A leading architect of Massachusetts’ health insurance overhaul, John E. McDonough was tapped by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy to help write the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act signed by President Obama in March. It’s still a work in progress, he says. “This new law is, in itself, not the end,” said McDonough, who for the spring semester is the inaugural Joan H. Tisch Distinguished Fellow in Public Health at the Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College. “It will be corrected, fixed, improved on, repeatedly, over the next coming decades.” In an interview, McDonough, who until January served as senior advisor to the U.S. Senate Committee of Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, discussed his role in enacting this new legislation and what it will mean for all Americans.
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Brooklynites, watch out. Poetry is on its way to your parks, street fairs, the public consciousness. So says Tina Chang, Brooklyn’s new poet laureate, who wants to put poetry center stage. “We might just have to confront them, the same way that Poetry in Motion does in the subway, so they’re actually surprised to be reading a poem,” Chang said of the public. Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz named Chang, a Park Slope resident and Hunter College adjunct professor, to the post in February and already a few of her ideas are in the works, including Adopt-a-Poet Day for Ronald Edmonds Middle School and a collaborative arts project for the Brooklyn Book Festival. She discussed her job and why she feels poetry is for everyone: It’s “an embodiment of every kind of creative thought you’ve ever had. …. It questions your self-expression and your sense of self in the world.”
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Dolphins may be the second smartest creatures on the planet, but as the Oscar-winning documentary film “The Cove” depicts, Japanese fisherman kill them for food and haul them from the wild for aquariums. Hunter psychologist Diane Reiss, the documentary’s technical advisor, helps lead a global campaign to stop the roundup and slaughter. Meanwhile, she works in the ocean and in the Baltimore aquarium to expand our knowledge of how intelligent they are. Can you believe dolphins can use a special underwater computer to say what they want?
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As New York State’s education commissioner David Steiner heads a department that employs more than 3,000 people and oversees every level of education in the state. Before taking on his current position, Steiner served as dean of education at Hunter College, where he helped create a highly successful program known as Teacher U, a certification program for graduates seeking master’s degrees that requires students to teach full time and spend Saturdays on campus being taught by a faculty of teachers and principals from top-performing high schools. “We’re very gratified to see that it’s received national attention,” Steiner said of Teacher U at Hunter. “Now we hope to build on that model, both here and elsewhere, because it focuses on those critical skills that we know make a difference in the classroom.” Steiner, who took the Albany post in October, discusses his role as a teacher-trainer innovator and the challenges he faces as the state’s top educator.
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Fed by a leap in calories consumed and lack of physical activity, childhood obesity is a growing epidemic, and school lunches are one culprit, says Nicholas Freudenberg, director of the Doctor of Public Health Program at CUNY School of Public Health at Hunter College. It’s up to the public — individually and by pressuring government to turn the heat up on schools — to control the problem, Prof. Freudenberg says. “Human decisions” are responsible,” he said. “People can unmake those decisions, but it’s not going to happen on its own.” In his lecture, “A Tale of Two Obes-Cities: Comparing London and New York City’s Responses to Childhood Obesity,” part of the Serving Science Cafe Series, he discussed a CUNY-London Metropolitan University study of efforts to improve opportunities for children to consume healthy food and increase activity. Both cities had difficulty implementing changes because of the large number of schools; most continued to dish out pizza, burgers and fries.
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Breast cancer isn’t one disease, but multiple ones, and the type of cancer should be identified before a care plan is set up, says Jill Bargonetti, associate professor of biological sciences at Hunter College and a biology faculty member at the Graduate Center. “We have to do pharmacogenomics to determine what the cancer is before we think about how we’re going to kill it,” she said. “If you use the same treatments without thinking about the genomics of the disease, you might do more harm than good.” In her lecture “Disarming Breast Cancer’s Elusive Molecular Arsenals: How Close Are We?” — part of the Serving Science Cafe series — Bargonetti explains how the focus of her research, the tumor suppressor protein p53, might someday be a common molecular target to help disarm multiple breast cancer types.
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In his “Environmental Town Hall†lecture, William Solecki, director of the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities, insists that any future plans to “green” New York City — from retrofitting old buildings to creating environmentally friendly ones — should start now. “We are literally rebuilding New York today in many fundamental ways,†said Solecki, professor of geography at Hunter College, “and it’s important that we rebuild with an eye towards that sustainable future.†Solecki said that cities are responsible for about 70 percent of the world’s carbon emissions, but since they contain about half the world’s population, they are also our best hope for a greener future.
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When she was about to graduate from high school, U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda I. Solis told the 2009 Hunter College graduating class, her guidance counselor advised her mother: “Your daughter is not college material. Maybe she should follow the career of her older sister and become a secretary.” Despite that, Solis said, her “ganas,” or desire to succeed, spurred her on to college and beyond. A daughter of immigrants, she became the first Latina elected to the California State Senate in 1994, representing Los Angeles’ 32nd congressional district. And earlier this year, she was tapped by President Obama for Labor, the first Hispanic woman to serve as a Cabinet member. “There are probably a dozen of you in this hall who are future Sonya Sotomayors and probably two dozen future Hilda Solises,” Solis told the graduates gathered at Radio City Music Hall.
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Dubbed “Felix the Fixer” by the tabloids during New York’s 1970s fiscal crisis, investment banker Felix Rohatyn was widely credited with saving the city from bankruptcy as chairman of the Municipal Assistance Corporation. At 81, Rohatyn is still solving problems. In a forum co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and Hunter College’s Roosevelt House, entitled “Leadership and the Economic Crisis: What’s Next?” Rohatyn argues that recent bank bailouts are essential to raising the public’s confidence in America’s banks and in pulling the nation out of debt. “For our economy to work, it is crucial for our citizens to believe in financial institutions,” said Rohatyn, who was joined by Robert Steel, former president and CEO of Wachovia, Daniel Gross, senior editor of Newsweek, and moderator Lesley Stahl, correspondent for 60 Minutes.
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Harvard history professor Niall Ferguson was so convinced Wall Street was about to collapse, he wrote “The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World (2008), which argues that every bubble bursts, and now it’s the U.S. economy’s turn. “Americans have gone from a culture of thrift to one of debt, ” Ferguson said at a Hunter College talk moderated by WNYC’s Brian Lehrer. Economist Jeff Madrick, a visiting professor of humanities at The Cooper Union, countered: “People have had to borrow a lot to make ends meet, and it will become much deeper if we don’t take on more debt.” The event was co-sponsored by the Aspen Institute and Roosevelt House.
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