By: Aarsh Chauhan and Yamila Martinez
A former college dean with a Ph.D. in English and an eye on artificial intelligence makes her mark as the interim president of Hunter College.
A Queens native with strong ties to the CUNY community, Dr. Ann Kirschner is a former dean of Macaulay Honors College, a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center and a strategic adviser for the CUNY Chancellor’s cabinet. She took office as Hunter’s interim leader after former president Jennifer Raab announced that after 22 years she would be stepping down from her duties.
Kirschner’s time as president will end this summer, following CUNY’s recent announcement that current Rutgers University chancellor, Dr. Nancy Cantor, will take office as the 14th president of Hunter College starting Aug. 12.
Her career at CUNY before Hunter includes a series of public-private partnerships aimed at empowering students of all backgrounds. One such initiative is Break Through Tech, a foundation known for partnering with investors including Verizon, Citadel and the Hopper-Dean Foundation. In 2022, Break Through Tech allocated about $26 million to institutions across New York City, Boston, and Los Angeles to increase the participation of women in fields related to artificial intelligence.
Kirschner’s interim presidency comes at a time when the Hunter community finds itself challenged on multiple fronts.
Budget cuts introduced by the city amounted to $155 million this year, and led to a loss of around 235 faculty jobs, according to a report published by the New York City’s Comptroller Office. Student and faculty groups at Hunter have long expressed concerns over consequences of budget cuts, staff shortages and a fragile state of infrastructure.
In light of ongoing geopolitical tensions in the Middle East, CUNY student organizations have organized protests condemning the violence and humanitarian crisis. Amidst the turmoil, Kirschner said she aimed to bring a sense of togetherness and take steps to protect Hunter’s community.
Dr. Kirschner condemned doxing incidents, a tactic in which an individual’s personal information is publicized without consent, which included displaying the faces of Hunter faculty members on the side of trucks parked outside campus, in an email statement sent on Nov. 29.
In her statement, she addressed doxing campaigns as a form of intimidation and harassment and encouraged the campus community to commit “once again to civility, compassion, and diverse perspective.”
The daughter of a Polish Holocaust survivor, Kirschner pivoted between different career paths and is now embarking on a new journey at Hunter.
The interim president spoke in an interview with The Envoy about her plans for her remaining time at Hunter, her views on higher education and AI, on-campus tensions amidst a growing humanitarian crisis in Gaza and her journey to where she is now.
The below interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
From getting a doctorate degree in English to pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in business and digital media, to ultimately coming back to higher education – what inspired these changes in career paths?
I loved my years in graduate school. I still reread “Middlemarch” [by George Eliot] every year just to remind myself how deep and rewarding Victorian fiction is.
It’s been a very important part of my preparation for everything I have done to see how media has changed from radio to television, to cable television, to satellite television, to streaming, to social media and YouTube. I’ve lived that evolution, and some of it has been remarkably good, and some of it has been troubling and divisive.
I came back to higher education because I started getting interested in how universities would be defined in the digital age. And so I’ve been back in higher education since 2000 when I went to Columbia to start one of the very first online learning ventures, and that eventually led me back to CUNY.
I learned a lot at Break Through Tech and their organization’s success is, to me, a national model for public-private partnerships and how with just a little more support, our students will find their way as leaders in the top tech organizations in the world.
How do you define the word “strategist” in your career? What are some of the strategies that you would like to implement at Hunter College?
At Hunter, you think about 49 elevators and 18 escalators, and you think about classrooms, and you think about labs, making sure that when it rains, the roof doesn’t leak. Facilities have emerged to me as a really important thing to think about.
I would say that my heart is around the careers of students who are thinking about life after college and making sure that there’s a smart strategic pipeline that runs from the classroom into life after Hunter. I would say that redefining that new connection between what happens in the classroom and what happens to you after you leave Hunter is, to me, one of the key priorities and strategies that we’re thinking a lot about this year.
An unofficial title for me is “dean of the rest of your life.” So the strategy is that we’re going to focus on students’ careers. We have just hired a person who will be responsible for reaching out to encourage you to apply to Hunter. This fellow is Robert Domanski. He’s a fantastic guy who’s going to be thinking about all the elements that will link you to the best outcomes we could possibly have for our students.
What are some of the challenges that publicly-funded higher education institutions, including CUNY, are facing right now?
There are many reasons why there’s a public concern about the value of higher education. I think that change is coming to higher education, and I think there are a lot of opportunities for us to have some changes. State funding is something that we are eager to increase every single day.
Do we wish that we had more resources? Absolutely. Do we deserve more resources? Absolutely.
And we’re working as hard as we can on all fronts to think about how to increase those.
I also think there’s more that we can do to make our dollars go farther. I’m excited about how technology can help us in some of these areas about operating efficiencies that we might identify. So, these are again amongst the priorities and the analysis that we are working on so that the new president has a really clear playbook for the future.
Speaking of technology, how is Hunter integrating the use of artificial intelligence into higher education?
We want to be careful about privacy issues and making sure that we always take account of human factors. I am a believer that in a place like CUNY, for instance, having enough support for our students is hard when our resources are limited.
So how could AI help us to provide support for students?
For example, I was always a struggling math student and I’ve seen adaptive learning tools that are AI-fueled, that can help you figure out exactly where your problem is occurring and then help you to overcome a particular point where you’re getting stuck.
And not to replace a human advisor, but to scoop up those questions that might be routine, and figure out how we can help students to get their questions answered 24/7. They come home working from a night shift, and they can ask their advisor at one o’clock in the morning, the burning question that they have about something.
During your time at Hunter, what goals do you hope to accomplish?
One is preparing for the transition to the next president of Hunter College, and that’s an unusual role for a president to have. I would like to be able to tell the next president what I have uncovered as the priorities, recognizing that they will have priorities of their own and a vision certainly of their own.
You don’t need to have a vision to know that the elevators have to work. So I would like to surface as many of those priorities as possible, explain where we are in the process, explain what we would have considered to be the next smart tactical moves, but then leave as close to complete optionality for the next president as we can, recognizing that person will and must leave their stamp on the university.
This has been a really tumultuous year. Maybe we’re going to turn the corner and it will be peaceful, but I don’t think we can necessarily count on that. And so, learning how to hold our community together, recognizing that many of our students are suffering and trying to bring together as much of understanding of each other as we can, and learning how to have difficult conversations about important and complex questions.
If you had the chance to address the Hunter community at this moment, what would that message be?
I want to reinforce this question of having difficult conversations around complex topics. I mean, that is absolutely at the heart of the academic mission, and that has gotten a lot harder since Oct. 7 because of the tragedies that have struck so close to our community, especially to our Palestinian and Jewish students at Hunter College.
This is a national issue. How do we have these conversations? What are the appropriate, safe, and responsible ways to have these conversations?
One of the advantages of being an interim president is that I have a sort of clarity about trying to figure out what the best answers are — doesn’t mean that everybody will agree with me. But my motives are to do the best I can to further that academic mission and to support the students, the faculty, and the staff of the Hunter community in my capacity.
Where do you see yourself after Hunter?
Oh my goodness, back to civilian life. I want to reflect on my experience. I want to be helpful during the next transition if it would be useful, and there are a number of different organizations that I’ve been involved in that I will pick up my activities there.
I hope that my time at Hunter evolves into something that’s a lifelong connection to the institution because I admire it, I respect it and I love it.
The Envoy 
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