Representing Students Through the Pandemic

The first full academic year after the shutdown came with $2,926,843 to spend on getting fifteen thousand students through it. The committee responsible for the plan held vice presidents, the provost, the IT director, and department chairs, alongside a handful of student seats. Victor Kiani, as Executive Vice President of the student government, held one of them.

The technology fee was one of the few levers that could reach students where the year had actually hurt them. The city's own Internet Master Plan had just put numbers to the gap: 29 percent of New York households had no home broadband, rising to 46 percent among families in poverty. CUNY had been forced to pause the entire university for a week in spring 2020 just to get devices into students' hands before classes could continue. And students were vanishing: community-college enrollment nationwide fell 10 percent in the pandemic's first fall, more than half a million students gone.

Figures: the New York City Internet Master Plan, January 2020; CUNY's spring 2020 recalibration pause; the National Student Clearinghouse on fall 2020 community-college enrollment.

The money came in two parts: roughly $1.96 million in projected fee collections, set against an assumed 15 percent enrollment decline, plus $965,964 rolled forward from the year procurement froze. The document itself is plain about where the second part came from:

The carried-forward funds made delayed technology needs part of the next year’s planning. The committee's work was to plan its use as things students could touch: hardware, software licenses, assistive technology, the machines in the open labs. Kiani's seat existed so the people the money belonged to had a voice in where it went; it was, after all, a student fee.

The plan went to CUNY on June 5, 2021. By then, Kiani had already told the SGA he would be enlisting in the Marine Corps; the budget would outlast his term and reach students he would never meet. A budget is a statement of priorities, and the line items that matter most are the quiet ones that keep people from falling behind.

A year into the pandemic, CUNY had let one of its few real protections for students lapse. Credit/No Credit, the option that lets a student take a passing grade without the number scarring their GPA, had carried the university through 2020 and then expired. With remote classes still grinding on, Victor Kiani made restoring it his fight.

Credit/No Credit is a small mercy with large consequences. A student drowning in a semester they never signed up for, a shared laptop, a sick parent, a job lost, can take the credit and keep the grade off their record. In an ordinary year it is paperwork. In 2021 it was the difference between a hard semester and a permanent mark.

Kiani advised the CUNY University Student Senate's Chair of Fiscal Affairs and Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs. The Senate is the student government for the entire university, all 25 campuses and roughly 271,000 degree students. He had no vote there. What he had was the floor of its Academic Affairs Committee, and he was relentless with it, making the case for Credit/No Credit meeting after meeting. He pressed the committee's chair to secure it fast, and the answer matched the urgency:

When the committee weighed surveying students across all 25 campuses before putting the policy forward, Kiani argued it down: the survey would only cost time the semester did not have. Credit/No Credit was not a contested idea, it was relief no one needed convincing of; a survey is how you pressure-test a radically new proposal, not how you deliver an obvious one.

The senate's officers came to rely on him for it. Its Chair of Fiscal Affairs spoke highly of him; its Vice-Chair of Graduate Affairs asked him to keep doing on the committee exactly what he had become known for:

And where Kiani did have a vote, he cast it. At Queensborough, as Executive Vice President of the student government, he voted for Credit/No Credit for the college's students, and it passed.

Figures: CUNY enrollment, 2020–21.

Credit/No Credit had carried CUNY's students through the worst of the pandemic, and Kiani fought to keep it within their reach when it still mattered, on a committee where he could not vote and a campus where he could. It was the same instinct behind everything he did at CUNY: find the lever that reaches students where the year actually hurt them, and pull it before the moment closed.

On February 4, 2021, at 7:40 on a Thursday evening, Andrew Yang's mayoral campaign contacted Victor Kiani, then Executive Vice President of Queensborough's student government, about a virtual forum with CUNY student leaders. Kiani brought the invitation to the college's executive board to prepare its participation. The forum was later cancelled before it took place.

It was February 4, 2021. Yang was three weeks into the race and had yet to trail in a single public poll; he was also campaigning over video from quarantine, having tested positive for Covid-19 two days earlier. The campaign kept moving anyway, and where it moved next says something about the city it was courting: the City University of New York.

The math was plain. CUNY is the largest urban public university in the United States, its students drawn almost entirely from the five boroughs: the city's voters, workers, and caretakers, and the people carrying the pandemic's weight. The system had laid off 2,800 adjunct faculty the summer before, roughly a quarter of its part-time teaching force, while students sat through remote semesters on whatever hardware they could find. For a candidate whose signature proposal was a billion dollars a year in cash relief for the city's 500,000 poorest residents, CUNY was the audience his platform had to survive.

Figures: the 2021 Democratic primary's public polling record, in which no candidate but Yang led until May; CUNY enrollment, 2020–21; the July 2020 adjunct layoffs as reported by Gothamist and Inside Higher Ed.

The message itself came from Hilary Kinney, the campaign's advance lead and chief of staff, who had been deputy national press secretary on Yang's presidential run. The plan, as she laid it out: "bring together CUNY student leaders for a virtual meeting with Andrew" to talk through what students were facing, what he proposed, and what he wanted for the city. Would Queensborough send its leaders?

Kiani answered that night, wished the candidate a quick recovery, and asked Kinney to send the details to his college office email rather than continue on LinkedIn. Kinney wrote back at 1:28 in the morning, thanked him for the quick response, and promised event details by email. About the candidate himself, she added one more line:

The exchange took place while Yang was campaigning remotely from quarantine and his staff were arranging opportunities to meet voters online. For Queensborough's student leaders, it was an opportunity to prepare questions about the conditions their students were facing.

Kiani took the invitation to the SGA executive board and broke it into working questions: who from Queensborough would attend, what the college would put in front of the candidate, and how to brief its representatives so the conversation would be substantive rather than ceremonial.

The year had already written the agenda: affordability, access, and the wreckage of twelve months of community college under shutdown. What a cash floor averaging $2,000 a year would actually change for students working through one. Who would be left to teach after 2,800 layoffs. Whether the city would close the technology gap that remote semesters had turned into a wall, the same gap his technology-fee committee was working against that same spring.

The forum was cancelled before it ran. The campaign followed: Yang's lead held into May and then broke, and on primary night, June 22, he conceded from fourth place with under 12 percent of first-choice votes. Eric Adams went on to City Hall.

The preparation concerned affordability, teaching capacity, and technology access. Those concerns also connected to Kiani's work on the committee responsible for Queensborough's $2,926,843 technology funding plan that June. His contribution to the proposed forum was bringing the invitation to the executive board and helping prepare its representatives and questions; the cancellation meant those questions were never put to Yang in that forum.