"People are no longer tied to the faith of their families,” says Mara Einstein, Professor of Media Studies at Queens College. That, combined with the lack of a state-sponsored religion, has left many religious groups “branding” their faiths to attract new congregants, according to Prof. Einstein, author of the critically acclaimed 2007 work “Brands of Faith: Marketing Faith in a Commercial Age.” In a panel discussion at the Graduate Center, she joins Queens College colleague Heather Hendershot, new-media guru Douglass Rushkoff, and religion reporter Jeff Sharlet to discuss the implications of packaging belief systems in America.
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For decades, David Harvey has argued that cities could not continue to function as centers for profit-making and capital accumulation in the face of urban poverty and associated ills. Today, the British-born social theorist continues to make his case. “The question of what kind of city we want to live in cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of human beings we want to be,” according to Dr. Harvey, Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the Graduate Center. In the Fifth Annual Lewis Mumford Lecture on Urbanism at City College entitled “The Right to the City,” Dr. Harvey says that such questions need to be addressed by all who seek a more humane and ecologically sensitive urbanism for the 21st century.
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Post-War World II Belgrade was a “living” slaughterhouse, says Yugoslavian-born Charles Simic, the Poet Laureate of the United States and the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College. After moving to the U.S. in 1954, Simic discovered poetry as a tool for exploring his postwar experience. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize, the Edgar Allan Poe Award, a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Award” and most recently, the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award for Poetry, Simic, now 70, reads and discusses poems from his 2008 book “That Little Something,” a remembrance of his salad days in New York City.
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For nearly 40 years, freelance photographer Mel Rosenthal has traveled the world to capture extraordinary images of ordinary people. A native of the South Bronx, his black and white chronicle “In the South Bronx of America,” captured a borough at the abyss; The New York Times described that work as “a classic example of the art of documentary photography.” Rosenthal’s ongoing project, “The Arab-Americans: Americans By Choice,” features photographs dating forward from 1992, highlighting the large diversity of Arab-American communities. The exhibit, which opened in New York in 2002, has traveled to other U.S. cities as well as to Jordan and Syria. In a lecture at Queens College, Mr. Rosenthal discusses his Bronx origins and the evolution of the Arab-Americans exhibit.
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In his report to the Board of Trustees, Chancellor Matthew Goldstein provides an overview of the University’s recently approved $1.8 billion capital budget, outlining plans for new facilities at many college campuses, including a CUNY-wide science research center at City College and a new building for CUNY Law School. The chancellor also discusses the prospect of a CUNY Endowment Fund.
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Public meeting of the Board of Trustees, April 28, 2008
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Two top White House counterterrorism posts continue to go unfilled following Frances Townsend’s resignation in January as assistant to the president for homeland security and counterterrorism. While Prof. Joseph King calls this a “terrible situation,” he also says he’s not surprised. “This is basically a lame duck administration and it’s hard to get people to come (to serve) when they know they have an expiration date of January 2008.”
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More than a half-century ago, Charles Simic arrived in the United States from Belgrade speaking little English. Today, at 70, he is among the world’s most celebrated poets. He has published more than 20 volumes of poetry, as well as other works, and has garnered virtually every major award, including the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. In 2007 he was appointed the 15th U.S. Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. A retired professor of creative writing at the University of New Hampshire, Prof. Simic is the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence at Baruch College for the spring semester. Discussing his work and remarkable life, Prof. Simic says, “I don’t think, ever before, has there been so much interest in poetry.”
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Derell Kennedo went from high school dropout to recent recipient of a Charles B. Rangel International Affairs Fellowship, one of 10 awarded annually to young Americans interested in careers with the Foreign Service of the U.S. Department of State. Kennedo finished his GED at his mother’s urging after leaving Thomas Edison High School in Jamaica, then enrolled at York College in 2003, graduating second in his class. But he says it was a book, “The Destruction of Black Civilization: Great Issues of a Race from 4500 B.C. to 2000 A.D.” by African-American historian Chancellor J. Williams, that played a pivotal role in his life: “A friend of mine from the neighborhood gave me the book and it changed the way I saw things.”
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By the year 2030 a staggering one million more people will be living in New York City, according to Amanda Burden, chair of the New York City Planning Commission, and they’ll all need a place to live. “We need to provide for this growing population and to make up for many years of not building any housing—and certainly not affordable housing,” says Ms. Burden, who has served on the City Planning Commission since 1990 and received the 2004 Design Patron Award from the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum for her work in fostering design excellence and enhancing the city’s landscape. As part of City College’s Architectural Lecture Series, Ms. Burden presents her lecture, “Shaping the City: A Strategic Blueprint for New York’s Future.”
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