By Jhaneel Lockhart
Dr. Arthur Lewin doesn’t need a textbook for the black studies classes he teaches at Baruch. He has personally lived through many of the historical events that his students learn about, and often finds that the textbooks have gotten it wrong or don’t tell enough of the story.
Lewin was around five years old at the beginning of the civil rights movement, and recalls hearing names like Martin Luther King and Malcolm X in conversations everywhere, and watching their speeches on a tiny black and white TV set in the Brownville projects where he grew up in Brooklyn. And his lessons, like the one he recently taught about Adam Clayton Powell, often include a bit of personal history.
It is this personal touch that has earned Lewin a reputation as an outstanding teacher both inside and out of the classroom, where he serves as a mentor for many his students, forming life-long bonds with a select few.
“That’s my job, that’s what I’m paid for, so that’s what I do,” he said during an interview in his office, where dozens of awards litter the wall above his desk. “I’m supposed to be here to spend time with the students, so I don’t think I’m doing anything exceptional.”
To Lewin, the mere suggestion that he is doing something extraordinary is absurd. He often steers conversations away from his achievements, preferring to point out what others have done. When a former student began praising his work during a recent interview, he left the room abashed.
His influence has extended beyond the classroom to affect the lives of many of the people who take his classes. He can still remember the names of students he taught 32 years ago when he arrived at Baruch, and maintains contact with them even today.
“We go above and beyond teacher-student. We always have,” said Rajen Persaud, who graduated from Baruch in 2003, but returns regularly to speak to Lewin’s classes. Persaud credits the professor for encouraging him to write his first novel “Making it Through College,” and later, “Why Black Men Love White Women,” both of which are assigned readings in Lewin’s classes.
Students who become close with Lewin not only gain a friend but a person who is invested in both their professional and personal success.
“The person most responsible for me being who I am today is him,” said Cashis Wesley, another former student who took his class in 2001 and went on to minor in black studies. “He gave me the idea that knowing about black people and our history gave me an identity. It gave me a future. He was my father figure in place of a person who was never there for me.”
Wesley recently visited a session of Lewin’s Politics in Black America, a course created based on another student’s suggestion. The sight of an unfamiliar person in the classroom is not unusual for Lewin’s students, as he often invites past students to come back and speak to his current classes or just to listen in.
The students seemed only mildly surprised when Wesley, after being asked by Lewin if he had anything to add to the lesson, stalked up to the whiteboard, picked up the dry erase marker and began schooling a panel of students who had just given a presentation on class structure in America.
Lewin, who sits among the students and asks questions during presentations, believes he has much to learn from his students, and his classes evolve according to their needs.
“It’s exciting because as you get older, if you still seem relevant to the students, it gives you energy and you feel like you’re still part of things,” he said. “And the only way you can do that is by listening to the young people. You’ve got to listen to them, you’ve got to discuss things with them.”
He sets aside time two days each week for that very purpose. And his office, filled with an eclectic collection of books, DVDs and memorabilia he’s collected over the years, can resemble a salon, with three or four students at a time picking his brain.
The professor attributes his ability to connect with students on this level to the nature of the subject he teaches. “When the students come into the classroom, they don’t treat it as just another class because very often the black and Latino students come there thinking they can get answers to questions they’ve been wondering about all their life and students that are not black and Latino come to the class and they think they will get insights into the nature of race in America, which is a fundamental question in this country.”
His interest in black studies began when he was an undergraduate student at Queens College and he became involved with the black consciousness movement. Influenced by his early acquaintances with the civil rights movement and the mass movement during his college years demanding the implementation of ethnic studies in universities, he pursued a bachelor’s degree, and later a Ph.D. in sociology.
Now, he continues his education by constantly following and analyzing current events. He can find subliminal messages almost in almost every film, image or published material, and encourages his students to never take anything at face value. As a result, his classroom is a forum for questioning and debate.
“That’s what it’s supposed to be,” said Lewin. “So I’m glad they like it but all I’m doing is what I understood the academy was always supposed to be.”