Thank you for your amazing work and collaboration

January 15, 2021

Dear Colleagues,

As you read in President Wu’s announcement on Monday, I’ll be retiring from Baruch at the end of January. As President Wu wrote, I made this decision to allow me to focus on recovering completely from what now is best described as “long-haul Covid”. Fortunately, the main symptom I face is “only” exhaustion—one that responds well to the combination of rest and physical training. But over the past few months, it’s also been one that has made it impossible for me to devote all my efforts to my positions as Interim Provost and Senior Lecturer in the Marxe School’s program in Higher Education Administration.

This impending transition is genuinely bittersweet. I certainly look forward to focusing on getting healthier, but I will greatly miss my work, my colleagues, and my students at Baruch. Reflecting back on what has now been a long career spent at a number of outstanding colleges and universities, no part of that career has been more rewarding than the years I’ve spent at Baruch.

Baruch’s mission, faculty, staff, and students are second to none. It is so rewarding to see Baruch getting the recognition it deserves based on the success of our students, staff, and faculty. It’s no accident that the Washington Post chose a wonderful photo of Baruch students at their 2017 Commencement to accompany an article titled “A 50-cent trick to help save the American Dream” on excellent schools that provide strong degrees at a fraction of the cost of others. I look forward to Baruch getting even more attention as a national and global model for affordable, excellent education—as a place where “the children of the rich and the poor take their seats together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good conduct and intellect” (quoting Townsend Harris, writing in 1847 on the founding of the Free Academy).

My main purpose in writing today is both simple and profound: it’s to thank all of you for the amazing work you have done and will continue to do for Baruch and our students. As challenging as the Covid pandemic has been to all of us, both personally and professionally, I want to express my sincere thanks to all of you—faculty, staff, and students—for your fierce dedication to Baruch’s core mission through one of the College’s most challenging periods in its history. In fact, everything I’ve accomplished at Baruch since I first arrived in 2007 has succeeded because of the efforts of the countless Baruch folks involved.

In his letter Monday, President Wu very kindly expressed his appreciation for my work this year and last on a number of key initiatives; I’m deeply grateful to him for this recognition—and for the honor of being able to work alongside him as he begins what I know will be a successful tenure as Baruch’s President.

I also want to thank his predecessor, President Mitchel Wallerstein, for asking me to take on the role of Interim Provost during the transition from his tenure as Baruch’s President to President Wu’s. Of course, neither Mitch nor I could have imagined that this appointment would encounter anything remotely like the disruption wrought by the Covid pandemic and subsequently conclude in the manner it has!

Again, my deepest thanks to all of you. Fortunately, I’ll be in New York for a while and I look forward to the time—soon, I hope—when we can meet over coffee and keep in touch other than through email or by Zoom.

Regards,

Jim