Author: Beth Harpaz

The Brooklyn Public Library has produced a literary walking tour that includes a number of writers with CUNY connections, including Baruch Weissman’s very own Professor Bridgett Davis, author of the acclaimed memoir The World According to Fannie Davis. The tour is downloadable in audio or text format as a cellphone app.

Davis is mentioned in connection with Weeksville, a historic site marking a 19th century African American community in what is now Crown Heights. The Weeksville Heritage Center‘s collection includes newspapers written by African American journalists and documents that were used to teach literacy to African Americans who’d escaped slavery.

“That history inspired Davis to create the Words@Weeksville program, which is still running today,” the tour states, adding that when Davis worked at Weeksville, she “spoke about the power that writing and journalism once gave to this self-sufficient community of free Blacks. It was a means of self-determination and self-documentation.”

Responding to a tweet about the tour, Davis tweeted: “Any chance to be included on the same list as both @JackieWoodson and Biggie Smalls is a good thing! #Brooklyn is lit.”

Hip-hop legend and lyricist Biggie Smalls is memorialized with a stop on the block where he grew up, St. James between Fulton and Gates. Woodson, who grew up in Bushwick, is the author of more than 20 books and has won the National Book Award, a MacArthur genius grant, and many other prizes.

Davis is one of many authors with CUNY connections on the tour. The others are Hunter alumnae Pauli Murray, Paule Marshall, and Kaitlyn Greenidge; Tanwi Nandini Islam, who holds an MFA from Brooklyn College, and City College alumnus Alfred Kazin, who taught at the CUNY Graduate Center.

By now you’ve probably heard the good news: Jessica Lang has been named dean of Baruch Weissman after serving as interim dean for 16 months during what was “arguably one of the most challenging periods in all of higher education,” as Baruch Provost Linda Essig put it.

“Your tenure as interim dean came at the most critical time when we were all on survival mode and focused on daily challenges,” said Professor Pablo Peixoto (Natural Sciences). “You got us through it all and put the future back in our perspectives. With your kind leadership, you reminded us of the value we bring to the table and inspired us to roll up our sleeves. Thank you for your catalyzing leadership, and here’s to many more victories!”

Professor Shelly Eversley, interim chair of the Department of Black and Latino Studies, called Dean Lang “an incredible collaborator and a compassionate leader who listens to and cares about the students, faculty, and staff in Weissman and across the college community.”

Dean Lang is also the founding William Newman Director of Baruch’s Sandra Kahn Wasserman Jewish Studies Center, and a scholar and expert in the fields of early American fiction and Jewish American and Holocaust literature. Her most recent book, which she co-edited, is Off the Derech: Leaving Orthodox Judaism.

We’re so grateful to the three outstanding alumni who helped us create a 30-second look at our corporate communication master’s degree program.

For more information on the program, click here. Watch the video slideshow below or click here.

A string of alumni who worked as assistants for the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program and/or who interned at The New York Review of Books are launching careers in the publishing industry.

Baruch alumna Ashley Candelario, a former NYRB intern, recently got a job at HarperOne Group (HarperCollins Español, HarperVia, Amistad, HarperOne) in the publicity department. Alumna Nikkia Rivera, who does publicity for Flatiron Books, was a Harman program assistant. Katherine Hernandez, who works at Simon & Schuster, was also a Harman assistant.

The pathway to the publishing industry “seems to be a lovely pattern for former Harman assistants,” said Professor Bridgett Davis (Journalism), former director of the Harman Program.

Student Sable Gravesandy and Baruch alumna Anacaona Rodriguez Martinez, who are both interning at The New York Review of Books, recently earned a double byline in NYRB for an interview with Ed Park, a novelist, journalist, former executive editor at Penguin Press, and founding editor of The Believer magazine.

“Our Harman interns are doing us proud over there,” said Harman Program director Esther Allen, who coordinates the NYRB internships for Baruch students.

Rodriguez is studying for her master’s at CUNY’s Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

Candelario decided to pursue a career in publishing after her stint at NYRB. The internship provided “the skill set and experience that made me confident in pursuing other internships, and eventually, my current role” at HarperCollins, she said.

We can’t stop loving this photo of the cast and crew of And Then There Was Us posing with Baruch President S. David Wu after last night’s performance.

NYC is back, baby, and live theater at Baruch is part of it! Just wow.

The show at Mason Hall is sold out but sources tell us if you get to the box office at 7:15 pm, you just might score standby tickets.

This text is reprinted from a Twitter thread by Professor Els de Graauw about an inspiring speaker she hosted in a recent class: 

“In my ‘Immigrant Cities’ course, I have amazing students. Behind them stand amazing parents. The mother of my student Marc serves on the leadership team of @unitehere100, and she visited our class today. Sussie Lozada is the union’s Secretary-Treasurer.

“…In an hour-long conversation, Sussie shared with us the work that the union does, what motivates her in her work, and the importance of community organizing around issues affecting workers, immigrants, and women.

Students pursuing master’s degrees in corporate communication heard from three alumni in a panel organized by Professor Caryn Medved for her “Introduction to Corporate Communication” course. The theme was “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion: Challenges and Opportunities for Communication Professionals.”

The alumni were Mary Anne Ravenel, diversity business partner at Facebook; Sabina Mehmood, product manager, Bloomberg Gender-Equality Index; and Meeckel Beecher, global head of DEI at Shutterstock. They were joined by Carmella Glover, DEI director for the Arthur Page Society and president of the Diversity Action Alliance.

Glover’s organization would like to see the communication industry “as diverse as the United States is by 2025.” That will require a major acceleration in progress, but she said it’s become easier to get organizations to sign on to DEI goals in the wake of the racial reckoning that followed George Floyd’s murder.

But because DEI is a relatively new area, “there’s no real roadmap” for achieving goals, Ravenel said. The speakers agreed that simply collecting data and being transparent about demographics is a key starting point for any organization–though that’s often easier pledged than done. But you can’t identify gaps or track progress without detailed information on a company’s makeup and how it changes over time.

The speakers noted that improving DEI isn’t just about recruitment and hiring. It also involves an unflinching examination of track records and policies in areas like promotion, salaries, and retention. At the same time, “DEI is not just HR,” as Beecher put it. Depending on the company, DEI principles may also need to be applied to areas like product development, marketing, and how customers are cultivated.

What challenges do women and LGBTQ individuals face in the military? What issues exist for Black veterans? How have Vietnam-era veterans coped with PTSD, and what lessons might their experience hold for a new generation of veterans?

These issues and others were discussed by three incredible featured speakers and two students at a powerful and moving Baruch-hosted pre-Veterans Day event: “Listening to Veterans,” Nov. 9, 2021.

Baruch College President S. David Wu offered introductory remarks and referenced his own national service in the Taiwanese Navy. The other speakers, all of them US military veterans from the CUNY community, brought expertise on a variety of issues related to the experience of serving in the military. You can watch a video of the hour-long event here:

We were thrilled to have Tanya Domi, a US Army veteran and CUNY Graduate Center director of public relations, participating. She’s an expert and activist on women’s/LGBTQ issues in the military.

We were also incredibly honored to have the participation of Isiah James, US Army veteran, Baruch MPA alumnus, and senior policy director of Black Veterans Project. He spoke about a recent trip to lobby officials in Washington to provide funding to care for veterans exposed to toxic burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan.

We also heard from Professor Glenn Petersen, an anthropologist who teaches at Baruch Weissman and at the CUNY Graduate Center. He served in the US Navy in Vietnam and recently wrote a memoir reflecting on the trauma and mental and emotional repercussions of his service, called War and the Arc of Human Experience. 

We were thrilled to have two Baruch College seniors participating. Roy Quintuna and Jacob Michaels spoke about their experiences and the challenges and opportunities of military service, along with reflections on their education at Baruch.

Roy shared his perspective as the child of immigrants (his parents are from Ecuador) and a first-generation college student. He is an officer candidate in the Air Force Reserve Officer Training Corps and is attending Baruch on an Air Force scholarship, majoring in Intercultural and International Communication with a minor in Spanish. He recalled telling his father when he was young that he wanted to be a pilot, and his dad saying, “I can’t help you.” The military, he says, offered him “a pathway forward.”

Jacob is majoring in political science and philosophy, and minoring in psychology and Japanese. He served in the US Navy from 2010 to 2019 as “an antiterrorism/force protection specialist as well as working within the nation’s intelligence community as a cryptologist and fusion analyst. All this just means I’m very skilled at standing in one place scanning the distance and I can make a solid PowerPoint.”

He said he’d wondered during his service what was the point of “all the suffering in Afghanistan … Was the Navy, as they say in their commercials, ‘a global force for good’ or did I devote my twenties to an organization that only helped to stoke the fires of imperialism?” At Baruch, “I got to ask my questions from brilliant professors like Claudia Halbac, Cory Evans, and David Lindsey. I learned terms like hegemony and grand strategy; about blowback and the close relationship between the Saudi royal family and the United States government. What I also learned was that I played a very tiny role in a very large machine … and that the moral failings and choices of the officers and politicians controlling the US military over the last two decades, both elected and unelected, that led us into ideological forever wars do not reflect and define my own choices to work with and for my fellow man.”

Please join us on November 18 at 4 pm on Zoom for the next “We Are Climate Action” event, called “Climate Change: Artists Respond.” This panel brings together contemporary artists whose artwork contributes to a broader public understanding of the consequences of climate change for human and non-human existence, and the urgent need for action and mitigation. The seemingly overwhelming scale of the climate crisis is a recognized barrier to public participation in tackling the climate crisis. Art can overcome this resistance through a myriad of methods, from educating and raising awareness to modeling problem solving or giving voice and form to intangible forces. Xavier Cortada, Anina Gerchick, Mary Mattingly and Katherine Behar have created art that is both geographically specific and universally relevant, providing entry points around which people can coalesce.

Register here for the event.

Behar, a professor at Baruch and the CUNY Graduate Center, is the director of the New Media Artspace. Cortada, a professor at the University of Miami, is an NSF fellow and creator of UnderwaterHOA, which looks at rising sea levels in Florida. Gerchick, a landscape artist and City College graduate, is the creator of BirdLinkNY, a deployable sculptural habitat. And Mattingly is the creator of Swale, a floating edible landscape. The panel is being organized by and moderated by Reiss, an art historian and CUNY Graduate Center PhD alumna, and editor of “Art, Theory and Practice in the Anthropocene.” Behar is co-moderator.

Check out videos of our two most recent “We Are Climate Action” events on the Weissman YouTube channel: Climate Change and Preparation for NYC Resiliency and Climate Change and Public Health. If you know any students, researchers, or journalists who are looking for comprehensive resources for papers, research, or stories about climate change, both of these events offer a wealth of data, information, analysis, and quotes from nationally recognized experts.