Discimus ut serviamus:
We learn so that we may serve.
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QC Celebrates Exemplary Alums at Gala
Three of the college’s outstanding graduates will be recognized for their achievements at the annual Queens College Gala on Wednesday, May 9, at Guastavino’s in Manhattan. This year’s honorees are President and CEO of Fashion Group International Margaret Hayes Adame ’61, a member of the boards for businesses and nonprofits, including the Movado Group and Montefiore Medical Center; former teacher and 3M scientist Joan Friedman Newmark ’61, who has held prominent positions in the St. Paul, Minnesota chapters of the League of Women Voters and Hadassah; and Comvest Partners Chairman Michael S. Falk ’84, who, with his wife, created the Michael and Annie Falk Foundation to support children, the environment, and the arts. The event is sure to be memorable, featuring excerpts from a fashion exhibition curated by Eugenia Paulicelli (European Languages) and jazz selections performed by students and alums from the Aaron Copland School of Music. To learn more about the gala and to purchase tickets,
click here.
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QC Gala honorees (l–r) Margaret Hayes Adame, Joan Friedman Newmark, and Michael S. Falk.
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Time to Vote: Faculty and Student Elections This Week
Faculty
Election Week runs from 12:01 am Sunday, April 15, through 11:59 pm Saturday, April 21. All faculty are encouraged to become involved in the important work of campus governance by running for a position on the Academic Senate or the Faculty/Student Disciplinary Committee (FSDC). The Senate and the FSDC play critical roles in the formulation of policy relating to the admission and retention of students, curriculum, granting of degrees, and campus life.
Note:
Since the adjunct positions are currently filled, only full-time faculty will be able to vote for the full-time positions during this election. Both full-time and adjunct faculty may run for the FSDC; however, you must run as a write-in. To vote,
click here
.
Students
The election period for students is shorter than it is for faculty: from 12:01 am Sunday, April 15 through 11:59 pm Thursday, April 19. Students can vote for Student Association leaders, including president, vice president, and senators. The elections occur entirely online, so you can vote 24 hours a day from wherever you are. Computers are also available throughout the campus, including in the library and the computer labs. To vote any time during the election period,
click here
.
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All-Women Hackathon.
On Sunday, April 15, the college hosted BQ GIRLHACKS, an all-women hackathon, for which 100 young women signed up to hack from 8 am to 9 pm. Teams were comprised of high school and CUNY students, and all are women pursuing studies in computer science and/or working in the technology sector. With workshops taught by QC students, it was a great opportunity for the college to recruit high school students interested in pursuing STEM careers. Pictured above with some of the hackers are (fourth from left) lead organizer Charusmita Madan, the president of the QC Student Chapter of the Association for Computing Machinery, and to her left is Melva Miller, Deputy Borough President of Queens, who is responsible for economic development, including tech.
Click here
to see the NY1 story about the event.
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Forbes
Ranks QC a 2018 “Best Value” College
The latest accolade the college has received comes from
Forbes
, which places QC on its latest list of America’s “Best Value” colleges.
Forbes
used the following categories to rank the colleges: net price, net debt, alumni earnings, timely graduation, school quality, and access for low-income students. Besides ranking as the fifth best value college in all of New York State, Queens finished seventh in the nation in the category of upper mobility, which is defined as helping students in the bottom 20% of income distribution reach the top 20% as indicated by their mid-career salaries.
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April, the Cruelest Month, is also National Poetry Month
National Poetry Month was inaugurated by the
Academy of American Poets
in 1996, and has since become the largest literary celebration in the world. In this and in the April 24 edition of
Q View,
we will be presenting work by some of the college’s distinguished poets. And don’t forget: April 26 is Poem in Your Pocket Day.
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Turns of Mind
Kimiko Hahn
Five thousand black birds fall from the sky--
not mid-fairytale but
News at Six
. Once established
neither army test nor pesticide are at fault,
the mind races for causative agents in case we’re next.
Ah!
Did the flock soar into some Invisible Divide
from another Dimension a la Twilight Zone?
Did the flock cross an exacting God? A ranger suggests
coincident fireworks
flushed the birds at such speed that they crashed into
buildings and power lines and in fact
necropsies do disclose
“blunt force trauma to brain and breast.”
Even so, since pyrotechnics are not sufficiently ominous
the blogosphere keeps alive a quest for the fabulous.
From
Brain Fever
, W.W. Norton & Co., 2014.
I Wanted to Write a Poem
Ali Jimale Ahmed
I wanted to write a poem on
Time and space
Continuity and conflict
How all four are manipulated
How strings are loosened
How bonds are arranged and rearranged
How time flies taking
With it all that is
How bones become brittle
And edifices lose their moorings
And how the sun still rises in the east
Exponential
Think
How tomorrow will emerge
From its socket
The dawn doesn’t say much
About the coming hours
The dawn
Is born of the dew of the night before
Tear drops on branches
Tear drops on grass
Shafts of joy that the
Night has come to an end
The joy is exponential
The hours
Only indices of the burning day
The dawn
Is conceived in the dream of the night before
What did you dream, brother, the night before?
What did you dream, sister, the night before?
Both poems from
When Donkeys Give Birth to Calves: totems, wars, horizons, diasporas
, Red Sea Press, 2012.
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Meet Your Makerspace
Stocked with microcontrollers, 3D printers, 3D scanners, soldering stations, electronic testing equipment, computerized embroidery machines, computer-programmable shop tools, and low- and high-tech supplies, QC’s new temporary Makerspace--located in the Media Commons on the first floor of the Rosenthal Library--invites all students, staff and faculty to visit. Makerspaces, if you don’t know the term, are community areas where people can design, fabricate, finish and collaborate on whatever projects they desire, such as robotics, wearables, physical computing, and interactive artwork. Successful makerspaces replace disposable consumerism with do-it-yourself, hands-on learning experiences. QC Makerspace’s location, a temporary workshop funded by a mix of grants from Queens College and CUNY, is furnished with tables and desks and decorated with signs and artwork like the
Periodic Chart of Adhesives
and a poster of the Maker’s Bill of Rights (example: “Metric or standard, not both”).
Whatever faculty, staff, and students want to do here, Maker-in-Residence Nick Normal and a rotating cast of student makerspace assistants are on hand several days a week to support the creative process: from helping people conceptualize a project, to showing them how to use the equipment on site. “I like to get artists to think about what technology can provide, and get technologists to think about art,” says Normal, who understands both camps: He’s an artist and veteran maker who learned computer coding in childhood.
“We want this to be a place where students and faculty come to facilitate learning for courses,” Normal continues. “It’s a shift in perspective. A library isn’t purely a head-down, book space. It can be a hands-on space.” The temporary makerspace will teach the library staff, too, explains Chief Librarian and Associate Dean Kristin Hart. “We hope to keep the pop-up going until the permanent site is ready,” says Hart. “We want to see how this space is used, and to learn how people are likely to use one in the future.”
QC’s Makerspace is open Monday through Friday to visit; use of the equipment in the space is by appointment only and is available to current QC students, staff, and faculty. Please email
makerspace@qc.cuny.edu
to make an appointment. For specific hours, visit
https://qcmakerspace.wordpress.com/
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Times
Columnist Collins to Speak
On Monday April 23, during free hour,
New York Times
columnist Gail Collins will be on campus to do a Q & A in the Q-Side Cafe and President’s Lounge. Students, faculty, and staff will get a chance to hear from the first woman to serve as editorial page editor of the
Times
and the recent winner of a George Polk Award for her career in journalism. The event is being sponsored by the
Knight News
and the journalism program. Refreshments will be served.
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QC Students Winners at Another Hackathon
More than 100 college students traveled to the Perkins School for the Blind in Watertown, MA, on Friday, April 13, for
PerkinsHacks
, the school’s assistive technology hackathon. Participants had 24 hours to solve real-life challenges faced by people with visual impairment. Challenges ranged from filling out paper forms in a doctor’s office to navigating a crowded college cafeteria.
The first-place winners in the category of Going the Extra Mile were three Queens College students: Sumaita Hussain, Ayo Johnson, and Margarita Zias. They created an app that allows gym-goers with visual impairment to reserve a specific machine in advance and request an optional “spotter” to help them use it.
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At the Godwin-Ternbach Museum:
Queens Selects
The first exhibition of its kind at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum,
Queens Selects
showcases objects from the collection chosen by QC faculty and staff. With objects spanning human history, this exhibition connects various individuals from different fields via their artistic preferences. Ranging from pre-Columbian sculpture to modern prints, these selections from the collection give us insight into the diverse personalities on campus and the art that calls out to them.
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Active Shooter Presentation by New York FBI Office
An agent from the New York office of the FBI will make a presentation on active shooters on Wednesday, April 25, at 12:15 pm in Kiely Hall 170. The presentation will cover both pre-attack behavioral indicators, or red flag behaviors, and how to identify, assess, and manage these to prevent future acts of violence. There will also be a brief overview of the Run, Hide, Fight protocol.
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Getting It in Writing
Addressing issues that range from gender and ethnic identity to contemporary theatre to cryptocurrencies, the online publication
QC Voices
reads like an op-ed section for twentysomethings. That’s the idea.
Voices
is a platform where QC columnists explore topics that matter to them. Through a competitive application process, eight to ten undergraduates are chosen as writers every year; each one is expected to file eight articles a semester, work that carries a $500 stipend.
“The writers are really impressive: passionate, knowledgeable, and super-curious,” says Jason Tougaw (English), who launched the site in 2012 under the co-sponsorship of Student Affairs and Writing@Queens. Today, Tougaw and Erin Spampinato, a CUNY Graduate Center digital fellow at QC, edit the copy students submit, while Patrick Smyth, another Graduate Center digital fellow, manages the technology behind the scenes. “The columnists do quite a bit of research for their pieces,” continues Tougaw. “As a faculty member, working with these students is one of the most gratifying things I’ve ever done.” You can read the results at qcvoices.qwriting.qc.cuny.edu or listen to the writers in person at a lunchtime event hosted by the publication at the Godwin-Ternbach Museum on April 25 during free hour.
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Focusing on a Legendary Music Professor
Celebrated in pre-WWII Europe as one of the most promising new voices in classical music and the first serious German composer to write film scores, Karol Rathaus saw his fame diminish after his forced immigration to the United States. Several American orchestras commissioned pieces from him, but on this campus, his colleagues and students were unaware of his European fame; he was best known as a beloved professor of composition. Now, a filmmaking team associated with QC--producer Lev Deych (Physics) and his sons, co-directors Daniil Deych ’08 and Sergei Deych ’11--is working on a documentary,
Discovering Karol Rathaus.
The Deyches themselves discovered Rathaus while preparing
Music for the barbed strings,
their multimedia program about Jewish composers who lived, worked, and, in many cases, died under the Nazi and Stalinist regimes. “We talked to Michael Hass, an expert on the subject of music lost under the Nazis,” recalls Sergei, a pianist who holds a master’s degree from the Aaron Copland School of Music. “Hass told us, ‘You’re sitting on a gold mine at Queens College, which has the Rathaus collection’”--the composer’s family donated his papers and recordings to the college’s library.
After learning about Rathaus and listening to his music, the Deyches were drawn to his story. As Soviet emigres, they feel kinship with someone who fled persecution and rebuilt his life somewhere new. They have outlined a movie that will incorporate archival material, commentary from people who knew Rathaus, visits to all the places he lived in Europe, and performances of some of his pieces.
Some interviews have already been filmed, including one with Professor Emeritus of Music Alexander Kouguell, who knew Rathaus
;
a friend of the Rathaus family, Patricia Schwarz, who passed away just a few weeks after being interviewed; and the renowned conductor and music scholar Maestro Leon Botstein.
“This movie is a work in progress,” observes Daniil, who majored in physics and film studies at QC and then went to Vancouver Film School.
“Any project takes a lot of time.”
While neither a musician nor a cinematographer, Lev, in his free time from teaching and research, moonlights as a producer, putting together live music shows for the 92Y and Brooklyn Public Library, as well as producing a few of his sons’ music videos. He shares Sergei’s and Daniil’s commitment to completing the documentary, and has refined an elevator pitch to share his enthusiasm with prospective donors. “I like his music,” says Lev. “I love underdogs. And as an immigrant myself, I entirely understand where Rathaus was coming from.”
The Rathaus festival, planned by the Copland School for next February, is an outgrowth of the film’s efforts. The Queens College Foundation
has established an account to facilitate fundraising
and
created a webpage
for the project
.
To learn more about
Discovering Karol Rathaus
and the people involved in making it,
click here
.
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How to Juggle Things this Summer
Juggling college classes with work, studies, family obligations, and leisure time is a talent that can be learned and honed. One way to improve your juggling is to take summer classes, which can lighten your credit load during the fall and spring. This Wednesday, April 18, a professional juggler (yes, there is such a thing) will join academic advisors and the QC Knights’ mascot, Sir Winsalot, in the Dining Hall during free hour. Come watch, enjoy the music, have some free Hershey’s kisses, and even take instruction on how to juggle while you consider what summer courses may work for you. Remember: Summer is coming . . . soon.
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Summer Session Cybersecurity Course
A new 10-week course on cybersecurity, The Threat Within, is now open for registration. The course, which will be held on Wednesdays from June 6 to August 22, is part of a unique education–industry collaboration between QC and the Cybersecurity Workforce Alliance. Students will work in teams with industry mentors, faculty, and teaching assistants using iQ4, an online technology platform. The goal is to enable students to identify and analyze the depth and breadth of cybersecurity challenges from multiple disciplines. For more information and to register
, click here.
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Copland School Book Sale
Previously canceled due to snowy weather, the Aaron Copland School of Music Book Sale will now be held on Thursday, April 19, between 11 am and 4 pm in the atrium of the Music Building. Sale items include donated books on music, scores, recordings (CDs, DVDs, LPs, cassettes, VHS tapes), and other books. Hardcover books and scores will be $3, softcover $2, and recordings will be 50¢ per LP/cassette, $1 per CD, $2 per DVD, and 50¢ per VHS tape. All proceeds fund the purchase of new books, scores, and recordings. Items in the sale are donations to the Music Library.
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Be a Big Buddy
Interested in being an inspiring mentor to a homeless child? Then join the Big Buddy Program, a mentoring program designed to foster an engaging learning and mentoring experience for QC students and homeless children in an equity-based, empowering, and socially just context. Big Buddies receive service learning hours, academic credit, and a lifetime learning experience. For more information, come to a Program Recruitment and Information Session on Wednesday, April 18, from noon to 1 pm in Powdermaker 018. Information:
bigbuddy@qc.cuny.edu
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Career and Networking Fair
Queens Connect: A Career & Networking Fair
will be held on Wednesday, April 18, 4–7 pm in the Q Café in the Dining Hall. Students are invited to connect with local employers, organizations, nonprofit industries, and professional associations in the education and liberal arts fields for experiential learning, internships, and other opportunities. Free giveaways while supplies last. For more information
click here.
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Stipends for Unpaid Internships
Students who will have unpaid internships this summer or fall may be eligible for a $1,500 stipend. The early submission deadline is April 24 and the final deadline is May 1. For more information
click here
.
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Building Futures: Joseph Hill
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Living His Life for Music and Those in Need
As a boy in Los Angeles County, Joseph Hill sometimes accompanied his adopted mother, a nurse, to places where the homeless gathered. “We’d give out sandwiches and clothes in the park or Taco Bell parking lots at midnight,” recalls Hill, whose parents stressed the importance of civic engagement.
“I could have been an orphan moving in and out of foster homes but instead I was adopted,” he says. “So I feel like my own life is a civic engagement project!”
An opera singer who expects to graduate this spring with dual degrees in Classical Performing Arts and Business Management of Performing Arts, Hill is committed to music and helping others.
Both were part of his life from his earliest years. When Hill’s mother became more deeply involved with her church ministry, he volunteered as an usher and began to sing in its youth choir. He also joined choirs in middle school and high school, focusing on classical music as a teen. At the same time, he was active circulating petitions and organizing events for causes he believed in.
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What’s in a Building’s Name?
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Colwin Hall
Colwin Hall is named for the husband-and-wife team, Laura and Arthur, who spent their 30-year careers at QC and won international recognition for their work with the electron microscope, which helped uncover the complex process that takes place when a sperm cell fertilizes an egg.
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Distinguished Professor of English
Kimiko Hahn
is president of the Poetry Society of America; her collection of poems,
The Unbearable Heart
, received an American Book Award.
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It’s easy to think of manufacturing as a dead letter or, at best, as a mere holdover from the past. Certainly that is how it often appears in policy debates and the media, especially since so many jobs have disappeared or are slated for replacement by robotics. In
Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
(W.W. Norton),
Joshua Freeman
(History), who is best known for his social and labor histories, has authored a beautifully written study of the rise, spread, and fate of large factories around the world. Despite the rhetoric of living in a postindustrial society, he reminds us, “The factory still defines our world”; some 8 percent of American workers continue to toil in factories while “worldwide, we are in a heyday of manufacturing.” Indeed, “We live in a factory-made world.”
Behemoth
traces the global movements of manufacturing frontiers, beginning with Europe and the United States in such sectors as textiles, then moving to other continents in today’s outsourcing of old and new commodities such as electronics. These movements have left a very material footprint in huge concentrations of capital and workers, the growth of cities, an explosion in business and consumer commodities, and immense environmental impacts as well as the encroachment of transportation and markets in virtually every corner of the world. Freeman views this history in interdisciplinary fashion similar to recent studies in the history of capitalism--probing the giant factories’ geographic, economic, social, aesthetic, cultural, and ecological dimensions and putting that history into perspective as an ongoing, transformative thread of contemporary life. The book has been widely and enthusiastically reviewed as a
tour de force
of provocative questions and historical synthesis on a matter that, contrary to received wisdom, still has purchase in the world today.
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On April 11
Mara Einstein
(Media Studies) appeared at the Mid-Manhattan Library to talk about advertising and her book
Advertising: What Everyone Needs to Know®
. . .
Alternatives to Privatizing Public Education: Festschrift in Honor of Dale D. Johnson
(Routledge), coedited by
Stephen Farenga
(SEYS) and Daniel Ness (St. John’s Univ.), received a 2018 Society of Professors of Education Outstanding Book Award . . .
Nancy Foasberg
(Library) was elected vice chair of the Literature in English section of the Association of College and Research Libraries . . .
Two QC students won awards in the LaborArt’s CUNY
Making Work Visible
writing/art contest:
neuroscience major
Yocheved Friedman
won in the poetry category and
political science major
Frances Raybaud
won in the fiction category.
The awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday, April 18, at 6 pm at the Graduate Center for Worker Education in Manhattan. All are invited to attend . . .
Tamar Lichter
, a 2017 graduate of the Macaulay Honors College at QC,
won a $114,000 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
. Her award is in algebra, number theory, and combinatorics . . .
Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology
(University of Georgia Press) by
Deirdre Cooper Owens
(History) won the Darlene Clark Hine Award for the best book in African American women’s and gender history. The award was given by the Organization of American Historians, the largest professional society dedicated to the teaching and study of American history . . .
Students working with
Stephen Pekar
(SEES) were the subject of a
NY1 story
about how they are examining samples Pekar brought back from the recently discovered continent Zealandia to see if these might hold clues to the future climate of our planet.
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C. Rutherford (Rudy) Fischer (Physics) passed away in March after a long illness. Rudy received his bachelor’s degree in physics from City College of New York in 1954 and his PhD in physics from Yale University in 1960. He joined the physics faculty at Queens College in 1964 as associate professor, and was promoted to full professor in 1970. His research focused on condensed matter theory, and he received numerous grants and published over two dozen papers. After retiring in the late 1990s, Rudy enjoyed travelling and hiking, and climbed Mt. Kilimanjaro twice. He was a generous donor to the college’s astronomy program. Several years ago a plaque in his honor was placed outside a physics teaching laboratory near the second-floor Science Building entrance and across from the Science Café. Rudy is survived by his daughter. The family suggests that donations in his memory be directed to either the Sierra Club or the Nature Conservancy.
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The
Q View
is produced by the
Office of Communications and Marketing.
Comments and suggestions for future news items
and the 8Oth Anniversary Website
are welcome.
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