CUNY Newswire

Dave Fields, a University dean who serves as special counsel to Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, has announced that he is leaving $1 million to CUNY Law School — the largest bequest in its history. The money will be used equally to support student scholarships and faculty development, including conferences and training courses.

On a recent chilly afternoon at City College, the scene inside the five-story Morris Raphael Cohen Library is a hive of buzzing activity. Surrounding the central shelves of books and journals on each floor, students are reading, viewing computer screens, writing notes, scrolling through their smartphones.

Most books and journals today can be readily replaced by their e-versions, but many historical items and special collections at CUNY libraries have no electronic substitutes: They’re the real thing. And yet, even these items are gradually becoming part of digital archives, too. The goal is not to replace them, but to provide greater access to such treasures for people who can’t physically get to the library.

A century after the sinking of the Titanic — a disaster retold and reconstructed in films, books, art and science — a City Tech professor has presented a new theory about how the doomed luxury liner broke apart, giving credence to the accounts of survivors that were dismissed at the time.

University scholars weigh in on subjects from art to Zionism.

Tuition discounts can add up to significant savings
on job-related courses.

June has been designated “Technology Month” by the University’s office of Professional Development and Learning Management.

New York State now recognizes same-sex marriage but the federal government does not. Nor does it recognize domestic partnerships. Therefore, in order to get the full benefit of health care coverage available to the same-sex spouses and/or domestic partners of CUNY employees, those spouses/partners must enroll in Medicare Parts A and B when they reach 65.

In March, the New York State Legislature approved changes to all state retirement systems — affecting new CUNY employees who enroll in TRS, ERS, BERS or TIAA-CREF.

A record 16 CUNY students — 15 of whom earned undergraduate degrees at the University — have won coveted National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships for work toward their master’s or doctoral degrees. Other CUNY students have also won prestigious awards including a Clarendon Fund Scholarship of the University of Oxford, a Goldwater Scholarship and a New York City Urban Fellowship.

At the request of John Jay College of Criminal Justice’s Faculty Senate, the University is moving towards toughening its sexual harassment rules to prohibit — rather than “strongly discourage” as at present — consensual intimate relationships between faculty or staff and students over whom they have professional responsibility.

Anyone who calls one of CUNY’s community colleges home knows that these campuses are some of the busiest places in the city. The six colleges — soon to be seven, with the opening of the New Community College in the fall — serve more than 96,000 students, an increase of almost 20,000 students in just the last five years. In addition, they welcome nearly 130,000 students in continuing education programs.

The University’s renowned faculty members continually win professional-achievement awards from prestigious organizations as well as research grants from government agencies, farsighted foundations and leading corporations. Pictured are just a few of the recent honorees. Brief summaries of many ongoing research projects are listed here.

University Student Senate Chairperson Kafui Kouakou intends to do something novel in November: cast his first vote as a newly minted American citizen. Coming from Togo — a country that has seen coups, political murders and arrests, political parties banned and the constitution suspended during its tumultuous 50-plus years of independence — he knows how valuable the right to vote is. “Where I come from, we had a president who took the power, and even if he got the vote in a so-called fair election [in 2010], people got into fights and got killed. Here you actually put the people in power. That’s a big difference compared to a place where you can vote, but the outcome of the election is preset.”

More high-achieving students have applied to and have been accepted at The City University of New York for fall 2012 than ever before, with Macaulay Honors College leading the way. At Macaulay, the number of applicants rose by 36 percent to 5,529 from 4,077; they are an exemplary group, having a mean SAT score of 1269 and a mean academic average of 91.4 percent.

For more than a quarter of a century award-winning landscape painter Daniel Hauben has set up his easel under elevated subway trains, at street corners and on overpasses, capturing the life of the Bronx on canvas and paper. In the last two years, however, Hauben, 55, has stayed inside, working in his Riverdale studio to create monumental art pieces for the new, $102-million, three-story North Hall and Library complex at Bronx Community College.

An array of nationally renowned leaders in higher education resoundingly endorsed the University’s Pathways reform of general education and credit-transfer policies, praising the work as an innovative national model that will promote academic excellence, improve graduation rates and create a more accessible, clear and efficient system of transferring course credits among CUNY colleges.

Iconic views of Manhattan with Long Island City in the foreground will be one attraction of a hotel and educational complex planned near LaGuardia Community College. New York City College of Technology has long been known for its degrees in hospitality management — top four- and two-year programs with a distinguished professional faculty and students who compete for national culinary awards, and have been going on to successful careers in the hotel, restaurant and tourism industries in New York and beyond since the early 1950s.

Views differ about Frances Fox Piven, the legendary rabble-rouser and Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Sociology at the Graduate Center. Glenn Beck, for example, despises her (“enemy of the Constitution”), attacked her dozens of times on the Fox network’s Glenn Beck Show, and seems to welcome visitors to his website, The Blaze, who are given to ominous violent threats that flirt with Gabrielle Giffords territory.

Jazzmine Clarke-Glover has an interesting job as a CUNY Graduate Center human resources specialist, but she also wants to start a business as she continues to work for the University. “One of my goals is to be an entrepreneur. To have companies that empower women,” she said recently, a white flower regally decorating her dark hair. She’s starting with a website — which she hopes to use as a springboard to develop wellness seminars for black women on issues related to their health and well-being.