Eugenio María de Hostos Community College’s longtime president Dolores Fernández reflects on her journey through academia and helping other Hispanics reach the top.
In 1998, Dr. Dolores Fernández was exactly where she wanted to be as a tenured, full-time professor at Hunter College, the largest in the City University of New York system. Then she got a call asking her to leave Manhattan and take the helm of Eugenio María de Hostos Community College, CUNY’s troubled bilingual community college in the South Bronx.
“I said, ‘No,’” she recalls. “I wasn’t about to leave Hunter.” CUNY’s chancellor called her to his office to try to change her mind, but it was a Black History Month speech at Hunter that made the difference. A Black minister from the Bronx looked at the comfortable academics and challenged them: Look at your communities. Do the people living there now have the same advantages you had? “I started crying,” Fernández says. “I said, ‘I’ve got to go upstairs and call the chancellor.’ I said, ‘I’ve got to go do this for an interim basis.’”
More than 10 years later — nine of them as Hostos’ permanent president — Fernández, 64, has announced she’ll step down once a replacement is named. In her resignation letter she cited a tenure of academic and financial improvements and beefed-up enrollment. Her efforts were, as she said in her letter, “my opportunity to ‘pay back’ my community.”
‘Not College Material’
The South Bronx community that is home to Hostos and its predominantly Puerto Rican and Dominican student population isn’t precisely her own, although she lives in the Bronx today. She was reared in Astoria, Queens, to a mother who emigrated from Spain and a father who came to New York from Cuba. But like many Hostos students, Fernández entered public school speaking only Spanish. Hostos accepts any high-school graduate, English-speaking or not. And, like many Hostos students, she came to higher education later in life.
