FACULTY AND STAFF
Reflections on the First Decade of the Colin Powell School President Vince Boudreau To mark the 10th anniversary of the founding of the Colin Powell School, Dean Andy Rich sat down with President Vince Boudreau, who was the Director of the Colin Powell Center and founding Dean of the Colin Powell School, to talk about the school’s roots, its expansion, and its future. President Boudreau recalled how General Powell first became involved with the Center, the significance of his role in establishing and expanding the school, and the expansion of the school’s reach and programs. I had been the director of the Colin Powell Center for only a few months when I 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. 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.” 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 6
THE CITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK
Powell Fellows. 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 deeply moved. As he would describe it later, he saw himself in them. Even before we launched the school, the Colin Powell Center was one of the things that people not involved in City College knew about. 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
