Not only are blacks and Latinos disproportionately charged with marijuana possession in New York City, the tactics used by the police are questionable, says Harry Levine, a professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center. In his report, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade: Racial Bias and Police Policy in New York City,” Levine found that between 1997 and 2009 nearly nine out of ten people charged with possessing marijuana came from the two groups, the majority being African Americans, even though national surveys show whites to be the heaviest users. Levine points out that possession of seven-eighths of an ounce, or less, of the drug in New York is a violation, not a crime. “But if that marijuana is open to the public view–meaning someone had been told by the police to take it out of their pocket–then it becomes a crime. The cops are allowed to trick people.”
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Since 2003 the number of “stop and frisk” encounters by the New York City Police Department has more than tripled, from roughly 161,000 to 576,000 in 2009, but only about 12 percent of those people were charged with criminal activity, according to a report by the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. Opponents of this practice call it racist–the majority of those stopped are black and Hispanic–as well as ineffective. “The return rate on these stops is minuscule,” says Delores Jones-Brown, director of the center and the lead author of the report, “Stop, Question & Frisk Policing Practices in New York City: A Primer.” “We would not accept that kind of return in any other profession.” Jones-Brown discusses how the policy has impacted the relationship between the NYPD and the public and what could be done to improve the communication between the two. “There needs to be a survey of police officers,” says Jones-Brown, “to determine what’s motivating them to engage in stopping.”
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In his 11th novel, “Parrot and Oliver in America,” Peter Carey reimagines Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” and his famous journey to the United States in the 19th century using the dichotomy of a French aristocrat and his servant. ”Being able to write about a French aristocrat was probably helped a little by my early consciousness of class and the ability to survive in different worlds,” said Carey, a two-time winner of the Booker Prize and executive director of the MFA Creative Writing Program at Hunter College. Carey explained how his own experiences as a young boy, coming from the country in Australia and traveling to a fancy boarding school in the large city of Victoria, had influenced his writing. “The culture shock between where I’d been and where I arrived was immense,” said Carey, who spoke and read from his new novel at a Book Talk hosted by Hunter College’s Roosevelt House.
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The arrival of jazz in the early 1920s not only challenged traditional musical tastes, but also was a powerful cultural force that brought African-American, Jewish and working-class culture into the white Protestant mainstream, according to David Savran, author of Highbrow/Lowdown: Theatre, Jazz and the Making of a New Middle Class. “A lot of antipathy for jazz had to do with fear of racial mixing,” said Savran, Distinguished Professor of Theatre and Vera Mowry Roberts Chair in American Theatre at the Graduate Center. “For a lot of white Americans, this was really scary.” Savran was joined by John Graziano, Professor Emeritus of Music at the Graduate Center and City College and Kevin Byrne, a doctoral candidate in theatre at the Graduate Center, to discuss how jazz not only revolutionized music, but reshaped America’s cultural landscape as it spread to legitimate theaters to attract the middle class. Listen Now >>
Student enrollment, the creation of a new policy institute, the state and budget outlook and a summit on higher education were among the items Chancellor Matthew Goldstein discussed with the Board of Trustees during its final meeting of the school year.
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Public meeting of the Board of Trustees, June 28, 2010.
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For Salvatore Cassano, nothing compares to the rush he would get from fighting fires. “The excitement of being able to help people never goes away,” says Cassano, who was appointed the 32nd commissioner of the New York City Fire Department in January 2010. “I hear a siren now and I figure I should be responding some place–I miss it every day.” In his forty-year career, Cassano has held every job in the department including chief, the highest-ranking uniformed position in the FDNY. In an interview in his Brooklyn office, Commissioner Cassano talked about his years of service, starting as a firefighter in 1969, as well as his experience at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in fire science in 1976. “My professors understood if I was late for class,” recalls Cassano. “They could smell the smoke.”
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As universities across the globe become digitalized — using technology within the classroom to offer online degrees — commercial interests must be addressed, according to Siva Vaidhyanathan, associate professor of Media Studies and Law at the University of Virginia. “The wrong reason to teach online is because administrators think there will be a payoff,” said Prof. Vaidhyanathan in “The Classroom is Sacred: Digitization Without Commercialization” a lecture at the Graduate Center sponsored by Digital Media Studies Group, the Center for the Humanities and New Media Lab. “The right reason to teach online is to reach students who can’t reach you,” he said.
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When women’s rights activists successfully campaigned for Morocco to adopt a landmark law supporting women’s equality in 2004, it proved reform in Islam was possible in non-secular countries, says Ebrahim Moosa. “Women were so dissatisfied with the state of Islamic law, in the national law, that they gathered 1 million signatures asking the King for reform,” said Moosa, an associate professor of Islamic studies at Duke University. In a panel discussion, “The Rise of Intellectual Reform in Islam,” part of the Great Issues Forum, Moosa, Baber Johansen, professor of Islamic studies at Harvard Divinity School, and Abdolkarim Soroush, former professor of Islamic philosophy at the University of Tehran, discussed the pressure many reformers face in Islamic countries. “In the case of Morocco, we had a mass movement finding a legal framework for its demands,” said Moosa. Listen Now >>
Subcommittee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Subcommittee on Investment, June 22, 2010.
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