“Open the doors to all – let the
children of the rich and the poor take their
seats together and know of no
distinction save that of industry,
good conduct, and intellect.”
— Townsend Harris, founder
cuny.edu/news
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK • FOUNDED 1847 AS THE FREE ACADEMY
Graduates are Advised to Show Passion;
Honors College Students are Called ‘Pioneers’
A
t CUNY campuses
around the city, students
marched in graduation ceremonies and heard speakers
— U.S. Senators, human
rights activists and others —
who told them to continue
their mission of self-discovery and to live lives of passion and commitment.
Latest estimates are that
31,700 students received
diplomas from CUNY
colleges in the 2004-2005
academic year. A preliminary statistical profile from
U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton spoke to the first graduating class of CUNY Honors College. Photos by Monica Jones.
the Office of Institutional
Research shows the latest
— a 1962 alumna — told her audience at
medical and law schools or travel to forbaccalaureate graduates reflect increasing
Brooklyn College, “Don’t be afraid to take
eign countries in pursuit of historical and
levels of immigration to the city, with 50.9
a stand.”
scientific studies,” she said.
of them foreign-born.
At Queens College, the presidential
There was a changing-of-the-guard at
Some ceremonies echoed the
medal was awarded to Jerry Mitchell,
some colleges. At the Graduate Center,
University’s focus on the sciences, as at
reporter from The Clarion-Ledger of
speaker Bill Moyers, the renowned journalYork College where President Marcia V.
Jackson, Mississippi, whose articles led to
ist, paid tribute to retiring President Frances
Keizs spoke of Fiona Smith, one of two
the arrest of a man now being tried in the
Degen Horowitz.
CUNY students selected to intern at the
1964 murders of three civil rights workers.
“My heroes are people like her who
prestigious Salk Institute for Biological
One of the murdered workers was
make public institutions work. These are
Studies in La Jolla, California, where
Queens College student Andrew Goodman.
fragile contraptions and their leaders are
Nobel Prize winners have worked.
Mitchell told the graduates, “I encourage
always vulnerable to the fashions of the
Hunter College handed a diploma to
you as you leave Queens College, just as
time, the perils of politics, and the prethe other Salk scholar, Irina Chaikhoutdinov.
Andy did 40 summers ago, to follow his
sumptuous judgments of the uninformed.”
History was made this season. For this
example: to notice others’ needs, to live for
At CUNY Law School, outgoing Dean
was the first graduating class of the CUNY
someone other than yourself....”
Kristin Booth Glen wept as she presided
Honors College, where students are called
One almost ubiquitous figure at exercisover her last graduation, saying of her 10University Scholars. Speaking to the
es around the University was Chancellor
year tenure: “I have been blessed to send
Scholars was U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton,
Goldstein, who spoke at Baruch, John Jay,
about a thousand graduates into the profeswho called them “pioneers” and said they
Kingsborough Community College, CUNY
sion.... You are our best hope for the
were “living reminders of why we, as a city,
Honors College and New York City
future.”
a state, and a
College of Technology.
Glen has been
nation, must conPROFILES OF THE CLASS OF 2005 succeeded by Mary Lu
The CUNY graduates were overwhelmtinue to keep faith
ingly — more than 63 percent — female,
Bilek, the Interim Dean,
On pages 10 and 11 are stories of
with the promise of
University data showed.
a graduate of Harvard
graduates, who hail from 175 countries.
higher education.”
“This is reflecting a (nationwide) trend
Law School who
Whether born in Bangladesh, Romania,
Chancellor
which is more pronounced in urban areas,”
previously served as
Jamaica or the Bronx, they are,
Matthew Goldstein
said Queens College demographer Andrew
Associate Dean for
collectively, a quintessentially American
described the
A. Beveridge.
Academic Affairs.
tale of ambition and achievement.
Honors College as
“It’s true particularly among AfricanAt John Jay College,
“a bold experiment
Americans,” he said.
new President Jeremy
that has been enormously successful, as
At Bronx Community College, valedicTravis gave an installation address noting
well as a symbol of the academic renaistorian Kirk Morrison, a computer science
how the college has expanded from its earsance that has transformed CUNY into a
and math major who had a 3.986 average,
lier narrow focus on criminal justice. Today
first-choice University.”
advised graduates to continue their studies.
John Jay students deal with international
Dean Laura S. Schor recalled that the
“I am hoping that my degree and future
and national issues, using literature, science
class was forged in the cauldron of
career will enable me to contribute to the
and technology.
September 11, 2001, when the students
education of the people of Jamaica and
“Our challenge today is to accelerate
were suddenly “faced with a tragedy that
help them bridge the digital divide that
the process of adapting to a rapidly changshook the country and the world. The
exists between them and other countries,”
ing world,” Travis said.
events of September 11 were formative for
he said. Morrison plans to go to Rensselaer
At Baruch College incoming President
everyone in this hall, but perhaps especialPolytechnic Institute or Clarkson University.
Kathleen Waldron told graduating students,
ly so for young students in their first weeks
Many graduates overcame personal
“Make your own opportunities, but also fight
of college.”
hardship, as did Ebony S. Francis, a
to ensure opportunities for those who will
Student Elizabeth Depasquale, who was
25-year-old single mother of two who
follow you.” At Kingsborough Community
also affiliated with Brooklyn College, spoke
graduated from Kingsborough Community
College, President Regina S. Peruggi also
of the unique opportunities offered to the
College with a 3.97 average and will be
presided over her first spring graduation.
189 graduating Honors College students.
attending Brooklyn College in the fall.
Other colleges honored the accomplish“We will take these experiences with us
ments of students from past generations.
as we move on to prestigious graduate,
U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer of California
Continued on pages 10 and 11 ©
S U M M E R 2005
AT A GLANCE
A Top Bush Appointee
Speaks of Years at York
Gerald A. Reynolds,
York Class of ’89,
was appointed by
President George
W. Bush as the
chair of the U.S.
Commission on
Civil Rights. He
says he welcomes
the controversy surrounding his
appointment. See page 4.
Expansion of Middle East
Studies is Underway
Professor Beth
Baron says demand
for Mideast courses
has grown since the
terrorist attacks of
September 11,
2001. Having
recently won a
federal grant, the
University is meeting that growing
demand. See page 8.
Alumnus is on Mission to
Save Parks and Birds
Biologist Robert
DeCandido, who
earned his doctorate from CUNY
and has taught at
CCNY, passionately monitors the
flora and fauna of
New York City. He
laments the losses, and says not all the
gains have been good. See pages 6 and 7.
The Business of Colleges,
Increasingly, is Business
Yoav Barth, of Queens College, is
among the growing number of young
men and women choosing to major in
business administration. One by one,
colleges have been seeking and receiving
approval to grant business degrees.
See pages 2 and 3.
FROM THE
CHANCELLOR’S DESK
Long-Term Forecast is for a
A Capital Future
G
et out your hard hats — and prepare
yourselves for a period of building and
restoration that will transform The City
University of New York as we know it.
At the conclusion of this year’s city budget, the University is hopeful that it will have
the largest capital program in its history,
almost $2 billion for much-needed building
and renovation projects across the University.
This anticipated multi-year investment
in CUNY and its students is evidence of
strong support from our state and city leaders, and I am very grateful for their recognition of CUNY’s critical educational mission.
Though substantial capital needs remain,
especially given the lack of adequate support in decades past, this proposed program
represents welcome progress.
The new funding would address needs at
every CUNY campus, including the construction of new buildings, renovation of
existing structures, and fulfillment of health
and safety code-compliance requirements.
These substantive changes were necessitated
by our growing enrollment, a shortage of
research and classroom space, and public
safety concerns. The funding is earmarked
for a broad range of projects—from the
replacement of Fiterman Hall at Borough of
Manhattan Community College, to a new
academic building at the New York City
College of Technology, to the CUNY Small
Business Incubator Network and roof
replacements at Kingsborough Community
College. It would also begin to answer our
need for investment in the sciences, with
funding to build new facilities or modernize
existing science buildings at Brooklyn,
Hunter, Lehman, Queens, and City Colleges,
as well as funds for the new University-wide
Advanced Science Research Center. These
improvements to our physical plant are not
merely decorative touches; they are integral
to our ability to provide an environment
conducive to learning at a high level.
CUNY’s six community colleges and
Medgar Evers College are funded through
matching appropriations from the city and
the state. This year’s budget offers an
unprecedented opportunity for enhancements to these campuses, which, of course,
will lead to substantial improvements in
the services they provide. For example, a
new instructional building and library at
Bronx Community College will offer classroom space, open study areas, and learning
centers to replace classrooms located in
what were once dormitories, ill suited to
teaching and learning. And a new
Holocaust Resource Center and Archives
at Queensborough Community College
will provide the
center with almost
5,000 feet of
additional space,
enabling it to
increase its exhibit
programming, accommodate larger tour
groups, and expand its library collection.
Other community college projects will
address long-deferred renovations and
upgrades.
An enhanced public investment in
CUNY’s physical facilities also provides an
opportunity for greater private investment.
A public-private partnership can often
make possible building projects that could
not otherwise find adequate funding. For
example, New York City College of
Technology’s planned academic building is
a mixed-use facility that will address the
college’s acute space needs with classrooms, an auditorium, labs, and a dental
hygiene clinic, among other things.
Leveraging available real estate resources,
such as air rights, would reduce the
amount of state funds needed for the project. We will continue to pursue publicprivate opportunities for collaboration to
meet our campuses’ need for space.
In addition to our state- and city-funded
projects, City College broke ground in
May for its first-ever residence hall, which
is being built without public funds. The
new facility will provide accommodations
for about 600 students starting in the Fall
2006 semester. It offers students an alternative to late-night commutes after labs or
design-studio work, and an even greater
connection to the city itself.
I am indebted to CUNY’s students,
faculty, and staff for their support of
improved city and state budgets, including
increased capital funding, through
www.supportcuny.org. During the recent
state budget process, more than 400,000
e-mails were sent to state legislators by
members of the CUNY community, which
was very helpful to our efforts to achieve a
better budget. Thank you for bringing that
message to your public representatives.
With the proposed capital program, we
can truly build the University’s future,
enabling CUNY to one day serve the children of the thousands of students graduating this month. Through continued public
support, our physical spaces will inspire the
next generation toward higher learning.
Board of Trustees
The City University of New York
Benno C. Schmidt Jr.
Chairman
Valerie L. Beal
Randy M. Mastro
John S. Bonnici
Hugo M. Morales
John J. Calandra
Kathleen M. Pesile
Wellington Z. Chen Carol Robles-Román
Kenneth Cook
Nilda Soto Ruiz
Rita DiMartino
Marc V. Shaw
Joseph J. Lhota
Jeffrey Wiesenfeld
Lauren Fasano
Chairperson,
Student Senate
Susan O’Malley
Chairperson,
Faculty Senate
Chancellor
Matthew Goldstein
Secretary of the Board of Trustees and
Vice Chancellor for University Relations
Jay Hershenson
University Director for Media Relations
Michael Arena
Editor Ron Howell
Writers Gary Schmidgall, Rita Rodin
Photographer André Beckles
Graphic Design Gotham Design, NYC
Articles in this and previous issues are available
at cuny.edu/news. Letters or suggestions for future
stories may be sent to the Editor by email to
Mediarelation s @ mail.cuny.edu. Changes of address
should be made through your campus personnel office.
2 CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005
ness and management rose 24 percent
around the University, from 2,878 to
ong before he enrolled in college, Yoav
3,579, according to data from the Office of
Barth had a passion for business and
Institutional Research. Office data also
finance. He knew that a BBA degree would
show Business/Management is the most
be a ticket to the life he wanted, of an entrepopular degree major, followed by Social
preneur, the owner of his own business.
Sciences and Psychology.
Now he’s on his way.
Here are some key developments:
An Honors College student, Barth was
• Lehman and Queens Colleges have added
among the first to take advantage of Queens
BBA’s to their degree lists, and in April
College’s new program leading to a bacheBrooklyn College received approval to do so.
lor’s degree in business administration.
• Hunter College is preparing to offer an
There was a time, just two years ago,
MS in accounting.
when the only route to a CUNY degree in
• The College of Staten Island plans to
business administration was through
offer its first master’s degree in business
Bernard Baruch College. While Baruch is
adminstration.
still the flagship in business education —
• Medgar Evers College is looking to expand
with a strong and growing national reputabusiness offerings.
tion — demand for degrees in business
• Baruch is planning
administration has
to grant a new BBA in
been like a bull marreal estate.
ket, and other
Students at Baruch
CUNY colleges have
are very much aware
been receiving
of the value of a busiapproval to grant
ness degree from there.
business degrees.
For Priya Shah, the
At Queens
business of education
College, enrollments
started all the way
in the BBA programs
back in high school
“are booming
when, as part of an
because employers
assignment, her class
are looking for busitook turns playing the
ness degrees,” says
“The Stock Market
Betsy Hendrey,
Game.”
chairman of the col“We had to buy and
lege’s economics
sell securities, and that
department and
piqued my interest,”
director of the BBA
the newly minted BBA
program, adding that
from Baruch College’s
15 students have
Zicklin School of
graduated since the
Business says.
program began in
Alan Liang’s path
2003. “We have a
to a BBA from Baruch
Yoav Barth graduated with a bachelor of
steady stream of
business administration degree from Queens wasn’t so early or so
alumni who are
clearly defined. He
College's new business program. Colleges
going into the busimade it his business
ness world, and they have been creating and expanding business
to go into business
programs throughout the University.
tell us they really
because he realized
need this.”
that earning a Baruch
From academic
BBA would “allow me to get my foot in the
year 1999-2000 to 2003-2004, the numdoor” in a “very competitive market,” where
ber of bachelor’s degrees awarded in busithe “trend is toward specialization, and the
L
Through Alumni, Bear Stearns
I
t is no surprise to find CUNY grads at
some of the city’s most prestigious companies, or among their top executives. But a
reception hosted by Bear Stearns revealed
something that was, perhaps, surprising to
many: more than 550 of the firm’s nearly
11,000 employees are CUNY graduates.
The recent gathering gave the
University a chance to renew ties with successful alumni, and to create a partnership
that hopefully will be copied at other prestigious firms around the city.
The story of how CUNY and Bear
Stearns forged a connection goes back 40
years, to 1965, when Mike Minikes, treasurer of Bear Stearns, graduated from
Queens College.
In the 1970s Minikes decided to
become “reacquainted” with his alma
mater and eventually joined the board of
the Queens College Foundation. “I had a
great education at a great price that gave
me the foundation to learn,” he said at the
April reception held at Bear Stearns’
Madison Avenue headquarters.
Minikes began to broaden his support
to the University as a whole and over the
past several years has played an important
role in Chancellor Matthew Goldstein’s
drive to reinvigorate CUNY. Among other
things, Minikes nurtured the development
of a mentoring and internship program for
CUNY Honors College students at Bear
Stearns.
“This mentorship and internship program placed our students in very prestigious positions,” noted Laura Schor
University Dean, CUNY Honors College.
“Working with our Honors students,
[Bear Stearns] found them to be every bit
as good as students from Cornell and
Wharton.” Six students participated last
summer, the program’s first year, and seven
have been accepted for this summer.
The Bear Stearns-CUNY reception was
styled after similar events done for a few
other colleges, including Columbia, Yale
and NYU. Two Bear Stearns executives
involved in the creation of the Honors
La Guardia-Wagner
Photos are a Big Hit
Booming Market for Business Degrees
Students like Shah,
Barth and Liang —
who are all 21-yearold Honors College
students — say that
earning a CUNY BBA
makes good business
sense. “It’s an incredible education for half
the price,” says Shah,
who is from Woodside. “Four years at
Baruch is the same
price as one semester
at NYU.”
Shah says
Baruch’s focus on
liberal arts, small
Priya Shah and Alan Liang received their bachelor of business
classrooms and peradministration degrees from Baruch College, which retains a national
sonalized attention
reputation as a flagship for business studies. They are photographed
from professors
at Baruch’s “virtual trading” area, officially the Bert W. & Sandra
made her decision
Wasserman Trading Floor of the Subotnick Financial Services Center.
easy. “I turned down
a scholarship to
BBA is a distinction that companies are
NYU,” she says. “At NYU, I would have
increasingly recognizing.”
been a Social Security number, a small fish
Phyllis Zadra, associate dean of Baruch’s
in a huge ocean.”
business school, speaking of the business
Liang, a Briarwood resident who got
degree, says, “The students feel that this is
offers from Brandeis and Stony Brook
the most direct route to
Universities, says Baruch’s
being employed.”
$3-million Subotnick
John Flateau, dean of
Center, a state-of-the-art
“We’re bursting
the school of business at
virtual trading floor, was
at the seams.
Medgar Evers College,
one of the things that
says the college has put in
tipped the balance in
Enrollment has
a proposal for a master’s
Baruch’s favor. “Less than
of professional studies in
increased in
10 schools have a facility
leadership degree
like this,” he says. “I have
the
last
two
to
program. The central
talked to people in other
Brooklyn college is also
three years and is now schools, and we have the
looking to broaden its
biggest and best one.”
at an all-time high… ”
four BS degrees in busiShah, who has been an
ness, accounting, computintern at JPMorgan Chase
— JOHN FLATEAU,
er information systems
& Co. for four years, and
DEAN OF THE MEDGAR
and applied management
EVERS SCHOOL OF BUSINESS Liang, who interned at
by adding majors in
Bear Stearns last summer,
advertising and other
say that Baruch has given
fields, he adds.
them hands-on experience that will make
“We’re bursting at the seams,” Flateau
the transition from classroom to office
says. “Enrollment has increased in the last
seamless.
two to three years and is now at an all“In my opinion, Baruch is on a par with
time high with the business school.”
NYU and Columbia,” Liang says. “It places
s
you on an even battlefield with students
from Wharton, NYU and Columbia.”
The Baruch experience, they say, has
persuaded them to further their business
education: After working for a while, Shah
wants to earn her combined JD/MBA, and
Liang plans to go back to school to get an
MBA.
Alan Zimmerman, associate professor
and area coordinator of the international
business program at the College of Staten
Island, says that enrollment in CUNY’s
business programs will continue to rise
because “business continues to make the
news. This will be a long-term trend, especially in our school, where many of the
students need to make a living even when
they are going to school.”
And he says that his field — international business — will be a constant draw. “I try
to get my majors to do double majors in
international business and finance, accounting or management,” he says. “This will give
them an edge in the job market.”
Barth, a Great Neck resident who studied in Israel through the Honors College,
says that understanding the business
world, which his BBA and the diversity of
his Queens College classmates helped him
do, will be invaluable for his plans of
starting his own business. By studying with
students from many different countries, “I
learned to challenge my assumptions and
learned about things from different vantage points.”
As for Liang, he’s looking forward to
working in the hedge funds division of
Bear Sterns in downtown Brooklyn. And
he says that the Baruch BBA made all the
difference. “After working on the college’s
virtual trading floor, I knew trading wasn’t
for me, but it gave me a feel for those who
do, and I’ll be working directly with people
who do trade.”
Regardless of which job he chooses,
Barth, who was an intern at Morgan
Stanley Dean Witter, says that he’ll always
have his eye on being his own boss. “I may
create my own hedge fund after working
for a couple of years,” he says, never
hedging in his ambitions.
A
fter being profiled in The New York
Times and Daily News, the La Guardia
and Wagner Archives at LaGuardia
Community College had millions of website “hits” from people eager to see a collection of Housing Authority photos,
many dating to the 1930s.
The photos are of interest because,
among other things, they show New
Yorkers inside tenement buildings that
later were razed to build housing projects,
said archive director Richard K.
Lieberman.
“Not since Jacob Riis have we gotten
that kind of look inside homes,”
Lieberman said, referring to the muckraking journalist who died in 1914.
Lieberman calculated that during two
weeks in May, the web site received about
two million
“hits,”
representing
about
34,000
people, or
website
“visitors.”
Interest
remains
high.
Thousands of
photos
can be
viewed at
www.LaGuardiaWagnerArchive.lagcc.cuny.ed
u. From there just click “How Public
Housing Transformed New York.”
Pictured above is a woman identified
as Mrs. Theodore Wurthmann in the
kitchen of her tenement apartment on
September 2, 1941. The exact location is
not given, though it was probably in
Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. After
demolition of their building, the
Wurthmann family was moved into the
newly opened Kingsborough Houses, in
Bed-Stuy.
Forms a Strong Partnership With CUNY Colleges
College internship program, Tony Brown
and Maureen C. Corbett, helped orchestrate the event.
At the reception, Minikes and
Chancellor Goldstein made brief presentations to the broad array of alumni. The
employees included some who joined Bear
Stearns straight from community colleges,
a good number who went there from four
year colleges, and others who hold CUNY
diplomas and advanced degrees in business, law and other areas.
The final speaker at the evening reception, Ikhtiar Allen, a member of the Honors
College class of 2005 and a City College
economics major, described his transformation from insecure teenage immigrant from
Bangladesh to a self-confident Honors
College student and intern at Bear Stearns.
Allen said he was looking forward to
embarking on his career with the firm.
Alumni who attended said they were
pleased to discover that so many of their
colleagues were fellow CUNY grads. And
college presidents who attended were
grateful for the opportunity to become
acquainted with alumni, many of whom
had not been in touch with their colleges
since graduation.
Queensborough Community College
President Eduardo Marti was pleased to
meet a senior managing director of the
firm who graduated in 1962. “He stated
more than once that Queensborough is
where he got his start. He could be a
wonderful spokesperson for a community
college,” Marti said.
Kingsborough President Regina Peruggi
learned that 59 of her alumni work at Bear
Stearns, and met some of them.
“We were delighted to meet them and
bring them up to date, and have invited
them all to Homecoming,” Peruggi said.
For Baruch President Kathleen Waldron,
the event presented an opportunity to
deepen bonds with the college’s many
alumni at the firm. Waldron summed up
the reaction to the evening, saying she and
others were touched by the personal
encounters.
The partnership with
Bear Stearns is one the
University hopes will
serve as a model for relationships with other businesses in the city.
Chancellor Goldstein has
recently initiated a conversation about partnership opportunities with
Verizon Communications.
Chancellor Matthew
Goldstein received an
award from Mike Minikes,
a Queens College alumnus
and Bear Stearns officer.
The award reads: “Bear
Stearns Honors our partner
City University of New
York for Developing
Business Leaders of
Tomorrow.”
CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005 3
STUDENT HONORS
Learning from Disasters
I
n 1998, Wandaly Rentas got a crash
course in class differences as Hurricane
George hit her native Puerto Rico and
wiped out the shacks of the poorest
people. “It made me think about the
way other people live and how they are
affected by the location and the class
they happen to be born into,” says the
Lehman College sociology major.
This summer, Rentas will get a
chance to analyze the sociological
effects of natural disasters during the
Research Experience for Undergraduates, a program run by the Disaster
Research Center. The program is based
at the University of Delaware.
A Ticket to Diplomacy
Aspiring diplomat Natalie Waugh, who
earned her bachelor of arts degree in
international studies from City College in
June, was one of 10 students in the country to win the 2005 Charles B. Rangel
Fellowship in International Affairs.
The fellowship offers up to $28,000
to support master’s degree studies.
Waugh is mulling acceptances from the
University of Denver’s Graduate School
of International Studies, the Monterey
Institute of International Studies and
Columbia University’s School of
International and Public Affairs.
In Salk’s Footsteps
It was the death of his father that set
Oladapo O. Yeku, who graduated in biology from Medgar Evers College, on the
path to a medicine.
Yeku watched helplessly as his oncevibrant dad deteriorated and died of
non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. He vowed
he would use the death to stop the
suffering of others.
Yeku, who will be an M.D./Ph.D.
student at SUNY Stony Brook’s School
of Medicine in
the fall, was one
of eight CUNY
pre-med students, including
Fiona Smith of
York College
and Luz E.
Liriano of City
College, awarded Salk Scholarships in May.
The scholarOladapo O. Yeku
ships, started a half century ago by City
College alumnus and polio vaccine discoverer Dr. Jonas E. Salk, carry a $6,000
stipend toward medical school tuition.
O f Fe a s t s a n d F u l b r i g h t s
It is folk culture that fascinates CUNY
alum Stephanie Trudeau, and her
research is leading to Italy, where, thanks
to a 2005 Fulbright Fellowship, she will
study three religious feasts: Giglio in
Nola, St. Joseph’s in Caltabellotta and
Festa dei Ceri in Gubbio.
In her project, “Festa, Family and
Food,” Trudeau, a January 2004 graduate
of the CUNY Baccalaureate Program,
will study the way the feasts allow
families in Italy and America to celebrate
their culture through music, art, food and
religious ritual.
A Colleague and Friend Recalls the
Fighting Spirit of Kenneth Clark
A
lthough newspapers around the
world published hundreds of laudatory
paragraphs about Kenneth Clark, who died
on May 1 at age 90, a former colleague
and friend says one word sums up Clark’s
character: fighter.
Lawrence Plotkin, professor emeritus of
psychology at City College, sat for a
University Relations video interview and
recalled his times with Clark, whose pioneering research played a pivotal role in
the 1954 Supreme Court decision Brown
v. Board of
Education, which
toppled the “separate but equal”
doctrine and
required the
desegregation of
public schools.
Clark was the
first black to earn
a doctorate in
psychology from
Columbia
University, the
first black
tenured professor
at City College
and the first
black elected to
Lawrence Plotkin, a
the New York
CCNY professor
State Board of
emeritus, collaborated
Regents. He and
on scholarly work with
Plotkin met while
his late friend and
they were stucolleague, Professor
dents in the
Kenneth Clark.
1940s, and
they continued to work
together on
various projects through
the 1980s
after they
retired.
“He never
gave up his
struggle to
improve the
condition of
AfricanAmericans,
particularly
young children
in schools,”
Kenneth Clark did research showing many black children believed white
Plotkin says.
dolls were better than black ones, paving the way to 1954 Supreme Court
“And he lost
decision banning school segregation. This photo is courtesy of Northside
more battles
Center for Child Development, founded by Clark.
than he won.
After many
defeats and at the end of his life, he felt he
had not succeeded in changing things that
Even after he retired from City College
much. He kept coming back. … [Toward the
in the 1970s, Clark maintained a special
end,] he said, ‘I can’t change things, you
bond with CCNY. “There was no City
know,’ and he stopped fighting.”
University when we started. His identificaIf Clark’s research had an impact on
tion was with City College,” Plotkin says.
education in the American South, he also
“He did all of his important work at City
had much to say about the school system
College and at the research institutes he
here in New York City. For example, he was
set up afterwards.”
an early advocate of creating powerful comPlotkin says that one only need look in
munity school boards. Inviting controversy,
any public-school classroom to see Clark’s
he accused the city of having a dual school
legacy, which literally is written in black and
system — one for whites and one for
white. “This man, for what he’s done, out of
blacks.
his life experience, has shown how to live an
honorable life in a dishonorable country.”
Top Bush Appointee is York Grad
Who Says He Welcomes Controversy
T
he attorney appointed by President
George Bush to head the U.S. Commission
on Civil Rights recalled his years at York
College, saying the experience engendered
in him a love of philosophy and history.
“At York, basically I had a small circle of
friends, and they were mostly history and
philosophy majors,” Gerald A. Reynolds
said in a telephone conversation from
Kansas City, where he is on the legal staff
of Great Plains Energy, a provider of electricity to the Midwest.
“I had good relationships with my professors,” the 1989 graduate told CUNY
Matters.
“At the time there were not many students who were very interested in philosophy and history and it was me and my
merry band of warriors. We could monopolize the professors’ time and they did not
mind our monopolizing their time.”
His mentor at York, he said, was the late
philosophy professor Barry R. Gross, who
was an early opponent of affirmative
action and in 1978 authored the book
Discrimination in Reverse: Is Turnabout Fair
Play? published by New York University
Press.
Reynolds, who went on to earn a law
degree from Boston University, was named
chair of the civil rights commission in
December. He replaced his long-serving
4 CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005
predecessor, Mary Frances Berry, a Civil
Rights-era activist and scholar whom
President Bush declined to reappoint.
Reynolds said he believes the civil rights
“problems that existed in the 1940s aren’t
the same problems we face today.” While
racial discrimination may occur in isolated
instances, “Now the largest barrier to
progress is the lack of a quality education,”
he said. That same line of thinking led
President Bush to press for the No Child
Left Behind act.
Reynolds’ conservative positions have
led critics to say the commission is turning
its back on its original mandate to protect
rights of minorities. “His appointment is
less about civil rights oversight than
remaking the commission in the image of
the [Bush] administration,” said Wade
Henderson, executive director of the
Leadership Conference on Civil Rights,
who was quoted in the New York Times.
Reynolds told CM the criticism only
encourages him. Being treated fairly in
employment is mostly about understanding “the market” and preparing oneself to
meet its needs, he said. “Market forces are
impersonal. Market forces want to know if
you have a deep knowledge base, and if
you don’t, the market forces won’t have
much use for you.”
The website of the civil rights commission lists Reynolds’ political affiliation as
Republican.
York College’s official student newspaper, Pandora’s Box, ran an article in its
April issue, written by Daniel Cuevas,
about Reynolds.
As for those who complain about the
new conservative direction of the commission, Reynolds said, in effect, Bring it on.
“Whatever topic we pick, there’s going
to be controversy. And since I know I’m
going to piss somebody off, I might as well
do what’s right.”
Gerald A. R e y n o l d s
F
NANO
TED
D
QUOTED
Colleges Rank High in
Graduating Hispanics
ive colleges of the University were
ranked tops in the Northeast in granting
bachelor’s degrees to Hispanic students in
such high-profile studies as architecture,
business and marketing, computer science,
English literature, protective services and
psychology, according to a major educational journal.
In an annual survey of the “100 Top
Colleges and Universities for Hispanics” by
The Hispanic Outlook in Higher Education
Magazine, John Jay ranked No. 1 in the
nation in awarding degrees in protective
services and No. 3 in psychology degrees.
The college also ranked No. 7 in public
administration degrees.
Lehman was ranked No. 3 in computer
science; Hunter was No. 4 in English literature; Baruch was No. 5 in business and
marketing; and the City College of New
York was No. 8 in architecture.
In master’s degree programs, Queens
College was ranked 65th and Brooklyn
79th.
CUNY’s Graduate Center was No. 18
in the nation in awarding of doctoral
degrees to Hispanics.
The magazine’s survey was based on
2003-2004 data from the U.S. Department
of Education’s National Center for
Education Statistics.
A
African Art at
Queensborough
frican art is dynamic, powerful and
expressive. So says longtime collector Gary
Schulze.
“It’s not art for art’s sake,” Schulze says.
“It was made for specific purposes like
secret societies and royal ceremonies.”
Schulze is exhibiting his collection,
reflecting 30 cultures, 15 countries and 2000
years of history, in his first solo show, which
is at the Queensborough Community
College Art Gallery through Sept. 30.
“Artists and Patrons in Traditional
African Cultures,” a display of more than
150 objects from Schulze’s 400-piece
collection, comprises everything from
terra cottas—hailing from the Nok area of
Nigeria and dating from 500 B.C. to 200
A.D.—to Benin ivory and cast-bronze
objects created in the 18th Century.
“There are quite a few pieces that have
never been seen before, like the metal
chief’s masks and the ancient stone figures
from Sierra Leone,” Schulze says.
“Hopefully, when people see them, they
will begin to develop an appreciation for
African art.”
For more information, call up
www.qccartgallery.org or call
718-631-6396
Reynolds’ Book on John
Brown Draws Huge Media
Attention
I
The Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education Class of 2007, at the White Coat ceremony celebrating its entry into medical studies. It is the first class from which graduates
will enter Dartmouth Medical School.
D
A Match Made in Heaven:
Dartmouth Med and Sophie Davis
artmouth Medical School recently entered into an arrangement with the
Sophie Davis School of Biomedical Education at City College, allowing Sophie
Davis graduates to enroll at Dartmouth as third-year medical students.
Dartmouth, located in Hanover, N.H., thus became the first school outside New
York State — and the first Ivy League school — to have such a partnership with
Sophie Davis.
“This is generating a lot of excitement among our students,” said Dr. Stanford
Roman, dean of Sophie Davis — and a Dartmouth College grad. “Not only will they
now have an opportunity to complete their studies at an out-of-state medical
school, but Dartmouth’s curriculum complements our interest in primary care.”
Sophie Davis offers a five-year curriculum for academically talented but often
economically disadvantaged students, combining undergraduate studies and the first
two years of medical school. After completing the program, its graduates transfer to
a partner medical school for their last two years of clinical training.
Other medical schools that partner with Sophie Davis are: Albany Medical
College, New York Medical College, New York University School of Medicine, the
State University of New York Health Science Center in Brooklyn and SUNY Stony
Brook School of Medicine.
Dr. David Nierenberg, Senior Associate Dean of medical education at Dartmouth
Medical School, said his institution is excited about having this opportunity “to have
this infusion of talented and diverse students transferring into the third year to
enrich our student body.”
Sophie Davis students transfer into a medical school through a match process
that offers the best fit for both students and programs. The Dartmouth match for
Sophie Davis students is slated to begin this fall when interested candidates for the
summer of 2007 will visit for interviews and prescreening.
City Tech Takes The Cake
at Hotel Show
S
tudents, faculty and alumni of City Tech
took the cake — and much more — at the
136th Salon of Culinary Arts, organized by
the Société Culinaire Philanthropique.
For the first time ever, City Tech’s hospitality management team won the coveted
Marc Sarrazin Trophy for the most points. In
previous years this award has been won by
the Culinary Institute of America or Johnson
& Wales (of Providence, Rhode Island).
City Tech also won a first prize in
Pastry, first prize in Culinary and first prize
in the Marc Sarazin Competition for
Complete Buffet.
The International Hotel, Motel &
Restaurant show, which sponsored the
competitions, was held recently at the
Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan.
A City Tech sugar piece, named
“Hoffman’s Playland,” earned the Best of
Show award. Professor Louise Hoffman
oversaw the production of that scrumptious looking work of art, though the
actual creation of it was done by students
Catherine Angore and Nichola Hall,
working with alumna Monica Ng, who is
now employed in the pastry section at
Café Des Artistes in Manhattan.
Hoffman said that Professor Jean
Claude deserved special credit for the victories — saying that “without his dedica-
tion and organization, the City Tech team
would not have fared so well.”
Founded in 1947, the hospitality management program at City Tech was the first in
the metropolitan New York area to offer a
degree in restaurant and hotel management.
Its students are proficient in all areas of the
diverse hospitality industry, including the culinary arts, lodging management and all aspects
of travel and tourism. It remains one of the
college’s flagship baccalaureate programs.
t’s rare that a scholarly work draws the
kind of attention David Reynolds’ book
has been receiving.
His latest book, John Brown, Abolitionist,
was recently the subject of long articles in
The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, The
New York Times Book Review and numerous other publications. Not to mention
airtime on National Public Radio, CSPAN
and elsewhere.
“This kind of coverage is both a testament to the strengths of the book and to
the fact that John Brown continues to be a
fascinating, relevant, controversial and
important figure,” said Gabrielle Brooks,
promotion director with the publisher,
Alfred A. Knopf.
Reynolds, Distinguished Professor of
English and American Studies at the
Graduate Center and Baruch College, says
in his introduction that
it was John
Brown who
placed the
United States
on the road to
the end of
slavery — and
to the modern
civil rights era.
For it was
John Brown,
long portrayed
by historians
as a crazed
fanatic, who
Author David Reynolds
in 1859 put
the slaveholding South on notice that slavery would
not be tolerated by a justice-loving people,
and its continuation would inevitably lead
to violent confrontation.
Brown’s twenty-two man raid on
Harper’s Ferry in Virginia ended in his
hanging, but it was also, in a sense, the first
sounding of the bugle that announced the
coming of the Civil War.
In the April 25 issue of The New Yorker,
writer Adam Gopnik said of the 500-page
biography that “almost every page forces
you to think hard, and in new ways, about
American violence, American history, and
what used to be called the American
character.”
Chemical Biologists Seek Answers That May Lead to Cures
T
he emerging field of chemical biology holds keys that may unlock doors to the understanding of cell activity, which in turn may lead to cures for a host of common yet serious diseases.
At a daylong conference at Hunter College recently, a CUNY expert in chemical biology, Akira Kawamura, explained how he is using DNA technology to screen compounds
in traditional Japanese Kampo medicines.
“Nobody understands how or why these herbal remedies work,” says Kawamura, assistant professor of chemistry at Hunter College and of chemistry and biology at the
Graduate Center.
“If we study how they interact with cells and discover which pathways the molecules
take in the interaction, we will get the answers to the how and the why and will be able
to use the answers to solve other problems.”
The symposium was organized by Kawamura and Distinguished Professor Emeritus Maria
Tomasz, and it featured internationally recognized speakers from around the world. More than
400 students and faculty from more than a dozen area universities attended, along with representatives from biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies.
“The interface between chemistry and biology allows chemists to modify molecules and
do biological research,” says Kawamura. “The molecules are the words that allow us to
communicate with biology or nature, and by changing the molecules and throwing them
into biological systems, we can understand biology better and that could lead to the development of new drugs and therapies.”
CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005 5
It Takes the Patience of a Scientist, and the Zeal of a
By Judith Watson
O
n a crystalline day in late May,
Robert DeCandido stood in the middle of
a dense woodland more reminiscent of the
Adirondacks than the Bronx. White Oaks
towered above while green lilies thickly
carpeted the ground, providing a lush
setting for weary urbanites. DeCandido,
however, was scowling.
He pointed an accusing finger at the
nearest bunch of Asiatic day lilies.. The
ecologist — who earned his Ph.D. from
CUNY and taught biology at City College
while doing his doctoral studies — pronounced them the plant equivalent of vermin, a non-native species that is fast
crowding into oblivion dozens of native
wildflowers from this setting, Pelham Bay
Park, and other parks across the city.
The next piece of green that got the
evil eye from DeCandido was a wispy stalk
with several side shoots yielding minute
white buds. Poking intermittently up from
the woodland floor, this garlic mustard
plant hardly looked the part of a killer. “At
least it doesn’t crowd the other plants out
like the lilies, but it doesn’t belong here,”
he said unhappily.
They are among a handful of invading
flora that are taking over the park like the
blob that ate New York — species that
include the porcelainberry, pineapple
weed, mugwort, Asiatic bittersweet and
phragmites. They are as green as what they
replaced, but the birds and mammals that
depend on ground plants for food and
shelter know the difference — and many
have left town.
“There used to be 400-500 species of
native wildflowers in this park. In just 50
years, that has been reduced 30 percent.
That’s a loss of two to three native species
per year — a very significant rate,” explained
DeCandido. “As you change these species, the
birds and mammals
also change. And
once they leave, it is
difficult to get them
back.”
The Bronx
native knows of
what he speaks.
For five years, from
1994 to 1998, he
and a colleague
methodically crisscrossed the 2,700acre park taking
plant samples and
recording what
they saw. For five hours a day, for 200
days, the duo tramped the park — the
largest in the city system — sampling all
areas at least every other week.
Cuttings of each flower, bush and tree
specimen found, along with collection
notes, were sent to the New York State
Museum in Albany. Findings were then
compared to those from a survey of
Pelham Bay Park flora conducted between
1946-47 by botany enthusiast Harry Ahles,
who had donated his 1,531 specimens to
the State Museum.
The findings formed the basis for
DeCandido’s doctoral dissertation at the
CUNY Graduate Center. While DeCandido
and his colleague, Howard Becker, a City
College alumnus and retired engineer, identified 101 native species that Ahles had
missed, they discovered that 26 percent of
the 474 native species he had identified had
disappeared from the park. Gone were
wildflowers like the American Columbine,
the Ragged Fringed Orchid and Blue Marsh
Violet and grasses like the Rhizomatous
Reed Grass and Canada Wild Rye.
More ominously, more than one in five
of the natives identified were considered
50 Years of Flora Lost and Flora Gained
Robert DeCandido documented how the flora of Pelham Bay Park has
changed over the past 50 years.
Added were species that crowd
Lost were more than 100 species,
out old native plants and are not
some of which fed and provided
hospitable to many native birds and
sanctuary for birds that have since
mammals. Among those added:
gone elsewhere. Among the losses:
• Asiatic day lilies.
• Ragged Fringed Orchids.
• Garlic mustard plants.
• Blue Marsh Violets.
• Pineapple Weeds.
• American Columbines.
• Mugworts.
• Rhizomatous Reed, a type of grass.
• Phragmites.
• Canada Wild Rye, a grass.
rare or uncommon because so few were
found. Meanwhile, non-native species had
moved in at a rate of almost three species
per year, rising from 187 to 298 — an
increase of 40 percent in 50 years.
DeCandido has been sounding the alarm
bells ever since, through guided nature
walks, interviews, scientific papers and magazine articles. “Part of New York’s natural
heritage is being lost at a disturbing rate, and
only a small minority of scientists and interested persons are taking notice,” DeCandido
warned. “Pretty soon you’ll have to go to a
herbarium to see these plants because you
won’t find them in our parks. Yet they’re as
much as part of New York and of us as
Nedicks, or Nathan’s or the Yankees.”
The lanky 46-year-old Bronx native
takes the intrusion personally. He grew up
on Morris Park Avenue and played baseball
on the Harris fields in Pelham Bay Park.
When he took up running, he logged 60-80
miles per week on the paths that snake
through the park. After earning his B.A. in
journalism at Syracuse University and his
M.S. in biology at Fordham, he joined the
New York City Parks Department as an
Urban Park Ranger and spent countless
weekends introducing New Yorkers to the
wildlife in their backyards in Pelham Bay
and other city parks.
Although one of the least known parks
in the city, Pelham Bay has a storied past
and a unique combination of ecological
habitats, ranging from meadow to freshwater and saltwater marshes, to woodland,
rocky coastline, recreational fields and
landfill. Its coastal location, combined with
temperate climate, means a lot of wildlife
still moves through the park en route to
elsewhere. Forget the herons and egrets —
DeCandido has seen 60-70 seals swim by
in winter and several hundred Monarch
butterflies alight on their way south.
Seated on a slab of Bronx gneiss that
dates back 450 million years, DeCandido
motioned at the sparkling waters of Long
Island Sound stretched out before him and
demanded, “Isn’t this great? And it’s only a
No. 6 train or No. 12 bus ride away for
New Yorkers.”
More than 1,000 years ago, the Siwanoy
Indians settled in the area because of its
abundant supply of wild game, fish and
crustaceans. In 1654, they sold 10,000
acres to Thomas Pell, an English doctor,
who built a manor house in what is now
the heart of the park. During the
100 Nights of Watching Birds Fly, and Sometimes Die
By Judith Watson
E
ver wonder how many birds pass
through Manhattan on long migratory
flights each spring and fall – and whether
they crash into tall buildings?
For years, Robert DeCandido wondered.
But it wasn’t until the Empire State
Building began keeping its lights on all
night, in post 9/11 show of defiance, that he
decided it was time to find some answers.
For almost 100 evenings during the
spring and fall of 2004 – and then again
this spring – he spent dusk to midnight on
the building’s observation deck counting
birds speeding north or south.
He and a band of rotating volunteers
counted 3,500 such birds in the spring and
10,500 in the fall. His aim, however, was
not simply to tally, but to document what
types of birds migrated at night.
On a few nights, the skies became a busy
interstate of flapping wings. On October
11, DeCandido and his cohorts counted
1,578 migrants, mostly small species such as
warblers, sparrows and woodpeckers.
DeCandido learned something else:
migrating birds of a feather do not usually
flock together.
“We generally saw small birds migrating
in loose associations, and not tight flocks,”
he reported.
Yet another curiosity DeCandido wanted to satisfy was whether urban lights on
tall structures posed dangers for migrating
birds. Bird enthusiasts have long believed
so. On a foggy night in 1948, some 750
birds of 30 different species were found
dead or injured at the base of the Empire
6 CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005
State Building.
DeCandido in his research found that
the landmark building did indeed present
some risks to the feathered travelers. While
he did not see any birds crash into the
building, seven feathery corpses were
found near the building’s base after a night
of heavy rain. He also discovered that
peregrine falcons used the building’s lights
to aid in their nocturnal hunting expeditions. One falcon netted seven birds one
evening.
Meanwhile, DeCandido and his fellow
enthusiasts drew a little attention themselves,
from building employees and other visitors.They
would freely pass around their binoculars to their
new friends and offer brief lessons in the art of
bird-watching.
It gave DeCandido pleasure to know
others were beginning to share his interest
and concern.
“Whether it was seeing a quarter-ounce
kinglet in its mad rush across the black sky,
or hearing the flight chirps of hundreds
more emanating from the darkness above,
people stopped to watch and listen,”
DeCandido reported. “This gave me hope:
once people were aware, they cared.”
Indeed, in August 2004, building managers began turning off the structure’s
lights at midnight. Furthermore, they
began shutting them off even earlier on
foggy or rainy nights, if large groups of
birds begin circling the building.
And so it seems that his many nights of
watching and listening have had some
impact, after all. And maybe there is more
to come.
“We hope these policies are instituted at
tall buildings throughout the world,” he said.
Missionary, to Try to Save a New York City Park
Revolution, a small band of Americans
held off 4,000 British Redcoats at Pell’s
Point, giving George Washington’s troops
time to escape north from Harlem.
In the mid-1800s, the area filled with
country estates for wealthy Manhattan
families. The most fabulous was built by a
merchant named John Hunter on an island
just off the mainland, which he outfitted
with Turkish carpets, wine cellars, Rafaels
and Rembrandts. As the cachet of these
estates waned, interest in creating healthy
public retreats like Central Park grew. In
1888, New York City bought hundreds of
acres of Westchester County along Long
Island Sound and annexed it to create
Pelham Bay Park.
The ecological trouble began with
Robert Moses. He filled in marshes for playing fields, meadows for golf courses and, on
a frigid day in January 1934, stood on the
southern shore of Hunter’s Island, waved
his arm and ordered Pelham Bay filled in.
Orchard Beach opened 30 months later, on
three million cubic yards of sanitation landfill and tons of white sand from the
Rockaways and New Jersey.
Moses’ legacy didn’t end there. He cut
swaths through the park with two highways. And after a federal court barred New
York City from dumping garbage into Long
Island Sound, Moses began the practice of
filling salt marshes in city parks with
garbage. In 1964, it was Pelham Bay Park’s
turn and the city began dumping tons of
refuse into a marsh and adjacent meadow.
The practice was halted in the 1970s and
the dump was capped in the 1990s.
Much of the park’s transformation had
taken place before Ahles, a self-taught
botanist, undertook his study of Pelham
Bay Park’s flora. The cumulative impact
over the ensuing years was documented by
DeCandido. More current urban threats
that DeCandido observed include salted
roads in winter, off-trail biking, herbicides,
intensified mowing, and introduction of
non-native earthworms.
The greatest cause for the reduction in
herbaceous species — non-woody plants of
24 inches or less — is the loss of open
meadow. Many open areas have been taken over for recreational uses; others have
grown naturally into woodland. Only one
large meadow remains in the park.
For much of the last century, bird
enthusiasts from around the world
traveled to the Bronx to view species
of owls in Pelham
Bay Park. An
abundance of
owls made
the park
home. Only
a few owls
remain.
Preserving open park areas today
requires understanding what they
contribute ecologically and then
using appropriate methods to preserve them, DeCandido said.
The departure of birds that
make their homes in meadows is
truly troubling to DeCandido,
who rarely ventures outside without binoculars dangling around
his neck and a camera stuffed into
a backpack. Because Pelham Bay
Park lies along a natural migration
route, it is a spectacular location
for bird watching in spring and
fall months. But during other
parts of the year,
it is primarily
home to hardy
species like
robins, blue jays
and sea gulls
(“weed” birds
among the
cognoscente)
and, increasingly, raptors.
“The warblers,
thrushes, vireos,
and tanagers have
turned into tropical migrants —
they’re no longer breeding in many parks in
New York City,” DeCandido lamented.
“Bobwhite quail and night hawks are very
rare.” Canada geese, though, are more common than 50 years ago, and so are raptors like
the red tailed hawk, because migrating raptors find rodents and the resident park birds
easy prey, he reported. “It’s like walking into
McDonald’s with no one minding the store.”
For much of the last century, bird
enthusiasts from around the world traveled
to the Bronx to view the six species of
owls living in Pelham Bay Park. An abundance of owls, including long-eared owls,
great horned owls and saw whet owls,
made the park home. Only a few owls
remain and they are elusive, despite
DeCandido’s studied imitation of an eastern screech owl territorial call.
Two sections of the park have been designated wildlife refuges, the northern side of
Hunter’s Island and the Thomas Pell
Wildlife Sanctuary bordering the park’s two
golf courses. Venturing through Hunter’s
Island marshland on wooden planks, it is
difficult to remember that this is Gotham.
DeCandido admits to occasional discouragement, but he does not shrink from
the challenge of protecting this and other
city parks from further loss of natural
habitat. “Most people like the environment, but that often does not translate
into protecting the park... With care,
foresight and good management, we can
have development and keep our remaining
natural areas — but people need to pay
attention.”
Convinced that educating the public is
the surest way to raise attention levels,
DeCandido spends his days leading bird
tours in Central Park and his evenings in
the fall and spring documenting bird
migrations across New York City. His website, www.birdingbob.com, reports on
upcoming outings and features photos of
rare birds he has spotted. For four years,
while he completed his doctorate, he
taught biology at City College, and found
Biologist Robert DeCandido, who did his Ph.D. studies at CUNY, has been on a mission to document how the environment affects flora and birds in Pelham Bay Park. The park’s predominant rock
formation is gneiss. Geology classes from City College and Queens College have been coming to
study the rock formations of the
park for at least a half-century.
the diversity of students
there as exhilarating as in
any woodland. He is currently working on a book
focusing on the natural history of New York City.
Of concern to him is the
increasing tendency of college biology departments to
shift focus from the field
sciences to the health sciences because that is where
grant money increasingly is
found. Instead of studying
genetics and evolution in
the natural environment,
scientists today are studying
it in the lab through DNA.
“There are a lot of important things remaining to be
learned out here in the
field,” he said, his voice rising to emphasize the point.
One such lesson, he noted wryly, is that man-made
ecological disturbances can
carry inadvertent silver linings. Orchard Beach,
despite its very unnatural
beginnings, draws
thousands of visitors to the
park. “Without people, you
lose the reason for a park.” A beach habitat
of sorts has been added to the park’s mix.
The massive parking lot, while an eyesore,
has its plus side — the warmth radiated
from the pavement creates wind thermals
that draw hordes of migrating raptors.
Even the scourge of the landfill holds
promise for recapturing part of the park’s
ecological past. Since the landfill was
capped and encircled with fencing, the
“meadow” thus created sometimes attracts
flocks of migrants such as Bobolinks not
seen in residence for decades. While the
vegetation in this meadow is a far cry from
that harvested and hunted among by the
Siwanoy Indians, its less disturbed condition offers an opportunity to recreate its
Photos by Robert DeCandido.
natural habitat.
Some of DeCandido’s recommendations
are disarmingly simple. “Perhaps New York
City biologists can start revitalizing the
park by planting native wildflowers,” he
suggested. “We can propagate seeds and
have a planting field where we can restore
the native habitat. This could be a win-win
situation.”
DeCandido believes that getting to
win-win is not just about New York, since
it is estimated that two-thirds of the
world’s population will live in cities by
2025. “How we strike a balance between
development for people and the needs of
wild things,” he said, “will determine the
future of wild things and the quality of life
for the rest of us.”
CUNY MATTERS — May 2005 7
FACULTY HONORS
Honor for Gay Studies Scholar
She’s been dubbed the “soft-spoken
queen of gay studies” and the “mother of
queer theory,” and now Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick has another title as well —
fellow of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences.
Sedgwick, a distinguished professor of
English at the Graduate Center, was
among 196 fellows and 17 foreign honorary members elected to the academy,
whose ranks include more than 150 Nobel
laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners.
She was cited for her pioneering work
on gay and lesbian studies and queer
theory.
“When my first book — Between Men:
English Literature and Male Homosocial
Desire — came out in 1985, there were
only about a half-dozen academic books
on lesbian or gay topics in any field,”
Sedgwick said.
“Mine was written out of a feminist
impulse to begin with. It was the first
book that tried to integrate anti-homophobic work with feminist work. Feminists
had been assuming that feminism only
had to do with what men did to women...
That book may have been the first example of a deliberately anti-homophobic
analysis applied to texts that weren’t
specifically gay.”
Her latest project? She’s just begun
writing a book on Proust that explores
the “sexualities, family formations and
gods and goddesses” in his work.
Mathematicians Love Birthdays
Leading mathematicians from around
the world attended a conference on
“Combinational and Additive Number
Theory,” held in honor of the 60th birthday of Mel Nathanson, math professor at
Lehman College and the Graduate
Center.
“There were 60 speakers — that’s a
huge number for a conference like this —
and one of them even joked in his lecture
that it was one speaker for every year of
my life,” said Nathanson, a leading number theorist who has been with Lehman
since 1986, when he served as provost.
For Nathanson, the beauty of the
conference, held May 18 through 21,
was that it highlighted his beloved specialty. “Numbers
have magical properties,” he said in
an interview.
“Mathematics
helps you think rigorously to try to
get an idea of why
something is true,
and then you have
to prove it’s true,”
Professor Mel
he said.
Nathanson
Nathanson said
that number theory has aesthetic qualities akin to great works of art. “One of
the amazing things about math is that a
beautiful proof is still beautiful even centuries after it is proved. Math has patterns and properties and makes beautiful
statements that you can conjecture about
and then prove.”
Nathanson said that while mathematicians tend to love all numbers, he
and others developed a special affection
in May for one in particular: 60.
Courses Being Added in Arabic and Mideast Studies
T
demic years,” said
Dr. Ammiel
hanks to a
Alcalay, a Middle
recent $192,000
East specialist in
award from the
Queens College’s
U.S. Department
Classical, Middle
of Education, the
Eastern and
University will
Asian Languages
begin expanding its
Department.
offerings in Middle
While stuEast studies.
dents can already
The demand for
study Arabic at
courses in those
Professor Beth Baron, co-director of CUNY's
a number of
subject areas —
Middle East and Middle Eastern American Center. CUNY campuses
including the
— including
intensive study of
Queens, Brooklyn, John Jay, Hunter and
Arabic — has increased markedly since the
CCNY
—
courses
will
become
more
terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,
intensive and more widely available,
University scholars say.
University administrators say.
“We’re delighted to receive this very
In September at the Grad Center, Baron,
competitive award. It will give us the
who also is a CCNY professor of Middle East
opportunity to expand, strengthen and
history, will teach a new class, “Approaches to
institutionalize Middle East studies at
the Study of the Middle East.” The coCUNY,” said Professor Beth Baron, co-direcinstructor will be Executive Vice Chancellor
tor of the Middle East and Middle Eastern
for Academic Affairs Selma Botman, a widely
American Center, known as MEMEAC,
published Middle East scholar.
which is located at the Graduate Center.
One recent Honors College graduate,
Starting this fall, the CUNY BaccalaureDiana Esposito, said the expansion is a
ate Program will offer a concentration in
good and overdue idea. For intensive
Middle East studies. And students at Queens
Arabic classes, she had to go outside the
College soon will be able to major in it.
University, said Esposito.
“We hope to have it [the new Mideast
“My Arabic courses were at Columbia
major] in place in the next one or two aca-
University and the American University in
Cairo,” said Esposito.
Baron said she understood Esposito’s
frustration, and said that perhaps as early as
the summer of 2006 an intensive course in
Arabic will be offered at the Grad Center.
Although the burgeoning interest in the
Middle East is largely related to the trauma of 2001, students have varying motivations. Some are children of immigrants
who desire to learn more about their
Mideast heritage. Others, very simply, “are
looking for job opportunities,” Baron said.
“The [federal] government has set
Arabic language training as a priority,”
Baron noted.
Botman, who holds a doctorate in
Middle East studies from Harvard, has
written extensively on the region. Her
recent work includes Engendering
Citizenship in Egypt, published by
Columbia University Press, and Egypt from
Independence to Revolution, 1919-1952,
published by Syracuse University Press.
Baron’s book, Egypt as a Woman: Nationalism, Gender and Politics, was released in
February by the University of California
Press.
Baron said the University, in its application for the federal grant, also proposed
to strengthen its work on the Mid East
diaspora residing in the New York area.
A Not-So-Modest Goal: Writing the Future of College Education
W
hat constitutes a meaningful college
education in the 21st century?
That’s the question that representatives
from 15 CUNY campuses set out to study at
the “Making Connections General Education
Conference on Integrative Learning” at
LaGuardia Community College.
The goal was to come up with ideas
that make it easier for undergraduates to
connect the dots that inform their college
and life experiences.
Judith Summerfield, University Dean
for Undergraduate Education, told more
than 200 graduate students, faculty members and academic deans packing the conference that “we as a group will write the
future of general education.”
The model for doing this is “integrative
learning,” a collaborative effort of the campuses that seeks to create infrastructures
that enhance liberal education.
The keynote speaker at the “Making
Connections” gathering was Columbia
University Professor Lee Knefelkamp, who
said colleges like CUNY have a duty not
only to teach from textbooks, but to
impart “the capacity for associative living.”
Students must be “intellectually inter-
cultural” as they
move from classroom to classroom, said
Knefelkamp, a
senior fellow of
the Association
of American
Colleges and
Universities.
Panelists at
the daylong conference discussed
a host of issues,
including the
Professors from CUNY and other universities packed a theater at
importance of
LaGuardia Community College, listening to ideas on how to make a
students having
college education more meaningful.
access to electronic and digital
learning tools,
of the Coordinated Undergraduate
the need for interdisciplinary educational
Education, or CUE, initiative, which aims
experiences not available in standard colto provide students with a more coherent
lege curricula, and the power of critical
learning experience from admissions to
thinking.
graduation.
“Making Connections” was intimately
Next year, everyone will have another
linked with “Writing Across the Curricuchance to exchange ideas and propose
lum,” a conference that took place a week
answers about the future direction of collater at the Graduate Center. Writing
lege education. That’s when QueensAcross the Curriculum and General
borough Community College hosts the
Education are the academic cornerstones
annual conference.
How to Think Like Einstein: Let the Creativity Flow
W
hen Professor Joe L. Kincheloe was
in high school in Tennessee, his guidance
counselor recommended he become a
piano tuner.
Kincheloe says the counselor failed to
recognize the spark that later led
Kincheloe to author 39 books, including
one on Albert Einstein.
Today Kincheloe has a message for educators: learn to recognize and nurture creativity in your students, and realize that
some of the most creative ones don’t per-
8 CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005
form well on tests.
Kincheloe expounded on his thoughts in
April at the Graduate Center where he gave
a talk titled “How to Think Like Einstein.”
“Einstein serves as an example of a
brilliant student who did not do well in
school,” Kincheloe said in an interview at
his office at The Grad Center. “They [his
teachers] were interested in low level
functions, like memorization. Einstein
was interested in new insights....”
Kincheloe, along with Shirley R.
Steinberg and Deborah J. Tippins, is co-
author of The Stigma of Genius: Einstein
and Beyond Modern Education, published
in paperback in 1999.
His April 6 talk was part of the Grad
Center’s Science & the Arts series of
lectures and events commemorating the
annus mirabilis, or “miracle year” of 1905
when Einstein published his groundbreaking papers.
The organizer of the series was Brian
Schwartz, a Grad Center physics professor
and co-producer of a musical, “Einstein’s
Dreams,” based on a novel by Allan Lightman.
BOOK TALK
Rebalancing the Scales of Criminal Justice with DNA
By Gary Schmidgall
I
n 1983 a Massachusetts 23-year-old
named Dennis Maher was convicted and
imprisoned for two rapes and an attempted rape. Maher never ceased to proclaim
his innocence, but it was not until 2000
that the Innocence Project — founded in
1992 by lawyer Barry Scheck at Yeshiva
University’s Cardozo Law School — took
on his case. The Project succeeded in ferreting out two boxes of long-misplaced
clothing evidence in a Cambridge courthouse basement and a rape kit in an Ayer,
MA, police station.
A new guide to the cutting-edge science
and jurisprudence of DNA testing, DNA:
Forensic and Legal Applications (WileyInterscience), tells us what happened next:
“The genetic profile [of semen on the
clothing] was not that of Mr. Maher,” and
testing of sperm cells on the rape kit slide
“excluded Maher as the source. At the age
of 42, more than 19 years after his arrest,
he was cleared of all charges.”
The book’s authors — John Jay College
Associate Provost and Professor of Science
Lawrence Kobilinsky and lawyers Thomas
F. Liotti and Jamel Oeser-Sweat (who
practice on Long Island and in New York
City, respectively) — point out that
“Dennis Maher is ‘number 127’ of 144
individuals (as of this writing) who were
convicted of various felonies and served
lengthy prison sentences [and] . . . thanks
to post-conviction DNA testing, these people were eventually exonerated.”
If editors at Time magazine or
Newsweek were to choose a law enforcement Celebrity of the Year (or even the
last decade), they could well put on their
covers an image of the mitochondrion, a
power-producing constituent, or organelle,
of every body cell. Its DNA, unlike nuclear
DNA, is maternally inherited and thus
becomes, for complex reasons only a
geneticist could love, a vital player in DNA
testing. Thanks to mitochondrial DNA,
stories in the media about such tests leading to the freeing of innocent parties have
almost become of “dog
bites man” familiarity.
The 50th anniversary
of the discovery of
Mother Nature’s elegant
double helix, by James
Watson and Francis
Crick, was widely celebrated in 2003.
DNA: Forensic and
Legal Applications
appears as the science of DNA fingerprinting celebrates its 20th
anniversary. The
explosive
advances in the
reliability and
sophistication
of DNA identification have
been identified as starting with the
publication in 1985
of an esoteric paper by Alec
Jeffreys on a curious DNA sequence in the
myoglobin gene.
When Jeffreys applied his science to a
notorious murder case in 1987, crime
scene investigators and defense counsel
around the world began to pay attention.
At a 50th DNA anniversary gala at the
Waldorf Hotel, Jeffreys was embraced by a
man who was exonerated by DNA from a
210-year prison sentence, of which he had
served 15 years.
Kobilinsky and his collaborators have
good reason to open on a celebratory note:
“In recent years our legal system has given
forensic DNA analysis the credibility that
nature has given it as the blueprint of life.”
But their main concern, clearly, is to
keep scientists and attorneys up-to-date in
a field that is not standing still. Looking to
the future, they observe: “The development of forensic DNA techniques in the
mid-1980s was followed by constant
advancements in both
science
and technology...
The techniques that
are used in
today’s
forensic labs
are quite different. They
are more sensitive, more rapid,
more specific,
more reliable,
more economical,
and less labor
intensive. Science is
not static.”
The thrust of the
book, therefore, is to
help lawyers and
judges “not only
understand what is
advantageous about the
science of DNA but
what can go wrong and
how to detect and prevent procedural errors.”
They add, “This book guides attorneys and
judges through the complexities of the
biochemical sciences to help them understand the methodology of DNA analysis.”
The book unfolds rather like an installment of TV’s “CSI: NY” — heavy first on
the science, then focusing on how the judicial system handles the data. The first of
four science chapters, all obviously under
Kobilinsky’s purview, offers a short course
on the “Biochemistry, Genetics, and
Replication of DNA.” The second, on
“Biological Evidence,” covers crime scene
investigation, serology (the analysis of
blood, semen, saliva, urine), and the proper
chain of custody for biological materials.
Chapter 3 describes the varieties of
DNA analysis (Restriction FragmentLength Polymorphism, or RFLP, which is
falling in popularity; polymerase chain
reaction, or PCR; Y-chromosome or mitochondrial analysis) and the ways it can be
compromised by contamination, degradation, sunlight, genetic glitches, or human
error. Chapter 4 deals with the genetics,
statistics, and databases involved in identification. Among the numerous topics here
are: population genetics, the need for quality control, likelihood ratios, paternity
determinations, and lab accreditation.
Several examples of real-life Certificates of
Analysis are included.
Liotti and Oeser-Sweat take over in the
last three chapters. Chapter 5, “Litigating a
DNA Case,” begins aptly with a quotation
from Thomas Jefferson (whose descendants have learned a lot about DNA
recently): “Laws and institutions must go
hand in hand with the progress of the
human mind.” Then follows an overview of
recent landmark court cases on admissibility of DNA evidence. Chapter 6 discusses
how to attack or defend DNA evidence.
The seventh and last chapter,
“Exonerating the Innocent through DNA,”
is perhaps the most intriguing for the lay
reader, highlighting as it does several
shocking cases of long-delayed gratification
of the innocent. New York and Illinois, the
authors note, were the first two states to
enact laws providing for post-conviction
DNA analysis.
Among the seven appendices are a summary of pertinent case law, a list of all
Innocence Projects nationally (only
Hawaii, and North and South Dakota have
none), and a list of enacted or pending
state laws on post-conviction DNA testing.
There can be no more fitting last words
on the book than those of the Nobel
Laureate James Watson himself and his
Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory colleague
Jan Witkowski. At the end of their preface,
they sum up: “DNA: Forensic and Legal
Applications is a comprehensive and
invaluable guide to the field. . .We are sure
it will play its part in promoting this most
powerful tool in the forensic scientist’s
armamentarium.”
Gender Policy in Japan and U.S.
Framework for Prisoner Reentry
C
I
ity
College and
Graduate
Center political scientist
Joyce Gelb’s
Gender Policies
in Japan and the
United States:
Comparing
Women’s
Movements, Rights,
and Politics
(Palgrave) is the
first comprehensive
comparison of gender policy processes
between the two
nations. It is also intended, Gelb writes, “to
remedy the relative lack of attention by
scholars to examination of the Japanese
women’s movement” and to draw attention to Japan’s political system, which “has
been slow, indeed extremely reluctant,” to
press for women’s rights.
Gelb’s interest in the subject was born
during a 1987 summer exchange professorship at Tokyo Metropolitan
University. A long-time student of
comparative feminist politics—she is
also the author of Feminism and
Politics (1989)—Gelb began to focus
early on Japan’s Equal Employment
Opportunity Law of 1985. Regular
trips over the last 15 years, she says,
“have provided me with a unique
opportunity to learn more about
and study Japanese politics and
society.”
The three major areas compared by Gelb are equal
employment opportunity,
domestic violence policy, and
reproductive rights policy. Particular
attention is paid to the Japanese Basic Law
for a Gender Equal Society, passed in
1999, which does not have a direct U.S.
equivalent.
In her conclusion, “Assessing Policy
Change,” Gelb applauds increased access
by Japanese women to the political process
but notes that access to the labor force
“remains problematic and lags behind.”
f the title of Jeremy Travis’s new book—
But They All Come Back: Facing the
Challenges of Prisoner Reentry (Urban
—is grim, it is because the
Institute Press)—
author is not happy with what he sees, and
his unhappiness is vigorously expressed.
Travis, John Jay College’s new president
(and former director of the National
Institute of Justice in Washington), begins
his short Afterword: “We have ample reason to be pessimistic about the state of
justice in America. We currently imprison
record numbers of our fellow citizens. We
have constructed systems of supervision
and extended sanctions that severely inhibit former prisoners’ ability to regain their
place at society’s table.”
Travis’s study of the prisoner reentry
miasma began in 1999 when then
Attorney General Janet Reno buttonholed
him and a colleague and asked them:
“What are we doing about all the people
coming out of prison?” Dissatisfied with
their answer, she asked them to report
back in two weeks with a better one. “The
two-week assignment has turned into a
five-year journey for me,” Travis writes.
The resulting book charts the debilitating
consequences of “mass incarceration,” “incongruous sentencing,” and the crush at the
prison “exit” door (in 2002, 1,700 inmates
left federal and state prisons every day).
The heart of this reform-minded study
is Part II, “Defining the Policy Challenges
of Prisoner Reentry,” in which Travis offers
lengthy chapters on Public Safety, Families
and Children, Work, Public Health,
Housing, Civic
Identity, and
Community.
Travis closes by
proposing a
multifaceted
“reentry
framework”
for strengthening the
“concentric
circles of
support” for
the newly
released.
CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005 9
Behind Diplomas are Stories of Struggle, Sacrifi
ficce,
Continued from page 1
Turning 9/11 into Triumph
W
hen Sara Cuya was in third grade,
her class took a trip to the Empire State
Building. Standing on the observation deck,
a thought popped into her head. Maybe
one day she would design a building that
would be part of that majestic skyline.
Now, 13 years later, Cuya is helping to
design not only one building but also a
whole village. She is one of three New
York City College of Technology students
working with Daniel Libeskind to help
rebuild Unawatuna, Sri Lanka, a small
beach resort and fishing village decimated
by December’s tsunami.
Cuya, whose parents emigrated from
Peru, is the first graduate of City Tech’s
baccalaureate degree program in architectural technology. She was selected for the
Sri Lanka project because of her threedimensional and computer-assisted design
skills. Interning at Studio Daniel
Libeskind—the famed architect’s firm—
Cuya was assigned to create a 3-D model
for one of the proposed community buildings in Sri Lanka.
“In the first week, I worked on mapping
out components for the master plan of the
village, which gave a rough idea of all the
large structures to be designed—a community center, medical center, crafts center,
hotel and restaurant,” she says.
Another City Tech student, Bala
Balsubramaniam, who is from Sri Lanka,
helped draw up plans for private homes.
Balsubramaniam also translated letters sent
to Studio Daniel Libeskind from residents
of Unawatuna, where about 150 were
killed by the tsunami.
Wendy James, Studio Daniel Libeskind’s
project manager, says that Cuya and her
fellow City Tech students have been
“incredibly helpful.”
“In their first
week, they were
thrown into the
deep end of things,
preparing presentation materials that
I took to Sri
Lanka,” James says.
“We’ve given them
a huge range of
assignments—
drawings, model
building, etc. and
they’ve been very
productive. I’ve
been very
impressed by what
they’ve helped us
Sara Cuya
to accomplish so
far.”
In volunteering to help at Studio Daniel
Libeskind, with work that will run through
the summer, Cuya turned down two fulltime job offers. She intends to earn a master’s degree in architecture after working
in the field for a year.
“I’m picking up ‘tricks of the trade’ . . .
and making models that build upon what I
learned at City Tech,” Cuya says. “Also, I’ve
learned so much in a short period of time
about how to present a project to the
client.”
Cuya decided to attend City Tech
because her older sister Esther, who is an
alumna with a
degree in dental laboratory
technology,
suggested it.
“My goal is
to become a
professor at
New York City
College of
Technology and
open up my
own architectural firm,”
she says.
marrow transplant. One
day when she
was ready to
give up, she
had a conversation with
her nurse who
revealed that
she, too, had
leukemia.
Strengthened,
Alicea decided that she
had a purpose
in life: to
become a
nurse.
Alicea
enrolled in
Hunter College and in
June, several
years after
her battle
with cancer,
she graduated
from the
HunterBellevue
A War
Vet’s
Dream
L
et’s just
say that before
enrolling at
John Jay, Jose
Barlow had
quite a bit of
life experience.
He was a war
Jose Barlow
veteran, who
had worked as a
paralegal and later as a corrections officer.
But his dream was to earn a college degree.
This spring, at 70, he earned a Bachelor
of Science Degree in Legal Studies.
Making his accomplishment even more
inspiring is the fact that Barlow is visually
impaired, suffers from diabetes and has
difficulty walking because of an accident
that occurred when he was a corrections
officer.
“This was the dream I had that I thought
wouldn’t happen and finally came true,”
Barlow says. “The Disabled Student Services
Office helped me tremendously. If it wasn’t
for them, I would have dropped out.”
Born and raised in New York
City, Barlow’s journey to a higher
education took many detours. At
18, he joined the Army and
served in the Korean War. He was
assigned to the stockade and was
a “prison chaser”—apprehending
prisoners that had attempted to
flee. After six years of service, he
returned to New York and
worked as a legal stock transfer
clerk—which today would be
called a paralegal—for 14 years.
He briefly worked as a 911 operator and then in 1974 decided to
become a New York State corrections officer. The injury that disabled him occurred while he was
on duty at Sing Sing.
Over the years, Barlow has
been a volunteer for the Boy Scouts of
America, serving in East Harlem, and he
has received several awards for positions
he has held within the organization. He is
also a volunteer with the American Red
Cross and is the co-district leader of the
Republican Party in East Harlem.
It’s been such a long time coming that
Barlow is not sure what he will do next
now that he has his degree.
Passing the Healing Torch
L
elanie Alicea was 22 when she was
diagnosed with leukemia and had a bone-
10 CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005
School of Nursing.
As she looks forward, Alicea sometimes
finds inspiration in looking back, to the
time when her life seemed to be slipping
away. While confronting cancer, she had
been told she could not live long without a
bone-marrow transplant. Her spirit sank as
she learned that no one in her family was a
match.
However, Alicea didn’t give up. While
ill, she spoke out at Hispanic-associated
community functions and organizations to
increase awareness of the importance of
bone-marrow donation and transplantation. When almost all hope was gone,
Alicea found a donor.
Alicea won a scholarship from the
National Association of Hispanic Nurses.
The $2,000 award was from a grant from
the AETNA/National Coalition of Ethnic
Minority Nurses Associations Scholarship
Program, which aims to increase the number of nurses from ethnic-minority groups
and to encourage them to go into research.
Now that Alicea has realized the first
part of her life’s mission, to graduate with
a nursing degree, she will embark on the
second part: to continue studying and
making contacts so that she can work with
cancer patients, giving them a reason to
live, as that nurse once did for her.
Another Victory out of 9/11
A
fter watching the destruction of the Twin
Towers from
her window
and, with it, the
loss of her job
teaching English
as a Second
Language in
downtown
Manhattan,
Sonia Toure
suddenly found
herself an
unemployed
single mother in
Sonia Toure
a devastated local economy. “I, like many
others, was forced to take a long look at
my life and re-evaluate the choices I had
made,” says Toure, who was in her mid-30s
and recently divorced at the time.
It was that moment of crisis, for her and
for her city, that changed her life. Toure
enrolled in Queens College, hoping to find
a niche in a health profession.
She graduated with a BA in anthropology and a scholarship to attend Columbia
University’s Mailman School of Public
Health. She also was admitted to the highly selective Summer Medical Education
Program at the Yale University School of
Medicine.
“I still want to heal the sick,” she says,
but her focus now is on “lessening the
degree of disparity between the poor and
their access to quality health-care services.”
“Many people asked me how I managed
to go to school full time, prepare for graduate school admission and maintain good
grades, all while raising three children
alone,” she says. Her answer: the college’s
Adult Collegiate Education Program for
students age 25 and over, through which
she initially returned to college.
In her Queens College studies, Toure
brought her own cross-cultural experiences
to bear, having lived and worked in Mexico
and the Cayman Islands. She conducted
ethno-botanical research with immigrants
in Queens, observing that “immigrants
often rely on traditional medicines from
their country because they lack access to
culturally sensitive medical care in the U.S.”
After receiving her MPH, Toure plans
either to become a doctor of public health
or an M.D. Whatever path she chooses, she
says she will combine her interest in healing with improving the quality of life for
underserved communities.
Learning to Start Over
W
hen Relu Adrian Coman came to
this country in 2002, he already had a
college degree in chemistry. But, signaling
the direction he would take in his adopted
city of New York, he also had a reputation
as a leading human-rights activist for gays
and lesbians in his native Romania.
When Coman realized that he needed
an American degree to continue his
human-rights work at a high level in the
United States, he enrolled in the CUNY
Baccalaureate Program, which allows highly motivated transfer students to work
with faculty mentors to design their own
majors and choose courses from the university’s 19 campuses.
Under the guidance of George
Andreopoulos, director of the Center
for International Human Rights at
John Jay College, Coman designed
his own major in human rights. “I’m
very pleased with my education in
the U.S. for its flexibility and individually-tailored approach,” he says.
“At the time I went to college in
Romania [right after the fall of the
communist regime of President
Nicolae Ceausescu in 1989], students were treated as a group, not as
individuals who have different interests and needs. The outcome then
was an equal preparation in the
given field. At CUNY, with its large
offering of courses, I could really
make choices to ensure a basic
Risk-Taking and Ultimate Victory
MISSIONS ACCOMPLISHED
She Found Herself
Kathleen Burke loves to figure out
A Selected Profile of Spring 2005 Baccalaureate Graduates
how things work, and when life wasn’t
working out as planned, she enrolled at
Baruch College.
“Baruch changed my whole life,” says
the 27-year-old Burke, who just graduated with a 3.98 grade-point average and a
BBA in economics.
It took Burke over a decade to get to
Baruch. She left home at 16, followed the
Grateful Dead and got married at 18 to a
man who loved alcohol and drugs more
than her. Living in poverty in Vermont,
she decided to change her life. She got a
GED, divorced and joined the Army.
Her first week at Baruch, she met
her future husband, a fellow student.
Burke’s new interest is international law.
• Percentage of graduating students foreign-born: 50.9
• Number of countries represented:
176*
• Number of languages spoken:
127*
• Most popular Baccalaureate degree major:
Business and Management
• Graduating students who are female:
63.4 percent
• Median age of all Baccalaureate graduates:
25
• Top countries of origin for foreign-born grads:
Dominican Republic
Jamaica
China
Russia
Guyana
A Long Journey
• Second and third most popular Baccalaureate degree majors: Social Sciences
Psychology
Source: Projected Spring 2005 graduates, Office of Institutional Research
*Includes associate degree graduates
preparation in
the field of
human rights.”
Coman’s
interest in
human rights
emerged as the
political and
social climate
in Romania
shifted seismically. “I felt I
wanted to be
an active part
of the changing
society, not just
bear witness
Relu Adrian Coman
from a distance,” he says.
His way of getting up close to the
important issues was to start working at
the grassroots level, eventually becoming
the first executive director of a national
Romanian human-rights group whose lobbying helped spur the repeal of the laws
that outlawed sodomy and that discriminated against gays and lesbians.
Coman plans to earn a master’s degree
in human rights from Columbia University.
Musical Notes to Bank Notes
G
uitarist, cricket ace and financial analyst all rolled into one. Some would call
him a renaissance man.
Ikhtiar Allen immigrated to the United
States from his native
Bangladesh just six years ago,
full of talent and ambition.
Now he is embarking on a
career in high finance.
The City College Honors
student was a 20-year-old
upper junior last summer
when, during a 10-week internship at Bear Stearns, he
designed a model to predict
passenger traffic in the airline
industry by studying revenue
from previous quarters.
Applying knowledge garnered from a financial math
class he took with CCNY
Professor Jay Jorgenson, he
made a big enough impression
Ikhtiar Allen
“I felt I wanted
to be an active
part of the
changing society,
not just bear witness
from a distance.”
on the prestigious brokerage firm that he
was offered a full-time position upon
graduation.
Plans for an MBA on the back burner,
Allen begins a prime brokerage analyst
training program this month at Bear
Stearns, where he serves as a conduit
between the firm and hedge fund managers, while he learns about the wider
world of financial analysis.
The 21-year-old Allen is excited about
his first job and the big changes it will
bring. After four years of commuting three
hours daily from his Bayside, Queens,
home to City College’s Harlem campus,
he plans to move close to his job.
“The first thing I’ll do when I get my
first paycheck is move to downtown
Manhattan or
Brooklyn,” he says.
“I want to keep my
commute under 30
minutes.”
Despite the long
commute, he says
he’ll miss his alma
mater, where he started in September
2001. He was in the
first class of the
Honors College at
CCNY.
“I’m totally nostalgic on leaving City
College,” says Allen,
who received several
awards from the insti-
It took Mia Mia Thi, who received her
Terence Mulvey
tution, including The Wall Street Journal
Achievement Award, the Ward Medal for
Outstanding Graduating Senior from the
Economics Department and The Byron
David Award for Excellence in
Entrepreneurship.
Music has been central to his college
experience.
He learned to play the guitar on a whim
in his freshman year and mastered the
instrument enough to perform at weddings
and parties. “My whole college experience
was accompanied by my guitar playing,”
he notes.
Then there’s the athletic side of him.
Allen, an opening batsman, was a founding
member of the CCNY cricket team, whose
upset defeat at the hands of Brooklyn’s
newly formed Shobuj Bangla club was
covered by the New York Daily News, with
an accompanying photo of Allen batting.
Making Grade, Decades Later
I
“
f at first you don’t succeed, try, try
again,” goes the saying — even if it means
trying again some two decades later. Those
were the words that guided Terence
Mulvey, a retired New York City Police
detective, who returned to Lehman
College in 1997 to finish what he had
started.
When he began his studies in 1977,
Mulvey was not exactly eager. He felt a
need to earn steady cash, and so he
dropped out after just three lackluster
semesters. Now, after eight years as a
part-time student, he’s a June magna cum
laude graduate. Mulvey also received the
Thomas Hunter Prize, awarded to the
graduate with the highest G.P.A. in history,
his major.
After leaving Lehman in 1977, Mulvey
quickly found a job working for Conrail,
now Metro North. Five years later, he
joined the New York City Police Department. In August 2003, he retired after a
20-year career on the force that included
service in several Manhattan precincts and
the drug enforcement task force as well as
on the executive protection unit for thenMayor Rudolph Giuliani’s family.
Now, he’s thinking about going into
teaching, which would add yet another
aspect to his varied and productive career.
diploma from the Grad Center, a little
longer than others to finish her doctorate in engineering.
A native of Myanmar, the former
Burma, she left her homeland in 1988
when a political uprising closed down
local schools. But things are looking up.
She is a research fellow at the Albert
Einstein College of Medicine, and was
just awarded the Ruth I. Kirschstein
National Research Award, a post-doctoral fellowship, from the National
Institutes of Health’s National Heart,
Lung and Blood Institute.
“It was a long journey,” she says.
Disabilities Don’t Stop Her
T
“
he mind is the most powerful tool
of all,” declares Madeline Gomez, a
recent graduate of Queensborough
Community College.
A native of Puerto Rico, Gomez has
little use of her hands and no use of her
legs. Wheelchair-bound, she had enrolled
in The External Education Program for
the Home-bound. As chair of the
Coalition for Students with Disabilities,
she heled pass legislation making textbooks available in alternative formats for
the disabled.
Gomez has enrolled in CUNY’s
Baccalaureate Program.
Counting on a Math Career
K
amal Barley, who just earned his BS
in math at Medgar Evers College, has
everything — well almost everything —
all figured out.
The St. Lucia native will study math
at Arizona State University, where he
has a full scholarship and where he plans
to earn his doctorate. He then hopes to
join the faculty of a leading research
university. He wants to specialize in
differential geometry.
Life After Vietnam
Hoang Do, an immigrant from Vietnam,
is excited about beginning doctoral studies
in engineering science at Brown University.
Hoang had been tapped for the
CUNY Honors College program
through a College of Staten Island
outreach program, and graduated at the
top of his class there and at CSI.
His mother, who speaks no English,
traveled from Hanoi for the graduation
ceremony.
CUNY MATTERS — Summer 2005 11
At Slam Poetry Competition, Students Speak and Act ‘From the Heart’
A
t the May 6 Intercollegiate Poetry
Slam Finals — where fast-talking bards
spoke their minds as they got things off
their chest — the Queensborough team
emerged the winner. And for 19-year-old
Queensborough sophomore Xavier Smith,
it was also a victory of a personal kind. He
won top honors for reciting his piece,
“Enter the Mind of a Young Black Male.”
“Everything I say is real, it’s what I’ve
been through, it’s what I’ve seen,” says
Smith of his performance that night at The
Bowery Poetry Club in Greenwich Village.
“It’s from the heart, it’s what I feel. I like
the audience to feel what I feel.”
Getting students like Smith to compose
and perform is what slams are all about,
says George Guida, associate professor of
English at New York City College of
Technology, who was one of the organizers
of the monthly intercollegiate competitions that started in October 2004.
“This is a tremendous self-esteem booster for them, and it gives them a community of people who support them, and it’s an
intellectual endeavor.”
The recent war of words was a threeway affair involving Queensborough, City
Tech and SUNY’s Westchester
Community College.
For Gabriel A. Huallanca, an 18-yearold Queensborough freshman from
Queens who was “born again on stage,”
the slams are in sync with his “life goal to
be remembered as a great writer through
the ages like Shakespeare.”
The experience also has proved eyeopening for aspiring novelist Stephanie
Rolon, a 19-year-old City Tech freshman
from New Jersey. Standing before the
microphone is the “scariest thing,” says
Rolon, who performed “Thirty Days,”
which detailed her breakup with her
boyfriend, at the May 6 slam. “I had never
really read my poetry to anyone before.”
Jabril Abdush-Shahid, an 18-year-old
freshman at City Tech from
Brooklyn who also is a rapper, says
that “I do a lot of public speaking,
and it helps me.”
The slams are part of a growing
resurgence of the popularity of
poetry on college campuses and in
the mainstream culture, says Billy
Collins, a former poet laureate of
the United States and a distinguished professor of English at
Lehman College. “Poetry is the only
history available
to us of a
human emotion,” he says.
“There’s only
one history of
the human
heart, and that’s
poetry. The grief
of absence, the
joy of experience and the
community of
emotion make
you feel like
you’re not
alone.”
The slams,
City Tech Professor George
which trace
Guida is the organizer of the slam
their roots to
Allen Ginsburg’s competition.
“Howl,” the
1955 Beat poem heard round the world,
began in the 1980s in Chicago, when Marc
Smith set up competitions judged by people off the street.
In the 1990s, slams went nationwide.
With the 1998 film “SlamNation,” the
genre entered the mass-market and penetrated even deeper with the advent of
Russell Simmons’ hit HBO series “Def
Poetry Jam,” which is in its fourth season.
“I try to give the audience a mental picture because I can’t put them on the corner with me,” Smith says. “I’m trying to
Xavier Smith of Queensborough Community College won the individual award at the
slam poetry competition held at The Bowery Poetry Club in Greenwich Village.
break the stereotype of the young
black male who sells drugs and
plays basketball and show that
they have something to say.”
For the collegiate poets, the
slams really aren’t about winning;
syllable by syllable, they’re all
about wordplay and having one’s say. “It’s
about me being heard and touching people. One person came up to me in tears,”
Smith says.
Rolon says it’s about having a good time
and bonding with peers. “We do it for fun,”
she says. “Even though it’s a competition,
we give tips to each other and talk about
our poetry.”
Queensborough and City Tech are hoping to get more students, especially ones
who are working in different disciplines
like math and science, to participate.
“Poetry is another tool for studying the
world,” says Lori Anderson-Moseman, an
assistant professor in the English
Department at Queensborough and the
coach for the Queensborough slammers.
“The team has people from all majors.
There is no set content. You can write
about everything from botany to racial
politics.”
If all goes according to plan, next
semester, the City Tech and Queensborough Community College poets will
have a little more competition: In a grand
slam, Guida recently sent out challenges to
more than 50 colleges in the metro area.
Abdush-Shahid, Rolon, Smith and
Huallanca say they are more than ready to
spread the word, rhyme by rhyme.
Says Rolon: “I say to anybody who
wants to perform: ‘Come to a slam.’”
Professors are Called Possible ‘Saviors’ of Polluted Canal
T
hey are being hailed as the sisters who
may someday rescue the contaminated
waters of the Gowanus Canal.
Niloufar and Nasreen Haque – Niloufar,
Sisters Niloufar Haque, right, and Nasreen
Haque, left, are doing research on the
Gowanus and other waterways. Niloufar, of
City Tech, also does brain studies that may
reveal more about Alzheimer's. Nasreen
teaches at Barnard.
a neuroscientist and assistant professor of
biology at New York City College of
Technology, and Nasreen, a biochemist
who teaches at Barnard College – are scientific advisers to Urban Divers, a nonprofit
that provides updates to the Environmental
Protection Agency on the Arthur Kill and
Gowanus waterways and area marshlands.
Last summer the sisters, who are natives
of India, helped collect samples of the
fabled “white stuff” that floats near the
bottom of the Gowanus, one of the city’s
most polluted waterways. The lab results
are due in the coming months.
In this, their latest collaboration, the siblings want to know which microbes thrive
in the contaminated Gowanus, which
dumps into New York Harbor, and whether
the chemicals are causing microbes to
evolve and become harmful to people.
In May, at City Tech, the Haques
presented “What Lies Beneath the
Underwater World,” a mix of lectures and
graphic presentations on pollution in area
waters. They are getting City Tech students
immersed in the subject by having them
monitor various waterways.
Niloufar furthermore oversees two
City Tech students who are doing research
on Pick’s Disease, which is similar to
Alzheimer’s in the accumulation of tau
protein in the cerebral cortex of the brain.
She is also working with another student
on a survey of genetic profiling, and has
been a mentor to a Brooklyn College student in a stem cell research project.
Nasreen says there is not enough
research being done on the waterways, and
hopes what she finds out about the “white
stuff” in the Gowanus can be used in the
canal’s rehabilitation. A column about the
Haques by Daily News writer Clem
Richardson bore a headline saying “Sisters
May Be Saviors of Canal.”
Much of the work being done on the
The City University of New York
Offi
ficce of University Relations
535 East 80th St.
New York, NY 10021
Gowanus is through CUNY. Last year,
Brooklyn College hosted a daylong conference to explore ways of restoring clear
water and wildlife there. Professor Martin
Schreibman, director of the college’s
Aquatic Research and Environmental
Assessment Center, has been overseeing
student research that could have positive
impacts on the canal.
Though much work remains to be done,
Schreibman expressed optimism about the
future of the Gowanus, saying that scientists
are paying more attention to it.
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