Richard R. White is general counsel for the Newmark J-School. He serves a similar role for CUNY’s Macaulay Honors College, Guttman Community College, and the CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies.
White brings more than 30 years of experience as an attorney and senior manager, including 20 years in executive management. Prior to his current appointments, in 2019 Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez named him CUNY’s first ever Vice Chancellor for Risk, Audit and Compliance, overseeing 25 institutions: 11 senior colleges, seven graduate and professional schools, and seven community colleges, serving more than 275,000 degree-seeking students.
In 2017, New York Governor Andrew M Cuomo appointed White Deputy Secretary for Public Safety/Homeland Security, the state’s first person of color to ever hold the position. There he managed various agencies with a combined workforce of over 36,000 employees and an annual budget of more than $5.5 billion dollars. Those agencies included: NYS Police, Division of Homeland Security, Division of Military and Naval Affairs, Office of Cyber-security, Department of Corrections and Community Supervision, Division of Criminal Justice Services, Office of Victim Services, Office for the Prevention of Domestic Violence, State Commission of Correction, Board of Parole, and Indigent Legal Services.
Previously, he led the Governor’s Tenant Protection Unit (TPU) at New York State Homes and Community Renewal, a unique statewide unit which proactively enforces landlord obligations to tenants and imposes strict penalties for failure to comply with NY’s rent laws.
Prior to working for Governor Cuomo, he served as of counsel to Cyruli Shanks LLP. He also served as Deputy Commissioner for Investigation, Trials & Litigation at the NYC Dept. of Correction and Deputy Commissioner of Operations at the NYC Dept. of Probation, and was a senior trial attorney for the late Robert M. Morgenthau in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office.
White received a B.A. in Economics from Franklin & Marshall College and a law degree from Delaware Law School. Additionally, he was an executive education graduate at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and was a recipient of Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation for Senior Executives.
He is admitted to practice in NY, NJ, DC, the Courts of the Southern and Eastern Districts of NY, U.S. District Court for NJ, and before the United States Supreme Court.