CUNY Newswire

THOUGH you probably have never heard of him, Hank Kaplan might go down in boxing history as the greatest of all time. Not for his boxing skill, but for amassing the largest archive of boxing memorabilia and artifacts in existence.
Upon his death in 2007, at age 88, Kaplan donated the collection — valued at $2.94 million and gathered over 60 years — to the Brooklyn College Library Archives and Special Collections.

SCIENTISTS ESTIMATE that there are 300 to 400 different species of terebrid snails — a type of venomous marine snail — that live in tropical environments around the globe. So far, only 150 species have been identified from DNA analysis. Some terebrids are equipped with a venom apparatus that produces compounds that could be used for drug development.

BEFORE historian David Nasaw agreed to write the biography of Joseph P. Kennedy, he says he warned Ambassador Jean Kennedy Smith and the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who asked him to do it, that “I’m a crazy researcher and I’m going to find stuff about your father that’s going to make the family unhappy.”

A collection of new books written by CUNY authors

STEPHEN SOMERSTEIN was a 24-year-old physics student in City College’s night school when he traveled to Alabama to photograph the 1965 Selma-to-Montgomery Civil Rights March. As a Managing/Picture Editor of “Main Events,” the student newspaper, he felt he had to document “what was going to be a historic event.” He tagged along with the marchers and gained unfettered access to everyone from Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks to James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin.

By Lenina Mortimer There is a surprising amount of cultural capital to be gained in Bayside, Queens. The residential northeast corner of Queens — far from the trendy Chelsea galleries, Museum Mile and the famed Great White Way — is home to Queensborough Community College where there are three acclaimed cultural centers. The highly celebrated [...]

THE COLLEGE SEARCH PROCESS is now easier for students — and their parents — with the help of a new website. “We want this to be the online ’311′ for college information in NYC because there is a real need for reliable information that is accessible to everyone,” says Lisa Castillo Richmond, the director of Graduate NYC!, a city program devoted to increasing college readiness and completion among NYC students.

A new species of monkey found in the Democratic Republic of Congo may help conservation efforts in the African bush, says Hunter College anthropology professor Christopher Gilbert. A paper on the discovery of the Cercopithecus lomamiensis, known locally as the “Lesula,” co-authored by Gilbert made news headlines last fall.

MAXINE FISHER MAY HAVE RETIRED but in her life the band — or better said, the chamber ensemble — plays on. All for the benefit of children. As she left her long-term position as a Queens College administrator, Fisher envisaged and created a new program, one that fills an educational and cultural gap by bringing classical music to elementary schools throughout the borough.

IT’S NOT EVERY DAY that the president of the United States mentions The City University of New York. But during February’s State of the Union address, Barack Obama highlighted a University program that prepares high school students for technical careers called Pathways in Technology Early College High School.

INSPIRED BY HER FATHER AND GRANDFATHER, who both served in the military in Taiwan, Baruch College freshman Rose Lee made up her mind in the second grade to become an officer in the U.S. Army.

Americans consume nearly 400 million cups of coffee a day, and the used coffee grounds that remain — like the leftovers of your Grande Skinny Caramel Macchiato — most often end up in the trash.

TRYING TO GET DEMOCRATS AND REPUBLICANS to agree on policy — especially in Congress — seems impossible these days. But Brooklyn College professor of economics Robert Cherry says he can help break some of the partisan gridlock in Washington. In Moving Working Families Forward: Third Way Policies That Can Work, a book he co-authored with Robert Lerman, Cherry focuses on third-way initiatives that would combine both liberal and conservative ideas that could help shore up the lower middle class ($40,000- $70,000 median family income), which has been hit hard in the economic downturn.

FOR DECADES, the retail industry provided many with a stable career path — with paid benefits and steady wage increases — but that’s no longer the case, according to a recent study by CUNY’s Murphy Institute and The Retail Action Project.

AT LEHMAN COLLEGE, students can’t help but hear the history echoing through the walls of Davis Hall or the Old Gymnasium, two of the original buildings on campus. Before Lehman was established in 1968, the campus was the Bronx branch of Hunter College, known as Hunterin- the-Bronx.

Fjoraldi Zguro, a student at Kingsborough Community College, snapped a photograph of KCC students sifting through the ads on a board in early January. “I saw this scene several times, but I didn’t have my camera with me,” says Zguro, who was a journalist in his native Albania and plans to attend Baruch College to study marketing. “. . . after I saw it, I tried to sell books that I bought in the first semester.”

CUNY has identified a burgeoning need to educate and support its rapidly growing number of students who have Autism Spectrum Disorders, and it hopes to become a national leader in providing a variety of higher education opportunities for these individuals.

WITH THE U.S. GOVERNMENT’S relaxation of restrictions on travel to Cuba last year, 11 CUNY students were able to visit the island as part of CUNY’s first-ever Cuban arts and culture program, in January.

FOR MORE THAN A QUARTER 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.

UNIVERSITIES are organic entities — they evolve and change, shedding and acquiring over time as they determine how best to advance students’ learning and enhance their own capacity to prepare a skilled citizenry.