@John Jay News and Events of Interest to the College Community

May 13, 2009

Worth NotingMay 15 8:00 AM - 6:00 PM5th Annual Forensic Psychology MA Student Research ConferenceFor more information, visit http://sites.google.com/a/jjay.cuny.edu/msrg/

Room 630, Haaren Hall

May 21 & 22 8:15 AM - 5:00 PM4th Annual National Conference: Men & Women Coming Together to Stand Up and Speak Out to End Violence Against WomenFor more information, visitwww.acalltomen.org, or email Jessica Greenfield, jgreenfield@jjay.cuny.edu

Various locations, Haaren Hall

May 26 5:00 PMCommencementAwards CeremonyGerald W. Lynch Theater

May 27 6:00 PMHonorary DegreeRecipients’ DinnerOffice of the President

May 27 7:00 PM -11:00 PM3rd Annual Night of the Stars:A Celebration to Honorthe Graduating Class of 2009(Event limited to members ofthe graduating class.)

6th Floor, Haaren Hall

May 28 10:30 AM & 3:00 PM2009 Commencement CeremoniesThe Theater at Madison Square Garden

John Jay students had their day in court on April 9 and made the most of the opportunity, sweeping first through fourth places in the annual CUNY-wide Moot Court Competition held at Fordham University Law School.

The four medal-winning students were part of a field of 15 — eight of them from John Jay — in

the Moot Court Competition.“How spectacular!” said President Jeremy

Travis. “This is a great tribute to our students, and to our nascent pre-law program. And thanks to our coaches for doing a great job.”

“First place I can take no credit for,” said Professor Martin Wallenstein, Chair of the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, who was one of the coaches. Referring to Ryan Wade, who won the competition for the second consecutive year, Wallenstein said, “He knows more law than most of the attorneys here.”

Wallenstein was assisted in the coaching efforts by Rosemarie Maldonado, Counsel to the President; Sylvia Montalban, Assistant Counsel; and Michael Liddie, Deputy Labor Designee.

“It was a lot of work,” Wallenstein said. “These students really had to push themselves.” The students had just a month to prepare. “It was fast and intense,” said Wallenstein. “My

philosophy in coaching is to work them so hard in practice that the competition seems a breeze.”

In addition to Wade, John Jay’s other award-winning moot court competitors were senior Najah Gall, who took second place, sophomore Tricia Lewis, who finished third, and senior Beruryah Batyehudah, who finished fourth. “Tricia Lewis really worked and really came through,” Wallenstein noted. “She worked her way into the medals.”

The competition was done “blind,” meaning that the judge — former Manhattan prosecutor Anne B. Rudman, who is now an attorney in private practice — had no idea what school the students represented until the competition and the judging were completed.

“I’m proud of our students,” said Wallenstein. “They won because our classes at John Jay gave them a great background and because they prepared very well.”

John Jay students have plenty of reasons to smile after trouncing the competition in the annual CUNY-wide Moot Court

Competition. From left, first-place finisher Ryan Wade, Najah Gall (2nd place), moot court judge Anne B. Rudman, Beruryah

Batyehudah (4th place) and Tricia Lewis (3rd place).

Oyez! Oyez! Oh Yes!John Jay Students Have their Day in Courtat CUNY-wide Moot Court Competition

Speaker after speaker at an April 23 awards luncheon urged a spirited group of John Jay students and visitors from Roosevelt High School in Yonkers to discover their purpose and to focus on “perseverance, goals and outcomes” in making their mark on society.

The Service Learning and Civic Engagement Awards Luncheon was co-sponsored by the John Jay African-American Studies Department, the Black Male Initiative and the Connecting Class-room to Community program. Before joining John Jay students and faculty for lunch, the 40 high school students spent the day getting a firsthand look at what John Jay had to offer, including a CSI-type demonstration courtesy of the forensic science faculty.

“Each of you has a purpose,” said Profes-sor Kwando Kinshasa of the African-American Studies Department. “It’s up to you to find it out through investigation and experience, and then use it to make a major change in this world.”

Basil Smikle Jr., a political consultant and for-mer top aide to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, offered an interactive keynote talk in which he stressed the importance of perseverance. “I want to help you get to a place where you can walk in the door and get whatever you want… . People may tell you it’s not your time or your place, but there should be nothing stopping you.”

In a closing “pay it forward” admonition, Smikle reminded the students, “As you go out

and start demanding your place in this world, remember that there are other folks you can lend a helping hand to.”

Five John Jay students were presented with Excellence in Academic Writing awards: Kirill Yemelyantsev, Bryant Duell, JaJa Grays, Amy Diallo and Shanelle McIntosh.

New York State Assemblyman Keith L. T. Wright made a special appearance at the luncheon to present the service award that bears his name. “There’s no greater calling than service learning and civic engagement,” said Wright, who has represented Harlem in the Assembly since1992. He presented the Keith L. T. Wright Service to Victoria Oyaniran, a student in the Ronald E. McNair Post-Baccalaureate Achieve-ment Program.

From left: Basil Smikle Jr., Professor Lori Martin, director of

the Connecting Classroom to Community program, Victoria

Oyaniran, and Assemblyman Keith L.T. Wright.

Students Learn About Service fromThose Who Have Been There, Done That

All Aboard at the Jay StopNew Student-Centered WebPresence Makes Its Debut

The home page of the new Jay Stop, where John Jay students can find a wealth

of information and interactive features geared to their needs and interests.

There’s a new place on campus for John Jay students to hang out: the Jay Stop, a new component of the College Web site that offers a broad range of features geared specifically to student interests and information needs.

The Jay Stop was unveiled on May 11 in what developers described as a “soft launch” — the core of the new site and many of its features made their debut, with more ex-pected to roll out in the weeks ahead. Among the features are RSS feeds from the John Jay calendar, links to TV, radio and news outlets on campus, a section on personal money management, “Learning Essentials,” and “My JJay,” a controlled-access feature allowing students to track their course schedules, transcripts, bursar information and more.

“The goal of the Jay Stop is to build community among the students through the use of technology,” said Vice President for Student Development Berenecea Johnson Eanes. “Student Council President Shaheen Wallace, as part his election platform, made a commitment to more efficient communications with students. Through the efforts of the Department of Information Technology and the staff of the Office of Student Activities, such a means has been created, and we look forward to seeing how this tool can be developed to service our students even more.”

Ana Giron of the Department of Information Technology (DoIT), the architect and designer of the Jay Stop, credited students with much of the impetus for the new site, including the name itself. As the site evolved over a two-month period, various features were tested and modified through the use of student focus groups. “We went into the focus groups with certain assumptions, and were surprised by some of what we learned,” said Giron. The students, she said, felt they were lacking basic information about their school, as well as a sense of community.

The new site will include a self-managed section for the John Jay student government and a provision for user feedback. Developers also hope to be able to create the means for students to upload their own content to the video section of the Jay Stop. There will also be a “Who’s Who” feature, an “Of Interest Around Campus” section and a page simply titled “Free Stuff” — a rundown of no-charge things to enjoy on campus. Poten-tial students can also visit the site to get a sense of what campus life at John Jay is like.

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educating for justice

PRESENTINGBENJAMIN LAPIDUS (Music and Art) performed his recent work Herencia Judía on March 29 at the Eldridge Street Museum in Manhattan. On April 4, he performed with his Latin jazz band Sonido Isleño at the Bronx Library Center.

ELLEN BELCHER (Library) was a panelist on the Feminist Archaeologist Panel at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art on March 14. The panel was presented in conjunction with the Fertile Goddess in the Herstory Gallery, an exhibit that runs through May 31, for which Belcher was a consultant.

PETER MOSKOS (Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration) spoke on the Baltimore Ghetto at the Yale University Urban Ethnography Project Mini-Conference, “The Urban Ghetto: Then and Now,” during the Eastern Sociological Society’s annual meeting in Baltimore, MD, on March 20.

BETTINA CARBONELL (English) presented a paper on “Bearing Witness in Twenty-First Century Museum Practice“ at the Curating Difficult Knowledge conference held April 16-18 at Concordia University in Montreal.

M. VICTORIA PÉREZ-RÍOS (Government)

presented “Back to the Future: Accountability for Past Abuses in Consolidated Democracies“ at the New York State Political Science Association Conference, which took place at John Jay on April 24-25. She also chaired the panel on Current Issues of International Relations

MARTIN WALLENSTEIN (Communication and Theatre Arts) presented two papers at the centennial meeting of the Eastern Communication Association (ECA) from April 22-26 in Philadelphia. The first, titled “Freedom of Speech 1909-1919: The Dark Decade,” was an invited paper. The second, “The Big Chill: First Amendment and the War on Terror,” was peer-reviewed and received an award as Top Paper in Communication Law and Ethics. Wallenstein was also elected chairperson of the ECA Communication Law and Ethics Interest Group.

JOHN STAINES (English) gave a paper on “Violence and Generic Experiment in Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller” at the meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Los Angeles on March 21. He also attended the Shakespeare Society of America conference in Washington, DC, where on April 11 he presented a paper on religious controversial prose of the 1590s, “Comic Violence” and “Martin’s Reforming Word in the Marprelate Tracts.”

HOWARD PFLANZER (Communication and Theatre Arts) had a staged reading of his play Living with History: Camus Sartre De Beauvoir presented May 5 and 6 at the Medicine Show Theatre in Manhattan.

STEPHEN HANDELMAN (Center on Media, Crime and Justice) delivered a talk on “How do Organized Criminals Hijack State Activities?” at a special seminar on organized crime and corruption hosted by the RAND Corporation in Arlington, VA, on May 1.

ADINA SCHWARTZ (Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration) made a Continuing Legal Education presentation, “Biting the Bullet: Challenging Firearms Evidence,” as part of the Fifth Annual Indigent Criminal Defense Seminar: Advanced Skills for the Experienced Practitioner, sponsored by the Supreme Court of Virginia and the Virginia State Bar, in Richmond, VA, on April 3.

KIMORA (Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration) recently spoke to a group of female inmates who are enrolled in the Going Out by Going In prisoner reentry program at the Century Regional Detention Facility in Los Angeles. In addition, she spoke to 35 at-risk youth in the Vital Intervention Directional Alternative program at the Lennox Station campus in Watts.

DELORES JONES-BROWN (Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration) served on a panel titled “Prosecutorial Discretion: From Mistake to Misconduct,” sponsored by the Diversity Committee of the New Jersey State Bar Association. Other invited talks include “Police Brutality: In the 10 Years Since the Death of Amadou Diallo” for the Women’s City Club of New York, and a presentation at the Russell Sage Foundation for the Consortium for Police Leadership in Equity.

BETWEEN THE COVERSDAVID KENNEDY (Anthropology) has had his article “Drugs, Race and Common Ground: Reflections on the High Point Intervention“ published in the March 2009 issue of NIJ Journal, a publication of the National Institute of Justice.

KATHLEEN COLLINS (Library) had her new book, Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows published this month by Continuum.

DIANA E. FRIEDLAND (Sciences) has published a manuscript in the February 2009 issue of Biochimica et Biophysica Acta: Genes and Regulatory Mechanisms. The title of the paper is “Characterization of pokeweed antiviral protein binding to mRNA cap analogs: Competition with nucleotides and enhancement by translation initiation factor iso4G.” Friedland presented this work with student researchers from John Jay and Pace University.

ANDREW KARMEN (Sociology) had the seventh edition of his book Crime Victims: An Introduction To Victimology, published recently by Wadsworth/Cengage. The original edition, published in 1984, was the first and only comprehensive textbook in the victimology field at that time.

PEER REVIEWROBERT MCCRIE (Protection Management) received the Eugene R. Fink Memorial Award from the Associated Licensed Detectives of the State of New York at the group’s annual banquet in New York.

ISABELLE CURRO (Security) received one of the New York State Bar Association’s President’s Pro Bono Service Awards on May 1, in recognition of her work in promoting pro bono service as a path to achieving equal access to justice.

JANE KATZ (Health and Physical Education) competed in the recent Albatross Open masters’ swim meet held in North Bethesda, MD, by the Montgomery Ancient Swimmers. She won the 50-meter, 100-meter and 200-meter backstroke events, setting a new meet record in the 100-meter race.

RODDRICK COLVIN (Public Management) was recently elected as the incoming President of the New York State Political Science Association.

For the fifth consecutive year, a delegation of John Jay students captured a top honor at the National Model U.N. (NMUN) Conference, held in New York April 7-11.

The 16-member John Jay contingent, which this year represented the African nation of Burkina Faso at the NMUN, won an honorable mention for overall team performance, as well as the team’s first-ever award for outstanding position paper.

“As you can imagine, we are all extremely pleased with this outcome,” said a proud Professor George Andreopoulos of the government department, who is director of the John Jay Center on International Human Rights and an advisor to the team. “Being part of this team is entirely voluntary and takes hours of hard work and determination to carefully and accurately manage being a delegate, while being a full-time student and, for some, a full-time employee as well.”

The team served as delegates on seven different U.N. committees and as an independent advisory justice and clerk on the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR). In

preparation for the conference, the students conducted extensive research on the national, regional and international policies of Burkina Faso on topics ranging from the situation in Israel/Palestine and the rights of children in armed conflict to climate-change economics and regional trade and integration, in addition to the applicable law for the two cases before the Rwanda tribunal.

The 2009 team, chosen from a pool of roughly 50 applicants after a rigorous screening process, included Patrick Scullin, Rennae Francis, Gabriele C. Ursitti, Mark Benjamin, Eva Helena Hernik, Stephanie Valarezo, Norhan Basuni, Mike Rodriguez, Beyi Polanco, Ama-Mariya Ampah, Geeta Gangadeen, Peter J. Cella, Marie-Andree Barthelemy, David Sabatelle, Jennifer Shim and Natalia Lysetska. Matt Zommer, a lecturer in the government department, assisted by his department colleagues Jacques Fomerand and Andreopoulos, coached them.

The NMUN Conference is recognized as one of the largest, international collegiate competitions in the world, attended by more than 3,000 students from 29 countries.

Members of the John Jay faculty were honored at an April 23 reception for their outstanding efforts in teaching, scholarship and service to students — “the three legs of the proverbial three-legged stool,” according to President Jeremy Travis.

New to the list of faculty honors this year was a Distinguished Teaching Prize, established by the office of Provost Jane Bowers and overseen by the advisory board of the Center for the Advancement of Teaching. Three faculty members were chosen for the initial prizes. Nathan Lents of the Department of Sciences was nominated by his colleague Anthony Carpi. Jillian Grose-Fifer of the Department of Philosophy and Dara Byrne of the Department of Communication and Theatre Arts, both of whom teach in the Freshman Learning Communities program, were nominated by students.

The award for Faculty Service to Students,

which recognizes mentoring, advisement and involvement in student activities, was presented to Carpi, one of the creators of the Program for Research Initiatives for Science Majors (PRISM). He was nominated by his department chair, Professor Lawrence Kobilinsky.

Awards for faculty scholarship included the Donal E. J. MacNamara Junior Faculty Award, which is presented annually to an instructor or assistant professor. The 2009 recipient was Amy Adamczyk of the Department of Sociology, a specialist in religious contextual influences on delinquency and cross-national differences in attitudes about crime and deviance.

Scholarly excellence awards were presented to Amy Adamczyk, Lisa Farrington (Art and Music), Bilal Khan (Mathematics and Computer Science), Margaret Bull Kovera (Psychology), Susan Opotow (Sociology), Hung-En Sung (Criminal Justice) and Philip Yanos (Psychology).

As the World Watches, John Jay Students Shine at U.N. Event

Kudos for Triple-Threat Faculty

CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE? Playwright and actor Sean Christopher Lewis stalks the

stage of the Gerald W. Lynch Theater during the New York premiere of his one-man play Killadelphia: Mixtape for a City on

April 29. The play, which weaves together the story of murdered teaching fellow Beau Zabel (on screen) with interviews of

inmates at Graterford Prison, was preceded by a panel discussion featuring the playwright along with Professors P.J. Gibson

and Peter Moskos, and Robyn Buseman of the Restorative Justice Program run by the Philadelphia Mural Arts Project.

COURT IS NOW IN SESSION: History’s most notorious betrayer, Judas Iscariot (kneel-

ing), is in the spotlight during a tense courtroom scene in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot, which was staged at John Jay April

21-25 under the direction of Professor Dana Tarantino. As an accompaniment to the play, the Department of Communication

and Theatre Arts presented a guest lecture “Judas on Trial: Theatre and Theology,” by the Rev. James Martin, S.J.