CUNY Newswire

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.

This year, more students than ever are filling the classrooms of The City University of New York: 270,000 degree-seeking students, to be exact. Across our 24 colleges and professional schools, the CUNY community is supporting all of our students in earning a degree that will allow them to realize their professional aspirations and contribute to New York’s communities, joining the 1 million CUNY graduates already living and working in New York State.

CUNY students will be required to take 30 credits in a number of specific and thematic areas, under the new Common Core framework developed by the Pathways to Degree Completion task force headed by Michelle J. Anderson, Dean of the CUNY School of Law.

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 start here and continue inside.

During three mid-January weeks, students can fulfill prerequisites, earn extra credits — even study abroad. For as long as she can remember, Sarah Leibowitz has had a keen interest in visiting the Galápagos Islands. But working on a double major in neuroscience and psychology at Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, she never had the time or the budget to fit a trip into her rigorous schedule.

A unique exploration of “The Great Recession” in the context of economic upheaval throughout U.S. history is now available on a dynamic website and a richly illustrated companion calendar.

There are hidden treasures throughout CUNY, programs launched and nurtured by faculty members with a particular blend of vision, passion and wherewithal. One of them is the Department of Photography at LaGuardia Community College, a program that started small in 1986 and became what remains CUNY’s only degree-granting program in photography. Its students’ work has become a signature of the college, earning the department a growing reputation as a jewel of the community colleges.

At Hostos Community College, students win prizes for using home grown technology to register for classes early and perform other tasks. At Brooklyn College, long lines at the registrar have thinned, thanks to a new online appointment scheduler for face-to-face advisement. And IT staff at John Jay College of Criminal Justice have devised a secure wireless link between two college buildings without using expensive fiber optic wiring.

That man from Stratford was an expert on the arboreal. He knew from deciduous.

Take Macbeth, who wistfully observes just before his demise, “My way of life/ Is fall’n into the sere, the yellow leaf….” Or the