The City University of New York (CUNY) doesn't have one faculty lounge or a single hiring office. It runs 25 colleges and schools across the five boroughs, from the City College of New York in West Harlem to Kingsborough Community College at the southern edge of Brooklyn. A CUNY career search is less like applying to one university and more like comparing dozens of public institutions that share a benefits system, a union, and a chancellor, but differ sharply in teaching load, lab space, and research money.
For faculty candidates, the first filter is campus type. CUNY's senior colleges set research expectations differently from its community colleges, and the graduate and professional schools run on separate calendars, budgets, and promotion clocks. The second filter is disciplinary strength: the lab you want may be at Hunter College, while the shared instrumentation may sit at the CUNY Graduate Center's Advanced Science Research Center.
This guide lays out all 25 campuses, identifies where research faculty jobs are thickest, and spells out which budget lines to compare before accepting an offer.
The 25 CUNY campuses, by borough and type
CUNY's official count of 25 includes eleven senior colleges, seven community colleges, and seven graduate, honors, and professional schools. The campuses are distributed through Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. CUNY School of Medicine operates within City College and is not counted as a separate campus in the official list.
Senior colleges
- Baruch College โ Manhattan, known for business and public affairs.
- Brooklyn College โ Brooklyn, with deep programs in film, education, and the sciences.
- City College of New York โ Manhattan, home to the Grove School of Engineering and architecture.
- College of Staten Island โ Staten Island, liberal arts and sciences on a large green campus.
- Hunter College โ Manhattan, with large health sciences, social work, and psychology faculties.
- John Jay College of Criminal Justice โ Manhattan, forensic science and criminal justice policy.
- Lehman College โ Bronx, strong in nursing, social work, and science education.
- Medgar Evers College โ Brooklyn, known for public administration and community-focused professional programs.
- New York City College of Technology (City Tech) โ Brooklyn, technology and applied professional degrees.
- Queens College โ Queens, liberal arts, teacher preparation, and environmental sciences.
- York College โ Queens, with health professions and aviation science programs.
Community colleges
- Borough of Manhattan Community College โ Manhattan.
- Bronx Community College โ the Bronx, on the former New York University uptown campus.
- Guttman Community College โ Manhattan, with a structured first-year model.
- Hostos Community College โ the Bronx, historically bilingual and health-focused.
- Kingsborough Community College โ Brooklyn, with a waterfront campus near Manhattan Beach.
- LaGuardia Community College โ Queens, known for career and technical education.
- Queensborough Community College โ Queens, with a large transfer pipeline.
Graduate, honors, and professional schools
- CUNY Graduate Center โ Manhattan, doctoral programs and major research centers.
- Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY โ Manhattan.
- CUNY School of Law โ Long Island City, Queens, public interest law.
- CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies โ Manhattan.
- CUNY School of Professional Studies โ online and Manhattan.
- CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy โ Manhattan.
- Macaulay Honors College โ Manhattan.
Some searches focus only on the senior colleges, but the community colleges and professional schools hire full-time faculty and administrators year-round, often with different expectations for scholarship and service.
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Where CUNY's research faculty jobs cluster
Research at CUNY does not spread evenly across the system. The strongest funded research faculty roles sit in a smaller set of institutions and institutes where lab space, core facilities, and grant administration are already built. The clearest hub is the CUNY Advanced Science Research Center at the Graduate Center, which houses shared instruments and interdisciplinary teams in nanoscience, photonics, structural biology, environmental science, and neuroscience. A faculty appointment that comes with ASRC affiliation usually includes access to core facilities that would be expensive to replicate at a single campus.
City College has the oldest and largest engineering research portfolio in the system. The Grove School of Engineering concentrates research in photonics, biomedical engineering, artificial intelligence, and energy systems, and it draws significant federal funding. Hunter College and Queens College run strong biomedical, psychology, chemistry, and earth science departments. The College of Staten Island hosts the CUNY High-Performance Computing Center, which gives research groups access to computational resources that smaller campuses generally lack.
- City College of New York โ the Grove School and its affiliated research centers make this the system's main engineering and physical sciences campus.
- Hunter College โ large life sciences and psychology faculties, with active National Institutes of Health and National Science Foundation-funded labs in Manhattan.
- Queens College โ environmental, earth, and data sciences, with strong ties to New York City field sites.
- College of Staten Island โ polymer science, computer science, and the CUNY High-Performance Computing Center.
- CUNY Graduate Center โ doctoral training and the Advanced Science Research Center, plus shared grant infrastructure through the Research Foundation.
The CUNY Research Foundation centralizes sponsored programs administration, but the day-to-day research environment still depends on the home campus's square footage, teaching release, and lab staff. That is why candidates should not assume that a name-brand CUNY college means identical research support.
What makes a research faculty post worth taking
Salary is the first number candidates ask about, but the more consequential variables usually appear later in the offer letter. For CUNY research faculty, four lines separate a job that can grow from one that stays stuck: the start-up package, the lab and core access, the teaching release, and the administrative support for grants. Ask for each in writing, with the semesters attached.
- Start-up package โ CUNY start-ups vary widely by campus and discipline. Ask whether equipment, summer salary, graduate assistants, and travel are itemised separately.
- Lab space and core facilities โ Direct square footage matters more than the campus's total square footage; a shared core agreement at the Advanced Science Research Center can replace a start-up laboratory at some campuses.
- Teaching release โ Some departments commit to reduced teaching in the first two years, but the terms may be informal. Get the exact semesters and credit-hour reductions named.
- Grant support โ Sponsored programs staff help with budgets and compliance. The CUNY research office describes the central services, but local research administrators carry the actual load.
The union context also affects working conditions. Full-time CUNY instructional staff are represented by the Professional Staff Congress, and the contract sets salary schedules, workload, and some research-related provisions. External candidates should review it as carefully as the department's start-up sheet.
For an application that makes those elements legible to a search committee, the advice in how to write a winning academic CV is directly useful: CUNY committees read for evidence of funded research and teaching capacity before they read the narrative.
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The CUNY job market in practice
CUNY hires full-time faculty through campus-based searches, with most tenure-track postings appearing in the fall and early winter. Research staff, postdoctoral fellows, and administrators are hired on a rolling basis across the 25 campuses. AcademicJobs.com carries CUNY openings in a searchable higher education job board, so candidates can filter by campus, role, and discipline instead of checking each college's HR page separately.
Public employment at CUNY carries specific benefits. Full-time service in a public university can count toward Public Service Loan Forgiveness, and the Professional Staff Congress publishes salary schedules and workload rules that are binding for covered titles. Check the Professional Staff Congress before comparing an offer against private universities or other public systems, because benefits and pension eligibility often close part of the salary gap.
Community college faculty at CUNY generally face heavier teaching loads and lower research expectations, which can be a feature for some candidates and a constraint for others. Ask about the campus's promotion and reappointment guidelines early, because they differ from the senior colleges even within the same union.
What to measure next
If you are weighing a CUNY research faculty offer, ask the department chair for four numbers on the way out of the interview: externally funded research expenditures per faculty line, square feet of lab space assigned to the position, the number of faculty who served as principal investigators on a federal grant in the past five years, and the exact teaching release promised for the first two years. Structures tend to predict outcomes more reliably than mission statements do.
The campus list is simple to find; the research capacity is less legible, but it is knowable in advance. The best CUNY research jobs are usually the ones where those four numbers are already in writing before an offer letter appears.