CUNYcast

The City University of New York
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CUNYcast

Smart voices, good stories and thought provoking conversation from the City University of New York.

  1. 12/07/2023

    CUNY’s Transformation SWAT Team

    CUNY this year unveiled an ambitious plan for transforming into the nation’s foremost student-centered university system by the end of this decade. One of the ways the “CUNY Lifting New York” strategic plan is getting off the ground is with the help of a new Office of Transformation created by Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. The office’s leaders, Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson, join the CUNYcast to offer a glimpse of CUNY’s transformation from the front lines. Rachel Stephenson (left), the University’s chief transformation officer, is a longtime CUNY leader who has been the founding director of initiatives including the CUNY Service Corps, CUNY Cultural Corps and the Dream.US scholarship program. Cathy N. Davidson is a CUNY Distinguished Professor of English who’s one of the nation’s leading higher education thinkers and innovators. She’s the founding director of the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center and the author of more than 20 books, most recently “The New College Classroom.” RELATED LINKS CUNY Office of Transformation: The Initiatives CUNY Lifting New York: The Plan

    27 min

  2. 06/14/2023

    The Emergence of Sidik Fofana

    Sidik Fofana started out writing rap songs as a kid, but it was fiction that really took hold when he was in college. It was a passion, if not a realistic career ambition, and so he kept at it while earning a masters in education at City College, and when he became a high school teacher in Brooklyn. Last summer, more than a decade later, Sidik finally got his first book published —  a collection called “Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.”  And then this spring came big news: He was a winner of the prestigious Whiting Award for Emerging Writers. Sidik’s CUNY connection is ongoing: For the past nine years he’s taught in the University’s College Now program, which offers college credit to New York city public high school students. In a profession where you publish a story and you’re so happy to get $500 and then someone gives you this big award and tells you you’re getting $50,000 – it’s just, wow. It’s a stamp of approval.

    29 min

  3. 01/27/2023

    Ryan Martin’s got game. And he’s putting CUNY adaptive sports on the map.

    As CUNY’s first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, Ryan Martin has quickly built a program featuring men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams that compete against colleges from around the country. Martin is a national leader and advocate for adaptive sports and a veteran wheelchair basketball player himself. Born with spina bifida, he lost both his legs when he was two years old but went on to play in college and then professionally in Europe.  His focus is on bringing athletes with disabilities to CUNY, but he says it’s ultimately not about the game. “I can talk all day about the numbers of wins and losses and the percentage of shots I want to take,” Martin says on the CUNYcast, “but being an individual with a disability, I think the number one thing is what are they doing three or five years from now — are they in a better position than they would have been had they not participated in this program?” Related Links Follow @cuny_adaptive on Instagram CUNAC Wheelchair Basketball on the web More about Ryan Martin: Changing the Landscape of Adaptive Sports Learn about Ryan Martin’s foundation for athletes with disabilities Ryan Martin huddles with his team during a recent tournament hosted by CUNY.

    24 min

  4. 10/31/2022

    Behind the Closed Doors of a Queens Family Story

    Queens College alum Nira Burstein spent six years making “Charm Circle,” an intensely personal documentary that took Burstein and her camera inside her childhood home in Flushing on a quest to understand the emotional chaos of her parents’ lives. Burstein is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25  New Faces of Independent Film, and “Charm Circle” has been hailed at film festivals around the world for its unflinching examination of her family’s struggles with mental illness and her own journey in confronting familial bonds that are often hidden. The film was screened at the Museum of the Moving Image in Long Island City as part of the 12th annual Queens World Film Festival. * Click HERE for more about “Charm Circle”

    19 min

  5. 04/07/2022

    Illuminating the Nazis’ Vast System of Genocide

    An ambitious new exhibition at Queensborough Community College’s renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center offers a new way  to understand the enormity of Nazi genocide by documenting the staggering number of sites across Europe where Hitler’s murderous army carried out his Final Solution. “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” is an immersive multimedia exhibit that includes first-person accounts by local Holocaust survivors, hundreds of images from the world’s leading Holocaust museums and a wall-sized map that illustrates how much more extensive the system was than most people realize. Laura Cohen, the Kupferberg Center’s executive director, and Cary Lane, the exhibition’s curator, talk about the sobering installation, the two years of painstaking and emotional work that went into creating it, and why it matters 80 years later. * Visit the exhibition’s website to read text and see videos, images and other content. * Take an interactive 360-degree online tour. * Learn more about the Kupferberg Holocaust Center

    30 min

  6. 03/21/2022

    A Backpack at 75: Ciro Scala’s Long Quest for a CCNY Degree

    Nearly six decades after he reluctantly dropped out of City College, Ciro Scala went back in 2016 and earned both an undergraduate and master’s degree from CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. Now he’s fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and he’s giving something back. He created a workshop program to help first-generation college students navigate some of the same kinds of challenges that sidetracked his own degree when he was a young first-gen student himself.                             RELATED LINKS * The New York Times: ‘I Was Not Whole’: Why a Grandfather Went Back to College * CUNY News: Chancellor Visits Ciro Scala’s First Gen Seminar

    28 min

  7. 12/08/2021

    Bringing Authenticity to Artistry in Spielberg’s ‘West Side Story’

    “West Side Story” is beloved for its music, dance and romanticism but has long been dogged by criticism of its stereotyping of Puerto Rican characters and the casting of white actors to play them in the 1961 movie. When Steven Spielberg set out to make a reimagined version, he and screenwriter Tony Kushner tapped Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol to help them portray New York’s Puerto Rican community of the 1950s with more authenticity and nuance. As a leading scholar of the history of Puerto Ricans in New York – and a Nuyorican who came of age in the time and place of “West Side Story” herself – Korrol was a natural to serve as the film’s historical consultant. First, though, she had to get past her skepticism that Spielberg and Kushner could pull it off. Virginia Sánchez Korrol graduated from Brooklyn College a year before “West Side Story” was released and went on to become the long-time chair of the college’s groundbreaking Department of Puerto Rican and Latino Studies and a foundational figure of that field. Among her books is From Colonia to Community: The History of Puerto Ricans in New York City. As part of her involvement with “West Side Story,” Korrol worked with María Pérez y González, deputy chair of the Puerto Rican and Latino Studies department, to create “West Side Story: The Brooklyn Connection,” an online lecture series featuring appearances by Steven Spielberg, Tony Kushner and experts with perspectives on the history, culture and music of “West Side Story.” Click here to see videos of those conversations. Related Links More About How CUNY Helped Tell a More Nuanced “West Side Story” West Side Story: The Brooklyn Connection lecture series

    36 min

  8. 11/22/2021

    A CUNY Professor’s Quest to Rescue Her ‘Literary Family’ from the Taliban

    In the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families are still trying to evacuate  their country and come to the United States. Zohra Saed (left), a poet, editor and distinguished professor at Macaulay Honors College who was born in Afghanistan, has rallied her literary peers and friends in New York’s community of Central Asian immigrants to rescue one such imperiled family — a writer, his sister and father and nine other relatives, including children — who are all now in hiding. Saed enlisted one of her former students, Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School graduate who is now an immigration attorney, to file applications for emergency visas that would allow them to evacuate and enter the United States. Saed and Ghouri join the CUNYcast to tell their dramatic story. RELATED LINKS ‘My Homeland’: A Poet’s Quest to Help a Family Flee Afghanistan (The New York Times) * CUNY Lecturer Mounts High-Stakes Effort to Help Imperiled Writer and His Family Flee Taliban-Controlled Afghanistan (CUNY News) * Explainer: Humanitarian Parole and the Afghan Evacuation (National Immigration Forum) * Contribute to the UpSet Press fundraising campaign for family’s evacuations * Afghanistan conflict background (Council on Foreign Relations) * About UpSet Press * About Neighbors Link EPISODE TRANSCRIPT RICK FIRSTMAN:  This summer, when the U.S. started withdrawing from Afghanistan and the Taliban were quickly seizing control, Zohra Saed’s thoughts turned to the fate of one family. Zohra was born in Afghanistan, came to New York, earned three CUNY degrees, and now she’s a poet and editor and a professor at Macaulay Honors College. Three years ago, she began working with a writer in northern Afghanistan to translate the folk poems he’d been collecting and publish them in a book. But the Taliban’s return to power had her worried about him, as well as his sister and father and the rest of their family. In various ways, they’d been active in the modernization of Afghanistan that now made them targets of the Taliban. They had to get out. From her apartment in Brooklyn, Professor Saed set out to help the family, 12 people in all including children. She mobilized her social network of literary peers and friends in New York’s community of Central Asian immigrants. Then she enlisted one of her former students, Mayha Ghouri, a CUNY Law School graduate who is an immigration attorney, to file applications for visas under an emergency process that would allow the family to come to the United States. She has raised thousands of dollars for their application fees and travel expenses as the family remains in hiding and on the run in Afghanistan. I’m pleased to have both Zohra Saed and Mayha Ghouri here on the CUNYCast to talk about their quest. Zohra, I’d like to start with you and your own history, which is part of this story. Tell me about your family and your own journey to the United States.

    33 min

  9. 05/27/2021

    Imagine That: How John Mogulescu Became the Dean of New Things

    John Mogulescu is affectionately regarded as the founding father of many of CUNY’s most innovative and consequential programs of this century. He’s been an unstoppable force and a guiding spirit bent on breaking down educational and career barriers for New Yorkers of all backgrounds. “I’ve never believed in the status quo,” he says. “I think that’s just boring.” This spring, after a prodigious career spanning nearly 50 years, he announced his retirement. To many, CUNY won’t be the same without him. Dean Mogulescu joined CUNY as a young and idealistic social worker in 1972 and went on to become senior university dean in the Office of Academic Affairs, where he oversaw the creation of everything from the nationally acclaimed ASAP program to Guttman Community College. In 2003 he took on a second job — founding dean of the School of Professional Studies, which he built from scratch into a school that has helped tens of thousands of adult New Yorkers advance their careers or find new ones. Under his leadership, SPS created the first online programs at CUNY and has been recognized as one of the leading providers of online instruction in the nation. On the eve of his departure, Mogulescu sat down for an exit interview — a conversation about his life at CUNY and what it took to launch so many trailblazing initiatives that changed the lives of countless students, and arguably changed CUNY and the city too.

    44 min

  10. 03/17/2021

    Convincing America to Vax Up

    The nation’s supply of Covid vaccines is opening up rapidly, but will vaccine hesitancy –and refusal– prevent us from reaching the 75 to 85 percent vaccination rate needed to end the pandemic? The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy has launched CONVINCE USA, part of a global project to reduce ungrounded fears and misinformation about the new vaccines and persuade the resistant that the shot is safe, effective–and necessary.  CUNY SPH’s Dr. Scott Ratzan, the co-founder and executive director of CONVINCE USA, talks about the challenges and the strategies. RELATED LINK: VAX UP CUNY

    26 min
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About

Smart voices, good stories and thought provoking conversation from the City University of New York.

Information

  • Creator
    The City University of New York
  • Years Active
    2019 - 2023
  • Episodes
    11
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © CUNY
  • Show Website
    CUNYcast

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