Discimus ut serviamus: We learn so that we may serve.
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The QC community comprises countless individuals who performed military service for the United States. These dedicated men and women will be honored with a virtual pre-Veterans Day tribute today—Tuesday, November 10—from 1 to 1:45 pm. President Frank H. Wu is among the prominent speakers. Everyone is invited to watch the event.
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More than 60 QC alumni lost their lives in World War II; to learn about them, as well as those who were fortunate enough to come back home, visit the History Department’s QC Alumni WWII Veterans Project.
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Covering Campus in a Magazine |
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The fall 2020 edition of Queens, the college’s alumni magazine, is available online. This issue features an enlightening Q-and-A with President Frank H. Wu, profiles of accomplished QC graduates, accounts of the college’s rapid transition to a remote model, and a round-up of campus news. The magazine is produced by the Office of Communications and Marketing in collaboration with the Office of Institutional Advancement and Alumni Relations.
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App-ed Tracing Tool
COVID Alert NY, a mobile contract tracing app, helps people protect themselves from the pandemic and strengthens contact tracing programs statewide. The app notifies users if they have been in close contact—defined as within six feet for at least 10 minutes—with someone who has tested positive for COVID-19.
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COVID Alert NY is completely anonymous; it measures proximity but not geographic location, and does not track or collect personal or location data from phones. Upon learning of possible exposure, individuals can rapidly make a plan to stay safe while maintaining their privacy and security. (If you have been exposed to coronavirus, please notify the college as soon as possible by submitting a report.)
COVID Alert NY is available in several languages to anyone 18 or older who lives, works, or attends college in New York or New Jersey and can be downloaded from the Google Play Store or Apple App Store. Complete details are available here.
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Top Lawyers Team Up for Panel Discussion
Two alumni will talk about their distinguished legal careers in the next virtual Professionals on Campus program from At Home with QC. The panel discussion, taking place today—Tuesday, November 10 from 1:45 to 2:45 pm—will feature Paul Frimmer ’66, partner at Loeb & Loeb, and Loren L. Forrest, Jr. ’92, partner at Holland & Knight.
Frimmer enjoys a national reputation as an attorney specializing in estate planning, wills and trusts, probate and trust administration, postmortem tax planning, probate litigation, art law, charitable giving, and tax issues relating to these matters. Forrest is part of the Labor, Employment, and Benefits Group at Holland & Knight, where he represents management in all aspects of employment litigation, labor relations management, and human resources counseling.
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Strategic Plan Virtual Town Halls
The college’s next strategic plan will establish overall priorities for 2021-2026, as well as benchmarks for each year. Members of the QC community can participate in the planning process through Zoom town halls scheduled for Monday, November 30; Tuesday, December 1; Friday, December 4; and Monday, December 7, as described in a recent message from President Frank H. Wu. The final session of the semester, on Thursday, December 10, will be a forum for students. Attendees must register in advance. Watch your email for instructions on how to RSVP for the town hall you want to attend. Five additional town halls are planned for the spring. You can directly visit the strategic plan landing page on the college website for background information and to share comments or questions.
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Knight News Series Showcases Alumnus |
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The Knight News Visiting Journalists Series will feature QC grad Amir Khafagy, a freelance politics and urban development reporter, on November 11 from 12:15 to 1:40 pm on Zoom.
Khafagy holds a BA in Urban Studies and an MA in Urban Affairs from Queens College. His writing has been featured in Vice, Bloomberg, Truth Out, City Limits, Dame, Talk Poverty, Jacobin, and In These Times. He has been awarded The New Economics Reporting Fellowship, The Economic Hardship Reporting Grant, The Talk Poverty Writer Workshop Fellowship, and the Asian American Writers Workshop Open City Fellowship.
Zoom meeting ID: 830 4900 7559
Passcode: 889323 036482
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World of Opportunity for Certified Language Teachers |
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Jennifer Eddy, associate professor and director of World Language Education at QC, is bullish on the outlook for junior high and high school teachers specializing in languages other than English. The coronavirus pandemic notwithstanding, “I can’t certify teachers fast enough,” she says. “There’s a serious shortage nationwide. Many districts will take our candidates as interns even though they have a little farther to go; our candidates are that good.”
World Language Education at QC offers training for individuals at every step of their career, from undergraduates to people seeking post-bacc certification or an MSEd to stay certified to teach Chinese, French, Italian, and Spanish in grades 7-12. The newest offering, the MAT in Critical Languages, prepares teachers for initial grade 7-12 certification in five additional languages that have particular value for national security and are commonly spoken on campus and elsewhere in Queens—Arabic, Hindi, Korean, Russian, and Urdu. Students in the MAT program work toward a master’s degree and eligibility for professional certification.
The field of language education, Eddy notes, is particularly appealing to would-be career changers who are thinking about going back to school. “Whether it’s five years or 20 years after they graduated, we welcome them with open arms,” she says.
Understanding the Nature of Language
Language education itself has changed in recent years, emphasizing real-world skills over verb conjugation drills. “Memorized lists without authentic context is an old-fashioned way of teaching and learning,” observes Eddy. Instead, she and her faculty prepare teachers to immerse classes in practical tasks for intercultural competence, such as how to reach people for a health fair, or how to stock a fashion boutique. “The nature of language is unpredictable,” Eddy adds. “You never know what people are going to say. You have to prepare learners for the inevitable unexpected.”
World Language Education at QC also provides courses in backward design for articulated curriculum and performance assessment, since many teachers end up being solely responsible for their programs. (A promotional video highlights this aspect of QC’s offerings.) With the current need for remote education, new apps and technology have been added to the mix. Prospective candidates should apply now for the Spring 2021 cohort.
To learn more about World Language Education at QC, click here.
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Trans Awareness Month
For November—Trans Awareness Month—QC organizations and their off-campus partners are hosting virtual events concerning transgender and gender-nonconforming people and the issues they face.
On Thursdays at 3 pm, the Queens College Gender, Love and Sexuality Alliance/GLASA will lead Queer Connect, a series of discussions focusing this month on the TG/GNC community. All are welcome. Queer Connect is co-sponsored by the Office of Student Development and Leadership at Queens College and the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives.
Meeting ID: 838 3822 3048
Passcode: 917817
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Shane Windmeyer, founder and executive director of Campus Pride, will lead Stop the Hate! Safer Space Training on Friday, November 13, 2020, from 1 to 3 pm. This program teaches CUNY student leaders, faculty, and staff how to create more inclusive campus and virtual spaces for the LGBTQIAA+ community—and train their peers to do the same. Certificates of completion will be sent to participants. Pre-registration is not required.
Stop the Hate! is brought to you by the Queens College Office of Student Development and Leadership in partnership with LaGuardia Community College and the New York City Council through the offices of Daniel Dromm (District 25) and Speaker Corey Johnson. The event is co-sponsored by the Queens College Gender, Love and Sexuality Alliance/GLASA, the Women and Gender Studies Department at Queens College, and the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives.
Meeting ID: 891 5843 7795
Passcode: 798981
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Transgender Day of Remembrance--Friday, November 20, 2020—honors the memory of victims of anti-transgender violence. QC will mark this day at 4 pm with a talk by Hunter College alumnx, educator, and trans activist Gracie Manning, followed by a multimedia presentation by Barbara Salva of Long Island TDOR and Gender Equality New York/GENY.
This event is brought to you by the Queens College Office of Student Development and Leadership in partnership with LaGuardia Community College and the New York City Council through the offices of Daniel Dromm (District 25) and Speaker Corey Johnson. The Queens College Gender, Love and Sexuality Alliance/GLASA, the Women and Gender Studies Department at Queens College, and the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives are co-sponsors.
Meeting ID: 826 9924 1994
Passcode: 077235
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On Monday, November 23, at 6 pm, Coach Mario Marin—from Gay Fight Club at Team Red Planet in Bed-Stuy—will present a trans-inclusive self-defense workshop. This empowering body-positive and gender-affirming session will teach trans and non-binary people, as well as all members of the LGBTQIA+ community and their allies, how to protect themselves from hate violence.
The self-defense workshop is brought to you by the Queens College Office of Student Development and Leadership in partnership with LaGuardia Community College and the New York City Council through the offices of Daniel Dromm (District 25) and Speaker Corey Johnson. The event is co-sponsored by Queens College Gender, Love and Sexuality.
Meeting ID: 892 3734 8553
Passcode: 445125
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NYC Men Teach Holds Town Hall
The next NYC Men Teach Town Hall, “Teaching to Save Black Lives: On Teaching, Protesting & Revolutionizing Education,” will take place on Wednesday, November 18, from noon to 1 pm, and feature Paul C. Harris (associate professor of Education, the University of Virginia). This virtual event is open to the entire QC community; RSVP.
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Best Practices in Developing and Delivering a Vaccine
Who should enroll in clinical trials? Who should receive a vaccine first? What is an equitable distribution? These are among the issues that will be explored in a Zoom session on Tuesday, November 17, at 4 pm, when Doug MacKay discusses the Ethics of the COVID-19 Vaccine. MacKay is an associate professor of public policy and the Duncan and Rebecca MacRae Fellow at the Center for Bioethics at the University of North Carolina. Prior to that, he was a bioethics fellow at the National Institute for Health. This event is being presented by the Philosophy Department.
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Alum Performs Flamenco Jazz |
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Music Makers, a Kupferberg Center for the Arts series featuring ACSM alumni, returns on Tuesday, November 17, at 7 pm with a concert by flamenco jazz pianist Alex Conde ’18 and his accomplished colleagues, including vocalist Israel Fernandez.
The son of professional singers, Conde manifested talent early and began his formal training at age 8. He came to QC after completing an undergraduate degree at Berklee College of Music in Boston. “I had a great time at ACSM,” he says. “I made many friends and got to discover New York City while doing so. It was truly a wonderful experience to complete a master’s degree and study with great professors.”
Working in his distinctive niche, Conde has performed throughout the United States, recorded CDs in tribute to Thelonious Monk and Bud Powell, and established the Piano Flamenco Institute of New York—now holding classes online. Through Music Makers, jazz aficionados can hear this unique artist from the comfort of their living rooms. The concert will be followed by a livestreamed Q-and-A session with Conde.
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Among the many hats he wears, Joseph Cohen (Sociology) is director of the Queens Podcast Lab—a project that produces both scholarly podcasts and research on what he describes as a “nascent media market.” His most recent podcast, launched with Jason Tougaw (English), is the QC Pod, which focuses on news and people around campus. With Tougaw’s help, the QC Pod explores not only the social sciences but the arts and humanities.
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“The QC Pod is a podcast where we meet students, faculty, and alumni to discuss the projects that they’re working on. Maybe it’s a book, maybe it’s an enterprise,” explains Cohen. “We really were looking for ways to reproduce campus life—finding cool things about your school, or meeting interesting people, those happenstance kinds of encounters that weren’t going to happen while we were all remote. And I thought, wouldn’t it be great if we could have a little show where at least people could get some exposure to everything that we’ve got going on at school?”
Like other projects at the Queens Podcast Lab, the QC Pod combines faculty research with mentoring student interns. Before coming to QC, Cohen had worked as a marketer and taught in the marketing department at Temple University; an economic sociologist, his research interests involve marketing, consumption, and personal finance. The Podcast Lab was conceived as a “field research site which is studying content creation entrepreneurship. We learn about how to run media enterprises by trying to create and run them,” he says. “There’s a new cultural market that’s opening up where bloggers, Instagrammers, YouTubers, and podcasters are displacing traditional media firms, and it’s creating spaces for people to become little media outlets unto themselves. We are interviewing iTune-ranked podcasters. We’re looking at what makes organizations tick, what are the keys to success, how do they develop businesses, how do you monetize? The idea is to develop a body of research that will help people understand how this market works before it gets monetized.”
Opportunities for Students
In Cohen’s view, “That’s the academic part, and there’s also an instructional part. We train students to produce audio and run social marketing campaigns. These types of skills, like blogging and social media content creation, can be valuable if students want to go into marketing or communications careers.” Through federal work-study, he can offer paid internships to those eligible for financial aid. “It’s a super opportunity for us to offer great opportunities to really gifted students.”
Their first intern, Anika Chowdhury ’18, was hired at DreamWorks as a production coordinator, which he finds a testament to the value of what they offer students. “That’s the kind of job that an Ivy League kid with media ambitions would want,” says Cohen. “She was our first producer for our original podcast. It was Annex Sociology Podcast, which is my own podcast that I run. We have regularly registered as a top 100 social science podcast, and some of our more popular episodes have broken top 20 of social science and science.” Students emerge from their internships with experience at both established and startup podcasts.
QC Pod is still finding its sea legs, with 10 pilot episodes planned for now. Cohen has been recruiting students while he and Tougaw take turns hosting episodes, such as a recent one Tougaw hosted with an MFA student who wrote a book of poetry on “why he hates Florida.” Cohen believes that CUNY underestimates itself. “When you look at who we get, we’re getting crazy good people. It’s a great institution.”
Cohen hopes that QC Pod will become another media source for the campus. “We’d love to have as many people hosting as possible. Jason and I are hoping that we’ll build the organization and eventually we’ll hand it off, and it will become more self-sustaining where students make their own content or feel free to try their hand at recording an episode. I don’t want to administer this. I just want to get something rolling.”
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Your Best Shot at Health
With the arrival of flu season, members of the QC community are urged to get flu shots. The customary free shots will not be offered on campus, which is operating 99 percent remotely. However, WorkWell NYC is making free flu shots available to faculty, staff, their dependents, and students at multiple locations: WorkWell NYC clinics, participating pharmacies, and offices of in-network physicians. So MaskUp, get a flu shot, and be healthy! For details, click here.
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In Memoriam: Joyce Wallace ’61
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Doctor and activist Joyce Wallace, who tried to halt the spread of AIDS among prostitutes and drug addicts, passed away on October 14 of a heart attack.
After graduating from QC with a degree in history, Wallace—nee Malakoff—completed pre-med requirements at Columbia University’s School of General Studies and earned an MD at SUNY Downstate in Brooklyn. Following an internship and residencies in the New York area, she briefly ran a private practice in North Conway, New Hampshire.
In 1974, divorced but retaining her husband’s surname, Wallace moved back to New York and opened an office in Greenwich Village. Seven years later, she was in the vanguard of physicians who reported a rise in the incidence of Kaposi’s sarcoma—a previously rare cancer—among gay men, as well as the disease’s connection to the syndrome that would become known as AIDS. Subsequently, through studies she conducted among prostitutes, she documented links between intravenous drug use and HIV infection.
Determined to help a reviled and vulnerable population, Wallace attempted to establish a facility where streetwalkers could get showers, clothes, food and, if drug-free, an interim home. When two neighborhoods rebuffed her plans, she created a clinic in a van that she drove around rough districts; on occasion, she brought clients back to her own home.
Wallace launched the Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases—which merged with the community health center Harlem United in 2007—and served on the faculties of New York Medical College, Stony Brook University, and the precursor to the Icahn School of Medicine. In 1992, she received the $10,000 Brooke Russell Astor Award for contributing substantially to New York City’s betterment. She is survived by her daughter Julia Query and son Ari Kahn, their spouses, and four grandchildren.
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Heard Around the Virtual Campus |
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Madeleine Hunt-Ehrlich (Media Studies) was named to Filmmaker Magazine’s annual list of 25 New Faces of Independent Film. The script for Madame Negritude, her film about the Caribbean writer Suzanne Cesaire, was awarded a San Francisco Film Society Grant of $25,000; her short film Spit on the Broom was screened in September at a Whitney Museum series curated by Cauleen Smith and Michael Gillespie . . . . Robin Naughton, QC's Web and Digital Services librarian, will moderate a panel and give closing remarks at the 10th anniversary conference of the Medical Heritage Library on Friday, November 13, from 11 am to 5 pm. Naughton is vice president of this library, a collaborative digital project that provides open access to resources on the history of medicine and the health sciences. The conference is free and open to all; register at EventBrite . . . . John Waldman (Biology) received a grant of approximately $55,000 from the Hudson River Foundation for “Calibrating eDNA Signals for Restoration of Alewife Runs Under Highly Controlled Field Conditions” . . . . President Frank H. Wu is among the experts providing commentary in “Scientists in the Crosshairs: What should Chinese and Chinese-American researchers do amid U.S. crackdown on ‘China ties?,’” posted on the news platform Sup China. In a virtual ceremony on Monday, November 16, at 1 pm, Wu will receive a 2020 John Hope Franklin Award from Diverse: Issues in Higher Education. Named for the celebrated historian and educator, Diverse’s Franklin Awards recognize individuals and institutions whose contributions to higher education are consistent with the highest standards of excellence.
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