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. The project will increase access to archival records including Chancellor’s reports, University reports, Minutes of the Board of Trustees, presidential papers, reports and minutes of the general faculty and faculty bodies, materials from Offices of Institutional Research, Alumni Relations, Communications, and other administrative entities, college catalogs, publicity releases, in-house publications, faculty papers, alumni papers, student newspapers, yearbooks, course bulletins, memorabilia, photographs, and audio-visual materials documenting the history of the City University of New York and its campuses, centers, and institutes. 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.

Recent funding from Mellon to develop Black, racial, and ethnic studies (BRES) programs across CUNY has revealed a deep desire among CUNY educators to access our own institutional archives. In response to these research inquiries, campus archivists have determined archival records with high research value include those relating to the period of open admissions and the development of CUNY’s equal opportunity programs (College Discovery and SEEK); the struggle for ethnic and Black studies programs; student movements and campus unrest; and administrative response to the New York City fiscal crisis of the 1970s. Additionally, student publications and records that document the founding of each college, the relationship between a college and its surrounding community, and local history collections are of broad research interest.  

There has been a recent upsurge of interest in CUNY’s history as it relates to diversity, social mobility, and social movements, evident in recent films such as The Five Demands, books such as New York Liberation School, and digital humanities projects such as The CUNY 1969 Project. 

Librarians and archivists working across CUNY know that teaching faculty are hungry for opportunities to work with primary sources in the classroom, since they provide outlets to examine bias, develop historical empathy, and experience history firsthand. 

For a decade, the CUNY Digital History Archive has demonstrated the value of collecting, preserving, and amplifying CUNY history among scholars and the general public. The project has developed a community of participants who are invested in teaching today’s students the people’s history of the people’s university, and this grant is an opportunity to extend those efforts by laying an equitable foundation of professional archival practice across the CUNY system.