Transcript: Mayor de Blasio Delivers Remarks at CUNY Luncheon

February 18, 2017

Mayor Bill de Blasio: Well, it is good to be among friends and in common cause. And there’s a lot to celebrate here. I just wanted to talk to you for a few minutes about why CUNY matters so much and why we need to fight for it every day. 

But let me first thank some folks here who deserve our appreciation. I’ve worked with Bill Thompson for many a year and I can tell you one thing, when there are complex and challenging matters flying around including those that include financial ramifications, no one sorts them out and gets people to a positive consensus better than your Chair, Bill Thompson. We thank you. 

[Applause] 

And of course, Chancellor Milliken, thank you for your outstanding leadership. You are literally making CUNY better all the time and that’s saying a lot because he’s pretty damn great already but you make it better all the time. 

Thank you, Chancellor.

[Applause] 

And I want to thank the trustees who are here including two great trustees from New York City, Uma Clarke and Rita DiMartino. Thank you. 

[Applause]

All of the CUNY presidents, and I have to say this with a heavy heart, I think what’s happened at John Jay over these years has been miraculous and wonderful, and Jeremy Travis has run a great race and we’re going to miss him a lot. Jeremy, thank you. 

[Applause]

And I want to say – I’m going to give you an extra shout out because I mean it – I love to remind people New York City is the safest big city in America. We’re all very proud of that. 

[Applause]

And one of the reasons, over this last 25 years as we’ve gotten safer and safer is the number of folks both in our police force and in so many other important roles who got educated at John Jay, who met at John Jay, who got great ideas at John Jay, that have made us the safe city that we are. So, Jeremy, well done. 

[Applause]

And finally, I want to thank my Deputy Mayor, Richard Buery. He is working with CUNY and he’s bringing such passion to this work with CUNY. We thank you for that. 

[Applause] 

On top of what he’s done with pre-K, on top of what he’s done with community schools, on top of what he’s done with after school for all our middle school kids, and the Young Men’s initiative, and I could go on and on. Thank you, Deputy Mayor Richard Buery.

[Applause]

I want to shout out the Caucus CUNY Scholars for all you are doing and for your pathway – 

[Applause] 

For getting on the pathway to public service. And I want to remind you, Caucus Scholars, that so many of our leaders today started out in some form of student government or student involvement. It is an amazing consistency that those who learn to lead then become leaders up ahead.

So, I want to urge everyone in the room – get to know them now, [inaudible] on the ground floor. Thank you for all you’re doing. We’re very proud of you.

[Applause]

Special shout out to Candice [inaudible] and she is the recipient of the Terence Tolbert Internship. A lot of us knew Terence and we miss him. And that is a very special thing. She is now working for Senator Comrie. So, Candice, congratulations to you.

[Applause]

I want to thank everyone joining together today for honoring CUNY’s Black Male Initiative which is the kind of focused effort [inaudible] – 

[Applause]

So, here’s what I want to say to you and it will echo something that I said to a group of folks at the gathering of the technology industry yesterday in the city. 

And you know there’s some gatherings where you have to be explicitly non-political, non-partisan. So, I’m going to use specially coded language. 

[Laughter]

Follow along. I did this yesterday. I’ll do it again today.

CUNY matters because right now we are fighting for the very concepts of democracy. That’s what happening in this moment in history. 

I’m not trying to be melodramatic. I’m not trying to overstate. I think we see before our eyes that the fundamental questions are being asked. Are we going to be able to be a multicultural society? Are we going to be able to be a society that respects all faiths? Are we going to respect our immigrant traditions? Are we going to adhere to our Constitution? Right?

I think the answer is yes but this is what’s going on right now. And one of the funny things about democracy is moments like this remind you it’s not something that was done for us and then we sit back and look at it. 

It is a living breathing concept. 

And now we have to earn it. There may have been times where we did not have to, in our view, earn it. There may have been times when we sat back. We know the times in history where people thought they had to earn a change. That was the Civil Rights Movement, wasn’t it? 

People believed they had to earn a change. It wasn’t – they should have had to. I’m not saying they should have had to fight for their basic rights but they knew they had to. And they did. And they changed the dynamics. 

So, this is one of those moments, make no mistake. 

CUNY epitomizes the things we’re fighting for, right? 

CUNY is about equal and fair education for all. It’s for something affordable to people who are not just in the one percent, it is for every kind of person regardless of background. It is for our immigrants.

CUNY epitomizes everything that is under attack right now. That’s a compliment to CUNY.

[Applause]

But it’s a reminder of why we have to fight for it even harder because, again, if you don’t take democracy for granted and you recognize that what sounded impossible yesterday could become possible today, right?

We saw just in the last couple of years, things said in public that used to be off limits. Right?

Bill and I have run for office plenty of times, and we could not have imagined in our worst possible, most negative, most malicious dreams saying in public what we’ve heard candidates say in the 2016 presidential elections. Presidential candidates. 

So, when you hear that don’t take it lightly. Don’t sweep it under the rug. Don’t say this will pass. 

There have been times in history where good people like those gathered here – educated people in what they thought was a good and open and democratic society said, “Oh, that’s just a temporary problem. That will pass.” And they found that in fact it was not a temporary problem. It was something bigger.

So, I say this to energize not to alarm but to energize. Fighting for CUNY, deepening the work of CUNY is protecting our democracy, is protecting a multi-cultural, multi-faith society, is respecting and protecting our immigrants. You can do it all – one stop shopping – by supporting what happens everyday in CUNY.

Now, we in the City of New York, have seen so many powerful things happening in CUNY that we believe were worth very strategic, powerful investment – what’s happening in the ASAP program is working wonders.

[Applause]

And I will refer to another – I mentioned these [inaudible] Thursday evening at Gracie Mansion, we had a gathering and Wynton Marsalis was there, one of the great cultural icons of this city. And we were talking about the problems that exist in our country. And he said – it was a beautiful, powerful, simple idea – he said the problem is this country has still not resolved the issues of the 19th century. He said we have still not overcome what slavery did to us and we haven’t overcome divisions that linger. 

I’m telling you that because when you think of the fact that we still have so many young people who don’t get the education they deserve and their family members before them didn’t get what they deserve, and they end up in a situation now where they will be the generation to break through. But sometimes they need that extra support, that extra facilitation because they’re carrying the weight of history on them. 

And I admire anyone and everyone, every family, every individual who overcomes that weight of history and breaks through because Lord knows there’s still plenty of things in our society that are sending a message. That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. 

ASAP is way of addressing the mistakes of history, healing the wounds, and giving people real opportunity. And it’s working.

And we also know the investments we are making to create a pathway to good employment – real and immediate job opportunities so people can go where a lot of others weren’t able to go before. 

We’re investing in two-year STEM degrees because we heard from people in the technology community, a young person who comes out of CUNY with a two-year STEM degree can go right into a good paying job immediately and then be on a track for a long term career in this exploding technology sector. 

This is the kind of thing we’re investing in more and more because we see the impact it has on our young people.

So, I want you to know the City of New York is honored to be a partner in everything that CUNY does. We’re honored to support so many of these exciting things that are working. And we’re ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with you to defend them.

I finally want to say this – in this moment in history, there has been another version of misinformation that’s been put out there and in this case we see it from the new administration in Washington, suggesting that the federal government makes the rules for our lives. Right? 

The fear people feel right now is not just because of the language they’ve heard – a divisive attitude – it’s not just because of the specific executive orders, it’s because they feel it’s going to reach right down to their life and change their life for the worst, and that they’re not going to be able to recover from it.

And for folks, for example, who are fearing deportation, they feel like that will change their life permanently in a way that they can never recover from. 

But what was left out of this equation, because it is misinformation, is that at the local level, here in this city of New York and our city of New York, here in Albany, in cities all around the country, states around the country, we control and make the decisions for our own government and our own people. 

If you hear people peddling the notion that an election nationally and a new president can therefore negate everything we’re doing at the local level – that’s just a lie. That’s just a lie. 

The federal government does not tell us how to police our streets. They just don’t.

Donald Trump talked about he wanted stop-and-frisk back in every police department in the country. Guess what? He doesn’t get to make that decision. 

The cities in this country, the police departments in this country make the decisions.

The federal government doesn’t decide how we educate our children in our schools. That’s a local decision. 

They don’t decide how we run our public hospitals. 

We’ve got to recognize our own power. 

We’ve got to remember – and this is what our Constitution says – it’s a country made up of states and the states devolve a lot of the power to the localities. And in New York City and in cities all over the country, we’re very clear we are not going to accept that negative and divisive path. 

We’re going to stay true to our values and no one in Washington can make us change who we are. 

Once again, those good values, every day, play out in CUNY. And thank you for that. Keep that going. 

[Inaudible]

God bless you all. 

[Applause]