City Tech held its 85th graduation this year. It was one of our best graduating classes ever, smart, resourceful students, thinking hard, reaching out for solutions, connecting stories.
I attended both our Human Services department and the college graduations, giving a shout out to the students in our department:
“To all those who commuted from the Bronx and the depths of Queens to find out class was cancelled, I see you.
To those couldn't get the technology work, I see you.
To those who still don't know who their advisor is or what classes you are required to take, I see you.
To those who tried to make sense of it all and listened to each other or helped each other out, I see you.
To those who felt like it was falling apart, I see you.
To those who lived with their abuelas and their kids in one bedroom apartments, I see you.
To those who had to re take statistics, I see you.
To those who lowered the grade average for their classes, I see you.
To those who hit a wall and still came to class, I see you.
To those who forgot we had an exam but still wrote something, I see you.
To those who waited in line only to be turned away for not having the right signature, I see you.
To those who understood C is passing, I see you;
To those who never won an award, but had compassion for those we work with, I see you.
To those who never found the new paperless internship evaluation form from Dr Rosado, I see you.
To those who worked with kids who screamed or clients who couldn’t say a thing, I see you.
To those who listened when things got rough, I see you.
To those who worked with drug users or kids, or gave immigrants food, I see you.
To those who reminded their clients to know their rights, I see you.
To those who lost credits transferring or who struggled with getting the gen ed credits, or had to stay for one more term for that final liberal arts credit, I see you.
To those who stayed out late instead of studying, I see you.
To those who did all the homework and only got half credit, I see you.
To those who role played as drug users or pregnant moms in group work, I see you.
To those who were traumatized in trauma class, I see you.
To all the human services students who suffered four years or more with the wild bunch, thinking about gerontology and community org, narratives and childhood development, internship after internship, year after year, I see you.
And I say congratulations. Don't forget human services workers are change agents; don't forget the little people, the homeless, the immigrants hiding, the grandparents being gentrified out of their apartments; go out and be advocates. Listen to all the stories you can hear. Listen for the stories beneath the stories.
And don't forget to think of us every now and then, or better yet drop by and say hi, tell us about your triumphs and tragedies, the thrills of victory and agony of defeat.”
Afterward, we greeted each other, took a few snap shots.
A week later, we met at Barclay’s Center, for the college graduation.
"Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way," says Borough President Antonio Reynoso, quoting Brooklyn's Christopher George Latore Wallace, aka the notorious BiGgie Small.He talked about his childhood in New York, the child of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. He grew up on wic, snap, food stamps, the very survival programs on the chopping block in Washington. Understand reciprocity, he told our graduates. You get what you give, so give a lot. The students roared with approval, cheered for their parents, their profs, an alum from 1957 who could not graduate as he was drafted to go to Korea.
Best class ever at Citytech. Congrats graduates.
A subtext of the graduation was hump the students got over, making it through college during a war on education. One of my professors from CUNY, retired, noting that a half century ago when he started education at CUNY was free. These days students pay some $20 thousand to get through the degrees here. Still the students make it, taking their lumps, hopefully staying out of debt. Some endure homelessness; others disappear, dropping out. Others were with me the day after the election, shocked. They were with me to make it work, to read, to go to the library, to complete internship, and to apply for graduate school.
In “A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand: The Need for A United Front in the Attacks on Higher Education,” Dr Caroline Chamberlin Hellman, of City Tech, framed the problem, describing the situation here in Brooklyn on
May 30, 2025.
“Walk east across the Brooklyn Bridge and you glimpse City Tech, the City University of New York’s college of technology. In The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald tells us that “The city seen from the Queensboro Bridge is always the city seen for the first time, in its wild promise of all the mystery and the beauty of the world.” The college seen from the Brooklyn Bridge is a microcosm of the city, in its wild promise of all the mystery and beauty of the world. Inside the buildings that form the City Tech campus, 14,000 students from myriad backgrounds pursue degrees across a range of areas of study. City Tech’s next-door neighbor is NYU Tandon School of Engineering, where students pursue degree programs at an institution that is one of New York’s largest private landowners. This dichotomy of public and private can be found in higher education throughout America. Many facets of this disparity were beginning to be challenged when the second Trump administration took office and began its attacks on higher ed. Harvard’s decision to resist the Trump administration has been greeted with relief, gratitude, and praise. “No government — regardless of which party is in power — should dictate what private universities can teach, whom they can admit and hire, and which areas of study and inquiry they can pursue,” President Alan M. Garber wrote in the public letter that outlines the institution’s stand against government interference. “Freedom of thought and inquiry, along with the government’s longstanding commitment to respect and protect it, has enabled universities to contribute in vital ways to a free society and to healthier, more prosperous lives for people everywhere. All of us share a stake in safeguarding that freedom. We proceed now, as always, with the conviction that the fearless and unfettered pursuit of truth liberates humanity—and with faith in the enduring promise that America’s colleges and universities hold for our country and our world.” Expressing support for Harvard’s resistance, Stanford President Jonathan Levin and Provost Jenny Martinez heralded the history of higher education in the United States, noting that “Harvard’s objections to the letter it received are rooted in the American tradition of liberty, a tradition essential to our country’s universities, and worth defending.” Steeped in the revolutionary language of our country’s founding documents, both Harvard’s letter and Stanford’s response speak to notions of the public good but mount a defense only of private institutions. Garber’s statement that “Neither Harvard nor any other private university can allow itself to be taken over by the federal government” calls into question what the future of higher education will be if public and private universities are divided not only by the cost of their degrees but also by government-mandated programming, curriculum, and hiring. Private and public degree offerings will become increasingly disparate as private institutions attempt to safeguard liberal education and an informed, empowered citizenry, while public institutions, some of which have already been choked by political zealotry, are plunged into dystopia—or, in the wake of resistance, face the loss of accreditation. As with the arbitrary gutting of the federal workforce and programs which served communities large and small, the damage done to more vulnerable, less moneyed institutions of higher education will not be easy to repair. Harvard can afford resistance to the Trump administration. What will befall public colleges and universities? City Tech, where I teach and have served as an administrator, is a part of the City University of New York, the largest public urban university in the United States. As a baccalaureate and associate degree-granting institution, City Tech is “committed to providing broad access to high quality technological and professional education for a diverse urban population.” Here, the revocation of grant funding affects not only innovative research, but also pivotal student success programs that support the “broad access” of our mission. The idea that all institutions of higher ed should follow in Harvard’s footsteps is noble but does not acknowledge quotidian reality; as analysts have noted, a limited number of institutions boast the endowments to independently combat the administration’s demands. Higher education has been under sustained attack for decades, and academia has sputtered in its own defense, long believing that the majority hold truths about the value of education to be self-evident. The escalating assaults on multiple fronts, combined with the latest attempts to dismantle access to education, present a crucial opportunity to appraise and reform the divisions we may take for granted. We must think about how an exhaustive focus on elite private institutions does not recognize the millions of hardworking students who pursue degrees elsewhere and contribute meaningfully to our society. We must reflect upon the multitude of ways in which public universities further the public good. In a smaller version of the coalition that is called for across the country, The Big Ten Academic Alliance, comprised of eighteen universities, passed a resolution for a Mutual Defense Compact in Defense of Academic Freedom, Institutional Integrity, and the Research Enterprise. The Call for Constructive Engagement, a petition circulated by The American Association of Colleges and Universities and signed by hundreds of college and university presidents, is a positive step toward realizing representation from a spectrum of higher ed institutions: community colleges, HBCUs, Ivy League universities, women’s colleges, public university systems, small liberal arts colleges and large universities. Resistance to tyranny has never been free, and liberty cannot be selective: all colleges and universities, public and private, merit protection from incursion. Beyond resolutions, colleges and universities must pursue aggressive, collective legal defense, fundraising, and communication strategy, allying with neighboring institutions just across the street, county, state, and country. Just as America cannot afford to pursue isolationism, American higher educational institutions across the geographic, disciplinary, and ideological spectrum must abandon notions of exceptionalism, instead banding together on an unprecedented scale to form a more perfect union. The entire landscape of higher education in the United States, red state and blue, will emerge the better for it.”
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