Hunter College Honors Nancy Pelosi and Carolyn Maloney

(NEW YORK, JUNE 8, 2023)—Hunter College President Jennifer J. Raab today presented House Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi with the college’s Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Leadership Award at a ceremony in the Danny and Sylvia Kaye Playhouse before some 700 attendees.

Pelosi is only the second recipient of the coveted award, which recognizes her remarkable achievements in public service. President Raab gave the inaugural trophy to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who accepted it during an address at the college’s 2019 Commencement.

“Speaker Pelosi’s history-making accomplishments as the first female House speaker and certainly the most effective speaker of this century need no introduction,” President Raab said. “She has followed Eleanor Roosevelt’s example by using her power for the common good.”

President Raab created the award to recognize remarkable achievements in public service reflecting Eleanor Roosevelt’s spirit as a champion for human rights and an advocate for the underrepresented, especially women.

Pelosi called the award a great honor recognizing her lifetime achievement and said that her breaking of the “marble ceiling” to become the first woman speaker of the U.S. Congress was a victory for all women, especially those women leaders who had gone before her. She thanked President Raab for her stellar leadership of Hunter and her tireless concern for the wellbeing of its students, praising the college with a quote from Eleanor Roosevelt: “The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”

Hunter operates Roosevelt House, the former Roosevelt residence on East 65th Street, which President Raab renovated and transformed into the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. The historic building is the birthplace of the New Deal and the home from which Eleanor Roosevelt launched her independent career as a human-rights advocate; the award honors this legacy.

At the same ceremony, President Raab also gave an honorary doctorate of humane letters to former Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, who served as the Eleanor Roosevelt Distinguished Leader in Residence at Roosevelt House during the spring 2023 semester — and will return in that role in the fall. Maloney, who taught a cohort of Roosevelt House Eva Kastan Grove Fellows, used her perch to advocate for the Equal Rights Amendment. She did so again during the June 8 ceremony.

“Even though I passed over 80 bills while in Congress, including 12 with presidential bill signings, and gained federal funding for the two largest construction projects in the nation, I was never able to achieve one of my most important goals, and that was getting the Equal Rights Amendment enshrined in the Constitution,” she said, pledging that she would accomplish that feat while she is at Hunter.

Speaker Pelosi is no stranger to Roosevelt House. In 2013, she joined President Raab, members of the New York congressional delegation, and Hunter students to advocate expanded economic opportunity for women across the country. The initiative — “When Women Succeed, America Succeeds” — called for paid family leave and other family-friendly policies. In 2008, she returned to Roosevelt House to discuss her book Know Your Power: A Message to America’s Daughters.

The awards to Pelosi and Maloney are a fitting capstone of the year for Hunter, which, for most of its 152-year history, was a women’s college, with a roster of distinguished female graduates including civil-rights activist Pauli Murray, Congresswoman Bella Abzug, actor Ruby Dee, poet Audre Lorde, poet and activist Sonia Sanchez, and Nobel Prize-winning scientists Rosalyn Yallow and Gertrude Elion.