Getting Things Done
Part Two: Macauley Honors College Where Exceptional is the Rule
This series is about people who while fully aware of the upheavals underway in so many institutions —government, media, education, business and NGOs — have personalities that enable them to confront challenges which have engulfed this era — and get things done.
In 1992, Lev Sviridov was ten years old. His mother, Alexandra, worked on a Russian investigative television show called Top Secret, exposing KGB agents in the early post-Soviet years. After an apparent poisoning and other harassments, her colleagues urged her to leave the country for short-term fellowships in the U.S. and Canada.
A year later, Alexandra and Lev were scheduled to return to Moscow when an unsuccessful coup was launched against Boris Yeltsin with tanks in the streets. Lev says he pleaded with his mother for them to stay in the United States. He still has their unused Aeroflot tickets.
For the past twelve years, Lev Sviridov has been the director of Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College, in the City University of New York system. Each year 120 applicants are chosen for guaranteed free tuition, extensive counseling, and other benefits. The acceptance rate, he says, is less than 10 percent.
Overall, Hunter enrolls about 17,000 undergraduates.
Sviridov was an acquaintance when he invited me to interview Macaulay applicants in tandem with undergraduates, and to rate the applicants’ potential. To get an interview, high school seniors should have an excellent academic record. To be selected, they need to be exceptional.
Being a college administrator in this contentious era is a high-risk career. Sviridov seems to relish the job, and the students seem to return the enthusiasm.
(Caveat: I guarantee I could uncover grumbling at Macaulay, but the upside prevails. When every institution seems to be grappling with the impact of political clashes and social norms, something of it is doubtless happening at Macaulay, but it is not — nearly as I can judge — the dominant mood as it is elsewhere.)
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With the encouragement of well-intentioned American friends, Lev was accepted with a scholarship to the private Ethical Culture Fieldston School in Riverdale, where, he says, he was miserable — an immigrant, economically and socially consigned to the minority outsider group of African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians.
(Though the Sviridovs have a Jewish background, they were not part of the wave of Soviet Jewish emigration of the 1970s and ’80s. Their passports listed their nationality as “Russian” and not “Jewish,” the case with those earlier arrivals, an identifier they understood to reflect a deep-seated Russian antisemitism.)
After a period of what Sviridov calls essentially homelessness and couch-surfing, Alexandra won a $5,000 grant from the literary estate of Lillian Hellman, enough to rent a comfortable apartment on the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, which Lev describes as “transformational.”
When it came to college, Lev chose City College not wanting, he says, to repeat the sense of exclusion he felt at Fieldston. And there he flourished. As a chemistry major he received a Barry Goldwater Scholarship, intended to courage a career in research science. He was also elected president of the student body.
On a web search during his senior year, he encountered the Rhodes Scholarships and noticed that the application deadline was a week away. The Rhodes at Oxford has always been associated with elite status — traditionally for “athletes, scholars and gentlemen.”
By then, the Rhodes was co-educational. And Sviridov was a scholar. But an athlete?
For more than twenty years, Lev has been a regular in fast-pitch softball games in Central Park. “I thought that if I could just get in the room for an interview, I’d be fine,” he said, which happened. Lev Sviridov was finding his way.
He spent four years at Oxford, earning a DPhil in inorganic chemistry. To supplement his scholarship, he worked as an assistant at the London office of the law firm Skadden Arps, where the managing partner, the legendary Joe Flom, had also attended City College.
Returning to New York, Lev was working in a CCNY lab when he caught the eye of Dr. Judith Friedlander, a senior administrator at Hunter, and the college’s president, Jennifer Raab. They told him that the director of the Macaulay program at Hunter was departing, and Sviridov’s appearances at several City University public events had led them to offer him the job.
That was 2014.
I asked him when he had started truly feeling as if he was an American. He replied: In 2004, when he received his citizenship — twelve years after his arrival.
“And your mother?” In 2022, he said, when the Russians invaded Ukraine, and she finally accepted that she could never return to Moscow.
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Macaulay Honors College was founded in 2001 and was named after William E. Macaulay, a CCNY graduate who was chairman of the First Reserve Corporation, a major private equity fund. In 2006, he donated $30 million to City University to endow scholarships and other student funding for the Honors College program and to finance the purchase of a building at 35 West 67th Street to be the hub for the Macaulay programs at eight colleges in the CUNY system. Hunter’s program is the largest. Macaulay died in 2019.
Lev’s role at Macaulay, aside from leadership, is, in a word, “mentoring.” The accepted students, he says tactfully, tend to arrive as “diamonds in the rough,” with accomplishments and a readiness to take on the next phase of their lives.
They are given a senior counselor with the expectation that this person will be advising them for the full four years. One of these counselors, Charlotte Glasser, described her efforts as providing “social capital” — the capacity to accommodate the social, economic, and cultural challenges they will face as they evolve from adolescence.
Glasser said: “Most of these kids come from large bustling public schools. Many balance additional jobs, research labs, and volunteering as they earn straight A’s, communicating by subway long hours every day … They navigate the additional challenges of a public university, while at the same time, exploring the many opportunities in New York ... that will fine tune their academic trajectories and career goals.”
I have no idea whether any of the high schoolers I interviewed will be accepted, but they all had a quality once described to me as SWAN — smart, works hard, ambitious, nice. At the end of every interview, I extended a fist bump and a comment about how impressed I was.
Lev Sviridov’s background qualifies him to closely identify with the students and gain their trust when disputes arise — as they did in the spring of 2024 over the Israel-Hamas war. Were there tensions? Yes. Did they create conflicts like those that cost the presidents of so many universities their jobs? No.
Sviridov has a belief in the students who make it to Macaulay Honors College — and based on his own experience, a belief in himself. That is how he is so able to get things done.
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Gina Raimondo, the subject of the first installment of this series, and Lev Sviridov were both Rhodes Scholars. Established in 1902 by the will of the British diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes and located at Oxford University, the program has always been identified with privilege and controversial exclusiveness. But that has changed over the years. Raimondo and Sviridov both were high achievers from modest backgrounds.
I heard Chelsea Clinton characterize the modern Rhodes well when she told her father, Bill (himself a recipient), that she would not apply for one. Were she chosen, she said, it would be for what she already was, the daughter of a president and an outstanding student at Stanford. The fellowships should go not for what the applicants already are, but to support them to become what they could be.
She paid her own way at Oxford.
