Matters
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A Newsletter for The City University of New York • Spring 1997
A PIONEERING TEACHER OF WRITING
2 New Board Ad Hoc Committees
Remembering Mina
and the “Grand Experiment”
O
n March 31, Board of Trustees Chairwoman Anne A. Paolucci announced the
creation of two Ad Hoc Committees of the Board. One committee will survey
remediation, performance and graduation rates, while the other will explore
mechanisms to facilitate a “seamless transition” between the last two years of high
school and the first two years of college.
Noting that additional members may be chosen, Chairwoman Paolucci appointed
Vice Chairman Herman Badillo to chair the committee on remediation, performance
and graduation rates. Other members are Trustee George Rios, who will serve as vicechair; President Vernon Lattin of Brooklyn College; President Kurt Schmeller of
Queensborough Community College; President Carolyn Williams of Bronx Community
College; and Saul Cohen, former President of Queens College and a member of the
Board of Regents.
Trustee Nilda Soto Ruiz will chair the committee on seamless transition, composed
of Trustee Michael Crimmins; President Leon Goldstein of Kingsborough Community
College; President Isaura Santiago Santiago of Hostos Community College; President
Marlene Springer of The College of Staten Island; Professor David Speidel of Queens
College; a representative of the Office of Schools Chancellor Rudy Crew; and Dennis
Claire, chairman of the English department of Greenport High School, Long Island.
From 1971 to 1978, Marilyn Maiz served as administrative
assistant to the late Mina Shaughnessy, City College’s fabled
pioneer in the field of teaching basic writing. Maiz now works
part-time in CUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs. Here, she recalls
the Shaughnessy years upon the publication of a biography of the
renowned teacher, and a celebration at the Graduate School.
I
was struck by the way Mina perceived literacy,” wrote the renowned
literary scholar Benjamin Demott in
a review of Errors and Expectations: A
Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing by
Mina Shaughnessy. “Her work was the
kind of work you would do if you were really going to take democracy seriously.”
At the time of her death from cancer
in 1978, Mina Shaughnessy was considered the leading figure in the field of basic writing. A remarkable teacher,
scholar, and administrator who began
her CUNY career in 1968 as an adjunct
lecturer at Hunter College, she quickly
became Director of City College’s Basic
Writing Program and in 1975, Dean at
the Instructional Resource Center for the
University.
Taking the Shaughnessy legacy seriously—and lovingly—the Graduate
T
he first Ad Hoc Committee will gather information on remediation, performance
and graduation rates, as well as other relevant facts pertaining to CUNY’s efforts
to help students overcome deficiencies. It will, in a second phase, propose options
to be considered either as separate pilot programs in certain colleges of the CUNY
system or as an across-the board experiment that will improve present conditions,
especially performance levels.
The second Ad Hoc Committee will work with representatives of public and private
high schools and members of the CUNY community, as well as outside advisors, to
establish ways and means to facilitate the “seamless transition” between the last
two years of high school and the first two years of college. The Committee’s mandate
is a broad one, in that it will survey all aspects of the existing situation and put forward proposals for improving it.
Both Ad Hoc Committees will meet at least six times a year and will send minutes
of all meetings to the Committee on Academic Programs and Planning (CAPPR) and
to Chairwoman Paolucci. CAPPR may present recommendations from the Ad Hoc
Committee to the full Board if and when such recommendations are ready to be considered, either as pilot programs or as permanent changes.
The two Committees will have access to materials collected in the Board of Trustees’ offices and may request the services of the Board’s Researcher to help gather
relevant materials from the Central Office of the Administration and the CUNY colleges, as well as from outside agencies, schools, individual educators and media,
both local and national. The Researcher may also be asked to prepare charts, summaries and reports as needed.
SERIOUS BUSINESS
Big Apple Job Fair Breaks Record
One visual aid captured perfectly the “we’ve got our eye on you” atmosphere at the ninth annual CUNY Big Apple Job Fair on April 30. The
largest number of employers—115—in the Fair’s history gathered at the
Javits Center to recruit nearly 5,000 graduating seniors and recent alumni.
Below, Alan J. Lipson and Beverly J. Rice of Mutual of Omaha confer with
June 1997 graduate Carmen Cerda of Hostos Community College. For
New York State Comptroller H. Carl McCall’s keynote remarks at the event
opener, see page 2. Photo André Beckles.
A+ Donor
A major player in the real estate industry, Bill Newman, is
pictured above attending a
round table sponsored by the
Steven L. Newman Real Estate
Institute at Baruch College. For
more on Newman's generosity to
his alma mater, see page 2.
Mina Shaughnessy
School’s Adult and Continuing Education
Office sponsored a presentation on Feb. 26
by Jane Maher, author of Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work (NCTE, 1997), at
one of its distinguished James Hall Lectures. In addition to educators from English
departments and literacy programs across
the University, the audience included many
friends and colleagues of Mina (pronounced
“Mynah”). Also present was one of her former
SEEK students, Lotte Wilkins, now a New York
State Supreme Court Justice.
Maher’s tome traces Mina’s journey from
her childhood in a South Dakota mining
town to Northwestern University and on to
New York City, where she at first pursued
an acting career. She also worked with a
Continued on page 9
CCNY’S 150TH FETED
General Powell,
Front and Center
I
n early April more than 600
guests gathered for a festive
dinner dance at the Sheraton Hotel
in celebration of City College’s sesquicentennial. The evening’s ceremonies, emceed by CBS correspondent Mike Wallace, included singer
Roberta Flack’s musical tribute to two CCNY
Class of 1918 grads, Ira Gershwin and Yip
Harburg, and an address by Colin L. Powell,
former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Earlier in the day CCNY President Yolanda
T. Moses announced that the College was establishing a Center for Public Policy Studies
and naming it in General Powell’s honor. The
Center will open officially in the fall, with the
mission of examining public policy issues affecting New York City and other large urban
areas in an international context.
“I am deeply honored,” General Powell
said, “but what gives me the greatest satisfaction is not the personal honor. It is the
thought of all the aspiring young people, for
generations to come, who are going to be
pursuing careers in public policy under the
Center’s auspices.”
CCNY, founded in 1847 and considered
the font of public higher education in the
United States, opened its doors as The Free
Board of Trustees Chairwoman Anne A. Paolucci,
left, and Chancellor W. Ann Reynolds joined General
Colin L. Powell to celebrate the 150th birthday of
City College. Photo, André Beckles
Academy at Lexington Avenue and 23rd
Street. In 1866 the name was changed by
legislative act to The City College of New
York. In 1907 the College moved to a 35acre campus in the St. Nicholas Heights
neighborhood of Manhattan, where several
of its main buildings in the neo-Gothic style
have become local landmarks.
Also present at the gala, which raised
funds for College academic and scholarship
programs, were five of CCNY’s eight graduates who have received Nobel Prizes:
Julius Axelrod (Class of 1933, Medicine),
Jerome Karle (Class of 1937, Chemistry),
Herbert A. Hauptman (Class of 1937,
Chemistry), Arthur Kornberg (Class of
1937, Medicine), and Leon M. Lederman
(Class of 1943, Physics).
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BARUCH’S BILL OF REITS
The Story Behind Newman Gifts
By Zane Berzins
B
ill Newman has been a real estate
man all his life. It’s an industry
that excites him and exasperates
him and still, after so many years, challenges him. He’s not about to retire and
rest on his laurels, though there are plenty
of them. As Chairman and CEO of New Plan
Realty Trust, one of the most respected and
largest of the nation’s Real Estate Investment
Trusts (known as REITs), Newman is a
leader in his profession. On four separate
occasions he has been honored with the Wall
Street Transcript’s gold, silver and bronze
medals as the nation’s best chief executive in
the real estate industry.
When Bill Newman gave Baruch College
a million dollars in 1995 to establish the
Steven L. Newman Real Estate Institute and
then followed up a year later with another
$2.5 million, it was not merely a magnanimous gesture. It was also an appropriate
one, for Bill Newman has no illusions about
his business. He has seen the speculators
and con men, the take-the-money-and-run
crowd, come and go. He saw real estate
syndicates by the score go bust in the
1970s. He also knows that New Yorkers
have a primal dislike of landlords. “I
wanted,” he says, “to create a better attitude toward the captive industries in New
York City, of which real estate is the primary one—so that it’s not considered a
dirty word by the vast majority of tenants.”
Baruch College’s School of Public Affairs
has become the home of the Newman Real
Estate Institute (it is named in memory of
Bill’s son, who worked alongside his father
at New Plan); among its plans is the first
and only undergraduate program in Real
Estate and Metropolitan Development in
New York City. Its inaugural class begins
studies this coming September, and its
leadership is now being recruited. Noted
architect Henry Wollman has been named
Director of the Institute.
This spring it sponsored a series of highpowered “round tables” dedicated to examining competing visions of New York City’s
future both as a mecca of commerce and a
place of residence. A series of Young Professionals Career Evenings is also under
way; over Cokes and pizza, students get to
meet some of the successful business men
and women, planners, and government officials who are re-shaping the city’s real estate landscape.
The academic program has a strong
component of mentoring and internships.
Newman wants to familiarize students with
the realities of the business while they are
still in college. He also wants to create ties
between today’s movers and shakers and
the young men and women who are just
starting to think about entering the profession. “I want to provide the kind of education for young people that will make them
desirable as employees. I met some students at a mentoring session recently,” he
says. “They struck me as very intelligent
and practical, so I have high hopes.”
Baruch’s President Matthew Goldstein
says of Newman, whom he has come to
know as a friend, “He really wants to give
opportunities to young people. In the end,
that is his true motivation. The thing that
gives Bill the most joy now is having an im-
2
pact on a place that is full of people who are
ambitious and smart but who have had limited opportunities in life.”
N
ewman’s relationship with his alma
mater escalated in dramatic fashion in
1993 when, shortly after receiving a Distinguished Alumni Award and meeting President Goldstein, he gave Baruch an unrestricted gift of $5 million. “I succumbed to
his charm,” says Newman, adding wryly, “I
also figured it was time to pay my tuition.”
Anyone who meets Newman will understand
that his generosity is not based on noblesse
oblige. He feels a real sense of empathy
with today’s CUNY students. “It’s still a
school for underprivileged kids, many or
most of whom are the first ones in their
family to attend college.”
To honor Newman and his wife, Anita,
Baruch named its spectacular new library
for them. They were pleased, of course, but
a few months later Bill Newman heard
something that really excited him: library
usage at Baruch had increased five-fold
since the new facility opened.
Today, Bill and Anita Newman don’t need
to make do with less. Residents of
Scarsdale, they also maintain a home in
Florida and a pied-a-terre in New York City.
They attend the theater, they go to the ballet, they read, they play a little golf, they
visit with their three grandchildren. Their
life is comfortable, but not ostentatious—
nor has it ever been. Family is a constellation of the Newmans’ life. Bill Newman gets
excited when he imagines that Samantha,
age nine and “a sharp little cookie,” or Loren
who is six and “a little ball of fire,” might one
day join the family firm.
And in a sense, despite having some 600
employees, New Plan is a family firm. Bill
Newman never speaks of his company without giving proper homage to his father,
Morris Newman, an accountant who graduated from Baruch in 1926, when it was still
the City College School of Business and
Civic Administration, and who soon afterward began dabbling in real estate—he
bought office buildings and industrial sites
that, during the Depression, could be
picked up for a song.
T
he kind of firm New Plan became was
a function of who the Newmans—father and sons—were. They were accountants: meticulous, careful, conservative
with their money and with the money of
clients who were their earliest investors.
“The one thing I really learned from him,”
says Newman’s daughter, Debbie, “was the
value of a dollar.”
New Plan, a public company for the past
35 years, has a market capitalization of
more than $1 billion. It has increased its
dividends for 71 consecutive quarters, the
only public firm that can make that boast.
Newman says with pride, “We in management have a tremendous stake in the company in terms of absolute dollars. It’s very
large. No one in the family has ever sold a
share!” Dean Bernstein, Bill Newman’s sonin-law, is now an executive of the firm and
the “sharp little cookie” is awaiting her turn.
Though New Plan Realty is headquartered
in Midtown Manhattan, not one of the
company’s properties is here. That’s because Newman refuses to buy into the old
real estate adage: location, location, location. “I’ve seen the biggest disasters in the
most beautiful locations,” he observes. For
doing business, he prefers small city and
suburban areas and such prosaic and
unglamorous properties as shopping centers, factory outlets, and garden apartments. New Plan owns them in places like
Ohio and upstate New York. “The stores
mostly sell things like pharmaceuticals and
jeans and shoes—things people need and
will always need, good times and bad.”
On the other hand, impossible though the
place may be, he still considers New York
City “the center of my world.” One is not
surprised to hear him echo the heartfelt,
albeit less-than-logical sentiments of so
many Big Apple natives: “No matter how
‘bad’ they say New York is, it’s still the best
place around.” And improving higher education, Newman obviously believes, will
make it even better.
Comptroller McCall Opens Job Fair
I
Bill and Anita Newman attending the dedication
of the Newman Library at Baruch College.
That the Newmans should have their
name on a library strikes their daughter,
Debbie Bernstein, as somehow “just right.”
Her parents, she says, have always been
great readers, and when she was growing up
“the room the family spent the most time in
was the library. It was the nicest room in
the house.”
Of course, when Newman graduated from
Baruch College in 1947 with his B.B.A. in
accounting, it was “City College Downtown,”
and tuition wasn’t a factor—it didn’t exist.
Even so, economic realities made a college
degree something that demanded hard work
and sacrifice. In that respect, Newman
doesn’t think there’s very much difference
between the students he knew then and
those he meets now. “We may have been
poorer,” he says. “I didn’t know a single
person who owned an automobile. It was
subways all the way. And I knew people
then who took 12 years to graduate. That’s
not surprising. They had to work.” He describes as “the usual nonsense” all the editorial jeremiads about the quality of today’s
CUNY students. “We’ve always been looked
down on by the expensive colleges. That’s
one reason I gave Baruch my money. I want
to show people we can do better with less.”
n his keynote remarks at the CUNY
Big Apple Job Fair, New York State
Comptroller H. Carl McCall reminisced
about his own days as a student. “I went
to one of those schools whose halls were
all covered with ivy, and I went through
school in four years. Money wasn’t a big
thing—I had scholarships. I had a room
all to myself and all the support that was
necessary to get a good education with
absolutely no distractions.”
Looking out over his audience, employers gathered to recruit CUNY students, McCall brought his point home:
“Well, I was lucky. Many of the students
you see here today didn’t have that kind
of experience. They had to get on a subway every day, and often they had to
worry whether they had the money to
pay for school. They had to leave school
and run out to make sure they got to
work on time—and some have worked
not one but two jobs.
“I’m here to tell you I
think they all had a better
education than I did. I think
that the sacrifices they
made and the obstacles they
overcame in order to get
their education made them
just the kind of people you
want working in your company. And I’m going to spend
some time out there trying to
convince some of them to
come and work for me rather
than you.”
McCall also explained
that he was at the Fair to protect his investments. “I’m interested in what is
happening today because, in addition to
all the other things I do as Comptroller, I
am an investor,” he observed. “I manage
the State’s pension fund. I have billions
of dollars to invest, and I invest in companies that believe in people and that
have good people. There are companies
here today like AT&T. Well, I own 6.9 million shares of AT&T. There are people
here from the Bank of New York; I own
1.6 million shares of the Bank of New
York. There are people here from Dean
Witter; I own 2.6 million shares of Dean
Witter. There are people here from
NYNEX; I own 1.7 million shares. UNISYS
is here; I only own 931,000 shares of
UNISYS. So what I am here to tell you, as
somebody who has invested in your companies, is that I believe my investment will
be secure if you secure the kind of people
who are here today to work for you.”
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PROGRAM EASES PATH TO NATURALIZATION
Making Citizenship a Snap
Comptroller
Fetes
Women’s
History
Month
By Allan Wernick, Esq.
Professor of Public Administration, Hostos
Community College, and Director of the CUNY
Citizenship and Naturalization Project
L
ina Chica is a junior majoring in
psychology at the College of Staten
Island. She arrived in the United
States from Colombia as a permanent resident more than eight years ago. She could
have applied for citizenship three years ago;
now, by providing citizenship services to her
on campus and cost free, CUNY has helped
her to take that step.
“It’s a beautiful program,” exclaimed
Lina Chica, referring to CUNY’s new Citizenship and Naturalization Project. “My
mother’s been bugging me to apply, but I’ve
Fingerprint specialist Marcos Santana assisting
freshman Rosemary Abreu in preparing her
application at a Queens College "Citizenship Now"
workshop. Photo, Nancy Bareis
been putting it off. She’s a citizen, and so
is my older sister. I’m glad you made it so
easy for me to become a citizen.”
Lina is one of almost 1,800 CUNY students who by mid-May will have taken part
in a program designed to help them navigate the naturalization process. The goal
of “Citizenship Now,” as it’s known, is to
provide free, top-quality, comprehensive
naturalization services. To our knowledge
it is the only university-based project of its
type in the country, and we expect it to become a model on campuses nationwide.
Public interest in the project has been
great, as reflected in coverage by the Daily
News and New York Times.
Many CUNY students see becoming a
U.S. citizen as a necessity now, rather than
an option. They feel threatened by increased anti-immigrant sentiments in Congress, and they fear losing access to public
benefits. They are also concerned that
naturalization may become more restrictive
and expensive in the future, and they are
very smart to worry. Though the nation’s
universities fended off Congressional efforts to end permanent residents’ eligibility
for student loans, the new welfare reform
and immigration laws serve as a warning:
Become a U.S. citizen now or your rights
and benefits could be taken away.
T
o meet this challenge, the program is
developing ongoing citizenship projects
at each CUNY campus. Students seeking
naturalization get soup-to-nuts assistance—everything from help in preparing
their applications to free fingerprinting and
photo services. They leave the campus
with a completed citizenship application.
We even provide an addressed envelope and
certified mail/return receipt requested
forms. Students need only add the $95 filing fee and mail the application to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. In
addition to these full on-campus workshops, thousands of students have received
our CUNY citizenship packet and will pursue applications on their own.
The project grew out of CUNY’s successful voter registration project run by the Office of University Relations. Participants in
that initiative discovered that a large number of students are permanent residents
(green card holders) and thus not eligible
to vote. At the initiative of Chancellor
Reynolds, Vice Chancellor Nuñez and Vice
Chancellor Hershenson,Citizenship Now was
launched. University Dean for Student Activities Angelo Proto has been supervising this
vigorous outreach to our immigrant scholars.
But how to reach them all efficiently and
cost-effectively? One answer has been to
train dozens of campus “citizenship advocates” to provide the services. Supervising
and deploying these advocates have been
Ivette Matos, project coordinator and a
third-year student at the CUNY Law School;
Susan Curtis, executive assistant to Dean
Proto; and myself.
R
epresentatives from 17 colleges, the
Graduate School, and the Law School
first formed a coordinating committee,
which produced a Citizenship and Naturalization Guide usually referred to as the
“read me first” handbook. The committee
also created a citizenship packet consisting
of the guide, the naturalization application
(INS Form N-400), the certified mail/return
receipt requested forms, and other documents necessary to complete the application. The guide contains a detailed explanation of the requirements for naturalization, step-by-step instructions on completing N-400, the 100 questions and answers
used by the INS to test civic knowledge
N
ew York City
Comptroller
Alan G. Hevesi, who
graduated with a
B.A. from Queens
College in 1962,
honored prominent New Yorkers at his
office’s annual Women’s History Month reception in March. From the left honorees
Dorothy Chin-Brandt, Queens Criminal Court
judge; and civic activist Sally Goodgold;
President Frances Degen Horowitz of
competency, and an application checklist.
We then asked each committee member
to select administrators, faculty and students from their campuses to participate in
an all-day training at John Jay College in
February. Trainees learned the ins and outs
of naturalization law and the niceties of INS
forms. We also taped a one-and-a-half hour
training session at CUNY-TV that has been
distributed throughout the University. To
help the colleges publicize the event, posters and flyers designed by Bill Freeland at
LaGuardia Community College and produced
under the direction of Deborah Paruolo, University Director of Admission Services, were
sent to the campuses in advance of the
workshops.
Our visits to each CUNY campus began
with pilot “Citizenship Day” workshops at
City College and Bronx Community College.
With the help of law students Nelson Rosario
and S. Tito Sinha, we engaged in the exhilarating but sometimes exhausting process of
individual citizenship advocacy for CUNY
students. To maintain quality control each
application is reviewed twice. I discuss particularly complex sets of circumstances
directly with the student applicant.
Threading the Labyrinth
U
nlike most citizens, whose brushes
with the law usually concern making a will or buying a house, the law constantly colors the lives of immigrants. To
help them deal with what he calls our
“incredibly complex and
elastic” immigration
law, Allan Wernick has
drawn on 25 years of
experience practicing
and teaching U.S. immigration law in his U.S.
Immigration and Citizenship: Your Complete
Guide. “Many excellent
handbooks on the subject are available, but
most are too technical
and dense for the average reader,”
Wernick observed. “I wrote the Guide
for the typical high-school-to-communitycollege reader, and to ease the boredom
of inevitable legal fine points I pepper
the text with actual tales
of success and sorrow in
navigating the INS labyrinth.” To keep readers
abreast of the latest
twists and turns in that
labyrinth, Wernick urges
them to monitor his
Website
(http://
i l w. c o m / w e r n i c k / ) ,
which is updated the
first of each month.
the Graduate School and University Center;
Hevesi; Columbia University Chaplain
Jewelnel Davis; Rabbi Julie Schonfeld; and
honoree Debra Fraser-Howze, President
and CEO of the National Black Leadership
Commission on AIDS.
B
eyond the 50 to 100-plus students
helped at each workshop, these events
are themselves an educational experience
for the participants. Also, citizenship advocates learn more and more about immigration law, building toward the day when providing naturalization information is an ongoing component of campus student services. The students leave informed about
the naturalization process, and we assume
this encourages them to spread knowledge
about dealing with the INS to their family
and friends. We organizers evaluate each
session to improve Citizenship Now’s information and cost-efficiency. Our ultimate
goal is to rival the services of top immigration law firms.
Nor have we forgotten our origins in the
voter registration project. As students
leave the checkout station, where their
packet gets a final review, we ask them to
send us a preprinted, prepaid postcard on
the day they file their application. This information will allow us follow up with voter
registration information, and will also help
us to monitor and develop data on INS processing times.
The on-site Citizenship Days are only a
beginning. We are holding borough-wide
meetings of campus representatives to discuss how best to coordinate future services. We are also exploring outside funding sources and ways of disseminating upto-date information on the CUNY Website.
Citizenship Now fills an ongoing need in
the University. With some exceptions, an
applicant must have been a permanent
resident for at least five years to qualify for
naturalization. Every day, new CUNY students become eligible. We are moving rapidly to the day when more than half of all
CUNY students will be foreign-born. The
citizenship project will become increasingly
important in making sure our immigrant
students fully participate in the shaping of
our city, state and nation.
For information on Citizenship
Now representatives on each
CUNY campus, phone Carmen
D. Alvarez in the Office of Student Services, 212-794-5380.
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ENROLLMENT EXTRAVAGANZA
Grassroots Media Blitz
Touts City College Engineers
By Sheldon Weinbaum
Distinguished Professor of Mechanical
Engineering, City College
L
isteners to 1010 WINS and WCBS
880 might have been a bit startled
recently to learn from City College’s
own students that in 1996 its School of
Engineering equaled MIT for the most
newly elected alumni to the National Academy of Engineering—or that “you don’t
have to spend $15,000 a year and more to
obtain a truly first-class engineering education.” Finally, the audience heard that
“this ad has been paid for by hundreds of
donations from School of Engineering students, faculty, and staff.”
Five versions of the radio ad—75 spots
in all—were aired on these news channels
and on a musical gamut, from KISS FM’s laid
back audience to HOT 97 FM and Spanishlanguage La Mega 97.9 FM (top-ranked stations for the area’s school-age listeners).
These ads were phase one of an extraordinary media campaign launched by the
School of Engineering in January. The idea
for the campaign was conceived after a presentation by a special Task Force of CUNY
Distinguished Professors in Engineering and
Dean Charles Watkins on the current status
and future needs of the School. These
speakers, tapped by CCNY President
Yolanda Moses to meet with CUNY officials,
stressed the unrelenting financial burden
the School imposed on the resources of City
College, its difficult current financial state,
and the major shift in its mission from
nearly exclusive service to undergraduates
to being CUNY’s de facto center for engineering education, where external grant
funding now exceeds the entire School of
Engineering faculty payroll.
Its operating budget for laboratories and
equipment and all non-personnel services
had shrunk from $1.1 million in 1989 to a
mere $290,000 in 1996, though it now
serves about 500 masters students and
nearly 150 doctoral students. Also, the
School had lost 35 of its faculty and staff
lines. An overriding concern was the
College’s and the School’s declining enrollment, which clearly required a sharp turnabout. Dramatic action was essential, in the
form of an unprecedented grassroots campaign that would involve everyone affiliated
with the School.
T
he campaign was comprised of four
phases. The first was to restore School
pride and establish a sense of continuity
between current achievements and historic
ones of our alumni. We would be very poor
ambassadors if we didn’t first believe in ourselves. We needed to feel that to some extent we could control our own destiny despite the storm clouds of newly proposed
state budget cuts and the last two years’
deep retrenchment.
The second phase would be broad-scale
recruitment of students to support the campaign. Third was spreading the word
throughout the city of the School’s academic
excellence and affordability. The final phase
will be to persuade other large divisions of
City College and other CUNY campuses to
follow in our footsteps with plans of their
own to boost enrollment.
A radio campaign seemed the obvious
starting point, but the idea of faculty and
students footing the bill was bold and unprecedented. I knew full well that major
fundraising for student and faculty political
campaigns rarely approached $10,000, a
sum that would buy meager radio exposure.
The secret, I felt, was to create a commu-
other radio stations proved willing to follow
suit. WCBS reduced their package to
$2,400. Our campaign goal was a lofty
$10,000, and Dean Watkins had agreed to
spring for the remainder.
What happened next was just as serendipitous: We used seven student announcers, and they created a sensation. Dean
Brown took each of the radio amateurs to
the studio for audition tapings in both English and Spanish. Even though the ads
were intended for a non-CCNY audience,
students loved hearing from their fellow students. The faculty sensed we had hit the
jackpot, and their donations started to pour
in. In the first 10 days we collected more
than $6,000, with more than $1,200 coming
from students. Faculty donations averaged
an amazing $140. For those students who
missed the recorded spots by their classmates, volunteers played them on boom
ing school at a low cost.” The Transit Authority is also providing a free bonus— 28
large billboards on platforms at stations adjacent to Polytechnic University, our major
competitor; at West 4th Street near New
York University; and at the two most heavily
used stations in Queens.
As a final impetus to reach our goal, five
favorite faculty members, representing each
of the School’s five departments (Computer
Science and Civil, Electrical, Mechanical,
and Chemical Engineering), volunteered to
match dollar for dollar all student contributions on April Fools Day. The event was
declared a success at noon to keep our volunteers solvent, with a final tally of $10,363.
However, the best news had come the day
before, when data revealed that first-time
freshman applications were already up an
incredible 34% from the previous year, even
with the subway campaign just beginning.
After just one week “underground,” we received more phone inquiries than during the
entire radio blitz. So on April 1, “mock”
champagne flowed in Steinman Hall.
If other members of the CUNY community
would like to join us in this effort, tax-deductible checks can be made payable to “The
City College Fund/Engineering Media” and
mailed to me at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, City College, Convent Avenue & 138th Street, New York, NY 10031.
A CCNY contingent, including five students who
made radio ads for the media blitz, gathers beside a
copy of the poster appearing in several subway
stations. From left, Assistant Dean Ramona Brown,
Andrea Ñunez, Allison Huang, Dean Charles Watkins,
President Yolanda T. Moses, Prof. Sheldon Weinbaum, Gregoria Camacho, Lyly Marecheau, and
Maxime Pinchinat.
nity effort that would motivate everyone to
participate. We would try to raise as many
dollars from 2,000 students, faculty and
staff as previous campaigns had raised from
200,000. I knew some faculty and administrators would cringe at the thought of collecting lunch money from our hard-pressed
student body. But these skeptics, it turned
out, seriously underestimated the dedication
of City College’s engineering students. They
also did not foresee the impact student donations would have on the attitude of radio
station officials.
T
he campaign had two ardent supporters
in Dean Watkins and Assistant Dean of
Students Ramona Brown. Brown immediately enlisted the support of all the student
clubs. Two students, Sarah Johnson and
Shi Shi Jen, volunteered to build campaign
barometer displays in the lobby of Steinman
Hall. I called 1010 WINS and told its advertising representative that I wanted to buy 15
one-minute spots to be paid for by hundreds
of donations that would be collected from
students and faculty.
The rep was dumbfounded and went to
the station manager, who happened to be a
Brooklyn College graduate. The rep called
back and told me they had never done anything like this before, but would offer us a
special rate of 15 spots for $3,000. (Typically, a single morning spot costs $800$900.) They would even throw in nine “billboards” for free—a billboard is a 10-second
announcement that weather, traffic, or
sports news was being sponsored by the
School of Engineering.
Hearing of this offer from 1010 WINS,
boxes in classes. One senior faculty member observed that we had done more for
School morale in two weeks than had been
done in the last 10 years.
This enthusiasm gave great impetus to
phase two of the campaign. We needed student volunteers to work with Director of Admissions Laurie Austin to mount
phonathons, citywide open houses and visits
by students to their former high school and
community college teachers and counselors.
Many students were happy to volunteer.
W
hile an estimated 2,000,000-plus New
Yorkers heard at least one of the radio
spots, we know that their effect is shortlived. Their primary purpose was to raise
the visibility and morale of the School and
remind the public it is an excellent institution. The third phase was needed to convey
our message more lastingly to many more
New Yorkers. My wife pointed to the obvious
next venue for our efforts: the subway.
There are 3,500,000 straphangers a day,
and the average subway ride is 20 minutes.
It is hard to imagine a more perfectly captive
audience. There is hardly a prospective student who will not use the trains several
times a month.
Soon I was negotiating with a senior advertising executive at the Transit Authority.
We obtained the premier wall spots opposite
subway maps and a one- by four-foot overhead poster—that’s one poster in 1,140 subway cars (a fifth of the fleet) for an entire
month. The poster we designed features
CCNY’s astronaut-alumnus, Mario Runco,
walking in space and the ad copy, “Launch
your career at City College. A top engineer-
AIDS SYMPHONY HONORED
Trio of Grammies
for Lehman Composer
J
ohn Corigliano, distinguished professor
of music at Lehman College, this winter became the first composer to win two
Grammy Awards for contemporary composition. The National Symphony performance of his Symphony No. 1 (“Of Rage
and Remembrance”), under the baton of
Leonard Slatkin, was honored in the best
classical CD category. The symphony was
commissioned and premiered by the Chicago Symphony in 1990 and had already
won a Grawemeyer Award and two
Grammies in 1991. To date, 74 orchestras
in 17 countries have performed the work,
which the composer wrote as a personal
response to the AIDS crisis. Corigliano’s
String Quartet also won in two categories
this year: best contemporary composition
and best chamber music performance (by
the Cleveland Quartet).
Photo, Julian Kreeger
4
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DISTINGUISHED BIOGRAPHER, FOUNDER OF CLAGS
An Interview with Martin Duberman
L Martin Duberman
ehman College’s Distinguished Professor of
History
last summer stepped down as the first director of CUNY’s
Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies, the first of
its kind at any university in the country. He was
also its founder. A prolific author of biographies
(James Russell Lowell, Charles Francis Adams,
and Paul Robeson), plays (In White America,
Visions of Kerouac, Mother Earth), and memoirs,
the editor of several anthologies devoted to gay
and lesbian culture, Duberman has also been an
extraordinarily active participant in the gay
rights movement since the early 1970s. He was
an originating board member of the Gay Academic Union, the Lambda Legal Defense Fund,
and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
On the occasion of CLAGS’s 11th anniversary in
May and the appearance of two large anthologies
of essays generated by CLAGS, which he edited,
Duberman met with me for a talk in his Chelsea
apartment. There was no sign of his dog named
Emma (not in homage to Austen, as will become
clear), except for the ill effects of her allergens
on his sinuses. After Duberman fended off a
fact-checker from The Nation for a forthcoming
review he had written, we were in business.
—Gary Schmidgall
GS: At a very well-attended “watershed”
conference of the old Gay Academic Union
in 1973 at John Jay College, you were the
keynote speaker. You spoke of “the beginning of a long march through academic disciplines and institutions.” Nearly a silver
anniversary later, how has the march gone?
MD: I would say that the acceptance of
the discipline of gay and lesbian studies
has been considerable, but paradoxically
the acceptance of academics who practice
in it seems to have lagged. They are not
getting lines, not getting hired. There is a
little too much unfounded pride on the liberal acceptance of difference.
GS: How would you characterize this
discrimination?
MD: It’s usually subtle. It reminds me of
blacks who distinguish between southern
and northern white reactions to color—and
prefer the former because there the bigotry
comes right out at you. Northern discrimination is more covert, and you’re often not
sure you heard what you heard. The same
is true for gay and lesbian scholars.
GS: And beyond the campus?
MD: To be brought up in our culture is
inescapably to be homophobic. And that
includes gay people. I know that I am
somewhat homophobic, so how the hell
would they not be? But getting back to the
discipline, in 1973 none of us in our wildest
fantasies expected that within 25 years we
would have gotten as far as we have.
GS: And where does the march go next?
MD: At CUNY, of course, there has been
much discussion, still ongoing, about a doctoral degree in the field under a Multicultural Studies rubric. I have always thought
that gay and lesbian studies is so deeply
interdisciplinary that such an umbrella
might be the best way to pursue advanced
degrees in the field. And such a degree
might be more easily marketable in the
ghastly job situation now.
GS: Oscar Wilde predicted that “public
officials...need educating” if the fight for
gay rights is to be won. What about educating the public?
MD: I’m not sure what we want to educate our leaders about. Let me illustrate.
Yesterday in my class on sexuality and sex
roles I showed a wonderful film called “It’s
Elementary” about introducing curricula
with gay and lesbian content as early as the
first grade. The children are so charming
and so hip! The film’s message is “we have
to respect all different kinds of people and
honor their differences.”
That’s lovely, but then the other half of
the brain kicks in and you say wait! Is this
the best we can do? Or should we be talking, as queer theorists do, about sexual
fluidity, about same-sex eroticism being
present in all of us, about different cultures
organizing sexuality differently. Should we
“challenge the binary” (there are gay
people or straight people), or do we acknowledge that, politically, the best we can
hope for is sincere embrace of the “other”?
GS: The American public does seem
comfortable with the binary: Republican
and Democrat.
MD: Or black and white.
GS: You have written that “our history
has been denied us” and have done much to
give this history back, notably with your
anthologies About Time: Exploring the Gay
Past and Hidden from History: Reclaiming
the Gay and Lesbian Past.
MD: Even that simple assertion—“our
history”—raises issues. It’s not clear what
it means. It could mean the history, say, of
gender non-conformity. That’s why I like
the word “queer”; it allows that umbrella
conceptualization of what the subject is.
Thinking only of erotic acts between people
of the same gender would foreshorten the
history a lot. Studying only self-identified
gays and lesbians would, too.
GS: But the sheer volume of publication
in recent years has to be gratifying.
MD: Material is coming out at a truly
astonishing clip, compared to what we had
even just 20 years ago. I can’t keep up.
GS: This May CLAGS is celebrating its
11th anniversary, its sixth as a formal Center at the GSUC. Tell me a little about how
it came into existence.
MD: I had been mulling leaving some
money in my will to foster gay and lesbian
studies. I was friendly with a film-maker,
Helen Whitney, who was married to Yale
President Benno Schmidt. So I asked him
how much an endowed chair would run. He
told me, and I got sticker shock! So I began
to consider a more modest plan B. That
led, in time, to the formation of CLAGS.
GS: I gather from reports that the establishment of CLAGS has not been without periods of
high drama and political maneuvering.
MD: Prima donna-hood flourishes everywhere—and I do not exclude myself, need-
less to say! Yale has more than its share of
divas. Anyway, it soon became obvious that
New York City was a better place for us.
GS: Was there a memorable moment for
you in making this move?
MD: I’d say it was then-President of the
Graduate School Harold Proshansky being so
immediately welcoming. I will never forget
the first meeting. He said, “This is an idea
that is long overdue, and I thank you for letting us implement it.” [Duberman’s eyes
twinkle a little, as if to suggest some operatic scenes followed.] What happened after
that is a juicy story, which I might write up
some day! But I can say that CLAGS now
feels perfectly at home at CUNY.
GS: Having taught at Lehman College since
1972, when you came up from Princeton, you
clearly feel at home here as well. Do you have
any silver anniversary thoughts on how you or
the University has changed?
MD: One way to dramatically illustrate
a change jumps to mind. When I first came
I said I preferred to teach only undergraduates. Graduate students were too dutiful;
they wrote everything down and thought it
was true! But several years later, when I
got interested in the history of sexuality, I
recognized the need to interact with students with more learning and life experience. So, in the late 1970s, I re-approached the Graduate School and offered
to teach a course on sexuality.
All hell broke loose. The responses were
“this course is an outrage,” “there is no
such academic discipline,” and that I was a
“full-time polemicist.” The History Chair
then, Gertrude Himmelfarb, took me to
lunch and said that, if offered, no students
would sign up for my course anyway! I
withdrew my proposal and said that, since
they suddenly felt I was so “contaminated,”
I would no longer read dissertations and sit
on doctoral orals.
GS: Flash forward?
MD: When CLAGS was established in
April 1991, I felt it was important to have a
presence at the GSUC beyond my directorship. I went to the new Chair of the History Program and re-suggested my old
course. This time it sailed through! President Horowitz has been magnificent, often
showing up and even sitting through our
events. Dean Alan Gartner has also been
marvelously supportive. The higher levels
of administration, most obviously Chancellor Reynolds, have been very helpful. It was
only at the mid-management level that I
encountered homophobia.
GS: Given your almost total devotion in
the last decade to CLAGS and queer studies, I wonder if you ever stop to think about
your early Bancroft Prize-winning life of
Charles Francis Adams and the James
Russell Lowell biography and wonder “who
was the guy who wrote those books?”
MD: I rarely think about them. Someone once called Adams “the iceberg of the
northern hemisphere.” I have to confess I
grew to be unutterably bored by the man,
but what hooked me was his involvement in
founding the antislavery movement. That,
in turn, sent me on to Lowell, a much more
appealing and romantic figure.
I think the common thread throughout my
career has been from the very beginning,
without my always being conscious of it, an
interest in the dissenter, the figures challenging the current orthodoxy.
GS: Emma Goldman, on whom you have
published an epic drama called Mother
Earth, certainly fills the bill.
MD: Absolutely, she above all has long
been my great hero.
GS: Have there been, to your mind, any
figures of similar “dissenting integrity” on
the recent American scene?
MD: Well, until last weekend there was
the late lamented Allen Ginsberg.
GS: Did you know him?
MD: No...just a few brief meetings. But
before I ever met him, I wrote a play called
Visions of Kerouac in which Ginsberg is the
hero; it played both coasts in the mid-’70s.
GS: Did Ginsberg give you any problem?
MD: No, but I was plenty bothered by
the New York Times critic, who advised
Burroughs and Ginsberg to sue me because
I said in my play that they were homosexual!
GS: Speaking of your plays of the ‘70s,
how many have you written?
MD: About a dozen full-length, plus
some short ones.
GS: Have you felt the theatrical urge
recently?
MD: Yes, just last year I pulled from a
drawer a play about Newton Arvin, the
Smith College professor and prize-winning
Melville biographer whose career was ruined by a pornography scandal in 1960 in
which he turned state’s evidence. Interest
has been expressed in it, so we’ll see. I’ve
also recently written a play on Roy Cohn.
GS: Anything brand new?
MD: For about 20 years I have wanted
to do a play about the Chicago Haymarket
riots, that defining moment in the late 19th
century class struggle. [Duberman then
politely evaded a question about gay plays
since Stonewall that might stand the test of
time.] Too many friends and acquaintances
on that scene! But let me turn it around and
tell a story on myself. When “The Boys in
the Band” came out I was doing some reviewing, and I gave it a bad review. But
then, three minutes later, I saw the light
and was a gay activist. Ever since, I’ve defended the play as an accurate portrayal of
gay life then...and, I think, how many gay
people still feel about themselves now.
GS: The Uncompleted Past is another of
your titles. Aside from your theater pieces,
is there any past project that still is not
quite completed?
MD: Paul Robeson’s centennial is in
1998, and it will be 10 years since my
Robeson biography appeared. I’ve changed
my “take” in some respects, and there is
some new evidence. So I am doing a long
reevaluation called “Revisiting Robeson.”
GS: How did that biography happen?
MD: When Robeson’s son—completely
out of the blue—asked me to do it, I was
stunned. He said he’d been searching for
years and then had read my books and felt I
was “the right person” to understand his
father. His views on that point have
changed, which is another reason to revisit
Robeson.
GS: And what about the future?
MD: I have done a piece on Donald
Webster Cory, who published in 1951 The
Homosexual in America and is considered
the father of the homophile movement in
America. I discovered Cory was a pseudonym and his widow was in fact still living.
I came to like her immensely—we practically
bonded as mother and son!—so I canceled a
contract with the New Yorker out of respect
for her feelings. She has given me permission to publish it in a gay venue where “all
Continued on page 7
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A NEW BRIDGE IN BROOKLYN
Teaching Science and Religion
By Peter J. Brancazio
Tow Professor of Physics, Brooklyn College
T
hroughout my career at Brooklyn
College, my main concern has been
teaching introductory physics and
astronomy to non-science students. In these
courses— most notably the liberal arts physics course that is a part of our Core Curriculum—I often have occasion to refer to instances of conflict between science and religion. A lecture on the work of Galileo naturally leads to a discussion of his conflict with
the Catholic Church, and in presenting this
topic I often draw parallels with the modernday reaction to the teaching of evolution.
When I describe the vast scales of distance
and time conceived by modern astronomers,
I am invariably provoked to remark on the
relative insignificance of human existence.
And the Big Bang theory always invites me
into a comparison with the first chapter of
the Book of Genesis.
I have learned over the years that many
students find such intersections of religious
faith and scientific fact to be especially
thought-provoking. Indeed, those students
who come from orthodox or fundamentalist
backgrounds often find them particularly
disturbing.
After many years of thinking about the
most effective and non-threatening ways to
discuss religion in a science classroom, I
finally felt the urge to draw up a syllabus for
a formal course precisely on the subject.
That the interdisciplinary Studies in Religion
Program at Brooklyn College offered a perfect venue for such a course was, one might
say, a godsend. To prepare for the course, I
was able to call upon my long-standing interest in the history and philosophy of science,
but I also had to become a student again
myself, reading extensively in theology, the
history of religion, and non-Western religious
traditions.
My overriding objective was to create a
course in science and religion, not science
versus religion. That is, I wanted to examine
both disciplines as even-handedly and objectively as possible. My purpose was not to
convert students or to challenge their faith
(or lack of it), but simply to inform, to clarify,
and to provoke thought by asking questions
without answering them. I saw my role as
that of a facilitator rather than a “professor,” and felt that it was best not to present
my own views on the subject. For the
record, I am primarily a scientific materialist and a skeptic, but my attitudes toward
religion have evolved considerably over the
years and continue to evolve. After all, this
is not a subject about which one comes to
easy conclusions.
I
n constructing the syllabus, I decided to
avoid a “confrontational” focus by not
concentrating on evolution or the Galileo
affair and instead present a wider perspective. I aimed for an objective comparison of
science and religion in terms of their world
views, sources of knowledge, methods of
reasoning, and use of language. The class
would be presented with different models of
the relationship between science and religion: Are they fundamentally in conflict, or
simply independent realms of thought? Is a
dialogue, leading to an integration of views,
possible? In considering these alternatives,
students would be encouraged to fashion a
personal accommodation between science
and religion consistent with their beliefs.
My students at Brooklyn College reflect
the great ethnic diversity that characterizes
New York City. Accordingly, the religious
beliefs professed by a typical class range
from orthodox Jews and Muslims to Catholics (practicing and non-) and professed
atheists. Most of these students, I have
found, know little about any religion other
than their own, and some of them—most
notably the Russian students—know almost
nothing at all about religion. Thus, one of
the collateral benefits of this course is that
students learn about one another’s beliefs.
The first day of class sets the tone for
what follows. I begin by asking the class to
name all the religions they can think of,
which I list on the board. Eventually, our
list grows to about 40 names, about half of
which are variants of Christianity. I then
pose a series of questions for discussion:
Why are there so many religions? Are religions God-given or man-made? If nearly
every religion believes that it alone is true
and all others are false, is it plausible that
all religions are false except for one? If so,
what criteria does one use to identify a
“true” religion?
TRUSTEE FINK – IN MEMORIAM
F
ormer CUNY Trustee Stanley Fink, one of the
most ardent and effective legislative advocates
for higher education in New York, died on March 4
at the age of 61. A New York State Assemblyman
who served his district in Brooklyn for 18 years,
Fink was Speaker of the Assembly for seven years.
He worked diligently throughout his career to increase funding for K-12 and higher education and
was instrumental in the passage of legislation in
1979 that substantially lifted state support for The
City University. A 1956 graduate of Brooklyn College, Fink brought his brilliance, good humor, and
persuasive eloquence to bear as a University
Trustee from 1989 to 1996. At the time of his death
he was a senior vice president at NYNEX and deeply
involved in its merger with Bell South.
6
This leads into a discussion of philosophical
theories of the nature of
truth, including the “coherence theory,” which
holds that a statement is
true if it is consistent
with the belief system of
a community. If religious truth fits this
model, then we may say
that all religions are
true. While some students are reluctant to
accept this premise, presenting it does establish
an atmosphere of relativism that allows us to
examine individual religions critically but non-judgmentally.
In subsequent lectures, I lead the class
through an examination of the commonalities
of all religions—a set of rituals, specifically, a
set of beliefs and rituals based on sacred
texts, traditions and stories that relate to an
unseen, spiritual realm of existence. During
these discussions, I emphasize that religion
is more than just individual belief; its most
important function is to link together a whole
community.
One must, of course, be equally analytical
about the nature of science. The students
know that I am a physics professor and fully
expect me to present a ringing defense of
science and the scientific method. Therefore,
I take great pains to look critically at the scientific enterprise, identifying its metaphysical
and methodological limitations. I also make
it clear that science is restricted to making
objective and verifiable statements about the
nature of the material world. Hence, profound questions about such topics as the existence of God or the nature of the soul are
simply outside of its scope.
Nevertheless, within its limited realm, science has been immensely successful in describing, explaining, predicting and modifying
the natural world. In so doing, it has demythologized nature, enormously extended our
concepts of space and time, and greatly diminished the significance of mankind in the
universe. Inevitably, science has presented a
strong challenge to the religious view of natural as well as human history.
A
comparison of the methodologies of
science and religion is appropriate here.
The strength and success of science lies in its
self-correcting nature. The strength of a
theory rests in its ability to make accurate,
testable predictions, and failure to do so ultimately leads to new and better theories. Religion, on the other hand, seems unwilling to
confront its failures. Does God direct or at
the very least intervene in human history? If
so, how can the Holocaust be explained?
Why is there so much suffering in the world,
and why is it so unevenly distributed? Yet the
inability of religious leaders to provide satisfactory answers to such questions does not
seem to invalidate their theological claims.
Why is this so?
At this point we arrive at what I see as the
central difference between science and religion, which is the matter of faith . Religious
faith may be characterized as a belief that is
unshakable despite the absence of supporting
evidence or even in the face of contradictory
evidence. Science, on the other hand, is
based on skepticism in the absence of confirming evidence. Some students may well
When Professor Brancazio suggested using William
Blake’s superb depiction of Sir Isaac Newton in a
physics textbook, his publisher blanched and said
it was too risqué. Cuny•Matters is fearless.
Distinguished GSUC Blake scholar Joseph Wittreich
comments on the aptness of the image to a discussion
of science and religion. “It reminds us of Blake’s adage
‘As a Man is So he Sees,’ as well as his prayer that God
save us from ‘Single Vision & Newton’s sleep.’ Newton,
who wrote commentaries on the Books of Daniel and
Revelation , presides here over a world in which the
senses are closed and perception darkened—just as,
in the poem Jerusalem , Blake has Newton join Chaucer,
Shakespeare, and Milton in building the heavenly city,
a palace of art and a place of imagination.” illustration
courtesy of the Tate Gallery, London.
ask whether science itself is also based on
faith. I suggest that it is perhaps a faith of a
different kind. Surely getting on an airplane
is an act of faith, even for the non-religious.
The power of religious faith cannot be
underestimated. It provides comfort, meaning, and hope for many who live in relentless
misery. It is especially important that the
non-believers in the class learn to appreciate
the great emotional and social value of religion, both for the individual and for the community. I ask these students, who may manage to live their own lives comfortably without religion, to consider carefully whether
they would like to live in a world in which
there was no religion at all.
I will be teaching this course for the
fourth time in the Spring semester. Student
reaction to it has been uniformly positive.
The non-believers tell me that they have become more tolerant of religious people. The
religious students have learned to be more
respectful of other religions and more objective about their own. I hope I have been able
to persuade all of these students that science is more than just a collection of formulas, but also that it is not the ultimate truth
nor the answer to all our problems. The
benefit of the course for me is more simply
stated: It has been the most stimulating,
challenging, and exhilarating experience of
my academic career.
CORRECTIONS
In the Winter issue story on photographer Jack Kligerman, a reference to
the Godwin-Ternbach Museum should
have placed it at Queens College. In
Dorothy Helly’s article on the “Balancing the Curriculum Seminars,” a reference to the “now medically recognized
disease nymphomania” should have
read “once medically recognized.”
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PARSING BELIEFS ABOUT “END TIME”
The Ambiguities of Heaven’s Gate
Charles B. Strozier,
Professor of History at John Jay College and
Co-Director of the Center on Violence and Human
Survival, has for several years been studying visions
of the apocalypse as the end of the millennium
approaches. His research, sponsored initially by
the MacArthur Foundation, produced Apocalypse: On
the Psychology of Fundamentalism in America
and,
forthcoming this summer, the anthology The Y ear
2000: Essays on the End
, co-edited with Michael
Flynn, a Lecturer in Psychology at York College.
Also a practicing psychoanalyst, Strozier’s research
on cultist views of “end time” pre-dated the shocking
mass suicide that occurred near San Diego at the
end of March. Here he places those views in the
context of an astonishing spectrum of millennial
beliefs in the 1990s.
T
he mass suicide of the members of
Heaven’s Gate in San Diego was a
startling event for most Americans.
All those who died went peacefully and
seemed to have eagerly embraced suicide
as a way of leaving their “containers” to
meet the spaceship waiting on the other
side of the Hale-Bopp comet to take them
to the “next level.” It even seems wrong to
deem “tragic” these deaths so willingly
embraced. Unlike Jonestown, where at
least half of those who died were murdered,
there appears to have been absolutely no
physical coercion.
The suicides nevertheless remain baffling. One longs for concrete, human, and
psychologically credible explanations that
can begin to put the beliefs and behavior of
this group into perspective. Granting that
anything said so soon after the event must
be tentative, I can offer some preliminary
thoughts about Heaven’s Gate. Four points
strike me as important.
As is often the case with cults, the role
of its leader, Marshall Herff Applewhite,
was extremely important. This former college teacher of music, who left everything
some 20 years ago to found the group,
Duberman, continued from page 5
my friends won’t see it.”
I’m also working on an essay on Jo
Carstairs, whose father Jabez Bostwick
helped found Standard Oil. A lesbian, she
had her own island in the Bahamas, was a
speedboat champion in the 1920s, and was
a lover of Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene
Dietrich, and others. She died last year at
the age of 96.
GS: A “generational” question: you write
in your memoir of the ‘60s and ‘70s, Cures,
of spending 20 years “building brick walls
between me and my sexuality.” Do you ever
feel impatient with younger gays coming into
a relatively less oppressive society?
MD: Or angry at them! All of the above.
But, seriously, I think many young gays are
struggling mightily; it all depends on the
accident of where you are placed, geographically and in terms of race and gender.
There is still plenty of internalized homophobia around. You are unlikely to hear a parent tell a five-year-old, “You are showing all
the signs of becoming a gay person, dear,
and we just want you to know how thrilled
we are!” No, I think we can see pretty
clearly across generational divides.
A lot of [young gays], when hearing about
people like Frank Kameny and Barbara
Gittings or the Mattachine Society and
Daughters of Bilitis for the first time, find it
clearly exercised a powerful influence over
his followers. He, together with Bonnie Lu
Nettles, a psychic who dabbled in UFOs,
formulated their beliefs and exerted an almost hypnotic control over the members of
Heaven’s Gate.
Applewhite has been derisively called the
“gay guru” because his academic career
was cut short by affairs with male students.
But clearly of much greater interest was his
troubled relationship to his homosexuality.
At some point Applewhite had himself castrated. In ways that are typical for such
cult movements, he then worked the idea of
sexual renunciation into his theology and
convinced most of the male members of the
group as well to castrate themselves. Such
an ultimate form of self-mutilation cemented their tie to the group and made
iron-clad the psychological power of
Applewhite over his followers.
By the end he had also established a problematic relationship to his own death. The
coroner reported he did not have liver cancer, but he either genuinely believed he did
or, more maliciously, manipulated the group
into believing that he was in fact dying. The
apocalyptic moment came when Applewhite’s
belief in his own demise connected with his
conviction that Hale-Bopp was the sign of the
end he had long awaited.
A
second aspect of significance was the
characteristic eclecticism of the beliefs
of Heaven’s Gate. Their central concern
with UFOs was mixed in with New Age and
Christian elements. The latter were particularly striking. Hale-Bopp as a sign
evokes the Star of David that shone over the
birth of Jesus. The suicides came just before Easter, the day of the resurrection, and
the purple shrouds that meticulously covered the bodies suggest, among other
things, Lent. The members of Heavens Gate
very easy to condescend to their “boring
assimilationist goals” and “bourgeois” values. When they joke about activists wearing suits and ties picketing the White House
in 1965, I have to say “What a minute! Do
you understand what that means...picketing
the White House in 1965. That really took
courage!” It makes me angry when they fail
to see they are standing on the shoulders of
others. There’s too much scorn and not
enough gratitude.
Of course, Americans—gay and
straight—are so ahistorical. Has anyone
heard of Emma Goldman or Norman Thomas or whoever?
GS: I had a student in a course a few
years ago refer to that famous Viennese
analyst in a paper as Sigman Fruit! The
main work of CLAGS has been to roll back
the darkness about queer history, so you
must be proud and delighted with the two
anthologies you have edited for New York
University Press, A Queer World and Queer
Representations, which have just appeared.
MD: When I gave NYU Press my selection—and, by the way, every essay originated as a CLAGS presentation—I was sure
they’d say “boil it down.” But they liked the
material so much that two volumes were
planned. A Queer World focuses mainly on
social sciences topics: sexual identity, gender, psychology, law, economics, political
were fascinated with the idea of being the
surviving “remnant,” which is from Revelation 6: 9-10: “And when he had opened the
fifth seal, I saw under the altar the souls of
them that were slain for the word of God,
and for the testimony which they held. And
they cried with a loud voice, saying, How
long, O Lord, holy and true, dost thou not
judge and avenge our blood on them that
dwell on the earth?”
Applewhite, among his many designations, was called “Father John”; his followers were “monks,” and they lived together
in a “monastery.” And when they began in
the 1970s, Applewhite and Nettles called
themselves “The Two” after the two witnesses “clothed in sackcloth” from Revelation (11: 3-14) who are slain by the Beast
and then rise from the dead.
Such loose beliefs can seem extremely
odd and closer to The National Enquirer
than a serious attempt to formulate new
religions and theological principles. It is,
however, important not to mock the quest
for new meanings that is such a vital impulse in all cult movements. There is much
spiritual creativity in the effort to break
free from old dogmas that many feel no
longer fit the special anxieties of the day.
The problem is that belief systems like
those of Heaven’s Gate can leave one ungrounded, ripped from the security of history and ritual. The authority of tradition
can suffocate self-expression, but it can
also guide us through troubled times.
Third, many have not fully grasped the
apocalyptic nature of the UFO movement in
this country, which is the crucial context in
which to understand Heaven’s Gate. It has
been estimated that between 700,000 and
three million Americans claim to have been
abducted by aliens (the higher figure is
more than there are Presbyterians and
equal to the number of Episcopalians). It is
anybody’s guess how many others believe
merely in the reality of UFOs.
Two camps compete to explain what aliens
science. Queer Representations takes a
more literary and media approach with sections on “Ancient Genealogies,” “Visualizing
Homosexuality,” “The Lives of Texts and
People,” “Approaching Autobiography,” and
“Creating Queer Literatures in the U.S.”
GS: You have been busy...a gatling gun of
titles intended to move and shake.
MD: It’s called anxiety control. It’s either
that or drugs! You have to keep the anxiety
down somehow!
GS: Just one more question, one that will
shamelessly tempt you to pontificate or, better yet, prophesy. In that keynote address at
John Jay we spoke about earlier, you expressed the hope that the gay movement
would “offer, in opposition to the current
vision of homogenized humanity, our celebration of human diversity.” Then you
added that “the goal is utopian, and must
partly fail. But only utopian goals will allow
us partly to succeed.” This reminded me of
Wilde’s remark that a map without utopia on
it is not worth consulting. My question,
then, is whether the terrain in utopia has
changed since 1973—or whether you’d be
inclined to add anything to its landscape for
the next millennium.
MD: I’d happily settle for the old utopian
model, though gender-revised: to each according to his/her needs, from each according to his/her gifts.
are up to. One group feels aliens come as
agents of destruction, and when they abduct
humans they take sperm from men and eggs
from women with which to build a future race
after they wipe us out. Another group believes
aliens come to warn us of our own imminent
destruction. In either case aliens are positioned
apocalyptically in relation to human existence.
F
inally, Heaven’s Gate is part of the
culture’s general obsessions with the
year 2000. Applewhite and his followers
believed that Jesus at the resurrection
shed his “container” to move to another
level. It is also clear from some of their
documents that the commune in Rancho
Santa Fe believed Jesus was born in 4
B.C., which makes 1997 the millennial moment, the real 2000. Suicide itself is
apocalyptic. As a potent symbol, 2000
stirs the imagination of virtually all believ-
A thousand years ago monks stopped
copying manuscripts and the building of churches ceased as the first
millennium approached. The anthology from two CUNY faculty members,
The Year 2000: Essays on the End,
explores a wide variety of cultural
responses to the coming of the second millennium, including black evangelical politics, apocalyptic violence,
environmentalist doomsaying, and
right-wing political extremism.
ing Christians at some level. Jesus, after
all, announces in the first book of the New
Testament (Matthew 24) that he is coming
back, just as the Bible’s last book of Revelation plays with the evocative power of
thousand-year cycles in its climactic chapter 20. “End time” means that moment
(which is at the same time a process) out
of human history and into “God’s time.”
But as a cultural artifact, 2000 connects
as well with other secular forms of the
apocalyptic. In this sense many cult members are drawn into generalized images of
endings around this definitive symbol for The
End; 2000 is everywhere as subtext, in literature and art, in all the media, in politics—especially at the extremes—and in all
religions new or old. It is present, one might
say, in the American self, sometimes degenerating into apocalyptic chic. It is everpresent, and not just in the minds and souls
of the semi-literate and weak at heart.
No one in our culture can entirely escape
the millennial hysteria of the 1990s. We are
not all potential Heaven’s Gaters, but neither
will this cult movement be the end of such
agitation over collective death in the next
few years.
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7
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CSI GRAD VISITS CUNY-TV
Animated Talk by Cybertoon Pro
Jerry Carlson, a film historian and
producer at CUNY-TV who teaches at City College,
recently helped organize a presentation by David
Master, a major player on the Hollywood
animation scene, and reports.
H
ow did David Master get from
Staten Island to the lot at Warner
Bros.? His answer takes only a
couple of frames: “Indirectly.” A union organizer in New York following his 1971
graduation from The College of Staten Island, Master always maintained an interest
in set design. A friend encouraged him to
move to Los Angeles, where he found himself in need of a day job while pursuing his
interests in the theatrical arts.
Master became a high school teacher in
an L.A. suburb and started to experiment
with ways to involve his students in the arts
through his own passion for animation.
Year by year the program grew, and by
1991 he was named IBM’s “Technology and
Learning Teacher of the Year.” Dozens of
his former students now populate the animation divisions of major studios. Finally,
Warner Bros. convinced him to come on
board, where he is now Director of Artistic
Development and Training.
In early April, Master stopped at CUNY,
as well as Columbia and Harvard, during a
two-week tour of the East Coast to recruit
for his company and lecture on aspects of
educational theory. The CUNY visit was
suggested by University Trustee and fellow
Staten Islander Jerome S. Berg and took
place at the CUNY-TV studio, which was
packed with faculty and students invited
from 17 campuses.
Master, who sports Bugs Bunny in his
lapel and lots of toons on his tie, answered
questions about his career and offered a
wide-angle view during more than two hours
of how to achieve “frame fame.” After the
official session, enthusiastic audience members continued to pelt him with questions.
T
alking even briefly with Master, one
understands the passion that guides
him as an educator, a word he continues to
use to describe himself even though “studio
exec” might sound tonier. The expert in
new digital technologies and their video
applications admits that he surprises many
EXPLORING OOBLECK, SHAPING THE FUTURE
Saying Yes! to Equity in Science
Dr. Delores Lowe Friedman, professor
of early childhood education at Kingsborough Community College, reports on
her recent work as Principal Investigator
and Project Director of Science, YES!, an
initiative to encourage girls to pursue
careers in science.
“I am almost reluctant to admit this
but I came into Science, YES! a math
and science phobic. To me, these two
areas have always been intimidating
and mysterious and even frightening...Is it possible that there are
more people like me—science chickens—who are virtually crippled when
it comes to moving our students into a
competitive class...? They don’t know
how fun it can be. I guess they never
played with Oobleck.”
view science and science teaching as a
career. The project seeks to reform the
presentation of science in schools, making
it “hands-on,” “minds-on,” and bias-free, so
that all children can be engaged by and
enjoy science. To do this, the adults who
influence them first had to be inspired.
The Summer Institute served as the centerpiece of the project, which also provided
development conferences for administrators, teachers, and parents to excite their
interest in science and enable them to promote gender equity.
T
he following data from a report by the
American Association of University
Women, “How Schools Shortchange Girls,”
tell us why the goals motivating Science,
YES! should be of national concern:
•By third grade 51% of boys and 37%
of girls had used microscopes.
T
he comment quoted above comes
from a journal written by a New
York City public school teacher at
the Science,YES! Summer Institute for
teachers at Kingsborough Community College last July. Exploring the characteristics
of Oobleck (a concoction of cornstarch,
food coloring, and water) set the stage for
56 teachers to engage in scientific inquiry.
The educators, from five Community School
Districts and the Brooklyn High Schools,
spent a month as practicing scientists
would—examining, asking questions, designing experiments, collecting data, drawing conclusions, and asking new questions.
The primary goal of Science, YES!—a
Goals 2000-funded project—was to increase the number of girls and women who
• In one state, 64% of male students
who had taken physics and calculus
were planning to study engineering
as compared to only 19% of females
who took these courses.
•In general, girls’ interest and enthusiasm for science and math declines
the longer they are in school.
Many factors, including an outmoded curriculum, low teacher expectations, genderbiased teaching and counseling, and parental discouragement, contribute to the problem of girls losing interest in science. Our
nation’s continued advancement in science
and technology in the new millennium re-
Warner Bros. animation executive
Dave Master . Photo, André Beckles
audiences with his insistence on the broad
education and strong professional discipline required for those who wish to enter
Hollywood’s elite circles. “If you’re in a
story meeting at a studio and think Hamlet is the name of a new restaurant in
Santa Monica, you’re not going to be a
player,” he quips.
Showing the CUNY audience a tape of
examples of work submitted by applicants
for internships at Warner Bros., Master
emphasized that the ideal candidate would
quires that we attract women and underrepresented minorities to these fields.
Science, YES! conferences presented
guest experts in gender equity and science
education, including Dr. Patricia Campbell,
a co-author of the AAUW report; Dr. Janice
Koch, associate professor of science education at Hofstra University; and Dr. Pamela
Fraser-Abder, director of science education
at New York University. Accomplished female scientists—including an engineer
from Brooklyn Union, a NYNEX engineer,
and a molecular pharmacologist—inspired
participants with their personal stories
about characteristics such as creativity,
self-esteem, and perseverance that were
instilled in them by parents and teachers.
All three Summer Institute conferences
were videotaped and aired by Crosswalks
Television during the spring, summer and
fall of 1996, and are potential professional
development resources.
The Science, YES! Institute provided a
rich variety of activities focused on doing.
We wanted teachers to experience the
same curiosity and wonder we hoped they
would convey in their classrooms. Field
trips and workshops at the Jamaica Bay
Wildlife Reserve, the New York Hall of Science, and a trip on the Research Vessel
CUNY were highlights of the summer.
Teachers took nature walks, built bridges,
constructed and flew kites, conducted water sampling experiments, dredged up sea
life from Sheepshead Bay to Jamaica Bay,
and examined specimens of spider crabs,
flounder, mussels, snails, and barnacles
under microscopes.
Teachers conducted “bottle biology,” in
which they created environments in soda
bottles with plants and animal life, manipulating and examining changes in variables.
They also acted as detectives, identifying
mystery powders that had been mixed together, and constructed buildings using
straws and paper clips and bridges from
be someone who had apprenticed in an
artist’s studio in Renaissance Florence.
“Knowing how the new digital hardware
works is necessary,” he insists, “but there
is no substitute for knowing what you want
to use it for. It took me eight years of intense mentoring in short-form storytelling
to master it,” he points out. “I could have
gotten a medical degree in that time!”
What is refreshing in Master’s presentation—something that has made him a valued presence on several national educational committees—is his flexible perspective. He is quick to correct a utopian faith
in technology with a dose of humanistic
critical thinking. Conversely, he insists that
great ideas are only as fine as a
practitioner’s disciplined capacity to realize
them in a chosen medium. His flexibility
allows him to talk to students across a
number of disciplines, as he did at CUNY—
film, theater, graphic design, computer science, and studio art.
Master emphasized again and again to
his CUNY audience that the future of the
media arts will require a workforce combining perpetual curiosity with broadbased knowledge and well-practiced
craft. In other words, the industry will
need more people like Dave Master, who
found a basis for that delicate balance of
qualifications in his CUNY education.
Crewman Noel Schneider of the Research Vessel
CUNY helps teachers from P.S. 3 and P.S. 164
examine sea life on a voyage last July in
Sheepshead Bay. From left, Valerie Menditto,
Leslie Daniels, Paulette Williams, and Lorraine
Thomas. Photo, Christine Rose.
toothpicks, testing the strength of their
structures.
F
aculty members Alan Ascher, assistant
principal of science at South Shore
High School and a College of Staten Island
adjunct professor, and Diane Varano, codirector of the air currents project and adjunct professor at Brooklyn College, taught
the methodology courses, which covered
such topics as Living Things and Change,
Chemicals in Our Everyday World, and Construction and Invention. Within those broad
topics methodologies of inquiry-based
learning and cooperative learning were explored. In their courses, Prof. Peter
Pilchman and Prof. Loretta Taras presented
an Introduction to Scientific Method and
Nutrition and Physiology Exercises. A
workshop on the Construction of Living
Things included assembly of rodent skeletons from the fecal pellets of owls, as well
as work with the human skeleton.
As part of their course work, teachers
were required to reflect on readings and
activities in journals. This comment from
one teacher exemplifies how the work affected many participants: “I wasn’t making
Continued on page 12
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Mina, continued from page 1
long-time associate of the Rockefeller family on a biography of John D. Rockefeller
and as an editorial supervisor at McGrawHill before joining City University.
T
hose of us who were privileged to know
and work with Mina remember a person of exceptional intellect, whose honesty, humanity, humor, and grace shaped
all her endeavors. These qualities shine
through Maher’s detailed narrative, which
is beautifully interwoven with Mina’s own
words taken from letters to her family and
friends, from her speeches, and from Errors and Expectations.
After becoming director of the Basic Writing program at City College, Mina was suddenly confronted with the challenge of expanding a program created for fewer than
300 SEEK students. Over one summer she
had to prepare for the arrival of thousands of
academically underprepared new students in
the first open admissions program in the
country. Colleagues at other campuses
faced the same prospect, and they began
meeting to share experiences and ideas.
Ken Bruffee, then directing the writing
program at Brooklyn College, recalls, “It was
a sort of floating craps game of three to eight
or 10 people. I called around CUNY to find
out if any of us knew anything about what we
were supposed to be doing, and everyone
told me that Mina Shaughnessy seemed to
have a handle on things. We’d meet in restaurants or coffee shops and talk.” These
talks evolved into CAWS, the CUNY Association of Writing Supervisors.
In 1975, as Dean at the Instructional
Resource Center, Shaughnessy’s responsibility was to create, gather and disseminate
information about effective teaching methods and practices. This was curtailed considerably by the budget crisis that closed
CUNY down for two weeks in 1976. “Mina
was forced to witness the dismantling of a
program she had painstakingly assembled
over a period of eight years,” writes Maher.
Her Errors and Expectations was published in 1977 to extraordinary reviews, not
only in educational but in popular publications as well. C. Michael Curtis of The Atlantic Monthly praised it as “a book about
the spirit as well as the mechanics of
teaching...its clarity, its commonsense humanity, commend it to anyone interested in
the quality of writing in American classrooms.” Benjamin Demott, writing in The
Nation, found the book “personal at its
core, individual: a reflection of a sensibility
at once acute, loving, and brave.”
Demott later commented, “Instead of
giving inflated speeches about what a
democratic society was all about (as so
many people were doing at the time), she
was doing the grainy, difficult work that
would help those of us who were already
‘privileged’ realize there are people in the
world who are just beginning to take the
steps toward developing an educated mind.”
Mina’s friend and colleague, Bob Lyons of
Queens College, echoed the sentiments of
many readers and reviewers when he observed that Errors and Expectations is “cherished by teachers because it is both academically rigorous and morally exhilarating.”
T
hese qualities come through best in
Mina Shaughnessy’s own words. The
following excerpts from her speeches and
her book offer a good sense of her thinking
and illustrate the elegance of her language.
For Mina was also a poet (see sidebar), as
her friend Irving Howe made clear when he
called her a “lover of words, a lover of literature, a lover of fine perception.”
J
ane Maher, currently an assistant professor at Nassau Community College,
has also written biographies on the younger
brothers of Henry and William James and
on William C. Stokoe, the father of sign lan-
On open admissions: “Open admissions
began as a remedial wing to a few departments
on traditional college campuses, but it is now
transforming the colleges themselves, exposing
far more than the deficiencies of the new
students. By probing the nature of those
deficiencies and resisting those who have tried
to isolate the phenomenon of disadvantage
from the society that caused it, open
admissions is forcing the real question—not
how many people society is willing to salvage,
but how much this society is willing to pay to
salvage itself.”
On the complexities students face in
learning to write: “For the [Basic Writing}
student, academic writing is a trap, not a way
of saying something to someone. The spoken
language—looping back and forth between
speakers, offering chances for groping and
backing up and even hiding, leaving room for
the language of hands and faces, of pitch and
pauses—is generous and inviting. Next to this
rich orchestration, writing is but a line that
moves haltingly across the page, exposing as it
goes all that the writer doesn’t know, then
passing into the hands of a stranger who reads
it with a lawyer’s eyes, searching for flaws.”
On literacy and democratic ideals: “The
experience of open admissions . . . has not only
revealed . . . that there are no pedagogical
reasons why writing should be an exclusive
skill rather than a common skill among our
citizens. It simply needs to be taught. And the
fact that it is not taught to the students who
need it most constitutes a true crisis of
literacy in this country, where . . . the most
fruitful and necessary activity is arguing
rather than agreeing.”
“Today, people are, for the most part,
alarmed over the declining levels of literacy
among the privileged, not over the traditional
sub-literacy of the poor. But until this traditional illiteracy is as alarming to the American
people as the declining literacy of the affluent,
our schools will continue to cultivate literacy
as a privilege rather than an entitlement.”
guage linguistics. Although she never met
Shaughnessy, Maher found this project particularly satisfying because of Mina’s palpable influence on her as a student and an
educator. Maher attended The College of
Staten Island as an open admissions
evening student for seven years. “During
those same years Mina was working tirelessly to improve conditions for open admissions students not just at City but in the
entire CUNY system,” she noted. “Mina’s
efforts were improving conditions for me
and thousands of students who, for any
number of reasons, were not expected to
attend, much less succeed, in college.”
Maher went on to earn a master’s in
British and American literature at Columbia
and a Ph.D. in English education at New
York University, then taught writing to open
admissions students at Kingsborough Community College. “No one seemed very sure
of how to go about teaching these students
AND ALSO A POET
M
ina Shaughnessy was also an accomplished poet. Earlier in her career she
published some literary criticism and several children’s stories. She especially loved Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, and James; the poem on the left reflects the convergence of her two worlds. Mina lived on East End Avenue, opposite
CUNY’s Central Office, and during her long battle with cancer she would often look
across the way. She knew she was dying when she wrote the poem on the right.
The blue books are passed out. Then the examination questions. And the scribbling begins:
the skin stretches white over the knuckles, eyes
look out occasionally from pathetic isolation.
Could they be writing about the pilgrims of
Canterbury with such stern faces? Could King Lear
ever arouse such dispassionate busyness?
No—surely this has nothing to do with Lear.
But suppose some student should, now, in this
room accidentally grasp Lear’s terror, feel the
burn of that great pessimism. Would the scribbling
stop? Would he, perhaps, sit there weeping all over
the blue book?
And would I give him an A?
I watch from my window
The people doing the work
of the world.
Floor upon floor of them
Too busy to note that the
winter afternoon has lit
them up like film strips.
They are busy in the world
I lately lived in
to write,” she recalled. “That is when I was
introduced to Mina’s book, Errors and Expectations. Although I have now been
teaching basic writing for almost 20 years,
I still use that book to guide me—and to
inspire me.”
One of Maher’s intentions is to bring
hope back to educators committed to the
ideals of open admissions. Shaughnessy’s
work and devotion, she writes, “can inspire
us as we face some of the very same obstacles that Mina faced: ignorance about
our students’ abilities, resistance from administrators and legislators who are too
short-sighted to realize that our students
can learn if we provide them with the time
and conditions necessary to do so.”
Mina worked nonstop, but she never
seemed tired or disheartened. I recall the
advice she gave to a young teacher who had
written to her about starting a composition
program. The man had recently been assigned to direct his college’s newly created
composition program, a daunting task given
the lack of preparation of many students, a
staff of new teachers, his own inexperience
as an administrator, and a considerable
amount of resistance from “regular” faculty
to the program. He had written to Mina
hoping she could provide him with a surefire
plan to turn things around. She replied that,
unfortunately, no such plan existed and then
offered four succinct bits of wisdom.
First, she said, be prepared to work
harder than ever before. Second, develop
camaraderie among the faculty by holding
meetings so that they can get to know and
learn from each other. Third, try to recruit
members of the senior faculty, where some
of the best teachers are likely to be found;
they are not only experienced teachers but
have influence in the department. Finally,
make it look like you’re having fun!
L
ess than a month before her death,
Shaughnessy’s work as a teacher,
writer, and scholar was recognized by
President Jimmy Carter. His deputy traveled to New York to present her with a
Presidential proclamation. In her acceptance speech before a small group of colleagues, Mina described in a characteristically modest—and candid—way the work
for which she was being honored: “It was, I
would say, a grand experiment, one that I
hope will continue in some form that will
perhaps change because we made mistakes. ...People thought we couldn’t do it,
and we discovered—because we were innocent—that we could.”
One with whom Mina worked and who
learned from her was the Pulitzer Prizewinning poet Adrienne Rich, who taught
both creative and basic writing at City College. Maher ends her book with Rich’s description of Shaughnessy’s continuing influence and impact on her field: “Her work
illuminates the links between literacy and
illiteracy, between student and teacher,
writer and reader, grammar and literature,
between the failures of our society and its
visions. She was one of our major educational theorists, whose quality I believe will
be recognized more and more as time goes
on; I would place her with Maria Montessori, Paolo Freire, Ivan Illich, among the
greatest of those who have understood that
intelligence is not determined by privilege.”
Mina P. Shaughnessy: Her Life and Work
can be ordered directly from National Council of Teachers of English at 1-800-3696283, or through local bookstores.
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QUEENS TEAM SOOTHES SAVAGE BREAST
Neanderthals Flaut
Early Music Theories
By Bonnie A.B. Blackwell
Professor of Geology and Earth & Environmental Sciences, Queens College and GSUC
Consortium for Evolutionary Primatology
N
eanderthals obviously were not the
brutes we once thought. With the
discovery of a remarkable object in
the Alpine foothills of Slovenia, in fact, our
attempts to imagine their life style must
now include soirées musicales featuring
serenades around the fire in their caves by
a very distant ancestor of James Galway or
Jean-Pierre Rampal.
In 1991, Ivan Turk, from the Slovenian
Academy of Sciences, sent me some cave
bear teeth for dating from a site called
Divje Babe I. Little did I know that I would
soon be dating what is now considered to
be history’s oldest musical instrument.
Even in 1994, when Beverly Lau, who was
then an eleventh grader at R.F. Kennedy
High School in Queens; Joel Blickstein, a
research associate at Queens College; and I
were working on dating the teeth, we had
no sense of the significance they would
have for musical history.
In the summer of 1994, as we ascertained the age of the bear teeth, Turk and
his crew found a partial femur bone of a
cave bear that had four nearly perfect circular holes in it. By October 1996 we were
able to report to the Geological Society of
America that the bone dated to between
42,000 and 82,000 years old, because it is
known that cave bears became extinct
35,000 years ago. Also, the cemented sediment that had been overlying the bone
meant it could not possibly have “migrated”
down from a younger layer. Mousterian
tools (used by Neanderthals) and a hearth
were found near the femur as well.
W
hat riveted us, of course, were the
neat, circular finger holes. Averaging
9 millimeters in diameter, the four holes in
the bone penetrate only one side of its
shaft, which is broken across two of the
holes. Since the bone displayed no other
results of animal chewing and the holes
were in
straight alignment, we concluded humans
produced
them. Encouraging to our
thesis was the
ability of Turk
and his colleagues to reproduce similar holes in
fresh bear
bones with
tools also
found at the Divje Babe cave. Very similar
bird bone flutes have been found in other
European and Asian sites dating from
22,000 to 35,000, but none as old as the
femur and none from a site peopled by Neanderthals.
A recent analysis by Queens College
graduate and musicologist Robert Fink indicates that the flute plays four notes from
the harmonic minor scale: neutral mi, fa,
so, and minor la—which is much like the
first four notes of the song “Danny Boy.”
According to Fink, “Under no circumstances
could the holes in the flute be anything
other than a deliberate attempt to make
different tones that, to our ear, can be combined to make music.”
Divje Babe is the richest site in Slovenia.
Bones and teeth from 58 different species
have been recovered there, along with the
only fossilized cave bear hair ever found.
When first visited by the Neanderthals, the
cave was surrounded by a boreal forest
similar to those in the southern Alps and
experienced temperate climates. By the
time Neanderthals abandoned the cave, glaciers were advanced toward it and the forest
was thinning out.
W
e dated the sediment in which the
flute was found by using a technique
called electron spin resonance (ESR). Earlier dating attempts indicated that the
The bone flute discovered by a team of archaeologists
that included three members from Queens College.
Photo, courtesy of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences.
youngest Mousterian layers were 43,400
years old ( 1,400), but the older layers
exceeded the limit of carbon-14 dating,
which is not effective on objects more than
about 50,000 years old. ESR, however, can
date teeth as old as six million years by dating the enamel from mammal teeth associated with given archaeological remains.
When buried in the ground, tooth enamel
accumulates small doses of radiation over
time, producing a measurable ESR signal.
By measuring the accumulated radiation,
the rate at which the ground generates radiation, and the dose rate generated by the
uranium absorbed by the tooth, an ESR age
can be calculated.
Beverly Lau, now an undergraduate at
SUNY-Binghamton, dated five cave bear
teeth from three layers in Divje Babe. Under my supervision she meticulously separated the enamel from the dentine of each
tooth by holding the enamel fragments between her fingers while grinding the surface with a diamond drill. “There were
times I thought the grinding would never
end!” Lau recalls. Eventually, however, 11
different samples were analyzed by ESR.
The big problem in dating Divje Babe has
been estimating how much water was
present in the sediment over history. This
is because water reduces radiation accumulation in enamel. Evidence suggested
the cave has been both very wet and very
dry over the past 100,000 years. Therefore, we decided it was necessary to calculate a minimum and maximum age for each
tooth. Once we arrived at a full picture of
our Neanderthal denture, we were able to
suggest that the flute’s age could be as recent as 43,500 ( 1,400) years to as late as
67,000 to 82,000 ( 11,000). This is a
unique Mousterian find, and my students
and I plan to do further dating to constrain
the age of our flute.
T
he arcane technology of electron spin
resonance and niceties of sedimentation, however, were not uppermost in the
minds of those who attended a New York
Flute Fair at which I spoke in March.
Naturally, eyes were riveted on pictures
of the flute, which is under careful guard in
the Slovenian Academy of Sciences, and my
audience was enthralled by news that their
favorite instrument is now considered the
oldest. The musicians wanted to hear every
gory detail about Neanderthal life, but were
particularly keen to learn of the chances of
discovering signs of an ancient flute concerto on one of those walls at Divje Babe. I
told them not to hold their breath on that.
Anyway, the Neanderthals were probably
into shorter forms. If we do discover an
ancient ditty, I’ve got the perfect title for
our find: “I’ve Got You, Divje Babe!”
Haywood Burns Chair Inaugurated
F
ormer Mayor David N. Dinkins
joined more than 100 distinguished
guests from the New York legislative
and legal community on March 6 in honoring Judge Nathaniel R. Jones. The judge is
the first holder of the Haywood Burns Chair
in Civil Rights at the CUNY Law School at
Queens College. It is the Law School’s first
endowed chair and also the first to be
named for an African American at a New
York State law school.
The new University Chair commemorates
Haywood Burns’ life-long dedication to the
civil rights movement and the broadening of
opportunities in legal education. For three
decades Burns was a leading civil rights
lawyer, and from 1987 to 1994 he served
as the second Dean of the Law School. He
was killed in an automobile accident in
April 1996 while traveling in South Africa.
Jones, a senior judge of the Sixth Circuit
of the U.S. Court of Appeals in Cincinnati,
was first appointed to a federal bench in
1979 by President Jimmy Carter after serv-
10
fundraising drive for the Burns Chair. University leaders also expressed thanks to the
State Legislature for its appropriation of
$100,000 to the endowment.
Kick-off donors to the Haywood
Burns Chair in Civil Rights
endowment Fran and Robert
Boehm, flanked by Law School
Dean Kristin Booth Glen and the
Chair’s first holder, Judge
Nathaniel R. Jones.
Photo, André Beckles.
ing the NAACP as General Counsel for 10
years. He brings an array of accomplishments appropriate to a chair in civil rights.
Jones has published numerous articles on
the subject, taught as an adjunct at the University of Cincinnati Law School for many
years, and has traveled often to South Africa as a civil rights advocate. He was ar-
rested and detained there in 1985 while
leading a delegation to observe a notorious
treason trial.
Philanthropists Fran and Robert Boehm
also received an ovation at the reception in
the Robert J. Kibbee Lounge at the Central
Office. Through the Boehm Foundation,
they donated $50,000 to kick off the
C
hancellor W. Ann Reynolds, recalling
the career of the late dean, said, “In the
same way that, as a child, Haywood Burns
instinctively knew that a segregated swimming pool in Peekskill was fundamentally
wrong, he knew that a public law school,
dedicated to the service of human needs,
was fundamentally right. With the help of
our legislative friends, we are able to commemorate an important part of his legacy.”
The Chancellor closed by quoting words
that epitomize “the rich bequest that
Haywood Burns has left us all”: “We must
neither accentuate nor submerge our differences,” he once said. “We must move to an
appreciation and even a celebration of both
the richness and the strengths we all bring
one another, and of the great unity that is
possible in diversity.”
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A NEW STUDY OF SEX, POWER, LAUGHTER
Queens of Comedy
Dr. Susan Horowitz, who holds a doctorate in drama from the GSUC, has been an adjunct in
English for more than a decade at Borough of Manhattan Community College and is an expert and
well-traveled lecturer on humor, stress, and communication. All three topics intersect perfectly
in her just published book, Queens of Comedy (Gordon and Breach), in which she examines recent
generations of America’s funny women. She sets out to place today’s comics—Roseanne, Ellen
DeGeneres,Whoopi Goldberg—in the grand tradition of Mae West, Sophie Tucker, Minnie Pearl,
and Totie Fields. Horowitz’ main focus is on four queens of contemporary comedy, introduced in
her opening chapter, “Comic Appeal, Sex Appeal, and Power.”
L
ucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol
Burnett, and Joan Rivers are
Queens of Comedy. Each created a
career that lasted more than a quarter of a
century. Each put her own twist on traditional female comic types and broke new
ground for younger, more radical comediennes. And each is a very funny lady. For
more than 25 years, these Queens of Comedy have been getting big laughs and big
hands—winning hands, because they are in
fact top cards.
The Queen of Hearts is, of course,
Lucille Ball. Her funniness and lovability
charmed “I Love Lucy” fans in the 1950s
and still appeal in syndicated reruns. The
situation comedy mixed broad farce with
domestic sentimentality and fine ensemble
comic acting. The emotional heart of the
program was the love between Lucy and
Ricky Ricardo (played by Desi Arnaz, Ball’s
husband, who produced the show).
The Queen of Clubs is Phyllis Diller, who
began performing in major comedy clubs
and nightclubs at a time when stand-up
comedy was 99% male. She broke down
barriers against women in comedy through
the sheer force of talent and determination.
At 37, Diller was a housewife with five children, an unemployed husband, and a gift
for making women laugh at the laundromat.
She embarked on a risky show business
career, honed her talent, and wrote much of
her own material, delivering 12 laughs a
minute, and playing in the biggest clubs on
the circuit.
The Queen of Spades is Carol Burnett,
who dug deeply into her own childhood
pain—both parents were alcoholic and sporadically abusive—to create comedy that
was darker and more violent than that of
Lucille Ball. She broke new ground with
her willingness to jump, trip, take pratfalls,
or do the famous Tarzan yell that challenged notions of ladylike behavior.
Burnett has said, “If you’re a woman, it’s
difficult to break through the barrier of having others accept you as funny. There’s all
that training you’ve had since you were
three. Be a lady! Don’t yell or try to be
funny. Just be a nice little girl. Sit quietly
with your knees close together, and speak
only when you’re spoken to. Women are
afraid to make themselves unattractive.
I’m not afraid of that, goodness
knows!...Most women are obsessed with an
outmoded sense of modesty. They are
afraid that being funny is unfeminine.”
Burnett’s willingness to challenge that feminine role-playing stereotype resulted in a
style of comedy that mixed broad slapstick
with vulnerability and pathos. Her talent
and personal likability were at the core of
“The Carol Burnett Show,” the most successful of the few prime-time variety shows
hosted by a comedienne.
Joan Rivers is the Queen of Diamonds.
Her sparkling wit and hard-edged comedy
cut through pretense with the precision of
an industrial diamond drill. Her love of
jewelry is evident in the necklaces, bracelets, brooches, and earrings of her fashionable ensembles. But for years Rivers was
more a diamond in the rough, obliged to
polish her act in low-pay or no-pay showcase clubs. She broke taboos with her act,
basing it on her own life and daring treatment of intimate subject matter. She finally
broke through on “The Tonight Show,” becoming Johnny Carson’s first permanent guest host.
Her own talk show later won an Emmy.
E
ach of these women had to struggle
against some form of prejudice.
Sometimes it was simple racism. Ball’s
sponsors, for instance, resisted casting
Arnaz as her television husband because
they thought the audience would not accept
an American woman married to a Cuban.
Susan Horowitz
Sometimes it was internalized sexism—a
fear of appearing unladylike or “not nice.”
For the first seven years of “The Carol
Burnett Show,” Burnett was so concerned
not to appear assertive that she avoided attending the program’s production meetings.
As female stand-up comics, Diller and
Rivers met with tremendous resistance.
Theirs was—and to an extent still is—a
male profession. Many male comics got
their start in strip joints, and audiences
were used to equating men with humor and
women with stripping. As a beginner, Rivers was booked into a joint that billed her
as “Pepper January—Comedy with Spice.”
When she kept her clothes on and tried to
be funny, the frustrated audience booed her
off and shouted “Bring on the girls!”
Why was stand-up comedy the only
branch of show business where men for so
long significantly outnumbered women?
Conversely, why are today’s female comics,
while still few compared with males, a rapidly growing minority? (According to Budd
Friedman, owner of the Improvisation Comedy Club in Los Angeles, about 15% of
comics are women.) Maybe it has something to do with how men look at women—
and how women see themselves. For a
long time, of course, a woman was simply
not supposed to be funny. A 1909 newspaper editorialized, “Measured by ordinary
standards of humor, she is about as comical as a crutch....A woman was made to be
loved and fondled. She was certainly not
made to be laughed at.”
Such a premise led to the absurd situation of female humorists who, as Nancy
Walker notes in her seminal book, A Very
Serious Thing: Women’s Humor and American Culture, “were writing humor in the
face of the prevailing opinion that they
were not capable of what they were, at that
moment, doing.” Deanne Stillman, coeditor of Titters, a 1976 collection of
women’s humor, wanted to be a humorist
as a teenager, but, believing that “writing
funny was something girls didn’t do,” she
signed the parodies she submitted to Mad
Magazine as “Dean.” As recently as 1988,
the owner of a well-known New York comedy club opined, “Stand-up comedy is aggressive. It takes balls. Sure, some women
do it, but you kind of wonder about them.”
Even some brilliantly successful female
comics feel the vertigo that comes from
trying to strike a balance between traditional roles and personal inclination. Joan
Rivers has said, “I don’t like funny women.
I don’t think I’m funny. I think I’m witty.”
Some have resolved the conflict between
funniness and femininity by choosing one.
Gilda Radner said, “You’re not likely to see
me sitting at the back of a party being
pretty.” And Burnett, stigmatized for years
as a gawky mugger, advised an audience at
the Museum of Broadcasting, “The idea
that it’s not feminine to clown around is old
hat. Just be you.” More breezily dismissive was Elayne Boosler on a recent HBO
special: “Being a lady has never been one
of my goals.”
What is the road of the future? Will
comediennes follow in the footsteps of
macho comedy styles, salting their vocabulary with profanity and donning aggressive posturing like shoulder pads
and pinstripes? Will the mood of the
country—and the comics—become more
conservative and return to traditional
sex roles? Or will both women and men
move toward a comedy style based less
on a power model of domination and
submission and more on sharing?
A
ll artists mirror their society. This is
especially true of comics, whose art is
validated not by its impact on a small
group of connoisseurs or succeeding generations, but on the instant feedback of
laughter. Comics who comment on contemporary mores exert an influence on
their fans that is more powerful than that
of standard (and duller) authority figures.
Lucille Ball, Phyllis Diller, Carol Burnett,
Joan Rivers, and all other comediennes
past and present, are rooted in a tradition
of female comic personae. The seed of
their individual talent is nurtured—or
twisted—by the needs and beliefs of
their contemporaries. The more adventurous among them break new ground,
challenge their audience, and open up
possibilities for a new generation of performers. By studying the art of popular
comediennes, we may learn what it
means to be female and professionally
funny—and something about what it
means for a woman to exert power.
We must all deal with issues of sex roles
and power. It is the special task of the
comic to handle these issues with charm
and humor. By looking into their “funny
mirror,” we may learn something about our
own ambivalences about comic appeal, sex
appeal, and power. We may even learn
something about masculinity and femininity—about, that is, ourselves.
TYPES A & B—A NIETZSCHEAN VERSION
One notices how some people know how to treat their
experiences—their insignificant everyday experiences—so
that these become a plot of ground that bears fruit three
times a year. Others—and how many of them there are!—
are driven through the storms of fate’s most exciting turns,
the most varied currents of their time or nation, and yet
always stay lightly on the surface, like a cork. Thus, one is
finally tempted to divide humanity into a minority who know
how to make much out of little and a majority who know
how to make a little out of much...perverse wizards who,
instead of creating the world out of nothing, create nothing
out of the world.
—from Human, All Too Human
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STUDENTS’ STATE SENATE COUP (DE THÉÂTRE)
E
arly in March 45 CUNY students from
16 campuses participated in the first
college- level Model New York State Senate
Session. Initiated by the Puerto Rican/Hispanic Task Force of the State Legislature,
the session took place in the Senate Chamber at the Capital in conjunction with the
10th annual “Somos El Futuro” (We Are the
Future) Conference, which is intended to
encourage latinos to become politically
aware and involved.
The session consisted of debate on two
bills with potential impact on the students’
own lives, one on rent regulation and the
other on welfare reform. Students played
the roles of Republican and Democratic
senators from actual districts, which in
some cases required them to argue views
contrary to their own. Prior to the session,
participants had four intensive training
sessions at the Graduate School developed
by the CUNY Internship Program. Special
speakers included Prof. Edward Schneier of
City College, Prof. Robert Pecorella of the
New York State Assembly Internship Program, Assemblyman Vito Lopez, State
Senator Efraim Gonzalez, and CUNY Vice
Chancellor Elsa Nuñez.
Reina Zeda, a junior at City College who
lives in Spanish Harlem, played the role of
Majority Leader Joseph Bruno and conferred frequently with his staffers to assure
that her arguments matched the senator’s.
“What I learned is how, as a leader, you
really have to stand for what you believe.
We were each assigned a district, and we
had to take into consideration constituents’
needs, the party, and re-election.”
Bronx Assemblyman Roberto Ramirez,
chair of the Task Force and initiator of the
session, spoke glowingly of the students’
performance: “You are sitting in one of the
most powerful legislatures in the country,
and I hope one day you will come back as
full-fledged senators.”
The Albany trip was developed by the
CUNY Internship Program office under the
direction of Prof. Ed Rogowsky, who was assisted by project coordinator
Michael Speer, Jill Simone Gross,
and project faculty member Anthony Maniscalco of John Jay.
CUNY mock legislators
included Aldo Valmon and
Daniel Ramirez, center
foreground; behind them,
from the right, Monica
Palacio, Sonia Galeano, and
Michelle Soto; Nibaldo
Aguilera is far left.
Science Yes!, continued from page 8
good use of the children’s questions or giving them a chance to discover or investigate. I’ve been afraid to do this in my
classroom because of the behavior problems I’ve encountered. I now realize that
was just an excuse, because I wasn’t clear
on how to go about performing an experiment. In fact, I have a room which contains
very little evidence of teaching science.
Shame on me, but not for long.”
T
he children in Science, YES! classrooms have been actively engaged in a
wide variety of experiments. Gerterlyn
Dozier’s 2nd graders at P.S. 243 have been
studying and writing about wildlife. “Owls
are wild. They’re cute,” says Stephanie, but
adds sensibly, “they need to stay in the
wild.” Luis reports, “When I go to the zoo
again I will take a picture. I will look for
the owl’s beautiful eyes.”
Valerie Menditto’s kindergartners at P.S.
164 have recently been planting bulbs
around their school, and she applied her
newly acquired inquiry-based learning
techniques when her students became fascinated by worms they encountered. One
critter, dubbed Wormy, became the star of
a science fair exhibit, “Wormy in Motion.”
The students experimented to find out how
Wormy navigated on different materials.
Clara found he “holds the carpet with his
scales,” while Albert observed that he
“goes slow on the foil because he slips on
the metal.”
It’s a good guess that “going slow” will
not happen to these kindergartners if they
choose a career in science...and if Science,
YES! continues to prepare future teachers
to nurture them.
A SCHOLARSHIP
FROM TRAGEDY
—AND THE HEART
T
here are no small parts, just small
actors,” goes the saying. That wisdom
applies to educational philanthropists as
well as thespians. There are no small donations to the campuses and students of
the City University. Of course, large gifts
like Fiterman Hall at the Borough of Manhattan Community College or the Newman
Library at Baruch College are bound to
take the breath away. But more modest
gifts can have the same exhilarating impact. Consider, for example, the Paris
Garcia Scholarship at the College of Staten
Island.
In 1987 Maria Garcia was a single parent studying finance at the College of
Staten Island. Because her son had suffered several serious ailments almost from
birth, Garcia decided to take some biology
classes to be able to follow his health
more knowledgeably. His death in 1991,
just before his fifth birthday, staggered her
and the sophomore’s GPA suffered. But the
loss of Paris finally steeled Garcia’s resolve to enter a health care profession,
and she soon joined the inaugural class of
the joint B.S. program for physician assistant at CSI and Bayley Seton Hospital. According to Prof. Pamela Carlton, director
of the physician assistant degree program
at CSI, Garcia “was able to persevere and
eventually graduated as valedictorian of
her class.”
Taking her degree in biology and physician assistant (plus an associate in finance) in 1995, Maria Garcia Plover—her
new married name—went on to complete
her residency in the neonatal intensive
care unit at Norwalk Hospital in Connecticut. She was immediately offered a position at the Hospital and is pictured here in
her workplace.
Paris not only inspired her change of
career path, but also a desire, as she says,
“to give something back to all the wonderfully supportive teachers in the biology
department and Physician Assistant program.” She decided, therefore, to establish the Paris Garcia Scholarship to be
awarded to a graduate of the Physician
Assistant degree program who has overcome hardship and demonstrated courage
in earning a degree.
Prof. Carlton recalls Maria as “an absolutely wonderful student with a very creative mind and superb manual skills.”
College of Staten Island graduate Maria Garcia
Plover, foreground, attending to one of her
charges with colleague Anne Mauk in the
neonatal intensive care unit of Norwalk Hospital.
Photo, Wendy D. Morgan
Carlton is just as admiring of the first Paris
Garcia Scholar. Robert Albanese, while
struggling financially through a divorce,
gave up a successful bus company he had
developed so he could go back to school.
Prior to graduating as a physician assistant, he earned a degree in biology with
honors and has already published two papers as a primary author.
Board of Trustees
The City University
of New York
Anne A. Paolucci
Chairwoman
Herman Badillo
Vice-Chairman
Satish K. Babbar
Jerome S. Berg
John J. Calandra
Michael C. Crimmins
Edith B. Everett
Ronald J. Marino
Susan Moore Mouner
James P. Murphy
Robert Price
George J. Rios
Nilda Soto Ruiz
Richard B. Stone
Sandi E. Cooper
Chairperson, University Faculty Senate
Ifeachor Potts
Chairperson, University Student Senate
Jay Hershenson
Vice Chancellor for
University Relations
Editor:
Pamela Bayless
Managing Editor:
Gary Schmidgall
Letters or suggestions for
future articles on topics of
general interest to the
CUNY community should be
addressed to
CUNY Matters
535 E. 80th St., 7th Floor
New York, NY 10021
CUNY Matters is available
on the CUNY home page at
http://www.cuny.edu.
12
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The Office of University Relations
The City University of New York
535 E. 80th St.
New York, NY 10021
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