The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York (CUNY Graduate Center) is a public research institution and postgraduate university in New York City. Formed in 1961 as Division of Graduate Studies at City University of New York, it was renamed to Graduate School and University Center in 1969. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, CUNY Graduate Center is classified as "R1: Doctoral University–Very High Spending and Doctorate Production".
CUNY Graduate Center is located at the B. Altman and Company Building at 365 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. It offers 32 doctoral programs, 18 master's programs, and operates over 30 research centers and institutes. The Graduate Center employs a core faculty of approximately 130 professors, in addition to over 1,700 faculty members appointed from other CUNY colleges throughout New York City. As of fall 2025, the Graduate Center enrolls over 3,100 students, of which 2,600 are doctoral students. For the fall 2025 semester, the average acceptance rate across all doctoral programs at the CUNY Graduate Center was 13.5%.
The Graduate Center's primary library, named after the American mathematician Mina Rees, is part of the CUNY library network of 31 colleges that collectively holds over 6.2 million volumes. Since 1968, the CUNY Graduate Center has maintained an agreement with the New York Public Library, which gives faculty and students increased borrowing privileges at NYPL's research collections at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. The Graduate Center building also houses the James Gallery, which is an independent exhibition space open to the public, and television studios for NYC Media and CUNY TV.
The faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center include recipients of the Nobel Prize, the Abel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Fellowship, the Schock Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Wolf Prize, Grammy Awards, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring, and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the National Academy of Education.
Contents
History
CUNY began offering doctoral education through its Division of Graduate Studies in 1961, and awarded its first two PhD to Daniel Robinson and Barbara Stern in 1965. Robinson, formerly a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, received his Ph.D. in psychology, while Stern, late of Rutgers University, received her Ph.D. in English literature.
In 1969, the Division of Graduate Studies formally became the Graduate School and University Center. Mathematician Mina S. Rees served as the institution's first president from 1969 until her retirement in 1972. Rees was succeeded as president of the Graduate Center by environmental psychologist Harold M. Proshansky, who served until his death in 1990. Provost Steven M. Cahn was named acting president in Spring 1991. Psychologist Frances Degen Horowitz was appointed president in September 1991. In 2005, Horowitz was succeeded by the school's provost, Professor of English Literature William P. Kelly.
During Kelly's tenure at the Graduate Center, the university saw significant growth in revenue, funding opportunities for students, increased Distinguished Faculty, and a general resurgence. This is in accordance with three primary goals articulated in the Graduate Center's strategic plan. The first of these involves enhancing student support. In 2013, 83 dissertation-year fellowships were awarded at a total cost of $1.65 million. The Graduate Center is also developing new programs to advance research prior to the dissertation phase, including archival work. The fiscal stability of the university has enabled the chancellery to increase, on an incremental basis, the value of these fellowships. The packages extended for the 2013–14 years increase stipends and reduce teaching requirements. In 2001, the Graduate Center provided 14 million dollars in student support, and, in Fall 2013, 51 million in student support.
On April 23, 2013, the CUNY Board of Trustees announced that President Kelly would serve as interim chancellor for the City University of New York beginning July 1 with the retirement of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. GC Provost Chase F. Robinson, a historian, was appointed to serve as interim president of the Graduate Center in 2013, and then served as president from July 2014 to December 2018.
Joy Connolly became provost in August 2016 and interim president in December 2018. Julia Wrigley was appointed as interim provost in December 2018. In July 2019, James Muyskens became interim president, as Connolly had been appointed president of the American Council of Learned Societies. On March 30, 2020, Robin L. Garrell, vice provost for graduate education and dean of graduate division at University of California, Los Angeles, was announced as the next president of the Graduate Center. She assumed office on August 1, 2020 and served until September 28, 2023.
Campus
The CUNY Graduate Center's main campus is located in the B. Altman and Company Building at 34th Street and Fifth Avenue in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. CUNY shares the B. Altman Building with the Oxford University Press. Before 2000, the Graduate Center was housed in Aeolian Hall on West 42nd Street across from the New York Public Library Main Branch. In 2017, the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center at 85 St. Nicholas Terrace in Manhattan's Harlem neighborhood became part of the CUNY Graduate Center.
Advanced Science Research Center
The Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center (CUNY ASRC) is an interdisciplinary STEM center for research and education. It covers five related fields: nanoscience, photonics, structural biology, neuroscience, and environmental science. The CUNY ASRC is located in a 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) building on the southern edge of City College's campus in Upper Manhattan. The CUNY ASRC, which opened in September 2014, is an outgrowth of CUNY's "Decade of Science" initiative, a multibillion-dollar project to elevating science research and education.
The CUNY ASRC formally joined the CUNY Graduate Center in spring 2017. Today, the CUNY ASRC is one of the major pieces of CUNY's citywide research network. Five years after the center opened, over 200 graduate, undergraduate, and high school students had been mentored by CUNY ASRC scientists. In that time, the center also hosted over 400 conferences, seminars, and workshops and awarded over $600,000 in seed grants to CUNY faculty.
The CUNY ASRC was founded on the principle that researchers across different disciplines would collaborate to make scientific advancements. Thus, it consists of five related fields:
Nanoscience: Exploring on the tiniest scale, using the living world for inspiration to create new materials and devices that advance fields ranging from biomedicine to energy production
Photonics: Discovering new ways to control light, heat, radio waves, and sound for future optical computers, ultrasensitive cameras, and cell phone technology
Structural biology: Combining physics and chemistry to explore biology at the molecular and cellular levels, with the intention of identifying new ways to treat diseases
Neuroscience: Investigating how the brain senses and responds to environmental and social experiences, with a focus on neural networks, metabolic changes, and molecular signals occurring in brain cells, with the goal of developing biosensors and innovative solutions to promote mental health
Mina Rees Library
The Mina Rees Library, named after former president Mina Rees, supports the research, teaching, and learning activities of the CUNY Graduate Center by connecting its community with print materials, electronic resources, research assistance and instruction, and expertise about the complexities of scholarly communication. Situated on three floors of the CUNY Graduate Center, the library is a hub for discovery, delivery, digitization, and a place for solitary study. The library offers many services, including research consultations, a 24/7 online chat service with reference librarians, and workshops and webinars on using research tools.
The library also serves as a gateway to the collections of other CUNY libraries, the New York Public Library (NYPL), and libraries worldwide. It participates in a CUNY-wide book delivery system and offers an interlibrary loan service to bring materials from outside CUNY to Graduate Center scholars. The main branch of NYPL is just a few blocks north on Fifth Avenue, and NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library is just around the corner inside the B. Altman Building. CUNY Graduate Center students and faculty are NYPL's primary academic constituents, with borrowing privileges from NYPL research collections. NYPL's participation in the Manhattan Research Library Initiative (MaRLI) extends borrowing privileges for CUNY Graduate Center students to NYU and Columbia libraries as well.
The Mina Rees Library is a key participant in the CUNY Graduate Center's digital initiatives. It supports the digital scholarship of students and faculty and promotes the understanding, creation, and use of open-access literature. Among its special collections is the Activist Women's Voices collection, an oral history project focused on unheralded New York City community-based women activists.
Cultural venues
The CUNY Graduate Center houses three performance spaces and two art galleries. The Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium, named for the institution's second president, is located on the concourse level and contains 389 seats. The Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, located on the first floor, seats 180. The Martin E. Segal Theatre, also located on the first floor, seats 70.
The ground floor of the CUNY Graduate Center houses the Amie and Tony James Gallery, also known as the James Gallery, which the Center for the Humanities oversees. The James Gallery intends to bring scholars and artists into dialog with one another and serve as a site for interdisciplinary research. The James Gallery hosts numerous exhibitions annually, and has hosted solo exhibitions by notable American and international artists such as Alison Knowles and Dor Guez.
CUNY TV and NYC Media
The University's citywide cable channel, CUNY TV, broadcasts on cable and WNYE's digital terrestrial television subchannel 25.3. Its production studios and offices are located on the first floor, while the broadcast satellite dishes reside on the building's ninth floor (rooftop).
Sharing CUNY TV's main facilities is NYC Media, which is the official broadcast network and media production group of the NYC Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment. The group includes WNYE-FM (91.5) radio station and WNYE-TV television channel (Channel 25), which also puts out "NYCLife" programming on 25.1 and "NYCGov" on 25.2, all broadcast 24/7 from within the building.
Academics
Rankings
In 2023, two doctoral programs at CUNY Graduate Center (criminal justice and English), were ranked among the top 20 graduate programs in the U.S., and four (audiology, history, philosophy, and sociology) among the top 30. In the 2016 edition of QS World University Rankings, CUNY Graduate Center's PhD program in Philosophy was ranked 44th globally. In the 2022 edition of the Philosophical Gourmet Report ranked CUNY Graduate Center's philosophy program 14th best in the United States and 16th best in English-speaking countries. In 2026, QS World University Rankings ranked CUNY Graduate Center's philosophy program 50-100 globally.
Faculty
Faculty members include the recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Schock Prize, the Bancroft Prize, Grammy Awards, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Many departments are recognized internationally for their level of scholarship.
Courses in the social sciences, humanities, and mathematics, and courses in the sciences requiring no laboratory work convene at the Graduate Center. Due to the consortial nature of doctoral study at the CUNY Graduate Center, courses requiring laboratory work, courses for the clinical doctorates, and courses in business, criminal justice, engineering, and social welfare convene on CUNY college campuses.
Community
The CUNY Graduate Center pioneered the CUNY Academic Commons in 2009 to much praise. The CUNY Academic Commons is an online, academic social network for faculty, staff, and graduate students of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Designed to foster conversation, collaboration, and connections among the 24 individual colleges that make up the university system, the site, founded in 2009, has quickly grown as a hub for the CUNY community, serving in the process to strengthen a growing group of digital scholars, teachers, and open-source projects at the university. The project has received awards and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Consortium and was the winner of the 2013 Digital Humanities Award.
Also affiliated with the institution are four University Center programs: CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies through which undergraduates can earn individualized bachelor's degrees by completing courses at any of the CUNY colleges; the CUNY School of Professional Studies and the associated Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies; the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers a master's degree in journalism; and Macaulay Honors College.
Research
CUNY Graduate Center describes itself as "research-intensive" and is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to be an R1 or have "highest research activity". The CUNY Graduate Center's primary library, named after Mina Rees, is located on campus; however, its students also have borrowing privileges at the remaining 31 City University of New York libraries, which collectively house 6.2 million printed works and over 300,000 e-books. Beginning in 1968, the CUNY Graduate Center maintains a formal collaboration with the New York Public Library that allows faculty and students access to NYPL's extensive research collections, regular library resources, as well as three research study rooms located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Further, as of 2011, students have access to the libraries of Columbia University and New York University through the NYPL's Manhattan Research Library Initiative. The CUNY Graduate Center library also maintains an online repository called CUNY Academic Works, which hosts open-access faculty and student research.
Initiatives and committees
The CUNY Graduate Center does additional work through its initiatives and committees:
Futures Initiative
Graduate Center Digital Initiatives
Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS)
Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative
The Committee for the Study of Religion
The Committee on Globalization and Social Change
The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies
Endangered Language Initiative
Intellectual Publics
Centers and institutes
With over 30 research institutes and centers the CUNY Graduate Center produces work on a range of social, cultural, scientific and civic issues.
American Social History Project
The American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning (ASHP/CML) was established in 1981 to create and disseminate materials that help with understanding the diverse cultural and social history of the United States. Founded by Stephen Brier and Herbert Gutman, who sought to teach the history of everyday Americans, early projects included the film 1877: The Grand Army of Starvation, about the 1877 railway strike.
ASHP has created curriculum grounded in the work of Howard Zinn, Herbert Gutman, and Stephen Brier which aims to teach social studies at the high school level with the inclusion of diverse viewpoints, including indigenous groups, enslaved Americans, immigrants, and the working class. Notable curricula and teaching tools have included Freedom's Unfinished Revolution: An Inquiry into the Civil War and Reconstruction, and Who Built America? Other curriculum, such as Golden Lands, Working Hands, has focused on labor history; these types of ASHP materials emphasize collaborative teaching and learning strategies and have been popular in teaching districts that prioritize union labor.
Digital teaching resources created by ASHP have included the History Matters website and the online resource Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité: Exploring the French Revolution. As teaching tools, these websites place an emphasis on inclusion of primary source material for use in the classroom, alongside teaching strategies for seamless use of these documents in classroom curriculum. The online resource September 11 Digital Archive has received acclaim for its comprehensive representation of historic perspectives. ASHP is also a partner of the Mission US project and co-produced Mission US: Cheyenne Odyssey, an award-winning video game about a Cheyenne tribesman whose way of life is challenged by western expansion.
ASHP was established out of the success of a series of National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminars; seminar topics have included Learning to Look: Teaching Humanitites with Visual Images and New Media, Visual Culture of the American Civil War and its Aftermath, and LGBTQ+ Histories of the United States. This focus on professional development opportunities for educators has included other workshops such as the Bridging Historias: Latino/a History and Culture in the Community College Classroom program.
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality was launched on September 1, 2016. The Stone Center expanded and replaced the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Center, which opened its doors at the Graduate Center in 2009. It began a post-doctoral program in 2019.
The Stone Center has hosted several scholarly convenings. One year after its launch, it hosted the 2017 Meeting Of The Society For The Study Of Economic Inequality (ECINEQ). In 2021, it convened wealth inequality scholars for the two-day conference, From Understanding Inequality to Reducing Inequality.
Notable people
The CUNY Graduate Center has graduated 15,000 alumni worldwide, including numerous academics, politicians, artists, and entrepreneurs. As of 2016, the CUNY Graduate Center counted five MacArthur Foundation Fellows among its alumni, including writer Maggie Nelson as the most recent recipient. Among alumni graduated between 2003 and 2018, more than two-thirds are employed at educational institutions and over half have remained within New York City or its metro area.
Among the CUNY Graduate Center's alumni are leading scholars across numerous disciplines, including art historian and ACT-UP activist Douglas Crimp, political scientist Douglas Hale, anthropologist Faye Ginsburg, sociologist Michael P. Jacobson, historian Maurice Berger, and philosopher Nancy Fraser. The City University of New York has been acknowledged for its exceptional number of faculty and students who have been awarded nationally recognized prizes in poetry. Among this group include student Gregory Pardlo, winner of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
The CUNY Graduate Center holds a reputation for attracting established scholars to its faculty. In 2001, the CUNY Graduate Center initiated a five-year faculty recruitment campaign to hire additional renowned academics and public intellectuals in order to bolster the institution's faculty roster. Those recruited during the drive include André Aciman, Jean Anyon, Mitchell Duneier, Victor Kolyvagin, Robert Reid-Pharr and Saul Kripke.
The CUNY Graduate Center utilizes a unique consortium model, which hosts 140 faculty with sole appointments at the CUNY Graduate Center, most of whom are senior scholars in their respective disciplines, as well as draws upon 1,800 faculty from across the other CUNY schools to both teach classes and advise graduate students.
Notable faculty members include:
Student life
Some CUNY Graduate Center students live in Graduate housing in East Harlem. The eight-story building includes a gym, laundry facilities, lounge and rooftop terrace. The Graduate housing opened in fall 2011 in conjunction with the construction of the Hunter College School of Social Work.
The Doctoral and Graduate Students' Council (DGSC) is the sole policy-making body representing students in doctoral and master's programs at the CUNY Graduate Center.
There are over forty doctoral student organizations ranging from the Middle Eastern Studies Organization and Africana Studies Group to the Prison Studies Group and the Immigration Working Group. These chartered organizations host conferences, publish online magazines, and create social events aimed at fostering a community for CUNY Graduate Center students.
Doctoral students at the CUNY Graduate Center also produce a newspaper funded by the DGSC and run by a committee of editors from the various doctoral programs. The paper, entitled The GC Advocate, comes out six times per academic year and is free for students, faculty, staff, and visitors.