SUNY Board of Trustees and Chancellor Statement on Speaker Appearance at UB
March 9, 2023
"We have made and witnessed great progress in our state and nation ensuring that our transgender friends, colleagues, students, family, and neighbors feel a sense of security and belonging, and are, in fact, safe and included. It is extremely dangerous to delegitimize and stigmatize transgender people by arguing they have no right to exist. References to ‘eradication’ are horrifying when leveled at any group of people. At SUNY it is core to our mission that we secure and promote an inclusive environment where our students thrive. Such hateful speech only redoubles our certainty that building learning communities that appreciate and respect diversity in all its forms, every person and every culture, is central to our mission."
About the State University of New York
The State University of New York is the largest comprehensive system of higher education in the United States, and more than 95 percent of all New Yorkers live within 30 miles of any one of SUNY’s 64 colleges and universities. Across the system, SUNY has four academic health centers, five hospitals, four medical schools, two dental schools, a law school, the country’s oldest school of maritime, the state's only college of optometry, 12 Educational Opportunity Centers, over 30 ATTAIN digital literacy labs, and manages one US Department of Energy National Laboratory. In total, SUNY serves about 1.7 million students across its portfolio of credit- and non-credit-bearing courses and programs, continuing education, and community outreach programs. SUNY oversees nearly a quarter of academic research in New York. Research expenditures system-wide are nearly $1.5 billion in fiscal year 2025, including significant contributions from students and faculty. There are more than three million SUNY alumni worldwide, and annually one in three New Yorkers who earn a college degree is a SUNY alum. To learn more about how SUNY creates opportunities, visit suny.edu.
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Holly Liapis
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