With approximately 79 million baby boomers facing retirement age, the country should be looking at the immigrant work force as a much-needed boost to the economy. “We need immigrants to help us balance the senior ratio,” says Dowell Myers, a professor of urban planning and demography at the University of Southern California. In a Baruch College lecture, “Finding the Keys to Consensus on Immigration by Looking Ahead: Old Myths and New Realities,” Myers urged lawmakers to help clear a legal path for the estimated 11.2 immigrants living here. “We need to cultivate the people who we’ve been neglecting — especially their kids, the future workers, taxpayers and homebuyers.”
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Executive Committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, July 21, 2011.
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A new biography of Malcolm X by the late author, Manning Marable, is bound to stir up emotions. “The saddest part of the text, which bought tears to my eyes, was when we find out that everyone close to Malcolm X betrayed him,” says Cornel West, referring to members of the Nation of Islam, in which Malcolm was a minister in Harlem before becoming estranged. At an event at the Graduate Center, moderated by sociology professor Stanley Aronowitz, West was joined by Gary Younge of The Guardian to discuss the significance of the book, “Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention.” “By returning Malcom X to a human being, Marable has restored the notion that history is made by real people,” says Younge.
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Public hearing on items on the Board of Trustees Calendar for the July Executive Committee meeting of the Board, July 20, 2011.
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When completed in 1913, Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building was the world’s tallest skyscraper and the jewel of Manhattan, but today its majestic crown is barely visible behind a maze of glass and steel towers. “I wonder whether, indeed, the new skyline taking shape before us will possess the same magic, elegance, artistry and glamour — the same urbanity — as the old,” says Gail Fenske, professor of architecture at Roger Williams University and author of “The Skyscraper and the City: The Woolworth Building and the Making of Modern New York.” Upstaged by more famous neighbors like the World Trade Center, and new structures like Frank Gehry’s Beekman Tower, the Woolworth building and the era it represents may be at risk of being forgotten, says Prof. Fenske in the City College lecture series, “New York, New York: Place, Culture And Urbanity,” sponsored by the Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture.
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