Standing committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Committee on Fiscal Affairs, February 6, 2012.
Standing committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Committee on Faculty, Staff and Administration, February 6, 2012.
Standing committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Committee on Academic, Policy, Program, and Research, February 6, 2012.
If you’re a New York City firefighter, you have to be a better one each day you’re on the job, says Sal Cassano, Fire Department Commissioner, and a Vietnam veteran and John Jay College graduate. “Every day that you come in,” Cassano says, “you have to learn.” The commissioner, who started as a rookie firefighter in 1969, sees the demands as similar to armed forces. “You have to train, train and train, just like we did in the military,” says Cassano, who joins Veterans Corner host Pat Gualtieri to talk about his career, being a veteran, and why he loves being a firefighter.
Early in World War II, Japanese intelligence had cracked every secret code the United States had devised. Seeking a different approach, the U.S. enlisted the help of 29 young Navajo men to form an elite unit — the Navajo Code Talkers. Using their Navajo language, they devised and spoke in a code in the Pacific battle theater that was never broken, protecting the advantage of secrecy for the U.S. military. Keith Little served in the U.S. Marine Corps as a Code Talker from 1943 until after the end of the war, and joined Veterans Corner host Donald Buzney to discuss the legacy of the Code Talkers, his recent appearance on the HBO series “The Pacific,” and a new project — The National Navajo Code Talkers Museum & Veterans Center, which is currently under development. Little passed away on Jan. 3, 2012, soon after this interview was recorded.
For every dollar earned by a man in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, a female counterpart earns 14 percent less, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. It’s a statistic that City College professor Maribel Vazquez says must change. “Women in the workforce lack strong negotiation skills, Vazquez says, “because female aggression is perceived negatively by both men and women.” Vazquez delivered the keynote address at “Women in Science: Negotiating a Successful Academic Career,” a panel discussion at the CUNY Graduate Center. An associate professor of Biomedical Engineering, Vazquez also presented her research on the use of micro and nanotechnology in the study of cell migration in the brain.
The proper teaching of African enslavement in America as a central component of American history remains a great failure of primary and secondary education, according to Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the new director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Speaking to students at New York City College of Technology, Muhammad cited data showing only 2 percent of high school seniors know the basics of the long struggle for civil rights and that only 15 states require the inclusion of slavery as a key factor in the Civil War. “Slavery is not an aberration in the American story; it is the quintessential American story,” he said.
Anita Hill, whose riveting allegations of sexual harassment almost derailed the confirmation of Clarence Thomas as a U.S. Supreme court justice 20 years ago, told a crowd at Brooklyn College: “I assure you: Nowhere on my bucket list was the ambition of testifying before a Senate Judiciary Committee about my own personal experience. Nevertheless, as the nomination proceeded, I realized what was at stake. At the heart of my testimony was the integrity of the court … [which] is only as good as the integrity of the people who are sitting on the court,” she said at the Shirley Chisholm Day celebration. Chisholm (Brooklyn College, 1946) was the first black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and the first woman to make a serious run for the Democratic presidential nomination, in 1972. Hill, a professor at Brandeis University, also discussed the role that gender and race continue to play, particularly in the current foreclosure crisis.
How will today’s green initiatives to combat worldwide climate change alter the world for future generations? For an answer, Thomas McGovern, anthropology professor at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, has spent more than a decade studying how Viking settlers in Greenland managed to avoid destroying the land for centuries. “In Greenland they [the Vikings] got it right, but the environment changed on them again,” says McGovern in his lecture, “Sustainability and Collapse: Lessons from the Vikings,” part of the CUNY Science Cafe lecture series. “Their robustness to deal with one problem made them vulnerable to another.”
Childhood trauma can make you a sick adult. “Physical and sexual abuse, harsh language and chaos in the home lead to heart disease, propensity for smoking, obesity, drug abuse, high risk for AIDS, depression, anxiety, anger, and other forms of antisocial behavior,” says professor Bruce S. McEwan, who heads up the Harold and Margaret Milliken Hatch Laboratory of Neuroendocrinology at the Rockefeller University. Speaking at Brooklyn College’s Children’s Studies Center for Research, Policy and Public Service for the Social Justice for Children, which convened a National Consultation to End Childhood Abuse and Violence Against Children, McEwan was among a group of experts from the fields of neuroscience, social sciences and public health, who presented recent findings on violence against children.
| GENERAL FINDS | TOP SEARCHES | TOP CLICKS | QUICK FINDS |
| SENIOR and GRADUATE COLLEGES | SENIOR and GRADUATE COLLEGES | HONORS and PROFESSIONAL | COMMUNITY COLLEGES |
![[X]](http://www.cuny.edu/resources/images/global/symbols/close_cuny_blue.gif)