Millions of New Yorkers have personal history with the City University of New York- current enrollment in CUNY alone is 250,000 New Yorkers! Eighty-two percent of those students graduated from New York City high schools, and the same percentage remain New York City residents after graduation. CUNY is the “People’s University,” and its 180-year history reflects the city’s development and struggles.
New Yorkers are not generally quiet about their demands, and CUNY students and faculty are no exception. In CUNY’s archival records, we see a continuous history of agitation for educational excellence and access. Like students and faculty in the 1930s and 1960s [see figures 1 and 2], contemporary CUNY students and faculty continue the tradition of activism for improvements to curriculum and policies. Supporting a vigorous exploration of that history is essential. So, as part of the three-year Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory project currently underway to explore and promote the use of CUNY’s massive archival collections while unifying the systems used to manage them, my team and I have developed collecting initiatives and outreach strategies to reinforce the shared understanding among New Yorkers of CUNY as a public good.
Fall 1934: Rally at City College of New York demanding the removal of the college’s president Frederick B. Robinson and the reinstatement of twenty-one students expelled for their participation in an anti-fascist demonstration the month before.
Spring 1969: A group of Black and Puerto Rican students from City College of New York hold signs in support of the “Five Demands” prioritized by student organizers.
Voices of CUNY
I believe that archives should be shaped by the interests and experiences of the people they serve. In that sense, all archives are community archives, and CUNY is composed of many communities, some more robustly represented than others. Part of my job as CUNY’s University Archivist is to empower people with underrepresented perspectives to get their stories into our collections. This means establishing channels for self-documentation that anyone interested in contributing their story can navigate. To get started, we explored the state of oral history practice across the university.
We discovered that many CUNY archivists were interested in doing more to support oral history projects by students and faculty but lacked the proper policy and digital preservation resources to do so. In response, we created a toolkit to support anyone interested in creating oral history interviews that could be preserved in CUNY’s archives. These materials support project development, legal and ethical considerations, and preservation best practices for oral history.
Next, we needed to field test our toolkit. An opportunity presented itself within CUNY’s robust, but sparsely documented, librarian community. CUNY libraries employ nearly six hundred faculty and staff, a group so big, it has its own association—the Library Association of CUNY (LACUNY)—that supports members’ professional development.
LACUNY leadership had initiated an oral history project among its members, but without the support of an archives the project stalled. A skilled group with a story to tell—this was the test case we needed. Academic librarians have a nuanced understanding of their colleges because they are both the keepers of historical records, and their department is one of the few on any campus that works directly with students and faculty from every other department.
To begin, we conducted a pilot interview with CUNY librarian Nelson Santana, a respected leader who has worked on multiple CUNY campuses, been a CUNY student himself, and served in various LACUNY leadership roles. We used his interview to establish a workflow and set of protocols that we’ll be able to use for the rest of the project.
In the Fall 2026 semester, LACUNY leadership will roll out a campaign with my team’s help to train members to interview one another and make collective decisions about their project, like questions they want to ask and their wishes around the future use of the interviews. We want to be sure our toolkit clearly leads teams of collaborators through these decisions so that it can guide future oral history projects. We hope that this initiative, along with producing a valuable contribution to institutional history, will make CUNY librarians knowledgeable guides through the oral history projects they help their faculty and students conduct.
Finding the Present in the Past
In the summer of 2025, our team was busy with one of the major deliverables of the Cultivating Archives & Institutional Memory project: a university-wide archival survey. This meant opening every box in every archives and noting its condition and contents. In the end, we opened 54,171 boxes, measuring 46,342 linear feet of archival collections, about 9 miles of record boxes. As our team worked our way across five boroughs of CUNY campuses, I asked everyone to keep an eye out for histories that surfaced across more than one collection as well as items of particular interest.
That same summer, there was an upswell of support for the “Fired Four” adjunct faculty from Brooklyn College, who had participated in activism in support of Palestine and the faculty union. Maybe it was our awareness of the Fired Four that particularly drew our attention to the fascinating records, found at nearly every campus, of Red Scare-era faculty hearing transcripts and documentation of administration surveillance of students’ political activities, primarily from the 1930s-1960s. Four of our Associate Archivists, Wilhelmine Coste, Erin A’Hearn, Scout Zabel, and Patrick McGee, formed a team to research these collections in greater detail and find a way to make them more accessible to researchers.
Six months later, we published Red Scare at CUNY, a comprehensive guide to archives documenting anti-communist political repression of faculty, staff, and students at CUNY. Organized by repository, the guide highlights relevant collections within CUNY as well as other repositories in New York City and New York State. Each entry is accompanied by a description that incorporates information from finding aids and other published research. These collections include faculty papers (personal and professional), student activist materials, and oral histories.
In May 2026, we hosted and recorded a panel discussion moderated by Dr. Shana L. Redmond that covered the history of the Red Scare at CUNY, the importance of collecting and preserving our stories in times of political upheaval, and archival strategies for navigating our present moment. The event was co-sponsored by faculty and student groups, who offered updates and information on how to get involved in ongoing support for the Fired Four. As of this writing, three of these faculty members have been hired back, but the Brooklyn College administration has not issued an apology, nor offered any further explanation of its decisions.
It was especially meaningful to facilitate a critical examination of the university’s conduct and policies through the format of a public event on a CUNY campus. Our team felt we had become part of the culture we had witnessed as we emersed ourselves in nearly two centuries of archival records of CUNY, a community that has always been strong enough to encourage critique in service of students and faculty who continue to demand that the university serve our city as a public good.
