The energy and inspiration we get from being with other people is what drives the world forward. It’s how problems get solved. It’s how innovation happens. It’s how power is exercised. It’s how tyrants are toppled. It’s how changes get made. And it’s how we can achieve great things in our lives, for our communities and for our countries.

The following remarks were delivered by Mike Bloomberg at the Howard University College of Medicine Honors and Oaths Ceremony on May 7, 2021. 

Reopening public schools without delay is crucial to both civil rights and economic justice. It has been encouraging to see President Biden heed calls to push states to prioritize vaccinations for teachers, which will help persuade more of them to return to the classroom, and to take a more active role in encouraging reopening. He should make it clear to states and districts that the time for excuses is over.

America’s schoolchildren and teachers have just gotten some very good news from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After reviewing data from multiple studies in the U.S. and abroad, the agency has concluded that in-person schooling poses very little risk of coronavirus transmission as long as basic safety precautions are followed. That should send a clear message to governors, mayors and teachers’ union leaders: It’s time to open the schools.

This op-ed originally appeared in The New York Times on November 18, 2018.  Here’s a simple idea I bet most Americans agree with: No qualified high school student should ever be barred entrance to a college based on his or her family’s bank account. Yet it happens all the time. When colleges review applications, all […]

$1.8 billion donation to Johns Hopkins University will be devoted exclusively to financial aid, allowing it to permanently offer need blind admissions and eliminate the need for student loans in financial aid packages “America is at its best when we reward people based on the quality of their work, not the size of their pocketbook,” […]

Following the Great Recession, we set out to make New York City the technology capital of the world. Today’s decision by Amazon to bring thousands of new jobs to Queens is the latest big step toward that goal. We always believed that the Applied Science competition would help catalyze the city’s tech industry, and that […]

The following are Mike Bloomberg’s remarks as prepared from The New York Times Higher Ed Leaders Forum on Thursday, May 31, 2018 “Thank you, Frank – and good afternoon. Frank was the Times’ food critic during most of my years in City Hall. And I will just say he was not the only Times journalist […]

On May 12, 2018, Michael R. Bloomberg served as Commencement Speaker at the Rice University commencement ceremony. These are his remarks as delivered.   “David thank you for those kind words. “Good morning, everyone and Members of the Board, faculty, staff, parents and family – it really is an honor to be with you to […]

College presidents who have found some measure of success often parlay that into a job at a more prestigious institution. But Daniel R. Porterfield, president of Franklin & Marshall College, will leave higher education this year to become president of the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit policy group. Porterfield already had a relationship with Aspen, and […]