City University of New York announced that the university broke records for fundraising in research funding. The public university raised over 633.2 million for funding its many academically-centered research projects during the 2023 fiscal year.
Héctor Cordero-Guzmán, President of CUNY Research Foundation, praised the public university system for its recent financial achievement.
“We are able to celebrate this milestone because of the efforts of CUNY faculty and staff and the many people involved in the CUNY and RFCUNY research enterprise,” said Cordero-Guzmán. “RFCUNY, in collaboration with campus grants teams, takes on the administrative and support tasks that allow researchers to focus on their intellectual curiosity and propose concrete solutions to society’s challenges. I am very proud of all the accomplishments that CUNY and RFCUNY have been able to achieve and we are poised to continue to make a significant positive difference in the next 60 years.”
The funding raised is the highest recorded award activity in the CUNY Research Foundation’s 60-year history. The increase is $73 million over the 2022 fiscal year and a 27 % increase over the $498.1 million raised in the 2021 fiscal year.
Funding sources included funders from both the private and public sectors of New York. Each sector donated an average combined contribution of under $180 million in the 2023 fiscal year. $84 million came from New York State funding sources and 9.1 million came from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
According to CUNY, funding for research is higher than the university’s pre-pandemic numbers, a sign that researchers have resumed academic work impeded by the pandemic.
CUNY Chancellor Félix Matos Rodriguez released a statement following the news acknowledging the importance of CUNY’s research.
“CUNY is a massive catalyst of creativity, ingenuity and innovation in research, an enterprise that is powered by people of all backgrounds and advanced by their success in obtaining robust financial support for this work in all areas of inquiry,” Rodríguez said in a statement. “If there’s an area of need, there is somebody at CUNY who is working on it, doing something important and contributing in some way. Their research is increasingly relevant to the pressing issues of our time. We’re committed to nurturing those efforts.”
CUNY’s seven-year strategic program, released during the summer, prioritized promoting public-impact research and scholarship. The plan’s progress includes $500 million in external expenditures annually and $200 million in research grants. CUNY was on track to break a record during the 2022 fiscal year.
Due to the record-breaking fundraising, programs including CUNY’s BRESI initiative, a program geared towards uplifting Black, Race and Ethnic studies across the university’s 25 campuses, saw nine of its RFP areas established and an allocated gift of $1.9 million from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a diverse number of research proposals.
