Chancellor John B. King Jr.
Good morning.
I know it's the end of a school year. But I'd like us to think for a moment about beginnings… particularly inauspicious ones.
Who here has ever felt out of place? Maybe at a new school, a summer camp, a job? I'm talking about the kind of situation where you're surrounded by people and promise… yet don't feel closeness or connection.
For me, one of those moments came in college: Having lost both of my parents by the age of 12… and having moved around for years between family members and schools… I struggled as a teenager. Like many young people who have experienced trauma, I felt lost, lonely, and often angry. I struggled so much with adult authority, I actually got kicked out of high school.
Only the intervention of teachers, a school counselor, and family members who were willing to give me a second chance made it possible for me to get back on track and go to college.
But when I got there, I was convinced that even though I had been a strong and serious student, I didn't belong. I had to write two essays as part of my college application – the regular one… and one about why I was expelled. I worried that someone from the admissions office would tap me on the shoulder one day and say they had made a mistake, that maybe that second essay about being expelled had fallen behind a cabinet and now that they found it, they realized I wasn't the right fit.
I wondered how I could possibly measure up to peers who seemed to wear their excellence with nonchalance… whose future successes seemed written in the stars. As an Afro-Latino man entering a class with the lowest number of Black freshmen in decades, I felt especially unsure of my place.
But unlike at other moments in my childhood, I decided to fight this feeling this time. I had planned to major in government, and I had a loose notion that I wanted to volunteer. Those two things brought me to the Phillips Brooks House Association—an umbrella organization for dozens of programs that served youth and adults in the community.
I started by teaching a volunteer civics class once a week in a local Boston public school, and added teaching conflict resolution as well. I was then asked to lead a summer enrichment camp in the Mission Hill section of Roxbury, Boston's historically African-American neighborhood.
I spent my college summers living with other camp counselors in the community where we worked. At the time, the Mission Main Housing Development was notorious for its drug trade and violence. Our cramped Mission Main apartment had no air conditioning, but a steady flow of roaches. Each night after camp, we'd stay up talking for hours about the kids and the challenges in the neighborhood… about the limits and possibilities of public service, about the connections between what we were learning in our economics and political science courses and the barriers we saw facing families in Mission Hill each day, and about how to best break down those barriers and achieve meaningful social change.
That period changed my life.
I no longer had the time to focus on my own sense of alienation. I had discovered my place and my people.
Through Phillips Brooks House, I met my best friend and future best man at my wedding, Eric Dawson, who went on to devote his career to combating school violence and promoting youth leadership.
And I met Maribel Tineo. Maribel grew up in a low-income, immigrant neighborhood in West Harlem. She was a phenomenal summer counselor, and she went on to a career as a social studies teacher and administrator in the New York City schools. She now teaches education and human development courses as a lecturer at the State University of New York at Binghamton.
Being at Mission Hill was where she discovered, as she says, "who I wanted to be." I am grateful that Maribel has joined us today.
I felt the exact same way Maribel did. Through Phillips Brooks House and the Mission Hill summer program, I found a sense of direction, purpose, and passion—for teaching civics and history, yes, but also for trying to make our democracy live up to its highest ideals through education.
It is because I found myself in service learning in college that I believe so strongly that higher education can be a vehicle that prepares students to do well and to do good.
That we have, in public higher education, a unique responsibility to prepare both the future workforce and future citizens.
That we have a critical role to play in advancing cures for diseases and innovative new technologies… and a unique and urgent responsibility to forge a future that is humane and connected.
The puzzle of public higher education has always been: is it all possible? Can we do it all with rigor and excellence—and keep it affordable and accessible?
I have an answer to that question.
Yes! Because, at SUNY, we already are.
We're making thriving lives and thriving communities possible.
We educate and serve.
We deliver value by living our values.
And we do it thanks to the unwavering faith of our Board of Trustees under the leadership of Chairman Merryl Tisch. We have made historic investments thanks to the bold leadership of Governor Kathy Hochul, as well as legislative champions, led by Senate Majority Leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins and Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, along with our Higher Education Committee Chairs, Toby Stavisky in the Senate and Alicia Hyndman in the Assembly. I am profoundly grateful for all our local, state, and federal partners, whose belief in the integrity of SUNY's mission sustains and fuels us forward.
And I would not be standing here were it not for the love and support of my partner in all things, Melissa Steel King.
At a time when public higher education is still under attack by leaders at the federal level, and—perhaps just as damaging—a time when doomerism and cynicism too often rule the day, our successes at SUNY stand in sharp rebuke to anyone who says higher education is adrift, or not worth the investment, or lacking in guiding principles.
To them, we say: come to SUNY, where we open doors. Come to SUNY, where there's a place for every New Yorker to thrive.
We hear a lot—rightly—about all the ways it is hard to afford living in this country today.
At SUNY, affordable excellence has long been our greatest strength. Thanks to Governor Hochul and the State Legislature, we have kept tuition to just over $7,000 per year at our four-year campuses, and generous state and federal financial aid helps more than half of our in-state undergraduates attend tuition-free.
Over the last three years, we have achieved back-to-back-to-back enrollment gains across every sector.
All across the state, we help students from every background graduate with the critical thinking abilities fostered by a well-rounded, rigorous general education, real-world skills, and strong career prospects—without a mountain of debt.
Sometimes, those students are coming straight from high school.
But increasingly, SUNY helps launch a second act—and makes manifest a once impossible dream.
That was the case for Ari and Chris Vanderweyde. Ari was a cosmetologist from Nassau County who'd planned to go to school for engineering. Chris was a kid from Suffolk County who'd wanted to study criminal justice. They first met while working at a Lowe's Home Improvement store in the Southern Tier, and they bonded over the grueling work of yearly inventory, and the culture shock of feeling like outsiders in tight-knit rural communities.
Their first date took place in aisle 8. They married in 2021; that same year, Ari's father suffered a near-fatal brain aneurysm. Together, with Ari's mom, the couple dropped everything to give him round-the-clock care.
As they did, their own priorities changed. They were inspired by the EMTs who helped Ari's father, who'd become some of their first friends in the region. Chris's interest soon shifted from criminal justice to emergency management services. He became a volunteer firefighter, then earned his EMT certification. Seeing the fulfillment Chris found in the work, Ari joined him.
But each longed to do more, so they enrolled full-time in the paramedic program at SUNY Broome. This proved financially and logistically hard to juggle with their part-time work as EMTs, and with caring for Ari's father. With deep sadness, they admitted the squeeze was too much, and they dropped out.
Then Ari's mom, a retired state employee, told them about SUNY Reconnect. She'd read about Governor Hochul's free community college program for adults between the ages of 25 and 55 without a college degree. She thought Ari and Chris might qualify.
They did. The two returned to the paramedic program at SUNY Broome this past fall.
And they have, in SUNY, a place that helps make their lives of service not only possible, but easier. A place that not only supports but shares their values of serving their community—and that makes that path as affordable as possible.
Chris and Ari are expected to graduate next year.
Since we launched SUNY Reconnect, more than 5,600 adult learners like Ari and Chris are starting their next chapters on our campuses. Beginning next fall, we'll expand to serve more New Yorkers, in more high-demand fields and on additional campuses that offer associate degrees.
Everywhere I go, I tell folks that our very first responsibility in higher education is to make sure students who start, finish. At SUNY, we are absolutely unyielding in our commitment to degree completion. So, in a time of economic upheaval and technological transformation, we are betting on the most time-tested support our society knows: a human connection that guides and uplifts.
We first pledged to implement the nation's leading retention and completion programs—ASAP and ACE—in 2023. ASAP and ACE are centered around the strength of one-on-one connections; students in these programs get access to personalized advising services, financial support, flexible course schedules, career advising, and more.
We have not only implemented these programs—more than 7,000 students across 34 SUNY campuses are currently enrolled—but we continue to scale them. We're on track to reach 10,000 students through ASAP and ACE this coming fall.
These programs have transformed the college experience for students like Ashley Reyes, a rising senior at SUNY New Paltz from the Bronx. Ashley's ACE counselor told her she might lose out on her TAP grant if she did not fill out critical financial aid paperwork, something Ashley had been unaware of. She's also encouraged Ashley's many passions and ambitions, making sure she stays on-track to graduate on time while being able to pursue each one. Ashley plans to graduate next May, with a double major in Deaf Studies and Political Science, and a double minor in Adolescent Education and Theater Arts.
She hopes to eventually get a master's degree in education, or maybe work in social media management.
Ashley—we love your many passions. The sky's the limit.
Ashley is here with us. Let's give Ashley a round of applause.
So we've taken what we know works from ASAP and ACE, and we're expanding it across the SUNY System. Our landmark academic momentum campaign is now helping integrate evidence-based strategies, like degree mapping and targeted advising, so every student who begins at SUNY sees a clear path to completing a degree and gets all the support they need to get there. This year, we will go even further to strengthen advising, redesign gateway courses, and make transfer work even better.
And because we believe that our mission is preparing students for great careers and thriving lives… and because it is nearly impossible to think about going to class if your car breaks down, if your kid gets sick, if you experience housing or food insecurity—as far too many students across the country do—we are strengthening basic needs supports like transportation assistance, emergency aid grants, and better access to fresh food after-hours at our campus food pantries. We do this knowing that addressing students' basic needs creates the enabling conditions for the rich, rigorous, and engaging academic experiences we seek to provide.
We are also very clear that affordable excellence means securing the pathway to a college degree for students from all walks of life. Diversity, equity, and inclusion are literally written into SUNY's DNA. Our values are clear in our enabling legislation, enacted more than 75 years ago, which proudly describes SUNY's mission to "provide to the people of New York educational services of the highest quality, with the broadest possible access, fully representative of all segments of the population…."
I am proud of the ways we've been able to grow our dedication to inclusive excellence over the last several years: building pipelines for leaders from all backgrounds, recruiting faculty committed to excellence through diversity, equity, and inclusion via our PRODiG+ postdoctoral fellowship, requiring all faculty, staff, and student leaders to get trained in federal Title VI civil rights protections, and making absolutely clear there is no place for antisemitism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, Islamophobia, or any other form of hatred on our campuses.
I'm excited about the ways we'll continue this work… from more support for neurodiversity and students with disabilities… to new strategies to enroll and support veterans.
Sometimes, inclusion is about the most basic things, like finding hair care products that help you feel like yourself. At SUNY Brockport, I met Chantel Francis, who created a vending machine filled with beauty and hair care products designed for people of color that they can access right on campus. It's called "Hello Beauty." This year, we will provide grants to campuses for these seemingly small improvements that can mean the difference between students feeling at home and feeling adrift.
I have so much confidence in our ability to open our doors ever wider, in part, because it's what we have always done. One of New York State's hallmark programs, which exemplifies our creed that there is a place at SUNY for every New Yorker, is our Educational Opportunity Program. EOP provides life-changing opportunities to students from low-income backgrounds who didn't get what they needed to succeed academically in their K-12 schooling.
With the right support and community, EOP students thrive. EOP graduates can be found in every corner of New York's economy and in all kinds of positions of leadership. They are CEOs, doctors, performers, innovators.
They are state assemblymembers—like one former EOP student whose high school guidance counselor once told her she just "wasn't college material." That former student is our Assembly Majority Leader, Crystal Peoples-Stokes.
Can all our EOP counselors, EOP alums, and EOP students in the audience please stand for a round of applause?
We are expanding on the great legacy of EOP by adding more EOP Scholars programs to prepare our EOP students for careers in computer science, cybersecurity, and artificial intelligence. We will also launch a first-generation ambassador program—modeled on our successful EOP ambassador program—to create a student leadership pipeline for students who are the first in their family to attend college.
Ultimately, classrooms enlivened by diverse perspectives—socioeconomic, racial and ethnic, cultural and religious, regional, experiential, intellectual, political and more—foster richer, more generative discussions and lead to more fulfilling college experiences for our students… more creative research questions… and more academic excellence.
SUNY is central to New York's economic development strategy. Nearly every New Yorker lives within 30 miles of one of our 64 campuses. SUNY generates $35.5 billion in impact for New York State each year, supports more than 165,000 jobs statewide, and generates an estimated $7.38 in economic activity for every dollar of State funding.
We are using this unique reach to connect students to careers, grow the economy, and serve as a powerful engine of upward mobility. That's why we are increasing the number of evening and weekend courses offered at our community colleges to support our students—especially adult learners. And because one in five college students across the country are parents, we are boosting support for student-parents, including the addition of child-friendly lounges, study areas, and more.
We also know that in today's world, a degree alone is often not enough. Students who complete internships are more likely to secure job offers before graduation, earn higher starting salaries, and experience higher rates of career satisfaction.
And so, three years ago, we promised we'd work towards providing a high-quality internship or other experiential learning opportunity for every SUNY undergraduate.
Each year since, we've made great investments and great progress. Thanks to our Governor and Legislature, we've provided $14.5 million in annual funding to campuses to expand paid internships. We've launched some incredible programs—from the SUNY Climate Corps to the Veterans Enrollment and Support Internships, to the Chancellor's Summer Research Excellence Fund.
The work goes on: this year, the Governor launched the SUNY Career Connect program to fund more than $7 million in paid internships, and we will also continue to increase the value of our degrees by embedding more industry-recognized certificates into our academic programs.
We are proud of all the ways we consistently demonstrate excellence in preparing the future workforce—whether that's filling gaps for healthcare professionals, or partnerships with the semiconductor industry at Onondaga Community College or SUNY Poly. And now, we are helping our students and communities navigate a world with artificial intelligence.
I can think of few topics today that provoke the level of economic and existential anxiety that AI does, and yet, I believe AI presents an opportunity to live our values. No matter what happens in five, 10, or 100 years… creativity, communication, and problem-solving are not just skills that can be taught—they are inexorably human, relational practices that help us navigate the world. In fact, these are the very same values a liberal arts education is meant to cultivate. This only reinforces what we know to be true: the liberal arts can and will have enduring value to our students, our society, and our economy.
But our job is also to prepare students to step into an uncertain future. We want to make sure all students, no matter their field of study, can evaluate information critically and understand the ethical dimensions of how information is created, used, and disseminated. That's why we updated our General Education information literacy core competency to include AI.
To support all our faculty in embedding the responsible use of AI in their curricula, we've named AI Faculty Fellows for the Public Good to work with their peers across campuses. Next year, we will also offer micro-grants to faculty members across disciplines—physics, health care, economics, philosophy—to explore what responsible AI can mean for their own courses. Already, we've seen our campuses find innovative ways to engage with AI literacy, such as an "Economics of Sports" class at SUNY Delhi. This class asks students to compete with an AI bot to predict which March Madness college basketball coaches will get fired after their teams' seasons end.
President Bonderoff: May I audit this course?
One of our AI for the Public Good Fellows, Dr. Diane Shichtman, who teaches a popular AI literacy course at SUNY Empire State University, offers a beautiful framework for thinking about artificial intelligence. She says it's not unlike the world of transportation. We didn't just get in a car and drive one day. We had to build roads and rules for those roads. Likewise, we need to make critical decisions about AI, and put up streetlights, signals, and stop signs.
I am pleased Diane has joined us today.
We're also deeply invested in finding responsible uses for AI through our research work at Empire AI, hosted at UB… through the first independent AI ethics research center at any public university in the U.S. at Binghamton… and through the research leadership of UAlbany, Stony Brook, and campuses throughout the System.
Speaking of new realities: as I stood on this stage last year, I promised that while SUNY was far from immune to the federal threats to higher education research budgets, our resolve was unwavering. I am proud to report that resolve has borne fruit over the past year. Consistent with Governor Hochul's goal to double SUNY research, we are breaking new ground and leading the way in everything from treatments for intractable diseases… to better understanding devastating conditions like Alzheimer's and PTSD… to emerging fields like Quantum.
Last fall, Governor Hochul and I traveled to Stony Brook to announce an extraordinary, $300 million State investment in the Quantum Research and Innovation Hub. The Hub's primary focus is building a secure and unhackable communication network that stretches across the state; this will pave the way for unbreakable cybersecurity, speedier than ever medical discoveries, cleaner energy solutions and, ultimately, a major new high-tech job market.
We also launched the SUNY Brain Institute, a multi-campus initiative focused on expanding our groundbreaking neuroscience research, and a major expansion of the RNA Institute at UAlbany, where Dr. Thomas Begley is matching cancer patients with newly developed treatments. His lab does this through software that allows them to analyze big data sets and identify patients who would benefit from specific therapies, ensuring SUNY leads the way as personalized medicine grows more capable and accessible.
Thank you, Dr. Begley, for your research and for being with us today.
We will continue to invest in research leadership. And we'll continue to reward success in research at all levels, adding a new SUNY-wide award for excellence in undergraduate research.
Thanks to the Governor and Legislature, we are demonstrating our leadership in sustainability research and climate action by investing in Mass Timber research at SUNY ESF and our new multi-campus Agritech Center. We're also doubling down on the labs and research facilities at our University Centers that will lead to new inventions, cures, and innovations.
I started today by telling you that what I love so much about SUNY is that we get to do and to be all of the things I believe higher education should embody. We provide degrees with value in the marketplace. We pursue academic excellence in the classroom and conduct world-class research and scholarship. We give students a foundation that prepares them to be citizens of a healthy democracy.
And it's true that I love the multidimensional nature of our success. Today celebrates that. It is also true that I cannot help but light up every time I talk about civic education and service learning. Now you can understand why! And it's especially true when I talk to—or about—any one of our Empire State Service Corps members. In them, I see myself. I see the next generation of Eric Dawsons and Maribel Tineos, and I feel renewed with hope.
Brian Brown is one of many Service Corps members I've been privileged to get to know. He's studying HVAC at Hudson Valley Community College. We are thrilled he could be with us today, because his days are usually jam-packed. He spends his mornings on his Service Corps hours at a Veterans Affairs Outreach Center. He's there by 8 a.m., after dropping off his four kids at daycare right on HVCC's campus. Then he's off to classes, more parenting, and working an overnight shift. Brian receives childcare assistance through SUNY, and his tuition and supplies are covered through SUNY Reconnect. Working with veterans and his fellow Service Corps members and mentors allows him to spend time with people he would never have met otherwise.
Let's give Brian a round of applause.
Brian is one of more than 500 students who have participated in paid public service internships through the Service Corps. In its first year, we received four applications for every available slot. I'm thrilled that Governor Hochul has now doubled the number of students who can participate in Service Corps this fall. We'll use some of these new slots to launch a disaster response team, as well as prepare K-12 reading tutors trained in evidence-based Science of Reading practices.
At SUNY, service learning is just one part of a broader civics and service agenda, which, starting this fall, requires students to build constructive dialogue skills and to flex their civil discourse muscles as part of our General Education framework.
Our view is that upholding our fragile democracy includes a fidelity not to any ideology, but to a pluralistic society—that we should strive for, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. called it, a beloved community. Civil discourse is not just about different cultures and races and religions and ideas coexisting. Rather, it calls on us to understand experiences and perspectives outside of our own, and, where we can't resolve differences, to cultivate a habit of mind that lets us hold two, maybe seemingly contradictory ideas at once.
Last winter, I was reminded of the force of that power while on a family vacation in South Africa. At the very beginning of our trip, we visited Constitution Hill in Johannesburg. For years, it housed a prison for those who resisted the cruelty and inhumanity of apartheid. Gandhi was once held there for the "crime" of refusing to "register" as an Indian man. Nelson Mandela was held there while awaiting trial for treason.
Today, Constitution Hill is a museum that tells the story of the worst relics of a dark time in the making of a democracy—a becoming fraught with a painful legacy of racism, not unlike ours.
The old prison sits right beside the new Constitutional Court—a place of laws, and justice. And the court, a place meant to establish and restore a respect for human rights, was intentionally built with stones and bricks from the prison.
The juxtaposition was an incredibly moving reminder that struggle is part of democracy's story, and that our own civic institutions—our courts, our city halls, our schools, and our universities—are a crucial part of the group project we've called America for 250 years and counting. This notion can be found everywhere in the writing of our founders, at every critical juncture of our history—including the struggle for civil rights—and everywhere in our story today.
That story has always been a story of struggle and triumph…of dark moments and committed citizens ushering in a new dawn.
At SUNY, too, we must constantly hold "both, and." Our challenge and our great opportunity is this: Can we fulfill the multiple purposes of our institution to their fullest potential?
Future citizens and a future workforce.
Hub of groundbreaking innovation and time-tested critical, humanistic learning.
Thriving lives and thriving communities.
Success and service.
Value and values?
We can. We are. And we will.
Thank you.
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