Project Will Streamline Access to Sources From 25 Campuses, Promoting Use of Materials That Are ‘Richly Intertwined’ With the History of New York City
Will Catalog, Organize and Further Digitize Special Collections, Including Material Related to Politician Shirley Chisholm, Philosopher Bertrand Russell and Poet William Butler Yeats
Shirley Chisholm, right, whose work is archived as part of the CUNY Digital History Archive and also at Brooklyn College.
The City University of New York has received a $2 million grant from the Mellon Foundation to create a centralized institutional archive. The funding will be used to establish a single public point of access for its 31 libraries and many of its 100 cultural centers and institutes, many of which house collections of significant historical interest. The work will standardize archive procedures across the system, making more of the material easier for historians and the public to find, including thousands of digitized photographs, news clippings, historical documents, video footage and oral histories that are contained in the CUNY Digital History Archive and campus archives. This will also create public access to CUNY’s Central Office University Archives, a collection of thousands of administrative and internal records dating to 1926.
“CUNY has been a focal point for waves of newly arrived Americans and social justice movements that have transformed higher education, and its history is richly intertwined with that of New York City and the United States. As a historian, this gift and what it means for the preservation of CUNY’s story, brings me tremendous joy,” said CUNY Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “This generous donation will create an essential resource for historians, students, alumni and the public, and it will help to secure CUNY’s legacy by preserving our institutional memory for generations to come. We are grateful to the Mellon Foundation for its continued support.”
Expanding Students’ Perspectives
The funding will allow the CUNY Central Office of Library Services to hire three full-time archivists who will work with students from the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies to sort and inventory the resources currently in CUNY’s libraries and records warehouse.
The grant will also support a large cohort of Faculty Fellows, who will promote teaching with archives by incorporating material from the collections into their course curricula, creating new and enriched educational opportunities for students.
Students and faculty from Hostos Community College march to advocate for the acquisition of the building at 500 Grand Concourse to expand the college’s usable space. The sign, in Spanish, translates to, “We Struggle United for More Space.”
“Faculty are hungry for opportunities to work with primary sources in the classroom, such as those found in the CUNY Digital History Archive. They provide outlets to examine bias, develop historical empathy and experience history first-hand,” said Kristin Hart, University dean of libraries and information resources, who will serve as the project’s principal investigator.
Created in 2014, the CUNY Digital History Archive is an open, participatory archive of curators, historians, archivists and others who are committed to collecting, preserving and amplifying CUNY history so it can support faculty research and teaching and be shared with students and the public.
Uncovering History
The project will make available thousands of previously inaccessible records from the Central Office archives — currently contained in 7,000 boxes that will be sorted and cataloged — that help tell the University’s story. Many files and documents are related to the stories of emerging communities that fought for access public higher education: These include documents about the formation of Hostos Community College and Medgar Evers College in response to demands from the Latino and Black communities, as well as the adoption of CUNY’s open admissions policy in 1970 and papers from its architect, senior vice chancellor Julius Edelstein, who also worked with Shirley Chisholm, Percy Ellis Sutton and others drafting legislation that led to the creation of the Percy Ellis Sutton SEEK program and College Discovery. These renowned Higher Educational Opportunity Programs trace their origins to the civil rights era and continue to serve thousands of students today.
CUNY students picket to save the University’s open admissions and free tuition policies. Documents related to the adoption of the open admissions policy will be made available through the project.
CUNY librarians have noted an upsurge in scholarly interest in the University’s history as it relates to diversity, social mobility and social movements, which has also been seen in films such as “The Five Demands,” books such as “New York Liberation School” and digital humanities resources like The CUNY 1969 Project.
CUNY’s Collections
CUNY’s 31 libraries, all of which are open to any CUNY student, serve more than 14 million visitors annually, with holdings that include 6.2 million books, more than 3,500 databases for science, law and other topics, more than 300,000 electronic books and many unusual pieces of memorabilia. Some notable items and documents from the University’s archives and special collections include:
- The Shirley Chisholm ’72 Collection, which includes correspondence, rare magazines, more than 300 photos and video footage; Brooklyn College
- A tenor saxophone from American jazz musician Al Sears; York College
- First editions of the works of William Butler Yeats; City College
- 1620 first English printing of Don Quixote; Queens College
- Handmade letters of sympathy and support to CUNY in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks; Borough of Manhattan Community College
- A science fiction collection of rare books, first editions and first-run magazines occupying more than 600 linear feet of shelf space; NYC College of Technology
- Black Panther Party newspapers and posters; Medgar Evers College
- Memorial book for victims of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Fire; LaGuardia Community College
- Noted photographer Pablo Delano’s “On the Job” 1986 photography collection, with 65 gelatin prints depicting businesses on the Bronx’s E. 149th Street; Hostos Community College
- Submissions from “Black Perspective,” a student-run journal published during the 1970s that focused on issues facing Black students; Lehman College
- Information about the controversial history and closure of the Willowbrook State School, an institution for people with developmental disabilities that operated from the 1940s to the 1980s, on the current site of the College of Staten Island; College of Staten Island
- Correspondence related to philosopher Bertrand Russell’s 1940 court case, which sparked wide debate about academic freedom; University archives
- Materials related to the proceedings of the Rapp-Coudert Committee, which served as a model for interrogations during the McCarthy era; University archives
CUNY’s Centers and Institutes
Besides its libraries, CUNY is also home to more than 100 centers and institutes, many with their own distinctive holdings. These include the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College (CENTRO), which received a $20 million dollar investment from New York State in 2023 to expand its library and archives; CLAGS, the Center for LGBTQ Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center, which was the first University-based research center focused on LGBTQI+ issues in the United States; AAARI, the Asian American/Asian Research Institute at Queens College, which focuses on research and scholarship relevant to Asia, Asian American and other Asian diasporas; and the CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, the nation’s first university-based research institute devoted to the study of people of Dominican descent in the U.S. and other parts of the world.
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving more than 225,000 undergraduate and graduate students and awarding 50,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background. To learn more about CUNY, visit https://www.cuny.edu.
###
