Birdsand

BabiesLearning

to Sing– or Speak –

Step by StepPage 10

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK WINTER 2014

ScoringFilms

WithMichael

BaconPage 14

Nearly 80%graduatedebt-free.

Quality.Affordability.Degrees of Value.

cuny.edu/value

22481013141718

202224262829303233

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

CONTENTS WINTER 2014

THE FIRST WORDThe Chancellor’s Column

WINNING DESIGNA Model of Urban Housing

SCHOOL TIESStories From Around the Colleges

PROFILEFilmmaker Jonathan Wacks

Brooklyn College

COVER STORYOfer Tchernichovski

Hunter College

MENTORClaudia Feldstein

Queens College

HEAD OF THE CLASSComposer Michael Bacon

Lehman College

TOP OF THE CLASSLizzette Bonfante Gonzalez

Brooklyn College

NEW ON CAMPUSDr. Ayman El-Mohandes

CUNY School of Public Health

LESSONS IN LEADERSHIPLeon and Toby Cooperman

Hunter College

GREAT GRADUATESCEO Kam Wong

Baruch College

HISTORY LESSON‘First’ Immigrant

City College

FIELD STUDYBaboons and Humans

Queens College

PAGE TURNERSBiographer Ann Kirschner

Macaulay Honors College

BOOKS AT A GLANCERecent BooksBy CUNY Authors

PHOTO FINISHFavelas in Miniature

Queens College

CAMPUS TOURThe City Classroom

Guttman Community College

CROSSWORD PUZZLEHarvard of the Proletariat

Page 5

Page 14

Page 17

Page 10

Page 24

Page 28

Page 30

Page 2

Page 26

2 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

STEPPING OUT of thesubway station at 149thStreet and Third Avenuein the South Bronx, youhear the sounds of honk-ing cars and noisy crowds

pulsate through the hardscrabble streetslike the borough’s heartbeat. But walkingfurther, after passing a smoke-filledfalafel truck, a pawnshop, and a weed-choked lot, you soon encounter a strikingoasis of homes known as Via Verde, orthe “Green Way.”

Via Verde, an award-winning afford-able housing development with sustain-able features, rises on 156th Street andBrook Avenue as a stylish 222-unitmixed-income residence that includes151 rental units and 71 co-op apartments.When the rental units were offered to the

ON THE COVER: What do birds andbabies have in common? They learnto vocalize — sing and speak—in thesame way. Humans and songbirdsare two of the few species that arereal “vocal learners,” developingthe ability to imitate and modify arange of sounds and soundcombinations by listening to theadults of their species. And fornearly 20 years Hunter Collegeprofessor Ofer Tchernichovski hasbeen studying how zebra fincheslearn to sing. Human language ismore complex than the songs ofbirds, but in studying our cousins invocal learning, Tchernichovski andcolleague Dina Lipkind havediscovered that the key to vocaldevelopment — a step-by-stepprocess of connection ortransitions — seems to be howbabies learn language.Tchernichovski and Lipkind havepublished a major study in thejournal of Nature with their results.The researchers hope the findingsmight be the foundation for a newunderstanding of speech andlanguage disorders in children andadults.

Birds and

BabiesLearning

to Sing – or Speak

– Step by Step Page 10

A PUBLICATION OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK WINTER 2014

Scoring Films

With Michael

BaconPage 14

In the fall 2013 issue of CUNY Matters, Nobel prize-winning chemist and CUNY alumnus Jerome Karle,who passed away in June, was celebrated for hiscontributions to his field and to the University.Karle’s legacy is extended by CUNY scholars, men

and women who advance the fundamental mission ofthe University: preserving, transmitting, and generatingnew knowledge. That work is embedded in CUNY’s DNA,passed from mentor to student, each identifying criticalquestions, unpacking data and positing new approachesand answers.

Perseverance is essential. Jonas Salk, another CUNYalumnus and the creator of the polio vaccine, is said tohave observed, “Nothing happens quite by chance. It’s aquestion of accretion of information and experience.”Flashes of inspiration and intuition may come, but only

after countless equations have beensolved, reams of source materialreviewed, dozens of theoriesdiscarded.

It’s particularly satisfying towitness our students embrace thistradition of scholarly inquiry. FromSalk Scholars – undergraduatesawarded scholarships for medicalstudy based on their originalresearch papers – to doctoralfellows pursuing interdisciplinaryresearch through the AdvancedResearch Collaboration, their work,like that of their mentors, isexpanding the boundaries ofknowledge.

This is one of the aims of the University’s researchagenda, demonstrated most emphatically by thedevelopment of CUNY’s Advanced Science ResearchCenter. When it opens in fall 2014, the building,designed as a collaborative, interdisciplinary sciencepark – an “intellectual crossroads,” as Vice Chancellorfor Research Gillian Small calls it – will encourage newdialogue and fresh connections.

The scope of CUNY’s research is also reflected in thework of the Research Foundation, which celebrates its50th anniversary this year. A scan of its yearly reports(www.rfcuny.org) documents the development oftreatments for spinal cord injuries, the creation ofprograms to support at-risk teenagers, improvedunderstanding of the effects of climate change on urbanareas, and much more.

Among the questions posed by Salk was one thatserves as a guiding principle for every CUNY scholar:“Are we being good ancestors?” The best scholarshipembraces a vibrant intellectual tradition to build a morecivil, humane and informed future.

— Interim Chancellor William P. Kelly is adistinguished scholar of American literature.

Our Tradition of Scholarly Inquiry

THE FIRST WORD

William P. KellyI N T E R I M C H A N C E L L O R

salutetoscholarsJay Hershenson • Secretary of the Board of Trustees

and Senior Vice Chancellorfor University Relations

Michael Arena • University Directorof Communications & Marketing

Kristen Kelch • Managing EditorNeill S. Rosenfeld • WriterLenina Mortimer •Writer

Miriam Smith • DesignerStan Wolfson • Photo Editor

Richard Breeden • Copy Editor

By Margaret Ramirez

WINNINGDESIGN

VIA VERDE —

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 3

public through a lottery,more than 7,000 peopleapplied.

Since opening last year,Via Verde has attractedattention from architectsaround the world, who are

impressed by the stunning design that com-bines affordability with energy efficiencyand programs geared toward a healthylifestyle. The $99 million developmentboasts 40,000 square feet of green roof spacefeaturing a grove of evergreen trees, an appleorchard and a vegetable garden for residents.The innovative design came from DattnerArchitects and Grimshaw Architects, whichteamed with two developers, Phipps HousesGroup and the Jonathan Rose Companies.

But beyond providing homes for working-class residents and reviving a blighted blockin the South Bronx, Via Verde seeks to trans-form the architectural world’s vision and thepublic’s view of urban affordable housing.

The story of Via Verde is a testament tohow small ideas can take root, inspire a dia-logue, change opinions, then blossom intohomes for more than 200 families. The pro-ject’s success stems largely from the dozensof architects, developers, urban planners,housing experts, community groups, banksand government agencies that came togetherto create Via Verde, and throughout theprocess, two CUNY professors also played apivotal role.

Lance Jay Brown, professor in theBernard and Anne Spitzer School ofArchitecture at The City College of NewYork, served as adviser on the two designcompetitions that led to Via Verde.

“CUNY has the only public school ofarchitecture in the city, and this is a publiclyminded project,” Brown said. “It’s a projectthat aims to respond to the needs of CUNY’sconstituency, which is the emerging urban-ite, the basic players on the stage of what thiscity is about.”

“It’s also helping, in a time when there is apaucity of affordable housing, to participatein showing the way,” Brown said. “It’s notjust participating in the production. It’s cele-brating the way.”

Setha Low, professor of environmentalpsychology and anthropology at the CUNYGraduate Center, served on the jury thatselected the winning architect-developerteam for Via Verde. Low raised key issuesabout the economic and social needs of low-income residents.

A new book, The Legacy Project, NewHousing New York: Best Practices inAffordable, Sustainable, Replicable HousingDesign, chronicles the development of ViaVerde. The 256-page work, co-authored byBrown, includes a forward by Mayor MichaelBloomberg and an epilogue by ShaunDonovan, secretary of Housing and UrbanDevelopment, who was trained as an architect.

Via Verde grew out of two internationaldesign competitions that sought to exciteinterest in the design of affordable housing.In the past decade, notable architecturefirms have turned away from housing todesign more lucrative projects like muse-ums and cultural institutions. Even archi-tectural school assignments for studentprojects on housing have diminished,according to Brown.

The American Institute of Architectssponsored the first contest in 2004 andasked Brown to serve as the competitionadviser. Brown agreed and was instrumentalin CUNY becoming a primary sponsor.

Response to the first competition was sogreat that organizers decided to hold a sec-ond competition in 2006. But this time, thewinning architect-developer team woulddesign and build an apartment complex.Four criteria were used to select a winner:affordability, sustainability, aesthetics andreplicability.

Brown said the main reason for publish-ing the book was for other cities and devel-opers to use the story as a primer on whatneeds to be done to make this happen. Healso hopes to use the book in the classroomto inspire architecture students to pursueprojects in affordable housing.

“All this feeds back into what I do whenI’m in the studio, and when I’m teaching. Ican bring that knowledge and informationback to the campus. And that’s important tome,” he said.

“It’s also helping, in a time when there is

a paucity of affordable housing, to par-

ticipate in showing the way. It’s not just

participating in the production.

It’s celebrating the way.”— Lance Jay Brown

City College architecture professor

Lance Jay Brown,professor atBernard and AnneSpitzer School ofArchitecture atCity College

— a New Model for Affordable Housing

SCHOOL TIES

SOME NEW YORKERS are being asked for infor-mation about their medical history to help re-searchers get a better understanding of urbanhealth. Nearly 3,000 New Yorkers have been

randomly selected to participate in the New York CityHealth and Nutrition Examination Survey, or NYCHANES.

CUNY School of Public Health and the New York CityDepartment of Health and Mental Hygiene are conduct-ing the large representative study on the health of cityresidents. Participants are asked to take a brief physi-cal exam and a computer-based survey, and re-searchers will analyze the blood, urine and salivasamples to test for conditions like exposure to second-hand smoke. Funding for the NYC HANES study wasprovided by the deBeaumont Foundation, with addi-tional support from Robert Wood Johnson, Robin Hoodand New York State Health Foundations.

A study as in-depth as NYC HANES reveals manythings that one could not get from a standard healthsurvey, says Lorna Thorpe, who is the lead investigatorof the study and a professor of epidemiology at theSchool of Public Health. “It actually tells [researchers]what the burdens of chronic conditions are and howmuch New Yorkers have been exposed to certain envi-ronmental hazards,” adds Thorpe.

Of the 3,000 people selected for the survey, re-searchers are aiming for a minimum of 2,000 participants. “We’ll be workinghard to get a high enough response rate for the results to be meaningful. It’s verydifficult to find New Yorkers at home and when we do reach them they are skepti-cal and wary and we need to persuade them to participate in the study,” saysThorpe. But participants will not have to divulge information that makes themuncomfortable and the survey does not include questions about immigration sta-tus. There is also a $100 cash incentive for people who participate in both thesurvey and the physical exam.

This is the second time the city has conducted the NYC HANES, and resultsfrom the 2004 study revealed that one in four adult New Yorkers had high bloodpressure and high cholesterol with an elevated risk of heart disease and stroke. Inresponse, the city banned the use of artificial trans fat by restaurants. “We havea number of municipal policies we are trying to evaluate to see if they have im-proved health and we’ll use the new data to inform new policies,” says Thorpe.

Lab results from the first survey also indicated that nearly one in three NewYorkers with diabetes didn’t realize they had the disease. And, it found that mer-cury levels in New Yorkers were three times higher than the national average. Thisled to the removal of dangerous products in stores and an increased effort to edu-cate the public about hazardous levels of mercury found in some fish.

“There was one survey participant who had extremely high levels of mercuryin her urine. Turns out she was using a skin-lightening cream purchased from thelocal bodega. We actually passed a commissioner’s order banning the sale of thatproduct in the city,” says Thorpe.

Thorpe hypothesizes that we will see some improvements in the city’s healthbut we won’t know until the results are available, which may not be until the fallof 2014. “There have been aggressive efforts to make New York City a healthy en-vironment. At the same time some of these efforts may have been offset by aworsening economy. So it’s hard know how what we’ll see.”

4 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

It was a special day for students at Path-ways in Technology Early College HighSchool. President Barack Obama had

come to visit the Brooklyn institution hehailed as a national model of technologyeducation.

President Obama sat in on algebra classand addressed students at the school thathe had highlighted in his February 2013State of the Union. “What’s going on at P-TECH is outstanding and I’m excited to seeit for myself,” said Obama, who also remind-ed students that he once lived in Brooklyn—

across the street from Prospect Park. A six-year high school, P-TECH is a

public-private collaboration of CUNY, theNew York City Department of Educationand corporate partner IBM that opened in2011. Students can earn associate degreesfrom New York City College ofTechnology. The school focuses on infor-mation technology, computers, engineer-ing, math and science. And IBM providesstudents with mentors, internships and ashot at a job at IBM.

During his October 2013 visit Obama

praised the program, which trains highschool students for jobs in engineering.“We live in a 21st-century global econo-my.… Companies [are] looking for the best-educated people, wherever they live … andif you don't have a well-educatedworkforce, you’re going to be left behind,”said Obama.

P-TECH founding principal RashidFerrod Davis described Obama’s visit ashistoric because it placed a national spot-light on the Crown Heights neighborhoodinstitution, helping people rethink the

Kathryn Forsythe collecting dataon the health of New Yorkers

New Yorkers Get Their 10-Year Physical

President Obama in Brooklyn: ‘What’s

Going On at P-TECH Is Outstanding’

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 5

THEY’RE ONLY TURTLES but theymay be the key to helping CUNYresearchers figure out how wildlifeis affected by habitat restoration.

Eugenia Naro-Maciel and a team ofstudent researchers at the College ofStaten Island and the Graduate Centerare studying the snapping, painted andred-eared slider turtles of the reclaimedecosystem at Freshkills Park.

The Staten Island park was once thesite of the world’s largest landfill and whilethe garbage has been covered, the ecologi-cal threat may still linger, says Naro-Maciel, the principal investigator and anassistant professor of biology at CSI.

“We’re using the turtles to figure outhow well the restoration process works. …My Ph.D. student Seth Wollney is lookingat the turtles to see if they have accumulat-ed toxins, which would be a strong reflec-tion of their habitat,” says Naro -Maciel.

The team will catch the turtles andrelease them after taking measurementsand blood samples. Back in the lab thesamples will be analyzed to find out aboutthe diet, health, demography and geneticsof the freshwater turtle communities liv-ing in the ponds of the 2,200-acre park.

The turtles make ideal subjects tostudy because they are relatively seden-tary, they are high up on the food chain

and they have long lifespans, whichmeans they can be monitored over anextended period of time. They are beingstudied over a period of five years andresults are expected in 2016. Study collab-orators include researchers at FreshkillsPark, the Staten Island Museum, theStaten Island Zoo and the AmericanMuseum of Natural History.

“We have something very importantgoing on in our own backyard with thereclamation of Freshkills. CSI studentsare working in the field during the sum-mer, so it’s wonderful that they can getinvolved in conservation in their owncommunity,” says Naro-Maciel.

Turtles are caught and released after blood samples aretaken and analyzed for health, diet, toxins and genetics.

high school model in the U.S.“Look at the conversation surrounding

the United States slipping in science, tech-nology, engineering and mathematics. Tocontinue to be competitive, [programs like P-TECH] are one way to ensure moreAmericans are hired for tech jobs,” saidDavis.

Shortly after his visit, Obama announceda $100 million competition, based on innova-tions such as P-TECH, to find new ways tobetter prepare high school students for theglobal high-tech economy.

TURTLESCUNY’s Excellent Partners for a Habitat Restoration Study

PresidentObamaspeaks tothe studentsat P-TECH.

6 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Through ChemistryGREENER LIVING

Spotting the Elusive‘Hofstadter Butterfly’

Cory Dean, City College physics professor

AT KINGSBOROUGH COMMUNITY COLLEGE, chemistry studentsare learning to synthesize biodiesel from vegetable oil found in theirkitchen cupboards. Other innovative chemistry lessons include

teaching student chemists to de-polymerize plastic bottles from recyclingbins and how to extract the naturally occurring hydrocarbon, limonene,from an orange, instead of using a petroleum-based chemical.

The revamped lessons and curriculum are just a small part ofKingsborough Community College’s involvement in the Green ChemistryCommitment. In July, Kingsborough and 12 other colleges and universi-ties signed up for the Green Chemistry Commitment, which is intended toincrease the number of green chemists in the United States and helpindustries develop safer, nontoxic chemistry materials.

“Our commitment is to transform the way we teach chemistry so thatstudents practice principles of Green Chemistry,” says Kingsboroughchemistry professor Homar Barcena. “Not only do they perform greenlabs, but they also assess how efficient these procedures are using “greenmetrics.”

Kingsborough chemistry students stand to gain a competitive edge inthe job market by learning green chemistry principles, Barcena says. Thegreen chemistry industry is expected to grow to more than $100 billionworldwide by 2020, according to a recent Navigant Research Report.

Along with Kingsborough, the 12 other colleges that adopted the GreenChemistry Commitmentare: the University ofCalifornia-Berkeley,University of Minnesota,Northeastern University,Bridgewater StateUniversity, Gordon College,Grand Valley StateUniversity, MichiganTechnological University,Simmons College, SouthDakota State University, St.Catherine University,University of Wisconsin-Whitewater andWashington College.

Barcena says he decidedto sign Kingsborough ontothe educational initiativelast year after meeting AmyCannon, co-founder andexecutive director of the nonprofit group, Beyond Benign, which devel-oped the Green Chemistry Commitment.

After the meeting, Barcena worked to change Kingsborough’s corechemistry curriculum, using $5,000 in funding from the KingsboroughPresident’s Faculty Innovation Award.

Barcena and his colleagues revised Organic Chemistry I and II coursesand created a new laboratory manual, “Greener Organic Experiments,”that debuted in classrooms in Fall 2012.

In addition, new experiments in green chemistry are being developed inundergraduate research projects. Barcena says he is also applying forgrants to support student research on green chemistry.

Currently, there are only about 50 students majoring in chemistry atKingsborough. However, many students from other majors such as phar-macy, nursing and pre-med are required to take organic chemistry.

“At Kingsborough, not only does the subject matter capture students’attention, but also prepares them to be aware of sustainability and chemi-cal toxicity while providing them practical experiences,” Barcena says. “Weare poised to build a learning community that focuses on green science.”

Peishan Chen, who goes by "KC," and professor Homar Barcena,in the lab at Kingsborough Community College

ATEAM OF SCIENTISTS who set out to study a new type ofmaterial inadvertently confirmed a nearly 40-year-old physicstheory that predicts a pattern of energy.

Researchers from CUNY and several other universities had beenstudying sheets of extraordinarily thin and strong mineral graphite,called a graphene. Only a single atom thick and nearly transparent,graphene is an excellent conductor of heat and electricity.

But the marvels of graphene, in this instance, are secondary tothe wonders of scientific thought, where a prediction made decadesearlier is at last confirmed.

While studying the ultrathin material, researchers observed arare effect — a repeating, butterfly-shaped energy spectrum. It’sknown as the “Hofstadter Butterfly,” named after the Americanscientist Douglas Hofstadter who developed a theory in 1976 topredict the behavior of electrons in a magnetic field.

But although there had been many attempts to prove the theoryover the years, none had been successful.

“Like many interesting discoveries, it was accidental,” says CityCollege physics professor Cory Dean, who is the author of the study“Hofstadter’s Butterfly and the Fractal Quantum Hall Effect inMoiré Superlattices.”

“We were studying properties of graphene . . . and once in awhile we’d see features in our data that we didn’t understand. Weended up putting all the pieces together and realized it was acomplete manifestation of Hofstadter’s prediction.”

The pattern arises naturally when a sheet of graphene sits atopa sheet of boron nitride at an angle. Once positioned properly, asecondary hexagonal pattern emerges on the overlapped sheets.“We were fortunate in our ability to discover a system that actuallyrevealed [Hofstadter’s butterfly],” says Dean.

“I get asked a lot, ‘What’s the real-world application of thisstudy?’ At this point we just don’t know. I can say with assurednesswe have discovered a new type of material that is exhibiting a newtype of property that hasn’t been explored,” says Dean.

However, there iscertainly apossibility that thematerial willenable new opticalelectronics, saysDean. “Will thislead to flatter TVs?Possibly, but atsome point one canonly get so flat.”

“I get asked a lot, ‘What’s the real-world

application of this study?’ At this point we

just don’t know. I can say with assuredness

we have discovered a new type of material

that is exhibiting a new type of property

that hasn’t been explored.”— Cory Dean

City College physics professor

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 7

CUNY RESEARCHERS are doing their part to helpthe city create an antiterrorism plan to dealwith the release of hazardous airborne

material. Last summer, New York City College ofTechnology was the hub of a field study investigatinghow these contaminants may disperse in the city’sstreets and subways.

“We want to understand what may happen to aplume of radioactive, biological or chemical materialif it were released in New York above ground andwithin the subway system. We investigated bothwhere the plume may spread, and if we had to sendfirst responders, to what locations should we sendthem first?” says City Tech physics professorReginald Blake, who was a team lead researcher ofthe Subway-Surface Air Flow Exchange study.

The dispersion of a “dirty bomb plume” wasstudied by releasing a gas called Perfluorocarbontracer (PFT). PFT is a chemically inert, colorless andodorless gas, with no known harmful effects. Duringthree days in July 2013, PFTs were releasedwithin the city and the concentration of the gaswas measured at different locations and withinthe subway system.

The measurements were carried out by ateam of 90 students who traveled to parts ofthe Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens and Manhattanfrom 96th Street to Battery Park. The datathe students collected will be used tooptimize an emergency response following

the release of hazardous materials and to refineevacuation plans.

The airflow study was expanded and synergizedwith Blake’s National Science FoundationOpportunities for Enhancing Diversity in theGeosciences grant to create a three-week internship.Students were also taught about the geosciences,covering topics such as climatology, hydrology andmeteorology.

“They got to experience real world, practicalservice learning by going out and taking thesemeasurements. But then they got more — they got a

baptism into the exciting and dynamic nature of thegeosciences.” The students learned about geophysics,participated in workshops and wrote a researchpapers on geoscience topics, such as fracking,hurricanes and heat waves, says Blake.

While students had the opportunity to participate ina study to make the city safer, they will never know theresults of their research, as it will not be shared publiclyBlake says. “When analyses are complete we won’tknow what the data show, and it’s something thatcertainly can't be discussed since it was done with theDepartment of Homeland Security,” says Blake.

The study was commissioned by the NYPD andfunded through a $3.4 million Department ofHomeland Security Transit Security Grant. City Techresearchers worked in collaboration with scientists atthe Brookhaven National Laboratory, who will analyzethe data. A similar study was conducted in New YorkCity in 2005 on a smaller scale when a trace gas wasreleased on the streets of Manhattan.

“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but a matter of ‘when’ wewill suffer another terrorist attack,” says Blake. “Wehave 8.25 million people in New York City, and our

subways are used heavily. We want to minimizecasualties and minimize the damage that couldbe done. We’re worried about chemical weaponsin Syria, well, we need to start thinking aboutchemical weapons being released here. We’re justbeing proactive to figure how best to prepare forthat situation,” says Blake.

Tamarah Cunningham reports to professor Reginald Blake, a team leader of City Tech science, technology and engineering students assisting with the NYC Air Flow Study

Tracking Where a Terrorist Cloud Could Move

SCHOOLTIES

“It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but a matter of ‘when’ we will

suffer another terrorist attack. We have 8.25 million

people in New York City and our subways are used

heavily. We want to minimize casualties and

minimize the damage that could be done.”— Reginald BlakeCity Tech professor

PROFILE: JONATHAN WACKSBROOKLYN COLLEGE’S BARRY R. FEIRSTEIN GRADUATE SCHOOL OF CINEMA

JONATHAN WACKS, founding pro-fessor of Brooklyn College’s Barry R.Feirstein Graduate School ofCinema, discusses what unique qual-

ities the new film school — scheduled toopen in the fall of 2016 on a working pro-duction lot — will bring to both studentsand the industry.

What is the vision for the program?That is being formulated every day and itruns from the design of the building to thatof the curriculum. There is a public contextas well. The school intends to reach out tofind those voices that are not being heard alot. In New York City we are in an environ-ment which is blessed by a wonderfuldiversity of people. That will be theessence of this film school.

Lights, Cameras, Action!

8 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

THE FIRST new film schoolof the 21st century is now“in development” at

Brooklyn College.It is a project characterized

by superlatives, innovations —and challenges. The school willbe the only cinema graduateprogram operating out of aworking production lot, one atwhich the facilities are rentedout to filmmakers, many quiteprominent.

They will be in good company. Jonathan Wacks, the school’s

founding professor, producedthe 1984 film classic “RepoMan.” And while that may be themost facile way to identify him,he also has impressivecredentials as an award-winning director, screenwriter,studio executive and cinemaeducator. Most recently, he wasprofessor and chair of theVisual and Media Arts

Department at Emerson Collegein Boston. He began his careerin 1980, as a political activist,making a documentarydepicting the struggles of ashantytown in South Africa, thecountry where he was born.

These days Wacks can oftenbe found poring over DattnerArchitects’ plans for the69,000-square-foot Barry R.Feirstein Graduate School ofCinema, to be located at the

Brooklyn Navy Yard’s vastSteiner Studios.

The school is being funded by about $21 million inendowments including $5.5million donated by Feirstein(’74), owner and president ofthe private investmentmanagement firm and a trusteeof the Brooklyn CollegeFoundation, with an additional$11.5 million from the city andstate.

Coming Soon! a Movie Lot, a Film School, a Graduate

How will you address changes in the cinema busi-ness itself?I feel very fortunate to have the opportunityto develop a set of curricular ideas that areresponsive to the changes going on in thebusiness. There are technological changesbut also changes in the means of produc-tion, distribution, exhibition and the finan-cial structures.Today, a screen can be in a movie theater, athome or on a mobile phone. The distinctionbetween television and cinema is rapidlyblurring. We are going to address all thoseissues at Feirstein, including writing fortelevision, writing for mobile, writing forYouTube etc. At the end of the day, it is allabout storytelling and filmmaking, whetheryou are using a 35 mm camera or an iPhone.The question is: What do you want to say?

What role did the faculty in the undergraduate filmdepartment play in this? A significant role. They developed the ini-tial curriculum; it’s a working document.And some of them will be teaching in thegraduate program. But there will be newprofessors hired, as well.Why has there never been a film school on a work-ing lot before?Film schools didn’t exist till the ’60s and thepeople who worked in the industry came upthrough the ranks. The idea that you couldactually learn how to make a movie at a uni-versity was in some ways antithetical to theway studios worked or the way universitiesworked.And today? Or better said, tomorrow, at theFeirstein School?What I like about our school is that it will

---From a Master

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 9

give students a chance to be very focused. Itwill address the fact that there is an industryout there and students are going to leave thisschool prepared. Everybody may want todirect. But not everyone will be able to get ajob directing. I do think it is important,though, that someone who wants to be a cin-ematographer takes courses in other areas aswell. This also speaks to the advantage ofbeing at Steiner Studios in Brooklyn.Students will be on a campus where film pro-fessionals are actively engaged in their work.The plan is also to offer internships on theseproductions so that our students can takeadvantage of our location.

In regard to the development of ourbuilding, itself, one of the wonderful thingsis that we are not trying to shoehorn a filmschool into an existing building, which oftenhappens. When you do that it is all about-

compromise. The big plus for us is that wehave an architectural plan for the school--and 69,000 square feet of space to developit in.Speaking of jobs, can a student take what he orshe uses in film school to work elsewhere?We will be giving students the tools tothink through and create as filmmak-ers. These are tools that have relevanceto many other endeavors they maywish to pursue. We will teach our stu-dents how to think critically and toproblem solve. And that is relevant toeverything you do in life.Are you still working as a filmmaker?When I got involved in academia, Ihad to pretty much put on holdwhatever else I was doing except forscreenwriting because I can do thatand have a day job. I tend to writeeither dramatic fiction or comedybut the project I am working onright now is neither. It’s actuallyan adaptation of a police proce-dural called Coldsleep Lullaby, abook by Andrew Brown. I justwrote a comedy called Stuck whichis about some college kids in SantaFe, N.M., trying to get out of town.They can’t get any traction ontheir lives. Another project is animmigrant story. It takes placein the early part of the 20th cen-tury and it is about aLithuanian Jewish immigrantwho falls in love with anAfrican girl.I’ll end with a question that I hopedoes not make you weary. Tell us about“Repo Man.”Not at all. When I got out of filmschool at UCLA, I wanted to writeand direct and so did two of my pals.We all agreed that whoever got thescreenplay written first would directand the two others would be producers.Three weeks later Alex Cox came backwith “Repo Man” and Peter McCarthyand I produced it. The film that I am mostproud of is “Powwow Highway,” a featurefilm, the first feature I directed. It broughttogether the political and the spiritualthrough the eyes of two CheyenneIndians. It was “Repo Man,” though,that got me working on films thatwere fictional, even if “Repo Man”isn’t really fiction.

The school, though, will be abargain for film students, thefirst of whom are scheduled tostart in Fall 2015. First-yeartuition is expected to be$18,805 ($26,990 for out-of-state residents), comparedwith about $50,000 at privateuniversities. The school willoffer MFA and M.A. degrees andhopes in the future to have onein entertainment businessmanagement.

Program All in One

10 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

MOST ADVANCES inscience these daystend to come out oflaboratories with thevery latest and mostsophisticated equip-

ment. And then there is the groundbreak-ing science emerging from OferTchernichovski’s lab at Hunter College.

You won’t find much in the way of high-tech, big-ticket instruments in hisLaboratory of Vocal Learning. What you’llsee are walls lined with Igloo coolers — 50of them, stacked in rows and turned ontheir sides, covers facing out but rarelyopened. The coolers have been repurposedfrom mobile beer fridges to miniaturebehavioral labs. Each one is soundproof,climate-controlled and equipped withlighting that simulates day and night.

And each is occupied by a single bird — ayoung zebra finch — and its live-in lab part-ner of sorts: a plastic version of a similarbird outfitted with a tiny speaker that pipesin a repertoire of chirps recorded fromadults of the species. From the day a youngbird arrives at four weeks of age, the fauxfinch is its personal singing teacher. And forthe next 50 days, 24 hours a day, every chirpof the student’s performance will be docu-mented. By the end there will be a millionchirps, sometimes twice that many – all ofthem recorded, analyzed, classified andentered into a database by softwareTchernichovski developed.

For nearly 20 years, Tchernichovski, a

COVERSTORYHUNTER COLLEGE

Discovering What Birds And Babies ShareIn Learning to VocalizeBy Richard Firstman

research professor in theHunter Department ofPsychology, has beenstudying how songbirdslearn songs. But it’s notjust about the birds. By aquirk of nature, theirbrains and ours have apeculiar thing in com-mon that makes new-born songbirds astand-in for humanbabies in one of the more challenging fron-tiers of child-development research.Humans and songbirds are two of the fewspecies that are “vocal learners,” meaningthey develop the ability to imitate and modi-fy a range of sounds, and sound combina-tions, by listening to adults of their species.

It doesn’t work that way with dogs orhorses or cows: Calves come out of thewomb knowing how to moo — and a moo ispretty much a moo. Puppies have to betrained to wait until they’re outside to dothe most natural thing, but that other mostnatural thing is inborn and fixed: You can’tteach an old dog a new bark. Even primates,our closest evolutionary and genetic rela-tives, arrive at their calls innately. But thereis something about the brains of humanbabies and young songbirds that makestheir acquisition of sounds a process of lis-tening to those around them and repeatingwhat they hear.

“Songbirds even have local dialects,”Tchernichovski says. “Birds of the same

species but come from differ-ent places don’t make thesame sounds. Go right here toInwood Forest and listen tothe cowbirds, then go toPoughkeepsie, and it’s a com-pletely different song. Theychange the song very locally.And the females only like thelocal guys.”

Human language, ofcourse, is a far more complex

form of vocal learning than that of songbirdsand the few other species that learn soundsby listening to them — dolphins, whales and,some research suggests, elephants and bats.It’s partly that complexity that makes child-hood language and speech development —and impairment — a hard thing to study.That and this: “You can’t put babies in acage,” as Tchernichovski’s colleague DinaLipkind puts it. But you can put zebra finch-es in Igloo coolers and control what theyhear, record and analyze what they repeatand compare it to a database of infant bab-bling sounds.

That’s what Tchernichovski, Lipkind andtheir colleagues did, and this spring theypublished a major study in the journalNature suggesting that the key to vocaldevelopment in babies — how they convertbabbling to speaking — isn’t merely learningdifferent sounds. It’s learning to make thedifficult connections, or transitions,between those sounds. The researchers,including collaborators at New York

Humans and songbirds are

two of the few species that

are “vocal learners,”

meaning they develop the

ability to imitate and modify

a range of sounds, and

sound combinations, by

listening to adults of their

species.

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 11

University and the Riken Brain ScienceInstitute in Japan, showed that babies seemto use the same step-by-step learningprocess as songbirds.

It’s been known since the 1970s that theability of songbirds to sing comes from a spe-cific area of their brains that is similar insome respects to the part of the human brainthat’s responsible for speech. The newresearch takes the parallel a leap forward,identifying for the first time the elaborateprocess at the heart of vocal learning. Thefindings, and the inventive method Lipkinddevised to reach them, have gotten the atten-tion of language-development researchersbecause they could lead to new understand-ing of developmental disorders in children,and perhaps even to treating speech deficitscaused by strokes in adults.

Tchernichovski never expected his stud-ies of songbirds to cross over into the scienceof human-language development. He is azoologist and veterinarian by training andbegan his CUNY career in the biologydepartment of City College. Until four years

ago, his focus was on the cagey way thatyoung songbirds learn complex sounds byimitating adults during a critical period ofdevelopment. “If you expose a three-week-old nightingale to 50 different songs, a yearlater the bird will start singing back each oneof those 50 songs,” Tchernichovski says.“And it all happens within a few weeks ofbabbling, without any further input duringthat whole year, like a miracle.”

That much has been known since early inthe last century. The mystery has been howthey do it: What happens in the bird’s brainthat allows it to master so many differentcombinations of sounds, seemingly out ofnowhere? To explore that big question,Lipkind, then a postdoctoral student inTchernichovski’s lab, had come up with away of simulating the lessons young song-birds get from adults in the wild, but in atightly controlled way that might allow theresearchers to isolate and observe the com-ponents of the learning process with extraor-dinary precision.

“What Ofer had found was that if you put

a bird alone in a soundproof chamber andjust let him hear the sounds of an adult bird,he will learn that song,” Lipkind says. “WhatI did was design a way to teach the birds asecond song. The first one has a certainorder of sounds. For example, A-B-C, A-B-C.Then I give them the same sounds but in adifferent order: A-C-B, A-C-B. And after awhile the bird will change to the new song.What’s important is that the birds don’t haveto relearn any sounds. They just have tolearn a new order of the sounds. The ques-tion is how does this ability develop?”

In 2009, Tchernichovski published apaper in Nature describing how his lab’smethod of raising young zebra finches in theisolation of the coolers demonstrated thatboth nature and nurture were at work in thebirds’ “culture” of vocal learning. Among thereaders most fascinated by the paper wasGary Marcus, a prominent research psychol-ogist who studies how infants learn languageand directs NYU’s Center for Language andMusic. Marcus wrote Tchernichovski “a fan

Professor Tchernichovski with one of the zebra finches under study

Continued on page 12

12 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

letter,” he says, and it led to an invitation tothe songbird lab — and to a collaboration.They set out to use Lipkind’s method tobreak down the elements of vocal learningand see, perhaps, if birds and babies use asimilar process.

The first step was for Tchernichovskiand Lipkind to try to tease out preciselyhow birds do it. They knew it was an ardu-ous process — that it took many thousandsof chirps for a zebra finch to go from A-B-Cto A-C-B. But was it a sudden advance, likea button being pushed, or did it happenincrementally, in stages? Even moreintriguing, was it a matter of random trial-and-error, or was there an identifiable pat-tern — a system?

What emerged from the computer analy-sis of those many millions of chirps wasstriking. The birds didn’t go directly fromsinging the first song to suddenly one daysinging the second. There was a bottleneckin the progression, and it was the surprisingdifficulty they had in learning to switch theorder of just two syllables. “If they can singA-B, you would think it should be easy tosing B-A,” Tchernichovski says. “But it’s not.It takes them a long time of training them-selves to learn the transition. It’s not thatthey need to keep hearing it again andagain. They heard thesequence only 20times a day. But theyhad to practice itthousands of timesbefore they masteredit. The transition washappening in theirminds.”

The breakthroughdiscovery was thatlearning a newarrangement of threenotes was always athree-step process,even when the first note stayed the same.“To change their song from A-B-C, A-B-Cto A-C-B, A-C-B, they first say A-C, then C-B and finally B-A,” says Tchernichovski.“Only then can they switch to the newsong. It’s a stepwise process, where newtransitions appear one by one, with gaps ofdays or weeks between them.” And in manycases, the birds could learn the individual

transitions but notthe entire set.

The findingswere exciting to theresearchers, butnot, initially, to thepeer reviewers ofNature. They werewary of applyingthe results with thezebra finches toogenerally. SoTchernichovskiextended the col-laboration to abirdsongresearcher he knewat the RikenInstitute in Japan.This colleague,Kazuo Okanoya,worked withBengalese finches,which use morecomplex combina-tions in their songsthan zebra finchesdo. Okanoya usedLipkind’s method and gathered datademonstrating the same learning patternin the smarter birds.

Finally came time to test the idea thathuman babies might use essentially thesame process. It was a head-on challenge tothe widely accepted thought that humansare born with an ability that allows them tomake an almost seamless transition frombabbling to speaking starting around oneyear of age. “The idea is that we have thislanguage-learning machine,”

Tchernichovski says. “Butmaybe it’s not like that.Maybe babies are likebirds.”

Lipkind and a graduatestudent in Marcus’ lab atNYU analyzed a databaseof infant language, calledCHILDES, that goes back30 years and has beencited in more than 3,000studies. “These are hugedata sets of recordings ofbabbling babies, takenevery two weeks, that

someone listened to and transcribed,”Tchernichovski said. “We took the databaseof nine American babies and looked at theconnection of each syllable, like ba, gu ordi, and how it developed over time.

“The data look very much like songdevelopment in birds. Every time an infantbabbles he learns to produce new syllables,but connecting them together seems much

more challenging. For example, it takes theinfant 20 to 30 weeks to connect a new syl-lable type to other syllable types.”

The study was published in May byNature with Lipkind as the lead author. Itamounts to the discovery of “a previouslyunidentified component” of how we learnto speak, she says. Tchernichovski adds,“Now we see that this notion that humansare born with the capacity to rearrangevocal elements is incorrect. It developsvery slowly, either by maturation or bylearning, or both. The ability to rearrangeelements is not the starting point of vocaldevelopment, it’s a laboriously achievedend point.”

Marcus, who has published several pop-ular books on the human mind and is acontributor to The New Yorker, wrote onthe magazine’s website: “Nobody had everreally explained why babbling took somany months; our birdsong data has finallyyielded a clue.”

The researchers hope the findings mightbe a foundation for new understanding ofspeech and language disorders in childrenand adults. “Can we predict developmentaldisorders in human infants based on thedevelopment of their combinatorial abili-ties?” Tchernichovski asks. “Can weimprove treatment of aphasia — speechand language — after stroke? The similari-ties between song development and speechdevelopment suggest a shared, primitivemechanism that we and others can nowexplore.”

COVERSTORYHUNTER COLLEGE

Continued from previous page

“Now we see that this notion that

humans are born with the

capacity to rearrange vocal

elements is incorrect. It develops

very slowly, either by maturation

or by learning, or both.”— Ofer Tchernichovski

Discovering What Birds And Babies ShareIn Learning to Vocalize

Hunter Collegepsychology professor

Ofer Tchernichovski and researchassistant professor Dina Lipkind in

the lab at Hunter College

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 13

By Barbara Fischkin

FOUR RECENT QueensCollege theater graduates satchatting with instructorClaudia Feldstein about theCapulets, the Montagues andthe major Shakespearian roles

they would soon play at Flushing Town Hall.And then the talk turned to boot camp.For the college’s drama students, “boot

camp” is not a military requirement or anexercise program but rather a nickname fora free, three-year-old, intensive — and suc-cessful — MFA preparatory course.

It was conceived by Feldstein with pro-fessor Susan Einhorn, who had chaired thetheater department, and Charles Repole, thecurrent chair. Feldstein teaches the course,directing a small group of graduating seniorsto identify, probe and rehearse the modernand classic monologues that they perform toaudition for graduate drama programs.

This year the four students who chattedwith Feldstein made up the entire class. Andall were accepted into prestigious programs.

Gabrielle Georgescu to the LondonConservatory of Music and Dramatic Arts;Thomas Stagnitta to San Francisco’sAmerican Conservatory Theater; ShaunetteWilson to the Yale School of Drama; andRosanny Zayas to Julliard.

Each student had a different story to tellabout choosing acting. Stagnitta, for exam-ple, originally came to Queens to studyphysics and mathematics, while Georgescusays she can’t remember a time when shedidn’t want to act.

Over the past four years, six other bootcamp students have attended MFAprograms at the American ConservatoryTheater, the American Repertory Theater atHarvard, Rutgers, NYU and Yale.

Feldstein agrees that there are manyroutes for actors. But as a Queens Collegealum who also went on to the Yale Schoolof Drama, she believes that actors shouldhave graduate school training, specificallyin theater.

“It makes them greater at what they do,”she says, emphasizing the importance someschools put on having students collaboratewith their teachers and other professionals.“It shows them what it takes to be a theateractor … and if you are trained as a theateractor, you can do anything. You can do film.You can do television.”

Feldstein encourages her students to trythe very monologues that challenge them inorder to show the breadth of their talent. “I

also ask them to find stuff that moves thememotionally. Something they would like tospend a few months working on, somethingthey believe in.”

Zayas says Feldstein builds confidence.By the time she entered the graduate audi-tion rooms, she says, “I knew I was goodenough … . There is a little switch in yourbelly and Claudia is the one who gets it toturn on.”

After Yale, Feldstein had a bustling careerin theater and television. But she was travel-ing a lot for regional theater roles and whenshe became a mother — her son Ethan is 8 —she began to concentrate more on the teach-ing she had been doing and loved before hewas born. An adjunct for 20 years, who oftendirected plays in her spare time, she becamea full-time lecturer in September 2012.

MENTORQUEENS COLLEGE

Boot Camp for MFA Theater Auditions

Claudia Feldstein,center, withformer students,from left, RosannyZayas, ShaunetteWilson, GabrielleGeorgescu andThomas Stagnitta

14 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

HEADOFTHECLASSLEHMAN COLLEGE

‘HERE’S the scenario,”musician and com-poser Michael Bacontells his students onthe first day of theirfilm-scoring class at

Lehman College. “I’m a film director andyou’re the composer. My film is in troubleand I say to you, ‘This scene doesn’t feel sadenough. Or it’s too sad. And this scene isn’texciting enough.’”

There are a dozen students, each sittingat a supersized Apple desktop paired with akeyboard — the kind that generates music,not words — in Lehman’s high-endMultimedia Center. Their semester’s workwill be to compose original music for scenesclipped from familiar movies. The first thingBacon wants them to know is the first thingthat happens in the real world — or doesn’t.Before a note is written, he says, the com-poser and director have to be in sync in theway they hear — and feel — music.

“Film people, all they’re thinking aboutis their film,” Bacon says. “But music is avery powerful thing in their film. And if youcan give them the impression that you con-trol that power for them, then they won’t beable to work without you. They will hireyou for the rest of their lives.” Of course, theopposite is also true: A filmmaker won’trehire a composer who’s on a differentwavelength.

Bacon speaks from long and varied expe-rience. He’s been a top film and televisioncomposer for decades, an Emmy winnermuch in demand particularly by producersof top-shelf historical documentaries forPBS and HBO, among others. But he’s also

still the rocker he’s been since he was a kidgrowing up in Philadelphia. He spends 50nights a year as half of the Bacon Brothers,the duo he formed with his younger broth-er, the actor Kevin, nearly 20 years ago.

The difference between those two partsof Bacon’s professional life is like night andday. The Bacon Brothers is carefree creativ-ity, no restraints. “We have a little tiny fol-lowing, and wecontrol the wholething ourselves,”he says. Film scor-ing, on the otherhand, comes withconditions, likeany livelihood. “It’snot an art; it’s acraft. Because arthas no bounds. Infilm you’re a teamplayer.”

In 2009, theyear he turned 60,Bacon added a newgig: teaching atLehman, his midlife alma mater. He earneda degree in music at the Bronx campus in1995, 25 years after he’d quit the Universityof Denver to join a band. He maintainedties with Lehman faculty over the years,and he and his brother made a few benefitappearances at the school. When the col-lege was opening its new $16 millionMultimedia Center, complete with a state-of-the-art recording studio, the center’sdirector, Jerry Barnard, asked Bacon if he’dbe interested in coming back to teach.

“I never saw myself as a teacher,” Baconsays, “but when this opportunity came up I

said I’ll try it. And I ended up liking it.”He turned out to be a natural as a men-

tor, guiding music students with the talentand interest toward potential careers infilm scoring. It’s a fertile job market, hesays, especially for those who look beyondthe glamour of feature films. “Look at thenumber of cable channels,” he tells his stu-dents. “There were three or four networks

Above, Angela Piva, chiefaudio engineer, and adjunctlecturer Steven Buonanottee.

Michael Bacon, at right,teaching film scoring atLehman College. He workswith student Nicole Johnson.

Film-Scoring MAGIC

He turned out to be a natural as a mentor, guiding music students with the talent

and interest toward potential careers in film scoring. It’s a fertile job market, he

says, especially for those who look beyond the glamour of feature films.

MAKING IMAGES REALWITH MUSIC

By Richard Firstman

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 15

when I started. Now there are hundreds,and they all have original programs, and allthe programs need composers, and all thosecomposers need help.”

Bacon himself arrived at film scoring as acareer seemingly by a combination of hap-penstance and necessity. Music was alwayscentral in his life, a passion infused by hisparents, a city planner and a nursery school

teacher who moved their family of five kidsinto a Philadelphia row house in the late1940s, a time when city dwellers were mov-ing out in droves. “My parents were urbanpioneer types,” Bacon says. “They thoughtthe city was a better environment for kidsthan the suburbs. They valued creativityabove everything else. We had musiclessons, art, singing, acting. That was what

they cared about. They didn’t care aboutgrades.”

Bacon started playing cello when he was8 and later took up the oboe, but it was folkand rock that got his ear. His older sister,Hilda, taught him the guitar and he addedthe banjo when he discovered Pete Seeger.Kevin Bacon, nine years Michael’s junior,

Continued on next page

HEADOFTHECLASSLEHMAN COLLEGE

has said his earliest memories of music werewhatever his brother brought home orplayed. The first Bacon sibling band wasMichael and Hilda, and Kevin recalls sittingon the basement steps as a young boy andlistening to them practice.

Michael Bacon went off to college think-ing that music was to be played and lovedbut not studied as one might study, say,international relations. So he majored ininternational relations. Perhaps not surpris-ingly, he left before his senior year to go onthe road as a singer and guitarist with aband called Good News. They had some suc-cess — a record deal, national tour and amoment of glory opening the fifth day of the1970 Isle of Wight Festival — “in front of250,000 cranky hippies” awaiting the likesof Jimi Hendrix, the Moody Blues andLeonard Cohen.

Bacon played on his own after the groupbroke up, sometimes backed up by a bandthat included his kid brother on percussion.And he focused on his songwriting. Histastes and talents matched the times —“acoustic guitar songs with confessionallyrics” in the vein of James Taylor and JoniMitchell — and eventually he landed a jobon the songwriting staff of a major Nashvillemusic publisher. One of his songs wasrecorded by Jerry Lee Lewis, another byPeter Yarrow.

Familiar pop music story, so far. Thencame one of those life-altering, one-thing-leads-to-another sorts of discoveries. Afriend asked Bacon to write some music fora film he’d made. It was a documentary ofsorts: “Safe use of pesticides for farmers,” asBacon describes it. (Opening lyrics: “Mitesan’ ticks an’ skunks an’ slugs/Weeds an’weevils an’ hundreds of bugs …”)

“It got around that I was good at writingcool songs for strange subjects,” Bacon says.Writing music for movies eventually startedfeeling like a possible career path. But forone thing. “I realized I had too many holesin my musical upbringing, I was a profes-sional songwriter with records out, but forthis sideline of film scoring I needed real

training in theory, composition, the thingsall the conservatory guys knew.”

Bacon moved back to Philadelphia, stud-ied composition and theory and built a stu-dio in his garage. In 1985, he moved to NewYork to pursue film scoring full time andspent a year making demo reels and sendingthem out to filmmakers. One of them, docu-mentarian David Grubin, finally hired himto score a film on the artist Andrew Wyethfor his PBS series “Smithsonian World,”adapting music by the artist’s daughter.

The film was Bacon’s big break — theepisode won an Emmy — but his educationwasn’t finished. He enrolled at Lehman forthe chance to study with one of its faculty —John Corigliano, a member of the pantheonof internationally renowned American com-posers. (He has since won a Pulitzer Prizeand an Oscar and remains a DistinguishedProfessor on the Lehman music faculty.)Bacon studied closely with Corigliano andconsiders his return to school at age 43 amajor turning point of his career.

“Lehman was a great force for me,” hesays. “So much of film scoring is the confi-dence that you know everything there is toknow. Studying with John Corigliano gaveme that confidence.”

Bacon has since become a prolific filmcomposer himself, scor-ing 12 feature films andhundreds of hours ofdocumentaries for tele-vision on figures rang-ing from the Kennedys(for PBS’ “AmericanExperience,” for which

he won an Emmy) to Marie Antoinette. Teaching the craft nowadays is a world

apart from when Bacon was learning fromthe masters. For today’s students and aspir-ing composers, computer technology canmake up for some of the gaps in musicaleducation Bacon felt he needed to fill whenhe was younger.

“When I first started, it was sitting at apiano and orchestrating a score with a pen-cil,” he says. “Now it’s kind of a hybrid oftraditional and contemporary composingskills,” the contemporary, of course, beingthe ever-advancing technology that allows asingle electronic keyboard and computerprogram to generate the complex sounds ofan orchestra. But making something broad-ly known as Musical Instrument DigitalInterface sound natural is another thing.

“Believability is what I’m trying to teach,”Bacon says, and there are a few techniques —“secret weapons,” he likes to call them —that the modern film composer uses to con-vert a recording session with just a few livemusicians into the (virtually) true sound of aMIDI orchestra. For instance, using just onelive violinist to create the sound of 25 willsound artificial. “But if you have three vio-lins playing on top of the orchestral samples,all of a sudden the idiosyncratic movementof their fingers and intonation gives believ-ability to the orchestra.”

To be sure, Bacon wants his students towork with live music so they learn how tocombine the two elements and make themcompatible. So he brings in the first instru-ment he ever played. “The cello helps themgo through the process of writing the piece,spitting out a part for me to play and record-ing it into their system, mixing it, addingreverberation and that sort of thing.”

There’s another reason: “Working withMIDI and working with a human being aretotally different. Live players are tempera-mental. If things aren’t clear they get frus-trated. I want them to have as manynegative experiences as possible becausethat’s how they learn. I’ve had 40 years ofnegative experiences. You have to know thepitfalls.”

Film-Scoring MAGICContinued from previous page

He spends 50 nights a year as half of the

Bacon Brothers, the duo he formed with his younger

brother, the actor Kevin, nearly 20 years ago.

16 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

Michael Bacon plays the cello, his firstinstrument, in Lehman’s Multimedia Center.

The Bacon Brothers, Kevin and Michael, perform at Lehman College

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 17

By Lenina Mortimer

LIZZETTE BONFANTE GONZALEZ, 23, ismoved to tears when she discusses theimportance of food education in the innercity. “My purpose is to share fairness andgoodness,” she says. “For me it’s all aboutfood justice and food education, and if

there’s Community Supported agriculture or a farmer’smarket in your community it should be supported.”

It is with this optimism that the Brooklyn Collegesenior began working with a local organization twoyears ago to bring affordable organic foods to herParkchester neighborhood in the South Bronx.

“There are plenty of farmers’ markets in Manhattanbut there are hardly any organic foods available in theBronx, and I feel like we need to have this in everycommunity,” says Gonzalez, who became a volunteerwith the Parkchester Community SupportedAgriculture program as part of her coursework atBrooklyn College.

Members subscribe to the program, paying upfrontfor a share of a farm’s crops during the 23-week grow-ing season from June to November.

Parkchester CSA works with the W. Rogowski fami-ly farm in upstate New York. Members pay $435 forseasonal vegetables distributed weekly at a local church. Each deliv-ery contains seven to 10 kinds of vegetables, which is enough to feeda family of four.

Supermarkets promote disconnection between consumers andfood producers, says Gonzalez. “But when you know the farmer,you have a special relationship with your food, with the land andwith the person who grows it. I think that it’s important for familiesto experience this.”

When she joined the group, Gonzalez, a double major in businessadministration and marketing and fine arts with a 3.8 GPA, wastasked with creating a marketing strategy for a small business. Thesemester-long project was assigned in a senior marketing course atBrooklyn College, but Gonzalez took it a step further and becamethe organization’s membership coordinator.

“When the program first started in 2009, it was going really well,but two years later it slowed down and I didn’t want it to disappear,”says Gonzalez. In an effort to increase membership, Gonzalez creat-ed a marketing plan that included strategies to strengthen commu-nity outreach like hosting “meet-the-farmer” events.

“One of the challenges that the CSA faces is that people don’t

really know what it is, so we began setting up tables at local commu-nity events to answer questions and give out free samples,” she says.She also beefed up the CSA’s online presence by updating its blogand Facebook page. She surveyed community members and learnedthat 83 percent of survey takers weren’t satisfied with the produceselection at local supermarkets and yet they were unaware of thesavings Parkchester CSA could afford them.

At a basement distribution site at St. Paul Evangelical Church earli-er this fall, member Rhonda Lamb confessed that being able to avoidsupermarkets was one of the draws for her. But that’s not all of it.

“It’s enlightened me about nature’s process,” says Lamb, a moth-er of two. “I learned about the foods that we eat, and knowing it ispesticide free puts me at ease.”

Before starting her class project, Gonzalez assumed the costwould be a major challenge in attracting members. “They don’t getto see or choose what they’ll get for their money,” she says. So shetold them about her market research, which found that residentsspend about $34 a week on vegetables. But Parkchester CSA mem-bers spend less — only $19 a week.

“I thought Lizzette really connected all the dots between busi-ness, agriculture and academic knowledge,” says Brooklyn College

professor of business and marketing, VeronicaManlow. “She looked at what she was learningabout marketing, management and consumersand connected that to an actual project that wasmeaningful to her. That’s what makes her a topstudent.”

TOPOFTHECLASSBROOKLYN COLLEGE

Setting Table in the South Bronx

Lizzette Bonfante Gonzalez, at theSt. Paul Evangelical Church fooddistribution site in the Parkchesterneighborhood of the South Bronx

Gonzalez surveyed community members and learned that 83 percent of survey

takers weren’t satisfied with the produce selection at local supermarkets and

yet they were unaware of the savings Parkchester CSA could afford them.

18 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

NEWONCAMPUSSCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH

AFTER A BUSY, HEARTBREAKING NIGHT as apediatrician for a neonatal unit in a city with thehighest infant mortality rate in the country, Dr.Ayman A.E. El-Mohandes decided that if he reallywanted to help as many patients as possible, heneeded to study public health.

That was in the mid-1980s in Washington, D.C.Today, El-Mohandes is also an epidemiologist — and an interna-

tionally recognized public health trailblazer.In May, he was appointed dean

of CUNY’s School of Public Health,the only public institution of itskind in the nation to span publichealth education from the associ-ate degree to doctoral-level train-ing. Previously, he was dean of theCollege of Public Health at theUniversity of Nebraska MedicalCenter, where he oversaw majorexpansions. A George WashingtonUniversity professor emeritus, hehas been a National Institutes ofHealth researcher on infant mor-tality reduction in minority com-munities He has conductedresearch in Egypt, where he wasborn and educated as a physician,South Africa, Indonesia and inAmerican Indian and Alaskannative communities.

Of the clinical days inWashington, El-Mohandes says, “Iwas taking care of one prematurelyborn or sick infant after another,running after gurneys carryingpregnant women at high risk. Itwas a tremendous drain on the families who loved and cared forthese children. One night in the intensive care unit I pondered thepredictability of the scenario and thought there must be a betterway to help. Once the patient left the clinic I could only beconcerned in a very theoretical way. But in public health I am deal-ing with the grass roots.”

Can you define “public health”?Public health is the system that is not recognized until it breaks.When you walk into the shower and the water is hot, abundant andclean, you don’t recognize the need for public health. But if you putthe shower on and all that comes down is a trickle of foul smellingwater, you immediately think: Public Health!

So, how do you fix the water — and so much more?It takes looking at things on a deeper level — the very significantchallenge of understanding the combined psychosocial and envi-ronmental risk factors that engulf communities. Behind disease liefactors that may not be biological in nature. And this is truewhether you are talking about bronchial asthma in children, obesi-ty, preterm birth and infant death, occupational hazards and more.As you study the ecological and the broad, comprehensive globalpath of risk progression you always end up with common problemsthat manifest themselves in different ways. One time it may bebecause a bus terminal is polluting a community. Another time it isbecause there is no outlet for fresh fruits and vegetables. Or thestreets are not safe and people can’t take a walk. Or people don’thave access to good housing or good education.

Dr. Ayman El-Mohandes, dean of theCUNY School of Public Health, chatswith students on the school’s terrace.

DR. EL-MOHANDES’ PRIORITY:

Better Health for the Many

“Today 70 percent of the

workforce in public health

does not have a master’s

degree. And we are offering

master’s and doctorate of

public health programs. But

we can also offer certifi-

cates and associate

degrees in public health,

which is important because

many departments of

health today are hiring high

school graduates.” — Dr. El-Mohandes

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 19

What role will the CUNY School of Public Health play in this?The school here is newly accredited. It will offer a unique platformthat I don’t think any other university in the United States has. Today70 percent of the workforce in public health does not have a master’sdegree. And we are offering master’s and doctorate of public healthprograms. But we can also offer certificates and associate degrees inpublic health, which is important because many departments of healthtoday are hiring high school graduates. That is all they can afford. Evenour competitors in the region, which are Ivy League schools, cannotoffer this continuum. And the affordability here is obvious.

How will you work with the entire University community?We are already a consortium of three colleges [Brooklyn, Hunter,Lehman] and the Graduate Center. But now I am reaching out, andothers are reaching out to me. The school is an umbrella seeking toexpand its partnerships. For example, the School of Professional

Studies is interested in providing public health certificates to peoplewho are already in the field or in related ones. John Jay is looking atthe interface between criminal justice and public health. We arestarting to have a tremendous diversity of programs at the master’slevel. Lehman College, for example, has started a program ingeographic information systems. I feel like I am partnering with awinning team and public health is all about teams.

Are you and your family enjoying New York?I loved Omaha. It is economically vibrant; it is the Lichtenstein of theMiddle West. But Cairo, as a huge metropolis, gave us the skills forliving here in New York, the ultimate urban environment. My wife —she was born in Alexandria and works for the Export-Import Bank ofthe United States — and I feel so at home here. We have two daugh-ters in California. We are very close to them and they are very excitedthat we have moved here.

20 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

IN THE FALL of 2010, Mayor Michael Bloombergagreed to host a small dinner party for a select circle ofcolleagues: fellow billionaires. Among the guests wereWarren Buffett, the renowned investor and philanthro-pist, and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, along with wife,Melinda, now co-chairs of the Bill & Melinda Gates

Foundation. The goal of the evening was to persuade otherattendees to sign on to the Giving Pledge, a campaignspearheaded by Buffett and Gates to encourage the wealthiestpeople in the world to commit to giving at least half of their

fortunes to charity.One of the guests,

Leon G. Cooperman, thechairman and CEO ofOmega Advisors, a NewYork hedge fund, laterwrote to Buffett, notingthat the Giving Pledgewas an “intriguing andmeritorious” concept.Cooperman and his wife,Toby, who also attendedthe event, enthusiastical-ly agreed to take thepledge. “Toby and I feel itis our moral imperative,”said Cooperman, “to giveothers the opportunity topursue the AmericanDream by sharing ourfinancial success.”

Earlier this year, theCoopermans reaffirmed

that sentiment, pledging $25 million to Hunter College —the largest gift ever given to their alma mater. Both grad-uates of Hunter’s Class of 1964, the couple say they feltcommitted to contribute to organizations that made adifference in their lives. “We were both lower middleclass with a high value on education,” says TobyCooperman. “I think we were very blessed to be able togive back.”

The gift will be split — $15 million will go toward thecompletion of The Leon and Toby Cooperman Library,while $10 million will fund a named scholarship programfor gifted students. With the Coopermans’ gift, thelibrary’s $45 million renovation, under constructionsince mid-2012, is now only $9 million short of its goal.

“The library is one of our signature projects and astrategic effort to improve student performance in the21st century,” says Hunter President Jennifer Raab. Thenewly imagined library has many innovative features,

By Ronald E. Roel

The Coopermans

pledged $25 million

to Hunter College

— the largest gift

ever given to their

alma mater.

Giving Back in a Big, Big Way

LESSONSINLEADERSHIPHUNTER COLLEGE

including more open spaces for communal learning and state-of-the-art student learning centers. “It’s a transformative proj-ect and funding has come almost entirely from privatephilanthropy,” says Raab, adding that the Coopermans’ giftmade it possible.

The scholarship fund will have a similar impact on Hunter’sfuture, says Raab. The Coopermans’ endowment will enable thecollege to offer “about $500,000 every year,” Raab says. “What itallows us to do as an institution is amazing. We won’t have toturn away anyone because of need.”

Affordable education has long been of interest to theCoopermans, who attended public schools in the Bronx. Leewas the son of a plumber; Toby’s father sold bed linens. Neitherset of parents went to college. “I’m all about equal opportunity,”Lee Cooperman says, “knowing that the world does not alwaysprovide equal outcomes.”

The Coopermans attended Hunter’s Bronx campus, whicheventually became Lehman College. “It was a first-class educa-tion for $24 a semester,” says Lee Cooperman. “It served as anexcellent foundation for the future.” Hunter also served as thefoundation for the Coopermans’ long life together. They metduring their sophomore year in French class: “She helped mewith my French,” recalled Lee. Toby, who became class presi-dent (while Lee was vice president) says, “I came into my own inmy four years at Hunter.” It was Toby who asked Lee to the jun-ior prom, in May 1963. “I accepted the offer,” he says. “It was anight out, no cost.” They were married the following summer.

During his senior year, Lee Cooperman initially decided topursue a degree in dentistry but quickly changed course, focus-ing on economics instead. He went on to earn an M.B.A. atColumbia Business School and the day after graduation hejoined Goldman Sachs. At the time, he had “a National DefenseEducation Act Student Loan to repay, had no money in the

bank, and a six-month-old child to support,”recalled Cooperman inhis letter to Buffett.Still, he ended up hav-ing a successful 25-yearrun at Goldman Sachs,followed by the last 19years at Omega —“years of happiness andgood fortune, with afew bumps along theway.”

Toby Cooperman,who majored in historyand political science atHunter, recentlyretired after spending

“We were both lower

middle class with a high

value on education.

I think we were very

blessed to be able to

give back.”—Toby Cooperman

25 years in the special education field.Earlier this year, as the couple contemplated the

50th anniversaries of their graduation from Hunterand their marriage, they began thinking of ways toexpress their appreciation for their college. “We’vealways given back,” says Toby.

Lee Cooperman said that he has considered fouroptions for managing great personal wealth: Onecould consume it (“we don’t have a lifestyle to dothat”); give it to your children (“a reasonable sum”);leave it to government through estate taxes; or giveit to needy organizations (which he prefers to doduring his lifetime or through the family founda-tion, to be managed by his two sons and grandchil-dren). The case for philanthropy, he adds, has beenprofoundly articulated over the centuries, citing, forexample, the words of Winston Churchill in the1930s: “We make a living by what we get, but wemake a life by what we give.”

Raab says the Coopermans’ gift will continue tosend a powerful message, not only to the widerworld, but also to Hunter alumni in particular. “Leemade his career as a ‘value investor’ — putting peo-ple’s money into what he thought would yield anenormous return. To see him support Hunter in thisway is a demonstration of his belief that we are agood investment for future generations,” Raab says.To Hunter’s alumni body, she adds, the gift sendsthe message that it’s important “to do what you canat your level. And it shows students that someonecares about your education enough to supportthem. Who knows, the next Lee Cooperman mightbe sitting in our library right now.”

Leon and Toby Cooperman

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 21

22 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

GREATGRADUATESBARUCH COLLEGE

IT’S HARD TO BELIEVE. But true.Kam Wong was not always a stellarstudent. Today, the distinguished BaruchCollege alumnus and donor is pres-ident and CEO of the Municipal

Credit Union of New York, with more than350,000 members and almost $2 billion inassets.

Wong has been a key player in the growthof the historic downtown Manhattan insti-tution’s unprecedented recovery after 9/11,ensuring that the credit union would notonly endure, but prosper.

But the 1981 CUNY graduate had strug-gled during his early years as a student inHong Kong.

“I did not do too well in high school,”Wong says candidly. “Actually, I kind offailed all subjects except English. I failedmath. I failed Chinese. I failed Chinese his-tory… but somehow, because I did prettywell in English, I was able to get a job in anoffice environment.”

Wong knew he needed more education,and when his grandfather asked him andother family members to emigrate and joinhim in New York, Wong had his chance. Heagreed, but only if he could go to college inthe United States.

Ambitious and determined, Wong com-

pleted his college education, graduatingfrom Baruch with strong grades, andascended quickly in the professional world.

He rose from an entry-level job at MCUto supervisor, then to assistant controller,and then chief financial officer. He becamepresident in 2006 and CEO a year later.

While he was an assistant controller atMCU, it took over a credit union in deeptrouble — and tied to what was then theBrooklyn Democratic machine. The creditunion, Hyfin, for “Help Your Friend inNeed,” was using the same collateral overagain to lend large amounts of money. Itwas a storied episode in New York financialcircles involving a political leader’s suicide,$2 million in assets — much of what Wongfound in Hyfin’s basement — Rolls-Roycesand more. Wong was able to return all fundsrequired to the federal government whilebuilding up MCU with the takeover.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Wong was chief finan-cial officer of MCU when the first plane hitthe Twin Tower about 500 yards away fromthe credit union’s office at 22 Courtlandt St.He evacuated all the employees, but Wongstayed because he was concerned about thecomputer system. And then he saw the sec-ond plane hit.

“The fireball is just coming at you, and Isaw paper melt,” he says. “This is going to be

a war zone,” he told himself. He knew therewas a lot of cash in the credit union’s vaultand its ATMs. “I made a decision and lockeddown everything. I predicted that it wouldbe a lockdown zone … Unfortunately myguess was right.”

In the end, he decided to buy all newcomputer equipment and start the opera-tion up from scratch at another site, settinga limit on the amount of money peoplecould withdraw each day during the crisis.

He hadn’t imagined himself in such adecision-making position when he arrivedin New York on May 9, 1975. One day laterhis grandfather found him a job in a restau-rant, and in between working hours hefound high schools and middle schools foreach one of his four younger brothers andone sister.

And then he researched schools for him-self — and applied to CUNY. College educa-tion was not without its challenges for him,and that’s just one of the reasons theUniversity remains so special for Wong, whois a recipient of the Baruch President’sMedal.

At first he attended Bronx CommunityCollege, an hour and a half subway commutefrom his home in Brooklyn, working hard tomaster coursework he had little experiencewith and often had to start from scratch.

FROM YOUNG, DETERMINED IMMIGRANT TO NEW YORK CEO

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 23

Kam Wong, CEO of the MunicipalCredit Union of New York

“But when I went to Baruch there wassome sort of culture shock,” Wong says ofthe transition to the senior college. On hisfirst accounting test, he got a 30.

“I panicked,” recalls Wong, who also hasan MBA in finance from a Long Island col-lege. “But I worked very closely with theprofessor,” Martin Benis, who died in 2010at 83 after teaching at Baruch for 30 years.

Six years later, he had a bachelor’s degreefrom Baruch and the confidence that camewith “A” grades in math and accounting.“The message is loud and clear. … We havegreat faculty members,” Wong says. He addsthat group study classes with other Baruchstudents also helped — as did sharing their“cultural” experiences at the Hop LeeRestaurant in Chinatown and the BlarneyStone bar on 23rd Street.

After he became a CEO, Wong says, “Istarted to think about where I came from. Icame from Baruch College.” In 2009, heasked the college to design a training pro-gram for his staff, and in 2011 he returned toHong Kong with a Baruch administrator torecruit international students and give themscholarships. He is as modest about hisdonations as he is about his accomplish-ments. They include the $10,000 a year henow gives, saying it is merely a “gesture frommy heart .”

Kam Wong remembers working in restaurantswhen he first arrived in this country, and latersharing ‘cultural experiences’ with fellow Baruchstudents at a special spot in Chinatown.

Accountancy professorMartin Benis, who died in2010, taught at BaruchCollege for more than 30years and worked closelywith Kam Wong to help himwith his transition to seniorcollege in New York.

this is a spirit of rebellion that you’ll find among manyimmigrants.” Hernandez adds that Rodriguez was paid for hisservices in goods — like hatchets — before the expedition sailed onto Holland without him.

“It’s particularly exciting to have a guy connected to the cityexhibit that kind of self-assertion,” says Stevens-Acevedo, the leadauthor of the monograph. “It’s an important history lesson for chil-dren to learn that there was a free man of African descent who

worked along side Europeans during slav-ery.”

The monograph describes Hispaniolaas a colony that was wild and rebellious.“Early Dominicans constantly defiedSpanish authority by trading with foreign-ers [like the Dutch] to avoid paying taxes,which in their eyes were unfair. And theattitude and behavior Rodriguez exhibitstoward his employers appears to be typicalof the culture in which he belonged,” saysHernandez.

Despite the historical significanceRodriguez’s story went untold until Dutchhistorian Simon Hart mentioned him in1959. Rodriguez was virtually unheard ofin American history until the 1990s whenblack scholars interested in the early his-tory of African-Americans in New Yorkbegan to discuss him. “They wanted toshow that we didn’t only come in on ships,with our hands and our feet tied — we alsocame as business people,” says Hernandez.“We would like to think history books nar-rating the story of this country would nowinclude this story so that children of allraces will learn about Rodriguez. His storyshows the complexity of the human familyand that we’ve been a diverse society from

day one,” says Hernandez.After 400 years, New York’s first immigrant was recognized

when a three-mile stretch of Broadway from 159th Street to 218thStreet was named in his honor. “Broadway is in the imagination ofalmost everybody who’s heard of New York. I think it was the per-fect street to be named after him,” says Hernandez.

Still, there is very little known about Rodriguez or what he didduring his stay in New York City. “We’re not letting this restbecause there are lots of questions. It’s simply a matter of timebefore more questions about his life are answered,” saysHernandez.

MEET JUAN RODRIGUEZ — New York City’sfirst immigrant.He’s also a historical figure who went unrecog-nized for centuries.But now researchers at City College havecome together to set the record straight.

Rodriguez was born in Santo Domingo or Hispaniola (presentday Haiti and the Dominican Republic) — the first European colonyestablished in the Americas. He was partof a crew that arrived in Hudson’s Harboraboard a Dutch ship in 1613, probablysailing from the Spanish colony ofHispaniola. Rodriguez was also a free,dark-skinned man, according to Dutchnotarial documents published by theCUNY Dominican Studies Institute.

“The story of Juan Rodriguez belongsto the history of all New Yorkers,” saysRamona Hernandez, director of the insti-tute and professor of sociology at CityCollege. “It shows that immigration andDominicans are as old as apple pie. And itshows that New York has had inter-actions between different races and eth-nicities since the very beginning.”

Rodriguez has been labeled the firstbecause “he is simply the first individualfor whom a historical record exists who isknown to have lived in the HudsonHarbor area for several months (1613-1614), far from his society of origin, withonly the local Native Americans as com-panions,” says Anthony Stevens-Acevedo,the assistant director of CUNY DSI.

It is likely that while living on theisland of Santo Domingo, Rodriguez washired to work as a sailor for the Dutch. The fact is that we findRodriguez on a Dutch expedition destined for New Amsterdam andthe Netherlands in 1613. But once Rodriguez arrived in Hudson’sHarbor he adamantly refused to leave, according to “JuanRodriguez and the Beginnings of New York City,” a monographpublished by the institute. Dutch notarial documents reveal that helived and worked in New Amsterdam for at least eight monthsbetween 1613 and 1614.

Paraphrasing the few written statements that survive aboutRodriguez, Hernandez says: “He was left here because he told who-ever hired him, ‘I’m staying right here. And if you don’t leave me,I’ll jump overboard!’ We don’t know why he said that but I think

By Lenina Mortimer

HISTORYLESSONCITY COLLEGE

24 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

New York City’s 1613 Solo Immigrant

Judicial document from La Española with Juan Rodriguez’s name

In America ON HIS OWN

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 25

Ramona Hernandez,director, andAnthony Stevens-Acevedo, assistantdirector, of theCUNY DominicanStudies Institute

FIELDSTUDYQUEENS COLLEGE

26 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

CUNY doctoral students

Margaret Bryer, left, andShahrina Chowdhury

collecting observational data on chacma

baboons in South Africa

IN PARTS OFAFRICA, baboons can becontroversial. Some peo-ple consider them pests,while others value the les-sons they teach us abouthuman behavior.

Queens College anthro-pology professor LarissaSwedell has studied thebehavior, environment andevolution of baboons in Africafor almost two decades. Swedelluses her research to inform con-servation strategies and helphumans and baboons to coexist.

In Cape Town, South Africa,stories about human-baboon con-flict appear regularly in the media,says Swedell. “We’re just trying tobe an objective voice presentingaccurate and useful informationabout baboons. We try to help peo-ple understand that they’re notyour enemies and they won’t eatyou. They just want your food,”says Swedell, whose researchfocuses on the social behavior andmating patterns of baboons.

She is currently involved in twofield projects: one on hamadryasbaboons at the Filoha field site,located in the Awash NationalPark in Central Ethiopia, and thesecond on chacma baboons in theTokai Forest outside of CapeTown.

Swedell and her team observebaboons in their natural habitatand collect behavioral data on each

Studying Baboons in Africa --

individual. Theresearchers record everything thatthe baboon does over 15-minuteperiods, taking notes on grooming,mating, feeding and socializinghabits. Over time, enough samplesare collected to be representativeof an individual baboon’s behavior.

Swedell’s fieldwork onhamadryas baboons focuses on therole of females in this unusualmulti-layered social system, whichshe became interested in becauseit is so male-dominated. Her otherresearch program, on the chacmababoon, examines their relation-ship with their human neighbors.It’s interesting because “there area lot of potential stressors for the

baboons in South Africa that areunique,” says Swedell, “such asbeing chased by people and havingthings thrown at them.”

Swedell contends that by study-ing baboons we can learn moreabout the evolution of humans andthe biology behind modern humanbehavior. “When I watch baboonsthey remind me of humans, theirposition in the social hierarchyimpacts how much food they eat,where they sit and who they inter-act with ... and that’s not very dif-ferent from our own behavior.”

An adult female chacmababoon with her juvenile

daughter in the Tokai Forest outside

Cape Town, South Africa

and Learning About Humans

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 27

Before and after Earp’s death in 1929,Josephine was determined to tell his tale,warts deleted. In particular, she wanted tostay out of her husband’s story — and didnot want anyone to know that Earp’s thirdmate descended into alcoholism anddespair and then committed suicide.Josephine seems to have feared that it washer fault; Earp left that woman for her. Shebegan to create a biographical trove forEarp that, although filled with myths and

omissions, put her far ahead of her time asan image maker.

“I think that the ability to spin the leg-end of Wyatt Earp was what made her sucha modern woman,” Kirschner says.

As a child in Jackson Heights, Queens,Kirschner watched television westerns withher older brother, Joey, who dressed up incowboy gear when the shows came on.

“Joey was my hero,” she writes. “AndMarshal Earp was his.” In a recent inter-view she added, “But I had a sense of havinggrown up with an incomplete picture of thefrontier … there were no real women in it.”

Surprised by a friend’s comment thatWyatt Earp is in a Jewish cemetery,Kirschner learned about Josephine —buried next to him — and was inspired towrite the book. “Josephine’s Jewish back-ground was the spark for the book,” sheagrees. Kirschner’s first book, Sala’s Gift,describes her mother’s experience in Nazilabor camps during World War II.

“But her religion did not turn out to be amajor factor in Josephine’s life,” Kirschnersays. “Had I wanted to write a book justabout Josephine as a Jewish woman, Iwould have been mightily disappointed …She didn’t hide her Jewish background. Shewas just indifferent to it …. Yet, at the great-est crisis of her life — Wyatt’s death, sheturned back to her Jewish roots and buriedhim next to her parents.”

To research the book, Kirschner enlisted

the assistance of her students, now gradu-ates. To help shape her vision of Josephine,she discussed her research with them. Theywere her sounding boards. And in turn thestudents learned how authors write books.

“I had one of the most memorable week-ends of my life working with Ann,” says grad-uate Dan Blondell, now the content managerat the Central Park Conservancy. “We wentto Massachusetts to view a never-before ana-lyzed and barely read archive of Josephine’sletters … research is detective work.”

About her writing process, Kirschnersays she has never taken a leave to write herbooks. She sometimes researches whiletraveling, writes in the early mornings andon vacations. As for her next book, she saysshe’s waiting to feel “an itch. Books are likemosquito bites. They itch. It’s not thereyet.” Nothing yet to compete with the storyof Josephine Sarah Marcus Earp, whichthe University dean calls “a magnificentobsession.”

28 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

By Barbara Fischkin

WYATT EARP was anicon of the AmericanWest. Both an outlawand a lawman, he wasthe only man to walkaway uninjured from

the legendary Gunfight at the O.K. Corral inTombstone, Arizona.

But he also attended family PassoverSeders — and maybeeven wore a yar-mulke. Perhapsmore tellingly,he is buried inthe synagogue-affiliated Hills ofEternityCemetery outsideof San Francisco.

For almost 50years Earp livedwith a common-lawwife who was Jewish.Her name wasJosephine SarahMarcus Earp and shewas a colorful, remark-able, often confound-ing adventuress.

She was also mostlyabsent from history.

Then, earlier thisyear, Lady at the O.K.Corral: The True Storyof Josephine Marcus byUniversity Dean Ann Kirschner ofMacaulay Honors College was published byHarper Collins. And with that, Kirschnerlifted a woman who was emblematic ofAmericana out of the heap of obscurity.

“We finally have the definitive story ofJosie Earp, a key player not only in theevents leading up to and after the infamousshoot-out but in crafting much of themythology that’s been widely accepted eversince,” writes Jeff Guinn, a respected Earpresearcher.

A noted beauty as a young woman,Josephine journeyed as an actress from herfamily home in San Francisco and woundup in Tombstone where she met Earp.

Ultimately, she was a participant in and awitness to more than eight decades of cru-cial American history, including the Alaskangold rush, San Francisco in the Gay Ninetiesand the coming-of-age of Hollywood.

And every so often she retreated with herfabled mate to life lived rough in the desert.

PAGETURNERSMACAULAY HONORS COLLEGE

Ann Kirschner, dean ofMacaulay HonorsCollege, with her newbook Lady at the OKCoral. At left, JosephineMarcus Earp and WyattEarp in undatedphotographs and theirtombstone near SanFrancisco.

Josie Marcus and the Legend of Wyatt Earp

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 29

Harvard SquareGraduate Center Distinguished Professor of comparative literature André AcimanW.W. NortonThis novel is a tale of the wages of assimilation — a moving storyof an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgottencosts and sacrifices of becoming an American. An Egyptian Jewattending graduate school at Harvard in 1977 meets a brash,

charismatic Arab cab driver nicknamedKalashnikov—Kalaj for short—for his machine-gun vitriol. The student finds it hard to resist hisnew friend’s magnetism, and before long hebegins to neglect his studies and live a doublelife: one in the rarified world of Harvard, theother as an exile with Kalaj, carousing on thestreets of Cambridge. As final exams loom and

Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation,the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to hisdream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his OldWorld friend.

Out of Many, One: Obama and the Third American Political TraditionGraduate Center professor of political science Ruth O’Brien University of Chicago PressFeared by conservatives and embraced by liberals when he

entered the White House, Barack Obama hassince been battered by criticism from both sides.In Out of Many, One:, O’Brien explains why. Weare accustomed to seeing politicians supportingeither a minimalist state characterized by unfet-tered capitalism and individual rights or a rela-tively strong welfare state and regulatorycapitalism. Obama, O’Brien argues, representsthe values of a lesser-known third tradition in

American political thought that defies the usual left-right catego-rization. This book sheds critical light on both the political andphilosophical underpinnings of his presidency and a fundamentalshift in American political thought.

New York and Los Angeles: The Uncertain FutureEdited by Queens College associate professor of sociology and UCLA professor ofsociology David Halle and Queens College professor of sociology Andrew BeveridgeOxford University PressThis book provides in-depth comparative studies of the twolargest cities and metropolitan areas in the United States.

Chapters of the book compare politics, eco-nomic prospects and the financial crisis anda host of social issues, including reformmovements in education, immigration, racialand economic segregation and environmen-tal issues. This comparative frameworkreveals that old paradigms of urban “decline”or “resurgence” are inadequate for graspingnew complexities. Each city is responding in

similar and different ways to the challenges created by the eventsthat defined the last decade. These regions act as harbingers forother U. S. cities, the entire nation and cities worldwide.

My 1980s and Other EssaysGraduate Center Distinguished Professor of English Wayne Koestenbaum FSG OriginalsKoestenbaum’s essay collection opens with a series ofmanifestos—or rather, a series of impassioned disclosures, intel-

lectual and personal—and then proceeds towrestle with a series of major cultural figures,the author’s own lodestars and lodestones: lit-erary (John Ashbery, Roberto Bolaño, JamesSchuyler), artistic (Diane Arbus, CindySherman, Andy Warhol), and simply iconic(Brigitte Bardot, Cary Grant, Lana Turner). Itamounts to a kind of intellectual autobiography that culminatesin a string of passionate calls to creativity; arguments in favor ofdetail, nuance and attention; and a defense of pleasure, hungerand desire in culture and experience.

Dressing Constitutionally: Hierarchy, Sexuality, and Democracy from Our Hairstyles to Our ShoesCUNY School of Law Distinguished Professor Ruthann RobsonCambridge University PressThe intertwining of our clothes and our Constitution raises fun-

damental questions of hierarchy, sexuality, anddemocracy. From our hairstyles to our shoes,constitutional considerations both constrainand confirm our daily choices. In turn, our attireand appearance provide multilayered perspec-tives on the United States Constitution and itsinterpretations. This book examines the rightsto expression and equality, as well as therestraints on government power, as they limitand allow control of our most personal choices

of attire and grooming.

Bodies of Subversion: A Secret History of Women and TattooLehman College assistant professor of English and CUNY Graduate CenterSchool of Journalism associate professor of Journalism Margot MifflinPowerHouse BooksMargot Mifflin has updated and resplendently illustrated this new

edition of Bodies of Subversion: A Secret Historyof Women and Tattoo, which was first publishedin 1997. The new edition arrives at a time when,according to a 2012 Harris Poll, Americanwomen are more likely to be tattooed than men.No longer a rebel emblem, tattoos are a main-stream fashion statement, according to Mifflin.

Her research has unearthed some choice tidbits of social history:Following the upper-class social trend of the late 19th century,Winston Churchill’s mother had a tattoo of a snake eating its tail(the symbol of eternity) on her wrist.

Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks: The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth and MemorySchool of Professional Studies assistant professor of Labor Studies Penny Lewis Cornell University PressIn popular imagination, college students and elite intellectuals

drove opposition to the Vietnam War, while thesupposedly reactionary blue-collar workers sup-ported the war. In Hardhats, Hippies, and Hawks:The Vietnam Antiwar Movement as Myth andMemory, Penny Lewis challenges the collectivememory of class polarization. Through closereadings of archival documents, popular culture,and media accounts at the time, she offers a more

accurate, “counter-memory” of a diverse, cross-class oppositionto the war in Southeast Asia that included the labor movement,working-class students, soldiers and veterans, Black Power, civilrights and Chicano activists.

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

BOOKSAT-A-GLANCE

PHOTOFINISHQUEENS COLLEGE

PHOT

O B

Y M

cLAN

E TE

ITEL

The Favelas of Rio— IN MINIATURE

on Queens College Campus

30 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

WHILE IT BEGAN AS A GAME played by teens in one of the working-class

Rio de Janeiro neighborhoods, or “favelas,” today Projecto Morrinho

has evolved into an art installation meant to inspire social awareness

and international dialogue on the Queens College campus.

A permanent installation, Projecto Morrinho, which is Portuguese for “little hill

project,” was built on the campus by visiting Brazilian artists and 30 student

volunteers.

Two tons of bricks – flown in from Brazil – were painted and stacked to recre-

ate the Rio’s neighborhoods. Three separate sites were built at the college during

the Fall 2013 semester. The largest of is on the steps of the Rosenthal Library

Plaza. Although Projecto Morrinho installations have been built in Europe, the three

on the Queens campus are the first in the United States.

Teenagers in Rio’s Laranjeiras neighborhood started building favela models in

1998 as a means of play and an escape from the police and drug-trafficker sur-

rounding their community. Some of those teens – now adults – traveled to Queens

College to build the Projecto Morrinho installations, not only as a means of play

but also as a cultural exchange, says Queens College anthropology professor John

Collins.

“The model has both an Empire State Building and a Christ statue so it’s not

just an import from Brazil but rather a collaboration between young people from

these two cities,” says Collins, who taught a semester-long course, Space in Brazil

that offered students the opportunity to work on the project. “The installations

offer students an opportunity to exchange ideas and help change perceptions of

what life is like for those in Rio and New York City,” adds Collins.

Documenting part of thecollege’s Year of Brazil,student McLane Teitelphotographed ProjectoMorrinho as it rose on campus.

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 31

An Innovative GuttmanMakes the City Its CampusAYEAR AFTER the Stella and Charles Guttman Community College

opened its doors, some students say it offers more than innovativeinstruction — it also creates the perfect marriage of city and campus

life. “This college paved the way with its brand new educational curriculum.But they’ve also paved the way in campus life — the college has been able toadd something more to make me feel like this is my second home,” says sec-ond-year student Stephen Icaza.

Guttman Community College, formerly known as the New CommunityCollege of CUNY, opened in the fall of 2012. It’s the first CUNY communitycollege to open in more than 40 years, and it was renamed after theUniversity received a $25 million gift from the Stella and Charles GuttmanFoundation. The donation, the largest to a community college in New Yorkhistory, was given to support the college and other community college initia-tives to boost student retention and graduation rates.

Located in Midtown Manhattan, the college is housed in a seven-story,92,000-square-foot building overlooking Bryant Park. While it may be limit-ed in space, the city serves as an extended campus, says Icaza. “We’re nearTimes Square, there is a park right outside and we have a huge library nextdoor. It’s like our campus is as large as our surroundings,” says Icaza, speak-ing in the Information Commons — the college’s nontraditional library.

The Information Commons, described as “a library for the 2.0 world” onthe college website, is a social space where students access an extensive digi-tal library and online database. Surrounding city institutions, such as themain branch of the New York Public Library, bolster the resources of thecollege library, which has a small collection of books.

Guttman offers five degree-granting programs, including associate degreesin liberal arts and sciences, information technology and business administra-

tion. Its innovative curriculum includes a mandatory summer bridgeprogram that prepares students for college course work. Students are also

required to attend school full-time during their first academic year.Although the college’s primary objective is to increase student

retention and graduation rates, creating a supportive community isalso a key part of its mission. “I don’t think any student will everfeel like a number here, even in the five years that we will grow.The message we hear from the school is that there is an actual rela-tionship between the student and the teacher. So it’s no longer stu-

dent-teacher, it’s now student-mentor,” says Icaza, of the collegethat opened with an inaugural class of 300 students. Enrollment will

grow to approximately 5,000 students when the college moves to itspermanent home at 59th Street and 10th Avenue.“I knew since day one of researching the faculty and staff that they were

gathering quality teachers. But I’m also having such a fun time beingstudious while being surrounded by so much culture,” says Icaza.

CAMPUS TOUR GUTTMAN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Stella and Charles Guttman Community College. Below, the first class gatherswith faculty and University officials for convocation in the fall of 2012.

32 W I N T E R 2 0 1 4

• The Hub: At Guttman, the Hub is the center for student services where youcan visit financial-aid, bursar, registrar and admissions offices.

• Information Commons: This untraditional college library is located in themain section of the first floor. Students gather in this space for the purpose ofresearch and collaboration.

• Atrium: The student lounge – with a view of Bryant Park – also houses theCompass, a resource center staffed by peer mentors who engage students incampus life by planning and providing information on eventsand activities.

• Peer Mentor Room: To ensure success, peermentors are on hand to support the academicand student life experience at Guttman.

• Student Lounge: Located in the lowerlevel of Guttman, the student lounge hasvending machines and a Ping-Pong table.

THEHOTSPOTSATGUTTMAN

Quick Facts About Guttman

• First community college to open at CUNY in over 40 years

• 494 students • Five associate degree programs

• Enrollment: 62% female, 38% male• Accessibility: • Subway lines - No. 1, 2, 3, 7

and B, D, F, M, N, Q, R and S • 11 Manhattan buses, including

the M1, M2, M3, M4, M5, M6 and M42

Across1. _____ of New York is theoldest CUNY college.11. City College was origi-nally called the _____Academy.15. Hugs to go with XX16. Like some humor17. John18. Bagel topper19. Abit start (live together)21. Dr. Horace ______, aWest Point graduate, was thefirst president of the FreeAcademy.23. In 1866, _____ waschosen as the College’s color.25. Cuba libre ingredient26. In 1930, CCNY admitted_____ for the first time, butonly to graduate programs.27. Alumnus Colin L.______ ’58 was U.S. secre-tary of state.29. In 1867 the academicsenate, the first _____ gov.in the nation, was formed.34. Self-help grp.35. Misguide36. Heavenly hunter37. Hesitating interjection39. ___ Girl40. CCNY has produced_____ Nobel Laureates.41. Made in ___45. The prince in The Princeand the Pauper50. Buildings are land-marked, and the campus hasexpanded to _____ tree-lined acres.53. Battery size55. CCNY’s academic excel-lence and status as a work-ing-class school earned itthe title “the poor man’s_____.”59. Alumnus Felix ___, 1902was a justice of the U.S.Supreme Court.62. Down-to-earth adherents64. Most coral66. ___, myself, and I67. See 63 Down68. Blood type69. ET70. Mississippian74. ______ is the largestbuilding and the centerpieceof the campus.81. Pre-owned vehicle auc-tion84. American ships85. Fink87. Candidate89. Deep blue91. The downtown campus,the Center for _____ Educa-tion, is located in the WallStreet area.92. "Come again?"96. U.S. air travel co.97. Unitarian Universalism,Abbr.98. The current president isLisa Staiano-_____.99. Alumnus A.M. _____,’49, was formerly executiveeditor of The New York Times.

105. Social network107. Modifies109. Alumnus Judd _____,’60, starred in the TV hit Taxi.110. Lord of the Rings twin112. Alumnus Jonas ____,’34, inventor of the polio vac-cine.114. Alumnus Upton ____,1897, wrote The Jungle.115. Alumnus Red _____,’42, two-time All-Star NBAguard, basketball coach forthe New York Knicks.120. Dedicated lines121. Spy org.122. Half and half123. Mike holder124. ___ and behold125. The Neo-Gothic campuswas designed by GeorgeBrowne _____, the arhitectof the NYSE.126. City College wasfounded in 1847 by wealthybusinessman and presidentof the Bd. of Ed, _______.

Down1. Haul2. Clod chopper3. Letterman’s network4. First subway in NYC

5. Car’s inwardly angled ad-justment6. Shostakovich’s “Babi __” 7. __-Rom8. Peruvian beast9. Cleanse10. Fifty-fifty11. Toward the front12. Prescription13. Dangerous bacteria14. In the early 1900s,mandatory _____ atten-dance was abolished — achange that occurred at atime when more Jewish stu-dents were enrolling.18. Mekong River land20. Whirlpo ending22. UCLA player23. Hawaii’s Mauna ___24. Printed resolution meas.25. Roman 15528. Bd. of ___29. George W., to George30. Prenatal oral vitamins31. Anonymous John32. Broad finale33. 1965 Disney film starringHayley Mills38. Make it happen, Abbr.39. Ethereal start to gible42. Remote access to inter-net

43. Exhibiting start for ying44. “Naughty!”45. Writer from the sticks46. Mental keenness47. Pink, as a steak48. 1950s slicked back hair-style49. Skater Babilonia51. “Ur Not Smashing,” Abbr.52. Assuming that54. Number one Hun55. British drollery56. State next to Ct.57. Video blogs58. Ave.60. Finish to politbu61. Black billiard ball63. With 67 Across,___ Avis, a rare bird65. Clearance items can befound here68. Oh71. Camera setting72. Get to the end of arr73. Circular74. 180° from NNW75. Sweet Indian treat76. Bord back77. Orchard item78. Rupee, Abbr.79. Calendar square80. ___ seen on tv82. Oldest and largest news-

gathering org.83. Meas. of freq. of rotation86. Cooling system, Abbr.88. Northern Kentucky Univ.90. “Why don’t we relax?”92. Court93. Distiller Walker94. Lean-___ (sheds)96. Jail98. Vampire Diaries network100. Lug101. Sh closure102. Unappraised, Abbr.103. Hudson Cty. Imp. Auth.104. After autob105. Common side order

106. Keep out108. Period110. Below decks111. Death in Venice author113. Commercial115. Head-mounteddisplay, Abbr.116. Grassland117. Pan epilogue118. Actress MacGraw119. Discouragingwords121. Credit Suisse GroupNYSE123. ___ space

W I N T E R 2 0 1 4 33

T1

H2

EC3

I4

T5

Y6

C7

OL8

L9

E10

GEF11

R12

EE13

C14

O15

OB16

ROADL17

AVL18

OXC19

O20

H

W21

EB22

STERL23

AVEND24

ARC25

OLA

RIW26

OMENP27

OWE28

LLP

S29

T30

UD31

E32

NT33

A34

AM35

ISADVISE

O36

RIONH37

M38

I39

TRL

N40

INET41

AIW42

A43

NT44

E45

DW46

AR47

D48

NT49

T50

HIRTY51

SI52

XIA53

AA54

H55

AR56

V57

AR58

DF59

RANKFUR60

TE61

RT

U62

TILITAR63

IANSR64

OSIES65

T

M66

EOR67

AA68

BGA69

I

O70

SA71

GI72

A73

NS74

H75

E76

P77

HAR78

D79

HA80

LL

UU81

SEDCA82

R83

SALEU84

SATSEA

R85

A86

TRA87

PPELLAN88

TYR

C89

OBAL90

TMW91

ORKERW92

H93

AT94

P95

EA96

AU97

UC98

OICO

R99

OS100

E101

N102

TH103

A104

LF105

B106

R107

E108

WORKS

IH109

IRSCHA110

M111

RASPA

S112

A113

LKS114

INCLAIRH115

OL116

Z117

MA118

N119

O120

DEC121

IAO122

NEE123

MCEEL124

O

NP125

OSTT126

OWNSENDHARRIS

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18 19 20

21 22 23 24 25

26 27 28

29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37 38 39

40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48

49 50 51 52 53 54

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

62 63 64 65

66 67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94

95 96 97 98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108

109 110 111

112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119

120 121 122 123 124

125 126

CROSSWORDPUZZLEHarvard of the ProletariatBy Miriam Smithand Ronald E. Roel

Non-Profit OrgU.S. Postage

P A I DStaten Island, NY

Permit #169Office of University Relations205 East 42nd St.New York, NY 10017