Hunter College report card: Jennifer Raab’s high standards produced great results

Herman Badillo, who came to New York as an orphan from Puerto Rico without a word of English, rising through his outstanding education at City College and later Brooklyn Law School to become a pioneering borough president and congressman, was a lonely voice against establishing open admissions for the City University in 1969.

Three decades later, as chairman of the CUNY board of trustees, Badillo saw the happy demise of that failed experiment and the end of remedial classes at the senior colleges. Enter Jennifer Raab, as the president of Hunter College, the first CUNY campus to get new leadership under the concept of restored standards.

Now, 22 years later, Raab is stepping down from an institution transformed. Hunter and the larger CUNY are no longer the Tutor U or second chance high school that this page bemoaned before the Badillo reforms.

Scholarship is foremost. Excellence is strived for. Under Raab, Hunter is producing Rhodes and Marshall scholars, the best undergraduate students in the country who could have enrolled anywhere. But they choose Hunter, which is enjoying strong admissions and enrollment even as other colleges are seeing declines during COVID.

While Hunter had little tradition of robust giving, Raab has raised more than a half billion dollars for the college, including the largest gift ever to any CUNY campus, $52 million from Leonard Lauder for the Hunter nursing school.

Importantly, she saved Roosevelt House, the home of FDR and Eleanor on E. 65th St. Long owned by Hunter, the townhouse was literally falling down when Raab invested the necessary millions to build an outstanding academic, historic and cultural center.

Recently, a happy father said that his son, who graduated from the Macaulay Honors College at Hunter studying with a fantastic music professor, had gotten an Oxford education. True, but at a much lower tuition, and the young man got to be in the heart of New York City, instead of a provincial English city an hour from London.

Hunter’s next president must keep building on Raab’s achievements.