Colin Powell School
Dean Rich in conversation with President Boudreau on the 10 Year Anniversary of the Colin Powell School
Dean Rich
This year marks the tenth anniversary of the Colin Powell School, and I want to invite you to take a step back and reflect on the founding of the School. Take us back if you will: Colin Powell graduated in 1958; what got him reengaged at the College?
President Boudreau
I had been the director of the Colin Powell Center for only a few months and was told that the way to change the profile of the Colin Powell Center was to bring Secretary of State Colin Powell to campus to give a policy statement. And that would change everything for us. That turned out not to be the case. He came, and he did a terrific talk. A woman from Iran had just won the Nobel Peace Prize, and he talked about her. But when he stepped down from the stage, he pulled me aside, and he said, “I can't do anything while I'm in this office, but when I step down, I'm going to come back, and I'm going to see how I can help you.” There are pictures of him mingling with our students at the reception before he gave his talk, and he was very devoted to that.
So, sure enough, about six months after he left the office, he came back to the campus and we had a group of the really extraordinary first cohort of Colin Powell Fellows and he sat in a room with them and they talked about their lives and experiences. He asked them who they were, what they wanted to do, where they were from, and was, I think, more deeply moved than I thought he was going to be. At that time, there was a board of directors of the Colin Powell Center, and that board had never met. I had a really clear sense that we needed to start over with the board because we had essentially been dodging phone calls from them. So, I raised the question of reformulating this board with General Powell, and he kind of had me at arm's length for a little bit there. We ran the Colin Powell fellowship program for another year or so. We were into our second cohort when he came back and was willing to talk about the trajectory of the Colin Powell Center. For me, it was all about this fellowship program. I didn't necessarily know very much about what I was doing. I didn't have a curriculum. But we were on to something, and it was exciting.
Dean Rich
Let’s back up even further. How did you get involved with the Colin Powell Center in the first place?
President Boudreau
Oh, it was really funny. I had been Chair of the Political Science department. I had a little bit of a reputation, I think, for taking a department that was kind of moribund and giving it a little bit more life. You [Andy] joined the faculty at the time. Our big innovation was that we were going to do a lectures series, and I would go to Costco and buy food, and we would get students to come to lectures, and we asked the speakers to stay and engage with the students. There would be 20 people in a room with a lecture, and it made no impact on the educational quality. We were really trying, as a department, to do something new. We had a bunch of younger faculty — you, John Krinsky, Bruce Cronin — that were interested in this project. With respect to the Colin Powell Center, the Rudin Foundation had given us $500,000 to be spent over five years, and they were coming to campus for the first time after making that gift to figure out what we'd done with it. And there was nobody directing the Colin Powell Center.
Paul Wachtel had done it for a year or two, but going into it knew he didn't want to do it permanently. A guy named Ron Farrell, who had been our dean, was given the Colin Powell Center, but he did not engage with it very much. It was kind of moribund, so the long and the short of it is, they needed somebody to talk to the funders about what we had done with the money, and the answer was, we hadn't done anything. It was all basically still there. They had asked me a couple of times to be the director. I had refused, because I was chair of the department. It didn't seem to me you could do both jobs. But finally, I agreed, thinking that this was an opportunity to develop a program that would really support our students. At the time, the only kind of similar program that we had on campus was the Watson Fellowship program, which did wonderful things for a very, very small group of students. And I thought we could do the same sort of thing — specialized seminars, supported internships, access to other kinds of opportunities. It was as vague as that.
And when we met with the Rudin Foundation, I told them we hadn't done very much, but I had this plan going forward, and the Rudin Foundation was willing to stick with me on it. I had that plan in place. I had a group of extraordinary students that were there when General Powell met with them, and that was going to be the way going forward. I had pretty good anecdotal evidence at the time of what the college's official line was: “The average City College student works an average of 30 hours a week.” I would say that to everyone who would listen. And I thought if we could give students a $10,000 scholarship every year, If we could give them the ability just to be students, to focus on education and then provide some other opportunities, they could do great things. And indeed, they did. That initial cohort was extraordinary, and it proved the concept that with more support, our students would be as good as any City College student ever in our history.
Dean Rich
And you shifted the name from the Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies. It became the Colin Powell Center for Leadership and Service.
President Boudreau
Yes, General Powell liked that idea. He was always a little disinterested in a policy studies center. It wasn't what he wanted to do. I had read his autobiography. I had heard him say at least once that every stage in his career, at its core, involved educating young people. And knowing what I knew about City College students, I knew that it would be tremendously beneficial to our students to have this kind of a support.
Dean Rich
You started at the very beginning with a cohort structure, and I wondered if you might reflect on that. You could have just given out individual fellowships, and they could come see you on their own, but you did it as a cohort. Now, as you know, everything we do is cohort, and I just wonder if you have thoughts about the importance of that as a structure.
President Boudreau
I always thought, particularly talking to alumni at the time, they always had stories about the people that were sitting next to them in classrooms and what they had gone on to do, and what they had gone on to do together with classmates and other City College graduates. But I also thought that our students didn't just need money. They needed a sense of accomplishment. And that worked better in cohorts. At that time, it's hard to think back, but there was no place to get a cup of coffee except for the student lounge. We didn’t even have the coffee spot in the NAC. There were no benches anywhere on campus, forget the Hoffman lounge or some of the things that you’re doing up at the Colin Powell School. We didn’t even have grass on campus, we didn’t even have a blade of grass on campus. And so, the idea, I thought putting our students in a cohort was essential. In fact, when I was running the master’s program in international relations, one of the things I did to try to do to develop a sense of cohort was I taught one class in my apartment where we’d have dinner every week. I used to do office hours — these are masters students so they were all of age — at a bar on 110th street and Amsterdam Avenue. The rule there was that it was only to talk about international relations. So, in all these different ways it just occurred to me that students who were typically engaged in City College in a kind of “cash and carry” way, where they come pick their classes and go home, would have an opportunity to build connections with each other and then with the institution. So, I brought all of that into the Colin Powell Center.
Dean Rich
How was the decision made to merge the school of social sciences with the Center?
President Boudreau
We had been getting bigger and bigger over the years, and we had gone from one scholarship to Colin Powell Scholarships. We then had taken on the Koch service scholarships. We had done something called Community Engagement Fellows, and Partners for Change. So, we had four separate scholarship lines. When you became Associate Director of the Colin Powell Center, you brought the whole service-learning portfolio. And then we had taken service learning and were also doing seminars on public scholarship, where we were taking faculty and supporting them to find their voices to write for broader public audiences. But none of this really had a foothold in the college’s core activities, which is its degree granting work. These activities were always co-curricular. So we began to think about bringing the two together.
There was an interlude where we had started a campaign to build Colin Powell Hall, largely at the behest of some of General Powell’s friends, I would say fairly reluctantly on his part. We were supposed to raise about $15 million and the state was going to pay for the rest of it. And then the state said they didn’t have the money, so we’d have to raise all of what was $25 million, and then step by step by step over the next two years $25 million turned into $81 million. I went to see General Powell when the price tag was $41 million and he said “Ok, let’s raise the money,” and then it was $61 million. At $81 million, I thought “If we raise this money to build this building, we’re going to have no more operational funds.” The president and I spoke, and we agreed that we should abandon the building project. We should instead do what we always had a sense that we should be doing, which is to attach the work of the Colin Powell Center to the main degree granting activities of the college somehow, and we founded the Colin Powell School. That way, we would be able to take the $30 million or so dollars that we had raised at that time and instead of spending it on construction, we could spend it on starting the programs of what became the Colin Powell School. I went down to have what I thought was going to be a really difficult conversation with General Powell, and it was so clear that this was far more attractive to him than building a building with his name on it. I was relieved to be able to say it; he was clearly relieved too. It had never occurred to me that he had in his mind acquired what he thought was an obligation to, or a responsibility or made a promise to, his college that he would help us build this building. And to be released from that and instead focus on what was a much more dynamic project, to build the school, was a relief to everybody and it made so much sense.
Dean Rich
As you now reflect, it’s been 10 years. What do you think you hoped the Colin Powell School would become on campus, and how would you describe what it means to have the Colin Powell School?
President Boudreau
You know, it’s funny. I thought even before we launched the school that increasingly the Colin Powell Center was becoming one of the things that people who are not involved in City College would see from a distance; that they would hear about it. They would start to see our students. But I also thought that this idea of service and leadership, of involving students in taking the things that brought them to school in the first place, a desire for just housing policy, equitable distribution of resources, fair immigration policy, policing policy that isn’t disproportionately visited on people of color — that a school that foregrounded those things and actually took students who were immigrants and people of color and people that had suffered at the hand of inequitable health systems or poor schools and put them in a position to make a difference, we’d have a much more informed set of policies in America. It was so important for me to figure out how to mobilize the voices of our students, and also to take faculty and staff who for the most part are not accidentally at City College, not accidentally at the Colin Powell School, but have come here to teach these specific students in this specific community around a set of specific concerns and commitment. That’s what I hoped the Colin Powell School would become, this place where leadership was developed to carry students with a more democratic and just or equitable perspective on important questions into the world when they graduated. And I only had, when I think of it now, I had less than three years, in some ways it felt like I was involved in the Colin Powell School forever. It was the leadup, a big long leadup. We had a year and a half of meetings where we talked about what it meant to take the ethos and the programs of the Center and move it over. And we spent time on questions from what the name would be to silly things like does it have to have special colors. And my view from the beginning was that we had established a mission and an ethos and a kind of commitment to certain things at the Colin Powell Center that had to be merged with the existing programs of social sciences.
Some faculty would say things like “Well, I just want to continue to be a sociologist. I don’t want to necessarily be involved in this other project.” So, it took us over a year to iron all that out and I felt like, as dean, we were only just getting started in the programmatic transformation of the school: building programs that would sink roots and would attract faculty. I tried to do some things that didn’t work. I had an idea that immigration was going to be one of our big strengths and taught a seminar designed to bring alumni and City College students together where one member of our faculty teaches his or her best lecture on immigration over the course of the semester. That didn’t really work out so well, but we started making investments in more activist programs. It was October, 2016, when I was tapped to come into the president’s office as interim president, and Kevin Foster agreed to be the acting dean while I was here. He did a good job of keeping everything running, but there wasn’t a lot of programmatic innovation during this period. We had built an Office of Student Success that I think had some real strong prospects and some important flaws. I think one of the significant flaws was it was on another side of campus, and so it was really difficult to integrate the work of that office with the academic core of the college. Kevin did me the favor of dismantling it and you all have now resurrected it in a place that’s intimately interrelated with the rest of the school.
So, what do I think of it now? I mean I got to be honest. If I could have mapped out where I wanted the school to be, it’s on that trajectory. You’ve done, I think, an exemplary job of taking the idea of the original fellowship programs, where we would maybe have 20 sometimes more Colin Powell Fellows who wanted to be in a seminar. But they came from across the college, and so did we teach leadership and service in the absence of a substantive curriculum? Hard to do. Did we on the other hand say you’re going to study this thing – immigration, justice reform, whatever be it– this is going to be the seminar this year. And some of them would be deeply interested, and some of them couldn’t care less. Working with that small group of students it was hard to figure out exactly how to teach leadership and service. What you’ve done now, with a group of between 3000-4000 students is you’ve said “No we’re going to recruit students interested in climate change, racial justice,” so you’re able to marry that activist mission of the school with the leadership and service values. Watching that unfold over new programs like the new Institute, Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, I think you’re now operating at a scale where you can say “these are the five issues for now that we have a commitment to, and we’re going to recruit students that also have a commitment to these issues.” And that’s going to be how we execute on one element of the mission. The core social sciences and our faculty are the backbone of the school, and they are stronger than ever. And, then, of course, is the extraordinary support that you have in the Office of Student Success and the various elements of the program that you’re bringing in. Those two levels — what do we do for students that are in an extraordinary way committed to making a difference on these issues and how do we connect the social sciences to that — and then, what are we going to do for the majority of students who maybe aren’t going to be a Racial Justice Fellow or a Climate Change Fellow but we know they’re going to be successful. I think that combination is exactly what we had in mind when we talked about bringing the ethos of the Colin Powell Center into the Division of Social Sciences.
Dean Rich
Speaking to you now as both the president and the founding dean, where would you like to see the Colin Powell School go over the next 10 years?
President Boudreau
I’ve always thought that people should recognize the Colin Powell School the way they recognize the Maxwell School or the Kennedy School. I don’t mean that it should just be prominent, I mean that it should be prominent in a specific way with a specific set of commitments. I think the social and political and economic leadership of people who come from underserved communities — that should be the identity of the Colin Powell School. I think expanding the work on student success is important. I think being diligent about asking — there’s climate change and there’s racial justice, significant work in immigration — where is social justice work going in the U.S. over the next decade, and making sure that the Colin Powell School keeps up with that. I also think there’s a real role for an expansion of work with people who aren’t necessarily matriculated students. You started this with Leadership for Democracy and Social Justice, where you’re bringing in mid-career professionals who are activists. I think there’s a lot of room for that level of engagement. I also think about the Conversations in Leadership series that you’re doing. And the fact that it is clearly being produced to be available online, in perpetuity, I think is fantastic. So, it seems a little like an empty response to say keep on doing what you’re doing, but that’s kind of what City College needs the ability to say “here’s how we translate our values, commitments, into social political economic impact.” I think that’s what the Colin Powell School should be doing.
Dean Rich
General Powell passed and Linda Powell stepped up to be chair of the board of visitors. And General Powell’s long-time assistant, Peggy Cifrino also joined the board. So many people remain involved who care deeply about General Powell and the legacy that he brought to this place. I wonder if you could reflect a little bit about having the connection of his family and friends to the school in an ongoing way as such a crucial part of his legacy.
President Boudreau
It’s funny, the original board that we put together, and so many of the original donors to the Powell School did it because of their personal friendship with General Powell. They worked with him, were influenced with him, socialized with him, many of those people were not available to us. General Powell would shepherd them into a supporting relationship with the college and the school, but that relationship always went through him. He was such a presence, he was so dynamic, so charismatic that I think you would be foolish if you didn’t ask the question “what happens when he steps away one way or another from this world?” I think the job always was to figure out how you translate his personal charisma and commitments and the desire that everyone had just to be in the room next to him and have his attention for a little while into an institution, into the aura of an institution. I think certainly having the family involved, Linda, Michael, that’s huge. Because what it says to us — Linda, when we launched the school, she used the phrase when she was talking about her service to the Colin Powell School “it’s my turn to put my shoulder to the wheel.” She meant that in my family this is the work that we do and this is going to be how I manifest that work.
So, there’s continuity there. But there’s also I think the ability to take the legacy of General Powell that was so concentrated in his purpose and diffuse it into the work of the school. You think about someone like Marco Antonio Achón who’s here, yes because he loved General Powell, but he doesn’t need for General Powell to be in the room to sustain the work that he’s doing. So many of the other people who are relatively new to the board, maybe younger and certainly more accessible, like Stephen Schwartzman, David Rubenstein, or even James Baker that will be able to see the importance of the institution not as a place where you get next to General Powell, but as an institution that will carry forward the values and commitments that he had and the mission that he gave us to build the place where people who are today like he was back then can be provisioned for success. And so, I think we are well on the way to at least identifying what a succession plan looks like and bringing in people. Here’s the thing: there was a long period of time where people didn’t need to see evidence that the Colin Powell Center was working because General Powell said it was. What’s fortunate, and I think a huge accomplishment, is that while he was with us and especially in the last four or five years, anyone can walk up to the program, to the Colin Powell School, without him being in the room and say “this is something that needs to prosper.” He’s not with us anymore, but I see him in the work that we’re doing. Frankly, that was the puzzle that needed to be solved in the institutionalization of the Colin Powell School, and we solved it.