attending the University, that CUNY stu-dents are winning major national awards,and that CUNY continues to offer educa-tional opportunities to immigrants and thechildren of immigrants. …”

And in a letter praising the Chancellor’scommitment to scientific research, EdReinfurt, vice president of the BusinessCouncil of New York State, Inc., wrote:“The steps the CUNY system is taking andthe progress you have made in reachingthe goals set for the ‘Decade of Science’ atthe University are most impressive.”

One of the declarations mentioningCUNY with admiration came from anunusual platform, across the sea. Speakingin Italy, First Lady Laura Bush cited CUNYas a school where students from differentcountries could learn more about eachother. Addressing faculty and students atthe University of Turin during the WinterOlympics in February, Laura Bush said:“…when your students visit America, atschools such as the City University of NewYork…American students and citizens gaina better understanding of Italian life, lan-guage and culture.”

Very close to home, right here in thecity, newspapers continued to offer editori-als urging Goldstein and the University tostay the course. The New York Postdescribed the Compact as a means tobring CUNY “to the next level” by invest-ing in “programs, personnel and physicalassets to secure a seat among America’stop-tier institutions of higher learning.”

in recent months. In some cases, the wordswere aimed directly at an outstandingmember of the CUNY community.

For example, President George Bushawarded the National Medal of Science,

America’s highest science honor,to Math Professor Dennis P.Sullivan of the CUNY GraduateCenter, hailing Sullivan andother recipients as scholarswhose research has “enhancedour understanding of life and

the world around us.”Then in New York,

Governor GeorgePataki offered praisefor the “Compact”that is being proposedby ChancellorMatthew Goldstein.

The Compact — the Chancellor’splan calling for guaranteed public fundingof certain operating costs, while commit-ting The University to raising hundreds ofmillions in donations and saving millionsthrough productivity — was welcomed byPataki as “an innovative and fiscallyresponsible approach” to the financing ofpublic higher education.

The Compact also received a strongendorsement from CUNY’s Business Leadership Council, composed of execu-tives in private industry. Chairman SySternberg said, “We are very proud thatCUNY’s enrollment is at a record 30-yearhigh, that better prepared students are

Robert Johnson manages to stand outfrom the crowd, in flattering ways, evenwhen the crowd is composed of the tough-est, most intelligent lawyers in New YorkState.

Johnson is the first African-Americanever to serve as a District Attorney in thestate. First elected in 1989, he is also thelongest-serving Bronx D.A. in more thanhalf a century.

And here’s the distinction he some-times seems most proud of: Among thefive District Attorneys in New York City,he’s the only CUNY college alumnus.

“I really believe City College is responsi-ble for my success,” Johnson said in aninterview at his office in the Bronx recently.

“I say that because it accepted me evenafter I had some rocky years in highschool; I say it, two, because it permittedme to return after I left school and wentinto the Navy; and, three, I say it becausethe quality of what I learned, in terms ofphilosophical and political thought, reallywas the preparation for how I analyzedcases in law school and how I analyzecases to this very day.”

The prosecutor, who still has the litheframe of the track star he was at City in theearly ’70s, tries to stay in regular touch withthe up-and-coming attorneys and other stu-dents now laboring toward their bachelor’sdegrees at the College-on-the-Hill.

For instance, Johnson spoke of a not-long-ago visit to the home of CCNYPresident Gregory H. Williams. There theprosecutor met one of the top mindsamong students in the country — LevSviridov, the 2005 City College grad who

went off to London to attend Oxford as aRhodes Scholar.

“Lev was very interested in what I do,and so we spoke quite a bit,” Johnsonrecalled of Sviridov, a Russian immigrantwho displayed strong interests in politicsand law while he was at City.

Back at his office, Johnson, a father offour sons, said he was aware that publiccolleges need financial support fromappreciative alumni. “I give…to send a stu-dent to the alumni dinner or $500 here or$1,000 there, just to show that…I believein City College,” he said.

He added, “I think that the CityUniversity is the best buy in the wholecountry in terms of higher education.” Hesaid the CUNY Honors College, which hasstrict admissions standards accepting onlythe cream of the high school crop, is rais-

ing CUNY’s profile and helpingto make it a place where “peo-ple are clamoring to get in.”

Johnson’s workdays are filledwith the grit of thousands ofBronx tales of tragedy andabuse that sit on the dockets ofthe Bronx Criminal andSupreme Courts. He has a bat-talion of 400 lawyers who han-dle these cases. And while con-ceding that daily exposure tothis side of life can cause greatstress, Johnson has some newsthat lifts his spirits.

In his most recent statisticalreport, the D.A. said the Bronxhas experienced huge drops inmajor crime.

“Homicides fell again, to alow of 125, a level not seen since 1966,”the report said. Johnson informed that in1990 there had been 653 murders in theBronx.

The intensity and complexity ofJohnson’s work require a certain compo-sure and intellectual confidence, whichtogether allow him to do rhetorical battlewith some of the feistiest legal minds inthe state. Johnson says he acquired bothqualities — the composure and the intel-lectual confidence — at City College,where he was a philosophy major.

Though he loved the argumentation andopen-endedness of philosophy, Johnsonsaid he also tended toward other academicdisciplines in which agility of mind wasrespected, such as political science.

“I took a number of political science

L E G I S L AT I V E

SPECIAL

EDITION

Of all the articles written about TheUniversity recently, one was particularlynoteworthy for its reach beyond the bor-ders of New York City and State. Theinternational journal The Economist, widelyread in the English-speakingworld for its crispand erudite con-veyance of the news,published in Januaryan article in which itlauded actions takenover the past severalyears by CUNY admin-istrators. It gave itsunusual 1,350-wordencomium the followingheadline:

“Rebuilding theAmerican dream machine.”

The article, featuredprominently in the one-million-plus circula-tion magazine, said CUNY was singular inthe world of public higher education, as apathway by which immigrants and otherscan achieve the American Dream — makethat the worldwide Dream — of materialand intellectual success. The London-basedEconomist (to see article, visitwww.cuny.edu/news) outlined and applaud-ed the work that has been done these lastyears raising standards at CUNY andimproving the educational environment.

From other perches, near and far, similarlaudatory sentiments have been expressed

Taking Notice of the ‘American Dream Machine’

CUNY.EDU/NEWS THE C I TY UN IVERS I TY O F NEW YORK • FOUNDED AS THE FREE ACADEMY

InsidePreserving ArchitecturalTreasures

Historic preservation andarchitectural inno-vation are occur-ring in tandem,part of a $7.5billion renais-sance. Render-ings of the pastare yieldingnew interpreta-tions of an “urban campus” ideal.

Kingsborough Grad isStar TV Reporter

Jeff Koinange wasintroduced toreporting at Kings-borough Commu-nity College. Hetravels the worldreporting for CNNand recently coveredHurricane Katrinaand the Iraq war.

Teaching for 60 Years–And Loving It!

TheUniversityfound anumber offaculty

members who began teaching in the1940s and are still teaching today. Theyhave seen many changes, and they havebeen transformed.

A Modern Socrates,with Many Devotees

Saul Kripke ofThe GraduateCenter is beingcalled the great-est living philoso-pher of our era.His colleagueswant to tran-scribe his brilliantlectures and turnthem into books.

Memories of City TechSustained Him in Iraq

Jude Poku stayed mentally strong whileserving in Iraq, and he did so becausehe dreamed of returning to sciencestudies at City Tech.This semesterhe finallyreturned.

PAGE

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14Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson at the campus ofhis alma mater, The City College of New York.

continued on page 12 ä

‘Open the doors to all —

let the children of the rich and

the poor take their seats together and

know of no distinction save that of

industry, good conduct, and intellect.”

— Townsend Harris, FOUNDER, 1847

SP R I N G 2006

The Economist

A Bronx Tale (of Law and Order) That Began on a Hill

Our Graduate School of Journalism willopen in Fall 2006. Our alumni are joiningour efforts, as demonstrated most recentlyby Intel co-founder Andrew Grove’s $26million gift to his alma mater, CityCollege. As David Ward, the president ofthe American Council on Education,recently noted, “Those of us consideringexamples of successful management and

enhanced academic quality inAmerican higher educationwould certainly include CUNYamong the top institutions onthe list.”

Without a very different fund-ing approach, CUNY’s ability toserve its students and achieve theinitiatives outlined in its MasterPlan will be threatened. That’swhy I have proposed a new wayto finance CUNY: a shared com-

pact among funding partners, including theState and City, the University, its alumniand friends, and its students.

This investment plan asks the State andthe City to cover the University’s manda-tory costs (such as energy and labor con-tracts) and 20 percent of the programmat-ic initiatives in the University’s four-yearMaster Plan. The rest of the fundingwould come from the University side, inthe form of increased philanthropic rev-enues; internal redeployment; managedenrollment growth; and modest tuitionincreases, not to exceed the HigherEducation Price Index over the life of theplan. Revenue from the increased tuitionwould go exclusively toward funding pro-grammatic initiatives in the Master Plan,with recommendations from CUNY stu-dents and faculty.

CUNY’s Board of Trustees unanimouslyadopted the budget investment plan, andCUNY’s Business Leadership Council hasendorsed the compact. As the Chair of theBusiness Leadership Council, Sy Sternberg,Chairman and CEO of New York LifeInsurance Company, said, “I believe that theproposed plan will establish the foundationfor the next level of success at CUNY.”

The 2006-2007 State Executive Budgetprovides important recognition of theCUNY Compact, described by GovernorPataki as “an innovative and fiscally respon-sible approach to financing operations bydelineating shared responsibility amongpartners and creating opportunities toleverage funds.” Right now, the University isworking closely with the State and the Cityof New York to realize the plan’s potential.

Every day, the University’s faculty andstaff demonstrate their commitment toproviding the best education possible to“the whole people.” Through an innovativepartnership, we can continue to strengthenthat critical mission.

Across the country and in New YorkState, from organizations as diverse as theNational Academies and the BusinessCouncil of New York State, an urgent callhas gone out for an increase in the partici-pation and proficiency of students in post-secondary education, particularly in theareas of science, math, and engineering.National and state leadersalike have recognized theneed for a strong, educatedworkforce to maintain eco-nomic and social growth.As Governor Pataki notedin his 2006 BudgetAddress, “If we wish toremain competitive in theemerging high-tech, globaleconomy of tomorrow, it’simperative that we contin-ue to invest in higher education today.”More than ever, public higher education hasa critical role in the state’s well-being.

The current funding model for publichigher education in New York State, how-ever, has serious limitations. Increasingly, aspublic funding lags, tuition is used to coveroperating expenses. Public institutions arefaced with a dilemma. Students should notbe asked to carry a continually increasingshare of operating costs. It is also unrealis-tic to expect the State and City of NewYork to be the sole providers of our esca-lating needs, given the costs associatedwith K-12 education, health care, andenergy requirements.

In addition, operating budget funding iscurrently determined on a year-to-yearbasis. When there is an economic down-turn, and government funding is tight, wesee large tuition increases — just at a timewhen students and their families, also feel-ing the effects of a bad economy, can leastafford it. The year-to-year model discour-ages long-range investment in public highereducation — the kind that could addressthe long-range needs spelled out every fouryears in the Master Plans both CUNY andSUNY are required by State law to develop.These Master Plans are endorsed by theState’s Board of Regents, but there has beenlittle funding to support academic priorities.

Unless we take steps to increase publicsupport, keep tuition manageable, createnew revenue sources within our universi-ties, and aggressively seek external partner-ships, the promise of equal opportunitythat is at the heart of public higher educa-tion will erode.

These funding realities are particularlydistressing because they do not recognizethe great strides CUNY has made in thelast several years. The University hasrecorded its highest enrollment in 30 yearswhile raising academic standards, admit-ting better-prepared students, andenrolling substantially more students fromselect public high schools. Last year alone,we hired more than 300 faculty members.

Standing up to a Dilemma

FROM THECHANCELLOR’S DESK

2 CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006

world of U.S. science are not consideredminorities, and 16 women.

With a total of 43 professors involvedin research, Dottin said, “This is, almost, agood balance.”

In the lab, Dottin studies the role ofphosphates in signal transduction — howproteins locking into receptors on the out-side of a cell can activate proteins insidethe cell.

The Gene Center’s facilities and facultyproved irresistible to young biologists Dr.Jill Bargonetti-Chavarria and Dr. DerrickBrazill, both of whom received the presti-gious Presidential Early Career Award forScientists and Engineers, which honors andencourages researchers who achieve excel-lence early in their careers.

Bargonetti studies the p53 tumor-sup-pressor protein, which acts like a cellular-level stoplight. Cancerous cells block p53’snormal protective, red-light action. Shehypothesizes that estrogen or epidermalgrowth factor locks onto certain breast cellreceptors and promotes tumor growth byturning p53’s stoplight to green.

Working with cell cultures, Bargonettiseeks ways to switch the stoplight back tored, so breast cells can resume killing cancer-ous cells. In April, the journal CancerResearch will publish a paper from her labsuggesting a new approach to cancer therapy— targeting the Mdm2 protein. One waycancer grows is through an increase in theamount of Mdm2, which inhibits p53’s nor-mal protective action by sitting on the DNA.

Bargonetti has teamed with GeneCenter colleagues like chemist MariaTomasz (examining mitomycins, which areantibiotics that slow or stop cancer growththrough DNA action) and biologist DavidFoster (studying how different substancespromote cancer by blocking the p53pathway).

Attacking cancer from another angle,Brazill studies how cells count the numberof similar cells.

If injury costs you a piece of your liver,normal liver cells will regenerate until theorgan has just the right number of cells.Cancer cells, however, have lost their abili-ty to count. Taking his research in thedirection of this problem, Brazill studies

Prepared byThe City University

of New YorkOffice of University Relations

535 East 80th StreetNew York, NY 10021

(212) 794-5317

Published byThe Legislative Gazette

PO Box 7329Albany, NY 12225

518-473-9739www.legislativegazette.com

Board of TrusteesThe City University of New York

Benno C. Schmidt Jr.ChairmanValerie L. Beal Randy M. MastroJohn S. Bonnici Hugo M. MoralesJohn J. Calandra Kathleen M. PesileWellington Z. Chen Carol Robles-RománKenneth Cook Nilda Soto RuizRita DiMartino Marc V. ShawJoseph J. Lhota Jeffrey Wiesenfeld

ChancellorMatthew Goldstein

Secretary of the Board of Trustees andVice Chancellor for University Relations

Jay HershensonUniversity Director for Media Relations

Michael ArenaEditor: Ron Howell

Writers: Gary Schmidgall, Rita RodinPhotographer: André Beckles

Graphic Design: Gotham Design, NYCArticles in this and previous issues are availableat cuny.edu/news. Letters or suggestions for futurestories may be sent to the Editor by email toMediarelations@mail.cuny.edu. Changes of addressshould be made through your campus personnel office.

Susan O’MalleyChairperson,Faculty Senate

Carlos SierraChairperson,Student Senate

What’s the best way to kill a breastcancer cell? How does your liver knowwhen it has enough cells to function prop-erly? How do cells use phosphate residuesto send signals? Do men and women per-ceive color differently? How do race,genomics and health inequities intersect?

These are among the questions pursuedby the scientist/professors at HunterCollege’s Center for the Study of GeneStructure and Function.

Since opening in 1985, the center alsohas successfully pursued another mission:attracting under-represented minority sci-entists and encouraging minority studentsto consider careers in scientific research.The National Institutes of Health’sResearch Centers in Minority InstitutionsProgram recently gave the center a bigvote of confidence, awarding it $13.2 mil-lion through 2010 — 55 percent morethan for 2000-2005. Hunter’s grant sup-ports basic and behavioral research in biol-ogy, chemistry, biopsychology, biophysicsand anthropology.

“When I came to Hunter 19 years ago,there was one other minority facultymember and he was just leaving,” saidRobert P. Dottin, the Center’s director.“We now have eight minority facultymembers out of the last 18 people wehired using Gene Center funds, with somematching funds from CUNY.” There alsoare four Asian-Americans, who in the

Forty years ago, when newsrooms stillshook with clattering typewriters, rumblingpresses and shouts of “(Copy) boy!” theiconic New York Herald Tribune — extolledby many as the city’s best paper — shut-tered its doors at 230 West 41st St. ThisSeptember, though, when CUNY flingsopen those fabled doors again as the head-quarters of the northeast’s only publiclysupported graduate school of journalism,don’t expect a paean to the journalistic past.

The Timeses — and the Posts, and theNewses, and the Tribunes and even the tel-evision and radio stations — they are a’changin’.

Traditional, “mainstream” media arecontracting as they struggle to retain read-ers and viewers, and so-called hyper-localcommunity papers are expanding andpicking up readership, as an ever-evolvingtechnology has unleashed a wave of newjournalistic “platforms”: blogs, podcasts,web-based news organs, and “wikis” —along with plenty of old-media-versus-new-media controversy.

The new CUNY Graduate School ofJournalism is ready to surf this wave, saysits dean, Stephen Shepard. A journalismschool functioning in the year 2006 must,Shepard said, not only honor the profes-

Seen here is Brooklyn College student DanMeloy with notebook and pen, practicing thetraditional skills that will be taught at the newGraduate School of Journalism, along with apanoply of new media skills, such as blogging.

J-School Will Enter New World of New Media, Armed With Traditional Skills and Values

Hunter Gene Center Receives $13.2 Million Grant for Cell Research

Dictyostelium discoideum, a single-celledorganism that sometimes joins with othersto become a multicelled organism, in aprocess that has similarities to human fetaldevelopment.

Brazill said he believes that “[t]he reallycool thing about the Gene Center is thatit’s interdisciplinary.” He added, “I’ve hadcontact with psychologists who work withaddiction; some of the same types of feed-back loops, of signaling, happen in cases ofaddiction…”

Psychophysiologist James Gordon, whowith Brooklyn College colleague IsraelAbramov recently discovered differencesbetween how men and women perceivecolor, also finds the crosscurrents stimulat-ing. “I’ve been at CUNY since 1970 and Ibarely knew anyone outside my disciplineand what they did.” But thanks to theGene Center, “We have joint seminars indifferent areas,” including a presentationon how the brains of birds develop andfunction.

In December,Bargonetti chaired thecenter’s 19th annual con-ference, which focusedon genetics, race andhealth inequities. Shedeveloped the themewith graduate and upper-undergraduate studentswho looked at mitochon-drial DNA inheritanceand the notion of theAfrican Eve.

“We are all descen-dents of homo sapiensfrom Africa. This is a con-troversial finding that stillis not stressed, I think,because it is so hard forsome people to accept,”she said. “The concept ofrace, which creates suchdivision among all of us,was created prior to thescience of DNA and haslittle to do with it. Raceis a social construct, yetwhat does it mean whenblack people get more

aggressive cancers and are dying at agreater rate?”

Outside the Gene Center, Bargonettisaid, “I’m often the only brown-skinnedperson in the meeting. I can raise my handand I’m answered in a very simple manner.They don’t recognize my intellect.” ButHunter provides “the most diverse envi-ronment of stellar researchers in thenation. At any other place I would havechosen, I would have been one in a sea ofnon-brown faces.”

Dottin also leads a national network ofminority scientists (www.justgarciahill.org)that, among other things, played a key rolein helping those whose labs and researchprojects were wrecked by HurricaneKatrina.

When it comes to recruiting minoritiesinto science, he said of the Gene Centerand the network, “There’s still a lot morework to be done, but we’re making anational impact.”

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 3

and Broadcast. Students will also beoffered concentrations in urban,business/economics, health/medicine andarts/culture reporting.

The architectural plans for the newschool — 40,000 square feet on twofloors, including a radio and TV broadcastcenter, a news room, a small library withwireless access throughout for online lap-top work anytime, anyplace — reflect thenew journalistic landscape, as does thecurriculum, which includes a free-of-charge, student-written local news wireservice to supply community news outletscitywide, a reflection of the growingdemand for local coverage.

And to guide students, teachers andmedia professionals through the brave-new-media world, CUNY has hired JeffJarvis as director and designer of theschool’s Interactive Media program.

Jarvis came out of print journalism; hewas founder and managing editor ofEntertainment Weekly, a TV critic at Peoplemagazine and TV Guide, worked for theNew York Daily News and The SanFrancisco Examiner, and has consulted forThe New York Times. But as “the evangelistfor new media,” as Shepard dubs him,Jarvis has passionately advanced blogs,podcasts and online media as the new par-

adigm. Jarvis, a well-known blogger(buzzmachine.com), will teach at CUNYand will recruit students and faculty.

Shepard added, “We’re going to try toset up a Center for Interactive Journalism,we hope with foundation support.” Theproposed center would provide new-media education for professional journal-ists — “how to blog, all the new tech-niques ... how to take advantage of them.”

The ascendance of interactive media isnot without critics. Among their concerns:“Citizen journalists” venting into the blogos-phere are unbound by professional stan-dards, ethics and editing. For the new-mediamavens, the freedom and “democratization”of journalism is precisely the point.

“There’s a lot of heat about this,”Shepard acknowledged. “What will happenis a synthesis of the two worlds...the bestof traditional journalism, the values thestandards, journalistic ethics, the traditionsof reporting and writing, blended with thenew interactive media world, in whichreaders are now part of the conversationand contribute to the news product...”

The profession, said Shepard, will go“from a top-down one to...a new world, atwo-way street and a conversation deliv-ered where people want it, when theywant it and how they want it.”

Shepard cited the eyewitness accountsblogged from events such as HurricaneKatrina as an example of the contributionsthat — vetted by professional editors —can make journalism more thorough andinvolving.

With CUNY’s tuition set at a fraction ofthe cost of the state’s private graduate-leveljournalism programs, the new CUNYschool itself will make journalism trainingmore accessible to a more diverse, less mon-eyed student pool. More than 200 applica-tions have been received for 50 first-yearstudent slots; the master’s candidates willbe selected through a two-tier process —after the first round of culling, finalists willtake writing and current events tests and beinterviewed. “We’ll let the students know(if they’re accepted) by the first week ofApril,” said Shepard. “They’ll respond byMay and we’ll have our first class.”

Professor Robert P. Dottin is the director of Hunter College’s Centerfor the Study of Gene Structure and Function.

sion’s traditional values but embrace —and use — the new tools.

“CUNY,” he said, “will be on the cuttingedge of the changes in journalism.”

“You have no choice,” insisted the for-mer Business Week editor-in-chief, who isdeveloping the new graduate school’s pro-gram, hiring a core group of full-time fac-ulty as well as tapping established CUNYprofessors, and fielding student applica-tions for the incoming first class.

“What used to be the audience is nowpart of the conversation, of a two-wayinteraction between journalists and citi-zens, so the delivery of news has to changefrom being just print or just broadcast tomultimedia — interactive, with a lot ofhyperlinking to various other sites. Themedia forms are converging.”

Journalists, he said, have to learn tech-niques such as blogging, along with thenuts and bolts of reporting and writing,regardless of whether they end up pursu-ing traditional media careers or writing onthe Web. The new J-school’s incomingclasses will be required to take a first-semester “Fundamentals of New Media”course. And Interactive Media will be oneof three tracks the master’s degree candi-dates may choose to pursue for theirthree-semester program, along with Print

In CUNY’s 2006-2007 BudgetRequest, Chancellor Matthew Goldsteincalls on the state and city to change theapproach to funding higher education inNew York.

He wants officials to know how theUniversity is saving millions of dollars inproductivity initiatives, and raising hun-dreds of millions in donations fromalumni and others.

Hoping to keep tuition at reasonablelevels, he is also calling on the state andcity to fully fund “mandatory” costs,such as energy and labor contracts, andpay for a modest portion of the pro-grams in the Master Plan.

To help convey such a message —the Chancellor calls it the “Compact” —some institutions would have turned toan outside cutting-edge design house.But CUNY found talent in its students.

Under the guidance of ErnestoMalave, Vice Chancellor for Budget andFinance, three students from New YorkCity College of Technology — Yue Chen,Tzvetan Kostov and Urara Minakuchi —designed the covers of the 86-page reportand everything in between.

“We…brainstormed and came upwith the idea of a new perspective onthe city, on CUNY, which we tried tocapture in the cover photo,” recalledChen, who, like the other students, wasa communication design major in theDepartment of Advertising Design &Graphic Arts.

All the students have since complet-

ed their studies toward Bachelor ofTechnology degrees.

Their cover photo, shot from theBrooklyn Heights Promenade, shows adynamic, vibrant skyline, a city on themove.

Marrying design to words required thestudents to think quickly on their feet,finding solutions to design problems.They had to communicate their conceptsto their CUNY “clients” and meet realdeadlines. Along the way, the studentsconsulted with University budget officialsand graphic arts professors.

The Chancellor’s Compact, to whichthe former students were lending graph-ic enhancement, is being recognizednationally as a practical way of resolvingthe funding crisis confronting publichigher education in the U.S.

“This assignment fit in with thedepartment’s philosophy of taking onreal projects to serve the College andthe greater community,” said AdvertisingDesign & Graphic Arts Departmentchair Joel Mason. Mason said he wasconfident the recent graduates will havebright futures in their field.

Referring to the great service ren-dered by Yue, Kostov and Minakuchi —and to the singular opportunity given tothem — Chancellor Goldstein askedelected officials to “join our effort toensure that generations to come willfind the same opportunities that thesetalented students, and their predeces-sors, have found at the University.”

Student-designed cover of the University's 2006-2007 Budget Request.

d of New Media, Armed With Traditional Skills and Values

2 Million Grant for Cell Research

With Help From Students, ChancellorCalls for Funding ‘Compact’

“Hostos has been…well-known for theirconcerts and cultural activities.”

In an interview at the campus, wherehe has been teaching music for the pastyear and a half, Torres-Santos spoke aboutthe thrill of being in the Bronx and sharinghis passion for music.

A keyboardist who has afollowing in Europe, LatinAmerica and the Caribbean,Torres-Santos said Hostoswants to expand its offer-ings so that students can beexposed to the pleasures ofcreating and listening tomusic, even as they aremotivated to pursue studiesat a higher level. For exam-ple, Lehman College, thefour-year CUNY institutionin the Bronx, has an espe-cially strong music program that could bea destination for Hostos graduates, theprofessor said.

As an academic discipline, music sits ona high plain along with the study ofEnglish or foreign language, Torres-Santossaid. It is special because it communicatesin a way that spoken language is notequipped to do.

“Music is about a communication offeelings,” he said.

“It is that dimension that so much,somehow, touches the spiritual fiber inyou…It has been called the universal lan-

There are things occurring at HostosCommunity College that radiate farbeyond the walls of the institution, waftingacross land and sea like an airborne herald.

Even from his perch in San Juan,Puerto Rico years ago, composer andscholar Raymond Torres-Santos had heardabout Hostos.

“I have known Hostos for many years,particularly when I was chancellor at the

Puerto Rico Conservatory of

Music in theearly ’90s,” hesaid.

Hurricane Katrina: CNN’s JeffKoinange was there. The 2005 Iraq elec-tions: Jeff Koinange was there. The war onterror, an attempted coup in the IvoryCoast, the civil war in Liberia: Koinangewas there.

From 1987 to 1989, however, JeffKoinange was here — getting his associ-ate’s degree, and his start in broadcastjournalism, at CUNY’s KingsboroughCommunity College.

In fact, Kingsborough was the bridgebetween the Kenya native’s days as a PanAm World Airways flight attendant —where passengers often applauded theyoung man’s recitation of in-flight safetyannouncements — and the world of pro-fessional journalism.

“I would stand at First Class and recitethe announcements as if performing onstage, and the response was amazing,” saidKoinange (pronounced Ko-e-nong-ay).Passengers “time and again would tell me Iwas wasting my time being a flight atten-dant and that I should go out and ‘makesome real money’ with my voice. I guess Ihave to thank them for inspiring me to dowhat I’m doing now.”

At 21, Koinange quit the airline andheaded for the airwaves — at Kingsbor-ough. It was 1987. “I was new to the Statesin general and Brooklyn in particular, sothe closer the college was, the better,” hesaid. “It turned out to be one of the bestdecisions I ever made.…Kingsborough hada massive influence on my life.”

Having seen the world with Pan Amafter high school in Kenya, he was alreadymature and worldly, he said. But the two-year college in Manhattan Beach openednew doors.

To hear his professors tell it, Koinangewas a stellar student (valedictorian of hisclass of 1989), soccer star (KBCC’s teamwon the City Championship for the twoyears he was there and he was votedCUNY student-athlete of the year in1989) and peer leader who left a lastingimpression on the school’s staff before he

4 CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006

ered major news throughout Africa andthe Middle East, from the historic 2005elections in Iraq to the commemoration ofthe 10-year anniversary of the Rwandangenocide that slaughtered up to 1 millionpeople in 100 days. Previously CNN’sLagos bureau chief, Koinange now leadsCNN’s coverage of Africa.

The excitement of having the opportu-nity “to inform, entertain and educate theworld about a continent I’m passionateabout... to provide that insight, that littlebit of news that will leave an audiencemember saying ‘Wow’...” is never-endingfor Koinange. With his wife of seven years— “my greatest inspiration” — he saidhe hopes to someday raise a family inSouth Africa or in his hometown, Nairobi.

As for Kingsborough’s commencementin June, “I really look forward to speakingfrom the heart, just like I do with my sto-ries on CNN,” Koinange said.

were...unforget-table,” Koinangeadded. “They rein-forced my goals ofpursuing a careerin journalism,despite my‘English’ accent atthe time, despitethe fact that Ithought maybe Ididn’t stand achance of workingin the U.S.Professor Hesseassured me that Icould be anythingI wanted to be.”

ThoughKingsborough gavehim academic andprofessional toolsand plenty ofencouragement,Koinange alsocredits his earlyprimary and sec-ondary school edu-cation in Nairobi — mostly at “SaintMary’s, a Catholic school run by IrishHoly Ghost Fathers,” for ingraining “disci-pline and team spirit,” values critical to hissuccess. The school also provided him withinvaluable opportunities to perform, fromannual opera presentations to the school’sacting and debating clubs.

Those activities, said Koinange, “pre-pared me for what I do now, namelystanding in front of an audience withoutnervousness or ‘stage fright,’ though itdoes happen from time to time.”

Koinange began his news career in 1991as a desk assistant/off-air reporter for ABCNews in New York, followed by two yearsas a reporter and producer for MedicalNews Network. He produced for NBCNews in 1994, then for Reuters Televisionfrom 1995 to 2001, with expandingresponsibility for Africa coverage.

Then he joined CNN and has since cov-

moved on to New York University to earnhis B.A. in broadcast journalism. They lookforward to his return to Brooklyn June 12as KBCC’s 2006 commencement speaker.

Koinange is based in Johannesburg asCable News Network’s Africa Corres-pondent.

“Jeff was a wonderful young man, a real-ly outstanding student,” recalled MarilynChernin, an adjunct counselor at KBCCwho was dean of student life there in thelate 1980s. “He was captain of the soccerteam, business manager of the school paper,he was on the radio station, he was veryactive in student government, he was a peeradvisor. He was certainly a man for all sea-sons, as they say — a renaissance man.”

Kingsborough CommunicationsProfessor Cliff Hesse, who taughtKoinange and was one of his broadcastingmentors, remembered the fledgling jour-nalist as “a guy who really knew what lib-eral arts meant” and who deeply under-stood its value in helping him chart hisprofessional course.

Hesse, who directs the school’sBroadcast Technology and ManagementProgram, said Koinange got his broadcast-ing start at Kingsborough’s radio station,WKRB, 90.9 FM. “He was very, very inter-ested in that,” says Hesse. “You could sensehis natural ability. ... He knew the rightplace to be funny and the right place to beserious.”

He also stood out as a writer. Then asnow, Hesse said, Koinange’s reports reflect-ed his personal warmth, thoughtfulnessand worldly perspective.

“That’s what I love about his work now— the humanity he shows in writingabout people — not just the event, butwhat it means to people,” said Hesse.

Koinange has praise for his Kingsboroughmentors as well. “The best part aboutKingsborough was the attention the pro-fessors paid to individual students,whether in English class or Psychology101 or indeed Journalism, and even on thesports field,” he said.

“The TV classes with Professor Hesse

guage because of that, because it transmitsemotions.”

With the addition of Torres-Santos toits roster of professors in the Bronx,CUNY is developing a strong cadre of pro-fessional musicians in the borough.Providing an artistic counterbalance to

Torres-Santos, PulitzerPrize-winning composerJohn Corigliano teaches,for instance, at Lehman,where he recently estab-lished a scholarship in hisname for music students.

Torres-Santos was bornin Puerto Rico and studiedat the Puerto RicoConservatory of Musicand the University ofPuerto Rico, before goingon to graduate studies at

UCLA, where he earned his master’s andPh.D. degrees, in music composition andmusic theory. He is equally at home withclassical and popular music, having arrangedfor such well-known artists as PlácidoDomingo, Frank Sinatra and Julio Iglesias.

Asked which of his compositions ismost meaningful to him, Torres-Santossingled out “Millennium Symphony.” Inthat work, the maestro said, “I composed asymphony of four movements at thebeginning of the new millennium.”

He added, “What I wanted to reallyportray in this work was like a summary of

Hostos Professor Believes That Teaching is a Joyful Symphony

Among Jeff Koinange’s recent assignments was covering the devastationof Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans.

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Kingsborough Spawned Intrepid CNN Correspondent, Jeff Koinange

“I was one of thosebelieving that because

I had a Ph.D. in musicthat I was ready for

teaching…but [teaching is]an experience that changesday by day, and changesin terms of the groups and

mentalities that you getevery semester.”

what has been the life of mankind…par-ticularly the creation of the earth whenGod gave form to all this space.” Thefourth movement offers an aural glimpseof humankind as reflected in the explo-ration of “other planets.”

Notable about the composition is theuse of a choir singing ancient texts of theTaino Indians.

Torres-Santos is not exactly new toCUNY. Back in 2000 — the new millenni-um! — he was a visiting professor atHunter College. “I had a wonderful time,”he said. “I helped them to design somecourses, particularly in film music, thebusiness of music, and Latin Americanmusic that they did not have.”

At Hostos, he continues to grow as amusician and as a teacher, he said.

“I was one of those believing thatbecause I had a Ph.D. in music that I wasready for teaching,” he said. “But my expe-rience through this year is that, indeed, it’san experience that changes day by day,and changes in terms of the groups andmentalities that you get every semester.

“It should not be fixed, and you shouldbe able to explore, and it is that explo-ration which I really enjoy, through theprocess of changing, and being able to puttogether another panorama for the newstudent coming in.”

Teaching, he said, should be a “renewalof every professor, every semester,” and itshould be full of “enjoyment.”

ProfessorTorres-Santosteaching class.

The World of Fashion,Through Scholarly Eyes

Queens College’s Godwin-TernbachMuseum is hosting an exhibit thatexplores the fascinating world of fashion.It is titled “The Fabric of Cultures:Fashion, Identity, Globalization,” and itwill run through June 1.

The exhibit illuminates the globalinfluence of culture and ethnicity on fash-ion, and displays works of famous design-ers (Chanel, Pucci, St. Laurent) andemerging ones.

Throughout the spring there will bescholarly lectures, an interdisciplinary con-ference, and a fashion show, all tied to thetopic of fashion, and the public is invitedto attend free of charge.

The Godwin-Ternbach exhibit of morethan 30 garments and numerous otherfabrics represents a variety of global tradi-tions and aesthetics, from the past and thepresent. Through the medium of dress, theexhibit illuminates the interplay betweenculture and personal identity. It demon-strates how traditional dress is transformedand finds new life in the creations ofdesigners.

AS for the spring series of lectures andconferences, there is something for every-one interested in the fashion theme. Forexample, on April 26, from 10 a.m. to 4p.m., there will be a student symposium atthe museum, where CUNY doctoral stu-dents, Queens College students and othersworking on Ph.D. projects will presenttheir work. On May 2, between 5 p.m. and7 p.m., at LeFrak Concert Hall, there willbe a fashion show of traditional costumes,designed and modeled by individuals fromthe diverse communities of New York.

For further information, call QueensCollege’s Godwin-Ternbach Museum at(718) 997-4747.

Former Law Dean DonsJudicial Robe

As shedonned theblack robe ofSurrogateJudge, KristenBooth Glen wassurrounded bya host ofUniversity fac-ulty and admin-istrators whoshare with hera passion forpublic service.

The swearing-in of Glen, who hadserved for ten years as dean of CUNY LawSchool, was in fact a kind of group reaffir-mation of the school’s commitment toturning out public interest lawyers.

Benno C. Schmidt, the chairman of theCUNY Board of Trustees, summed up themeaning of Glen’s role as jurist to theUniversity community.

“Many of you know that Kris had aposter in her office at the CUNY LawSchool with a quote from an Alice Walkerpoem called ‘Remember,’” Schmidt said inprepared remarks.

“The lines on the poster read: ‘I am thewoman / offering two flowers / whose roots/ are twin / Justice and Hope / Hope andJustice.’ Few women, or men, could layclaim to those lines as wholly as Kris Glen.”

He added, “During her decade at theCUNY law school, all of her colleaguesknew her as someone who was unwaveringin her goal to advance access to justice …”

Among those attending the ceremony,held in early January at Borough ofManhattan Community College, wasInterim Dean Mary Lu Bilek.

Schmidt paid tribute to Bilek as someone

John Jay Accord HelpsDominican National Police

Under an agreement that was lauded bythe president of the Dominican Republic,John Jay College of Criminal Justice istraining Dominican police officials inmodern-day crime fighting.

“The goal,” according to Dr. LawrenceKobilinsky, a forensic professor and scienceadvisor to President Jeremy Travis of JohnJay, “is to create a system similar to theCompstat crime-mapping and analysisprogram that has been used extensively inthe United States.”

Compstat is the system of collectingand classifying crime data, with the goal ofshifting resources to areas where they aremost needed.

President Travis said: “Our faculty isuniquely qualified to provide expertise andassistance to this nation in its efforts notonly to educate and train their law enforce-ment leadership but also to improve andsolidify their criminal justice system.”

An agreement sealing the new relation-ship was signed by President Travis; Dr.Franklin Almeyda Rancier, the DominicanRepublic’s Secretary of the Interior andPolice; and Dr. Francisco Dominguez Brito,Attorney General of the DominicanRepublic.

The Dominican Republic’s President,Leonel Fernandez, said he was pleasedwith the development and declared the“professionalization of the National Policewill improve all aspects of criminal justicein the Dominican Republic.”

The agreement calls for the creation oftwo liaison offices that will serve as conduitsbetween the college and the DominicanRepublic, one at John Jay and the other inthe Dominican Republic. A criminal justiceinstitute will also be established in the coun-try’s Office of the Attorney General.

In addition, the government has pur-chased a building to house a new crimelaboratory. Following construction of thelab, John Jay will provide training for theDominican Republic’s crime analysts andforensic scientists. The laboratory willeventually have DNA-testing capabilities.

President Jeremy Travis (left) met withDominican Republic officials, includingMajor General Bernardo Santana Paez.

NOTEDAND QUOTED

Colin Powell Looks at CCNY and SeesReflections of Himself 50 Years Ago

As he winds down from his illustrious career ingovernment — shaping foreign policy for

two presidential administrations — Colin Powellwants to ensure that his beloved alma mater, TheCity College of New York, trains coming genera-tions of public policy specialists.

The former U.S. Secretary of State said onABC television recently he will “raise money forthe Colin Powell Center, focusing not just on

conferences — we’lldo that — but reallyfocusing on the stu-dents themselves andpreparing them forleadership roles in thefuture…”

The Center isdesigned to cultivatelinks between CCNYand the applied worldsof politics and policy-making. Its programsprovide uniqueresources to the col-lege’s students, whilealso supporting facultyresearch and discussion

of foreign policy issues.In the ABC interview with George Stephanopoulos, Powell described a recent visit

to City College, where he met with a dozen Powell Center Fellows. He said the stu-dents reminded him of himself there half a century ago. He graduated from CCNYin 1958 at the top of his ROTC class and later went on to duty in Vietnam, wherehe was wounded and received the Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Speaking of his visit to the campus, Powell said, “I saw myself 50 years earlier, animmigrant kid, or the son of immigrants.” He added, “[T]hat this great public institu-tion is still taking in the poor, those who can’t go to other institutions, and givingthem a great education, that’s what I want to be a part of.”

Powell’s family emigrated from the Caribbean island of Jamaica.After his service in Vietnam, Powell became a White House Fellow and then was

appointed to ever-increasing positions of responsibility having to do with internation-al affairs. He served President George H.W. Bush as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs ofStaff, and more recently was Secretary of State under President George W. Bush.Powell retired from government service last year.

It was announced recently that the Powell Center and Yale University’s UnitedNations History Project will jointly create a record of selected official papers of UNSecretary-General Kofi Annan.

The project will officially begin when the Secretary-General completes his secondterm, December 31, 2006.

were supporting would greatly help thecollege, which has ambitious plans forgrowth. Describing a bright future, sheticked off coming initiatives such as theconstruction of residence halls and a newMacromolecular Assemblies lab.

Students were present also andexplained how their own scholarships hadhelped them, in some cases making thedifference between attending and notattending college.

with a long history at the law school, who“has played a major role in the school’sgrowth, especially through faculty hiringand the development of the curriculum, andin maintaining its core mission of preparinglawyers to work in the public interest.”

Staten Island Alumni Give$50,000 to Their College

The Alumni Association of the Collegeof Staten Island decided to do more thantalk about good things that might happenat their alma mater.

They decided to make those good thingshappen, and they came up with the moneyto assure that their wishes come true.

As alumna and CUNY Board of Trusteesmember Kathleen M. Pesile stood withthem, officers of the association handedover a check, in the amount of $50,000,that will be used for academic scholarships.

The money will be offered to deservingstudents beginning in the 2006-2007 aca-demic year, and will be available in theyears after that, as well.

The check, made out to the Collegeof Staten Island Alumni AssociationScholarship Endowment, was presented atthe home of President Marlene Springer.

The presentation was officially madeby: Pesile, an advisory board member ofthe Alumni Association; Richard Prinzi,President of the Association; and LouiseBrinskelle, Treasurer.

During the evening, President Springertold the donors that the scholarships they

Left to right, College of Staten Island President Marlene Springer, Richard Prinzi, President ofthe CSI alumni association, and CUNY Trustee and CSI alumna Kathleen M. Pesile.

Ret. Gen. Colin Powellsays he will do all hecan to help his almamatter, City College.At right is City’sShepard Hall, withstatue of Civil WarGen. Alexander S.Webb, president ofthe college from 1869to 1902.

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CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 5

he spent with the great stars of the historydepartment, especially the late Arthur C.Cole, author of The Irrepressible Conflict,about the Civil War.

“I think he [Cole] retired about 1956,about the same time John Hope Franklincame in,” said Trefusse, speaking of thefamous 81-year-old black historian,Franklin, the author of the recently pub-lished autobiography Mirror to America.

Trefusse isno slouchhimself whenit comes tohaving his

name on books. “I’vewritten some 17 books,some of them ‘non-books,’ that is, merelyedited by me. But I

wrote ten or eleven all on my own.”Trefousse retired in 1998 but is still

teaching history at Brooklyn College in theInstitute for Retirees in Pursuit of Educa-tion, or IRPE program. He also works in asimilar program with retirees at the Collegeof Staten Island. And all the time he’swriting books.

“Last year I published a book, FirstAmong Equals, which is subtitled:Abraham Lincoln’s Reputation During HisAdministration and deals with the contem-

porary perceptions of Abraham Lincolnwhile Lincoln was in office,” Trefusse saidabout his latest work, published byFordham University Press.

A 1942 graduate of City College,Trefusse is in the midst of research on yetanother tome, this one about the dispatch-es filed from abroad by American diplo-mats during wartime.

When the conversation turned to tech-nology, Trefusse said, “I haven’t quitecaught up with the twenty-first centuryyet. I have a special name for my com-puter. I call it ‘misery.’ …But if you pub-lish today you have to do that, use acomputer, because you have to sendeverything in a disk. You can’t write ontypewriters anymore. They’re as gone asthe horse and buggy.”

The ’60s Were a High Point“It’s quite a shock to realize how long

I’ve been there,” said Mary Rita Donleavy,who joined Hunter College as a secretaryin 1940 and landed a teaching job atHunter’s then-Bronx campus on July 1,1948 — it later became Lehman College— after earning her Hunter B.A. Her field

was education. Her Ph.D. in educationaladministration came from Fordham in 1964.

Today, Donleavy, who officially retiredfrom full-time teaching at Lehman in1969, is still an adjunct there. This semes-ter, she is teaching a research-orientedcourse for teachers.

And while she splits her time betweenher Yonkers residence and her home inCounty Wicklow, Ireland, Donleavy —who turns 83 in March — is still excitedby her work. “I’ve been rooted in the CityUniversity,” she said. “We have a commonhistory.”

The high point of her professional life,she said, was “the ’60s — when the stu-dents were in revolt” and she was Lehman’s

formance at Queens College. That led toauditions for the Queens College FacultyString Quartet, and a job teaching “musicappreciation and all the instruments forthe education majors.”

“We played together many years,” hesaid of the string group. “We gave courseson the quartets of Beethoven. We wouldanalyze the quartets, and give a history ofthe quartets.”

Recalling those days, he said, “Thebuildings were smaller. We had those armyshacks...barracks...That’s where the MusicDepartment was.” The passing of time hasbrought expansion and beauty, he said,noting that the music building today is the“beautiful Lefrak Hall.”

Though he retired in 1990, Kouguell isnow Adjunct Professor at Queens’ AaronCopland School of Music, teaching cham-ber music. “I’m still able to carry the celloand perform.”

The rewards of his 56-year connectionwith Queens College have been great, theprofessor said, adding, “I’m very proud ofthe institution, and especially proud of theMusic Department, which is a realjewel.…It has a wonderful reputation allover the country.”

Of his students, he confided, “I feel likea great-grandfather.”

Wistful About the PastQueens College psychology professor

Wilma Winnick admitted to feeling wistfulas she prepared to put in her retirementpapers in February.

Yet Winnick, who taught her first classin Queens the summer of 1946 — “a won-derful class, World War II soldiers who hadjust come back and were picking up theirGI credits” — isn’t quite giving it all up. “Iwill be teaching my first semester ofretirement,” she declared. “It’s a compro-mise, teaching a single class rather thantwo or three.” And that’ll leave time forher weekly tennis matches.

At 82, Winnick specializes in the exper-imental psychology of learning and memo-ry. She also served as Queens’ PsychologyDepartment chair, from 1992 to 1995. “Itaught straight through, except for two

fellowshipleaves andtwo materni-ty leaves,”she noted.The high-

light of her professionallife: “when (Queens)began to be associatedwith CUNY and began toteach graduate courses(during the 1970s). Thatwas a thrilling experience.”

Adjusting to a Computer WorldIn 1947, Hans Trefusse was just a cou-

ple of years out of the army and the inter-national trauma of World War II. He waspursuing his love of Civil War history as agraduate student at Columbia University,and began teaching a course that year atBrooklyn College.

It was a love affair, between him andthe college, that was to last more than halfa century. Appointed as a full-time facultymember in 1950, he cherished the time

The memories span more than a half-century: A psychology class with youngmen picking up their lives after World WarII. White-gloved deans’ wives pouring tea.Student protests of the 1960s. The excite-ment and tragedy of Tiananmen Square.

It was the 1940s, the ’60s, the ’80s, butfor a handful of CUNY professors, thelong-ago highlights of their professionallives seem like yesterday. Now mostly intheir 80s, they joined Hunter, Queens, Cityand Brooklyn Colleges during the 1940s,well before the University’s emergence asthe 19-campus institution it is today.

And while some of these longest-serv-ing CUNY professors have put in theirretirement papers and struggle with physi-cal limitations, they remain connected toand energized by their colleges — teachingand researching and still engaged in theplace that has been their home away fromhome, the academy.

From All-Women to Co-edProfessor Grace Horowitz is not over-

whelmed when she reflects on her 60years at Hunter College. “You take them ayear at a time,” she said. “You don’t noticeyou’re getting older. From consideringyourself a young member you eventuallyconsider yourself middle-aged. And thenyou find you’re quite senior.”

She continued, “We just had party forme the other day. I just hit 80, not a thingI’m happy about.” But she is happy abouther continuing relationship with the col-lege where she started as a fellow in 1946.

Horowitz’ specialties are 17th centuryEnglish literature, primarily Shakespeareand Milton. She still teaches Introductionto Literature and, in the summer, a classfocusing on British literary humorists suchas Bernard Shaw and Oscar Wilde.

“I find teaching a lot of fun, or else Iwouldn’t be doing it all this time,” she said.

There have been some changes atHunter, of course. “When I tell studentsthis was a women’s college, they find itvery hard to believe,” Horowitz said. “Theslightly prim ‘teacher’s college’ for ladieshas now turned into part of CUNY, with abasketball team and everything.”

Because of her arthritis, Horowitzdepends on Access-a-Ride to transport herfrom herhome inQueens tothe Man-hattan cam-pus andback. “I usea walker andthe result isstudents areextraordi-narily kindand solici-tous of me,alwaysmoving chairs and opening doors,” she said.

Years Brought ExpansionCUNY has also been congenial,

comfortable and exciting for Russian-born,Beirut- and Paris-educated cellistAlexander Kouguell. Originally, Kouguellhad come here from Lebanon with plansto study comparative literature atColumbia. “I found out I was really moreinterested in music,” the 85-year-oldrecalled. “I’ve devoted my life to music,and especially the cello.”

He had been in this country only threeyears, and was playing with the BaltimoreSymphony, when in 1949 he was invitedto substitute for another cellist in a per-

Professor Grace Horowitz

Professor Mary Rita Donleavy

Professor Alexander Kouguell

6 CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006

They’ve Taught at Our Colleges Since the 1940s and They

Professor Claire Kaplan

This photo was taken at the Bronx Campus of Hunter College (now Lehman College) on March 25, 1946 (the year some of our "Longest-Serving Professors" began teaching). On the day the photo wastaken, the campus hosted the first meetings of the UN Security Council. The flags of the original 51 members of the United Nations were raised on flagpoles planted in the grass along the inner rim of thecircular driveway separating the Gym Building from Student Hall (now renovated as the Music Building). From March to August of '46, the Security Council met in the Gym Building.

y

1946 (the year some of our "Longest-Serving Professors" began teaching). On the day the photo wasmembers of the United Nations were raised on flagpoles planted in the grass along the inner rim of thelding). From March to August of '46, the Security Council met in the Gym Building.

charge of such a vast collection of real estate thatcontains buildings that have been done with somuch care and have made history for all of us.”

City College,Where It All Began

A rich commission and priceless prestige wereat stake in 1897 as the College of the City ofNew York invited eight leading architects to com-pete for the prize of designing the first building atits new uptown campus. Some had designed glo-rious buildings like Carnegie Hall and theMetropolitan Opera House, others the new NYUand Columbia campuses, leaving George BrownePost with a dilemma.

Should he go with the classic-revival/BeauxArts style so praised in his pavilion at the 1893Chicago Exposition? Or should he heed therumor that competition jurors would like toevoke the great medieval universities atCambridge and Oxford?

Post submitted two designs. One was a classicof continuous arches surmounted, in its sevenmiddle bays, by a podium suitable for a Romanemperor to address his subjects. The other was aGothic confection with towers, turrets, peaked

roofs, gables, dormers, cornices and,of course, gargoyles where thehunchback of Notre Dame wouldhave felt at home.

The jurors jumped for Gothic, andconstruction began in 1903. To savemoney, Post used the sparkling, darkgray stone excavated on site, knownas Manhattan schist. For variety, he

designed perhaps 75,000 decorations for the fivebuildings, from flowers to curlicues to grotesquefigures depicting the educational objectives ofeach building. Fashioned of white terra-cotta(glazed, kiln-fired clay), they were built into thewall and used interchangeably with the stone.

Although an aesthetic triumph, the Gothictower (now named Shepard Hall) and the otherbuildings were doomed to structural decay. Mostof the façades were bearing walls, not stoneveneers supported by steel frames, and terra-cottawas too brittle to resist the natural movement inthe schist, especially in the central tower. Within30 years, the freeze-thaw cycle had cracked theterra-cotta, allowing rainwater to further damagethe structure.

Flash forward to 1986, when the tower was indanger of collapse. Enter Carl Stein of SteinWhite Nelligan Architects of Manhattan, whobegan a preservation project at Shepard Hall thatis not yet finished. “The first challenge was to seeif there was a way to rebuild the tower, includingreplacing all of the terra-cotta,” at least 13,000

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

By Neill S. Rosenfeld

IMAGINE the sadness of agargoyle watching its build-ing decay. Imagine the

lamentations that 600 gargoylesand other grotesques couldraise; surely their cries couldmelt stone.

Now, following years of restoration, these terracotta figures at City College must be rejoicing.The last of the five original Gothic structures isnearing repair. Meanwhile, the first of severalnew buildings sure to sparkle with 21st centurysophistication is rising nearby.

Historic preservation and architectural innova-tion on a hill in Harlem are but two shiningexamples of the $7.5 billion renaissance emergingat the campuses of the City University. Fueled bystate, city and, increasingly, private philanthropicresources, the blueprints and renderings of adecade ago are yielding bold new interpretationsof the “urban campus” ideal.

In some cases the University is caring for thearchitectural treasures of the past. In otherinstances, it is designing and erecting what maywell be the architectural treasures of thefuture. Together, the mix of old stone andthe new glass — dovetailing endeavors,tradition and innovation— aremetaphors for the intellectual life andlearning on the campuses they serve.

And just in time: these new facilitiesare arriving at a moment of greatneed. CUNY enrollment hasjumped to levels not seen inthree decades, to nearly225,000 degree-students.Another 200,000 nontradi-tional students enroll in con-

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 7

A R C H I T E C T U R A L

JANUStinuing education programs, a ten-fold increase in the past decade.

Higher academic standards havefueled a demand for better laborato-ries, more research facilities, newtechnology and smart classrooms. Arange of new buildings— libraries,daycare centers, affordable perform-ing arts centers and modern athleticfacilities—are at their disposal.

Academic functionality is at thecore of these structures. But goodbuildings— and great campuses—are also good neighbors. Since 1993,more than 80 new or restored build-ings (some completed, others in con-struction or design) are enhancingand reviving neighborhoods, helpingto reinvent cityscapes from Jamaicato Flatbush, from GroundZero to the Upper EastSide and across all fiveboroughs.

“Thomas Jeffersonbelieved strongly that thearchitecture of a universi-ty, by its very nature,could teach,” says RichardP. Dober of Dober,Lidsky, Craig andAssociates, an internation-ally known campus andfacility planning firm inBelmont, Mass. A

Brooklyn College grad-uate who praised thehistoric preservationand modernizationof that campus’slibrary as well as its

future building plans,he adds, “The commitment of a public institu-

tion like City University to engage in this activityis an important part of education. Students leavewith some regard for their heritage, and that mayhave some spillover onto the lives they lead.”

A great deal of the credit for CUNY’s archi-tectural renaissance belongs to architect

Emma Macari, who signed on as vice chan-cellor for facilities, planning and construc-

tion mangement in 1993. Back then, thestate had stalled construction funds for

two years. Albany wanted more plan-ning and a guiding vision. Now,Macari says, “We’re in the third year

of a five-year, $2.5 billion capital pro-gram.” A lot of it is targeted toward cut-

ting-edge science facilities, but $600 mil-lion is for primarily instructional build-ings at community colleges.Because it can take 10 or 12 years

between conceiving of a building and open-ing its doors to students, CUNY phases inbudget requests to reflect only work thatcan be done in a given time period.State- bonded University capital projectsare executed by the DormitoryAuthority of the State of New York.

Macari says that the responsibility forpreservation and new construction “keeps

me awake at night. When projects comeout beautifully, it’s awesome. One of the

dreams that any architect would have is to be in

CUNY Preserves the Past,Builds for the Future

Continued on next page

From bottom leftto right ascend-ing: WeatheredgargoyleembracesShepard Hall,City College;scale model ofproposed aca-demic andmixed-useddevelopment,New York CityCollege ofTechnology;Vertical Campusand “napkin”schematic,Baruch College;StudentServices/BusinessSchool, MedgarEvers College;restored gargoyle,City College.

pieces of it, he says. After ayear of research, Stein choseglass fiber reinforced con-crete, which is strong, easilyshaped and extremely weath-er resistant. Specifying fourshades of white for variety, hesent off surviving decorationsand photographs for repro-duction, which involved con-siderable hand work byskilled artisans. It is thelargest terra-cotta replace-ment project in history.

Post had used a stiff, con-temporary mortar, “whichdidn’t have any allowance forlarge-scale thermal move-ment,” Stein says. Instead, hebolted decorative elementsindividually onto steel chan-nels. “Since each piece is sep-arately supported, we canhave soft joints [like caulking] aroundeach, so the building can move.”

And if, say, in 100 years repairs are need-ed, the cladding can be removed withoutcompromising the building’s strength orweather integrity.

“Sometimes the question comes upwhether it was worth putting all thismoney into Shepard, but it was the firstbuilding built for public higher educationin New York and its symbolism is pro-foundly important. In talking to olderalumni and to students at City— I taughtat the School of Architecture there aboutfive years — I have a clear sense thatShepard and the Great Hall are places thatshow commitment to public education,and that society thinks it’s importantenough to make a place that obviously isvery special.

“I think the campus looks wonderful,”Stein says. “Shepard looks like a spectacu-lar, proud matriarch.”

* * *If Shepard Hall is the proud matriarch

of City College’s North Campus, threenew buildings slated for the SouthCampus are sure to be the party girls.

Crews are constructing the $67 millionSchool of Architecture, Urban Design andLandscape Architecture. Celebrated archi-tect Rafael Viñoly recycled the college’sugly former library, later called the “Y”building. That ponderous mass of concreteand glass block from the 1950s last houseda hodge-podge of administrative offices.Says Vice Chancellor Macari: “I had myeyes on that building because it could besuccessfully gutted; it had good bones.”

Viñoly crafted a glittering 130,000-square-foot space.The architecture school, now inShepard Hall (which was never designed forit), expects to move in the fall of 2008.

Fifty paces due south, plans call for twonew science buildings separated by a lushgreen commons. One will provide top-notch laboratories for City College.

The other will be the Advanced ScienceResearch Center, where researchers fromacross CUNY will share ultra-sophisticatedinstruments, special facilities and controlledenvironments — equipment and settingsfar too costly to have built on more thanone campus. According to ChancellorMatthew Goldstein’s vision, prominent sci-entists will work there for the duration oftheir projects, then return to their home

bases, opening space for other scientists.The architects have echoed the native

schist used in the Gothic quadrangle in thebases of the new buildings. “The base, theplinth, is beautiful. Above it is five storiesof glass. It’s a very elegant building,” Macarisays. Construction will start in the summerof 2007, with occupancy two years later.

Back to the Future at BronxCommunity College

Rome has only one Pantheon. BronxCommunity College has two.

The Gould Memorial Library, designedby the 19th century’s premier architect,Stanford White, echoes the temple to allthe gods that has graced Rome for 19 cen-turies. Outside it displays the same artfulgeometry. At its portal, as at the Pan-theon’s, stand great bronze doors; dedicat-ed in 1921 by peers who chose Gould asWhite’s memorial, they depict themes inhis life. Inside, Tiffany windows and a cof-fered dome supported by 16 columns ofrare, green marble from Connemara,Ireland, inspire hushed reverence. The cityLandmarks Preservation Commissioncalled the interior “one of the supremeexamples of interior design in America.”

White’s second pantheon — an architec-tural hymn to home-grown gods — is theHall of Fame for Great Americans, a colon-nade with bronze busts that curves behindthe library. It celebrates citizens from PatrickHenry to Alexander Graham Bell, fromSusan B.Anthony to Harriet Beecher Stowe,from George Washington to Booker T.Washington to George Washington Carver.

Flanking Gould (no longer a library) areWhite’s Language and Philosophy Halls.Clad in yellow Roman brick and trimmedwith limestone and terra-cotta, they framethe west end of White’s quadrangle. Theyand the Hall of Fame are city landmarksand are on the State and National Registersof Historic Places. All were commissionedby New York University Chancellor HenryMacCracken, who moved his undergradu-ate college from industrial Washington

Square to Bronx farmland. There, he said,students could “enjoy the country environ-ment, yet be able to study close at handthe great city.”

NYU moved after merger talks with thecity’s other private university, ColumbiaCollege, collapsed and Columbia had hiredWhite’s partner, Charles Follen McKim, todesign a new campus at 116th Street.“There was a respectful working relation-ship, more so than competition, betweenWhite and McKim, as both were pushingthe envelope of campus design simultane-ously,” says Manhattan preservation archi-tect Lisa Easton.

Still, it’s hard not to read competitioninto a letter that White wrote toMacCracken about the Connemaracolumns and McKim’s more grandioseLow Library: “This is the marble theyendeavored to use in Columbia, but whichhad to be abandoned because it wasimpossible to get the marble in so largediameter. It is the most beautiful greenmarble in the world, and it would be agreat thing to use it after having had togive it up in Columbia.”

Sadly, Gould’s lower-level auditoriumwas firebombed in 1969 during a studentprotest against the Vietnam War; NYUmade repairs. By then NYU faced financialdisaster, partly due to the protests. In 1973it sold the campus to CUNY for $61 mil-lion, providing a home for BronxCommunity College.

Although it had scant money for preser-vation, the University was able to restoreGould’s auditorium, its rotunda and theHall of Fame in the 1990s. In 2004, BCCsecured a $238,000 planning grant fromthe Getty Foundation, one of the largest inGetty’s so-far $7 million drive to protecthistoric architecture at some 60 colleges

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 8

The sixteen

Corinthian

columns of the

Gould Memorial

Library are

made of “the

most beautiful

green marble in

the world… ”Stanford White

1894

ARCHITECTURAL

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Clockwise from above:Restored stained glass,Great Hall, CityCollege; one of ninety-eight bronze busts,Hall of Fame of GreatAmericans, BronxCommunity College;entrance, formerChildren’sCourthouse, BaruchCollege Newman RealEstate Institute; detail,restored WPA mural,and interior,LaGuardia Library,Brooklyn College;original 1894Stanford White sketchand interior oculusand dome, GouldMemorial Library,Bronx CommunityCollege; interior,former courtroom,Newman Institute;swimming pool,APEX, LehmanCollege.

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 9

Because of her “notable contributions to theadvancement of the profession of architecture,” ajury of her peers at the American Institute of

Architects has elected CUNY Vice Chancellor EmmaEspino Macari to its College of Fellows, its most accom-plished group of members.

In charge of facilities planning, construction and manage-ment since September 1993, Macari has stamped CUNYwith her vision – a vision that has resulted in some of theworld's best architects putting pen to paper in theUniversity's service.

She has used her canny political and budgetary skills tocreate and manage CUNY's capital program.When shearrived, the state had zeroed out funding requests for twoyears. It's estimated that $7.5 billion will have been expend-ed on planning, designing and construction during Macari'stenure, including the current $2.5 billion capital construc-tion program.

“It can take 10 or 12 years for buildings to be designedand built,” she says. “So the [building] rebirth at CUNY hasbeen a long time in coming.”

The first thing she did was find money off-budget to hirea planning team. Next, she ordered a physical assessment ofevery CUNY building.Then she started helping collegesdevelop or update master plans. “Academics drives facilities,”she says.

Macari started architecture school in her native Cuba.She finished it at the University of Florida in Gainesville and

did graduate work in environ-mental design at the Universityof Wisconsin-Madison. In 1976,after nine years of private prac-tice in the design and construc-tion of public, institutional andcommercial projects, she joinedthe university at Madison as,successively, staff architect, assis-tant director for architectureand engineering, and universityarchitect.

In 1991 the University ofFlorida asked her to transform its drab campus in Tampa.But after two years, the strain of commuting to and fromMadison, where her husband, Hanque Macari, taught archi-tecture, had gotten to her.Then CUNY offered a dream job.Independently, her husband landed a teaching post at CityCollege's architecture school.

Nothing escapes her attention. Small picture:While reno-vating City College’s Great Hall, she installed an elegantlimestone floor to cover the original concrete slab. Big pic-ture: She brainstormed with then-Baruch College PresidentMatthew Goldstein, now the chancellor, and architectWilliam Pedersen of Kohn Pedersen Fox, to help create theaward-winning Vertical Campus.

One day, she predicts, it will be designated a landmark.Completed in 2002, the Vertical Campus, with its distinc-

tive curved tower, provides 40 percent ofBaruch's floor space. Sunlight splashesthrough diagonally stacked, four-storyatria, offering separate “campuses” for theSchool of Business, the School of Arts andSciences and the shared amenities.Students and faculty gather in the atria asthey would on grassy quadrangles.

Where appropriate, Macari also fosterspublic-private partnerships.A firm thatbuilds and runs dormitories is erecting astudent residence at City College; shemade sure its exterior harmonizes with

neighboring apartments. In downtown Brooklyn, New YorkCity College of Technology will get new classrooms and lab-oratories in the lower floors of a mixed-use, high rise devel-opment.

Macari says she loves her job. “We define our projectsvery well and architects apply for them.”Although she relieson them for inspiration — Pedersen famously first sketchedthe Vertical Campus on a napkin — she and her team aren'tshy about “directing architects if they are going astray.”

She recalls working with David Childs, architect of theWorld Trade Center's Freedom Tower, on an upcomingbuilding for John Jay College. “So here was little old metelling David Childs how our building needs to be brokenup. Imagine.”

Actually, that's not hard to imagine at all.

nationwide. Planning is essential, says foun-dation director Deborah Marrow, becauseimplementation won’t succeed unless it’swell planned.

Architect Easton says the “oculus,” orskylight that White had placed at thedome’s center “is the most important fea-ture to recapture.” At some point NYUreplaced it with a plaster disk supporting16 industrial lights. “The skylight enclosureis still there. The steel is in excellent shape,although the wood will need rehabilita-tion.” NYU also covered a second oculuson the floor, which had lit the auditoriumbelow. “It also would be wonderful to openthe floor oculus, but that’s a design prob-lem for the next phase.”

With the planning study completed inJanuary, BCC will seek funding for whatcollege President Carolyn Williams calls“the comprehensive and authoritativepreservation and restoration of the com-plex to its original grandeur. For our stu-dents, these buildings are everyday visualreminders of the importance and traditionof higher education in an increasingly com-plex world.”

* * *More than 100 years after Stanford White

laid out the campus,Vice Chancellor Macarihas selected an architect to complete his con-ception with a new library and computer cen-

campus.” He was recently hired to designan education building there.

Stern also has worked at StanfordUniversity, designing the five-story BillGates Computer Science Building, whoseoverhanging red-tile roof and casementwindows reflect the old quadrangle’s look.

“He will be contemporary, but veryrespectful of proportions and continuity ofarchitecture,” Macari says. “I can’t wait tosee what he will dream up for us.”

FDR’s Home Morphs intoHunter Institute

The stately neo-Georgian town-house at 47-49 East 65th Street,

Manhattan, has known joy,tragedy and triumph, and afteran upcoming makeover, it issure to gain prominence asHunter College’s new PublicPolicy Institute, which willseek solutions to vexing socialproblems.

Sara Roosevelt built thesemirror-image houses with a

single façade and entrance in1908. She lived in 47. Her son,

Franklin, and daughter-in-law,Eleanor, occupied 49, moving in

three years after their marriage. Itbecame a city landmark in 1973 and

joined the National Register of HistoricPlaces in 1980.

There Eleanor bore two of their six chil-dren, one of whom died in infancy.There, in1921, FDR recuperated from polio, whichleft him unable to walk.There FDR, thengovernor of New York, celebrated the first ofhis four elections as president.

There Eleanor launched her own politicalwork.This champion of the civil rights ofblack Americans would fight for humanrights for all downtrodden people — a goalshe made international as chair of the com-mission that wrote the Universal Declarationof Human Rights, which the nascent UnitedNations adopted without dissent in 1948.

And there, historian Deborah S. Gardner,special adviser to Hunter’s president andprovost, writes in an unpublished study, Sararaised funds for black colleges “during an erawhen few Americans would have hadAfrican-American guests in their homes.

“Sara welcomed Mary McLeod Bethune…whose parents were slaves, but whowould become a national leader for African-American rights.” From then on, Bethunerecalled,“ ‘our friendship became one of the

ter on the long north side,which now is a parking lot.

Robert A.M. Stern, dean ofYale’s School of Architecture,has built projects as diverse asDisney hotels in Florida, Tokyo and Paris,the glitzy Hobby Center for PerformingArts in Houston and the Brooklyn LawSchool tower.

Macari says Stern sees the BCC project“as the challenge of his life, to design in thecontext of White and Marcel Breuer,” amodernist who designed several buildingsfor NYU between 1956 and 1961.

A challenge, indeed — trying to harmo-nize with both the lyrical White and thehere-brutish Breuer, whose material ofchoice was concrete. His forbidding sciencebuilding (“He didn’t do a good job thereand everybody dislikes it,” Macari says)dominates the quad’s south side. Breuer isperhaps best known locally for hisWhitney Museum of American Art and hiseponymous chairs.

Referring to Stern’s Darden GraduateSchool of Business at the University ofVirginia, done in the 1990s and inspired bythe adjoining campus designed by ThomasJefferson (which, in turn, was inspired bythe 16th century Italian Andrea Palladio),Macari says: “Everybody loves it; it’s verymuch in keeping with the form of the

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

From left: Vice Chancellor Macari,Eduardo del Valle, director of design con-struction and management; and MeghanMoore-Wilk, director of space planningand capital budget.

CUNY’s Top Architect Wins Top Honor

Continued on next page

Counter-clockwise fromleft: College of StatenIsland; 1915 stainedglass detail, lightfixture and oak ceiling,and exterior concretefloret, former Children’sCourthouse, NewmanInstitute, BaruchCollege.

This photo was taken at the Bronx Campus of Hunter College (now Lehman College) on March 25, 1946 (the year some of our "Longest-Serving Professors" began teaching). On the day the photo wastaken, the campus hosted the first meetings of the UN Security Council. The flags of the original 51 members of the United Nations were raised on flagpoles planted in the grass along the inner rim of thecircular driveway separating the Gym Building from Student Hall (now renovated as the Music Building). From March to August of '46, the Security Council met in the Gym Building.

CUNY’sLandmarks and HistoricDistricts

1857 Day CareCenter, formerly

St. Monica’sChurch,

York College

1897 GouldMemorial Library,Bronx CommunityCollege

1902 North CampusQuadrangle,

City College

1905 B. Altman &Co. DepartmentStore, GraduateCenter

1907 Sara DelanoRoosevelt House,Hunter College

1910 LouisArmstrong House,Queens College

1912 ThomasHunter Hall,*Hunter College

1935 BrooklynCollege Campus *

1938 NorthBuilding,*

Hunter College

1956 Begrisch Hall,Bronx CommunityCollege

1987 Bedford Hall,*Medgar EversCollege

Dates denote construction start * Buildings within historic

districts

Sources: City, state and federalagencies as compiled by the colleges.

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Above: SaraDelano RooseveltHouse, HunterCollege; PresidentFranklinRoosevelt leavinghis home, circa1933.

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 10

It was the Great Depression. BrooklynCollege, founded in 1930 with the merger ofthe Brooklyn branches of Hunter College (forwomen) and City College (for men), wasjammed into five rented buildings in the con-gested Borough Hall area. (A student poetwrote: “Oh, Brooklyn College, thou art loveli-est seen/In gentle springtime, when trafficlights are green.”)

One day, without appointment or commis-sion, architect Randolph Evans knocked onPresident William Boylan’s door and spreadout plans for a new campus.

In better times, Evans had designed single-family homes. Now he worked for the Wood-Harmon Corp., which owned a small golfcourse and football field in central Brooklyn.He sketched the plans because he had “littleelse to do,” the college Web site says. Could ithave been that Wood-Harmon was desperatefor more than the few weeks’ rent it got byletting the Barnum and Bailey Circus use thetract as a staging area each year?

The next day Evans drove the delightedBoylan to walk the land. They agreed that theGeorgian style that Thomas Jefferson hadused at the University of Virginia would bet-ter suit the then-rural area than City College’scollegiate Gothic style.

In December 1934, the city, led by MayorLaGuardia, bought the property for $1.6 mil-lion (the 2005 equivalent of $23.2 million —a nice pay day for Evans’ employer). The fed-eral Public Works Administration allocated $5million for construction a month later.

When President Franklin D. Roosevelt laidthe cornerstone of the gymnasium (nowRoosevelt Hall) a year later, he joked to anaudience of 7,000, “Every time the Mayor ofNew York comes to Washington I tremble,because it means he wants something, and healmost always gets it.” Then he turned serious.“This project is killing two birds with onestone. It is not only putting to work thousandsof people who need work, but it also isimproving educational facilities now and forgenerations to come.”

But by the early 1990s, the library was outof space and inhospitable to students and thecollection.

Chief librarian Barbra Buckner Higgin-botham and her library colleagues workedwith the college community to secure a newbuilding as the top construction priority inthe 1995 master plan.

Architect Alexander Howe, of Boston’sShepley Bulfinch Richardson and Abbott, hadto first solve the problem of the “stack core,” amass of brick and limestone built to bear theweight of a million books. Students neverentered its narrow aisles, but staff did toretrieve requested volumes. “It was prohibi-tively expensive to remove,” Howe says, “butit was dead center in terms of access” fromthe 1959 addition, which had become thelibrary’s ungainly entrance.

His solution lay in knitting together thetwo buildings and restoring LaGuardia Hall’smain entry from the quadrangle. Howe gut-ted the annex, stripped off its façade andadded 100,000 square feet of space, some ofit between the two buildings. This includestwo octagonal towers, one in front for a grandstaircase, the other in the rear for double-height reading rooms.

The arrangement of space let him changetraffic flow. Students now make a quarter-circle turn around the hidden stack corebetween the old building and the new onevery floor. The stack core now houses specialcollections, which only librarians can enter;other books are in open stacks.

His second challenge “was to develop anexterior expression that is sympathetic to theold library, but is not a reproduction.” That

S P E C I A L R E P O R T

ARCHITECTURAL

JANUS

Above:1894 drawing,Stanford Whiteinterior of GouldMemorialLibrary, BronxCommunityCollege; and preserved 1857wall and belltower, child carecenter, YorkCollege.Below: restoredShepard Hallexterior, CityCollege.

Jim

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most treasured relationships of my life.’ ”After Sara died in 1941 and FDR put the

building up for sale for $60,000, Hunter sug-gested having an independent nonprofit organi-zation buy it for use as the city’s first inter-reli-gious center.The president (whose PublicWorks Administration had built Hunter’s 16-story Park Avenue building in 1939) loweredthe price to $50,000 and contributed $1,000 inhis mother’s name toward the acquisition fund.For nearly 50 years the Sara Delano RooseveltInterfaith House would house some 120 reli-gious and extracurricular clubs.

In her syndicated newspaper column in1943, Eleanor wrote, “No houses could have abetter background for the use they will nowserve.Always in both houses there was aneffort to look on all human beings with respect,and to have a true understanding of the pointsof view of others.”

That vision informs the building’s future.Hunter President Jennifer J. Raab, formerlychair of the city Landmarks PreservationCommission, has likened the forthcoming insti-tute to “the domestic version of the Council onForeign Relations,” a nonpartisan organizationthat promotes understanding of foreign policyand America’s role in the world. It will belinked to an academic program in public policy.

The outside of the six-story building, clad inbuff-colored brick and limestone, has beencleaned and repaired.The Roosevelt crest –three ostrich plumes above three red roses –appears between the third and fourth stories.

Inside,Architect Charles Adams Plattdesigned mirror-image houses reached througha common vestibule, which will remain afterrenovation. Each first floor had a receptionroom with fireplace in front; in the rear weredining rooms that could be combined withsliding doors.

Platt cleverly placed the main stair and serv-ice areas in the middle, allowing the public andprivate rooms to occupy the full width of thehouse.And he brought light to interior hallsand bathrooms through an innovative “lightwell” — a five-story skylight from the secondto the top floors.The primary furnishings thatremain from that era are bookcases, the deepoversized bathtubs and freestanding, four-legged sinks.

Renovation is in the hands of PolshekPartners, the architects who designed thesphere-in-a-glass-cube Rose Center for Earthand Space at the American Museum ofNatural History in New York. President Raabsays that Hunter’s Public Policy Institute willbring “important discussions of social issues”back to the house. “It will be a place wherefaculty, students and the community can cometogether to craft solutions to these problemsand, in doing so, honor the legacy of one of thegreatest presidents and first ladies in UnitedStates history.”

Library and Quad Reborn atBrooklyn College

Take a 1937 neo-Georgian library, whoseclock tower is Brooklyn College’s logo. Add a1959 annex, garishly clad in steel, orangebrick and turquoise glass. Omit space for stu-dents and books. Stir in floods, mold andpoor ventilation. Add the impossibility ofadequate technology. What you have is arecipe for a dysfunctional library and archi-tectural apoplexy.

But rest easy. A triumph of historic preser-vation and contemporary design, completedin 2002, has given Brooklyn College a thor-oughly modern library and returned the orig-inal library building, LaGuardia Hall, as thecollege’s fulcrum.

That’s no mean feat for a campus born ofan architect’s dream – or, perhaps, hisemployer’s need for cash.

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led to similar brick (hand-molded and ofdiffering colors), high windows and “anodd roofscape, which is based on the adja-cent science building — big gable endswith two chimneys.”

Inside, the new library is a feast of light,seats and logic. Students can choose theupholstered reading room overlooking theoriginal lily pond, study carrels, or sound-proof group-study rooms.

“The library is inspirational for students,”Higginbotham says. “We love our buildingand are happier than I can ever say.”

* * *Before Harold Evans’ campus design

could be reborn, Brooklyn College had todeal with its own version of the BerlinWall that separated East from West –quadrangles, that is.

In the 1970s, the college put up the undis-tinguished Plaza Building along BedfordAvenue, as well as a gargantuan staircase andoverpass.They sundered the campus. Nowthey are gone and the mission in the West isto achieve Eastern balance.

In the West Quad, landscaping will mir-ror the East’s.And to provide a visual andfunctional counterweight to the library,construction is soon to start on architectRafael Viñoly’s sleek one-stop-shop for stu-dent services and athletics. From “theOasis,” or glassed double-height lobby, stu-dents will go up for the bursar, enrollment,financial aid, counselors and physical educa-tion offices.And from the Oasis spectatorswill watch competitions in the NCAA-reg-ulation pool and basketball court below, ordescend to use racquetball courts, a weighttraining room and other facilities.

This campus transformation is due toBrooklyn College’s award-winning 1995master plan, devised by architects atGruzen Samton and Kliment & Halsband,both New York City firms.Citing its “continuity, thoughtfulnessand clarity,” the Society for College andUniversity Planning and the AmericanInstitute of Architects’ Committee onArchitecture for Education jointly pre-sented the award in 2005. The judgespraised the architects for “re-establishingand protecting the campus heritage,”adding that the master planmakes “better use of openspaces and is athoughtful wayto increase density.”

acting associate dean for teacher education.“The students were marching on me,”

she declared. “They accused the depart-ment of being racist, and I think they hadcause.”

She added, “I felt the college wouldrespond in a responsible way, and it did.…The university is so resilient in terms ofsocial change.”

Training Today’s Science ScholarsThere are those among the longest-

serving who have been very comfortablewith technology, new and old. There is, forexample, Myer M. Fishman, who joined thechemistry department of City College in1946, and today does his part to ensure the

college turns out a good share of minoritiesin the sciences. He is a professor emeritusand director of the chemistry department’sBiomedical Research Programs.

Fishman has mentored most of CityCollege’s Jonas Salk Scholarship winners.

Starting with him in 1946 was AmosTurk, who also joined the chemistrydepartment. Turk left for a while to gointo private industry and then returned toCity in 1954. He is now a professor emeri-tus, doing research on air pollution andconsulting with the chemistry department.

Accounting for the YearsOn CUNY’s list of longest-serving

faculty members — a list that grew as

1946 (the year some of our "Longest-Serving Professors" began teaching). On the day the photo wasmembers of the United Nations were raised on flagpoles planted in the grass along the inner rim of thelding). From March to August of '46, the Security Council met in the Gym Building.

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 11

become surrogate daugh-ters and sons. They are apart of celebrations, andwe’re still e-mailing.”

Kaplan has a special lovefor the freedoms offered ina democratic society.

In 1985 she was offeredthe opportunity to teach inChina and accepted theoffer. At the Beijing univer-sity, Kaplan worked withsenior English literaturemajors and trained teach-ers, and four years later sheand her husband went backto China. That trip coincid-ed with the height of the1989 student-led pro-democracy demonstrationsin Tiananmen Square.

“We were there for itall,” she said. “There was all of this joy andhappiness. We watched the million stu-dents and workers protesting. We hadflags.…Faculty members would bicycle toTiananmen Square to give the studentsmoney for food and medicine.”

Then came the fateful June weekendwhen the People’s Liberation Army tanksrolled in to brutally crush the protests,leaving still unknown numbers dead andinjured.

“We saw the students staggering back tothe campus, crying, devastated,” Kaplanrecalled, saying she and her husband each“lost one student,” explaining further,“They were killed.” The couple left Chinafor Queens soon afterward. This past sum-mer, overcoming her husband’s reluctance,the Kaplans went back to see old friendsand “to see where China was today.”

The Kaplans believe they owe a debt ofgratitude to CUNY for the extraordinarythings they witnessed and experienced inlife, even the painful events likeTiananmen Square.

“Without City University, neither oneof us would have gone to college,” she saidof herself and her husband. She’s aQueens graduate, he went to Brooklyn. “Ihave very happy, mellow feelings when Isay ‘Queens College,’ the speech clinic, thefaculty — it was glorious. It still is.”

And so, she continues to “do my job,what I’ve been hired for.” At school, shesays, “I’m literally the old lady, but I don’tfeel it.”

Her age is not for public consumption,says Kaplan. “It’s only a number.”

Witnessed the Evolution of a Vibrant Public University

Excerpted from the chapter titled “College Years” in Chisholm’s 1970 autobiography,Unbought and Unbossed, which was published by Houghton Mifflin.

…One needed an 89 percent average to enter Brooklyn College then [the mid-1940s], sothere were only about sixty black students in the day school. Brooklyn was the largest of thefive city-run colleges, and its campus was supposed to be especially for bright lower-class, poorerstudents. Tuition was free; it was a “subway campus,” and one would have expected moreblack students. The trouble was, of course, that the grade and high schools they attended —then as now — did not do enough to overcome the handicaps of their background….

I had already decided to become a teacher. There was no other road open to a young blackwoman. Law, medicine, even nursing were too expensive, and few schools would admit blackmen, much less a woman…

…A blind political science professor, Louis Warsoff, became interested in me, and we hadlong talks. I called him “Proffy,” affectionately. He was one of the first white men whom Iever really knew and trusted. From Professor Warsoff I learned that white people were notreally different from me. I loved formal debating particularly, and once after I starred in amatch he told me, “You ought to go into politics.” I was astonished at hisnaivete…“Proffy,” I said, “you forget two things. I’m black — and I’m a woman.”

…When I graduated in 1946, cum laude, I was nearly twenty-two but I looked sixteenor seventeen; I weighed about ninety pounds. It made job hunting hard. School after schoolturned me down, even as a teacher’s aide… So, to be as well prepared as possible, Ienrolled in Columbia University to work evenings for a master’s degree in early child-hood education. It was about then that I had my own early education in politics, in thetoughest and most instructive school possible, New York City’s old-time clubhouses.

In the 1940s, a Blind “Proffy” Opened Shirley Chisholm’s EyesShirley Chisholm: 1924-2005

After graduating from Brooklyn College in1946, Shirley Chisholm went on to changeAmerican politics. In 1968 she became thefirst African-American woman in the U.S.Congress, and in 1972 she became the firstwoman to make a serious bid for the presi-dency.

She died last year.On November 30, at Brooklyn College,

Governor George Pataki signed a documentmaking the day “Shirley Chisholm Day.”Assemblyman Nick Perry, Brooklyn CollegeClass of ’78, was there, as was State SupremeCourt Justice Emily Goodman, Class of ’61,among others.

“The legacy that Shirley Chisholm left us wasthe knowledge that a woman, and in particularan African American woman, can run for officeand can win,” said Barbara Winslow, coordinatorof the Women’s Studies Program at BrooklynCollege.

inquiries were made —is a professor at BernardBaruch College.Abraham J. Briloff,renowned as an emi-nence in the accountingprofession, began teach-ing there in 1944, whenit was the downtowncampus of City College.In 1968 the college wasincorporated into CUNYas Baruch.

These days, still lec-turing there, Briloff is theEmanuel Saxe Distin-guished ProfessorEmeritus of Accounting.A former student of his,Charles R. Dreifus, fundsthe annual Abraham J.Briloff Prizes in Ethics.

From ESL to Tiananmen SquareThe high points of Claire Kaplan’s near-

ly 60 years with CUNY have had a decid-edly international cast. When she joinedQueens College in 1947, she was a speechpathologist in the school’s clinic, helpingaphasics and people with cerebral palsy.

“I was the mom who was raising herchildren. I had a part-time practice,” saidKaplan, whose husband, Martin Kaplan,was a biology professor at Queens and alsobriefly an assistant dean. “At that time, thedean’s wife used to pour tea and wear lit-tle white gloves” at Queens CollegeWomen’s Club functions, she remem-bered. “I can still picture it.”

During the ’70s, Kaplan’s focus onpronunciation took an interesting twist,when “one of the other faculty wives,”also a Queens College teacher, told her sheneeded someone to teach “English for theforeign-born, and would I help her out.”

The rest is history: Kaplan and the pro-gram now known as English as a SecondLanguage, or ESL, clicked. Today, as anAdjunct Professor of English, she teachesEnglish pronunciation and Foundations ofReading, primarily to “non-native students”who come to CUNY from city highschools or from other countries. She alsoteaches advanced ESL in a community-based continuing education program.

“It’s always a fascinating bunch of peo-ple with very broad backgrounds,” she saidof her students, who over the years havehailed from at least 20 countries. Manykeep in touch. “Some of them have

“It’s quite a shock to

realize how long I’ve

been there,” said

Mary Rita Donleavy,

who started teaching

at the

Bronx campus of

Hunter College

(later Lehman College)

in 1948.

“I’ve been rooted in

the City University.”

Saul Kripke, called by many the world’sgreatest living philosopher, is almost aswell known for what he doesn’t do as forwhat he does.

When Kripke, a Distinguished Professorat The Graduate Center, gives lectures, hedoesn’t use notes; like Socrates, everythinghe says comes right out of his head. “Ithink faster than I write,” he explained.“I never liked to write things down, evenwhen I was in school.”

Through the decades, students andacademics have avidly taped his lectures,passing them among themselves, all thewhile lamenting the fact that only aselect few had access to the master’sbrilliant ideas.

In late January, CUNY and the GradCenter’s philosophy program sponsoreda two-day conference to celebrateKripke’s 65th birthday. ChancellorMatthew Goldstein — a strong support-er of the Graduate Center’s successfulefforts to recruit the DistinguishedProfessor and philosopher — welcomedthe attendees, many of whom seemed toview Kripke with a reverence otherwisereserved for thinkers of the ancientGreek variety. At the event, which wascovered by The New York Times, TheNew York Sun and other publications,Kripke gave a talk on “The First Person,”offering heady metaphysical speculationson the nature of self.

Now, with the philosophy journalMind getting set to publish one ofKripke’s works — an article celebratingthe centenary of the publication ofRussell’s famous article “On Denoting”— it is being proposed that CUNY setup a Kripke Center that would tran-scribe the thousands of his tapes thatexist and then publish them.

“We’ve had this idea ever since werecruited Saul in 2001,” said MichaelDevitt, Distinguished Professor of philos-ophy at The Grad Center.

“It’s a dream that is shared by others,

includingPresidentBill Kelly.We nowfeel thetime isright andare workingon a pro-posal at thismomentand willthen be seeking funds toestablish the center.”

Devitt, who was astudent of Kripke’s in the1960s at Harvard, said thatthe center would attractscholars from around the world.

“Graduate students would help do thetranscribing. Kripke has only published acouple of books — the famous Namingand Necessity of 1972 among them —and a small number of papers, includingfive on modal logic when he was veryyoung, and a few very influential philos-ophy papers in the 1970s. We have 100items in transcript, and that’s only about10 percent of the amount on tape.”

Devitt says that the other works willjoin the ranks of Kripke’s Naming andNecessity and his seminal book-lengthinterpretation of Wittgenstein. The back-log of untranscribed, unpublished mate-rial is so vast that not even Kripke’scomputer-like brain knows exactly howextensive it is. “Some of the stuff that Idid in my teens and 20s hasn’t beenpublished yet, and there are some writ-ten-out things that also need to be pub-lished,” Kripke said. “People often sendme tapes of my lectures in the mail, andit’s frustrating because they don’t labelthem or date them.”

Establishing the center would be “areal coup,” said John Greenwood, execu-tive officer of the Ph.D. program in phi-losophy at The Grad Center. “He isunlike any other academic. He just

thinks and says it, and it’s crystal clear.It’s like theater with Kripke; he holds hisclass spellbound.”

Devitt was “bowled over” by the “radi-cally new ideas in philosophy of lan-guage, epistemology and metaphysics”that Kripke presented to him and 15other Harvard undergrads and graduates.

“Naming and Necessity came fromthose 1967 lectures,” Devitt said. “He hasthe most extraordinary mind I’ve everencountered…It is almost as if he hadsome privileged access to reality.”

The reality is that Kripke, a childprodigy, grew up equally interested inmath and philosophy. “I did major inmath at Harvard, but from about age 12,I discovered philosophy and started read-ing Plato, Berkeley and Hume.”

By the time he was a Harvard under-grad, he already was teaching philosophyto grad students at MIT, and his kudos-filled career was launched. And in 2001,he was awarded the Schock Prize, theNobel of philosophy. After a long career atPrinceton, he became a full-time Distin-guished Professor at CUNY in 2003.

The idea of getting involved in thewriting and editing aside, Kripke wel-comes the idea of a center because “I stillhave more ideas.”

Grad Center Professor Saul Kripke is being called theSocrates of our time, the greatest living philosopher.

Socrates

12 CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006

courses with Professor Marshall Berman,”Johnson said. “I could just sit and listen toProfessor Berman for hours. He taughtabout the soul among many things, andhe taught about Montesquieu,” saidJohnson, referring to the 18th CenturyFrench Enlightenment scholar and authorof The Spirit of the Laws.

Today, 34 years after Johnson’s gradu-ation in 1972, Marshall Berman is stillteaching at City College and is still anactive figure in the intellectual discoursethere.

Reflecting on his youth,Johnson informed that hishalcyon years at CityCollege were preceded byan extended period of innerturmoil that took him fromPower Memorial HighSchool (where he had beena schoolmate of the gifted,and very tall, basketball starLew Alcindor, later knownas Kareem Abdul-Jabbar);to City College downtown(later Baruch College), where in the mid-1960s he majored in — and did poorly in— accounting; to the Navy, where hespent two years in a kind of search for hisinner self, reading, among other things,Plato.

Accepted into City College, Johnsonfinally found his inner self and put thatself on a path from which there was noveering in the years to come.

After graduation, Johnson went toNew York University Law School andthen to the Legal Aid Society in theBronx, and then to the Bronx DistrictAttorney’s office, where he was an assis-tant prosecutor in the homicide unit. Inshort order, he was named a CriminalCourt judge and then an Acting StateSupreme Court Justice. The judgeshipswere the fulfillment of his life’s ambi-tion, inspired largely by the influence ofhis now retired father, who had been auniformed court officer.

But while he was a judge,opportunity, creeping up eerilyand unexpectedly, knockedeven louder for Johnson. In1987, long-serving BronxDistrict Attorney MarioMerola died of a heart attack,and Johnson threw in his hatto succeed him, and he wonthe election.

In the years since, therehave been many cases that,even individually, markedJohnson’s tenure as special.

There was, for one, the 1990 HappyLand massacre, in which 36-year-oldJulio Gonzalez set fire to a Bronx socialclub and killed 87 people.

Johnson said he will never shake loosethe memory of walking through thatgruesome scene of bodies in the club.“That actually at that time was thelargest mass murder in the history of thiscountry,” Johnson said. “It was then

exceeded by Oklahoma City [in 1995]and September 11, 2001.”

He and his office have prosecutedmany high visibility cases since theHappy Land, including that of the policeofficers who shot African immigrantAmadou Diallo in 1999.

It’s worth noting that Johnson’s toptwo officials, supporting him through thecrises that rise with regularity, are gradu-ates of CCNY. They are: Barry Kluger(Class of ’70), Johnson’s Chief AssistantDistrict Attorney; and Anthony Girese(Class of ’68), the Counsel to the D.A.

Known as someone who is open ofheart even as he remains press shy,Johnson does not grant many interviewswith the press. One of the most interest-ing profiles of him was written by JackNewfield in a 1999 column for The NewYork Post. The late Newfield calledJohnson “a different kind of cat — a Zenprosecutor who has mastered the art ofserenity in a storm.” He said thatJohnson is the embodiment of justice asan act of balancing, opposing the deathpenalty as he applies tough prosecutorialtactics against violent criminals.

Newfield, a graduate of CUNY’sHunter College, quoted Johnson as saying,"Part of serenity is not feeling self-impor-tant…My self-image is still of being a kidplaying stickball in the projects."

And from the projects, that kid wenton to study in the Gothic hall of anuptown college, and then climbed theladder of an old and honored profession.

Stein Teaching in Moscow

Judith Stein, professor of history atCity College, was one of 31 prominentscholars selected as a FulbrightDistinguished Chair for 2005-06 bythe Council for International Exchangeof Scholars, which administers theFulbright Scholar Program.

Through July, she will hold theNikolay V. Sivachev DistinguishedChair in History at Moscow StateUniversity, where she will teach U.S.history, starting with World War II, toundergraduate and graduate studentsand she will be a resource person forRussian students and scholars studyingAmerican history.

Cheng Writing Novel on China

Terrence Chenghas received a$20,000 CreativeWriting fellowshipfrom the NationalEndowment forthe Arts. With themoney he willtravel to China andJapan for researchon Little Flower, hisupcoming book about China during theJapanese occupation of the 1930s.

The Lehman College professor’sdeveloping book is based on real eventsof recent history, including the Rape ofNanking and the Japanese army’s useof so-called “comfort women.”

The research will be a homecomingof sorts for Cheng, born in Taipei,Taiwan. “It was not until graduateschool, while doing research for myfirst novel, Sons of Heaven, that I beganto study Chinese history,” he said.

Cheng hopes that Little Flower willencourage others to pass down theirpersonal histories so future generationswill never forget.

Tully is Pres. of Ed Group

Katee Tully, associate dean ofBorough of Manhattan CommunityCollege’s Center for ContinuingEducation, was elected president ofthe Continuing Education Associationof New York, which represents 83CUNY and SUNY colleges.

Tom Cracovia, director ofContinuing Education at QueensCollege, was elected vice president atthe association’s annual conferencelast fall at West Point.

This marks the first time in the42-year history of the Center forContinuing Education that it will haveCUNY officials in its top two posts.

Chapel Discovered in Turkey

It’s not every day that one discovers alost monument of the Middle Ages, butthis is precisely what history professorEric Ivison (of the Graduate Centerand College of Staten Island) and grad-uate student Christopher Pettit did.

They were excavating recently atthe Byzantine city of Amorium in cen-tral Turkey, near the ruins of a largebasilica church that Professor Ivisonuncovered between 1994 and 2004.

Attached to the north side of thischurch they found a baptistery — achapel-like building that was original-ly vaulted and domed. The construc-tion of this baptistery can be dated tothe late fifth or early sixth centuries.

Few baptisteries have been discov-ered in this part of Turkey, and so theAmorium example is a major additionto our knowledge of Byzantine archi-tecture in the region.

FACULTY HONORS

Terrence Cheng

Now Playing at Grad Center: ‘World’s Greatest Philosopher’

Robert Johnson

Bronx D. A. Robert Johnson Says City College Made Him What He Iscontinued from front page 1

Act, which allowed citizenship “to any freewhite person” after two years’ residency.The final time-line entry is for 2003, whenCalifornia voters rejected a Racial PrivacyInitiative that would have banned thegathering of racially coded data by stateand city agencies.

Also illuminating is the collection ofexcerpts from two dozen epoch-making“primary documents” and “original writings”that make up the last half of volume 3.

Among the former: the 1848 SlaveCode of the state of Georgia, wherein onelearns the punishment for teaching a slaveor free person of color to read was a fineand a whipping; the anti-immigrantNational Origins act of 1924, which musthave made the gallant lady with the tire-less right hand near Ellis Island weep;excerpts from Plessy v. Ferguson, withJustice John Harlan’s noble dissent fromthe nonsense of “separate but equal”; andthe text of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Among the “original writings” areexcerpts from a Lincoln letter defendingthe Emancipation Proclamation, fromW.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk(1903), and from Malcolm X’s Autobio-graphy. On the dark side is an excerptfrom the platform of the Aryan Nation,which informs us, “Not all races descendedfrom Adam. Adam is the father of theWhite Race only.” More uplifting, and per-haps a bow to Min’s own discipline, is the

By Gary Schmidgall

Browse through them andweep: about 450 entries, spreadover more than a thousand pagesin three volumes, that leave onefeeling racism is a congenital andineradicable part of the humangenome. The whole revolting his-torical panorama of Americans’ badbehavior toward their fellowsojourners on the planet with differ-ent racial genes is laid out in cogentbrief essays on such topics as ArchieBunker, Bigotry, Black Anti-Semitism,Block-busting, Draft Riot of 1863, JimCrow Laws, Ku Klux Klan, Race Cardin Political Campaigns, Skinheads,Yellow Peril, and on and on.

Such is the new, first-of-its-kindEncyclopedia of Racism in the UnitedStates (Greenwood Press), single-hand-edly edited by Pyong Gap Min, profes-sor of sociology atQueens College andthe Graduate Center.Min’s purpose was tocreate a comprehensiveencyclopedia coveringracial victimization forall racial and ethnicgroups in the U.S., andthe project — the“most difficult” of hiscareer — absorbedthree years andinvolved the work of afive-member advisoryboard and nearly threedozen contributors.

Min offers the classicdefinition of racism as“the belief that on thebasis of their geneticdifference some racialgroups are innatelysuperior to other racialgroups in intelligence,temperament, and atti-tudes,” and he notes thatracist ideology began toburgeon in the 15thcentury, when voyages of discovery broughtwhite Europeans in contact with non-whites in the New World, Africa, and Asia.

The Encyclopedia homes in on the threemain areas of prejudice, discrimination,and physical violence with entries that fallinto several categories, including: social-sci-ence terms and theories; historical events;reactions of minority groups to racial dis-crimination; and major books either sup-porting or exposing racism. Twenty-fivelong essays explore general topics likeAffirmative Action, White SupremacistGroups, and Derogatory Terms. Another180 mid-size entries up to 1,500 wordsdeal with significant subjects like Black-Korean Conflicts, Capital Punishment andRacial Inequality.

The remaining 250 entries of up to 500words are devoted to more specific sub-jects, such as Henry Ford (a ferocious anti-Semite), Executive Order 9981 (HarryTruman’s 1948 call for an integrated mili-tary), the Howard Beach Incident (the1986 hate crime), Redlining (aka mortgagedisinvestment), and Ghost Dance Religion(a Native American 1880s movement bornas a response to racism).

Among the bells and whistles of theEncyclopedia is a detailed time-line, thoughit seems to begin rather late, in 1790(surely the Dutch and British have someracist skeletons to answer for). That yearCongress passed its first Naturalization

American Sociological Association’s 2003statement on “The Importance ofCollecting Data and Doing SocialScientific Research on Race.”

Indeed, one reason to cheer rather thanweep as one thumbs through theEncyclopedia is that so many of its entriesmake clear the considerable progress thathas been made by researchers into thenature and causes of the wide variety ofracisms: dominative racism (do our bid-ding), aversive racism (stay away from us),biological racism (it’s your genes, as earlymeasurers of intelligence thought), institu-tional racism (profiling, for example), lais-sez-faire racism (free-market ideologyinvolving negative stereotypes), internal-ized racism (collaborating, wittingly ornot, with the oppressors), even color-blindracism, which Min defines as “uninten-tional racism” that fails to grasp and faceup to the lingering effects of past racism.

Another reason to cheer rather thanweep, of course, is thatmany famous voicesraised against racism arehonored in its pages.Among the earliest isThomas Paine, whoseegalitarian Rights of Man(not “Men,” as in hisentry) led inexorably tothe 14th Amendment.Others receiving well-deserved entries areBooker T. Washington,W.E.B. Du Bois, MarcusGarvey, Cesar Chavez,Jackie Robinson, and, ohyes, there is Rosa Parkspictured sitting in a vin-tage bus forty years afterher bumpy ride.

The reader is oftentaken by Min’s contribu-tors down surprising backalleys of history whereserendipity rules. Oneentry tells the story ofthe “Buffalo Soldiers,”two African-Americancavalry regiments that

were posted in the West to fight NativeAmericans for the next 30 years after theCivil War. There’s an interesting entry onthe Fu Manchu movies — their inventorwas an Irishman — that fueled early 20th-century negative Asian stereotypes.

Another is on the Los Angeles Riot —no, not the one in 1992 (it’s covered too)— the one in 1871 which ignited the anti-Chinese movement in California. “Nigger”gets an entry, which ends with the observa-tion that the epithet is “becoming accept-able again…given the prevalence of blackactors, artists, authors, and public personali-ties who use it to celebrate AfricanAmerican life.” The Zoot Suit riots? Themost notable example of 20th-centurywhite violence against Mexican Americans,they took place in Los Angles in 1943. Theloose-fitting jackets and baggy pants ofyoung Mexican men, known as zoot suits,proved a sartorial flashpoint for whiteAngeleno hoodlums.

Professor Min would probably be thefirst to agree that the work of an encyclo-pedist of American racism will never end.I suspect he already has a growing filefolder titled “New Entries.” If I’m right, Ihave a suggestion: right there between“John Birch Society” and “KernerCommission” (it reported to PresidentLyndon Johnson on the racial violence of1967), I think there should be an entry for“Katrina.” A very long entry.

The Jews of Washington, D.C.

Martin Garfinkle’s own history is theinspiration for The Jewish Community ofWashington, D.C. (Arcadia Publishing,October 2005).

Although the associate professor ofhuman services at New York City Collegeof Technology has lived in theWillowbrook neighborhood of StatenIsland for many years, he is a fourth-gener-ation Washingtonian, and his great-grand-father founded many of the Jewish organi-zations that still exist in that city.

Through poignant profiles, he highlightsthe accomplishments of a wandering peo-ple who were welcomed by the communi-ty, even courted by presidents. RabbiMoses Yoelson’s son, Asa Yoelson (theworld knows him as Al Jolson, “The JazzSinger”) got his start in D.C., as didAdolphus Solomons, one of the foundersof the American Red Cross.

Radical Heritage of Italian-AmericansPhilip V. Cannistraro, thelate distinguished profes-sor of Italian AmericanStudies at CUNY, dedi-cated his life to settingthe record straight onthe Italian Americanpast. His last work, TheLost World of Italian American Radicalism:Politics, Labor and Culture (PraegerPublishers), sheds light on a long-sup-pressed portion of that history.

The anthology, co-authored withProfessor Emeritus Gerald Meyer ofHostos Community College, detailsthrough 16 essays the radical movementthat helped shape the Italian-Americancommunity and the American left.

Historical eventss, including the trial ofSacco and Vanzetti, take on new meaningand pave the way for the exploration of theradicalism of other immigrant communities.

Cannistraro died last year.

Swimming to Health

International Swimming Hall of Fameboard member Jane Katz uses a holisticapproach to total fitness, via exercises inthe water.

Her book, Your WaterWorkout, published byBroadway Books, offerssoothing and strengthen-ing exercises drawn fromyoga and other disci-plines like tai chi andPilates.

Speaking of Katz,who is on the faculty

of John Jay College of CriminalJustice, where she teaches physical educa-tion, author Gail Sheehy said the profes-sor’s unique approach is “a fabulous work-out for the body and soul.”

In the introduction to the book, Katzsays her techniques come “from over fiftyyears of experience as a competitive swim-mer,” including 40 years teaching in theCity University of New York.

Advice for Minority ManagersMany people fail in their first attemptto climb the corporate ladder, not becausethey lack strong resumes or technicalknow-how, but because they don't fullyunderstand the corporate culture.

So says Randolph W. Cameron, professorat the Medgar Evers College School ofBusiness, in his book Finding a Way to theTop: Career Moves for the Minority Manager.

The AuthorHouse published book is astep-by-step guide for Blacks, Asians,Latinos and women who are entering thebusiness world, telling them about the“written” and “unwritten” rules of life incorporate America.

BOOK TALKOF THE CITY

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 13

From Abolition to Zoot Suit Riots—The First Encyclopedia of U.S. Racism

Will Racism Ever End?The encyclopedia’s 13-page chronology includes the following:1800 Gabriel Prosser leads slave uprising in Virginia.

1865 Ku Klux Klan is founded in Tennessee.

1871 Anti-Chinese race riot erupts in Los Angeles after a white man is acciden-tally killed while trying to stop a dispute between two Chinese men.

1890 U.S. troops massacre Lakota Sioux Indians at Wounded Knee, SouthDakota.

1907 Bellingham Riots begin when a mob of white men, who fear the loss of theirjobs to immigrants, attacks a Hindu community in Bellingham, Washington.

1915 Leo Frank, a Jew convicted of murdering a girl in Georgia in 1913, isabducted from prison and lynched, despite the existence of evidence thatcasts doubt on his guilt.

1954 In Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, the U.S. Supreme Court declaresracial segregation in schools unconstitutional.

1965 Congress passes the Immigration Act, phasing out national-origin quotasand emphasizing the reunification of families.

1999 Amadou Diallo, an immigrant working as a street vendor in New York, isshot by four undercover police officers, who mistake him for a rape suspect.

2003 U.S. Supreme Court renders decisions in two University of Michigan affir-mation (sic) action cases — Grutter v. Bollinger and Gratz v. Bollinger —declaring that race can be considered in university admissions decisions butcannot be a “deciding factor.”

Soros Fellow at LehmanLehman College senior AliceMichelle Augustine is one of 30 stu-dents across the country — and theonly undergraduate from New YorkCity — to win a 2006 Paul & DaisySoros Fellowship for New Americans.

A native of Dominica in theCaribbean and a double major inEnglish and political science,Augustine plans to earn a law degreeand then a doctorate in public affairs.

The award will pay one-half of thetuition costs for her first two years oflaw school, as well as provide anadded grant of $20,000 per year.

“I feel as though all my years ofhard work have paid off,” she said.

Besides being a full-time student,Augustine works full-time as a stu-dent teacher in a pre-kindergartenprogram in the Bronx.

Grove Awards at CCNYFive first-year students at the newlynamed Grove School of Engineeringat The City College of New Yorkwere chosen to receive the School’sfirst Andrew S. Grove Scholarships.

Grove, a co-founder and formerchairman of Intel Corp. and memberof CCNY’s Class of 1960, establishedthe scholarships through a gift madein 2004.

In October, the college announcedthat he had given a separate $26 mil-lion donation to support several otherinitiatives in engineering. The 2005-2006 Grove Scholars are: KeithGallardo, Joel Gonzalez, RicardoLantigua, Uzma Syed and ThanhhanhTran. They will each receive a one-year, $5,000 scholarship, with oppor-tunities to receive additional financialsupport.

On His Way to Ph.D.Aliou Diop, a Bronx CommunityCollege alumnus of the 2001 class, iscurrently pursuing a Ph.D. at theGraduate Center of the CityUniversity of New York while teachingin BCC’s Mathematics Department.

Diop began his undergraduateresearch with the Louis StokesAlliance for Minority Participationprogram in the Spring of 2000, underthe mentorship of Andrew McInerney,professor in the Department ofMathematics and Computer Science.

Diop completed his B.S. in Mathe-matics at Lehman College in 2003.

Tech Grad’s Salad Days

“If it weren’t for City Tech, Iwouldn’t be where I am today,” saidAnnie Christopher, a New York CityCollege of Technology alumna.

Today, Christopher is co-owner ofAnnie’s Naturals, the leading naturalfoods condiment and salad dressingbrand in the country.

Recently, in a sign of the compa-ny’s success, it was announced thatAnnie’s Naturals was being bought bya California company, HomegrownNaturals. Annie’s will retain its nameand Christopher will “be staying ondoing product development.”

Christopher was a hospitality man-agement major while at City Tech.She earned her associate’s degreethere in 1983.

City Tech officials believe they areimparting to a current generation ofstudents skills that take them to thesame heights achieved by Christopher.

14 CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006

Two years ago, Jude Pokuwas happily ensconced in hisstudies at New York CityCollege of Technology, wherehe had developed a specialinterest in chemistry and hopedsomeday to be a physician.

Then Poku, in the armyreserves at the time, receivedword that his unit was beingcalled up for duty in Iraq. Dutycalled and he answered. Butfive months after landing inIraq, Poku’s humvee over-turned, and he sustained chest,shoulder and knee injuries thatcut short his tour of active duty.

Poku spent time at Fort Dixin New Jersey last year beforebeing formally discharged fromthe military on January 11.

“I feel lucky to have gotten out with allmy limbs intact. Many didn’t,” he saidrecently.

And this spring semester Poku, 26 and aresident of the Flatbush section ofBrooklyn, is resuming his studies at City

Tech, where science contin-ues to inspire him.

In a sense, it was his loveof chemistry that helpedsustain Poku emotionallywhen he was in Iraq. Hekept thinking about hispast, knowing in his heartthat it would take him to afuture he wanted, a futureof studying science andbecoming a doctor.

He received letters fromthe chemistry professorwho had been his mentor,Pamela Brown, and the cor-respondence with Brown,now Acting Dean of Artsand Sciences, kept Poku’sspirits up.

“While I was in Iraq, Dr.Brown wrote to me and sent

me biology and MCAT (entrance boards formed school) study guides,” he said.

“When I would return to the base after

Biology major Mamunur Rahman gothis first taste of the medical profession as ahigh school student when he volunteeredto work in a hospital. For chemistry majorAyomideBomide, thedecision tobecome a doctorcame in 10thgrade when heattended ahealth-careerworkshop.

Besides theirmedical ambi-tions, BrooklynCollege studentsBomide andRahman havesomething elsesignificant in common: They are amongthe 39 CUNY students who since 1999have been designated Gates MillenniumScholars, an honor that comes with acco-lades and full tuition support to completetheir undergraduate degrees.

While under the rules of the Bill &Melinda Gates Foundation, which fundsthe minority scholarships, Bomide andRahman could have attended any collegein the country, they choose Brooklyn, anddidn’t even apply anyplace else.

“My family is a bigsupporter of publiceducation,” the 19-year-old Rahman said.“Brooklyn College isclose to my house —it’s literally 13 stepsfrom my front door— and it’s a familyinstitution,” he said,adding that his threeolder siblings —Mafuzur, a doctor;Abeda Khanam, ahigh school teacher;and Aminur, a com-puter networkadministrator — areBrooklyn Collegegrads.

“In high school, Ihad done researchwith a Brooklyn College professor, so I

knew all about the school and the faculty,and I wanted to continue my projectthere.”

Bomide’s decision was equally easy:“The school has a great science

program that alone iscompetitive with the IvyLeagues. It’s well knownthat if you are successfulat Brooklyn College, youwill be successful wher-ever you go.”

The work, however,hasn’t always been soeasy. “I’ve been chal-lenged in classes,” saidRahman, whose familycame to New York fromBangladesh and who is inhis third year. “I thoughtit was going to be easier,

but I knew the sciences weregoing to be hard.”

To give himself a head start,the 18-year-old Bomide, who is in his sec-ond semester at Brooklyn College, attendedthe summer session. “This really helped meget adjusted to college-level courses in sci-ence,” he said.

Rahman and Bomide say that the stu-dent-based emergency medical servicesprogram and the college’s close associationwith the State University of New York

Downstate Medical Center,which they plan to attend, alsowere big factors in their deci-sions.

“Brooklyn College is one ofthe few colleges that has anEMS,” Rahman said, referringto the emergency medical serv-ice program. “Being a memberof the EMS has been reward-ing. I had worked in a hospitalwhen I was in high school, butyou really don’t get to do any-thing that is medical-related. Iwanted that medical experi-ence that comes with being inthe EMS.”

For Rahman and Bomide,being in the medical professionoffers a way to help people andto give back. “I’m really con-cerned about the New York

City community,” said Bomide, a native of

Nigeria who wants to be a family physi-cian. “A lot of people don’t have the quali-ty health care they deserve. When I attend-ed that workshop in 10th grade, I got to

see the disparities inmedicine, and itexposed me to theshortages in medi-cine.”

Rahman, who has-n’t decided whichtype of medicine hewants to practice,does know that hewants to practicepart-time inBangladesh. “Mymother still livesthere, so I go back,and when I do, I wantto help the peoplethere,” he said. “Myoldest brother, thedoctor, does this

about two months per year.”Rahman and Bomide say that their

hopes and dreams would not have beenpossible without the Gates scholarships,which since their inception in 1999 havebeen awarded to 9,050 African-American,American Indian/Alaska Native, AsianPacific Island-American and Hispanic-American students and have helped some2,741 students like themselves graduate.

Thirty-nine of those students chose toattend CUNY schools: five attendedBaruch College; Rahman, Bomide andthree others enrolled at Brooklyn College;five selected Hunter College; four went toLehman College; four opted for John JayCollege of Criminal Justice; two went toQueens College; two chose York College;and 10 went to City College.

Two others continued their educationsat the Graduate Center, enrolling in one ofthe six fields — science, library science,engineering, education, math and publichealth — that the Gates program contin-ues to fund for Millennium Scholarsthrough the doctoral level.

Bomide encourages other students toapply for the scholarships. “You have toplan your life,” he said. “You have to knowwhat you want to do in life. BrooklynCollege will not fail me. The experiences Ihave here will help propel me to the top.”

Mamunur Rahman, whose fami-ly is from Bangladesh, is aBrooklyn College junior andGates Millennium Scholar.

Ayomide Bomide, a native ofNigeria, is a Brooklyn Collegefreshman and GatesMillennium Scholar.

Returned Iraq war vet Jude Poku is here with Pamela Brown, his chemistryprofessor and mentor who sent him letters in Iraq to keep his spirits up.Brown is now Acting Dean of Arts and Sciences.

Memories of City Tech Kept Him Strong During

Gates Scholarship Helps Brooklyn Students,Who Want to Treat the Sick Here and Abroad

STUDENT HONORS

“You have to

plan your life,”

says Ayomide Bomide.

“Broklyn College

will not fail me.

The experiences

I have here will help

propel me to the top.”

For Dennis P. Sullivan, The GraduateCenter professor who just received the2004 National Medal of Science, mathe-matics is a lot more than numbers.

“Higher math is like symphonic music,”mused Sullivan, the Albert Einstein Chairin the Sciences at The Graduate Center,where he also is a distinguished professorof mathematics.

“It’s deep, satisfying and unusual. Itnever ceases to amaze me, and you canreally understand it; it’s not like a paintingthat you like but that you can’t under-stand. It’s like when you put a puzzletogether because you’re trying to figurethings out. I worked on one problem foreight years, and it was very satisfying. Youdon’t want to waste your IQ on a cross-word puzzle when you can do math.”

Last month, Sullivan had cause toreflect upon his nearly half-century careerwhen he was invited to the White Houseto meet President George W. Bush andreceive the nation’s highest scientifichonor for his work developing new fieldsof mathematics and finding ways to con-

doing a convoy patrol or searching homesfor insurgents and weapons, I would readand study these books and think aboutbeing in the classroom again, if I made it outalive. Reading those books kept me going.”

At least twice a week, hesaid, either a U.S. militaryvehicle or a civilian vehiclewas blown up by suicidebombers. More than 20 menin his unit were killed duringhis tour of duty.

[Editor’s note: LastOctober, another City Techstudent, Army SpecialistSegun Fredrick Akintade, 34,died in Iraq. Born in Nigeria,he had graduated in 2003with an associate’s degree incomputer science, and hadbegun work towards his bach-elor’s degree when he wascalled up.]

Poku had been doingextremely well at City Tech,

CUNY MATTERS — Spring 2006 15

nect seemingly unrelated disciplines.“I’ve gotten a lot of awards, but this one

I feel I’ve earned it,” he said, adding that itwas extra special because the presentationceremony was on Feb. 12, his 65th birth-day. “There is only one national medalgiven for science, and it includes the fieldsof physical, biological, mathematical,social, behavioral and engineering sciences.There were only eight recipients this year.”

Winning awards and gaining recognitionin his field is nothing new for Sullivan,who has been at the top of the numbersgame since the age of 26 when he solvedthe Hauptvermutung, the main conjecturethat any two triangulations of a polyhe-dron are combinatorially equivalent.

As Sullivan might say; “Go figure…”The professor’s National Medal of

Science joins a host of other prestigiousprizes and distinctions, including the 1971Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry fromthe American Mathematical Society, the1981 Elie Cartan Prix en Geometrie fromthe French Academy of Sciences, the 1993King Faisal International Prize in Scienceand the 1997 New York City Mayor’s

Award for Excellencein Science andTechnology.

The internationallyrenowned theoreticalmathematician special-izes in topology, whichstudies those propertiesof curved spaces thatdo not depend on sizes,lengths, areas or vol-umes, but rather onqualitative features likedimension or connect-edness.

In addition to hiswork for CUNY, healso is on the mathe-matics faculty at SUNYStony Brook. He has abachelor’s degree fromRice University and adoctorate fromPrinceton.

“I’ve had to workvery hard,” Sullivansaid. “You have to havea passion for math, ataste for it, you have tobe thirsty.”

In his college days,Sullivan was thirsty, but it sure wasn’t formath. “I was your typical teen whothought only about cars, music and girls. Imade a D in Math 101 in my first semes-ter,” he said.

It wasn’t only that it was a rigorousclass; it was that he had been banned fromcampus for six weeks—for drinking andrunning away from the cops. “I also didn’tunderstand how to study,” he confessed.“But I did make an A in the second semes-ter. Before college, math had always beenformulas and problems.”

It was when it became a philosophicalproblem that it caught his attention andpersuaded him to go into teaching. Heloves working with grad students becauseit helps him think and rethink problems.And he regrets that school-age childrenare not good at his favorite subject.“Almost every kid I meet who is 5 to 6years old likes math, but it gets all turnedaround in school,” Sullivan said. “Theyhave a bad experience, and they end uphating it. The teachers don’t know enough

about it, even the ones who are supposedto know.”

When he’s not up to his elbows innumbers, Sullivan, who lives in StonyBrook with his wife, Moira Chas, whoteaches the math department’s computerscience course at SUNY Stony Brook, he’splaying dad to his three youngest children—3-year-old Clara, 10-year-old Ricardoand 17-year-old Thomas; he has threeother children ages 33, 39, and 41.Ricardo, he said, was particularly thrilledby the White House visit.

Describing a typical day, Sullivan said, “Iget up when the children do and get themoff to school, and I usually try to workafter everyone is asleep. I’m not as effi-cient as I used to be, but I’m 65 and I’mstill kind of doing it.”

Saying “I’ve had a nice job with CUNYsince 1981,” Sullivan also informed that hehas no intention of retiring anytime soon.“I can’t even tell people that I’m going towork because they know I’m going in tohave fun,” he said, laughing.

Renowned mathematician Dennis P. Sullivan says he's 65 buthas no intention of retiring, because he's having too much fun asa Grad Center professor.

before being sent to Iraq. With the help ofBrown, he was doing the kind of scientificresearch he hoped would help get himinto medical school. He had developed a“breathalyzer” to be used by future stu-

dents as a lab tool in chemistry.“Jude was a very good student and I

knew he wanted to go to medical school,”explained Brown. “I thought an opportuni-ty for him to do research would improve

his chances for admission.”To work on the project,

Poku had received a stipendfrom the National ScienceFoundation’s Louis StokesNew York City Alliance forMinority Participation.Brown had received releasetime to work with him,using a grant through theProfessional Staff Congress-City University of New York(PSC-CUNY).

Eager to show the projectto peers, Poku had presentedhis work at the New YorkChemistry Students Asso-ciation’s 52nd Annual Under-graduate Research Sympo-sium, which was held at

Queensborough Community College inMay 2004.

Born and raised in Guyana, Pokumoved to New York believing it was aplace where dreams could be realized.

He recalled, “I was always good in mathand science and my father had beenencouraging me since I was little tobecome a medical doctor. I had to getaway and see what I was about.”

But initially life in America meant earn-ing $180 a week for 50 hours of work at astore in Downtown Brooklyn’s Fulton Mall.

“I wasted a couple of years at thesedead-end jobs before realizing the longhours would not let me go to college,” heexplained.

Farther down the road, after medicalschool, Poku said that he intends to travelto less fortunate countries and treat theirpeople. "I saw a lot of sick Iraqi womenand children while stationed there," heexplained. "My time in Iraq taught me tobe grateful for what I have here in theStates and to extend a hand when I can.”

His Tour of Duty in Iraq, and Now He’s Back at the Books

Medal-Winning Mathematician Says: Don’t DoCrossword Puzzles. Do Math!

The Grad Center’s Ph.D. Program in Mathematics is acrossroads for the many research mathematicians working in the CityUniversity of New York. The majority of the faculty have dual appoint-ments at the Center and at one of the CUNY four-year colleges.Research areas include algebraic geometry, algorithms, combinatorics,complex analysis and Teichmuller theory, dynamics, group theory, Lietheory, logic, number theory, probability, Riemannian geometry andanalysis, and topology.

The Mathematics Program provides students of high ability andstrong preparation with an opportunity to begin study for the doctoraldegree, either immediately upon graduation from college or after com-pletion of some graduate work in CUNY colleges or other accreditedinstitutions.

The program is designed to give students the background they willneed to pursue careers as pure or applied mathematicians.

MATH NOTESFROM THE CUNY GRADUATE CENTER:

Jude Poku, pictured here while he was serving in Iraq and longing tocontinue his science studies at City Tech. He is now back at the college.

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PAIDNew Haven, CTPermit # 1411

The City University of New YorkOffice of University Relations535 East 80th St.New York, NY 10021

In 2004, Andrew Beveridge, sociologyprofessor at Queens College, discovered anenclave of Afghans living in Flushing, onlya few blocks from his office on campus.

He found these new New Yorkers bystudying, with a demographer's intensity,some brand-new numbers from the latestcensus.

Beveridge's insight into the demograph-ics of the Afghan enclave was included inan enlightening feature article in the NewYork Times, tellingabout youngAfghan womenstruggling to bal-ance ethnic tradi-tions with the vicis-situdes of daily lifein New York.

As demographerspredict hugeincreases in thenumber of Asianand other NewYorkers settling inFlushing and otherneighborhoods,such skills are tak-ing on a specialurgency.

And Beveridge wants others to be ableto do the kind of work he does. In further-ance of that desire, he and a handful ofother seasoned demographers from aroundthe University helped create a new CUNYInstitute for Demographic Research.

The new Institute is expected soon tobegin hiring numbers-crunching scholars,with University administrators hoping theInstitute will be fully staffed in about fouryears with ten senior scholars.

Selma Botman, Executive ViceChancellor for Academic Affairs, boastedthat CUNY has some of the best-knowndemographers in the country. And nowthe University’s envied reputation in thisarea will deepen and expand.

“The demographers at CUNY aresought out and quoted by journalists at allthe major newspapers,” Botman said.

“Armed with data on immigration, vot-ing patterns, mortality and so much else,these scholars also are respected and trustedfor their ability to fairly interpret the datathat they uncover. With our current demog-raphers as our foundation, CUNY’s reputa-tion in this growing field of demographywill be multiplied several times over.”

There are a number of veteran demog-raphers at CUNY who regularly appear assources of hard-to-obtain data, in newspa-pers and magazines, as well as on televi-sion and radio and on the Internet.

Call them the Deans of Demography.Among the veterans are: Beveridge;

Neil G. Bennett, professor at the BaruchSchool of Public Affairs and the CUNYGraduate Center; Sanders Korenman, aneconomist who teaches at the School ofPublic Affairs at Baruch; and Ted Joyce,professor of economics at the Zicklin

School of Business at Baruch.Others are extremely skilled at using

databases, but are better known as practi-tioners of the discipline in which they teach.John Mollenkopf, for example, is consultedwidely for information about voting patternsbut is considered primarily a political scien-tist, as opposed to a demographer. “Youcould call me a political demographer, Iguess,” Mollenkopf said in an e-mail.

At Queens College, Dean Savage, chairof the sociology department, is another

skilled cruncher ofnumbers. Like the oth-ers mentioned above, hewas very instrumentalin establishing the newInstitute forDemographic Research.

Bennett saidCUNY’s new Instituteis filling a big void.“There's been anabsence of places atwhich you can train fordemography in NewYork City for decades,”he said.

Initially, administra-tors will hire threedemographers this year,

and those scholars will be based at BaruchCollege’s School of Public Affairs, TheGraduate Center and Queens College,where strong work in demographics isalready being done. Officials then plan tohire seven more demographers for thenew CUNY-wide Institute. over the nextfour years. The project is expected to costover $1 million to operate.

But CUNY demographers say theInstitute could bring in millions of dollarsmore annually, in grants and contractsfrom government agencies and founda-tions that study, for example, health andmortality in the developing world or inthe United States.

Bennett, who has had formal training indemography from the Office of PopulationResearch at Princeton University as well asa doctorate in sociology, was one of theprime movers behind the new institute. Heis also the founding director of the NewYork Census Research Data Center, anoth-er important resource for demographicstudy that is expected to open soon atBaruch. A second location of the center atCornell University is already open.

The center, one of nine in the nationand the only one in New York City, willallow researchers to study the mostdetailed census data, which is normallykept confidential to protect respondents’privacy. Korenman of Baruch is the currentexecutive director of the census center.

But it is the CUNY Institute forDemographic Research that is creatinggreat expectations for the training of alarge new crop of specialists. “I expect thatwe’ll create an environment of great intel-lectual vitality in the field of demographicsat the Institute,” Bennett said.

CUNY Will Train NewGeneration of Demographers

Professor Neil G. Bennett, renowned forresearching marriage patterns of Americanwomen, and mortality rates of developingnations, teaches at the Baruch School ofPublic Affairs and at The Graduate Center.