THE GRADUATE CENTER, CUNY: 365 Fifth

Newsbriefs

Three Graduate Center English department alumni - Sean McCann, Derek Miller, and Christina Boufis - contributed pieces to the inaugural issue of The Common Review, a quarterly devoted to books, ideas, and culture published by the Great Books Foundation in Chicago. The editor of the new magazine, Daniel Born, also received his Ph.D. in English from The Graduate Center. The second issue will include work by English faculty member Morris Dickstein and Peggy Samuels, another graduate. The piece by Boufis, "A Close Reading: Teaching Literature at the County Jail," was recently excerpted in The Chronicle for Higher Education.

The Graduate Center welcomed Gloria M. Barlow last spring as the new executive director of Information Resources. Before coming to The Graduate Center, Ms. Barlow was chief information officer at the School of Visual Arts, and, previously, was director of the University Technology Initiative at the New School for Social Research. Her extensive management experience in the field of information technology also includes overseeing and implementing networks at the law firm of Mudge Rose Guthrie Alexander & Ferdon and in the New York City Mayor's Office of Management & Budget. She was appointed to her position at The Graduate Center in May and assumed responsibility for client services, systems and infrastructure, and administrative systems components of the Information Resources department.

Six doctoral students from various disciplines were selected as Honors College Technology Fellows and assigned to the five campuses participating in The CUNY Honors College, beginning this fall. This first group of fellows, listed along with their departments and assigned colleges, includes Elizabeth Wissinger (Sociology, Baruch College), James Hitt (Philosophy, Baruch College), Cara Murray (English, City College), Ira Dworkin (English, Brooklyn College), David Humphries (English, Queens College), and Tammy McJannet (Anthropology, Hunter College). Fellows work with students and faculty, helping to foster virtual learning communities across campuses, for two years. Qualifications for being selected include a broad interest in and solid working knowledge of instructional technology and the ability to employ this technology in the classroom.

The book Improbable Warriors: Women Scientists and the U.S. Navy in World War II (Naval Institute Press, 2001) by Kathleen Broome Williams features Mina Rees, the first president of The Graduate Center, who died in 1997. Rees, a mathematician, is one of the women profiled in the book who left college teaching positions to work for the government during the war. Rees became the chief technical aide to the Applied Mathematics Panel of the National Defense Research Committee. The author, Williams, is on the faculty of the Ph.D. Program in History.

The City College department of chemical engineering, home of many Graduate Center faculty and students, was the subject of a feature article in the summer 2001 issue of Chemical Engineering Education. The article, prepared by the department with doctoral faculty member Professor Reuel Shinnar as lead author, detailed the department's history and activities and included several photographs. Articles of this kind are by invitation only, according to department chair Professor Robert Graff, and only the most prominent departments are featured.

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New Survey Provides Portrait of Religion in U.S.

A new Graduate Center study, co-directed by Professor Egon Mayer of the Ph.D. Program in Sociology, presents the most comprehensive portrait of religious identification available in the U.S. today. First conducted in 1990 and repeated this year, the survey fills a gap left by the U.S. Census, which does not ask about religion. The findings have been widely reported in the national media, including the New York Times, the New York Post, the Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post.

The American Religious Identification Survey 2001 finds that fifty-two percent of adults in America are Protestant, 24.5% are Catholic, and 14.1% adhere to no religion. Those giving their religion as Jewish were 1.3% and those as Muslim or Islamic were 0.5%.

The survey questioned over 50,000 randomly selected respondents aged 18 or over. It was co-directed by Mayer and Barry Kosmin, formerly of The Graduate Center, who now teaches at University College in Chichester, England, along with research fellow and demographer Ariela Keysar. Nearly 95% of those interviewed were willing to indicate their religious identification and views on important questions about their beliefs. The findings, weighted to be representative of the 208 million U.S. adult population, include national and state-by-state examinations of religious identification in relation to racial/ethnic identification, education, age, marital status, voter registration status and political party preference.

A few of the notable comparisons with the 1990 study include the following: Catholic adults increased from 46 million to nearly 50.8 million, but their proportion in the population fell by nearly two percentage points. Although Protestant and other non-Catholic denominations remain the majority with more than 105.4 million adult adherents, their proportion slid sharply from 60% to 52%. Adults giving their religion as Jewish numbered 2.8 million, down from about 3.1 million in 1990. (Another 2.5 million, who say they have no religion or identify with another religion, are of Jewish parentage, were raised Jewish or consider themselves Jewish.) Muslim/Islamic adults total 1.1 million, nearly double the number in 1990.

One of the most striking comparisons is the more than doubling of the adult population identifying with no religion, from 14.3 million (8%) in 1990 to the current 29.4 million (14.1%). (The 1990 figure may be downwardly biased due to a slight change in the wording of a survey question in 2001, which added the clause "if any" to the question, "What religion do you identify with?" The prior wording may have subtly prompted more people to name a religion.)

Among the vast amount of data collected, the survey found that New York state is home to more of America's Jews (25%) and Muslims (24%) than any other state. It is also home to the largest percent of the nations Taoists (26%) and Greek Orthodox (17%). Jehovah's Witnesses have the highest proportion of female adherents (68%), followed by Church of God (64%). The highest proportion of male adherents is among Muslims (62%) and Buddhists (61%). Black adults are most likely to give their religion as Baptist (47%) or as no religion (11%); Native Americans are most likely to give their religion as Baptists (20%) or as no religion (19%); and Hispanics are most likely to give their religion as Catholic (57%) or as no religion (13%).

The complete report is available on The Graduate Center's web site at www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/folio/index.htm.

First Gotham History Festival Honors New York's Past

The Conference on New York City History, the centerpiece of the first Gotham History Festival, organized by the Gotham Center, took place at The Graduate Center from October 5 - 7. Events continued throughout the five boroughs through October 14.

Of the more than 100 panels, presentations, and special events of the conference, some highlights pictured here are (from top): Martin Scorsese discussing his upcoming film Gangs of New York; a performance of Riot at the Opera House!, a documentary theatre piece; and Gotham Center Director Mike Wallace in discussion with New York filmmaker Ric Burns.

In honor of the festival, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani issued a proclamation naming October 5-14 New York City History Week. The proclamation begins: "In the aftermath of the attack on the World Trade Center, New Yorkers' love of unity and pride in their city is stronger than ever...This makes it the perfect time to reflect on New York City's history."

Photos: Jason Berger

Gittell Wins Career Award in Urban Politics

On August 31 Professor Marilyn Gittell, who is a member of the political science faculty at The Graduate Center and director of the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center, was awarded the Norton Long Career Achievement Award In Urban Politics by the American Political Science Association Urban Politics Section at its annual meeting in San Francisco. The Norton Long Award is presented biannually to scholars who have made distinguished contributions to the study of urban politics over the course of a career through scholarly publication, the mentoring of students, and public service. Past recipients have included Robert Dahl, Clarence N. Stone, and Donna E. Shalala.

Professor Gittell, noted for founding the Urban Affairs Quarterly, and who served as its first editor, has researched and taught urban politics for over four decades. Her books and articles on community organizations and citizen participation are widely cited. She is the founding director of the Howard Samuels Center, which was established in 1988. With grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Ford Foundation, Gittell has conducted important research and publishes widely on urban policy issues including, especially, decentralization, school policy, community development and federalism. Her work on the Empowerment Zones, the federal initiative designed to improve economic and social life in distressed inner cities, was mentioned in the award citation, as was her work on a special issue of The American Behavioral Scientist, which focused on economic development and higher education.

Her many publications include Community Participation, Social Capital Building and the Urban Empowerment Zones (2001); Women Creating Social Capital and Social Change (1999); The Politics of Community Development: CDCs and Social Capital (1999); Strategies for School Equity: Creating Productive Schools in a Just Society (1998); State Politics and the New Federalism (1986) and Limits of Citizen Participation: The Decline of Community Organizations (1980).

Photo: Wayne Geist

As a Bunche Institute Fellow, Jonah Looks Back on UN Career

James O. C. Jonah, originally from Sierra Leone, who served as minister of finance and development of that country and spent over 30 years in an illustrious career at the United Nations, is now a senior fellow of the Ralph Bunch Institute for International Studies at The Graduate Center. He was awarded a grant by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and subsequently became a fellow at the institute, where is writing his memoirs.

"Ralph Bunche was my mentor," says Jonah of the first African-American under secretary general of the UN, for whom The Graduate Center's institute is named; therefore, Jonah's association with the institute has special meaning for him. Soon after Jonah came to work at the UN in 1963, he met Bunche and began a long affiliation with his office. "He set out to educate me as to how to be an international civil servant and to play a role in conflict resolution," says Jonah.

Jonah left the UN in 1994, when he was under secretary general of political affairs, and returned to Sierra Leone to help oversee the transition from military to civilian rule. He came back to the UN in 1996 as permanent ambassador from Sierra Leone, but, after the reversal of the 1997 coup d'etat, he returned in March 1998 and was appointed minister of finance and development. He recently resigned from this position to focus on his memoirs, which he had been intending to write for some time.

Photo: Susan Angstadt

New Center for Middle East and Middle Eastern-American Studies

The Graduate Center has announced the formation of the Middle East and Middle Eastern-American Center (MEMEAC), the only such center in the country that incorporates the Middle Eastern-American experience in Middle/Near East Studies. MEMEAC is devoted to stimulating the study of Middle Eastern peoples, cultures, and countries as well as Middle Eastern immigrants and people of Middle Eastern descent in the United States, particularly New York. Reflecting the extraordinary scholarship in Middle Eastern studies throughout the CUNY system, the Center brings together more than 50 faculty members working in related areas across many disciplines on most CUNY campuses.

"This Center was proposed and brought forth because of its timeliness before the tragic events of September 11," said President Frances Degen Horowitz. "Sadly, the need for CUNY to create a center that brings together the expertise of its significant cadre of scholars in these fields is now all the more compelling."

MEMEAC will be co-directed by Professors Beth Baron and Mehdi Bozorgmehr. Baron is a specialist in Middle Eastern history with a focus on gender issues. She recently completed a manuscript on nationalism in Egypt and will be launching a study on social politics in the Middle East. She is on the faculty of The Graduate Center's Ph.D. Program in History and also serves on the faculty at City College. Bozorgmehr is a sociologist, also at City College and The Graduate Center, specializing in the adaptation of Middle Easterners in the U.S. He is completing a book on Iranian immigrants in Los Angeles--home to the largest Middle Eastern population in the country--and is also beginning a research project on second-generation Iranians in the U.S.

In response to a request for proposals from the National Science Foundation to study human and social behavior responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11, Bozorgmehr has received a $60,000 NSF grant to look at U.S. Middle Eastern and South Asian ethnic and religious organizations and their roles in averting, coping, and responding to backlash from these events.

Scholars from The Graduate Center and the CUNY campuses represent expertise spanning such areas as Middle Eastern politics, anthropology, religion, cultural psychology, Ottoman art, New York mosques, North African literature, Egyptian theater, Muslim migration, Iranian music, Sephardic studies, Yemenite Jews, the medieval Arab world, Algerian women, water issues, law, linguistics, Hebrew, and Sufism--plus expertise on countries such as Iran, Iraq, Israel, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, and many other regional, cultural, political, and social issues and topics. Drawing also on the vast Middle Eastern-related resources in New York City, MEMEAC will conduct research and sponsor workshops, special events, conferences, and lectures.

Four years in development, MEMEAC was established with the assistance of a grant from the Ford Foundation.

Lecture By Delmos Jones Scholar is First in Series

On October 26 in the Skylight Conference Room, Professor Robert Crutchfield of the University of Washington gave a lecture, "Paradise Lost? Urban Problems in the Global Century," the first ever in the Delmos Jones Visiting Scholars Program series. The program, which will bring up to five minority scholars to The Graduate Center each year, honors the life and career of African American anthropologist Delmos Jones (1936-1999), who was on the doctoral faculty for 28 years. The second lecture in the series will be on Thursday, December 6 at 4 p.m. by Alfred Wade Boykin, a psychology professor from Howard University who specializes in the area of black child development. He will speak on "Contemporary Urban Education: Opportunities and Challenges."

Photo: William Charles Moss

Rustow Memorial Lecture Delivered

On October 16, Richard Goldstone, justice of the Constitutional Court of South Africa and former chief prosecutor of the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda, delivered the Dankwart A. Rustow Memorial Lecture, entitled "Healing a Violent Past: The Role of Humanitarian Law," in the Elebash Recital Hall. The lecture honored the memory of Dankwart A. Rustow, a political science and sociology professor at The Graduate Center for 25 years who was one of the world's preeminent scholars in comparative politics. Pictured above are Goldstone (left) and Presidential Professor Thomas G. Weiss (right), director of the Ralph Bunche Institute for International Studies.

Photo: William Charles Moss