only grow stronger.
I believe it has. I believe it will continue to do so.
And I thank you for all you do to make that possible.
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