Professor Adam Sheffer of the math department.

This REU program, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, brings together several Weissman colleagues dedicated to paving more inclusive pathways into the study of math. It is co-directed by me and Professor Pablo Soberón Bravo, and supported by Professors Anna Pun, Matthew Junge, and Guy Moshkovitz. Under our collective guidance, students spend the summer doing research work in mathematics. But this summer research is just the beginning: we do a lot more and stay in touch with the participants for many years, supporting them as they continue their careers. Over 80% of the program alum continue to PhD programs and many land in prestigious institutions.

One of our main goals is to increase the number of women and underrepresented minorities in the mathematical community. Thus, we are committed to taking at least 50% women or non-binary participants each summer. For a math program, this represents a very high percentage.

We also love to support students who seem to have huge potential but have not had many opportunities to demonstrate it. Some of the most satisfying moments in the program are when a student who comes from a relatively unknown college continues to a PhD program in a place like MIT or Harvard. It really makes us feel like we made a difference.

We created a network of professors from a wide variety of institutions across the country. Each winter, we send a reminder email to all these professors, asking if they noticed any promising students from underrepresented minorities who might benefit from an REU. We send a personal invitation to each student about applying to our REU, saying that we are also happy to chat with them over Zoom about REUs or anything else.

The program is gradually becoming more popular. For the 12 spots we had in the summer of 2023, we received about 750 applications, most of which look great. The acceptance process is quite depressing, since we have to reject so many amazing students.

The program started with NSF funding and most of the funding still comes from NSF. However, at some point we were approached by the company Jane Street Capital. They heard good things about the program and very kindly wanted to contribute some funds. We use these funds to offer a few spots for international students. Such students usually have very limited opportunities, not being able to participate in NSF-funded program. It’s great to be able to provide them with an option. In 2023, we had one participant from Mexico, one from Barbados, and one from China (all from US colleges).

In January after the program ends, we go with most of the participants to the Joint Mathematics Meetings, the largest math conference in the world. There, the participants present their work. We also encourage them to participate in other mathematical events around the country.

Dr. Adam Sheffer

Associate Professor, Math Department

Director, Computer Science Program

As an appropriate complement to Women’s History Month, the Mishkin Gallery’s new exhibit, “What is Psychedelic” featuring artist Aura Rosenberg, opened on Friday, March 10th.

The exhibit consists of artworks from throughout Rosenberg’s career, starting with her work as a painter in 1970, and spanning to her more recent focus on photography, film, sculpture, and installation. As we move through the exhibit, we experience the metamorphosis of Aura’s career as an artist. But regardless of the medium or the decade, there is consistently an amplification of the very same chorus of diverse voices we aim to capture in our conversations around DEI. We can see this in her serial work from the ‘90s, addressing topics such as male sexuality and the dichotomy between masculinity and vulnerability, or in her contemporary work, exploring the idea of memorials and the memorialization of Jewish culture in her series Berlin Childhood and Statues Also Fall In Love.

“Rosenberg’s practice challenges how images produce and reproduce notions of spectatorship, gender, family, and history—that is, the conditions of everyday life. In this way, she examines how vernacular images naturalize and normalize meanings through which people understand themselves in the world.”

Addressing and reframing what images can say in themselves, Rosenberg plays with the idea of gender roles, sexuality, the physical body, love, culture and community. The multidimensional way Rosenberg explores identity reminds us of the intersectionality we address with DEI. Reiterated through the technique of layering, seen within the physical paint in The Window, and the layering of time in her films Berlin Childhood, we are presented with the paradoxical complexities her work presents—both asking and answering a question. Aura invites the viewer to engage in the conversation and reflect on these questions through the lens of our own lives. There is clearly a dialogue within the work itself, but how does the viewer participate in that dialogue?

“Aura Rosenberg’s work playfully questions accepted notions of gender, family, history and artistic identity. A CUNY graduate herself, Rosenberg shares over 50 years of work that embraces collaboration across an array of media. Faculty and students interested in queer and feminist studies, Jewish studies, art history, public monuments and more will be particularly surprised by her unique approach in empathetically engaging with these topics.” –  Alaina Claire Feldman, Director and Curator of the Mishkin Gallery

Since the origins of art, images have and always will hold a multiplicity of meanings, but Rosenberg shows us how an image can alter meaning, even deeply established meanings and associations. Creating the muscle memory of questioning culturally and historically established meaning is integral when engaging with artworks, or as this show reminds us, considering the role that DEI can play in institutions like Baruch College.

—Emily Mack

Student, Masters Program in Arts Administration and Program Assistant, Weissman Associate Dean’s Office

Angela Chi-Chi Glass, a current student of Weissman Graduate Studies’ MA in Arts Administration program, has been named the Association of Arts Administration Educators (AAAE) 2022-23 Equity, Diversity & Inclusion Research Fellow. EDI Research Fellows at AAAE investigate the confluence of equity, diversity, and inclusion and arts management programs, a position that Glass’ lived experience and passion for artistic community makes her a perfect fit for.

The daughter of Peruvian parents, Glass came to the United States at a young age and was raised by her Lima born aunt and a Brooklyn Jew from Flatbush in the town of Virginia Beach, VA. Not too different from any other kid trolling the beaches of Southern Virginia, the lively Navel town’s cultural and linguistic diversity became surprisingly formative for Glass.

“I guess, looking back, it was pretty unique,” she reflected. “We were the kids of the diverse community you would expect to find in the largest Navy town in the U.S.— my friends were Black, Filipinx, Latinx and a lot of us were first generation and spoke different languages and we were all also making art in this relatively small town. My Mom also really wanted us to feel centered in our Judaism — she converted from Catholicism when she married my Dad — and I have fond memories of Shabbat dinners at our house being surrounded by educators, social workers, artists and of course also military personnel, all giving impassioned points of view while chowing down on challah and lomo saltado. From the very start my existence was one of multitudes, and that’s probably the connective tissue through it all.”

These intimate experiences, growing up around so many different communities, instilled in Glass a conviction that everyone should have access to the arts and a sustained arts education—a conviction from which both her creative and academic work springs.

As she entered adulthood, Angela focused on her classical piano studies which led her to earn degrees in piano performance from L’École Normale de Musique in Paris and the New England Conservatory in Boston. Upon graduation, Angela’s desire to work on music more closely related to her heritage, took her back to her native Perú where she spent several years immersed in the kaleidoscopic proliferation of musical forms native to the region. “I came back singing songs in Spanish and in Quechua, which is an indigenous language still spoken in the highlands,” Glass said.

“My time living in Lima as a musician and composer was transformational and uplifting in so many ways.” Nonetheless, Glass describes an attitude in Perú that women in bands are expected to be singers rather than instrumentalists. “There’s still this perception that if you’re the woman in the band, you’re not really the piano player or the guitarist, you know?” She notes that she also felt a sense of being at odds with the predominant musical mindset she experienced when she first moved to New York . Despite the passage of time, Glass suggests that some of these attitudes may still persist in New York and elsewhere. 

Glass then saw herself at a crossroads and feeling pulled towards centering herself in service towards her community, she began more and more to dedicate herself to music education. It was a vocation that she had explored during her time in Peru and, as a resident of Sunset Park, home to one of the largest Spanish speaking populations in the city, she created a music studio and started doubling down on teaching.

As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolded, her vision of creating community through music education only grew.

“What was once a personal project, I began to envision as a bigger project. Both as a musician and an educator, I’ve experienced what the interchange of ideas and music can do, and I thought I would very much love to do that on a broader scale,” Glass said. “But you need skills, you know? You need to learn how to do your taxes as a nonprofit. How to even exist as a non-profit in the first place. Who’s going to be the director of education? Who’s helping me think through and create the programming that is grounded in community-first? So, I realized I needed to go back to school and the Arts Administration program at Baruch seemed like the place for me.”

Since entering the program in the Spring of 2022 , Glass has been a quick study, bringing a systematic financial understanding to her love of music. She’s quickly fallen under the guidance of DEI Fellow and Program Director of Arts Administration David Milch and Professor Beth Allen who is also the Executive Director of the Downtown Brooklyn Arts Alliance, who helped her put together her application for the AAAE fellowship.

“And they made themselves completely available to me,” Glass said. “That’s the beauty of Baruch, you know? David mentioned the fellowship, Beth helped me think through some ideas, and, amazingly, I got it! I’m so thrilled to be able to be working together with AAAE toward finding solutions to the problem of lack of diversity in the arts in New York. This is really my dream—my way of bringing all these pieces of my personality together—and it really is coming together. Who knew?”

Glass will present the culmination of her research at the AAAE Annual Conference in June, which will be hosted by Baruch College.

Rene Hernandez speaks about Success Amplified, the program at Baruch she has been the Assistant Director of since Spring of 2021, with a fluency that can only come from repetition and devotion. The Weissman DEI Alliance was treated to her impassioned pitch at their February meeting, heralding a new cross-college partnership as Baruch College’s many moving parts unite around the urgency of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion for the future of education.

Success Amplified is a program aimed at supporting students—particularly Baruch’s Black and Latinx population—with the resources they need not only to transition successfully into a college setting, but to thrive in that setting, persist towards graduation, and eventually claim the careers they desire. It began as a passion project shared by a handful of faculty and staff members sensitive to the needs of this growing population nearly a decade ago. It wasn’t until 2015 that they were able to launch a small cohort, offering students a three-day event. Now, only 8 years later, the program has grown into a full-fledged four-year experience, centering around cohorts, and mentoring around 300 hundred students college wide.

“In my many years working with Black and Brown students,” Hernandez reflected, “I see that there’s a tendency for them to think ‘I have to be independent, there’s just no way I can ask for help.’ These students are sometimes the first members of their families to pursue higher education, so there’s a lot of pressure on them to succeed without the tools they need necessarily built in. That’s really what this program is for, to fill in the gaps.”

Over the course of Success Amplified’s carefully scaffolded four-year program which aims to fuse academic success and student life to create a holistic college experience, students focus on everything from transitioning into college, avoiding procrastination, and cultivating study skills, to exploring their cultural wealth, avoiding impostor syndrome, and thinking seriously about their individual desires. 

“I like to do this thing during their first summer with us,” explained Hernandez. “I have them write down: ‘What is it that everybody else wants you to be?’ Right? ‘What does your mom want you to be? What does your teacher want you to be? What do your friends want you to be? Like, who is this person? And then, after they write that down, I tell them to rip it up.” The students rip up these collective aspirations as Hernandez centers a different, perhaps more difficult question: “Who are you? What do you want to become?”

The ongoing success of the program’s methods are far from anecdotal. In a statistical analysis conducted last year which compared the trajectories of students who used the Success Amplified’s resources versus those that didn’t, the results were unambiguous. In 2020, 94% of Success Amplified students returned for their second year, compared to Baruch’s overall 79%, 87% of students returned in their third year compared to concerning 58% for Baruch as a whole. 

When asked about her hopes for what this nascent partnership will lead to, Hernandez says she excited to start building a support system for Baruch students that is true to the diversity of the student body itself. “I love that the DEI Alliance is interested in supporting us because it shows how every school benefits from the success of these students. Every day I think that there must be more resources for this group of students. It is my hope that this partnership leads to those being unlocked.”

Cheryl Smith, Interim Associate Dean of the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences and now Director of the Alliance, met Rene by chance at the Community Brown Bag Lunch break in October 2022. “I saw such great synergy between the work of Success Amplified and the Weissman DEI Alliance. Both are committed to building community, supporting a culture of inclusion, and ensuring equitable access to all the affordances of higher education,” she said. “Too often, student support units and faculty operate in separate silos. When we join forces, we can be better advocates for students and more impactful in all aspects of our work. I am excited to see what this partnership can build for students and the College, and I am committed to supporting it going forward”

There are some things I repeat over and over again,” says Hernandez. “One of them that never gets old is: college is not just going to class, it’s an experience. It’s up to us to make that experience just and equitable.”

The Alliance has joined Spotify!

A few of our fellows took some time to contemplate how the music they chose for the playlist connects feelingly to the work they do.

Cheryl Smith: I chose “What the World Needs Now is Love” performed by Jackie DeShannon because, on April 4, 1968, Audre Lorde went to see her former students from Tougaloo College perform at Carnegie Hall. The student choir was singing this song when they interrupted it to let the audience know that Dr. King had been murdered. Everyone started to cry. According to Lorde, the choir director said, “The only thing we can do here is finish this as a memorial.” And they sang again, “What the World Needs Now is Love.” Since hearing this story, the song represents resilience and revolution built on a foundation of love, a Beloved Community, and that is what our DEI work means to me.

Gisele Regatao: I chose the song “Siembra” performed by Willie Colón and Rubén Blades because it’s the title track of an iconic album with a great story. Salsa fanatics thought the record was doomed when it came out on Fania Records in 1978. The songs were too long. They bashed American consumerism and instigated Latinos to push for social change. But it became the first salsa record to sell more than one million copies. It’s still probably the best-seller in the genre. I did a piece about the album a few years ago for the national public radio show Studio 360. Interviewing Rubén Blades, who is one of the biggest names in Latin music ever, was definitely a highlight in my career.

David Milch: I added “When I was a Boy” performed by Dar Williams because it always gives me “all the feels.”  Dar is actually an old college friend and so the song brings back personal memories of exploring feminist and queer theory… and practice.  It’s a beautiful story song about a woman remembering when her sex didn’t matter and she was “a kid that you would like, just a small boy on her bike, riding topless, yeah, [she] never cared who saw.”  In just a few stanzas and with playfully meaningful pronoun use, Dar shares with us the pain and loss all genders experience through narrow socialization… and she does it with a hauntingly simply and beautiful melody and images that recall the joy, hope, and freedom of our youth. 

Pablo Peixoto: I chose “YáYá Massemba” performed by Maria Bethânia. This song by Sergio Mendes and immortalized by this performance imagines the origins of Brazilian samba through the despair, the solitude, the humanity, and the fortitude of enslaved Angolans en route to colonial Brazil. A child born and growing up in the dark holds of a slave ship contemplates the long nights, the spins of the Earth, the deep ocean, the waves drumming like the beating of a bird’s heart in captivity. The samba growing in his heart to quench his solitude, his pain, his fear, and to summon justice through his ancestral gods Oxossi and Xangô.

The final verse “Vou aprender a ler, pra ensinar meus camaradas” – I will learn to read, so that I can teach my compatriots – is one of the reasons why I became a teacher. 

Check them all out here:

https://open.spotify.com/embed/playlist/5jMD4s3yi6uK5mErvRv969?utm_source=generator