When the Yang Campaign Came to CUNY

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.