When the Yang Campaign Came to CUNY

Andrew Yang was the frontrunner for Mayor of New York, and his campaign wanted CUNY's student leaders in a room with him. The message reached Victor Kiani at 7:40 on a Thursday night, from the candidate's chief of staff. Kiani decided what that room would be for.

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 and set the terms: he wished the candidate a quick recovery, then moved everything off LinkedIn and onto his office email, where a campaign DM became official college business. If the campaign wanted Queensborough's students, it would deal with Queensborough. 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:

That was the state of the race in February 2021: the polling leader for Mayor of New York running his campaign from a child's bedroom, his chief of staff working messages past one in the morning, and a community college in Queens worth both of their evenings.

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.

What survived was the part Kiani controlled. The questions drafted for a frontrunner did not expire with his campaign; they were the same priorities he carried onto the committee that allocated Queensborough's $2,926,843 technology budget that June. The campaign was after reach. What Queensborough kept was a written account of what it needed, and someone prepared to put it to whoever ran the city next.