Dear Hunter College community members,
It is beyond exciting to have the Hunter family back together for the new academic year! We’ll miss — and are, of course, supremely proud of — the 5,874 undergraduate and graduate students who earned their degrees this past May, but we are thrilled to welcome 6,517 new students this fall. This includes what may be the largest class of first-year students in Hunter’s history (which we’ll know for sure once registration activity settles down), more than half of whom are first-generation college-going — powerful evidence that our legacy as an anchor institution that is an exceptional engine of social mobility is going strong. We also are welcoming 49 new faculty members this fall and another 11 in 2026 across the schools of Arts and Sciences, Education, Health Professions, Nursing, and Social Work, along with the 543 new staff members we’ve welcomed college-wide over the past year. These numbers illustrate vividly how we are building our capacities at Hunter and speak volumes about the ways that our faculty, staff, students, and alumni, too, make Hunter the place to be.
On the flip side of that: The world really needs Hunter right now. The challenges we see manifesting locally — from climate change and sustainability, to gentrification, overincarceration, affordability, intercultural conflict, health equity, caring for an aging population, increasing inclusion, forced migration, science skepticism, workers’ rights, civic disengagement, sustaining democracy, and beyond — also are facing communities across the nation and around the globe. It’s no coincidence that these are many of the very challenges that members of the Hunter family are working on day in and day out in their publicly engaged scholarship and community collaborations — we see the connections and are striving to work collectively to create a world that is a safer, more just, and more peaceful place for all.
We know that this work begins at home, so to speak, and at Hunter we have a strong foundation to build on thanks to the expansive, deep-impact work that faculty, staff, and students have been doing to strengthen our cohesion as a community. First and foremost, we should all be clear that Hunter has been and will remain a place where people of all backgrounds and identities are invited, welcomed, and nurtured. Our greatness as a college lies in the degree to which we realize that in each new generation. We categorically reject attempts to reverse that progress and, in the face of rising bigotry today, we recommit ourselves to investing in efforts to cultivate and leverage our diversity in every dimension for our collective good.
Toward that end, we will be extending our series of faculty-, staff-, and student-driven events under the theme of Promoting Civil Discourse and Intellectual Dialogue, with soon-to-be-announced events throughout the new academic year. Likewise, we want to build on the foundational work of our student Affinity Spaces on the third floor of Thomas Hunter Hall as places where all are welcome to celebrate our diverse identities, building intra-group solidarity and inter-group connectedness (questions about connecting here may be directed to the Dean of Students at deanstud@hunter.cuny.edu), and spaces such as our International Student Office, Immigrant Student Success Center, and the Maralyn G. Cohn LGBTQ Community Space, the Leonard Dunston space at the Silberman School of Social Work, and the Health Professions Education Center in Brookdale West at the Hunter-Bellevue School of Nursing remain vital resources for guidance and support in our campus community. Our newest such space, the Transfer Student Success Center, a one-stop hub of multi-faceted support, is open in the West Building of the 68th Street campus, room 417.
We’ll also continue building out our physical infrastructure this year, improving the spaces we have for instruction, research, and gathering, as a way of building our social infrastructure that supports academic success and growth personally and collectively. At 68th Street, you may have noticed the new seating we’ve installed on the pedestrian bridges and the ongoing installation of new furniture in lounges in the West Building. We also recently have brought amenities to the Lenox Hill campus that largely already exist at Silberman and Brookdale, including gender-neutral bathrooms (North Building 359, 759, 764, and 920; Thomas Hunter Hall 316), lactation rooms (North Building 324 and West Building 723), and meditation rooms (West Building 105A and 105B). This year, we will continue moving methodically through our list of planned facilities upgrades to support our aspirations — a list informed directly by the Hunter family’s responses to our one-question, community-wide survey last year that helped launch our strategic planning process.
Speaking of which, strategic planning will kick into high gear this fall inspired by the dreams and aspirations for Hunter articulated in the survey. Building on the town halls and group meetings of last year, we will work to ensure that we keep our eye on our values, mission, vision, and legacy of Hunter — for example, our excellence in achieving social mobility for our next diverse generation, our support for scholarship addressing local challenges that resonate globally, and our partnerships with the many diasporic communities and organizations across this city. We want the strategic plan that results to reinforce all of these pillars of our identity as an anchor institution — social mobility, publicly engaged scholarship, and collaboration in and with community partners — reflecting our physical presence from East Harlem to Lenox Hill to Kips Bay to Tribeca and driving home our place-based commitment to New York City with “third spaces” across our footprint where college and community come together as true partners. Stay tuned in the coming weeks for an invitation to students, faculty, and staff to self-nominate to serve on work groups that will draft recommendations for addressing major themes identified through the strategic plan survey.
In all of these, among many other, ways, we will continue doing everything we can to realize what one of the great s/heroes of all time, the late Hunter alumna and professor Audre Lorde, had in mind when she said to her students more than 40 years ago:
“Our differences are polarities between which can spark possibilities for a future we cannot even now imagine, when we acknowledge that we share a unifying vision, no matter how differently expressed; a vision which supposes a future where we may all flourish, as well as a living earth upon which to support our choices. We must define our differences so that we may someday live beyond them, rather than change them.”
As a poet and scholar who transcended categorization herself, Lorde knew well the healing and uniting power of the arts to uplift us, allow us to experience each other, and see the power of our diversity in action. That legacy lives on today in Hunter community members who are prolific in creating opportunities for exactly that, for example in the documentary by Hunter film professor Kelly Anderson and colleagues, Emergent City, now streaming on PBS, the States of Incarceration exhibition now installed on the sixth floor of Hunter’s Cooperman Library at 68th Street from our newly resident Humanities Action Lab, the Last Art School exhibition opening this week at the 205 Hudson Street home of our M.F.A. studio art program, and the upcoming Women in Jazz celebration of jazz legends at the Sylvia and Danny Kaye Playhouse in Hunter North at 68th Street.
At a time when we are facing historic challenges to a unifying vision of a more inclusive, more just, and more peaceful world, let’s recommit ourselves at the start of this new academic year to take such opportunities to come together and build the future locally that we want to see globally.
In solidarity,
Nancy Cantor
President and Professor of Psychology
