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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 

 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alvin Eng’s long, strange trip began in his family’s laundry in Flushing (presided over by his Cantonese opera-singing “Empress Mother”). From there, somehow, he became  an adolescent punk rocker and then a downtown playwright and storyteller inspired by a delayed embrace of his Chinese heritage. He teaches at Borough of Manhattan Community College, and if his students want to know more than what’s on Rate My Professors, they can read his memoir. It’s just out in paperback.

RELATED LINKS



* More about Alvin Eng

* A bit about his academic life at BMCC

* NYT: How a memoirist and playwright spends his Sundays 

* Alvin on YouTube

    

Her father’s absence when she was growing up made half of Ava Chin’s family history a family mystery. But when she finally met him in Chinatown, in her twenties, it sparked a years-long quest that not only uncovered her own family’s remarkable story but revealed the much deeper history of exclusion that defined the Chinese American experience for a century.  Chin, a professor of creative nonfiction and journalism at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, tells a deeply personal story with the sweep of history in Mott Street: A Chinese Amerian Family’s Story of Exclusion and Homecoming.”

 

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.

 



Crystal Hana Kim says the Korean War is so deeply ingrained in her family’s history–but so remote for Americans today–that it became the driving force for her to become a writer. “I wanted to force it into our cultural consciousness because it’s known as the Forgotten War,” Kim tells Joe Tirella on this episode of CUNY Book Beat. “I went to public school [in New York] and I think the Korean War was one paragraph sandwiched between World War Two and the Vietnam War. And I found that really frustrating as a child because my grandparents, my aunts and uncles, all of my family experienced it.”

The Korean War is the backdrop of Kim’s widely hailed 2018 debut novel, If You Leave Me, in which she digs into her cultural roots to tell the story of a young woman’s life-altering choices as she and her family struggle to survive the war. Now a visiting assistant professor at Queens College, Kim was named to the National Book Foundation’s 5 Under 35 list in 2022, and her second novel, The Stone Home, will be published next year.



* More about Crystal Hana Kim and If You Leave Me



 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

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.