In Baruch Elevator, Student and Teacher Reunite After 20 Years

For students, faculty, and staff, thoughts of Baruch’s elevators typically evoke a variety of frustrations: remembrances of long lines, out of order signs, and tight squeezes. As in most busy Manhattan high-rises, this experience has become practically archetypal. But, as many long-time members of the Baruch community know, sources of consternation can suddenly, and unexpectedly, give way to moments of surprise and delight. 

In the middle of the second day of the Appreciative Inquiry Summit, an event which is part of the College’s five-year strategic planning process, Harold Ramdass, a Lecturer in the English Department, made his way to the elevator on the 14^th floor of the Newman Vertical Campus Building. He held the door as a woman ran towards it, and as she entered her familiar appearance struck him. Unsure of exactly how he knew her, he decided not to approach. Then suddenly, he realized who she was. “What is your name? Are you…Debra Phillip?” he asked. She turned surprised, tilting her name tag towards him. “Yes, I’m Debra Phillip.” “You were my student!” he said. They hadn’t seen each other in twenty years.

New Faculty Introductions

Meet new faculty members Dr. Sabrina Kizzie, Keisha Allan, and Alex Manevitz in the latest of our series of video introductions. 

An integral part of the Great Works of World Literature, a course required for every Baruch undergraduate regardless of major, is the Joel Segall Great Works Reading Series. Each semester, a group of professional actors gather at the Baruch Performing Arts Center to present a staged reading of a dramatic work. The experience has been fundamental for students exploring the many literary genres and modes covered by the typical Great Works syllabus. Last year, in lieu of an in person performance, the Reading Series presented a "handkerchief edit" of Shakespeare's Othello where actors collaborated on a YouTube video, interspersed with readings from the text, which explored the play’s new resonance in the wake of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was well received, but nothing compares to hearing a dramatic text reverberate through a theatre.

This fall, in another sign of the campus’ recent rebirth, the actors returned to BPAC, again directed by Christopher Scott, for a stirring interpretation of Sophocles’ masterpiece of ancient Greek tragic art, Antigone. “You can do it really well with a small cast, so it lends itself to this kind of reading,” said Great Works Coordinator, Allison Deutermann. “We also wanted to explore how a classic that gets taught often manages to open up a lot of important questions about justice and speaking truth to power, things that feel very alive and important.” The Great Works Reading Series is yet another example of the way Weissman touches every Baruch student regardless of major or affiliation. “The play reads really well of course,” Deutermann said, “but you have to see it for the full resonance to land. We’re so happy to be able to bring that back for students to experience.”

Next semester, the series continues with a dramatic work culled from the modern period. 

13 Drivers' Licenses Comes to Baruch

This past week, The Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center presented the portable exhibition, 13 Drivers' Licenses which tells the individual stories of thirteen Jewish citizens who were persecuted during the Nazi-era in Lichtenfels, Germany. After thirteen driver’s licenses that once belonged to Jewish residents were discovered in the basement of the county office in the small Bavarian town, the county commissioner disobeyed government orders to have the artefacts digitized and sent to the state archive, and instead handed them over to a local high school teacher. In 2017, the teacher and his students embarked on a research project to determine the license-holders’ fates. They found that five of the Jews and their families were murdered in the Holocaust. Remarkably, the students were able to locate the descendants of the surviving license-holders and inform them of their discovery. In a compelling lecture and accompanying pop-up exhibition, Lisa Salko recounted how the high schoolers contacted her and how she traveled to Germany to unveil a lost chapter of her family history.

With her new book, Broken Irelands: Literary Form in Post-Crash Irish Fiction, Professor of English Mary McGlynn takes a fresh look at the textual strategies and syntactical patterns used by contemporary Irish authors to represent Ireland during the Celtic Tiger and the global recession that followed in 2008. 

“At the time, there was a huge outcry that the artworld, and the literary world in particular, was not responding to or engaging with this economic reality. But it always seemed to me that there were Irish novels doing that work. Maybe they weren't engaging with issues like inequality and overconsumption directly, but they were definitely thinking about them,” McGlynn said.

• Poet Donika Kelly "From The Renunciations: A Poetry Reading." - November 17th, 11AM - 12PM, Mishkin Gallery