“Lehman Was My Life”
Dr. Ramona Hernández (B.A., ‘79)
When Dr. Ramona Hernández applied to Lehman College in the
1970s, it was for one specific reason: “Lehman had a bilingual
program and I didn’t know English,” said Hernández, who had
recently arrived from the Dominican Republic. “I graduated in
exactly four years, because I made my life there. I went in the
morning and I didn’t leave until late at night—I had a work-study
job, I was the president of the Bilingual Student Association, I ran
for student government once I knew some English. That’s where I
started my activism. Lehman was my life,” she remembered.
It was an auspicious start to an even more auspicious career:
Dr. Hernández is now the Director of the CUNY Dominican Studies
Institute; a professor of sociology at the City College of New York
(part of CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership); and on the doctoral faculty of the CUNY Graduate Center’s
Ph.D. program in sociology. She has written numerous academic
books and articles in both Spanish and English. Now, she says,
when heads of state are in town for United Nations gatherings,
“it’s common for me to meet with the former president of the
Dominican Republic in the morning and the current president in
the afternoon.”
Dr. Hernández’s accomplishments are all the more impressive given
her humble beginnings. “My mother did not graduate from elementary school (in the Dominican Republic) and my father never went
to school at all. The apartment where I lived with my mother and
father in