Salute to Scholars 09 FFFF - CUNY

Dean Kenneth Olden of the proposed CUNY School of Public Health

Protecting Our FutureOne Glass at a Time

Page 14

Colin Powell’sNew Mission

Page 8

Adding It UpAt CUNY Page 22

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK JUNE 2009

SalutetoScholarsCover 09:Salute Magazine 4/23/09 1:26 PM Page 4

CUNYRates Five Stars!

20052006

20072008

2009

20052006

20072008

2009

DON GOMEZ

Colin Powell Fellow

at The City College

RYAN MEROLA

Macaulay Honors

College at

Brooklyn College

CHRISTINE CURELLA

Macaulay Honors

College at

Hunter College

DAVID BAUER

Macaulay Honors College

at The City College

of New York

of New York

CLAUDIO SIMPKINS

Macaulay Honors College

at The City College

of New York

Visit www.cuny.eduor call 1-800-CUNY-YES

DON GOMEZ, Colin Powell Fellow atCity College, is the 5th CUNY student in 5 years to

win up to $30,000 for graduate study from the Harry S. TrumanScholarship Foundation. In the last 6 years, CUNY students have also won

ten $7,500 Barry M. Goldwater Scholarships in undergraduate mathematics,natural sciences and engineeering.

CUNY students continue to win the nation’s most prestigious awards,including Rhodes and Marshall Scholarships, Fulbrights and NationalScience Foundation grants.

World Class Students + World Class Faculty = Success

Truman Scholarships 5 Years in a Row

contents I spring 20092 First Word

3 Investing in Success

4 School Ties Stories from Around the Colleges

8 Lessons in Leadership Colin Powell

10 Profile Art Curator Joachim Pissarro

12 Community College The First New Two Year School in 37 Years

14 Public Health Kenneth Olden Works for a Healthier Future

18 Field Study Scott Sternbach

22 Problem-Solving Math Today and Yesterday

30 Head of the Class Short Story Writer Amy Hempel

32 Great Graduates Private Investigator Jay Salpeter

34 History Lesson Sportswriter Maury Allen

36 Mentor Cindy Puente and Her Teachers

37 Page Turners Lincoln Prize Winner James Oakes

39 Books At-A-Glance Recent Books Written by Faculty

40 Top of the Class Pre-Med Student Nick Copeli

41 CUNY Crossword

42 Photo Finish Kingsborough Community College

44 Campus Tour Hostos Community College

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

ON THE COVER: Science changed the life of notedcancer researcher Kenneth Olden, who grew up inpoverty and is mindful of the toll it can take. Nowas founding dean of CUNY’s proposed graduateSchool of Public Health, he wants to see sciencechange the lives of city residents, who bear thebrunt of complex medical problems caused by theirenvironment. Since your longevity depends in parton where you live, Olden puts an emphasis onurban wellness and prevention. Cleaning up the airand water will help extend the lifespan of futuregenerations — good news for the kids at theLehman College Child Care Center above, fromleft: Jazmin Mauras, Maya Vasquez, Nathan John,Kamil Rodriguez and Ethan Martinez.

salutetoscholarsJay Hershenson • Senior Vice Chancellor

for University Relationsand Secretary tothe Board of Trustees

Michael Arena • Director of Communications& Marketing

Kristen Kelch • Managing EditorRich Sheinaus • Director of DesignBarbara Shea • Deputy Editor

Neill S. Rosenfeld • WriterMiriam Smith • DesignerStan Wolfson • Photo Editor

Charles DeCicco • Copy Editor

2 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

In 2004, The City University of New York launched the first CUNY-widefund-raising campaign with a goal of raising $1.2 billion by 2012.

When Chairman Benno Schmidt and I announced the “Invest in CUNY”plan, we were met with some skepticism. A billion-dollar campaign at auniversity not well known for its strong tradition of giving was considered

audacious at best.

Now, of course, it is well known that we did reach our goal — four years earlierthan expected. What we have found is that there is a hunger among our alumni andfriends to contribute to the institution that has made such a difference in their lives.

For example, in the 1950s Andrew Grove fled Hungary in such a hurry that hedidn’t have school transcripts or any proof of his education when he came to theUnited States. Yet someone in the admissions office at City College saw his talent.He was admitted and ended up graduating first in his class. Later, he helped foundIntel Corporation. And in 2005, he gave the City College School of Engineering a$26 million gift, saying, “This institution is a veritable American-dream machine. Ihope to keep it that way.”

Bernard and Anne Spitzer recently gave City College an ex-traordinary gift of $25 million for the School of Architecture.Anne went to Brooklyn College and Bernard attended CityCollege—and they attribute much of their success to theirCUNY education. Transformative gifts such as Bill and LindaMacaulay’s $30 million donation to the Honors College andLarry and Carol Zicklin’s numerous contributions to BaruchCollege are indicative of the generosity of our alumni and theirstrong ties to the University where they got their start.

These and many other gifts are enabling CUNY to ensurethat faculty are positioned to do their best work and thatstudents have the tools they need to compete in an econ-omy that demands a high level of skill, creativity and talent.The support of our alumni and friends allows the University

to leverage state support and invest in scholarships, academic programs and facili-ties. We are tremendously grateful for every contribution.

Today we are expanding the Invest in CUNY campaign, with a goal of raising$3 billion by 2015. We are emboldened by the great strides that have been madeat the University over the last decade.

In the last few years, we have established the Macaulay Honors College, theSchool of Professional Studies and a new Graduate School of Journalism. You willread in these pages about the development of a new School of Public Health anda new community college. We are also planning a school of pharmacy.

Our enrollment is expected to reach record levels this fall, with more than250,000 degree-seeking students. CUNY faculty and students continue to benationally recognized for their outstanding work. Most recently, six CUNY facultymembers were selected as 2009 Guggenheim Fellows. This spring, another CUNYstudent won a Truman Scholarship — the fifth CUNY Truman winner in five con-secutive years — and three students won Goldwater Scholarships.

We must maintain this momentum. We have an obligation to make sure thatfuture generations of students who come to CUNY with the will and tenacity tolearn will find every opportunity to succeed in their academic goals.

I deeply appreciate your partnership in building a University of great academic dis-tinction, accessible to every deserving student. I look forward to continuing to workwith you to help our students achieve their own version of the American dream.

— Matthew Goldstein, Chancellor

Maintaining the Momentum

THE FIRST WORD

Matthew GoldsteinCHANCELLOR

SalutetoScholarsInterior:Salute Magazine 4/27/09 4:07 PM Page 2

www.cuny.edu

WITH ENROLLMENT soaring and philanthropic support at recordlevels, the University is embarking on the next phase of its capitalcampaign whose new goal is to raise $3 billion by 2015.

The Invest in CUNY campaign, launched in 2004 by CUNY Board Chair-person Benno C. Schmidt Jr. and Chancellor Matthew Goldstein, had aimed toraise $1.2 billion by 2012.

That goal was surpassed four years early with the raising of $1.436 billion, anunprecedented amount for a public urban university. The funds largely supportscholarships, investments in full-time faculty, research and modern facilities.

The campaign’s expansion was detailed March 25 at a news conference at theCUNY Graduate School and University Center. It coincided with the announce-ment of a $25 million gift from philanthropist and developer Bernard Spitzer forthe School of Architecture at City College, to be named The Anne and BernardSpitzer School of Architecture.

“The theme of this day is making investments to ensure, to the degree that wecan, that the greatness of this University will continue its momentum in givingopportunities to young people, to really change their lives,” Goldstein said.

Investments such as Spitzer’s reflect CUNY’s “hard work” in building greateraccountability and its reputation for academic excellence, the Chancellor said.Other gifts include Samuel J. and Lois Silberman’s $40 million to construct a$135 million Harlem building for Hunter College’s School of Social Work;William E. Macaulay’s $30 million to purchase a building for the MacaulayHonors College; Andrew Grove’s $26 million for The City College’s School ofEngineering; Lawrence and Carol Zicklin’s $18 million to name and endow theZicklin School of Business at Baruch College; and William and Anita Newman’s$25 million toward Baruch College’s Vertical Campus.

Continued giving is critical as CUNY faces shrinking state and local govern-ment support, an expected record enrollment in fall 2009, including 250,000who are seeking degrees, and the need to hire more full-time faculty.

“We have to move forward and we have to compete ... to get the very best peo-ple in classroom for our students,” Goldstein said. “To do less would be an injustice.”

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 3

Winning Run ContinuesWith 2009 Truman,Goldwater Grants

University undergraduates

continue their impressive wins

of two prestigious nationwide

awards: the Harry S. Truman

Foundation Scholarship and the Barry

M. Goldwater Scholarship. In the past

six years, five students have won

Truman grants and 10 have received

Goldwaters.

Don Gomez, a City College

international studies major, is among

60 students in the nation cited this

year by the Truman Foundation, which

recognizes college juniors committed to

careers in government or other public

service and demonstrate “exceptional

leadership potential.” His $30,000

award is for graduate study.

Three 2009 Goldwater scholarships,

named for the late Arizona senator,

were won by Alena Leitman of Hunter

College, and Yitzchak Lockerman and

Jamar Whaley, both of Queens College.

The awards of $7,500 per year for one

or two years go to students pursuing

math, science or engineering to cover

various college costs.

Gomez, who attended Queens-

borough Community College, enrolled

in CCNY after serving two tours of U.S.

Army duty in Iraq; he hopes to return to

the Mideast as a State Department

officer. Leitman intends to conduct

biomedical research in her own lab at

a hospital or university. Lockerman, a

computer science major, plans to

conduct research in algorithm design.

Whaley, a neuroscience/psychology

major, will apply her research to a

clinical setting.

Investing in Success

Army service in Iraq inspired Truman Scholar Don Gomez to pursue a City Collegedegree in international relations. Here he speaks at an “Invest in CUNY” event.

4 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

AS A MEMBER of the NewYork CityPolice Department's Harbor Unit, Det.Robert Rodriguez is used to saving

lives. But who expects to save people from acommercial plane that plops out of the skyinto the Hudson River?

On Jan. 15, 2009, with 155 peopleaboard, US Airways Flight 1549 made anemergency landing in theicy waters of the Hudsonafter both engines lostpower following a collisionwith birds.

Rodriguez, 37, was at theharbor unit’s Floyd BennettField headquarters inBrooklyn when the rescuebell went off around 3:35p.m. He dashed towards theunit’s helicopters.

“They said it was a planein the river so I knew thatwe had a big job ahead of us,” Rodriguez, agraduate of Kingsborough Community Col-lege, says. “All I kept thinking was, ‘We needto get to the plane, we need to get to theplane.’”

Seven minutes later, Rodriguez and hispartner, Det. Michael Delaney, spotted peo-ple on and near the wing of the plane, who

were trying to get to the ferries that had spedto the scene along with U.S. Coast Guard,and police and fire department boats.

One woman was clinging to the side of aferry. Rodriguez and Delaney jumped out ofthe helicopter and swam toward her. Afterrescuing her, they spotted a woman who hadfallen off a rescue raft.

“The two women werein the water for five to 10minutes at that point andnot aware of their set-tings,” Rodriguez says.“They both screamed,‘Please help me!’ and theone hanging on to theferry was afraid that shewas going to get run overby the ferries. But we as-sured her and helpedboth of them out of thefreezing water.”

Rodriguez says it was the biggest andmost satisfying job he’s had in his eight yearswith the NYPD.

A native New Yorker, Rodriguez alwaysloved the water. “My playground was basi-cally the beach,” he says. Yet despite thatpull, initially he wasn’t sure what he wantedto do with his life. But he knew he needed

an education.“My mother always stressed that educa-

tion is important,” Rodriguez says. “She usedto take me to her alma mater, LaGuardiaCommunity College, so that I could get intothe college environment.”

Rodriguez went to LaGuardia andBaruch College to study finance before herealized his love for the water was too great.He set his sights on the NYPD, with the goalof getting into its elite harbor unit. He en-rolled at KCC to earn a degree in MaritimeTechnology.

Rodriguez wasn’t the only KCC graduateon the job that day. Police Officer BrianBrody was distributing rescue equipmentand John Kodetsky worked security at theaircraft the next day.

Following KCC, Rodriguez graduatedfrom the New York City Police Academyand spent four years as a street cop in EastHarlem’s 23rd Precinct, before finally join-ing the NYPD’s scuba team.

As part of the team he does regular secu-rity dives, including counter-terrorist bombsweeps, when he’s not on rescue missions.The work can be dangerous but, Rodriguezsays, “I don’t think of myself as a hero.This is my job and I know I’m the onlyone that can do it.”

StudyLinksTVFood Ads,ObeseKids

TELEVISION COMMERCIALS for fast foodrestaurants have contributed to the stag-gering obesity rate among American chil-

dren, according to a groundbreaking studyco-authored by a CUNY professor.

“We combined data on kids’ weight with boththe number of hours they spent watching TV in aweek and the number of fast-food restaurantads that were aired in their area,” says MichaelGrossman, distinguished professor of economics

at the Graduate Center. “The kids who watchedthese ads were more likely to be overweight.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Preven-tion estimates that one-third of America’s chil-dren are obese or overweight. They spend moretime than normal-weight children watching TVand playing video games instead of gettingphysical exercise, according to the centers.

Grossman has been a research associateand program director of health economics re-

search for the National Bureau of EconomicResearch at the Graduate Center since 1972.His study “Fast Food Restaurant Advertisingon Television and its Influence on ChildhoodObesity” was funded by a federal grant andpublished in the November 2008 issue of TheJournal of Law & Economics.

Although it has long been suspected that toomuch television contributes to childhood obesity,Grossman’s is the first national study to show

“They said it was a

plane in the river so I knew

that we had a big job ahead

of us.

”— Det. Robert Rodriguez

Rescue’s Routine for this Hudson Hero

Rodriguez, far left,and in the water

near downed planewith partner

MichaelDelaney.

SCHOOL TIES

IT WAS ONLY TWO YEARS AGO that journalist Alaa Majeed was one of five women whowere dodging bullets and gingerly navigating around land mines to report on the Iraqwar for the McClatchy newspaper company’s Baghdad bureau.Covering a war is never easy. Majeed recalls a demonstration by Mahdi Army support-

ers during the 2004 Battle of Najaf, where many were killed in the crossfire. Witnessingcountless such shootings made it hard for her to do her job. “These are people that looklike your brother, your sister, yet you watch their blood being shed,” says Majeed, who is astudent at CUNY’s Graduate School of Journalism. “A journalist’s duty is to report objec-tively — it was impossible.”

But Majeed persevered, and she and her colleagues received the International Women’sMedia Foundation Courage in Journalism Award in 2007.

Born and raised in Baghdad, Majeed came from a middle-class family and is the oldestof seven children. She earned a degree in English at Al-Mustansiriya University in 1998.

“I wanted to use English to travel, not to become a journalist. Journalism was not onmy agenda,” Majeed says. But a few months after the United States invaded Iraq in 2003,she found herself covering the war.

It began when she volunteered for a group that sheltered children who had lost theirparents or had become disabled during the war. There she met a European journalist whowas writing about the group. “I was translating for the journalist and became very inter-ested in the field.”

Majeed spent a year translating for the McClatchy newspapers, and when it becametoo difficult for foreign journalists to move around in Iraq, she was promoted to reporter.

Now living in the Bronx in a one-bedroom apartment with her husband and two young sons,Majeed is the graduate school’s second International Journalist in Residence. The fellowshipwas created by the CUNY Journalism School and the Committee to Protect Journalists to estab-lish links between the American journalism community and international journalists forced toleave their countries.

“I am getting a lot of experience here and a lot of skills that I’m very proud of,” she says."The courses and the professors are really some of the greatest."

She also loves the freedom of being able to socialize with friends without worrying aboutthe dangers of war.

With all that she’s accomplished, Majeed doesn’t knowwhat her future holds. But she does have one hope that is

common to many New Yorkers: “I just want a two bed-room apartment,” she says.

Alaa Majeed, reportingfrom Times Square.

Iraqi Journalist’s Base Now NY

that fast-food commercials also play a partby getting children to buy the fast food.

The study was based on severalyears of government data dating fromthe late 1990s that included in-person

interviews with thousands of families. It alsofound that a ban on fast-food ads would reducethe number of obese children by 18 percent anddecrease the number of obese older children by15 percent.

IN THE WORLD OF CULINARY ART — emphasis on art— the Marc Sarrazin Trophy is akin to a Pulitzer Prize orperhaps an Oscar. The award is bestowed on the best

overall entry at the Salon of Culinary Art, conducted annuallyby the Société Culinaire Philanthropique, an organizationstarted by French chefs in America in 1865.

In this culinary competition, it’s not about how the foodtastes but how it looks. And over the last half-dozen years, ithas boiled down to a duel between The Culinary Institute ofAmerica and the less celebrated but perhaps hungrier NewYork City College of Technology. City Tech took the trophy in2008, its third triumph over the CIA in five years, with a tableof visually arresting culinary offerings.

At one end was the savory: dishes such as a duck leggalantine with orange parfumé pistachios and dry cherries. Atthe other end was the sweet: an abstract sugar sculpture basedon Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous photograph of a sailor kissing anurse in Times Square on V-J Day. It was “a complete buffetwhere you kind of go back to the old rules, the way it was in

the 1800s,” saysLouise Hoffman,one of the CityTech team’sfaculty coaches(and anindividualwinner for apiece of “doughsculpture.”)

“It doesn’tmatter if ittastes bland,”says JeanClaude, anotherCity Techfaculty coach.“The focus is onthe appearance.It needs to be

presented as a showpiece.”The entries must be as creative and

elaborate as possible while also payingserious respect to the classical French

techniques that the Société Culinaire ispledged to preserve. So the prep work starts before anyoneenters the kitchen — with research. “It has to be a techniquethat was used 150 years ago,” says Claude. To win over thejudges, “you must make the case for authenticity.”

After deciding on Times Square as their theme for the 2008competition, the City Tech pastry arts students tookphotographs and made sketches then went back to Brooklynand dreamed up pieces such as a New Year’s Eve cakefeaturing a top hat made from sugar that they heated andpulled as if blowing glass.

Traditionally, decorative presentations are the work of agarde manger, “keeper of the food” or pantry manager. For thestudents, though, today’s world will not be so elegant: amodern garde manger usually is in charge of the salad. “They’llnever do any of this again,” says Hoffman, but they will bebetter chefs for the experience. “Garde manger is all aboutexactitude and orientation to detail.”

In kitchens of every level, that will never go out of style.

Gold medalists LouiseHoffman and JeanClaude with their teamtrophy. At left, abstractsugar sculpture entry.

It’s the Look, Not Taste that Counts

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 5

6 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

Quietly, as if tiptoeing into a new home, Mexicanshave been establishing themselves as a presence

in New York City.Today, in a population explosion that has occurred

largely off the radar, there are some 290,000Mexicans living in New York City.

If demographic trends continue Mexicans willsurpass Puerto Ricans to become the second largestLatin national group behind Dominicans in 2022,according to the University’s Latino Data Project.

The University has distinguished itself amongpublic institutions by reaching out early to theMexican community.

Four years ago, Senior Vice Chancellor for Univer-sity Relations and Secretary to the Board of TrusteesJay Hershenson chaired a task force aimed at findingways to strengthen the educational opportunities forthe new immigrants. Since many move to the U.S. asunskilled migrants with little education, Hershensonworried their growing numbers would result in an“educational catastrophe.”

In collaboration with the Consulate General ofMexico, the task force created several initiatives.These include dropout prevention sessions, commu-nity leadership programs designed for Baruch Collegestudents to assist staff and volunteers in community-based Mexican organizations and CUNY College fairsco-sponsored by prominent community organizationswhere potential students also learn about financialaid, scholarships and citizenship services.

The University has created a Spanish website withinformation about the colleges and sent mobile Mexi-can Consulate units to some campuses. And for largenumber of immigrants working in the food serviceindustry, the New York City College of Technology isencouraging study of management and businessownership in the hospitality fields.

CUNY Reaches Outto Mexican Immigrants

Violinist DanielPhillips took hisfirst bow at age 2.

From left: Hershenson, Consulate General ofMexico Rubén Beltrán Guerrero, communityactivist Joel Magallan

DANIEL PHILLIPS was 2 years oldwhen he received his first violin. It

was a wooden toy made by his grandfa-ther, a luthier. For Phillips, professor ofviolin at the Aaron Copland School ofMusic at Queens College, it marked thebeginning of a successful career inclassical music.

“Until I went to nursery school,everyone I knew played an instrument,”says Phillips, who in 1987, along withhis brother Todd Phillips founded theOrion String Quartet, one of the mostsought-after ensembles in the UnitedStates. “Our home was a music conser-vatory.”

Over the years, the Orion earned anenviable reputation for its interpreta-tions of Beethoven’s string quartets andrecently recorded the complete quar-tets, a collection of eight CDs, forKOCH International Classics. The finalinstallment of the Beethoven quartets isslated for release this year.

“Beethoven’s quartets are the back-bone of our repertoire,” says Phillips, whoalso has performed as a soloist with manyof the country’s leading symphonies andtoured and recorded in a string quartetfor SONY, with Yo-Yo Ma, Gidon Kre-mer and Kim Kashkashian. “It’s a culmi-nating goal for a quartet,” he says.

This season, the group will performin England, Taiwan, South Korea andNorway. Philips hopes the Orion will beable to record the quartets of Bela Bar-tok, one of the greatest composers ofthe 20th century.

Each year the Orion spends nearly 80days on the road, and serves as Quartet-in-Residence at the Chamber Music So-ciety of Lincoln Center and New York’sMannes College. As does Phillips, theother members of the Orion also enjoycareers in teaching.

“When you’ve amassed what youknow, it’s a great responsibility to pass iton,” says Phillips, who’s been teaching atQueens College since 1989. “When youteach, you tend to be more clear toyourself because you have to be clear toyour students.”

Phillips is particularly clear when itcomes to advising his students aboutmusic. “You should only pursue it in aserious way if you really don’t want todo anything [else],” he says. “If you areinterested, for instance, in medicine,keep music as your cherished part oflife. If you choose music as your career,the work itself needs to consume yourinterests. It’s a hobby, it’s your profes-sional career, it even engages you on aphysical level, like being an athlete.”

Finding Harmony in Dual Careers

SCHOOLTIES

IT’S NOT EASY to find an internshipin the corporate world right now soHaider Mehmood, a business major

at Baruch College, feels pretty luckyhe landed a spot at the Park BenchMarketing Group.

At Park Bench, he’s promotingHelix, a new sport fashion watchmade by a subsidiary of Timex. Andhe didn’t have to go to an officebuilding for the experience.

Park Bench is a Baruch-basedmarketing group created and led byprofessor Michael Lissauer, formerexecutive vice president of marketingand business strategy for Business

Wire. Mehmood’s office is a com-puter workspace in the marketinglab at the college library.

“I’m getting real-world experi-ence,” says Mehmood, who alongwith four other students is design-ing a low-cost viral marketing andWeb campaign that would drawpotential customers to the Helixwebsite. “It’s a multimillion-dollarcorporation and we’re learning alot by working in a corporate envi-ronment. I’m making lots of con-tacts and I’ll know which channelsto take when I’m ready to promote myown business.”

Nine undergraduate and threegraduate students make up ParkBench, and they work closely withLissauer and Kapil Bawa, professorand chair of the marketing and inter-national business department atBaruch, and David Luna, associateprofessor of marketing, on a variety ofmarketing campaigns.

Lissauer, who retired from BusinessWire in 2007, established Park Benchlast year to help students get real-world marketing experience. He pickedthe name to honor Bernard Baruch, fin-

ancier, statesman and the college’salumnus, who spent a lot of time think-ing and discussing government affairson benches in parks in Washington andNew York. Lissauer is also a member ofthe Executives on Campus program atBaruch, a one-on-one mentoring pro-gram, and says he’s doing it all be-cause he wants to give back.

“The interaction with studentskeeps you young,” says Lissauer. “Theyare hard working, focused and theydon’t think the world is given to them.”

The group’s next big project focuseson creating a public relations campaignfor “We are New York,” a half-hour TV

show aimed at immigrant families. Thenine-episode series, scheduled to pre-miere on Channel 25 in late 2009, wasdesigned by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’soffice and CUNY. It demonstrates howviewers can access vital city servicesand other helpful resources. The groupplans toget the word out through thecity’s ethnic newspapers and duringethnic parades and local street fairs.

“This is a little company and thekey is to sustain it by getting moreprojects and by attracting new stu-dents,” says Lissauer. “We’re doing abig push at the school to get morestudents. It’s a real thing.”

Park Bench group with leader Michael Lissauer, third from left.

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 7

IT’S NO SECRET that the business ofjournalism is in turmoil. News-papers are closing across the country,

and news executives are brainstorming totry to figure out how to provide informa-tion on the Web and still make money.

Now CUNY, partnered with The NewYork Times, is trying out a new Web-based model for community coverage.

The pilot program — The Local —will have Times reporters and studentsfrom the CUNY Graduate School ofJournalism covering local news whilealso teaching residents the basics of re-porting and the use of interactive media.

Residents will be able to post news stories and contribute commu-nity information including creative work, real estate information,restaurant reviews and volunteer opportunities.

Jeff Jarvis, associate professor and director of in-teractive journalism program at CUNY's JournalismSchool, says the “hyperlocal” model is the future.“News will be created through collaborative net-works that are part of their communities, with jour-nalists and community members working togetherand possibly expanding the reach of news,” he says.

The program has launched in Brooklyn’s Fort

Greene neighborhood with plans to ex-pand to Clinton Hill in Brooklyn andthree communities in New Jersey —Maplewood, Millburn and South Orange.

The Local brings together the journal-ism school’s ongoing New York Hyper-local News Project and reporters andeditors at the Times who are trying toengage their readers in new ways.

“We thought it would be an interestingidea and that it would be a good chal-lenge for both the Times and CUNY tofigure out how to work together” said JimSchachter, editor for digital initiatives atthe Times.

The reporters will be covering the everyday life of the commu-nities, including crime, school issues, government services andtransportation. “At CUNY, we are training every student in the skills

of all media and are also preparing them for newroles as journalists — aggregators, curators, or-ganizers, even educators, ” says Jarvis, who blogsabout media and news at Buzzmachine.com.

He also hopes to get students from BaruchCollege’s Zicklin School of Business partneredwith the Times to figure out how to make TheLocal sustainable with ad revenue.

A New Spin on Local Reporting

“I’m getting real-

world experience.... I’m

making lots of contacts

and I’ll know which

channels to take....

”— Haider Mehmood,Baruch College business major

“At CUNY, we are training

every student in the skills of

all media....

”— Jeff Jarvis, CUNY J-School

Student reporter Mike Reicher, center, and theTimes’Andy Newman talk with local resident KarenTappin Anderson about Fort Greene coverage.

The Little Company that Could

8 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

MAYBE IT WAS BECAUSE he grewup during World War II and came ofage during the Korean conflict, times

when a blue star in the window meant thatsomeone was in the military and a gold starmeant that someone had been killed. Or be-cause war movies made indelible impres-sions during his youth. Or his conclusionthat if he were to get drafted, he might aswell go in as an officer. Or just seeing somany young men in uniform stride acrossthe City College campus.

Whatever the reason (and his autobiog-raphy mentions all of those), in 1954 ColinPowell signed up for City College’s ArmyReserve Officer Training Corps (ROTC) —a decision that set him on the path towardbecoming chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

By Neill S. Rosenfeld

OnA Mission

Colin Powellmade his mark inpublic life. Nowhe’s giving back tostudents at CCNY.

LESSONS IN LEADERSHIPCOLIN POWELL CENTER FOR POLICY STUDIES AT CITY COLLEGE

dren and youth. That prompted him tomake his first City College endowment, theMaud and Luther Powell America’s Prom-ise Scholarship, which is aimed at City Col-lege students who perform community orpublic service.

Also that year, New York City’s RudinFamily Foundation paid tribute to the gen-eral by launching the Colin Powell Centerfor Policy Studies at City College. Its goalsare to develop leaders from underrepre-sented groups and to bridge the academicand policy-making spheres through re-search and programs.

Because of his work with America’s Prom-ise and his later return to government, Powellat first did not have time to engage with thePowell Center. But after his four-year hitch assecretary of state ended in January 2005, “I

Staff, U.S. secretary of state and a philan-thropist who supports a City College pub-lic policy center that’s named after him. “Ifound my career and my life's work atCCNY,” Powell said. “When I finished mymilitary career and went out into privatelife, I wanted to try to give back to youngpeople who are like me, coming up in mod-est or disadvantaged circumstances.”

His involvement with students began inearnest in 1997 after he had retired fromthe Army. Presidents Carter, Clinton, Fordand George H.W. Bush, as well as formerfirst lady Nancy Reagan, asked him to chairthe Presidents’ Summit for America’s Fu-ture, then to create America’s Promise —The Alliance for Youth, a foundation thatworks with companies, nonprofits and gov-ernments across the country to help chil-

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 9

went up to see what wasgoing on at this centerthat had my name at myalma mater. I met with10 or 12 youngsters inthe president's confer-ence room, and they toldme what they were doingand what the center wasdoing for them. Theywere from everywhereimaginable in the world. Isaid to them, ‘You kidslook like I was 50 yearsago.’ That is when I de-cided I wanted to getmore actively involved.”

He hopes that thePowell Fellows emergewith an expansive visionof society. “We want toget young people in-volved in serving others.We send them aroundthe world on fellowshipsand programs to learnwhat is happening and toexpand the base ofknowledge and experi-ence of inner-city kids so thatthey under-stand thebroader world,”he said.

For example,Renee Rolstonspent last sum-mer at a districthealth office inMalawi, work-

ing on HIV/AIDS and malaria. Sheexpects to graduate this spring fromthe Sophie Davis School of Bio-medical Education as part of aseven-year BS-MD program, whichshe intends to finish at New YorkMedical College.

Powell uses his personal connectionsto further the fellows’ education. “Wesend students to sit and talk with HenryKissinger [the former secretary of state who ison the center’s advisory council] in his officeabout foreign policy. I sent a bunch of young-sters down to Leonard Lauder [the chair ofEstée Lauder Inc.] and I said, ‘Leonard, I donot want you to give them all of that HoratioAlger stuff [about how his mother started thecompany]. They can tell you their HoratioAlger stories. What I want you to tell them is:How do you make money in business?’”

If Powell has one regret about CityCollege, it might be that it ended the ROTCprogram in June 1972, at the height of anti-war sentiment on American campuses. Froma high of 1,500 cadets during the KoreanWar, enrollment had plunged to 81 in its lastyear. “In a country where civilian control ofthe military is fundamental, I found it unfor-tunate to have this source of citizen officersreduced,” Powell wrote in his 1995 autobi-ography, My American Journey.

“Friendships that I formed there are stillalive and well 55 years later,” he told Saluteto Scholars. He was a geology major, butROTC “showed me a way of moving for-ward and something to do with my life andsomething that I was good at.” ROTC “ledme to hang around, even though my gradeswere not great. Then they sent me out tothe Army and said good luck.”

Powell is helping to assure good luck fortoday’s students by putting $1 million intothe center while helping with fund-raising.

Other grants include $10 million fromthe New York Life Foundation in 2006 toendow scholarships and programs related toAfrican-American issues and, most recently,$1 million from the Korea Foundation forpolicy and service lessons rooted in the Ko-

rean experience.“Townsend

Harris [thefounder of TheFree Academythat became CityCollege] saidthat the childrenof the poor andthe children ofthe rich shouldsit together inbrotherhood andlearning,” Powellsaid. “To keepthat spirit alivetakes money. It iswonderful thatthe taxpayers ofNew York Stateand New York

City are willing to fund such a system ofpublic higher education, but weneed to get more private phi-lanthropy involved. Thoseof us who have been suc-cessful in life have anobligation to reachdown to those whowonder whether or notthey can besuccessful.”

Powell on Immigration

THE NONPARTISAN Colin Powell Center for PolicyStudies chooses its fellows through a competitiveprocess. Scholarships and fellowships offer up to

$12,000 for undergraduates for each of two years andone-time grants of $15,000 for graduate students tosupport scholarship, research and internships.

Students participate in service learning, in whichthey volunteer or intern in a public service setting.The Powell Center also has shown City College facultymembers how to weave service learning into coursesranging from architecture to public relations writing.

Students receive professional mentoring and par-ticipate in the center’s policy programs. Its core initia-tives are urban issues in New York City; leadership andphilanthropy; democracy assistance; and multilateraldiplomacy and international organizations.

The students focus on a different theme each year.This year it was immigration, the subject of a Febru-ary conference where experts in immigration policyand advocates for immigrant rights discussed thechallenges and opportunities facing both immigrantsand the society they are joining.

At the conference, Powell spoke of his immigrantheritage — his parents were Jamaican — and theimportance of public higher education.

“Few experiences bind people to the life of their so-ciety more than the process of getting an education,”he said. If you didn’t succeed, he added with humor,“There was no greater curse … than for one of your rel-atives … to say, ‘What, you have shamed the family.’

“Hit me, beat me, do anything you want, but don’tgive me that shame, because they had dreams, theyhad expectations for you.”

Immigrants are often portrayed as posing threats tosafety and American jobs while the reality is that mostwork hard, succeed and contribute to the economy.

Yes, Powell argued, strengthen the borders, butalso devise policies to develop the economies of theneighboring countries and make “a sensible decision”about who should be allowed into this country andunder what circumstances. “We can neither throwopen our borders entirely nor can we shut them downcompletely. We must rather think about the rights androles of new Americans and temporary residents in re-lationship to our broader interests of security, prosper-ity and democracy,” he said.

Master’s student and Powell Fellow Easter Woodfound the conference and the focus on immigrationstimulating.

“I have been a student of African-American stud-ies, but I had not thought as much about the inter-

twinement between immigrant populations andthe African-American population,” she said.

She particularly appreciated “the opportu-nities to meet with dynamic people and getto talk to those who are out there on thefront lines in the policy field and doing the

work that I hope to be doing.”

To hear Powell’sspeech, go to www1.

cuny.edu/forums/podcasts/?m=200902. For information

on the Powell Center,go to www1.ccny.cuny.edu/

ci/powell/index.cfm.

“I found my career and my

life's work at CCNY.

”— Colin Powell

At the center that’snamed for him, Powelllistens to student viewsduring immigrationpolicy conference.

Art historianJoachimPissarro, scionof the famousImpressionist,says creativitycan open manydifferent doors.

JOACHIM PISSARRO, Bershad Professor of Art History and director of the HunterCollege Art Galleries, didn’t intend to make art his career even though he grew upin a family of artists. You’d never guess that from his resume: adjunct curator at the

Museum of Modern Art, and a former curator at the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, theYale University Art Gallery and director of the Musée de la Fondation de l’Hermitage inSwitzerland. He’s also written several books on Impressionist painters, including his great-grandfather, Camille Pissarro, and was one of three curators of MoMA’s “Van Gogh and

the Colors of the Night,” which opened last fall.Salute to Scholars caught up with Pissarro recently to find out more about Van

Gogh and Pissarro’s own artistic path.

WHAT WAS THE BIGGEST SURPRISE YOU FOUND WHEN RESEARCHING “COLORS OF THE NIGHT”?None of us expected to find more than a half-dozen works related to the night. But wewere able to find enough to cover two, three, four, five rooms and could have broughtin much more. Van Gogh was deeply in touch with this reflection… Over 12 years heconstantly thought of the night, and this show gives you a sense of that.

YOUR GREAT-GRANDFATHER WAS FRENCH IMPRESSIONIST CAMILLE PISSARRO AND YOUR FATHERAND SISTER ARE PAINTERS. BUT YOU DIDN’T WANT A LIFE IN ART. WHY IS THAT?I wanted to become a professor of philosophy and at that time, all students in

France had to take philosophy. But in 1979, a law passed cutting philosophyfrom high schools, which meant thousands of jobs were out. So suddenly, the

horizon became a little bleak.

SO CAMILLE PISSARRO DIDN’T COME TO YOU IN YOUR DREAMS AND ORDER YOU TO THE EASEL?No, it was an accident, really. I had to recycle my philosophical mind into something semi-productive and thought art history was quite close.

SO HOW HARD IS IT TO BE CURATOR? DID YOU EVER GET A SHOW THAT JUST SEEMED IMPOSSIBLE?Almost every single one. I specialize in those, I think.

EVEN THE RECENT SHOW? DIDN’T YOU JUST ASK THE VAN GOGH MUSEUM IN AMSTERDAM TO LEND YOUSOME PAINTINGS?The Van Gogh was very generous, and we were able to get a core of work throughthem. But many times, the show was dead because we couldn’t get the loans.

SO IT’S NOT LIKE YOU CAN JUST CALL SOMEONE UP WHO HAS A PAINTING ON THE WALL AND ASK TOBORROW IT?Well, the value of one Van Gogh can be nine figures. Over $100 million, so quite oftenit is hard to get people to loan them.

WHAT SURPRISED YOU WHEN YOU STARTED TEACHING AT HUNTER?I had never had almost as many M.F.A.s as M.A.s in my classes before and the M.F.A.swere absolutely brilliant. Typically [studio] art students are not well versed in Heideg-ger or in Cantor or Romantic theory, but they are here. Now I like to have classesthat have equal numbers of both because it creates very interesting discussions, as

you can imagine.

WHAT DO YOU TELL PARENTS WHO QUESTION THE VALUE OF AN M.F.A. IN THESE HARD ECONOMIC TIMES?Creativity, the notion of thinking big outside the box, is extremely important, and atthe end of the day, it doesn’t matter if an artist ends up using the M.F.A. to become

the next Picasso or Damien Hirst because there are so many doors that can openup to him if he has creativity. You can use creativity in so many situations.

DO YOU HAVE ANY OF YOUR GREAT GRANDFATHER’S PAINTINGS?I have a drawing, something he did as a student, I think. It is a beautiful work.

OK, AGAIN, WITH ALL THE ARTISTS IN YOUR FAMILY, YOU NEVER WERE TEMPTED TO GETBEHIND THE EASEL?

No, it’s like being brought up in the circus and figuring out very early thatthe trapeze was not something you wanted to do for the rest of your life.

PROFILE: ART CURATOR JOACHIM PISSARROHUNTER COLLEGE

Master of the Impossible

10 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

www.cuny.edu/investing1-800-CUNY-YES

The National Science Foundation, and far-sightedprivate foundations know the value of quality public

higher education. They are financing schools andprograms, supporting scholarly research by world-class faculty, and endowing student scholarships atevery college of The City University of New York. Theyare answering CUNY’s call for a Compact for PublicHigher Education that unites all stakeholders — government, donors,students and the University itself to ensure that our city, state andnation will continue to have well-educated leaders. They are investing inCUNY, investing in New York, and investing in futures.”

— Chancellor Matthew Goldstein

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION’S highly competitive Graduate Research Fellowships support exceptional students whose cutting-edgeresearch shows clear evidence of contributing to important scholarly knowledge in their fields. Outstanding CUNY winners include (l.-r.) Yisa Rumala,York College 2006, University of Michigan 2012, MS Electrical Engineering, Ph.D. in Applied Physics; Joseph Hirsh, Macaulay Honors College atQueens College 2008, CUNY Graduate Center 2012, Ph.D. in Mathematics; Mitsy Chanel-Blot, Macaulay Honors College at Hunter College 2008,University of Texas 2012, M.A.-Ph.D. in Social Anthropology.

THE NATIONAL SCIENCE FOUNDATION

“

Look Who’sin CUNY!

12 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

CUNY plans aninnovative new community collegeto help studentscross the finish line.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Startingfrom

By Ron Howell

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 13

ONLY A QUARTER of the nation’scommunity college students earn anassociate degree or go on to a four-year college within six years.

Some educators have come toaccept these outcomes as intractable,but now an emerging model atCUNY for a new type of community

college — with its primary focus to keep students in school andon track — may offer a pathway to improvement.

“We need bold and new approaches,” Chancellor MatthewGoldstein said in testimony recently before the State Assembly’sCommittee on Higher Education. “Our students will faceincreasingly competitive pressures in an unforgiving economy andgetting a degree matters,” he said. “It is therefore in their interestto attend community colleges where the focus is on highstandards and degree completion.”

The plan for a new community college comes at a time whenenrollment across CUNY’s system is soaring. This fall, the totalnumber of students is expected to top 250,000 — the highestlevel in the University’s history. Community college enrollment isup 20 percent — from 68,044 to 81,538 since 2002.

The new community college — CUNY’s first new two-yearschool in 37 years — is outlined in a 120-page “concept paper”that was produced for the chancellor by a team of educators ledby John Mogulescu, senior University dean for academic affairs,and Tracy Meade, University director for collaborative programs.

The paper envisages a school with approximately 3,000students, a much smaller enrollment than at other communitycolleges. The real difference, however, would be in the college’sethos: Students would be interviewed before admission, theywould be required to enroll full-time in their first year, and theirchoice of majors would be limited to a handful of fields with thebest job prospects.

The concept paper proposes a number of new strategies:• Use of interviews in the admissions process. Mogulescu stresses

that the interviews, not used at existing community colleges,are to help administrators assess students’ needs, not to weedthem out.

• Required attendance at a summer “bridge” program. This isbased on an awareness that many students have been poorlyprepared for college.

• Division of the semester into three blocks of roughly five weekseach, with case-study based seminars introducing students toissues central to the vitality of New York City and its people.These include health services delivery, business and technology

needs and elements of a green economy.• A reduced selection of about a dozen majors. “We’re limiting

the choices, trying to pick majors that seem to be more in tunewith the economy,” Mogulescu says. Possible majors includenursing, energy services management and urban education.The plan for the new college joins a host of community

college initiatives at the University aimed at supporting studentsuccess and timely graduation. A noteworthy example is that ofthe Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, (ASAP) a jointundertaking of CUNY and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’sadministration, in which selected students study full time andreceive focused assistance, including tuition support, with thegoal of dramatically increasing the number of students whograduate in three years.

The work ahead for the new community college involvesmoving the concept paper from a description of key educationalfeatures and practices into a detailed and comprehensive plan forimplementation of the school.

University faculty and staff will be actively involved in alllevels of planning, from serving on the project’s steeringcommittee to chairing and serving on the many committeescharged with developing a final plan and hiring inaugural facultyand staff to open the college.

As CUNY moves its plan for the new school forward, it istaking heart from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which isspending hundreds of millions to help boost college graduationrates around the country, especially among low-income andminority groups.

In November, Hilary Pennington, director of special initiativesfor the Gates Foundation in the United States, praised CUNY’sblueprint. She lauded the idea of creating “new institutions toshow what is possible when a college is designed from the startwith completion as the focus.”

Early this year, the Gates Foundation gave CUNY a $560,000grant for the planning phase of the new college.

Bill Gates has said the time is right for iconoclastic approaches.He’s mentioned the “dynamic new president” who has puteducation and innovation at the top of the domestic agenda.

In a systemwide effort to improve degree attainment for itscommunity college students, the University is designing newprograms and pathways that face up to the challenge of raisinggraduation rates. With the national spotlight illuminating theaccomplishments of and challenges faced by community colleges,CUNY’s effort to develop and implement a new model will beclosely watched for what it can contribute to the largerconversation about innovation in higher education.

“Disease occurs

when you have a genetic

predisposition and are

exposed to an environmental

trigger.

”— Kenneth Olden

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 15

AS A BLACK YOUTH IN 1959, Kenneth

Olden knew it would be dangerous to

integrate the legally all-white University of

Tennessee, yet he volunteered. And there he not

only made history but also saw his first research

laboratory and found his future — as a geneticist,

cancer researcher, the first African-American

director at the National Institutes of Health and

now founding dean of CUNY's proposed

graduate School of Public Health.

Why did he risk injury and possibly death to walk ontothat segregated campus when the South was a tinderbox ofracial intolerance?

“It occurred to me that the only way this is ever going tochange is that one of us must make it, not forget fromwhence we came, and change things,” Olden says. “I cancommunicate about issues now in a way that most of mycolleagues just have no connection with.”

And communicate he does in rivers of words that are in-tense, engaging and passionate. As he describes it, the stakesare high not only for the University’s proposed School ofPublic Health, which is set to open in 2010-2011, but alsofor the city and, indeed, the world.

Olden cites a modern adage: Genetics loads the gun, andenvironment pulls the trigger. “Something like 85 to 90 per-cent of chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson, asthmaand cancers are caused by the interaction of genetics, envi-ronmental agents and behavior, not by any one factor alone,”he says. “Disease occurs when you have a genetic predisposi-tion and are exposed to an environmental trigger.” That ex-plains why some smokers — those lacking the geneticpredisposition — don’t get lung cancer.

Chancellor Matthew Goldstein believes the new schoolwill be an important addition to the University. “ Urbanhealth problems, like diabetes and obesity, are on the rise,” hesays. “As the largest urban public university in America, wehope to be able to work against these scourges.”

The school will differ from the nation’s approximately 30others in two major ways: It will be the first dedicated tourban issues, those forged by the collision of genetics, aging,medicine and the environment in the heat of a worldwidemigration into cities. And it will tackle those issues by engag-ing experts from across the spectrum of public health fields,

which traditionallykeep their distancefrom one another.

Take the rising tideof pharmaceuticalsthat’s washing intowaste water and beingrecycled into drinkingwater — a tide that is bound to grow as urbanized, agingpopulations treat chronic diseases, discard pills and flushaway their residues.

“We don't know what the health consequences are of allthese pharmaceuticals in drinking water, but we knowthey’re not good,” Olden says.

What is known is that human sperm count can plummetand the sex of fish can change in environments laced withestrogens (such as from discarded birth control pills) andproducts that act like them (like the breakdown products ofplastics, pesticides and livestock growth hormones). Interfer-ence with organ and gene functioning is why this March,several attorneys general forced six manufacturers to stopselling hard-plastic baby bottles made with bisphenol A, anestrogen-like chemical that can leach into formula; studiesshow it can damage reproductive systems and cause heartdisease, obesity and diabetes later in life.

“Drugs in the water [not to mention baby formula] couldrepresent a threat to us in a short period of time. That's oneconsequence of urbanization that I want us to research,”Olden says.

Children younger than 6 and adults older than 65 aremost vulnerable, particularly in cities, because urban envi-ronmental exposures tend to be intense and of long durationdue to the sheer concentration of people and the way citiesare built and operate. The very young are at risk because ofundeveloped immune systems, while the elderly face deteri-orating immune systems from a lifetime accumulation ofDNA mutations and aging.

Decades can pass between exposure and the onset of dis-ease, which underlines the importance of protecting the en-vironment in which children live. Most critical are the firsttwo years of life, when babies grow and change rapidly. Forbreast cancer, the most dangerous time is puberty, whenducts, the site of most breast cancers, are developing.

Olden joined the University in September 2008 after havingled the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences(NIEHS) and the National Toxicology Program from 1991 to2005; he later taught at the Harvard School of Public Health.

“Dr. Olden is a distinguished scientific leader and cancerresearcher who displayed an unwavering commitment to

COVER STORY

By Neill S. Rosenfeld

The founding dean

of CUNY’s proposed

School of Public

Health knows how

to fix problems born

in poverty.

He’s been there.

A Visionary Man–And Plan


16 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

public health at the National Institutes of Health,” says CUNYChancellor Matthew Goldstein. “He brings an impressive com-bination of internationally recognized experience and service tothe country to this vitally important and new initiative.”

Hunter President Jennifer Raab notes that Olden is recruit-ing a dynamic faculty while involving professors from the pub-lic health master's programs at Brooklyn, Hunter, Lehman andthe Graduate Center, as well as from elsewhere in the Univer-sity. She added that CUNY has rich programs in allied fields inthe natural and social sciences, like Hunter's School of SocialWork, which will host the school in a new building in EastHarlem. “Under Dr. Olden's leadership, CUNY and HunterCollege will be well positioned to establish a world-class Schoolof Public Health,” Raab says.

Olden calls the decision to place the school in a lower-in-come area “a stroke of genius,” because schools of public healthand social work “ought to be out in the community where thepublic health problems are. The locationspeaks volumes for the commitment of thisinstitution.”

* * *The third of six children, Olden grew up

in poverty in the 1940s and 1950s in Par-rottsville, a small, segregated farm town inAppalachian Tennessee. His parents, Mackand Augusta Olden, were sharecroppersuntil his father and uncle scraped togethermoney to buy a farm to grow tobacco, raisehogs and plant vegetables; they also soldmilk, leaving it at the road for pickup.

“There were no opportunities for anykids, black or white, in Parrottsville. Peoplecouldn’t get out and they didn’t dream big.You were going to become a farmer and, if you were lucky, getsome sort of menial job eking out minimum wage,” he says.

Grade-school education was poor, a one-room schoolhouse.There was no bus service for black children, so from age 6, eachday he and a brother walked 12 miles round-trip. “The wintermonths were very difficult, yet often we had a perfect atten-dance record,” he says.

The farm lacked electricity through his high school years, “sowe did our homework by the light of a kerosene lamp.” But atleast bus service was available by the time he reached high school.

Olden liked reading and went through “everything in ourhouse that I could put my hands on. Mostly, we didn't have anybooks,” he says, “but the Bible was one of them and I read itcover to cover more times than once.”

A pivotal figure was the Rev. Isaac K. Rakestraw, his principalat the all-black Tanner High School in neighboring Newport.Olden says that Rakestraw continually exhorted students: “Bygolly, you country bumpkins can be anything you want to be!”

The message clicked. Olden regularly walked past Newport'sFirst Baptist Church, a middle-class white congregation, on hisway to school. “I knew I wanted to be on that side of the tracks,but I wanted to make sure that I built bridges so other peoplecould also cross over, and I’ve done that.” Not long ago hestepped inside that church to speak about his life.

Rakestraw also told him “that there was something called col-lege and I could go. He helped me get a scholarship and find ajob in the summer to earn my keep. I shined shoes on the week-end and saved enough money at 15 cents per pair to put myselfthrough college the first year,” he says. Olden enrolled at the his-torically black Knoxville College and worked summers at Wild-

wood on the Jersey Shore.And then came the courageous decision that quite by chance

propelled him into a life of science. In the fall of 1959, while asenior biology major, he volunteered to be one of two studentsto informally integrate the University of Tennessee in Knoxville.

“Integration in the South always had a girl and a boy, and theyneeded people who could take the harassment and wouldn't em-barrass the black population,” says Olden, “So I was the guy. Icouldn't officially take classes because it was against the law, but Icould participate in research programs, go to seminars and be visi-ble. I couldn't get credit, so I would go back across town and takecourses at my college.”

His parents worried, for integration attempts often led toreprisals against students and their families. They doubtlessfeared the kind of violence that would erupt in neighboringMississippi three years later, when Gov. Ross Barnett physicallyblocked Air Force veteran James Meredith from enrolling at the

state university.But Knoxville was not Oxford, Missis-

sippi, and Olden says he experienced noproblems. The university officially inte-grated with 150 black students the follow-ing fall without protest.

It was during his unofficial year at theUniversity of Tennessee that he experi-enced “an epiphany” about science.

“I had been in a laboratory as a class, butI'd never seen a person in a lab doing realexperiments and trying to solve problems,”he says. As part of a grant from the AtomicEnergy Commission, “I was able to work inthis lab conducting research into geneticmutations in tapeworms; they had treated

them with X-rays at Oak Ridge National Laboratory and youcould see changes in the chromosomes. That excited me and Irecognized that this is brain power. Faculty from other universi-ties would come and give seminars, and I wanted to be one ofthose people.”

Gone were his plans to become a physician, “because I knewblack physicians in Knoxville and in my little hometown, but Ididn't know any black person who was nationally competitive inbiomedical research. Science changed my life.”

The satisfying postscript to this story came in 2004, whenOlden was asked to apply for the presidency of the multi-cam-pus University of Tennessee, a position like the CUNY chancel-lorship. He hesitated, for he was 65 and unsure about tacklingsuch a demanding job. “I thought about my parents, who weredeceased. If they knew that I had just one iota of a chance to be-come president of the University of Tennessee and I said no,they would turn over in their graves, so I couldn't say no.” Hewas the only Tennessean and nonwhite among the six finalists,but someone else was selected.

Olden earned a master’s in genetics at the University of Michi-gan and a doctorate in cell biology and biochemistry at TempleUniversity.

While doing postdoctoral work and teaching at Harvard Med-ical School, he and his wife, Sandra White, ran a dormitory atRadcliffe College for four years. White, who has a doctorate inimmunology, and Olden would co-author some 30 cancer-relatedpapers over the years, among their many publications. She nowdirects a program at historically black North Carolina CentralUniversity in Durham that encourages minority high school stu-dents to go into math, science and technology. They have two

COVER STORY

“Dr. Olden is a distinguished

scientific leader and cancer

researcher who displayed an

unwavering commitment to public

health at the National Institutes

of Health.

”— Chancellor Matthew Goldstein


daughters, one a journalist and the other a pre-med college junior,and two sons, one in finance and the other in the music industry.

Olden’s research focused on preventing metastasis, which oc-curs when cancer cells break off from a primary tumor and es-tablish new tumors elsewhere in the body. A 1978 paper hewrote in the prestigious journal Cell about glycoproteins (pro-teins that contain sugar polymers and serve many functions inthe body) is among the 100 most-cited scientific research re-ports. A 1985 paper in The Journal of Biological Chemistry re-versed the 15-year conventional wisdom that secretory proteinsare transported via a “conveyor belt.” And in the 1980s, hecaused a sensation with an article in Science describing how hehad prevented metastasis in mice, but that approach laterproved too toxic for human use.

His research continued until just before coming to CUNY.He pursued it at Harvard, NIH, Howard University, where hedirected the cancer center and chaired the depart-ment of Oncology, and then at NIEHS,where besides being director, he alsowas chief of the metastasis sectionof its environmental carcinogen-esis program.

Olden has never forgottenthe lessons of his youth. AsNIH’s first African-Americandirector, “I had a perspectiveon issues that others didn’t. Itnever occurred to anybody thatcertain people weren’t at the table— and it wasn’t just blacks and His-panics and Asians, but poor white folksweren’t around the table, either.” When hearrived, the directors of the 17 institutes andcenters then in existence were white; one wasfemale; all were middle-class.

He says that part of the lure of helping tolaunch the CUNY School of Public Healthwas that “there is a lot of poverty and painand suffering, and somebody has got to com-municate that.”

* * *From the beginning, CUNY wanted its School of Public

Health to target urban issues. Twenty years from now, two-thirdsof the anticipated world population of 8.1 billion are expected tolive in cities. And cities are where many contemporary healthproblems — from HIV infection to variants of chronic diseaseslike asthma and diabetes — have emerged. Cities also are wheremedical researchers are turning cancers that once spelled certaindeath into chronic conditions.

CUNY is taking a different approach than traditional schools,

which separate the disciplines. “Com-plex problems cannot be solved byone discipline working in its own silo,”Olden says. “You need epidemiologistsworking with biostatisticians, toxicol-ogists, environmental health scientists,social workers, nurses, behavioral sci-entists, life scientists and communitygroups. They don’t necessarily speakthe same language, or have the sameway of thinking, or use the same tools,so collectively they can see a largeslice of the problem, rather than just a

little sliver of it.”Olden says previous public health efforts were spectacularly

successful. “At the turn of the 20th century, average life spanwas about 50 years. That’s increased to about 78. That’s huge,and it had to do with sanitation practices as simple as washingyour hands, eliminating death from infectious diseases, food anddrug safety, environmental regulation, cleaning up the air, clean-ing up the water.

“What’s going to happen over the next hundred years? We'realready seeing people living longer. How much more? I don’tknow. Now we have improved medical technology. We could in-crease lifespan another 10 to 15 years, which would have a hugeimpact on our way of life. We've got to anticipate that,” he says.

But how long you live depends in part upon where you live.Olden cites 2006 research by health economist ChristopherMurray, who found “eight Americas” divided by race, counties of

residence, income, and a few other social factors.Thirty-three years separated Asian women in

Bergen County, N.J., from Native Amer-ican males in some South Dakota

counties—91 versus 58 years.“You can't account for this

by differences in access tohealth care, because across theeight Americas the differenceswere small,” Olden says, “but

Murray mentioned dispropor-tionate exposure to risk factors,

which tend to be environmental.”Nevertheless, Olden sees the need to

ensure that the approximately 50 millionAmericans who lack health care get it. Headvocates an emphasis on wellness and pre-vention — which in part means cleaning upand safeguarding the environment — be-cause “we don't have enough resources inthe U.S. Treasury to handle the health-careproblems of chronic diseases” if every eld-erly person gets sick.

“We've got to promote healthy aging, soyou can live to 85 and be active and involved and independent, andthat can happen,” says Olden. “That's where the excitement is.”

Olden stresses the “founding” in his role of being the school'sfounding dean. He’s hiring core faculty at the rate of two or threea year, recruiting the first students and working out logistics withthe college master’s programs. He intends to shepherd the schoolthrough accreditation in 2011, then “hand it off to someone else.Hopefully, I will have some say in helping them identify some-body who can take it the rest of the way,” he says. “That’s thelegacy I want.”

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 17

“Drugs in the water ... could

represent a threat to us in a short

period of time.

”— Kenneth Olden

The proposed School of Public Health will share the new home of Hunter College's School of Social Workin East Harlem.


FIELD STUDY

SCOTT STERNBACH, director of theCommercial Photography Program atLaGuardia Community College, doesn’t

compromise his craft.During his 10-week trip to Antarctica in late

2008, Sternbach lugged around a bulky 8x10-inchWisner camera, which he used to photograph ateam of 30 scientists, researchers and support staffat the Palmer Research Station. A throwback inboth size and design to cameras used 100 yearsago, the vintage Wisner doesn’t work well in harshclimate and it’s much heavier and slower thandigital cameras. But when it comes to portraitphotography, Sternbach believes a Wisner camerais without equal. It produces

images of the highest resolution that capture indi-viduals in candid, relaxed and natural poses.

“By the time I got to making an exposure,people have almost forgotten they were havingtheir picture taken,” said Sternbach, whose proj-ect, “Antarctica in Black and White,” was fundedby an Antarctic Artists and Writers grant fromthe National Science Foundation.“I tried to cre-ate a window on these people and show them asthey are.”

Initially Sternbach wanted to document thework of biologists, divers and sea captains, buthe quickly realized that the Palmer stationcouldn’t function without the cooks, mechanics,

SouthernExposure

Scott Sternbach and Wisner camera on location in Antarctica.

Turn to next page

18 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

FIELD STUDY

20 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

carpenters, waste managers and other support hands.“They’re essentially heroes,” said Sternbach, who photographed almost

everyone at the station. “They sacrifice their personal life to support agreat cause. I was impressed with how no one really complained about theharsh conditions they work in. They’re all heroic.”

It’s not the first time Sternbach worked with a Wisner camera. He usedit to capture the declining lifestyle of dairy farmers in upstate New Yorkand to document the desolate sites of pre-war industrial ruins in New YorkCity. He hopes to use his “Antarctic Souls” environmental portraits to raiseawareness about global warming.

“I photograph things that are disappearing, that are important to me;that’s what I’m about,” said Sternbach, who had his own darkroom by theage of 11 with equipment used by his grandfather.

‘AntarcticSouls’From previous page

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 21

(CLOCKWISE FROM LEFT)

ERIC COOPERCook

“He’s a funny guy. When you first meethim he comes off as a bit threatening butbeneath that is a very smart, politicallyactive guy. We always talked aboutObama and the upcoming election. He’dhelp you out any way he could. He wasvery proud of the food he cooked. He madegreat Indian food and on Rosh Hashanahhe made a traditional Jewish dinner.”

MICHAEL BRETTChief Engineer NSF LM Gould Research Ship

“You would just see him emerge, pop outof nowhere. He looked like he didn’t seemuch light because he worked in the en-gine room on the ship. I never thoughtwe’d have a problem on the open seasbecause of the way he maintained theship. He made sure everything wastight, no leaks.”

CHRIS CHENG-DEVRIESScientist

“She is a relentless worker. She almostnever went to sleep. She does researchon Antarctic ice fish, which haveanti-freeze in their blood. They live in28-degree water, no other fish can dothat. She’s so knowledgeable, sopassionate. She’s been doing this forover 20 years with her husband Art.”

CHRIS SELIGALab Supervisor

“At 12 midnight everyone would be relax-ing or sleeping and he would be makingsure the labs were in perfect shape. He’svery dedicated to the labs. I asked him towear his firefighter uniform because hewas a member of the fire brigade at thestation. He was very proud to be there toprotect station personnel.”

KRISTEN GORMANand JEN BLUMBirders

“The idea behind this photograph was toshow the women in their working environ-ment. They were difficult to photographbecause they were so busy. We met themon one of the islands this day. Nothingelse much mattered to them except learn-ing what was happening to the birds. Iwent out with them one time and it wassome of the worst weather they had en-countered. It made me realize how theyrisk their lives each day to continue theresearch. They’re very brave. I felt theywere an excellent representation of whatPalmer station is all about.”

22 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

PROBLEM SOLVING

SOAP BUBBLES.Candle flames. Wargames. Financial engi-neering. Neurons.Gravity. Elections.These are some of thepassions that drove —and are driving — thestellar mathematicians

who have taught and studied at the CityUniversity of New York over the past 150years. They have won Nobel Prizes, FieldsMedals and the National Medal of Science.They helped lay the groundwork for com-puters, contemporary cryptography andmachine vision.

Today’s mathematicians veer in direc-tions that were never imagined in 1853,when The Free Academy awarded one ofits first 17 four-year baccalaureate degreesto Alfred George Compton, who wouldbecome City College’s preeminent mathinstructor until his retirement in 1911. Hismodern successors study stars and brains,Shakespeare and Wall Street, set theory,number theory and geometric constructs inmultiple dimensions that twist in ways thatwould give a pretzel-maker headaches.

City University “is plastered with peoplewho are extraordinary” in mathematics,number theory, analysis topology andgeometry, said Chancellor Matthew Gold-stein, a mathematician and graduate of CityCollege who has published extensively onmathematics and statistics.

Reflecting the University’s Decade ofScience, which Goldstein conceived,CUNY is hiring many junior professors inthe math-heavy STEM fields — science,

technology, engineering and math, itself.Pushing the frontiers of pure and appliedmathematics, they are predicting the flowof ocean waves, forecasting the movementof the stock market and invoking stringtheory to explain particle physics.

And they’re inspiring interest among anew generation of students. More than2,700 undergraduates signed up for theUniversity’s first Math Challenge this win-ter. In recent years one undergraduate, JanSiwanowicz (City College 2008), won thenation’s toughest math competition, theMathematical Association of America’sWilliam Lowell Putnam Competition;another, Joseph Hirsch (Macaulay HonorsCollege at Queens College, 2008), captureda National Science Foundation graduatescholarship for pure mathematics and ispursuing a doctorate at the CUNYGraduate Center.

The mathematical ferment attracts stu-dents like Eugene Krel, who graduatedsumma cum laude from the Macaulay Hon-ors College at Baruch College in 2008 andis pursuing a master’s in financial engineer-ing at Baruch. “I was always into mathemat-ics. It was always better for me to solveproblems than ponder something in myphilosophy class,” said Krel, who nonethe-less majored in math, philosophy and NewYork City studies. “I figured that if mathe-matics could be so nice in theory, it couldbe even more so in practice.”

A LOOK INTO THE PASTThe accomplishments of today’s math

faculty and students stand on a foundationof scholarship and instruction that stretchesback to The Free Academy, the precursor of

The City College of New York and CUNY.Alfred George Compton laid the first

stones of that foundation. After earning hisbachelor’s degree at The Free Academy in1853, he became a leading teacher of math,physics and technical/mechanical studies.More practical than theoretic, Comptonwas committed to students. In 1878, whentranscontinental travel was arduous, he leda group to the Rocky Mountains to makeobservations of a solar eclipse.

When he retired in 1911, mathemati-cians were roaming another frontier — thegreat unsolved theoretical problems of thenew century. At the Second InternationalCongress of Mathematicians in Paris in1900, German mathematician DavidHilbert had unleashed 23 dazzling prob-lems that set much of the mathematicalagenda for nine decades.

Those who solved them won renown.One studied at Brooklyn College, Paul J.Cohen. Another taught at Queens College,Leo Zippin. And a third, Martin Davis,graduated from City College.

Cohen, a prodigy, attended BrooklynCollege from 1950 to 1953, until theUniversity of Chicago invited him to pursuegraduate studies without bothering with aB.A. He was best known for solving Hilbert’sfirst problem, which concerns set theory (thecontinuum hypothesis or, as Ben Yandellphrased it in The Honors Class: Hilbert’s Prob-lems and their Solvers: “Is there any size big-ger than the counting numbers but too smallto be matched up one-to-one with the reals[real numbers]?”) Cohen showed that thecontinuum hypothesis could be neitherproved nor disproved. He held two of math-ematics’ highest honors, the Bôcher Prize

1853Alfred George Compton graduates from

Free Academy; belovedteacher of math,physics and technologywho lays foundation formath instruction at CityCollege; retires in 1911.

1900German mathe-matician DavidHilbert poses23 problems,setting mathagenda for20th century.

1921Post publishes first proof ofcompleteness and decida-bility of the propositionalfragment of Principia Mathe-matica, a landmark attemptto develop the logical foun-dations of mathematics in afixed axiomatic system.

Adding GravitasMath can be a challenge, an art form, or “really cool stuff.”It’s also a University cornerstone — and a key to life itself.By Neill S. Rosenfeld

EmilPost

BenningtonGill

DavidHilbert

1917Emil Post andBennington Gill,legendary math-ematicians andCCNY profes-sors, graduatefrom CCNY.

��

MILESTONESin

MATH Compton

� �

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 23

(for analysis) and the Fields Medal (forlogic) and he was working on Hilbert’sunsolved eighth problem, about numbertheory, when he died in 2007.

During the Depression, Zippin studiedwith a founder of the field of topology atthe Institute for Advanced Studies inPrinceton, where he met Deane Mont-gomery. Zippin, who moved to the year-old Queens College in 1938, andMontgomery produced a series of papers,including the 1952 solution to Hilbert’sfifth problem (“Are continuous groups au-tomatically differential groups?”). JosephMalkevitch, Zippin’s young student atQueens and now professor emeritus ofmathematics from York College, recalled“a special excitement in taking a coursewith someone who had solved one of the

world-famous Hilbert problems.” Davis’ pioneering work at NYU in au-

tomated deduction helped set the stagefor contemporary computer science. Hetold Salute to Scholars that one of themost renowned City College professors,Emil Post, in essence challenged him toattack Hilbert’s 10th problem (“Is there ageneral algorithm to solve Diophantineequations, that is, polynomial equationswhose solutions must be integers?”).

- + -Post contributed to pure mathematics

and helped pave the way for computerscience years before the first computerswere built. When he graduated from CityCollege in 1917, he had “already donemuch of the work for a paper on general-ized differentiation that was eventually

published in 1930,” according to theAmerican Philosophical Society, whichhouses his papers. His 1920 doctoral dis-sertation at Columbia “involved the math-ematical study of systems of logic,specifically the application of the truthtable method to the propositional calcu-lus of Whitehead and Russell’s PrincipiaMathematica.” He showed “that the ax-ioms of propositional calculus were bothcomplete and consistent with respect tothe truth table method. This dissertationwas to help form the foundation of mod-ern proof theory.”

And yet, Post would realize, there is afundamental incompleteness to any for-mal logic — in other words, certain thingscan’t be proved. This was revolutionary,for it contradicted Plato’s contention that

1936Jesse Douglas(CCNY 1916)wins firstFields Medal;teaches atCCNY1955-1965.

�

1937Banesh Hoffman,Einstein collabora-tor on gravitationand relativity, joinsfirst QueensCollege faculty;teaches into late1970s. �

1938Leo Zippin,researchassistant to thefounder of thefield of topology,joins QueensCollege faculty.Banesh

HoffmanJesseDouglas

Andrew Poje, a mathematician at theCollege of Staten Island and physicist atthe Graduate Center, collaborates withoceanographers.

1940About half of CCNY’sMath Club wouldlater teach at Stan-ford, where this photowas on display. No-belist Kenneth Arrowis bottom,2nd from left. �

>

24 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

there is a reason for everything that istrue, as well as Euclid’s millennia-oldstructure for proving mathematical hy-potheses using axioms and reason.

Unfortunately, Post could not whip thisinsight into a publishable form before theAustrian Kurt Gödel announced hisgroundbreaking Incompleteness Theo-rems in 1931. Post later graciously wroteto him that “for fifteen years I carriedaround the thought of astounding themathematical world with my unorthodoxideas … As for any claims I might make[,]perhaps the best I can say is that I wouldhave proved Gödel’s Theorem in 1921 —had I been Gödel.”

Paul Chessin, once chief mathemati-cian at Westinghouse and an IBM analyst/programmer on NASA’s Project Mercury,studied with Post, who had lost an arm ina childhood accident. “Invariably dressedin a three piece suit, empty sleeve care-fully tucked into the side suitcoat pocket,”

Post would pace, lecture and write vigor-ously on the blackboard, his sleeve pullingloose and flapping like a cape, Chessinonce recalled. “That freedom of motionseemed to us to liberate his thinking.”

Nobel Laureate Robert Aumann, whostudied real variable theory under Post,recalled that the class consisted almostcompletely of problems; Post assignedthem as homework and students wouldpresent their solutions at the blackboard.“He made us figure things out for our-selves, never giving answers, only suggest-ing the next problem, the next place togo,” Aumann told Salute to Scholars fromhis office at the Center for Rationality atthe Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “Younever really understand something untilyou figure it out yourself.”

- + -Post’s career overlapped that of Jesse

Douglas, who had graduated a year earlierfrom City College and eventually re-

turned to teach there. Douglas won thefirst Fields Medal in 1936 for solving aproblem in differential geometry firstposed in 1760 by Joseph-Louis Lagrange.Douglas proved that a minimal surfaceexists for a given boundary, such as a cir-cle having the least perimeter to enclose agiven area or a sphere having the least sur-face to enclose a specified volume. Soapfilms and soap bubbles are nature’s handi-est examples, and a blind 19th-centuryphysicist who studied their properties,Joseph Plateau, bequeathed his name tothe problem.

- + -Bennington Pearson Gill, Post’s CCNY

classmate, made his mark as a teacher andmentor in the tradition of Compton, thebeloved teacher, during 47 years at thecollege. A testimonial statement found inthe City College Archives deemed him“our department’s leader on curricularmatters” who “continuously … broadened

and deepened” thecurriculum. ”So manyof our students havegone on to distin-guished careers inmathematics” becauseof him, they wrote.Among them wasAumann, who saidGill gave him “a feel-ing of excitementabout mathematics.He encouraged meand oversaw theprogress of myeducation.”

Kenneth Arrow,another Nobel laure-ate and NationalMedal of Sciencewinner, was also astudent of Gill. “Theword ‘great’ is onlyone I can apply tohim as a teacher.”Arrow told Salute toScholars that Gill’stwo-term course inadvanced calculuswas “original, verythorough and rigor-

1946Through mid-1953,Rees sets stage formodern federal fundingof academic researchwhile leading math andcomputer developmentat Office of NavalResearch.

1948Informal “math corner” at CCNY cafeteriaincludes subsequently prominent mathe-maticians Robert Aumann (Nobelist),Martin Davis, Leon Ehrenpreis, LeopoldFlatto (teaching at CCNY since 2007),Melvin Hendrickson, Donald J. Newman,Jacob T. Schwartz, Harold S. Shapiro andAllen L. Shields.

Lehman College’s ChristinaSormani explains a pointabout curved surfaces to

student John DeJesus.

>MinaRees

1943Through 1946, Hunterprofessor Mina Rees(Hunter 1923) mobilizesmathematicians to solvemilitary problems inwartime federal AppliedMathematics Panel.

�

LeoZippin

1952ZippinsolvesHilbert’s 5thproblem.

�

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 25

PROBLEM SOLVINGous, but very lively.” Arrow, a Stanfordprofessor emeritus, added: “He was anatural born teacher. I just do my best.”

- + -The underpinnings of graduate-level

mathematics at CUNY today can betraced to three people: Gov. Nelson Rock-efeller, who in 1961 forged the city’sdisconnected public colleges into the CityUniversity of New York and grantedCUNY the power to award doctoral de-grees; Albert Bowker, a pioneering statisti-cian who was recruited as CUNY’s secondchancellor (1963-1971) partly because ofhis success in fostering graduate educationat Stanford; and mathematician Mina Rees(Hunter 1923), whom Bowker picked asthe Graduate Center’s first president.(Bowker’s influence continued after hestepped down as chancellor, for he men-tored Goldstein, like him a statisticianwho would go on to become chancellor.)

Rees was a pioneer, a woman in a male-dominated field who had to fight for herdoctorate. Columbia admitted her to amaster’s program, but let her know it “wasreally not interested in having womencandidates for Ph.D.s,” she said. Sheearned hers at the University of Chicago.

In the pivotal event of her life, duringWorld War II she became deputy to thechief of the Applied Mathematics Panel(AMP), a federal civilian agency that con-tracted with mathematicians to solve mil-itary problems, such as understanding gasdynamics in air and water explosions. Shedefined the mathematical essence of allrequests for research, found the best-suited talent and flew around the countryensuring that jobs got done.

After the war, AMP disbanded and theOffice of Naval Research (ONR) becameWashington’s prime source for fundingbasic scientific research until the NationalScience Foundation opened shop in 1950.In 1946 ONR pulled Rees from Hunterto run its Mathematical Sciences Branch;in 1949 she became deputy science direc-tor. She saw to it that ONR financedalmost all of the early development ofcomputer hardware and software, de-manding faster machines, greater memoryand visual display. In 1954 she rightly pre-dicted that, with the right mathematics,

computers would model experiments inareas like nuclear physics, where directobservation is impossible.

“The decisions that Rees and her staffmade about what research and re-searchers to fund, and how to implementthat funding, inaugurated the era of uni-versity research that continues today,”wrote her biographer, mathematicianAmy Shell-Gellasch. In 1949 alone, ONRawarded contracts for applied and puremathematical research worth $247million in today’s dollars; that supported1,200 projects and 5,000 researchers atmore than 200 universities.

Rees returned to Hunter in 1953 as amath professor and dean of faculty. Shewas appointed the University’s dean of

graduate studies in 1961 — the firstwoman to head a coeducational graduateschool in the country — and Bowkernamed her founding president of theGraduate Center. Rees turned to Leo Zip-pin, the Hilbert problem solver at QueensCollege, to establish the mathematics doc-toral program.

Rees had funded Bowker’s researchwhen he was a graduate student at Co-lumbia during the war, working on bomb-sights and how ships could avoid aerialtorpedoes. “I have always thought thatMina and ONR have not been givenenough credit for the development ofmathematical statistics in this country. Inmost major universities it is the only newdiscipline (until the recent addition of

1961Rees namedUniversity deanof graduatestudies.

1963StatisticianAlbertBowkerbecomes2nd CUNYchancellor.

� Albert Bowker withMatthew Goldstein

1964Rees namesZippin to foundGraduate Centermath depart-ment; he ran thedepartmentthrough 1968.

1966Paul J. Cohen (left BrooklynCollege as junior in 1953)wins Fields Medal for show-ing that Hilbert’s 1st prob-lem could not be solvedunder existing axioms of settheory; taught at Stanford.

� Paul J. Cohen

>

More than 2,700 students signed upfor the first CUNY MathChallenge, a contest designed to

engage the finest mathematical mindsamong University undergraduates.

“CUNY has many students who are notrecognized for their ability to be creative inmathematics,” said Ted Brown, executiveofficer of the Graduate Center’s Ph.D. pro-gram in computer science and executivedirector of CUNY’s Institute for SoftwareDesign and Development, the latter ofwhich is co-sponsoring the contest withCUNY’s Office of Academic Affairs. “Ouridea also was to promote the idea that mathcan be fun and, perhaps, generate interest inmathematics for any major.”

The first four rounds take place online,with students having two weeks for eachround. Approximately 30 students willmake it to the final, in-person examinationon May 10, vying for 14 cash prizes thatrange from $500 to the grand prize of$2,500. Each round includes five problems,some of which get tougher as the contestgoes on. The prizes are funded by theAcademic Leadership Award, whichChancellor Goldstein received from theCarnegie Corporation of New York.

Professors from nine CUNY institutionsdevised the questions, which require highschool-level math but, quite consciously,not calculus. “We didn’t want this to be justfor math majors,” Brown explained.

First CUNY Math Challenge Attracts 2,700 Students

HERE’S A PROBLEM FROM ROUND 2: Two CUNY math professors arrange to meet to prepare a test. Each will arrive at arandom time between 1:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. and will wait up to 15 minutes forthe other before leaving. What is the probability that the meeting takes place?The solution appears on page 29.

26 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

computer science) added to the Arts andScience area since World War II,” Bowkersaid in a 1987 interview.

With ONR’s financial support — andbefore he had even received his doctorate— Stanford hired Bowker to launch itsstatistics department. He scored a majorcoup by recruiting Arrow, who, he said“came in with a joint appointment be-tween statistics and economics … WithKen Arrow as a nucleus, we had really avery interesting and stellar group of math-ematical economists,” including othermembers of the City College Math Club.For many years, the Statistics Departmentat Stanford displayed a 1940 photographof the club, “because half were facultymembers there,” Arrow noted.

- + -In 1972 the Nobel committee cited

Arrow’s work in equilibrium theory, whichsays there are prices for goods that balancesupply and demand in a complex economywith numerous markets, and the relatedarea of welfare theory. The Royal SwedishAcademy of Sciences wrote: “As perhapsthe most important of Arrow’s many con-tributions to welfare theory appears his‘impossibility theorem,’ according towhich it is impossible to construct a socialwelfare function out of individualpreference functions.”

What does that mean? Con-sider, as Arrow did, an electionwith more than two candidates.The winner may not be the per-son whom the majority of votersreally want, as in many primaryelections, not to mention the2000 presidential contest, whenAl Gore and Ralph Nader to-gether received far more votesthan George W. Bush.

In 2005, Aumann shared theNobel Prize with ThomasSchelling of the University ofMaryland “for having enhanced our under-standing of conflict and cooperationthrough game-theory analysis,” the RoyalSwedish Academy of Sciences wrote.“Why do some groups of individuals, or-ganizations and countries succeed in pro-moting cooperation while others sufferfrom conflict?” Their work “established

game theory — or interactive decision the-ory — as the dominant approach to thisage-old question ... The repeated-gamesapproach clarifies the raison d’être of manyinstitutions, ranging from merchant guildsand organized crime to wage negotiationsand international trade agreements.”

Game theory helps explain countries’decisions to go to war — or to strive forpeace. Aumann sees war as an infinitelyrepeated game. When both sides in a con-flict refuse to compromise, neither getsanything. For example, he has said, IsraeliPrime Minister Rabin’s negotiations withthe Syrians in the 1990s “blew up over afew meters [of land].”

- + -Some of the University’s leading math-

ematics professors have come in throughjoint appointments at the GraduateCenter and CUNY colleges, like DennisSullivan, who was named the GraduateCenter’s Albert Einstein Chair in Sciencein 1981, initially with Queens College.The winner of top mathematics prizesand the 2004 National Medal of Science,Sullivan leads a Graduate Center seminaron the relationship between algebraictopology and quantum field theory.

Linda Keen, recruited by Zippin and

accomplished in a variety of mathematicalfields, has developed a devoted followingamong both faculty and students. Eachyear since about 2000, she and associateprofessor Katherine St. John have run aNational Science Foundation-fundedscholarship program for 30 to 40 under-graduate and graduate students in math,

computer science and computer graphics.She also partners with IBM, which offerspaid internships in computer science. Inboth programs, she said, “We have gottena lot to go to grad school. I feel I’ve madea real difference.”

Other renowned faculty membersinclude Lehman distinguished professorVictor Pan, who fled Soviet oppression forAmerican freedom in 1976, alreadydubbed as “polynomial Pan” for his workon polynomial computations.

CUNY named the Graduate Center’slibrary in Rees’ honor in 1985, and whenshe died in 1997 at age 95, she left $1.7million to endow a graduate chair inmathematics and pay for a fellowship. In2002 the University appointed Victor A.Kolyvagin, a Soviet-born mathematicianwhose research fundamentally changednumber theory, as the first Mina ReesChair and as a distinguished professor.

CALCULATING THE FUTUREToday’s junior faculty, recent alumni

and students at CUNY are engaged acrossthe spectrum of mathematical investiga-tion. Here’s a brief look at a few of them:

First, try to understand this: There is aninfinity of infinities. Think of all thewhole numbers from one up. That’s yourfirst infinity; call it a set. Then think of allof the numbers you didn’t include, likethe real numbers, or endless decimals,between zero and one. That’s anotherand bigger infinity; call it another set.

Second, realize that you need a way tocount even infinite things in a set. This iscalled cardinality.

Third, recognize that cardinality in-volves concepts that would take a book orthree to explain.

This is the world of Grigor Sargsyan,who received his CUNY Baccalaureate in2003 and a U.C. Berkeley Ph.D. this year.Sargsyan explores an aspect of cardinalityknown as inner model theory. Suffice it tosay that includes Kurt Gödel’s model ofthe constructible universe, the continuumhypothesis of Georg Cantor and Zemelo-Fraenkel set theory. Call it really bignumbers.

“Set theory may be epsilon more abstractthan other areas of math,” said Sargsyan,

1968CohenreceivesNationalMedal ofScience.

1969Bowker namesMina Rees asfirst GraduateCenter presi-dent.

LindaKeen

1969Victor Pan, renowned for workon polynomials and computa-tional math in Soviet Union,begins teaching at LehmanCollege and Graduate Center.His work applies to sciences,engineering and signal andimage processing. �

Hunter graduateShari Levine isstudying for amath Ph.D.at Oxford.

>1966Linda Keen (CCNY 1960), recruited to GraduateCenter by Zippin, joins Lehman College when itsplits from Hunter. Research focuses on theinterconnection between analysis, geometry and algebra. Heads programs to encourage stu-dents to pursue math degrees. Chaired board,American Mathematical Society; board member,Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics. �

VictorPan


S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 27

using a mathematical term for infinitesi-mally small. “The mathematics of infinity isso mysterious that sometimes even funda-mental questions — such as what consti-tutes an answer to a given question — needto be addressed. On the other hand, infini-ties are just as concrete mathematical ob-jects as anything, and the combinatorialstructures existing on them are just asbeautiful as they are on finite sets.”

After emigrating from Armenia, he en-rolled at Baruch College in part to take agraduate-level independent-study coursewith Arthur W. Apter, a set theorist spe-cializing in large cardinals. They coau-thored six papers and Apter co-directedhis Ph.D. with John Steel of Berkeley.

Sargsyan switched to the CUNY Bac-calaureate Program in order to study withprofessors at Queens and Lehman Col-leges and the Graduate Center.

Through the CUNY Baccalaureate,he qualified for a Thomas W. Smithacademic fellowship. With doctorate inhand, Sargsyan is heading to NationalScience Foundation-supported post-doctoral study at UCLA.

- + -Take logic, mix with geometry and stir

in algebra. Specifically,

use the logic of model theory to create an“ultraproduct,” a structure that combinesan infinite number of smaller structures ina way that allows you to simultaneouslymanipulate all of them when you manip-ulate the overall structure.

Then suppose you are curious aboutsingularities — the points on geometricobjects where something extraordinaryhappens, like self-intersection or sharpcusps — and suppose that algebraic ringsdescribe the geometric objects. With theright operations, you could draw conclu-sions about the rings, the singularities andthe ultraproduct’s parts and whole.

If this sounds like Winston Churchill’sdescription of the Soviet Union — a rid-dle wrapped in a mystery inside anenigma — you’re not far wrong, but itmakes perfect sense to Hans Schoutens,cofounder of the CUNY Logic Workshopat the Graduate Center. The workshophas become an East Coast magnet forlogic, which is to mathematics whatlinguistics is to English.

It started in 1996, when Schoutensarrived in New York from his native Bel-gium with impressive credentials, no job,but a CUNY connection — logicianRoman Kossak, then an adjunct at Bronx

Community College and now a professorthere. They teamed up with JoelHamkins, then a fresh recruit to the Col-lege of Staten Island and now also a pro-fessor, to launch an ongoing seminar.

“People kept joining and becoming lo-gicians because of our little group, andthat has contributed to CUNY becomingone of the leading logic centers in theU.S.,” said Schoutens, now an associateprofessor at New York City College ofTechnology (City Tech). “Once you havea critical mass, you get all of these stu-dents, and now we even have model the-ory and set theory divisions. It’s led to arenaissance of logic at CUNY.”

- + -Katrina was an ordinary Category 3

hurricane as it entered the Gulf of Mexicofrom the Caribbean. There it passed over avast, powerful eddy that rushed unseenbeneath the waves. Far warmer than thesurrounding water, this eddy quicklystoked Katrina into the raging Category 5storm that drowned New Orleans.

Associate professor Andrew Poje, amathematician at the College of StatenIsland and a physicist at the GraduateCenter, collaborates with oceanographersto study fluid dynamics. He has focused

PROBLEM SOLVING

KennethArrow

1972KennethArrow (CCNY1940, mathmajor)receivesNobel Prize ineconomics.

�

1973Martin Davis(CCNY 1948)solves Hilbert’s10th problem;acclaimed forearly computerwork in 1950s;taught at NYU.

1974- 1975Davis wins LeroyP. Steele Prize,Chauvenet Prizeand Lester R.Ford Prize forwork on Hilbert’sproblem. Dennis

Sullivan

City Tech’s Hans Schoutens cofounded the CUNY Logic Workshop at the Graduate Center.

>1981Dennis Sullivan – winner of1971 Oswald Veblen Prize ingeometry – begins teaching atQueens College and GraduateCenter and wins Prix Élie Cartan.Wins 2004 National Medal ofScience and 2006 Steele prize.

�

28 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

on the eddies, or rings, which are torrentsup to 1,000 meters deep and hundreds ofkilometers across that break off randomlyfrom the Gulf’s Loop Current, a warm-water branch of the Gulf Stream.

“The swell speeds of these rings are sofast that oil companies can’t dig whilethey’re passing their rigs. They’ll bend thedrill,” Poje said. Writing in Yale’s Journalof Marine Research, his team detailed thelife cycle of three potentially devastatingrings, which go by names like Juggernautand Millennium.

Poje uses nonlinear dy-namics and chaos theory tounderstand the rings’ geom-etry. “If you plotted tracertrajectories driven by theseeddies you’d get a spaghettiplot. I try to make sense ofthe spaghetti.” Constantlymoving, frequently splitting,the eddies get squashed andripped apart. “I want toknow what factors areresponsible for the disinte-gration, as well as the mostdangerous place to crashyour oil tanker. Can a modelpredict where the oil will goif I dump a million gallonsto the left of some line youcan’t see?”

- + -Think of the shape of a

candle flame as it flickers,with constantly changingcorners, surface, tips andcurvature. Knowing aflame’s dimensions can beimportant in a factory orspacecraft, where its posi-tion and shape are critical.

The same notion ofcurved surfaces applies tothe universe. Near theEarth, explained LehmanCollege associate professorChristina Sormani, the uni-verse looks like everyday,three-dimensional Euclid-ean space.Forward-backward, left-right and up-down are the

familiar directions. But near heavy stars and black holes,

space curves in a phenomenon calledgravitational lensing. Direction isn’t quitewhat it seems to be and, due to curvature,there is more than one shortest distancebetween two points. The universe be-comes what mathematicians call a Rie-mannian manifold that can exist in farmore than three dimensions.

Sormani studies the Ricci curvature ofRiemannian manifolds, that is, how the

volume of a multidimen-

sional manifold differs from the volume ofa comparable region in Euclidean space.(Einstein popularized Ricci curvature inhis theory of general relativity.) She is alsointerested in mirror symmetry and stringtheory, which help explain particle physicsand cosmology, as well as manifolds. “It isvery abstract,” Sormani said.

More comprehensible is her work asprincipal investigator of Lehman’s newMath Teacher Transformation Institute.Funded by the National Science Founda-tion, it focuses on better equipping Bronxjunior high and high school teachers toteach algebra, geometry and other areas ofmathematics. The institute also seeks toassess the best instructional practices, asmeasured by New York State RegentsExams.

Sormani teaches geometry to the firstcohort of 40 state-certified math teachers.Geometry had faded from the classroomwhen many of them were in high schoolthemselves, because the Regents keptchanging the curriculum. With the state nowreverting to a more traditional approach toalgebra, geometry and trigonometry, theteachers have turned to the institute to expand their knowledge and skills.

- + -Does the shape of a neuron, or nerve

cell, determine how it functions in thebrain? Queens College neurobiologistJoshua C. Brumberg can learn only somuch by examining tissue. But withmathematical models, “We can test hy-potheses that we might not be able to doin a living system.”

“Computational neuroscience gives usa leg up,” said Brumberg, an associate pro-fessor and director of the Graduate Cen-ter’s neuropsychology Ph.D. subprogram.And for mathematics he turns to talentedundergraduates.

“Biology is the new discipline drivinginnovations in mathematics. It used to bephysics,” said Michael Schwemmer(Macaulay Honors College at Queens Col-lege 2005), who expects to earn his doc-torate in applied mathematics from theUniversity of California-Davis in 2010).Examining brain activity to discover howcognition works “is really cool stuff.” Hisdoctoral research probes the relationship

1985Jerome Karle and HerbertHauptman (both CCNY 1937,with Hauptmann a math major)receive Nobel Prize in chemistryfor developing mathematicaltechniques through which X-raycrystallography can disclose3-D structure. ��

2001CCNY student JanSiwanowicz (CCNY2008) is among fiveto win PutnamCompetition, themost prestigiousU.S. undergraduatemath prize. �

MatthewGoldstein

JeromeKarle

HerbertHauptman Jan Siwanowicz

1999StatisticianMatthewGoldstein(CCNY 1963)becomesCUNYchancellor.

�

>

Neurobiologist Joshua C.Brumberg, right, and

honors student HaroldGomes study the function

of brain neurons.

between neurons’ syn-chronized electrical ac-tivity and sensoryinformation processing,motor skills and associa-tive learning. “What arethe fundamental bio-physical mechanismsthat make them syn-chronize their activity?”

Schwemmer, a gui-tarist, was first attractedto Queens College’sAaron Copeland Schoolof Music, which he at-tended in high school.But math won out,thanks to a graduate-level class in numbertheory with assistant math chair Steven J.Kahan. “That made me appreciate howmathematics can be an art form.”

With Brumberg, Schwemmer exam-ined action potentials, or electrical dis-charges, in neurons, looking at how cellgeometry affects firing. “It was amazing touse math to understand biology,” he said.Upon graduation, he received the Claireand Samuel Jacobs Award for excellencein mathematics.

Brumberg is now working with HaroldGomes (Queens 2009), an honors studentmajoring in math and physics. He startedat Queensborough Community Collegeand his studies are supported by the Na-tional Institutes of Health Minority Ac-cess to Research Careers program. Hewondered whether the shape and size of aneuron affect physiology and signal pro-cessing. “We showed that the geometry ofthe cell matters,” said Gomes.

Or as Brumberg put it, “Neurons in-volved in one pathway have differentproperties than neurons in another path-way. That’s what Harold’s data is showingyou.” The next step will be to see whetherthose mathematical findings bear out inthe laboratory.

- + -What if Romeo had fallen for Juliet at

first sight and then discovered that shesmelled bad?

“The play would have gone in a com-plete opposite direction, into extreme ha-tred or apathy to one another,” said Shari

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 29

PROBLEM SOLVING

RobertAumann

Joseph Hirsch

2005RobertAumann(CCNY 1950,math major)receivesNobel Prize ineconomics.

�

2005Goldstein announcesCUNY’s Decade of Science(2005-2015), resulting inhiring of many mathemati-cians and emphasizingmath-heavy STEM fields—science, technology, engi-neering and math.

2008Joseph Hirsch (MacaulayHonors College at QueensCollege 2008) winsNational Science Founda-tion graduate researchfellowship; now pursuingPh.D. in math at CUNYGraduate Center. �

2009More than2,700under-graduatesregister forfirst CUNYMathChallenge.

2009Six students in Baruch’sMaster’s of FinancialEngineering Programplace in 2009 InteractiveBrokers Trading Olympiad,10% of winners in thisinternational graduatestudent competition.

Levine (Hunter 2008), who is studying fora math Ph.D. at Oxford. “The only way thestory could explode into intense romanceis if both were attracted from the start.”

How does she know that? Differentialequations tell her so.

Cornell mathematician Steven Strogatzfirst seized upon “Romeo and Juliet” in1988 to inject drama into his teaching ofdifferential equations. Levine gave “Romeo”her own spin in undergraduate researchsupported by the National Science Foun-dation and then wrote equations to explain“Hamlet,” “Henry V” and “MidsummerNight’s Dream.” Graphing the equationsshows how the play will end, but changethe conditions and the graphs and endingswill differ wildly.

“It surprised me how surprised people arethat you could do this,” she said. She pre-sented her work at the 2007 Einsteins in theCity International Student Research Confer-ence, which alternates between CCNY andThe Technical University of Vienna.

- + -As the financial world imploded this

year, critics vilified financial engineers —the once-vaunted quantitative analysts, or“quants,” who use mathematics to studyand manage the market. Weren’t they re-sponsible for creating those toxic mortgagederivatives?

Partly, but there’s plenty of blame to goaround, and more should be heaped uponsalespeople and rating agencies. Had theraters fairly valued those derivatives fromthe beginning, things might have turned

out differently, most commentators agree.“The field is bound to continue grow-

ing,” said Dan Stefanica, director of BaruchCollege’s Master’s of FinancialEngineering (MFE) Program since it startedin 2002. “With the advent of electronictrading, all transactions are recorded elec-tronically. There are terabytes of informa-tion. You need models to sift through andprocess that information, which you canuse to hedge your positions and investmore efficiently. You can’t go back topencil and paper.”

Since the advent of financial engineersin the last decade, quants primarily deter-mined exposure to risk and analyzed struc-tured products. But today their algorithmsalso drive trading decisions, particularly athedge funds.

The three pillars of financial engineeringget equal emphasis in Baruch’s highly com-petitive program — mathematics, whichcreates a model; finance, which employsthe model; and computer programming,which runs the model.

Baruch’s strategy of admitting only themost qualified candidates, not a predeter-mined number, appears to be paying off.Most students earn their degrees andquickly find work, if they aren’t in thefinancial industry already. Consider the 22graduates of December 2008: Five workedin the sector; by February 2009, 11 othershad landed jobs guaranteed to pay anaverage of $94,000 in the first year — animpressive record, especially in these nail-biting times.

There’s a 44 percent (more precisely, 7/16) chance that the professors will meet.Here’s how to solve the problem:

Associate each arrival time between 1 p.m. and 2 p.m. with a real number r suchthat 0 < r < 1. The number r represents the part of the hour that has elapsed beforethe arrival. In this way the arrival times of the two professors determine a coordinatepair (x, y) that corresponds to a point in the unit square with 0 < x < 1, 0 < y < 1.

The pair (x, y) corresponds to a situation where the professors fail to meet if either y> x + ¼ or x > y + ¼ (see below).

In the first of these cases the point (x, y) lies in the triangle that lies above the line y= x + ¼. The area of this triangle is 1/2x3/4x3/4=9/32. Similarly, in the second case,the point (x, y) lies in the triangle with area 9/32 that lies below the line x = y + ¼. Wededuce that the probability that the professors do not meet is 9/32+9/32=9/16.

Bearing in mind that a 100 percent guaranteed meeting would be 16/16, yousubtract the probability you’ve derived of their not meeting (9/16) from that to get theprobability that they will meet, 7/16.

THE SOLUTION:

30 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

HEAD OF THE CLASSBROOKLYN COLLEGE

Brevity’s Also the Soul of Lit

Award-winning short story writerAmy Hempel teaches budding

authors how to be selectiveobservers.

IT’S BEEN MORE THAN 20 YEARS since the American shortstory was at the height of its popularity, but pity not AmyHempel, who burst on the scene in 1985 and remains one of the

form’s brighter lights and more committed practitioners.“Some people in publishing will still ask, ‘Hey, great story, but have

you got a novel?’ ” says Hempel, the coordinator of Brooklyn College’sM.F.A. program in fiction. “I don’t have any interest in writing a novel.You can’t write to the marketplace. You just do what you do.”

What Hempel does, what she’s been doing for nearly threedecades, is write some of the more luminous short fiction to bepenned — minimalist, unsentimental, painfully observant — whileteaching younger writers to find their own voices. She taught at SarahLawrence, Bennington and Princeton before taking over the graduatefiction program at Brooklyn last fall, succeeding Michael Cunning-ham, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Hours. No sooner hadshe settled into her new office in Boylan Hall than did Hempel findherself the recipient of the 2008 Rea Award for the Short Story, an

annual $30,000 prize whose prior winners have included John Up-dike, Eudora Welty, Cynthia Ozick and Tobias Wolff.

Since her first collection, Reasons to Live, Hempel has publishedthree more, followed by a volume of all her work that The New YorkTimes Book Review named one of the 10 best books of 2006.“Hempel, I’d argue, knows as much as anyone since Kafka about thetendency of human beings to do much better at dreaming than living,”the novelist Rick Moody wrote in an introduction to that collection.

The Rea Award jurors went Moody one better, comparingHempel’s work to Chekhov’s. “Amy Hempel,” they wrote, " is one ofour masters of the dire emotional state rendered with an off-handed-ness that, combined with tenderness, results in fiction that’s at oncedispassionate and compassionate.”

Hempel says her writing comes from the thing that’s always inter-ested her: “How do people get through things? How do you getthrough your life? I look for the same things, moments of great beauty,moments of great sadness that stick in your memory. And I’m inter-

An Excerpt: Weekend

THE GAME WAS CALLED on account ofdogs — Hunter in the infield, Tucker in theinfield, Bosco and Boone at first base. First-

grader Donald sat down on second base, andKirsten grabbed her brother’s arm and wouldn’tlet him have third to make his first run.

“Unfair!” her brother screamed, and the dogs,roving umpires, ran to third.

“Good power!” their uncle yelled, when Joy,in a leg cast, swung the bat and missed. “Nowput some wood to it.”

And when she did, Joy’s designated runner,Cousin Zeke, ran to first, the ice cubes in hisgin and tonic clacking like dog tags in the glass.

And when Kelly broke free from Kirsten andthis time came in to make the run, members ofthe Kelly team made Tucker in the infield danceon his hind legs.

“It’s not who wins — “their coach began, andwas shouted down by one of the boys, “There’sfirst and there’s forget it.”

Then Hunter retrieved a foulball and carried it off in the direc-tion of the river.

The other dogs followed —barking, mutinous.

* * *Dinner was a simple picnic on

the porch, paper plates in laps, theonly conversation a debate as towhich was the better grip forthrowing shoes.

After dinner, the horseshoeswere handed out, the post

pounded in, the rules reviewed with a new ruleadded due to falling-down shorts. The new rule:Have attire.

The women smoked on the porch, thesmoke repelling mosquitoes, and the men andchildren played on even after dusk when it gotso dark that a candle was rigged to balance ontop of the post, and was knocked off and blownout by every single almost-ringer.

Then the children went to bed, or at leastwent upstairs, and the men joined the womenfor a cigarette on the porch, absently pickingticks engorged like grapes off the sleeping dogs.And when the men kissed the women goodnight, and their weekend whiskers scratchedthe women’s cheeks, the women did not thinkshave, they thought: stay.

ested in obsession, quite honestly. Extremes of behavior. There are so many kinds —some good, some damaging. That powers some of the best writing I can think of.”

Hempel finds it easy to connect with her young students, despite the personalnature of what she teaches, or perhaps because of it. “I still have the same questionsthey have when I sit down to write,” she says. “I have to remind myself of the verythings I’m telling them. It’s like we’re all in this together. We’re all trying to see bet-ter and hear better — to amplify the senses, which is an adjunct to good writing.‘Here’s what anyone on the street might notice in this situation. Here’s what novel-ist Don DeLillo noticed in this situation.’ You can teach selectivity — don’t reporteverything you see, report the single thing that tells you everything about it. Thereare ways to refine imagination. At the same time, you don’t want to remove all themysteries from it. There’s something ineffable that you can’t transfer.”

What seems to transfer easily is the appeal of the short story among aspiringwriters—whatever the state of the market for their work. “I think people continueto love stories,” Hempel says. “I always find more students interested in writingstories than novels. There’s the gratification — not quite instant, but quicker thana novel. Simple completion is important.”

“And when the men kissed the women good night, and

their weekend whiskers scratched the women’s cheeks, the

women did not think shave, they thought: stay.

”-— from “Weekend” by Amy Hempel

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 31

32 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

GREAT GRADUATESJOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE

ON NEW YEAR’S DAY2001, Jay Salpeter, a pri-vate investigator and for-

mer New York City policedetective, was going through hismail when an envelope caughthis eye because of its return ad-dress: the maximum securitystate prison in Dannemora.

The letter was from MartinTankleff — Inmate 90T 3844.He was serving a 50-year sen-tence for the 1988 murders ofhis parents which happenedwhen he was 17. But he wrotethat he was innocent. And after10 years of failed appeals, hisonly hope was to find out whoreally killed his parents and re-open the case with evidencethat proved it. Tankleff hadheard that Salpeter had a knackfor finding new evidence in oldcases. But his family didn’t havemuch money to pay him. “Iwonder if you would be willingto work on my case on a probono or primarily pro bonobasis,” he wrote.

Salpeter took the case andworked it for seven years. Hemade $10,000 but the real pay-off was far bigger. On Dec. 21,2007 — seven years almost tothe day Tankleff sent his firstletter to Salpeter fromprison — a state appealscourt vacated his convic-tions. The reversal wasbased on evidenceSalpeter turned up overthe course of a methodi-cal, lonely and often ago-nizing investigation thathe sometimes thoughtwould never end. “Once I wasconvinced that Marty was inno-cent, how could I not do it?How could I stop?” Salpetersays. “But in my wildest imagi-nation, I didn’t think I wouldwind up working the case forseven years.”

Salpeter had similar thoughts

once before — as a student atCUNY’s John Jay College ofCriminal Justice during his earlyyears as a police officer: “It tookme nine years to graduate,” hesays. “I stuck with it, going atnight, stopping, starting up again.I just wanted to have a collegedegree. All my friends did. I grad-uated the same year as my clos-est friend growing up. I got mybachelor’s he got his M.D.”

Salpeter’s persistent naturepaid off for Tankleff, a youngman who found himself in themost Kafkaesque of circum-stances. He was a typical LongIsland teenager until that day, inSeptember 1988 — the first dayof his senior year in high school— he woke up to find his par-ents stabbed and bludgeoned.Arlene Tankleff was dead. Sey-mour was barely alive. By theend of that day, he was underarrest, the police saying he con-fessed. He was convicted twoyears later and sentenced to themaximum. Tankleff, 19,wouldn’t be eligible for paroleuntil he was 69.

A decade later, Salpeter be-came his unlikely savior. Hegrew up in Queens and joinedthe New York Police Depart-

ment after high school. Heworked as a patrolman inBrooklyn and then as an under-cover decoy on the depart-ment’s street crimes unit.Meanwhile, he spent whateverspare time he could find pursu-ing his B.A. in criminal justice atJohn Jay. He began while in the

police academy in 1972 andearned his degree just before his30th birthday. “I saw the schoolgrow,” he says. “When I started,it was on Park Avenue Southnear Baruch College. It wasmostly cops and law enforce-ment then. By the time I gradu-ated, they moved to Tenth

Avenue and itwasn’t just cops.”

Salpeter be-came a detectiveabout the sametime he becamea college gradu-ate. After 10years, he tired ofthe murder and

mayhem and retired.A year later, he became a pri-

vate investigator and instead ofarresting suspects he was work-ing for their lawyers. Along theway, he found himself with afew cases in which it seemedthat his former brethren hadlocked up innocent people. So

when he received Tankleff’sletter from prison, Salpeter wasopen to the possibility that Tan-kleff was, as he claimed, an in-nocent man, wrongly convicted.

“What I saw right away wasthat the Suffolk County policenever investigated the case,”Salpeter said. “If they did, theywould have made Jerry Steuer-man the prime suspect, notMarty.”

Jerry Steuerman was Tankl-eff’s estranged business partner.He owed Seymour Tankleff ahalf million dollars, and the twohad been at war for months.Salpeter came to believe that thelead detective, James McCready,might have framed Tankleff byfabricating his confession — ascenario suggested by its incon-sistency with the physical evi-dence. Salpeter eventuallydeveloped evidence that Mc-Cready had a prior relationshipwith Steuerman but lied about itat the trial. McCready has denied

“The Tankleff case became a cause

célèbre and made Salpeter one of the country’s

most high-profile private investigators.

”

PI’s New EvidenceWins FreedomFor a Convicted Man

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 33

FALSE CONFESSIONS have come a long way as a recognized phenomenonsince the days when Jay Salpeter was a student at John Jay College ofCriminal Justice. A good deal of the credit goes to another man with a

connection to John Jay who has an abiding professional interest in the MartinTankleff case.

Saul Kassin, distinguished professor of psychology at John Jay, is one of thecountry’s leading authorities on interrogations and confessions. And like othertop experts who have studied the case, he concluded long ago that Tankleffwas the victim of psychological manipulation and outright fabrication by theSuffolk County police that cost him 17 years of his life.

Kassin is a pioneer in the field of false confessions, an area of interest hecame upon after spending his early career researching juries and how they makejudgments. “My fascination with confessions started with the question, ‘Can youpry juries away from confessions?’ ” The answer, generally, was no. The next ques-tion was: Is confession evidence necessarily reliable? And the answer to that wastroubling.

In 1985, Kassin and colleague, Lawrence S. Wrightsman, were the first toraise questions about confession evidence. They called on others in the fieldsof criminology and psychology to join them in making it the subject of scientificstudy. They were particularly interested in exploring false confessions — howoften they occurred, under what circumstances, and how jurors might distin-guish them.

Kassin began looking at the Tankleff case in 1992, not long after Tankleff’sconviction. He found that the lead detective told Tankleff several manipulativelies in the interrogation room; the pivotal one was that his father had regainedconsciousness and identified him as his assailant. It led the dazed teenager tothink he might have committed the attacks, as the police were insisting, andthen blacked out. But he was unable to supply the details. According toSalpeter and Kassin, the detective did that for him.

“There was no evidence of Marty’s involvement in these murders,” Kassinsaid. In fact, he said, the physical evidence of the case disproved virtuallyevery element of the confession that the police attributed to their teenage sus-pect. But the jury convicted him nonetheless. They couldn’t imagine the policemaking up a confession. And they couldn’t imagine someone confessing tocrimes he didn’t commit. Kassin has been writing and lecturing about the Tan-kleff case ever since. It’s now a staple of the graduate-level course he teachesin confession evidence.

any wrongdoing.In the criminal justice system,

reversing a murder convictionwith new evidence is one of thehardest things to do. Harder still,nowadays, without DNA evi-dence. But Salpeter did, using old-fashioned gumshoe work to slowlyunravel the case. The big breakcame when Salpeter tracked downa man who eventually admittedhe had driven the killers — twomen allegedly hired by Steuerman— to the Tankleff home on thenight of the murders.

Salpeter continued to find peo-ple who knew pieces of the puz-zle, while still others cameforward on their own. One wasthe teenage son of one of the al-leged hit men. He testified in ap-peals court that his fatheradmitted to him that he commit-ted the murders — and said thathis father claimed that McCreadywas paid off to protect him andhis coconspirators. The teenager'sstory along with other evidence

Salpeter found led the court tooverturn Tankleff's convictions.

The Tankleff case became acause célèbre and made Salpeterone of the country’s most high-profile private investigators. “JaySalpeter is the best investigator I’veever known,” Tankleff’s lead attor-ney, Stephen Braga of Washington,declared at a news conference fol-lowing Tankleff’s release. Tankleffhimself hailed Salpeter as his sav-ior. “…You gave me my life back,”he wrote to him on his last day inprison, a poignant bookend to hisfirst letter seven years earlier.

Last December, Salpeter andauthor Richard Firstman pub-lished A Criminal Injustice, a bookthat both deconstructed thewrongful prosecution of Tankleffand reconstructed the investiga-tion that reversed it. The bookalso revealed new details exposingthe corruption by Suffolk Countyauthorities that the authors allegewas at the root of Tankleff’s 17-yearimprisonment.

JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL JUSTICEAnother Top Expert Spots Lies

Private investigator Jay Salpeterworked for seven years to freeMartin Tankleff, left.

Saul Kassin,distinguishedprofessor ofpsychology atJohn Jay College.

ONE AFTERNOON in the fall of 1950, a City Collegesophomore named Maury Allen dropped by the foot-ball coach’s office and asked to interview him for an

article he was writing for the college paper, The Campus.“But you’re on

the team,” said thecoach.

“Well, I’m onthe paper, too,”Allen replied.

The coachgranted the inter-view, perhaps fig-uring the scrawnydefensive back andthird-string quar-terback had a morepromising future injournalism thanfoot-

ball. It was a goodcall. The CCNY

Beavers went 1-7 thatyear and never took the

field again: A fewmonths later came the

notorious basket-ball point-shaving scan-dal that shut down mostof City’s athletic teams.Maury Allen, mean-while, went on to be-come an institutionon the New Yorksportswritingscene. Last fall,the Society ofThe Silurians,

New York’s oldest journalism organization, honored Allenwith its annual Lifetime Achievement Award, a tributewhose past recipients have included the likes of WalterCronkite, Bill Moyers and Pete Hamill.

Lifetime achievement notwithstanding, Allen is hardlyfinished. At 76, he still writes every day —whether hisweekly piece for thecolumnists.com, a website that featuressportswriters retired from daily journalism, or his annualbook. He’s written more than three dozen, most on the sub-ject of baseball. There have been books about the gloriousand futile seasons of the Yankees and Mets, biographies ofJoe DiMaggio and Jackie Robinson and Mickey Mantle andeven one about Bo Belinsky, a pitcher best remembered forleading the league in carousing.

“The writing has always been easy to me,” says Allen. “It’salways been fun. Some guys write one page and think that’sa lot. I write 2 or 3,000 words a day.”

Allen’s been pounding out copy since his days at CityCollege, where he learned the craft from Irving Rosenthal, a

professor inthe EnglishDepartmentwho taughtthe college’sone and onlyjournalismcourse.Rosenthalhad a simple

philosophy: You want to learn how to write? Then write.That’s how you learn how to write. Allen learned fast andloved the payoff. “What a thrill to be in the Great Hall atCity College and watch a kid sitting there reading my storyin The Campus.”

Allen graduated in 1953 and went into the Army, butkept writing — for Stars and Stripes in Japan and Korea.Back home in Brooklyn two years later, he took the subwayup to CCNY to ask Rosenthal for his advice: Should he goto Columbia for a graduate degree in journalism, or get ajob? “He said, ‘You’ll learn more in two weeks on a paperthan you’ll learn in two years at Columbia.’ ”

Allen worked at a couple of small papers, in Indiana andPennsylvania, before returning to New York in 1959 tocover baseball for a new magazine called Sports Illustrated.The job had cachet and a handsome salary, and it was at SIthat Allen met his wife, Janet. But he didn’t like the slowerpace of a weekly — and he really didn’t like it when the edi-tors reduced his stories to captions for the photographs thatthe magazine treasured. What Allen really wanted to do waswrite for the great sports section of the New York Post. Hefinally got his chance when the paper’s baseball writer diedin a fire in St. Louis. “He was smoking and drinking in hishotel room,” Allen said. “I called up the sports editor, Ike

HISTORY LESSONCITY COLLEGE OF NEW YORK

“What a thrill to be in the Great Hall at

City College and watch a kid sitting there

reading my story in The Campus.

”— Maury Allen

By Richard Firstman

For legendary baseball writer Maury Allen, mingling with Mantle, DiMaggio and Robinson was all in a day's work.

Still Crazy for the Game

Writer MauryAllen withbaseball legends,from top: JoeDiMaggio, CaseyStengel, JoeTorre, GeorgeSteinbrenner.

34 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 35

Gellis. I went in thenext day. He says, ‘Do yousmoke?’ I said no. ‘You’rehired.’ ”

Allen quickly made his mark as a baseball writerwho didn’t take the games, or the players, so seriously.He was at the forefront of a new breed of New Yorksportswriters — “chipmunks,” they famously dubbedthemselves—who wrote with an irreverence that ulti-mately changed the way all the media covered sports.

The chipmunks turned the press box into a chatter-ing clubhouse, which prompted the legendary Jimmy

Cannon to bellow, “Shut up and keeptyping!”

When Maury Allen typed, itwas often with atouch of the face-tious. In 1963,Mickey Mantle spentmost of the season onthe disabled list, evenas Yankee manage-ment kept telling thepress he’d be back inthe lineup any day.

“There is noMickey Mantle,”Allen wrote finally.“No blond-haired,blue-eyed sluggerfrom Oklahoma. He’s a fic-tional character created by theYankees.” Allen was behind thebatting cage the next day whenhe saw Mantle approaching.“You piss me off just standingthere,” Mantle told him. It be-came a classic line, repeated foryears by other players to otherwriters, although Allen becamegood friends with Mantle, as hedid with many of the playershe covered.

“The fun of covering baseball in the ’50s and ’60s was youcould get to know a guy personally, you could go to his house,”Allen recalls. “On the road, you always ate dinner with theplayers, you’d buy them a beer at the hotel, talk to them aboutthe game or their lives. They considered you part of their world.When I broke in with Sports Illustrated in 1959, I was making$22,000 a year, which was more than what half the playerswere making. Ten years later, it became a different world.”

But for Allen, the old world still exists. He lives it everyday, in his head and on the page. His latest book is about theold Brooklyn Dodger Dixie Walker, a project that reconnectedhim with dozens of players he knew when he was just startingout. It will be Maury Allen’s 40th book.

“The fun of covering baseball in

the ’50s and ’60s was you could

get to know a guy personally,

you could go to his house.

”— Maury Allen

Allen still lives the old world everyday, in his head and on the page.

MAURY’S PICKSFor Best Players Ever

Willie Mays — He had the fa-mous five skills (hit, hit withpower, run, field and throw) to adegree no one ever equaled.

Mickey Mantle — Would havebeen the best ever if he wasn'tinjured so much. He was thegame’s power icon.

Hank Aaron — Stylish star whocould do it all when few peoplereally noticed.

Joe DiMaggio — Only a rela-tively short career keeps himfrom being considered the bestthe game ever saw.

Jackie Robinson — Playingthat way under that pressuremakes him an immortal of thegame.

36 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

MENTORHUNTER COLLEGE

Guiding a Future Researcher

By Cathy Jedruczek

IT TOOK A VILLAGE to mentor CindyPuente, Hunter College senior and aspir-ing cancer researcher. Several professors

in the Department of Biological Sciencesrecognized Puente’s potential early on andtook turns advising her until she got ac-cepted to Yale, Harvard, Sloan-Ketteringand other top graduate research programs.

“Without my professors, I wouldn’t havegone as far as I’ve gone,” says Puente, 22,who chose to pursue a Ph.D. in cancer biol-ogy at the Gerstner Sloan-Kettering Gradu-ate School of Biomedical Sciences this fall.

“I don’t think I would have gone intoscience,” Puente explained. “It takes a com-munity to build a young scientist. Youneed people to tell you that it’s okay tomake mistakes and that you have to shakeit off and move on.”

Every professor in Hunter’s BiologicalSciences department allots two hours perweek to advise students. Students are alsorequired to seek permission from depart-ment professors to enroll in advanced biol-ogy courses. It’s all part of an effort to helpsteer students like Puente in the right di-rection.

“We just want to make sure our stu-dents have an idea what they want to do,”said Dr. Shirley Raps, biological scienceschair. “It’s amazing how they don’t knowwhat opportunities are there for them.Sometimes we miss some students becausethey don’t come to see us.”

Puente, who was born in the UnitedStates but spent most of her childhood inColombia, thought about becoming amedical lab technician while in her firstyear at Hunter. But her biology and pre-calculus professor, Dr. Ezra Shahn, told hershe had the ability to reach higher.

“I was a good student in high school but Ihad no interests,” Puente says. “I wanted tomajor in medical laboratory technology be-cause I had an idea that you go to college toget a job after graduation.”

Puente listened to Shah’s advice and vol-unteered at Dr. Peter Lipke’sbiology lab. Lipke recom-mended her for the MinorityAccess to Research Careersprogram, which he headed atthat time. She got acceptedand joined Dr. Jill Bargonetti’slab.

“She has the ability to askvery thoughtful questions,”says Bargonetti, who doescancer research. “That’s asign of somebody who has the ability tothink deeply. She’s an incredible student.”

Although Puente was an outstandingstudent, she needed special attention in thelab. “Doctor Bargonetti has been very pa-tient and a she’s a good mentor,” saysPuente, who has made tremendous leaps indoing lab research that focuses on under-standing the cellular and molecular mecha-nisms that underlie disease. “She’s the oneperson who sees all of my flaws,”says

Puente. “She’s very tough, and she didn’tallow me to slack.”

Puente also thought of becoming a doc-tor, but after a summer at the Cold SpringHarbor Laboratory in New York, at Raps’recommendation she set her mind on sci-ence research. That experience was spon-sored by the Howard Hughes MedicalInstitute, which has funded summer re-search opportunities for Hunter biologystudents for several years.

“At Cold Spring Harbor lab, I worked onan independent project,” says Puente. “It

exposed me to a lot of newtechniques and I interactedwith people from across thecountry, including Nobel Prizewinner James Watson, [one ofthe co-discoverers of DNA].”

Puente’s work at ColdSpring Harbor and her progressin Bargonetti’s lab convincedRaps to nominate her for theHoward Hughes Medical Insti-tute’s Exceptional Research

Opportunities Program. As a result, Puentespent last summer in Dr. Robert Tjian’s labat the Department of Molecular and CellBiology at the University of California atBerkeley.

Puente says she wouldn’t have accom-plished nearly as much without her men-tors. “I see them all the time,” she says.“They’re genuinely concerned and theywant to make sure I’m doing okay. So it’smotivating to know that people care.”

Dr. Shirley Raps,left, andDr. Jill Bargonettimentor aspiringscientist Cindy Puente.

“It takes a

community to

build a young

scientist.

”— Cindy Puente

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 37

JAMES OAKES got the idea to writethe book that won him the LincolnPrize more than 15 years ago after

reading an 1876 speech by abolitionistFrederick Douglass.

“I thought it was brilliant,” says Oakes,distinguished professor of history and hu-manities chair at the Graduate Center. “Itwas his big summation speech of every-thing he had come to terms with aboutLincoln. I thought about doing a generalhistory of slavery, but I couldn’t get [thespeech] out of my mind and though Ithought I understood Lincoln, I didn’t un-derstand Douglass very well, so I thought,‘let me put the slavery book aside andwork on these guys.’”

The Lincoln Prize, which recognizesthe year’s best book on Lincoln and theCivil War, was awarded to Oakes in 2008for The Radical and the Republican: Freder-ick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Tri-umph of Antislavery Politics.

It came as no surprise to Oakes thatPresident Barack Obama has an interest inLincoln. “I think what he admires aboutLincoln, and it’s a good thing to admire, isthe way Lincoln balanced the need to beflexible and pragmatic at critical points inorder to achieve victory and to get thingsdone while holding fast to his principlesand refusing to compromise on the mostfundamental and moral commitments hemade,” says Oakes. “He likes the way Lin-coln was able to articulate in a very plainand beautiful language the basic princi-ples, the ideals upon which the UnitedStates is grounded.”

Published in 2007, The Radical and theRepublican is among a new round of books celebrating the bi-centennial of Lincoln’s birth. Reviewers have praised it foradvancing the study of Lincoln and emancipation by makingDouglass an equal protagonist.

Oakes grew up in Staten Island and entered Baruch Col-lege in 1970 intending to become an international banker.But he became inspired by the writings of historian KennethStampp, who was known for his scholarship on slavery, theCivil War and Reconstruction. Oakes was accepted to a grad-uate program at the University of California Berkeley, whereStampp became his advisor. After Berkeley, he taught historyat Princeton and Northwestern Universities and in 1997 hejoined the Graduate Center faculty.

That same year, one of Oakes’ students at Princeton, John

Matteson, joined the faculty at John Jay College of CriminalJustice to teach English. The two men had lost touch yearsago and didn’t meet again until last year when Matteson wona Pulitzer Prize for his biography of Louisa May Alcott andher father. “He gave me useful and mature advice as I movedforward with the most important work of my undergraduatelife,” Matteson says of his time as a student with Oakes. Nowthey hope to teach a class together at the Graduate Centeron literature written about the Civil War.

“I came back to CUNY because I wasn’t getting my writ-ing done,” says Oakes. “The Graduate Center creates an envi-ronment very conducive to writing. And the proof is in theresults. My productivity has gone way up since I came backto CUNY, plus I’m from New York, so coming back to NewYork was like putting on a comfortable pair of shoes.”

PAGETURNERSTHE GRADUATE CENTER

A President and His Foil

James Oakes, here with son Daniel, illuminated another side of Lincoln.

By Cathy Jedruczek

38 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

Near BlackWhite-to-Black Passing in American CultureJohn Jay College assistant professor of English Baz DreisingerUniversity of Massachusetts Press

Dreisinger explores the often-ignored history ofwhat she calls “reverse racial passing” by lookingat a broad spectrum of short stories, novels,films, autobiographiess and pop-culturediscourses that depict whites passing forblack. The protagonists of these narra-tives span centuries and cross contexts,from slavery to civil rights, jazz to rockto hip-hop. Tracing their role from the1830s to the present. Dreisinger arguesthat central to the enterprise of reverse

passing are ideas about proximity.

Jonathan Demme: InterviewsEdited by Queens College professor of sociology and film studiesRobert E. KapsisUniversity Press of Mississippi

With conversations from the1970s to the present, the bookfocuses on Demme’s artistry, onhis filmmaking philosophy andespecially on his progressivesocial and political concerns andhow these have influenced hissubject matter. Best known for theOscar-winning dramas “TheSilence of the Lambs” and“Philadelphia,” Demme discusseshis troubles with studios, his needto balance documentaries withfiction films, his early work as a critic and publicist and hisapprenticeship with Roger Corman working on B movies.

RIDING HIS BICYCLE across the Williamsburg Bridge oneday in 1995, Gregory Snyder encountered something thatnearly knocked him off his seat and into the East River. He

stopped to admire a sprawl of graffiti — SENTO, the writer’s“tag,” in bold shades of green, blue, orange and yellow — on aconcrete support at the crest of the bridge.

Snyder was a graduate student in sociology whose master’sthesis explored the conver-sion of early slaves to Chris-tianity. But the graffitichanged all that. “I was fasci-nated by the color, the size— and the fact that it couldbe done,” recalls Snyder, whois now an assistant professorof sociology at Baruch Col-lege. “There was a bit of dan-ger in hanging on the ledgeto write it. I was just, ‘Wow.’It unleashed this onslaughtof curiosity that I couldn’tstifle. I went straight to myadvisor and said, ‘I’m notgoing to study Christianityany more. I’m going to studygraffiti writing.”

Over the next 10 years, Snyder immersed himself in one ofNew York City’s more disreputable subcultures. “It’s as complexas any,” Snyder says. “The idea of writing your name throughoutthe city, in as many ways as possible, in as many dangerous waysas possible, for the purpose of becoming famous.

“Who were these young men? Why did they do what theydid? Was it art or vandalism — or both? To find the answers,Snyder interviewed and hung out with scores of graffiti writ-ers—or “taggers” and “bombers,” as they’re known — and be-friended many. He accompanied them into underground train

tunnels and dark alleyways — sometimes serving as a lookoutand, on a few occasions, partaking with a can of spray paint.

Snyder’s book Graffiti Lives: Beyond the Tag in New York’sUrban Underground, (New York University Press, 2009) hasstirred spirited reactions by reviewers. Said Publisher’s Weekly:“Snyder’s ‘the kids are all right’ assessment, buttressed by manyexamples of thrill-seeking taggers finding successful careers in

art, design, pub-lishing, and (com-missioned) muralpainting, is well-articulated, con-vincing, and quitepossibly reassuringfor the urbanitesliving among (orperhaps raising)today’s writers andbombers.”

A Wall StreetJournal critic,meanwhile, ex-pressed equal con-tempt for Snyder’sbook and a famous1974 essay in

which Norman Mailer celebrated graffiti as artistic expression.The Journal published Synder’s response. His objective was toexplore and understand a particular subculture in all its “com-plexity and confusion,” he wrote, and in the process discovered“an empirical reality that flies in the face of conventional wis-dom. Graffiti writers for the most part are not immoral, crime-addled imps.”

On the other hand, says Snyder, “to be mentioned in thesame paragraph as Norman Mailer — that’s pretty goodcompany.”

PAGETURNERSBARUCH COLLEGE

‘Tagger’ Fan Draws Flack

Gregory Snyder at graffiti-covered wall he spotted in lower Manhattan.

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 39

Gastropolis: Food & New York CityEdited by associate professor of foods and nutrition Annie Hauck-Lawson(Brooklyn College) and assistant professor of tourism and hospitalityJonathan Deutsch (Kingsborough Community College)Columbia University PressGastropolis explores the personal and historical relationship

between New Yorkers and food. Beginningwith the origins of cuisine combinations, suchas Mt. Olympus bagels and Puerto Ricanlasagna, the book describes the nature of foodand drink before the arrival of Europeans in1624 and offers a history of early farmingpractices. Essays trace the function of place

and memory in Asian cuisine, the rise of Jewish food icons,the evolution of food enterprises in Harlem, the relationshipbetween restaurant dining and identity and the role of ped-dlers and markets in guiding the ingredients of our meals.

The Other Side of TerrorEdited by John Jay College assistant professor of EnglishNivedita MajumdarOxford University PressThe book offers insights on terrorism fromthe literatures of India, Nepal and Sri Lanka.The Nepali writings concern the Maoist in-surgency; those from Sri Lanka, the Tamilmilitancy. The Indian selections engage withmanifestations ranging from the militantwing of the Independence movement to thevarious post-Independence terrorist movements, such asseparatism in Punjab, the insurgency in Assam and theNaxalite movement in Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Bihar andMadhya Pradesh.

Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a PhilosopherQueens College professor of English Charles Molesworth and Purdue Uni-versity professor of philosophy Leonard HarrisUniversity of Chicago Press

Molesworth and Harris trace Locke’sPhiladelphia upbringing, his undergraduateyears at Harvard and his tenure as the firstAfrican American Rhodes Scholar. Theheart of their narrative illuminates Locke’sheady years in 1920s New York City andhis 40 year career at Howard University,where he helped spearhead the adult edu-cation movement of the 1930s and wroteon topics ranging from the philosophy of

value to the theory of democracy.

American Therapy: The Rise of Psychotherapy in the UnitedStatesBaruch College professor of health care policyJonathan EngelPenguin Group (Canada)Fifty percent of Americans will undergosome form of psychotherapy in their life-times, but the origins of the field rarely areknown to patients. Yet the story of psy-chotherapy in America brims with colorfulcharacters, intriguing experimental treat-

ments and intense debates within this community of heal-ers. The book begins, as psychotherapy itself does, with themonumental figure of Sigmund Freud; it outlines the basicsof Freudian theory and discusses the peculiarly powerful in-fluence of Freud on the world of American mental health.

How Does It Feel To Be A Problem? Being Young and Arab inAmericaBrooklyn College associate professor of English Moustafa BayoumiThe Penguin Press (USA)Bayoumi tells a story of seven men and women in their 20s

living in Brooklyn, home to the largestnumber of Arab-Americans in the UnitedStates. He jettisons the stereotypes andclichés that surround Arabs and Muslimsand allows the reader instead to enter theirworlds and experience their lives. Throughthem, Bayoumi exposes the often-unseenentanglements wrought by our age: govern-

ment surveillance and detentions, workplace discrimination,warfare in their countries of origin, threats of vigilante vio-lence, the infiltration of spies and informants into theirmidst and the disappearance of friends or family.

Lincoln: The Biography of a WriterQueens College and CUNY Graduate Center distinguished professoremeritus of English Fred KaplanHarperCollins PublishersAn acclaimed biographer, Kaplan exploresthe life of America’s 16th presidentthrough his use of language as a vehicle toexpress complex ideas and feelings and asan instrument of persuasion and empower-ment. An admirer and avid reader of Burns,Byron, Shakespeare and the Old Testa-ment, Lincoln was the most literary of ourpresidents. Since Lincoln, no president has written his ownwords and addressed his audience with equal and enduringeffectiveness. Kaplan focuses on the elements that shapedLincoln’s mental and imaginative world; how his writingsmolded his identity, relationships, and career; and how theysimultaneously generated the distinctive political figure hebecame and the public discourse of the nation.

Listening Well: On Beethoven, Berlioz, and Other Music Criticismin Paris, Boston, and New York, 1764-1890Baruch College and CUNY Graduate Center professor of musicOra Frishberg SalomanPeter Lang PublishingSaloman’s 12 essays illuminate aesthetic, educative andevaluative strategies utilized by writers inParis, Boston and New York to guide listen-ers in confronting the challenges of musicalmodernity between 1764 and 1890. Theessays explore contrasting responses to newoperas and symphonies by composers,librettists, authors, critics and conductorsthat include Chabanon, Lacépède, Berlioz,Urhan, D'Ortigue, Dwight, Fuller, Watsonand Hassard.

Here is a collection of new books written by CUNY authors.

BOOKSAT-A-GLANCE

IN A HIGHLY TECHNICAL WORLD that increasingly demandsspecialists in every field, is it possible for a humanities major tobecome a good doctor?Officials at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine’s Humanities and

Medicine Program think it is.The program, established in 1989, has shown that success in

medical school does not depend on a traditional pre-medscience curriculum. And Dr. Mary Rifkin, director of theprogram, says humanities and social science majors areoften better doctors than pre-med majors.

“They look at patients as a whole person rather thansomething that can be scientifically engineered,” saysRifkin. “They tend to be excellent communicators andtreat the whole patient.”

Nick Copeli, a Queens College anthropology majorand Macaulay Honors College senior is one of a selectfew who will be heading off to Mount Sinai in the fallwith hopes of becoming an epidemiologist. Copeli andTemitope Ademuwagun, a 2008 Honors Collegegraduate, are the only two Queens College students tobe accepted by the program.

“This program is very progressive,” says Copeli. “Doctorswho majored in humanities in college are more in touchwith patients. They have more compassion. I wanted to be a humani-ties major because it’s relevant to my perspective on medicine.Medicine is a study of humans and I’m interested in how illness anddisease affect how someone lives.”

The program, which accepts students in their sophomore or junioryear, allows them to explore their interests in humanities and socialsciences as undergraduates. They are required to complete only oneyear of college biology and chemistry and they must attend an eight-week summer program of physics and organic chemistry along withan introduction to various clinical disciplines.

“We think it’s a better way to spend your time in college,” saysRifkin. “They are better rounded and they’re passionate about some-thing they’ve pursued.”

Without the traditional pre-med classes the students might struggleat the beginning, Rifkin says. “It’s a little bit of a cultural shock, but theyeventually catch up.” So far, Copeli isn’t worried about keeping up.

“The first semester will be a little difficult, but I am not new tohard work.” he says.

Copeli, 22 was born in the United States to parents of Ukrain-ian and Uzbek heritage. Raised by a single mother, hestarted working at 13 as a stock boy at a pharmacy,and as a private tutor to help support his family.Later he became a lifeguard and for the past fiveyears he’s been a swimming teacher. He also volun-teers at a nursing home.

Copeli attended the Hebrew Academy of WestQueens in Richmond Hill and then Francis LewisHigh School. He had been offered full scholarshipsto a number of private universities, but family com-mitments kept him closer to home. As a MacaulayHonors College student he received full tuition andan opportunity to study abroad. He’s also a recipientof several scholarships.

A Benjamin A. Gilman International Scholarshipallowed Copeli, a proficient Russian language speakerto spend a semester in Russia where he worked at St.

Petersburg State University as an English teacher and translator. A grant from Macaulay Honors College let him travel to Peru, wherehe volunteered at a remote orphanage in Lima.

Copeli is also the recipient of the Jeanette K. Watson Fellowship,which granted him three, eight-to-ten-week paid summer internshipsin non-profit, government services and private enterprise sectors.Copeli interned at Global Kids, an organization that prepares urbanyouth for global citizenship and at Donors Choose, an organizationthat brings together donors with projects to improve public education.For his third internship, Copeli, a budding photographer, will travel toSantiago, Chile, where he will teach photography at acommunity center supported by VE Global, a nonprofit internationalvolunteer organization.

40 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

Humanizing Medicine for Worldly Students

“Doctors who

majored in

humanities in

college are more

in touch with

patients.

”— Nick Copeli

TOP OFTHECLASSQUEENS COLLEGE

Pre-medstudent NickCopeli says ahumanitiesmajor isrelevant to hismedicalperspective.

By Cathy Jedruczek

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 41

CROSSWORDPUZZLE

ACROSS1. Honors

Collegedonor

14. Ape15. Number of

CUNY lawschools

16. ____ Reader17. Objective caseof we19. Street urchin21. Leased23. First infallibleimam24. Nay25. Universitytown in Maine27. PSAT examiner29. Bachelor’s

degree32. “Shortcut”

Romannumeral 99

34. Greek theaters35. Opposite SW36. Action figure38. _____ but no

cigar40. Trademark43. Note between

la and do45. Dept. of

Higher_______

47. Tramp49. Home of 240-

acre college50. Internet

address51. First issuance

of shares52. Queensboro-

ugh or Kingsborough56. Small 4-stringed guitar57. Soak58. Raised NY railway59. Dash61. Ratio of circle’s circumference to

its diameter63. Perpendicular to NS64. Flyers since 1947: Abbr.66. Derriere muscle67. Undercover drug cop70. Chinese word for love72. ____’s Irish Rose74. Rd.75. Funny Queens College grad80. Climax82. Upbeat part of a measure83. _______-fi85. Numbered compartment for mail86. Dummkopf88. Emergency news: CUNY _____92. 1994 Nobelist Kenzaburo93. Puerto ____94. Roman goddess of night96. Noah’s ark resting place98. CUNY chancellor

DOWN1. ____ bist du? Ger.2. Word add-on3. NY airport4. Refreshing summer drink5. ___ Amin6. State between KS and IL7. Sign up for class: Var.8. Poet _____ Alexander, Graduate

Center prof.9. Miss class

10. Tete-_____11. Zombie12. French the13. Christmas season14. Hold down18. Title20. Fat-free22. Person, place, or thing23. Fits you to ____26. Sun god28. Conclude29. Bust30. Ongoing learning: Abbr.31. Old-fashioned32. Fish disease33. Begin work

37. Undergoes again39. Woodwind instrument41. ____ Mandelstam, Russian poet42. Scram44. Trouble46. Accomplish48. Calliope or Clio50. Westwood campus: Abbr.51. Inuit house: Var.53. Absolutely not54. Absolutely affirmative55. Fished for Lamprey56. Out of bed60. After deductions62. Diver Louganis65. College financial help

form: Abbr.66. Comedian Gottfried68. Get ____ !69. Acknowledgment of

learning71. I came, ____ …73. Exist76. Nazi German state77. Outer Pentagon

corridors78. How much ____ much?

79. Knights who say __80. Phillipine volcano81. Rhymed verse84. First NYC subway87. Third Stooge89. Refrains after tra90. Oldie Martha91. Numerical prefix93. Opposite of LT95. Between L and XXL97. Sumerian god of heaven

By Miriam Smith

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PHOTO FINISHKINGSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE

S P R I N G 2 0 0 9 43

GraduationDay At the Beach

Three newly-minted KingsboroughCommunity College grads, bearing fresh

diplomas and mixed emotions, say so long to thecampus waterfront on Graduation Day. Courses over,

they can savor the 70-acre Manhattan Beach location onBrooklyn’s southern tip as a treasured urban oasis for

quietly pondering the future or joyfully kicking up their heels.

44 S P R I N G 2 0 0 9

IT’S KNOWN as the “Jewel of the South Bronx,” and it’seasy to see why. For the last 40 years, HostosCommunity College has been a leading bilin-

gual and multicultural higher-educationinstitution in the South Bronx. It was namedin 1969 in honor of Eugenio María de Hostos,abolitionist, educator and lawyer.

At the busy intersection of Grand Concourseand 149th Street, Hostos is only 15 minutes bythe 2, 4 and 5 subways from midtown Manhattan.At 5.3 acres, Hostos is CUNY’s smallest communitycollege. (The largest community college is Kingsborough with 69.7acres and the largest four-year college is College of Staten Islandwith 204 acres).

Hostos offers a warm, friendly andacademically rich atmosphere to over5,000 students of diverse backgrounds,mainly Dominican, Puerto Rican, or ofCentral or South American descent.

Students have a lot to choose from.They can get associate degrees in radiol-ogy technology, nursing, dental hygiene,digital design and animation, accounting

and public interest paralegal studies, amongothers. Joint programs with CUNY’s seniorcolleges including chemical engineering science

with City College or forensic science with JohnJay College.

The campus is home to CUNY’s first ImmigrationCenter. The library, which boasts a multi-level integrated informa-tion literacy program, received the 2007 Excellence in AcademicLibraries Award for Community Colleges from the Association ofCollege and Research Libraries.

But the centerpiece of the campus is the Hostos Center of theArts & Culture, which includes a museum-grade gallery nicknamedthe “Chelsea of the Bronx” by the neighborhood; a 367-seat theater;and a 907-seat concert hall. Each year more than 80,000 peoplevisit the center, which is in the East Academic Complex. This iswhere “The Immortal Plena”, a mixed-media artwork by PuertoRican artist Antonio Martorelli hangs from the ceiling, and the cafe-teria walls display art donated by Spanish artist Angelo Romano.

CAMPUS TOURHOSTOS COMMUNITY COLLEGE

1 “A” BuildingAllied Health & ScienceBldg. (475 GrandConcourse)

2 “B” Building(500 Grand Concourse)

3 “C” Building(East Academic Complex)

4 Savoy Building(120 E. 149th St.)

5 Administration Building(471 Walton Ave.)

6 135 E. 144th St. (offline)7 Pedestrian Bridge8 Memorial Plaza

2

4

56

7

1

38

“It’s known as

the ‘Jewel of the South

Bronx,’ and it’s easy to

see why.

”

East Academic Complex,“C” Building: Café, cafeteria, studentlounge, pool, fitness center, basket-ball court; student activities officefor 36 student clubs and organiza-tions, veteran affairs office.

Pedestrian bridge connectingEast Academic Complex to the AlliedHealth Building: Students’ favoritehangout, especially when it’s sunny.

Shirley J. Hinds Allied Health andSciences Complex, “A” Building:Student health center, a smallhangout area in front of the librarywith a nearby coffee stand servingStarbucks brew.

Memorial Plaza: A tiny oasiswith tables, benches and a Wi-Ficonnection nestled between “B”and “C” Buildings.

7

3 1

8

THEHOTSPOTS at HOSTOS

With 5.3 acres,Hostos is CUNY’s smallest community

college and has over 5,000 students. Womenaccount for 71 percent of the student body, and

97.6 percent of the students are members ofminority groups. They speak 75 different

languages and come from 112different countries.

Diversity Personified

SoarwithCUNY!

Brilliant students. World-classfaculty.Modern facilities. Growingphilanthropic support. This is

The City University of New York today.Join us. Visit cuny.edu/invest

“The American Dream Machine.”– THE ECONOMIST

“An elite program helps CUNY take anotherstep to restoring its luster.”

– THE NEW YORK TIMES

Non-Profit OrgU.S. Postage

P A I DStaten Island, NY

Permit #169Office of University RelationsThe City University of New York535 East 80th St.New York, NY 10075

Dean Kenneth Olden of the School of Public Health

Protecting Our FutureOne Glass at a Time

Page 14

Colin Powell’sNew Mission

Page 8

Adding It UpAt CUNY Page 22

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK JUNE 2009

50% recycled25% post-consumer fiber

CUNY professor travels to the Antarctic! Southern Exposure, Page 18

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