Ralliers decry CUNY’s selection of Muslim activist Linda Sarsour as graduation speaker National co-chair of Women’s March scheduled to give commencement address Friday

Foes of Muslim activist Linda Sarsour held a rally Thursday to decry her selection as graduation speaker at the City University of New York, accusing her of supporting terrorism and chanting, “Surely CUNY can do better!”

At a protest outside the CUNY building in Manhattan, New York Assemblyman Dov Hikind condemned as “outrageous” the decision to invite Ms. Sarsour to speak at Friday’s commencement at the Graduate School of Public Health.

“When CUNY invites Linda Sarsour to be the commencement speaker, that is something that is imposed upon the students,” said Mr. Hikind. “Freedom of speech is a precious commodity in America, and no one wants to take away anyone’s freedom of speech. But when CUNY imposes Linda Sarsour on the students, that’s outrageous. Shame on CUNY!”

Speakers at the rain-soaked rally used a microphone but still had to shout to be heard over the shouts and whistle-blowing of counter-protesters who gathered to support Ms. Sarsour. Pamela Geller, president of the American Freedom Defense Initiative, which organized the rally, blasted the public university’s decision as “obscene,” describing Ms. Sarsour as a “pro-terror vicious anti-Semite” and punctuating her remarks with, “Surely CUNY can do better!”

CUNY president James B. Milliken has stood by the school’s decision to have Ms. Sarsour speak, even though she “might hold views that are controversial.”

While one might disagree with the School of Public Health’s decision to invite Ms. Sarsour to speak at commencement, that difference of opinion provides no basis for action now,” he said in an April 26 statement. “Taking action because critics object to the content of speech would conflict with the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom.”

Five CUNY professors defended the school’s decision to invite Ms. Sarsour in a Monday open letter, saying the selection committee decided she represented “the new activism of young people, women, immigrants and others speaking out against discrimination and intolerance.” “Right-wing critics are quick to complain when college students protest inviting speakers like Betsy DeVos, Milo Yiannopoulos or Charles Murray to speak on campus, but feel justified in calling for limits on free speech when they disagree with speakers, a double standard that fundamentally misunderstands the First Amendment,” said the letter on Inside Higher Ed.

Ms. Geller insisted that “this is not about free speech,” given that “Linda Sarsour is free to speak on college campuses and does so frequently,” but rather with honoring her by providing her with a graduation platform.

“The idea of inviting her to keynote the commencement address—those invitations are bestowed upon people to enhance the college’s reputation,” said Ms. Geller. “Why would you hold her up as a role model?”

An advocate of Sharia law, Ms. Sarsour has become a political icon on the left, honored in 2014 by the Obama administration as a “champion of change” for her work in Arab-American communities.

She raised her profile this year as a national co-chair of the anti-Trump Women’s March in January and drew outrage by suggesting in a March interview that supporters of Israel cannot also be feminists because they don’t care about Palestinian women.

“Can you imagine if you defend Israel, if you support Israel, you cannot be a feminist?” asked Mr. Hikind. “My wife took that to heart, because she’s a feminist and she loves Israel.”

Milo Yiannopoulos-led protest against CUNY commencement speaker Linda Sarsour turns violent

A raucous rally against CUNY’s School of Public Health’s commencement speaker ended in violence Thursday when demonstrators clashed with counter- protesters.

The scuffle broke out after an unlikely band of protesters — including conservative provocateur Pam Geller, Assemblyman Dov Hikind and alt-right bad boy Milo Yiannopoulos — blasted CUNY’s decision to select civil-rights activist Linda Sarsour.

A small group of demonstrators chanting “Make America Great Again” surrounded and roughed up 19-year-old counter-protester Heather Morris.

“They tried hitting me with their fists, their sticks, whatever they found,” Morris said after the fracas on E. 42nd St. at Second Ave.

“They’re a bunch of Nazis...They probably targeted me because I’m young and I’m brown, too.”

No arrests were made. An outcry broke out in April after CUNY announced that it tapped Sarsour, a city activist who some accuse of being anti-Semitic, to be its June commencement speaker.

Sarsour’s profile has risen in recent months as she organized the Women’s March in Washington.

She has also led a number of city protests against police brutality and helped raise thousands of dollars to help repair a vandalized Jewish cemetery in St. Louis.

But Sarsour has also been criticized for denouncing Zionism and tweeting a photo of a young boy with rocks in each hand facing Israeli police, along with the words “the definition of courage.”

“Why would CUNY have a commencement speaker who supports terrorism and believes in throwing rocks?” Hikind (D-Brooklyn) said at the Thursday rally.

Geller expressed a similar sentiment.

“I wanna say a prayer for CUNY chancellor James Milliken that he rights this terrible wrong,” said Geller, best known for trying to run a series of controversial subway ads ripping radical Islam.

“That he would invite a pro-terror, vicious anti-Semite to keynote the commencement address this year is obscene and profane."

Yiannopoulos, not surprisingly, launched an even more scathing attack on Sarsour.

“Linda Sarsour is a Sharia-loving, terrorist-embracing, Jew-hating, ticking time bomb,” said the former Breitbart editor who lost his job after suggesting that he supported pedophilia. Several CUNY professors have come forward to resist the calls to replace Sarsour — saying that bowing to the critics would “conflict with the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom.”

A CUNY spokesman used similar language in defending the decision Thursday.

“Some, who object to Ms. Sarsour's positions, have called on CUNY to rescind the invitation,” the rep said. “To take such actions at a public university would violate the First Amendment as well as the principles of academic freedom.”

PROTESTERS CLASH ABOUT LINDA SARSOUR’S CUNY SPEECH IN RAINY NYC

BYDANIELLE ZIRI

MAY 26, 2017 00:35

Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist known for her anti-Israel rhetoric, is set to address the graduates of its School of Public Health at their commencement ceremony on June 1st.

NEW YORK - As hundreds of people gathered on Manhattan’s 42nd street on a rainy Thursday afternoon to protest Linda Sarsour’s upcoming speech at a City University of New York graduation, they were met with vocal opposition from the some of the activists’ supporters.

Sarsour, a Palestinian-American activist known for her anti-Israel rhetoric, is set to address the graduates of its School of Public Health at their commencement ceremony on June 1st.

Since her participation was announced, pro-Israel activists and politicians have lead efforts to pressure CUNY and state officials into rescinding her invitation. In an interview conducted in March, Sarsour said one cannot be part of the feminist movement unless he or she is critical of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. Last month, she also publicly supported a convicted Palestinian terrorist, Rasmea Odeh.

“I don’t think that she should be representing not only a city school, but a taxpayer funded school, with hate speech,” one of the anti-Sarsour protesters, Lisa Bloomstein told the Jerusalem Post.

Bloomstein, who chose to come to the protest despite the heavy rain, said she isn’t just protesting Sarsour for her stances on Israel.

“It’s a lot more than that,” she said. “As Jews, yes we don’t want to see someone calling for boycott and for denying the existence of the State of Israel, but more than that, as an American, I’m standing up for our democratic values and our civil liberties.”

“I think there’s gotta be many many other women and men who are muslim and could better represent our values rather than a woman like this,” Bloomstein added.

Parallel to the protest, on the other side of the same street, Linda Sarsour supporters held signs and shouted at the pro-Israel speakers, calling them “fascists”.

One of the organizations present on that side, Refuse Fascism, issued a statement saying the anti-Sarsour protest is “aimed at intimidating, silencing and even unleashing harm against those who have the courage to stand up and say no”.

Travis Morales, who defended Linda Sarsour, told the Jerusalem Post the Palestinian activist represents “a voice of conscience”

“She and any other person who is standing up against the crimes of the Trump-Pence regime must be defended,” he said. “We cannot allow them to silence and intimidate.”

“Linda Sarsour is not anti-Jewish, from my understanding, she is anti- Zionist,” Morales added. “One horrific crime against humanity [the Holocaust] does not justify another horrific crime against humanity, which is the genocide and expulsion of the Palestinian people from their historic homeland.”

Thursday’s rally which was held outside CUNY offices, drew much criticism mainly because it included the participations of controversial right-wing activists Pamela Geller and Milo Yiannopoulos, a Breitbart editor associated with the alt-right. Both spoke to the pro-Israel attendees, against Linda Sarsour.

Yiannopoulos begun his speech mentioning the terror attack which took place this week in Manchester in the UK.

“It’s now more important than ever to fight Islam in America and particularly its emissaries like Linda Sarsour,” he said.

NY Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who has been leading the efforts to cancel Sarsour’s CUNY speech over the past months, said he is proud to be standing at the rally, even alongside people like Yiannopoulos.

“Where is the establishment of Jewish organizations? They are quiet. If they were doing public rallies, I’d be at their rallies,” he told the Post. “People who are concerned about Milo, those same people give excuses to Linda Sarsour. So, double standard? Hey, what’s new?”

Protest in New York over Palestinian-American graduation speaker

Dozens of right-wing demonstrators, including far-right commentator Milo Yiannopoulos, gathered in New York on Thursday to protest a university's decision to invite a Palestinian-American activist to deliver its graduation speech next week.

The City University of New York's (CUNY) Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy, which will have its commencement on Tuesday, described liberal, Muslim speaker Linda Sarsour on its website as a "powerful public health and social justice" leader.

Protesters in midtown Manhattan chanted and marched under rainfall to criticize the school's choice of Sarsour, 37, an organizer of this year's Women's March on Washington who has drawn fire from conservatives for her opposition to Israel's occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, among other issues.

Yiannopoulos, 32,said she should be allowed to speak but should be held accountable for actions he considered anti-American.

"Working underneath all of that sweaty polyester is a mind that hates America," Yiannopoulos said of Sarsour, who wears a hijab head covering.

A representative for Sarsour did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Demonstrations against both liberal and conservative speakers on university campuses has been a growing trend in the United States.

In April, conservative commentator Ann Coulter said she had scrapped plans to speak at the University of California at Berkeley in defiance of campus officials, who had barred her original engagement out of concerns about inciting violent protests.

In February, protesters at Berkeley started fires, broke windows and clashed with police, forcing Yiannopoulos, then a senior editor for the conservative Breitbart News website, to call off his appearance.

Yiannopoulos was permanently banned from Twitter for abuse and harassment of Saturday Night Live actress Leslie Jones in July 2016.

ADL Rejects Anti-Israel Activist Linda Sarsour Over BDS, Upholds Her ‘First Amendment Right’ to Address CUNY Graduation Ceremony

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) issued a sharp rejection on Thursday of the pro-BDS positions advocated by Linda Sarsour – the controversial Palestinian-American activist who is scheduled to deliver the commencement speech at the graduating ceremony of the City University of New York (CUNY) School of Public Health on Thursday, June 1.

Sarsour, a co-organizer of the Women’s March held in Washington, DC in January, has enjoyed a rapid rise to prominence among progressives over the last year, despite an established record of violent outbursts against her political opponents on social media, as well as her ideological baiting of the Jewish community. Her statements have included the contention that “nothing is creepier than Zionism,” as well as her forthright insistence that pro-Israel women should be excluded from the feminist movement on the grounds that t just doesn’t make any sense for someone to say, ‘Is there room for people who support the state of Israel and do not criticize it in the movement?’ There can’t be in feminism.” “We profoundly reject Linda Sarsour’s positions that delegitimize Israel,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement. “We have vigorously opposed efforts like the Boycott Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, which she supports and we oppose her stance that one cannot be simultaneously a feminist and pro-Israel.”

The ADL was firm that Sarsour should be allowed to speak at CUNY nonetheless. “Despite our deep opposition to Sarsour’s views on Israel, we believe that she has a First Amendment right to offer those views,” Greenblatt told The Algemeiner. Greenblatt pointed out that this perspective is shared by CUNY Chancellor James B. Milliken, who recognizes, he said, “that defending one’s right to free speech does not equate to defending the content of that speech.” Greenblatt said he commended Milliken’s “principled leadership in denouncing BDS and distancing the University from Sarsour’s problematic views.” The ADL also upbraided speakers at a rally opposing Sarsour’s CUNY invite – held outside CUNY’s offices in midtown Manhattan earlier on Thursday – for their “anti-Muslim bigotry and other invective.” Among the rally’s organizers were far right firebrand Pamela Geller and Milo Yiannopoulos, a media provocateur who on Wednesday slammed US pop singer Ariana Grande – whose concert in Manchester on Monday night was targeted by an Islamist suicide bomber – for being “pro-Islam.” Sarsour’s invitation to speak at the CUNY ceremony – where Chirlane McCray, wife of New York Mayor Bill de Blasio, will receive an honorary doctorate – has been strongly criticized by a number of influential Jewish figures, among them ADL national director emeritus Abraham Foxman. In an April 30 interview with The Algemeiner, Foxman cautioned against canceling the invite to Sarsour, arguing that doing so would turn her into a “free speech martyr.” But, Foxman said, the invite should not have been extended in the first place. “She is an enemy of Jewish sovereignty and Jewish liberation,” Foxman stated. “She’s a bigot.”

In an exclusive Algemeiner opinion column published on Wednesday, the Israeli writer Petra Marquardt-Bigman examined Sarsour’s links with Nation of Islam (NoI) leader Louis Farrakhan – described by the ADL as “the leading anti-Semite in America.” Marquardt-Bigman pointed out that in 2015, Sarsour shared a platform with Farrakhan at his “Justice or Else” rally in Washington, DC. At that event, Farrakhan attacked Jews for “saying they’re the children of God, and they don’t have no forgiveness in them.” For her part, Sarsour asserted that the “common enemy … is white supremacy” and that “the liberation of the Palestinian people is bound up with the liberation of Black people in America.”

Sarsour commencement speech draws fire

Opponents call on CUNY to rescind invitation By Paula Katinas Brooklyn Daily Eagle Despite mounting public pressure from elected officials and leaders of Jewish and Catholic organizations, the chancellor of the City University of New York (CUNY) is refusing to rescind an invitation for controversial Arab- American civil rights leader Linda Sarsour to serve as the guest speaker at the graduation ceremony for the Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.

The graduation ceremony is set for Thursday, June 1. Sarsour, a political firebrand from Bay Ridge, was one of the organizers of the Women’s March on Washington, the massive protest demonstration that took place in the nation’s capitol the day after Donald Trump was inaugurated the 45th president of the U.S.

Sarsour is also the former executive director of the Arab-American Association of New York and has frequently spoken out on civil rights issues regarding the Middle Eastern community.

Chancellor James A. Milliken issued a statement standing by CUNY’s decision to invite Sarsour to speak to the Class of 2017, citing the importance of the First Amendment.

“The current discussion about the invitation to Linda Sarsour to speak at the commencement ceremony of the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy draws into sharp focus principles central to a free society and its academic institutions. The School of Public Health made a decision to focus on women leaders for its commencement this year and invited Ms. Sarsour because of her involvement in public health issues in New York City and her position as a leader on women’s issues, including her role as co-chair of the recent Women’s March in Washington,” Milliken said in a statement.

“While one might disagree with the School of Public Health’s decision to invite Ms. Sarsour to speak at commencement, that difference of opinion provides no basis for action now. Taking action because critics object to the content of speech would conflict with the First Amendment and the principles of academic freedom,” the chancellor added.

Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights President Bill Donohue is the most recent leader of a religious- affiliated organization to object to the decision to invite Sarsour to speak.

“I stand with my Jewish brothers and sisters by respectfully urging you to withdraw the invitation,” Donohue wrote in a letter to Milliken.

“The primary purpose of higher education is the pursuit of truth. For Americans, there is one foundational truth that towers over all others: our unalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Those who find this goal objectionable are welcome to their view, but they should not be given a prestigious platform to advance their politics. That would certainly include Linda Sarsour,” Donohue wrote.

Assemblymember Dov Hikind (D-Borough Park-Midwood), an Orthodox Jew who represents a heavily Jewish community, disputed CUNY’s contention that Sarsour’s commencement address is a First Amendment issue. “While everyone else who understands the danger that Sarsour poses seems content with hand wringing and forelock tugging and issuing notes of tepid criticism, there are a few good people willing to actually stand up,” Hikind said in a statement praising Sarsour’s detractors.

Sarsour could not be reached for comment on the controversy swirling around her.

CONTROVERSIAL BRITISH MEDIA STAR HOLDS NYC RALLY AGAINST LINDA SARSOUR

BYJPOST.COM STAFF

MAY 25, 2017 21:34

British provocateur and former Breitbart News editor Milo Yiannopoulos held a rally in New York City Thursday morning to protest a college commencement speech scheduled to be delivered by controversial Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour.

Yinnapolous, who himself became embroiled in a shocking scandal earlier this year after video emerged purportedly showing the UK media star provide a justification for pedophilia, set up the demonstration on a busy Manhattan street where dozens of attendees braved rainy weather.

For over 20-minutes, Yiannopoulos blasted the Brooklyn-born Sarsour, at one point describing her as a "Jew-hating ticking time bomb."

Sarsour is scheduled to deliver a speech for graduating students of CUNY later on Thursday. The mother of four gained vast media attention earlier this year after helping organize the Women's March just one day after US President Donald Trump's January 20 inauguration.

Excelsior Scholarship details are approved

By Rick Karlin, Capitol bureau on May 25, 2017 at 5:11 PM The state’s Higher Education Services Corp., which helps oversee student loan financing, has approved final regulations for the new Excelsior Scholarship program which will eventually provide free SUNY/CUNY tuition to families earning up to $125,000 per year.

The governor’s release highlights some of the exceptions or exemptions to the 15-credit per semester requirement, which has drawn criticism for being unrealistic for some students. Among those are a provision that would accommodate those serving in the military and allowing hardship waivers for those who graduate and move out of state.

The original plan called for grads to remain in the state for up to four years or risk a penalty in the form of having to pay back some of the tuition money.

There is also a catch-up provision for students who may fall short of the 15 credit requirement.

Here are some more details:

Governor Andrew M. Cuomo today announced that the New York State Higher Education Services Corporation Board of Trustees voted to approve regulations governing the Excelsior Scholarship, the first-of-its-kind in the nation program to provide tuition-free college at New York’s public universities to families making up to $125,000 a year. The regulations can be found here.

Key provisions adopted today provide flexibility for Excelsior Scholars by: • Allowing for the interruption of study and waiver of post-award obligations based on military service requirements

• Allowing students to apply college credits earned in high school toward the 30-credits per year completion requirements

• Prorating repayment of an award if residency/work requirements are not met, and making provisions for waiver/postponement of repayment in cases of extreme hardship

• Allowing current college students who are six or less credits short of meeting the program’s credit requirements the opportunity to become eligible for the Excelsior Scholarship in 2018-2019, enabling them to “catch up” and qualify

• Authorizing disabled students to attend part-time and receive a pro-rated award

“A college education has become a necessity, and with the Excelsior Scholarship, all New Yorkers, no matter where they come from or how much money their families make, will have access to a higher education,” Governor Cuomo said. “This program will open the door of a high quality college education to more students than ever before, and build the highly skilled workforce that is needed for New York to continue to compete on the world economic stage. I applaud the HESC Board for approving these regulations that will allow so many students to benefit from this program.”

Under the Excelsior Scholarship, nearly 80 percent of New York families, or 940,000 middle-class families and individuals making up to $125,000 per year, would qualify to attend college tuition-free at all CUNY and SUNY two- and four-year colleges in New York State.

HESC Acting President Dr. Guillermo Linares said, “It is significant that the motion to approve the regulations came from the Board’s public sector student representatives. With the majority to jobs requiring a college education, the Excelsior Scholarship will allow more students and families to access a college education so that they meet tomorrow’s workforce demands.” The Board of Trustees also approved regulations to implement the Enhanced Tuition Awards program, which would provide scholarship awards to students from families making up to $125,000 a year and who are attending private colleges.

The Excelsior Scholarship application will be available June 7. More information is found at hesc.ny.gov/excelsior.

CCRB Defends Director After Investigation into Reported Crude Remarks

MIDTOWN — Civilian Complaint Review Board leaders defended their new head Thursday after he was investigated for inappropriate workplace behavior in 2013, including calling an area where Hispanic workers sat as “el Barrio,” according to reports and the agency.

CCRB Executive Director Jonathan Darche, 44, who was picked to lead the agency on May 15, was a deputy supervisor at the agency when he was accused of making the remark in reference to the East Harlem neighborhood, possibly groping a male employee’s buttocks and suggesting he would give his children “black names” to help them get into college, the AP first reported Thursday.

Agency leaders said they knew about the report before he was promoted.

"Throughout Mr. Darche's time at the CCRB, he has demonstrated a commitment to the mission of the agency. I have witnessed first-hand his efforts to create a safe and inclusive workplace,” CCRB Board Chair Maya Wiley said in a statement.

“As the Board Chair leading the hiring, I took into consideration all aspects of Mr. Darche's record, including the findings of the 2013 EEO complaint. Quite simply, Mr. Darche demonstrated in all of his roles at the Agency that he is a proven, caring, and fair leader. Mr. Darche took responsibility, was held accountable, and has demonstrated his commitment to our policies and staff."

Several of the accounts were substantiated and he was docked four vacation days and given management training, the AP reported.

The investigation was started by a senior official in the office after hearing about incidents, according to the AP report.

Darche formerly worked for Sen. Chuck Schumer and got his law degree form CUNY in 2005.

He was appointed to lead the agency after former director Mina Malik stepped down to teach at Harvard.

Board chair Richard Emery also resigned in 2016 after making controversial remarks, including complaining about police unions “squealing like a stuck pig.”

Board member Angela Fernandez said in a statement that the new director's actions did not "represent the culture and climate that Mr. Darche is cultivating at the agency today.”

Third Street Music School Settlement Awards the New York Community Trust Harris Scholarship

Third Street Music School Settlement will be presenting three students graduating this June as recipients of the New York Community Trust Harris Scholarship. This year's scholars, Emma Peleg, 17, Hale Sheffield, 17, and Jennifer Loo, 17, will each receive $25,000 over four years towards their college expenses. Entering college in fall 2017, the scholars have been accepted to schools such as Yale University, Princeton University, Duke University, SUNY Stony Brook, Binghamton University, The New School, New York University, CUNY Hunter, CUNY Baruch, Oberlin College, and Northeastern University. The scholarships are made possible by Charlotte Daniels Harris, a Queens kindergarten teacher who wanted her life savings to make a difference in kids' lives. Before her death, she started a fund in the New York Community Trust to help city students who show promise in their studies, demonstrate financial need, have good character, and study music. The Trust awarded a grant of $171,000 to Third Street to provide students with four-year college scholarships from 2016 to 2020.

"The New York Community Trust is proud to work with Third Street Music School on the Harris Scholarship," said Kerry McCarthy, Program Officer at The Trust. "The scholarships recognize musical achievement, academic performance and community engagement, which are so vital to New York."

"At Third Street, we guide our students through their musical journey that begins in early childhood, continues through their tweens and teens, and carries on into adulthood," said Valerie G. Lewis, the Anna-Maria Kellen Executive Director of Third Street Music School. "We are deeply grateful to the New York Community Trust and the Charlotte Daniels Harris Memorial Fund for the opportunity to support our students' transition from high school to college. We are so pleased that this partnership also supports our students' continued music studies as they pursue a higher education."

ABOUT THE HARRIS SCHOLARS

Emma will graduate from Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music and the Performing Arts. She has studied music at Third Street since childhood; her favorite genre is jazz music and her instrument of choice is the saxophone. Emma has a natural curiosity that drives her to participate in many extracurricular activities both at Third Street and at her high school. At Third Street, she's a member of a student-directed jazz ensemble, rock band, and the Interschool Symphonic Orchestra. At LaGuardia, Emma is part of Senior Jazz, Senior Band, Senior Orchestra and the Opera Club. While she does not plan to pursue music professionally, she is interested in exploring its connection with other fields. She plans to study neuroscience and engineering.

Hale will graduate from NYC iSchool. She has been participating in Third Street's music and dance classes since 2006 through a partnership program with her school (Partners@3rd), that enabled her to enroll for free/low-cost arts instruction. Hale is an integral part of the Third Street family, engaging in many activities such as guitar lessons, guitar ensemble, rock band and ballet. In 2016, Hale was also the student representative and speaker at Third Street's annual spring gala where she inspired many with her poise and talent. She plans to major in Gender Studies.

Jennifer will graduate from Hunter College High School. She has studied at Third Street for more than seven years, taking multiple classes including piano, voice, music theory, and sound recording, one of the School's newest courses. Jennifer also enjoys performing at Third Street's music hours and recitals as well as through the Chamber Choir at her high school. She plans on studying public policy.

"Being 17 is the start of a lot of changes in my life, it is a 'new beginning' but I feel confident in knowing that not only does Third Street have my back but my music does as well," said Hale Sheffield. "There are not enough words to express my gratitude, except to say thank you to the New York Community Trust Harris Scholarship for this gift."

ABOUT THE NEW YORK COMMUNITY TRUST

Since 1924, The New York Community Trust has been the home of charitable New Yorkers who share a passion for the City and its suburbs-and who are committed to improving them. The Trust supports an array of effective nonprofits that help make the City a vital and secure place to live, learn, work, and play, while building permanent resources for the future. The New York Community Trust ended 2013 with assets of $2.4 billion in more than 2,000 charitable funds, and made grants totaling $141 million. Read more about The New York Community Trust here: www.nycommunitytrust.org/. ABOUT THIRD STREET MUSIC SCHOOL SETTLEMENT

Founded in 1894, Third Street Music School Settlement is the nation's longest running community music school, with roots in the late-19th-century settlement house movement. Instrumental in establishing community arts education in the United States, Third Street has been changing lives and its community for over a century by providing access to high- quality music and arts instruction to students of all ages and backgrounds, regardless of artistic experience or economic circumstance. Today, Third Street serves over 5,000 students annually, helping them thrive in school and in life by promoting healthy personal and academic development, opening avenues to further study, sparking professional careers in the arts and instilling a lifelong love of learning. Located on East 11th Street in the heart of the East Village, Third Street offers early childhood classes, a unique music-centered preschool, after-school and Saturday programs for children and teens, as well as daytime and evening programs for adults. It also provides in-school arts education through 30 school and community partnerships across the city, as well as a year-round schedule of more than 250 public performances. Third Street alumni-- many who are professional artists--include violist Masumi Per Rostad of the acclaimed Pacifica String Quartet; Ray Chew, musician and music director of Dancing with the Stars and American Idol; Irving Caesar, composer of the 1920's hit "Tea for Two;" Bobby Lopez, co-creator of the hit Broadway musical Avenue Q and Academy Award-winning writer of "Let It Go" from Disney's Frozen; Ingrid Michaelson, pop singer/songwriter with hits on the Top 40 charts; and Jessie Montgomery, recipient of the Sphinx Award.

City Council Progressive Caucus Sets 18 Policy Goals for 2018 May 26, 2017 | by Ben Brachfeld

The City Council’s Progressive Caucus met this week to discuss its 2018 agenda, a set of 18 policy proposals that, its members say, pits them as direct adversaries to President Donald Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress.

“Now more than ever, it is crucial for local progressive leadership in NYC to set the example for our country,” said Council Member Antonio Reynoso, co-chair of the Progressive Caucus, in a statement.

The 18 policy points were posted to the caucus’s website last month, but the group of 19 City Council members hosted a policy summit on Tuesday to share more detailed goals with the public. The agenda is focused on action New York City should take this year and includes some items already in the works, like closing the Rikers Island jail complex, and others that have been stalled, such as passing The Right to Know Act, which would mandate certain communication from police officers in certain encounters with civilians.

Like Right to Know, several other items on the list are not supported by Mayor Bill de Blasio, himself an avowed progressive who has often been aligned with the Progressive Caucus, itself co-found by City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito, a close de Blasio ally. Like the caucus, Mark-Viverito has often outflanked de Blasio to his left, including on Rikers closure, on which her advocacy greatly contributed to the mayor’s recently- announced support for closing the complex in about ten years.

Any differences with de Blasio are, however, fairly minor in comparison to those between the caucus and President Trump.

The Progressive Caucus convened on the agenda with support from organizations such as the Working Families Party, Just Leadership USA, and Make the Road NY. The policy convening occurred on the same day as the release of the most recent budget proposal from the Trump administration, which stands at the opposite pole of the Caucus’, slashing funding for assistance programs such as Medicaid, the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP), and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), as well as cutting federal funding for affordable housing.

“In the age of a Trump administration, it is clear that the responsibilities of moving our country in the direction of progress will fall on the shoulders of our cities. Our new policy platform for 2018 is the Progressive Caucus’ pledge that we are up to the challenge,” said caucus co-chair Donovan Richards, a Democrat from Queens, in a statement.

In a repudiation of positions from the Trump administration, the proposal calls for a “right to counsel” for the city’s immigrants facing deportation. In a compromise with the City Council, Mayor de Blasio announced a new legal defense fund for immigrants in his executive budget unveiled last month, but the progressive caucus’ proposal would enshrine a legal right rather than simply providing funding. The caucus agenda also calls for the preservation of the city’s status as a sanctuary city, meaning law enforcement won’t turn over undocumented immigrants to federal authorities such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for low-level offenses such as possession of marijuana. The Trump administration has proposed withholding federal funds from sanctuary cities.

The caucus is also calling for expansion of reproductive services in the wake of threats to defund Planned Parenthood coming from the federal government.

The Progressive Caucus has challenged the mayor from the left in each budget season on certain priorities while, in large part, praising him. Compromises are often reached for the final, adopted budget, which is due by July 1.

Responding to criticisms that his mayoralty has not been as progressive as advertised, de Blasio, at a press conference in Queens on May 17, listed policies enacted during his tenure that he identified as progressive, including mandatory inclusionary zoning, the end of the “unconstitutional use” of stop-and-frisk, the end of arrests for low-level marijuana offenses, and implicit bias training for police officers.

“All those things actually are happening right now,” de Blasio said. “So I'll challenge anyone, anytime on those facts and on how progressive those changes are. And if some people want us to go farther, I'll always be honest about where I think we can and should go. But this is a thoroughly progressive record and it's not talk, it's something that actually happened."

The caucus’ proposal addresses areas of disagreement with the mayor, such as the “Fair Fares” proposal, which would provide half-priced subway and bus fares to low-income New Yorkers, and Citi Bike expansion to all corners of the city, using city funds if needed. These measures have been championed by the Council as means of transit equity, but de Blasio has pushed back, arguing that the state, which controls the MTA, should fund Fair Fares and that there is no plan to use public money for Citi Bike expansion. De Blasio has agreed, however, to eliminate some fees so that Citi Bike can expand to the South Bronx and Staten Island.

The Progressive Caucus 2018 agenda also endorses the enfranchisement of approximately one million U.S. Permanent Residents to vote in all local elections, like that for Mayor and City Council. From 1968 until 2003, noncitizens were permitted to vote in school board elections in New York; the practice ended under former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, despite the fact that he requested then-Governor George Pataki to allow noncitizen voting in local elections that same year. It’s been argued that noncitizen voting can facilitate greater diversity of representation in government, given that certain ethnic groups, such as Asians, are more likely to be immigrants and thus have minimal representation in government despite making up a significant proportion of the population.

This is a “valuable long-term policy objective” according to the progressive agenda, rather than an immediate concern, due to the Trump administration’s hostility towards immigrants. It has also mostly been implemented only in much smaller localities than New York, such as Takoma Park, Maryland and Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The proposal calls for full funding for the Worker Cooperatives Business Development Initiative, which facilitates the creation and expansion of worker cooperatives, a business model where employees own and operate the business.

The education planks are also ambitious. The “18 for 18” includes universal childcare from birth until age four, establishing a “Birth to Four” agency to “integrate early childhood services, better identify needs, and nurture children from delivery room to kindergarten.” The Caucus also proposes that the city provide three meals per day plus a snack to public school students, extensively building on a pilot program in middle schools providing free lunch to all students regardless of income level, eliminating the stigma associated with free lunches. A February IBO report on the pilot program indicated that if federal funding of school lunches switches to block grants, as Trump has proposed, then the city “could face the choice of contributing more funding or scaling back the program” in the event of increasing costs of meals, or perhaps an economic downturn.

The proposal also calls for school desegregation, something de Blasio has promised to tackle but been slow to act on; universal after-school and summer programs; and the restoration of free tuition at CUNY schools regardless of citizenship status, which will be free for families making under $125,000 per year under the Excelsior Scholarship.

Regarding housing, the caucus has a plank requiring all new multifamily developments in the city be built with an undefined number of affordable units, and “all available public land designated to include housing units should only be used for permanent, affordable housing, including deeply-affordable units.” The Council has wrestled, and made many compromises, with de Blasio on affordable housing as the mayor has pushed forward new zoning rules and a 200,000-unit 10-year plan in partnership with the Council. There have been tensions, though, around levels of affordability and neighborhood and plot rezonings.

The inclusion of a “Fair Work Week” plank pleased fast food union leaders, with new protections for industry workers such as “a right to request a flexible schedule,” a ban on “on-call” scheduling of hours, and a requirement that employers offer additional hours to existing employees before hiring new ones to fill those hours. It is one measure of the 18 that is already coming to fruition, similar to steps to end gender pay inequities that the Mayor, Council, and Public Advocate Letitia James have worked on together.

“We are proud to support the New York City Council’s progressive caucus platform,” said Hector Figueroa, president of 32BJ SEIU, one of the city’s largest and most influential labor unions. “Important initiatives like the Fair Work Week legislation that will provide important scheduling protections to fast-food workers and other workers across NYC are needed as soon as possible.

The members of the City Council Progressive Caucus are Council Members: Antonio Reynoso (Caucus Co-Chair, District 34) Donovan Richards (Caucus Co-Chair, District 31) Ben Kallos (Vice Chair, Policy, District 5) Helen Rosenthal (Vice Chair, Budget Advocacy, District 6) Melissa Mark-Viverito (Council Speaker, District 8) Jimmy Van Bramer (Council Majority Leader, District 26) Margaret Chin (District 1) Corey Johnson (District 3) Mark Levine (District 7) Bill Perkins (District 9) Ydanis Rodriguez (District 10) Ritchie Torres (District 15) Julissa Ferreras-Copeland (District 21) Daneek Miller (District 27) Steve Levin (District 33) Carlos Menchaca (District 38) Brad Lander (District 39) Jumaane Williams (District 45) Debi Rose (District 49)

Guides for Exploring New York Bookshelf By SAM ROBERTS MAY 25, 2017

In 1950, William Kornblum completed his first solo mission on the subway, at age 11. He rode the No. 7 train from his home in Flushing, Queens, to Lower Manhattan to deliver hearing aid batteries for his father, who was conducting labor negotiations in the Municipal Building.

“International Express: New Yorkers on the 7 Train” by Stéphane Tonnelat and Mr. Kornblum (Columbia University Press, $35) is a anthropological field guide to riders several generations later. The Flushing line’s route across Queens might be the same, but the passengers have undergone a remarkable metamorphosis.

Professor Kornblum, an emeritus professor of sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center, and Mr. Tonnelat, a French ethnographer, explore what they perceptively describe as the challenges of integration in a “situational community in transit.” Their research is culled from diaries, written by students with immigrant backgrounds, who recounted their daily rides.

Drawing on the recommendations of Richard Ravitch, a former chairman of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the authors make a compelling case for elected officials to seize responsibility for the subway system and to invest in it. The region depends on the system for its survival and not just for transportation.

“The fleeting interactions on the 7 train are part of an urban middle ground between the parochialisms of family and neighborhoods, and the larger horizons of America,” the authors conclude. “On their way to becoming American, riders of all origins are helped by the subways to first become ‘New Yorkers.’”

Memorial Day weekend is the unofficial start of summer. Here are other intriguing guides to getting around New York City and its surrounding areas:

“The Borscht Belt: Revisiting the Remains of America’s Jewish Vacationland” (Cornell University Press, $29.95), featuring photographs by Marisa Scheinfeld, provides a vivid, bittersweet record of forsaken archaeological sites that were once beloved summer havens in the Catskills. “To me,” Ms. Scheinfeld writes, “these discarded places are artifacts of time, evidence of change and settings of intrigue.”

“A Field Guide to Long Island Sound” (Yale University Press, $27.50) by Patrick J. Lynch is a lavishly illustrated and enlightening companion to anyone who cares about the 110-mile long estuary’s survival.

“Figures in Stone: Architectural Sculpture in New York City” (W. W. Norton & Company, $19.95) by Robert Arthur King, an architect and designer from the Bronx, takes readers on a tour of visible, but overlooked, carvings.

“Fire Island Lighthouse: Long Island’s Welcoming Beacon” (Arcadia Publishing and the History Press, $21.99) by Bill Bleyer explores the 1858 tower.

“Gardens of Stone: The Cemeteries of New York City From Colonial Times to the Present” (Fonthill Media, $22.99) by Alexandra Kathryn Mosca offers a historical excursion, with stops at grave sites that include Louis Armstrong’s and Harry Houdini’s.

“Magnetic City: A Walking Companion to New York” (Spiegel & Grau, $22), by Justin Davidson, New York magazine’s architecture critic, provides an intimate, seductive guidebook.

“New York Art Deco: A Guide to Gotham’s Jazz Age Architecture” (Excelsior Editions, State University of New York Press, $24.95) by Anthony W. Robins is a colorful keepsake for any aficionado.

“The Rockefeller Family Gardens: An American Legacy” (The Monacelli Press, $50), with lush photographs by Larry Lederman, captures how gloriously each generation expressed its personal character on a monumental canvas.

“The Quarry Fox and Other Critters of the Wild Catskills” (The Overlook Press, $25), by the naturalist Leslie T. Sharpe, is a poignant and modern reminder of untamed creatures so close to home.

New York Approves Free Tuition Regulations

By

Rick Seltzer

May 26, 2017 0 COMMENTS

The New York State Higher Education Services Corporation Board of Trustees approved regulations for the state’s new tuition-free public college tuition program Thursday, including some key regulations that would seem to address concerns about residency and credit-completion requirements. Several provisions address a requirement that students complete 30 credits in a year in order to remain eligible for the program or risk having to pay their tuition back. One of the new provisions would allow students to count college credits earned in high school toward the 30-credit requirement. Another would apply to students who enrolled in the last two years but fell six or fewer credits short of the 30-credit-per-year requirement. It would allow them the chance to catch up on credits and be eligible for 2018-19 academic year and afterward. Other provisions apply to requirements that students live and work in New York State for the same number of years they received program grants or have their grants turned into loans. One allows for the residency obligation to be waived for military service requirements. Another would prorate repayment of awards if residency and work requirements are not met. The regulations also address the possibility of repayment waivers and postponements for cases of extreme hardship, allow students to interrupt study for military obligations and authorize students with disabilities to attend college part-time and receive prorated awards. Students from New York families with annual incomes of up to $100,000 per year will qualify for the program in its first year, and it will scale up over the next two years to cover students from families with incomes of up to $125,000 annually. The program, called the Excelsior Scholarship, functions as a last-dollar program, enabling such students to attend two- and four-year institutions in the State University of New York and City University of New York systems without paying tuition. Estimates show 940,000 families qualifying for the scholarship program when it is fully in place. Applications are expected to be available June 7.

Appeals Court Rejects Trump Travel Ban Decision says the administration’s policy discriminates unconstitutionally on the basis of religion. Elizabeth Redden and Scott Jaschik May 26, 2017 13 COMMENTS

A federal appeals court on Thursday declined to lift an injunction on President Trump’s ban on travel to the United States from six majority-Muslim nations. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in a 10-to-3 ruling, found that the Trump policies amounted to religious discrimination, in violation of the Constitution. Further, the appeals court found that while the president of the United States has broad powers related to entry to the country, those powers are not absolute. Of the president’s travel ban, the court decision called it “an executive order that in text speaks with vague words of national security, but in context drips with religious intolerance, animus and discrimination. Surely the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment yet stands as an untiring sentinel for the protection of one of our most cherished founding principles -- that government shall not establish any religious orthodoxy, or favor or disfavor one religion over another. Congress granted the president broad power to deny entry to aliens, but that power is not absolute. It cannot go unchecked when, as here, the president wields it through an executive edict that stands to cause irreparable harm to individuals across this nation.” The case is expected to go to the U.S. Supreme Court. The current version of the ban, which the government has been blocked from implementing, contains some modifications from an earlier version, which was also rejected by courts. The current version applies to people coming to the United States from Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen, and includes those coming for educational purposes. More than 15,000 students and more than 2,000 visiting scholars came to U.S. universities from the six nations named in the current version of the ban in 2015-16, according to data from the Institute of International Education. While they make up only a small share of international students and scholars in the United States, leaders of academic groups have been united in condemning the travel ban. Many say it has had an impact on the image of the United States with international students (or potential students) all over the world, not just in those countries covered by the ban. The Middle East Studies Association, a scholarly group, is one of the plaintiffs in the case decided today by the Fourth Circuit. The association’s president, Beth Baron, a professor at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center, said in a statement that the Fourth Circuit’s ruling “reaffirmed what MESA and our partners in this lawsuit have been saying from the beginning: President Trump’s Muslim ban violates the U.S. Constitution. We are thrilled that the court upheld the Constitution’s prohibition on actions disfavoring or condemning any religion, for that principle is a fundamental protection for all of us -- including MESA members.” “Today’s decision will allow MESA to move forward more freely in advancing our mission as a scholarly association -- to facilitate the free exchange of ideas,” Baron said. “The order has already harmed our student and faculty members by preventing travel and disrupting research. We hope today’s legal victory will mitigate this disruption.” The other plaintiffs include refugee resettlement organizations -- in addition to the ban on entry for nationals of the six countries, Trump’s executive order also suspended all refugee admission -- and six individuals who allege that Trump’s executive order would impact the ability of their immediate family members to obtain visas or enter the U.S. as refugees. One of the plaintiffs, identified only as Jane Doe No. 2, is described in the opinion as a college student who has a pending visa application on behalf of her sister, a Syrian refugee living in Saudi Arabia. Another, identified as John Doe No. 1, is a scientist with lawful permanent residency status who has filed a visa application on behalf of his wife, an Iranian national. The opinion quotes John Doe No. 1, who is Muslim, as saying that the ban “forces [him] to choose between [his] career and being with [his] wife.”

Tech it out! City Tech debuts new facility Downtown

Give them a round of app-lause!

New York City College of Technology opened a new facility on May 19 at which students are taught how to use software to develop new apps and other tech training — a positive addition to the college’s curriculum, according students.

“I benefit greatly from it,” said Shanardo Sharpe, a City University of New York employee enrolled in the program. “I believe that it will be an excellent source for people who are technology-savvy or who are just technology enthusiasts to further their skills in application development.”

Students at the new Downtown computer lab, called the Center of Excellence, are trained to use a software called Mongoose, which was created by the Manhattan-based tech company Infor.

The organization provides City Tech students with internships and other professional opportunities, so working with it on the new facility and curriculum was a no-brainer, according to a college spokeswoman.

“The best next step for the City University of New York really was to have a dedicated space with this company that has demonstrated an amazing commitment to really give our students an extra set of skills and marketability with the tools that they’ve learned,” said City Tech’s Faith C. Corbett.

New and Noteworthy Books on Military History, from Afghanistan to Waterloo By THOMAS E. RICKS MAY 26, 2017

Two very good and very different new books reflect the extraordinary range of military history being written these days.

In the unusual THE ALLURE OF BATTLE: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost (Oxford University, $34.95), Cathal J. Nolan seeks to demolish how historians view war — and succeeds surprisingly well. The traditional Western view of conflict is that the way to win a war is to seek battle and prevail. This is the approach embodied by Napoleon, made doctrine by Clausewitz and captured on film in “Patton.” And it is entirely wrong, Nolan, a history professor at Boston University, says, as he conducts the literary equivalent of scorched earth warfare.

Nolan’s primary argument is that focusing military history on battles is the wrong way to understand wars because what wins conflicts is almost always attrition, not battle. Generally, one side, usually the one with a smaller economy and population, becomes exhausted, and gives up. Talk about élan and audacity all you like, he counsels, but what wins wars is demography and economic strength.

In fact, he says, the ideal of a “decisive battle” waged by great leaders should be seen as a pernicious myth that takes weaker, fascistic powers into wars against nations they know they cannot defeat in the long run. Two leading examples of this “short war” delusion are, of course, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. Hence Germany’s blitzkrieg campaigns early in World War II and Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.

Inside this very good fat book is an excellent thin book trying to get out. That’s more a criticism of the Oxford University Press than of the author, because what this book needed was an editor with a strong hand. At 670 pages, it is just too damn long. It contains sections that wax encyclopedic without any evident connection to the book’s core themes. For example, we are subjected to seemingly everything Nolan knows about the Crimean War, like the fact that the efforts of Florence Nightingale, the pioneer of modern nursing, were at first rebuffed by some British officers. We get a deep dive into the Franco-Prussian War, but oddly almost nothing on the American Civil War that preceded it. Asia goes unmentioned before the 20th century. The chapter titles are opaque, more like symbolic poetry than guideposts for the book.

On the other hand, a book has to be really thought-provoking to have so many problems and still be so fascinating. I cannot remember reading anything in the last few years that has made me reconsider so many basic questions — What wins wars? What is the most illuminating way to relate military history? Most important, is our own military too focused on battles and insufficiently attentive to what is required to win wars? In other words, are our generals flailing because they try to substitute battlefield skill for strategic understanding? (I think they are.)

Ultimately, Nolan is persuasive that too much attention has been paid to battles. Even for that great genius of warfare, Napoleon, he argues — credibly — that the slow bleed of guerrilla war in Spain did much more than any battle to bring about his defeat. By the time of Waterloo, he insists, France was a spent force. And if Napoleon hadn’t been finished off there, he would have been at his next battle, or the one after that. So much for perhaps the most famously decisive battle in history.

THUNDER IN THE MOUNTAINS: Chief Joseph, Oliver Otis Howard, and the Nez Perce War (Norton, $29.95) is almost the opposite kind of history book. In this far more traditional work, Daniel J. Sharfstein, a Vanderbilt University law and history professor, offers a brisk narrative of one of the last major collisions between Native Americans and white America. His two main characters are complex and compelling — Chief Joseph, a thoughtful, powerful speaker who spent years trying to find a way for his people to live alongside American settlers, and General O. O. Howard, a moralistic liberal Army general whose fate it was to crush Joseph’s small Nez Percé tribe.

In the summer of 1877 it became clear that Joseph’s peaceable dream of coexistence was not possible. Deciding they would have no more to do with the whites, the Nez Percé set off on a trek from their homeland, which lay in the area where Oregon, Idaho and Washington meet. They eventually turned north, crossing at one point through the Yellowstone National Park, which had been established five years earlier. Howard’s soldiers, pursuing the tribe, enjoyed that park, Sharfstein notes, catching trout in the mountain rivers and poaching them in its geysers.

The tribe’s thousand-mile retreat ended not far from the Canadian border, where it was finally surrounded by Army forces. Joseph famously stated there, “From where the sun now stands I will fight no more.” Less well known is the speech he gave in Washington, D.C., a few years later: “If the white man wants to live in peace with the Indian, he can live in peace. There need be no trouble. Treat all men alike. Give them all the same law. Give them all an even chance to live and grow. … Let me be a free man … and I will obey every law, or submit to the penalty.” Despite its stuffy academic title, AMERICAN SANCTUARY: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution (Pantheon, $30) tells a similarly dramatic tale — in this case, a good, readable story in the mode of Nathaniel Philbrick’s nautical histories. It has to do with a 1797 mutiny aboard the British warship Hermione that was far more violent than the better known one that occurred on the Bounty eight years earlier. And because some of the mutineers were Americans who had been impressed into British service, and some were turned over to the British Navy by American authorities, it became the Benghazi incident of its time. Federalists tended to see the mutineers as bloodstained murderers, while Jeffersonian Republicans viewed them as men held involuntarily who had a right to seek their liberty. The debate had a significant effect on the election of 1800, turning the vote away from John Adams and toward Thomas Jefferson, the ultimate victor.

The book occasionally falters. The author, A. Roger Ekirch, a historian at Virginia Tech, seems to have a better feel for American political history than for command at sea. For example, a deep sea generally is an advantage for a ship, not a hazard. Similarly, marine officers were more likely to be resented aboard a ship than others, because the marines were effectively naval police, enforcing shipboard discipline. And the second half of the book occasionally bogs down in multiple quotations from newspapers of the time. Still, the level of detail, including verbatim testimony from subsequent courts-martial, is impressive.

A more puzzling work is LINCOLN’S LIEUTENANTS: The High Command of the Army of the Potomac (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $38), by the Civil War stalwart Stephen Sears. It is a fine book, enjoyable to read. All the greatest hits are here — the spectacular feuds between Union generals, the preening of Gen. George McClellan, the pervasive tendency to underestimate President Lincoln’s strategic insight and the tragedy of the battle in the Petersburg Crater.

Yet all this has been well told before. The mystery is why it has to be told once more, especially in a volume of almost 900 pages. This is not an argument that historians should stop writing about the Civil War. But when they do, they should offer new information or a fresh perspective. I found neither here.

It is disquieting to turn from these books about the early United States to one about our own century’s war in Afghanistan only to find some of the same flaws from the past, like the attempt to impose capitalist liberal democracy on people long accustomed to very different ways. Aaron B. O’Connell, the editor of OUR LATEST LONGEST WAR: Losing Hearts and Minds in Afghanistan (University of Chicago, $30), calls that country “the worst possible testing ground for a Western democratic experiment conducted at the point of a gun.” The other contributors to the volume — almost all military veterans of the Afghan war — generally agree that the American people are culturally unable to win wars like this one. “Prudence was blinded by unexamined political and cultural assumptions, and the result was a massive and avoidable waste of time, lives and resources,” Aaron MacLean concludes; he led a Marine infantry platoon there and also holds a master’s degree from Oxford in medieval Arabic studies.

MacLean tellingly observes that the Americans were not trying to bring governance to a place that had none, but rather were trying to replace an existing unwritten constitution they didn’t understand and indeed barely perceived. “It consisted of traditional ethnic, tribal, state and religious patterns, all of which had been partially transformed by modernization and traumatically stressed by decades of war and the rise of Islamic radicalism,” he writes. Surprisingly, no good overview of our Afghan war has been published yet. Until that happens, this enlightening volume is probably the best introduction to what went wrong there, and why.

There is a common thread to almost all wars: They begin with hubris, stumble on miscalculation and end in sorrow. So it was, emphatically, with the Athenian empire’s invasion of distant Sicily in 415 B.C., during the Peloponnesian War. As a result of that poorly considered action, Athens eventually suffered political upheaval. “War abroad had given rise to civil discord at home,” Jennifer T. Roberts writes in THE PLAGUE OF WAR: Athens, Sparta, and the Struggle for Ancient Greece (Oxford University, $34.95). Reading that, I began to wonder if there was a parallel to the unnecessary American invasion of distant Iraq in 2003, and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency some 13 years later. Roberts, a classicist at the City University of New York, notes that as a result of its political turmoil, Athens found its democracy temporarily overthrown by an oligarchical “motley crew with differing goals.”

Do we really need another history of the Peloponnesian War? That was the question in my mind when I opened this book. When I finished it, I thought, yes, we seem to. Military historians often neglect developments in the arts, for instance, but Roberts weaves in Greek culture, showing how works by dramatists and philosophers reflected events in the war. Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” about women going on a sex strike to bring peace, was produced in 411 B.C., in the wake of the Athenian disaster in Sicily. She portrays the death of Socrates 12 years later as one more evil consequence of the war, with the great philosopher scapegoated “for the ills of a city that had suffered war, economic collapse, demographic devastation and civil strife.”

A less examined aspect of ancient history is the Praetorian Guard of the Roman emperors. Guy de la Bédoyère, a prolific British historian, tackles the subject in PRAETORIAN: The Rise and Fall of Rome’s Imperial Bodyguard (Yale University, $35). This is not an enjoyable book to read, but it is an interesting one, as the author pulls together the scraps and threads of information about the Guard. The problem is that so little is known about it that the story never really comes alive.

The Harvard historian David Armitage offers another unsettling echo from ancient history when he notes that the Latin phrase variously translated as “public enemy” or “enemy of the people” — the second used by President Trump to describe the American news media — was first devised by Romans in the context of their civil wars, as a way to justify violence against fellow citizens. But overall, his short CIVIL WARS: A History in Ideas (Knopf, $27.95) offers more dry analysis than juicy insights or rich narrative.

Storytelling and details are not lacking in AT THE EDGE OF THE WORLD: The Heroic Century of the French Foreign Legion (Bloomsbury, $30). One of its themes is how routine suicide was in the Legion. Out of 845 Legionnaires sent on an expedition to Madagascar, 11 were officially declared to have taken their own lives. The author, Jean- Vincent Blanchard of Swarthmore College, says that number is almost certainly an undercount, with other self-killings recorded as deaths by disease. Among its interesting details: Near a major Legionnaire base in Morocco, there was a huge government-run prostitution complex, protected by a police checkpoint and populated by 600 to 900 women. Members of the Legion were not allowed to venture more than seven kilometers from their headquarters in Algeria, or to buy drink stronger than wine. The rightist, monarchist, religiously conservative strain in French thought represented by the Legion continues today, of course. Marine Le Pen, the far-right French politician who was recently defeated for the presidency, is the daughter of Jean-Marie Le Pen, who served in the Legion in Vietnam and Algeria in the 1950s.

Americans also tend to forget what we as a people once knew. One of the oddities of World War I was that for most of its duration, from August 1914 until April 1917, American reporters were from a neutral country, and so able to cover the fighting from both sides. At the outset, Chris Dubbs reports in AMERICAN JOURNALISTS IN THE GREAT WAR: Rewriting the Rules of Reporting (University of Nebraska, $34.95), the most welcoming country, surprisingly, was Germany, which wanted to present its side of the story to the American public. Britain was less open to having its operations covered, and the French were the strictest censors of all. The Allies arrested reporters while the Germans offered them tours of the front. Among the consequences, Dubbs, himself a journalist turned military historian, notes, was that when the British public finally learned about the horrible nature of trench warfare, it was all the more shocked.

If Dubbs’s book is about how journalists covered World War I, Ray Moseley’s REPORTING WAR: How Foreign Correspondents Risked Capture, Torture and Death to Cover World War II (Yale University, $32.50) is about how the second global war affected the reporters who covered it. Today, too many people have come to think of World War II as the “good war.” One of Moseley’s themes is that there is no such thing. A veteran foreign correspondent, he quotes a British journalist after a German victory in the Sahara: “I found myself hating the desert with a neurotic, tormenting hatred. I was obsessed with the waste of tears and blood and sweat that … I found I could no longer even write about it.”

“Reporting War” makes for melancholy reading. Among the most famous of American war correspondents was Ernie Pyle. Another journalist covering the fighting, The New Yorker’s A. J. Liebling, astutely observed that part of Pyle’s success came from his treating the war not as an adventure or crusade but rather as “an unalleviated misfortune.” After the liberation of Paris, Pyle himself wrote, “For me war has become a flat, black depression without highlights, a revulsion of the mind and an exhaustion of the spirit.”

Pyle died during the landings on Okinawa in April 1945. Such ends were not unusual; Moseley cites one estimate that correspondents suffered a higher casualty rate during the war than combat troops did. After the war, some of those who survived went on to fame, like Walter Cronkite and Eric Sevareid. But many others expired prematurely of alcoholism, depression, midlife heart attacks and car accidents.

One of the lessons of all these books is that wars always look worse closer up. Indeed, one of the tests of the veracity of a history of a conflict is whether it is depressing. If it is not, something may be wrong.

Women’s March Organizer and Sharpton Ally Slams Critics of Linda Sarsour

Activist Tamika Mallory, a former aide to Rev. Al Sharpton, lambasted critics of her fellow Women’s March organizer Linda Sarsour as “racist, Islamophobic people”— and urged her allies at the Black Institute Ball to “talk us up and pray for us.”

Yesterday, alt-right British media personality and former Breitbart senior editor Milo Yiannopolous—who himself has been embroiled in controversies, including comments on child molestation—led a protest against Sarsour’s scheduled commencement address at City University of New York’s Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy next month. Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind and right- wing anti-Muslim activist Pam Geller were among the participants.

The demonstration turned violent as protesters clashed with counter-protesters.

Today, there was a big, stupid rally with some racist, Islamophobic people against my sister and there were a lot of people who went to this rally who as far as I’m concerned are a bunch of hateful folks,” said Mallory, former executive director of Sharpton’s National Action Network. “And what I’m asking is not for them to stop but for us to turn up in helping to express our love and support of Linda Sarsour because to know Linda Sarsour is to know me and to stand for her is to stand for me.” Mallory, who accepted an award from the Black Institute along with Sarsour, insisted that anyone who loves her “must love my sister.”

She requested that the roughly 100-plus people in attendance to “talk us up and pray for us, because it certainly is not easy.”

Mallory praised Black Institute founder Bertha Lewis, who previously served as CEO of Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, and Hazel Dukes, president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People New York State Conference—calling both women “exactly what I am trying to become and that is courageous, able to really speak truth to power no matter what.” “We know that the Women’s March—while it was truly incredible—it really was not the beginning for us nor will it be the end,” she said. “We have some real serious work that we must do, and I appreciate when our people—when people look like us, when people who love us and actually care about us—acknowledge our work.”

Hikind, Staten Island Assemblyman Ronald Castorina and Queens Councilman Rory Lancman—who have butted heads with Sarsour in the past—have called on CUNY to rescind the invitation because of her support of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement, her past supportive statements about sharia law and her protests against Israeli military operations in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Mallory joined fellow Women’s March organizer Carmen Perez and Brooklyn Councilmen Jumaane Williams and Brad Lander, among other advocates, for a rallyearlier this month at City Hall to show solidarity with Sarsour. Sarsour is known for her involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement and in Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. Until recently, she headed the Brooklyn-based Arab-American Association of New York, which receives public funding from the city. She also donated to Staten Island Assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis‘s campaign, which has raised eyebrows as the GOP lawmaker has sought her party’s nomination for mayor. Sarsour, for her part, praised Lewis, saying that she always “has her back” and called Dukes “our mama” whom she listens to no matter what. She vowed she would not allow protesters to dissuade her from speaking at CUNY, or anywhere else.

“As your Palestinian, Muslim-American sister, I will stay committed,” she said. “I will not be silent. I will not be intimidated. I will continue to speak truth to power knowing the consequences because if speaking truth to power was easy, everybody would be doing it.”

Kirsten John Foy, NAN’s Northeast Regional Director, also had some tough words for Sarsour’s critics, calling her and Mallory “the cream of the crop.”

“I just want you all to spread the word to anybody out there that may have the wrong intention when they mention their names, that they are not alone, that they will never be alone, that we will wrap our arms around them ’til the day that we die,” Foy said. “And anybody that has poor intention—let me just put it like this—poor intention towards them are gonna have to face the wrath of some pretty unrefined people.”

The other honorees were Joy Reid, who called Sarsour and Mallory “personal heroes,” and Rev. Leah Daughtry, CEO of the 2016 Democratic National Convention Committee and daughter of renowned pastor, Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry of the House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn.

Lewis, for her part, stressed to the crowd that the honorees—as well as past honorees—were “not random, not pulled out of the air.” “Every last one of these sisters before they got ‘bigged up,’ before they took the headlines, before they became the leaders that they are—and became famous—they never forgot where they came from,” she said.

In the News, and in the Classroom By Duncan Dobbelmann MAY 25, 2017

In August 2014, after the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., refocused national attention on questions of institutional racism, power, and injustice with a new urgency, colleges and universities were once again confronted with the difficult question of just what role they have in responding to late-breaking events of critical concern. Educators have typically responded by issuing public statements, writing editorials, organizing teach-ins, encouraging ad hoc conversations, and addressing current events in the classroom. In the case of Ferguson, Marcia Chatelain, an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Georgetown University, took to Twitter, asking her peers to suggest books, films, articles, and artwork that spoke to the situation, which she collected and disseminated in the #FergusonSyllabus.

But colleges, as institutions, can do more. There are times that colleges — especially those dedicated to instilling a social purpose — must offer courses that address unfolding events such as Ferguson with the same attention, skills, and rigor as regularly scheduled courses. Courses that can — and should — be seen as existing on the same continuum of learning. At my institution, Bennington College, a liberal-arts college that holds student agency and engagement as core values, we felt that we needed to create opportunities for discussion less ad hoc and more sustained than town-hall meetings and teach-ins — something more like our courses themselves. We recalled an idea that had previously been discussed only casually, in one of those wouldn’t-it-be-nice-if moments: pop-up courses. If we could create courses more or less on the spot, as the need arose, then we would have a strong, learning-oriented mechanism ready for such events as Ferguson.

But colleges are not usually the most responsive, adaptive, or flexible institutions. Even at small and relatively nimble Bennington, the logistical problems that pop-up courses posed seemed formidable. Who proposes them? Who teaches them? How are they approved? How many can we offer at once? When can they be offered, given that the curriculum for the term has already been established? Then, too, there were questions about enrollment and faculty workload.

Bennington, however, has a few advantages in this regard. The most important is our open curriculum, which is constructed anew each year under the guidance of a faculty committee accustomed to tackling both pernicious logistical questions (the course grid, for example) and more-conceptual questions, concerning discipline and content (Bennington has no majors and no departments). We also happened to have an existing time slot dedicated to one-credit, three-week courses. (A normal, full-term course is four credits.)

The pop-up idea was discussed and approved by the curriculum committee in the fall of 2014. Pop-ups were defined as one or two credit module-style courses meant to respond to unfolding local, national, or international events or issues.

A mechanism for proposal and approval was quickly put in place: Any student, faculty member, or staff member could propose a pop-up course to a faculty member, who could agree to teach it at his or her discretion. The proposal would then be brought to the curriculum committee, which would assess it in the context of the curriculum for the term. If approved, the pop-up would be entered into the curriculum (a live document) and broadcast to students.

In the spring of 2015 we offered five pop-up courses, among them "The Ferguson Report," "Nepal: Before and After the Earthquake," "Measles and the (Sometimes Unnatural) History of Outbreaks," and "Am I Charlie?" (about the Charlie Hebdo attacks). As expected, each saw a healthy enrollment, as have the pop-ups offered since then.

But such brief — and often intense — courses about events taking place in real time are not the usual fare for either faculty members or students. These pop-ups are neither simply shortened courses nor intensives. They cannot be approached primarily in terms of content coverage and discipline-specific skills mastery. Often the subject either is not fully understood or is actively contested (or both) while still unfolding before the eyes of students with varied personal and academic backgrounds. The instructor her or himself may have a vigorous interest but not the accustomed mastery of the subject.

How does one teach, and how does one assess, in this context? The course’s very immediacy, its proximity to our lives, offers the answer: It demands teaching and learning that embraces central, cross-disciplinary skills such as research, analysis, collaboration, and creativity. The development of these skills is much more heavily emphasized than are fixed outcomes. In this way, pop-up courses can both enact and model a deep, thoughtful, and active engagement with the world.

Duncan Dobbelmann is adviser to the president at Bennington College. He has previously served as associate provost and dean of studies there and as director of the Learning Center at Brooklyn College.

Scientists to probe dolphin intelligence using an interactive touchpad May 25, 2017

Using optical technology specifically developed for this project, dolphins at the National Aquarium in Baltimore, MD, are at the center of research from an interdisciplinary team from Hunter College and Rockefeller University. The system involves an underwater computer touchscreen through which dolphins are able to interact and make choices. The system, the first of its kind, will be used to investigate dolphin intelligence and communication by providing them choice and control over a number of activities. Researchers believe this technology will help extend the high-throughput revolution in biology that has brought us whole genome sequencing and the BRAIN project, into the field of animal cognition.

The eight-foot underwater touchscreen features specialized dolphin-friendly "apps" and a symbolic keyboard to provide the dolphins—which are intelligent and highly social—with opportunities to interact with the system. To make the system safe for the dolphins, the touchscreen has been installed outside an underwater viewing window, so that no parts of the device are in the pool: the animals' touch is detected purely optically. While the research is still in its early stages, the team has embarked on studies aimed at understanding dolphin vocal learning and communication, their capacity for symbolic communication, and what patterns of behavior may emerge when the animals have the ability to request items, videos, interactions and images.

The interdisciplinary research team is comprised of Diana Reiss, a dolphin cognition and communication research scientist and Professor in the Department of Psychology at Hunter College; biophysicist Marcelo Magnasco, Professor and Head of the Laboratory of Integrative Neuroscience at Rockefeller University; Ana Hocevar, a postdoctoral research scientist; and Sean Woodward, a doctoral student, both in Magnasco's lab.

"We hope this technologically-sophisticated touchscreen will be enriching for the dolphins and also enrich our science by opening a window into the dolphin mind," says Reiss. "Giving dolphins increased choice and control allows them to show us reflections of their way of thinking and may help us decode their vocal communication."

Reiss is known for her earlier work demonstrating "mirror self-recognition" in dolphins (and elephants) as well as a prior dolphin study that pioneered the use of an interactive underwater keyboard system and demonstrated their capacity for spontaneous vocal imitation and self- organized learning.

"It was surprisingly difficult to find an elegant solution that was absolutely safe for the dolphins, but it has been incredibly rewarding to work with these amazing creatures and see their reactions to our system," says Magnasco. "It has always been hard to keep up with dolphins, they are so smart; a fully interactive and programmable system will help us follow them in any direction they take us."

"The interactive system was designed to engage the dolphins without requiring explicit training. It is an open system in which the dolphins' use of the touchscreen will shape how the system evolves," says Hocevar, who built the hardware and programmed its functionality.

In addition to the touchscreen itself, the dolphin's habitat at the National Aquarium has been outfitted with equipment to record their behavior and vocalizations as they encounter and begin to use the technology. "We want to monitor whether the dolphins integrate novel elements from touchpad interactions, such as acoustical signals, into their daily repertoire, to which end we have installed an array of underwater microphones and video cameras," says Woodward.

Already, the scientists have begun to introduce the dolphins to some of the system's interactive apps, so the animals can explore on their own how touching the screen results in specific contingencies. "Without any explicit training or encouragement from us, one of the younger dolphins, Foster, spontaneously showed immediate interest and expertise in playing a dolphin version of Whack-a-Mole," Reiss says, "in which he tracks and touches moving fish on the touchscreen."

This research is funded by The National Science Foundation, The Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation, and a fellowship from the Raymond and Beverly Sackler Foundation, and it is carried out in partnership with the National Aquarium.

"Using methods from statistical physics to analyze dolphin communication will open the door to understand how other animals communicate, which could be a game-changer in understanding how even human language originated," said Krastan Blagoev, the program director for the National Science Foundation's Physics of Living Systems program, which funded the research. "Projects like this not only enable science, but excite the next generation to think about science."

The research team hopes that the information gleaned from this research will also result in increased empathy toward dolphins and inspire global policies for their protection.

Pulitzer Center 2017 Student Fellows Announced

May 25, 2017| General news, Education news

The Pulitzer Center and its Campus Consortium partners are proud to announce the 38 students selected to receive international reporting fellowships in 2017. Our fellows will report on stories of communities facing complex issues across the globe—from refugees seeking asylum and migrants looking for work to marginalized people fighting for equity. Still others will be documenting the experiences of people battling public health concerns and adapting to shifting climates and contaminated environments. Fellows will be mentored by Pulitzer Center-supported journalists and staff throughout their projects. These reporting fellowships are awarded to students who attend colleges and universities that are part of the Pulitzer Center's Campus Consortium educational initiative. SEEKING LIFE ON THE MOVE Amid conflict and fragile economies, citizens flee their countries to seek refuge and work in neighboring states. Fellows travel to regions that have become epicenters of rising tensions as well as countries that offer asylum–sharing stories of the lives of families and unaccompanied youth living on the move. Amy Russo, a recent media studies graduate of Hunter College, shares the stories of unaccompanied child refugees as they seek asylum in Sweden. Two journalism students of Northwestern University in Qatar, Ifath Sayed and Jueun Choi, report on the experience of child refugees who are refused the right to education due to their unchanging illegal status. Esohe Osabuohien, a recent graduate of Spanish and communications studies from the University of Michigan, travels to Cuba to document marginalized communities in the country. WWII marks a critical point in the history of Israel for those Polish-Jews who immigrated prior to the conflict and those who came after to the country. Tomek Cebrat, a political science student at Washington University in St. Louis, explores the evolution of a diaspora community of Jews of Polish ancestry and their experiences pre and post WWII. South Dakota State University journalism and political science student Palak Barmaiya ventures into the northernmost state of India, Ladakh–a mountain desert with a small population working in agriculture. Lack of an established education system in Ladakh led to an educational reform in the 1990s–and a campus where students are involved in finding sustainable solutions.

DEFENDING LABOR RIGHTS, LAND RIGHTS, AND SAFE INFRASTRUCTURE The need for work forces many to make sacrifices to support their communities; whether by embarking as migrant workers in foreign lands or entering into dangerous occupations closer to home. Southern Illinois University, Carbondale student Ryan Michalesko documents the lives of migrant workers in Mexico. Bruno Beidacki, multimedia journalism and political science student at Kent State University, embarks on a trip to Macau, China, to investigate the impact of the gambling industry on the local community, as legalization of gambling has led to development of casinos for the past two decades. While stories of the black market trade that results from rhino poaching in South Africa have been brought to light, accounts of the people who fight to protect the endangered species have gone under-reported. Kelsey Emery, a recent biology studies graduate of Texas Christian University, travels to South Africa to document the lives of veterinarians who work to save the lives of rhinos who are attacked. As extractives industries build networks in resource-rich regions, land rights of residents come under threat, perpetuating sustained economic injustice. Lila Franco, a Wake Forest University student of communications and psychology, documents the experiences of 19 indigenous groups–in her native Venezuela–who are being driven from their lands by mining corporations. In Colombia, landmines still lie on the surface of regions like Bogota. Westchester Community College communications and media arts student Viridiana Vidales Coyt travels to Bogota to report on a group called “Sports for Social Change” that educates children about mine risk through soccer drills, helping protect them while also addressing social issues such as homelessness, poverty and violence. University of Chicago student Patrick Reilly makes a trip to Tijuana, Mexico, to investigate the effects of public transportation systems and new rapid transit routes on the residents of the urban areas they serve.

DEFINING IDENTITY ALONG THE MARGINS As people who are pushed to the margins of society seek to define their identity, human rights abuses continue to threaten progression. Fellows document these injustices and, alternatively, the efforts some organizations are making to close these gaps in equity. Pakistan is unique in the treatment of transgender people. They’re viewed as being good fortune, yet they are also discarded with contempt. The word "transgender" in Pakistan is commonly used to refer to individuals born with both female and male parts. Harry S Truman College student Rubab Anwar travels to Pakistan to learn where the transgender community stands socially, politically, and religiously in the developing country—especially in light of government shifts such as including a third option under gender on identification cards and within the census. University of Pennsylvania student Siyona Ravi reports on a shift in human rights after the repeal of India’s anti-sodomy law. Davidson College student Aman Madan travels to Jordan to report on identity issues, asking, “Can the country’s ethnically heterogenous composition be its downfall?” Southern Illinois University, Carbondale student Morgan Timms reports on the experiences of indigenous youth in Australia. As Praveena Somasundaram, a student from Guilford College, reports, “The patriarchal notion of women’s inferiority to men follows Indian women from a young age, contributing to the severe gender inequality in the country.” In India, Somasundaram illuminates the experience of women who seek educational and occupational opportunities. In a project that turns toward the U.S., Columbia University students Sarah Bellingham and Max Toomey continue reporting for a documentary about “People 4 Trump” as they follow people they met during the country’s 2017 presidential election campaign. University of Pennsylvania student Gareth Smail writes, “Morocco’s 30-year experiment with teaching exclusively in Arabic may be coming to an end.” Smail reports on how students and teachers have navigated linguistic and cultural challenges.

COMBATING GLOBAL HEALTH ISSUES Public health issues can originate from environmental degradation, hereditary medical issues, and traumatic events. Student fellows travel to regions where the after-effects of disease and conflict have presented people with public health and mental health concerns. Boston University student Erica Andersen reports on global policy surrounding pharmaceutical pollution in water. Elon University student Juliana Walker travels to London to explore the causes of severe air pollution and the public health concerns associated with the long-term exposure. Jessica Rowan, a Flagler College journalism student, travels to Costa Rica to learn how people living in remote regions address their type 1 diabetes health concerns, amid restricted access to healthcare education and medical supplies. Women’s health continues to be a neglected issue in developing countries. Breast and cervical cancer are two such diseases that are emerging as a crisis in many underdeveloped nations, none more so than Haiti, a country with the highest mortality rate of cervical cancer in the world. The George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health students Katie Corrigan and Anna Russell report from Haiti, sharing stories of the women who fight against the odds, working to secure funding for the treatment of their cancers. Ambar Castillo, a LaGuardia Community College student, travels to India to report on organizations that use the arts to combat social justice issues that threaten people who live with chronic diseases. Advances in genetics are testing the bounds of medical ethics. The “right not to know” is viewed as extremely important by the medical community, but to the general public the term may feel in direct opposition to the Hippocratic oath. Anna Clausen, a graduate student in journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, brings a unique story about genetic research to light, as she reports from Iceland, a country at the forefront of genetic research, where a biopharmaceutical company has discovered that 0.7 percent of the nation likely carries the BRCA2 mutation which increases the odds of getting breast cancer. In February 2016, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared Zika virus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. Brazil, the epicenter of the Zika outbreak, caught global attention with a surge in newborn babies born with a birth defect called microcephaly, now known to be only one of many neurodevelopmental abnormalities that fall under congenital Zika virus syndrome (CZVS). From Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, Poonam Daryani explores the lives of those caring for and raising children with CZVS. Lauryn Claassen, a Boston University student, travels to El Salvador to report on the effects of restrictive reproductive policies on women and families after the wake of the Zika virus, which prompted El Salvador’s deputy health minister to instruct women to “hold off” on becoming pregnant. As mental health issues have gone under-reported, four fellows commit to voicing the experiences of those who live with mental illnesses and presenting the solutions some organizations are trying to implement. Boston University students Madeline Bishop and Campbell Rawlins cover the high suicide rate in Guyana. Sawsan Morrar, a University of California, Berkeley, journalism graduate student with a background in international relations studies, reports on the mental health of refugees who seek asylum in Jordan. Northwestern University Medill student Pat Nabong reports on trauma associated with mental illness in the Philippines.

ADAPTING TO CLIMATE CHANGE Climate change increasingly threatens livelihoods of communities around the world who rely on fragile land for their food, income, and spiritual traditions. Fellows travel to islands, coastal communities, forests, and factory-side towns, to share stories of resilience as people adapt to shifting landscapes. Loktak Lake is one-of-a-kind wetland ecosystem that has been designated a Wetland of International Importance through the Ramsar Convention treaty of 1960. Phumdis, numerous floating islands comprised of vegetation, soil, and other organic matter, cover nearly two-thirds of the lake’s 236 square kilometers, changing shape according to a season, and moving around the lake surface—playing a critical role in water cleansing, nutrient absorption, flood control, and carbon sequestration. Neeta Satam, a University of Missouri student, documents the clash of development against more than 100 indigenous families that live on these islands. Gorilla tourism contributes significantly to the Rwandan economy, in addition to benefits through distribution of income from national parks to local people. Elham Shabahat, a student at Yale School of Forestry, learns how climate change impacts mountain gorillas in Rwanda, as people venture into gorilla habitat, and gorillas are pushed higher into the mountains with limited access to their usual food sources and vegetation. Chile is a nation that deeply feels the effects of a changing climate. High Point University student Taylor Lord travels to Casablanca, Chile, to document the effects of climate change on the community that relies on vineyards as its key source of income. Graduating from American University this summer, with a degree in international journalism and public affairs, Natalie Hutchinson travels to Patagonia, Chile, to share stories of the lives of Mapuche people, identified as “sea people,” who rely on the waters of Patagonia for their food and spiritual identity. Erin McGoff, also from American University, travels to Laos to follow a team of Laotian UXO (unexploded ordnance) clearers who work tediously to dig up live bombs and destroy them. These unexploded ordnance continue to terrorize Laotians today, especially the majority of whom are subsistence farmers. Congratulations to all our 2017 student fellows!

Queens College graduation on tap for Friday - rain or shine

Queens College’s 93rd commencement ceremony will be held on Friday at 9 a.m. on the campus’ quadrangle located at 65-30 Kissena Blvd., come rain or shine.

Congresswoman Grace Meng (D-Flushing) is set to deliver the commencement address and receive the President’s Medal.

Philosopher, financier and alumnus Donald Brownstein and Saul Kupferberg, QC Foundation board member and chair of the Kupferberg Center Arts Advisory Board, will receive honorary doctorates.

The student speaker will be Nina Bakoyiannis, who is graduating summa cum laude. She is graduating with majors in psychology and English, worked as a research assistant for a study on the psychological impact of smoking during pregnancy and is the co-author of a forthcoming article on the findings.

Over 3,000 degree graduates are set to attend, including students from the classes of September 2016, February2017 and May 2017.

Reach Gina Martinez by e-mail at [email protected] or by phone at (718) 260–4566.

Posted 4:15 pm, May 25, 2017

A public university refused to pay for an antiabortion speaker. Now students are suing.

Universities that have been visited by incendiary speakers in recent months have experienced similar scenes: mobs of protesters working to disrupt the speeches or shut them down.

Protesters caused $100,000 worth of damage before the University of California at Berkeley canceled the speech of conservative provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. After the speech was scrubbed, President Trump threatened to pull the university’s federal funding. Protesters set campus property on fire and pepper-sprayed a Trump supporter being interviewed by a local television station. In March, a mob at Middlebury College shoved author Charles Murray, who has been called a white nationalist, and prevented him and two school employees from getting into a vehicle. The event, The Washington Post’s Peter Holley wrote, “was edging frighteningly close to outright violence.” Last month, hundreds protested when white nationalist Richard Spencer spoke at Auburn University, and video of two men rolling on the ground punching each other rocketed around the Internet. And just the threat of violent protests thwarted Ann Coulter’s attempt to speak at Berkeley last month. As a result of these campus clashes, an antiabortion group at a California university says, schools are more likely to say “no” to controversial conservative speakers — including its university.

Their solution: sue.

Students for Life at California State University at San Marcos filed a complaint in U.S. District Court, saying the college wouldn’t give them funding to bring an antiabortion speaker to campus. They claim they’re being treated unfairly by a public university that has hosted speakers on controversial topics, including a lecturer who favors abortion rights and a professional sexologist who led “a discussion of BDSM and Kink which included prizes and participation in an interactive workshop.”

The antiabortion group wanted to bring conservative columnist Mike Adams on campus to speak. Adams once referred to abortion rights activists as “animals” that “needed to be caged,” and his controversial statements about abortion and other topics led students to start a petition to get him kicked out of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, where he is a professor of criminology. Nathan Apodaca, the antiabortion group’s president, said other, more liberal groups had received funding for speakers from the mandatory student activity fees at CSUSM, which is near San Diego.

“Some of the speakers that were being brought in had speaking expenses that were the exact same amount that we had been asking for and they were getting funding but we were not,” Apodaca said in a video statement. The state school is violating the antiabortion group’s constitutional rights, the federal lawsuit says, by forcing its members to “subsidize speech with which they disagree without affording them the opportunity to respond by bringing in their own speakers.”

The case is being handled largely by attorneys for the Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian nonprofit that has launched court battles — including several against universities — on behalf of antiabortion or religious groups.

Many of the dozens of campus cases that the ADF has been involved in are about obtaining equal standing for groups that champion conservative causes. The ADF has sued a college professor who erased an antiabortion group’s sidewalk chalk messages and sued Queens College for not officially recognizing an antiabortion club. In the CSUSM case, the ADF’s argument is simple, said Casey Mattox, senior counsel for the group: Students should have equal access to the benefits of their fees, regardless of political stance.

“The Supreme Court has said that these kinds of fees can only be collected by schools if they guarantee that the money is handed out in a neutral way,” he said. “You have students who are forced to pay this money every semester that are paying to hear the other side’s perspectives, but not being able to use the money to bring speakers in who represent their views.” The lawsuit asks the court to declare that CSUSM’s student fee policy violates the constitutional rights of students in the antiabortion group. The lawsuit also asks the court to make CSUSM pay the antiabortion group $500 and refund its student activity fees. Margaret Chantung, a spokeswoman for CSUSM, said the university could not comment extensively because of the pending lawsuit.

But she said in a brief statement: “Cal State San Marcos is committed to fostering a campus environment where diverse ideas and views can be presented and discussed. In addition, we take student complaints and concerns very seriously.”

Queens College has also been targeted by the ADF for not officially recognizing an antiabortion club — meaning the group couldn’t receive student activity fees or bring speakers to campus.

After the group filed a lawsuit in January, a Queens College spokeswoman told The Washington Post that “the club in question was granted status.”

“This decision is consistent with the College’s commitment to an open and inclusive environment,” the college said in February. In a statement after that change, Mattox said that Queens College did the right thing but “still needs to change its egregiously unconstitutional policies.”

The ADF scored another victory several years earlier, winning a suit against the University of Wisconsin after an appeals court said the university couldn’t withhold student fee money from certain groups that have an explicitly religious purpose. And courts have consistently sided with that viewpoint, even though universities have argued that controversial speakers can disrupt campus life.

Eugene Volokh, a law professor at UCLA, said the political climate may make administrators wary of hosting the most controversial speakers. Those speakers almost guarantee protests, along with added security costs, headaches and the chance that campus violence will be splashed on the national news.

The ADF’s lawsuits send a message that colleges cannot err too far on the side of caution, said Volokh, whose blog, The Volokh Conspiracy, is hosted by The Post.

“There is political pressure on campus and also pressure from administrators’ natural desire to avoid hassle for themselves,” he said. “They say, ‘If we let the speakers speak, then the consequences will be all these students protesting and then there will be a riot and bad publicity.’ And I think what ADF is saying is if you don’t let this speaker speak, there’s going to be a lawsuit — and bad publicity from a lawsuit.”

A protest, Volokh said, can be “a classic heckler’s veto,” which can squelch minority opinions.

Mattox said he would just as soon see an end to student fees being used to bring in speakers, because he doesn’t think colleges can distribute the money fairly to groups that represent minority viewpoints.

“Controversial speaker rules and security fees end up being a tax on conservative ideas,” he said.

Agency releases rules for Excelsior scholarships By KESHIA CLUKEY 05/25/2017 06:34 PM EDT ALBANY — College and universities will now be able to answer questions about Gov. Andrew Cuomo's highly touted Excelsior scholarship program after the state Higher Education Services Corporation approved regulations for the program on Thursday.

The regulations provide further flexibility and clarify legislation passed in the 2017-18 state budget creating the program, which is designed to help middle-class students afford higher education.

The scholarship will cover the cost of in-state tuition at the state’s public two- and four-year colleges for students from families with incomes of $100,000 or less beginning in September. The income eligibility ramps up to $125,000 in 2019 when the program is fully rolled out. The application period opens June 7 and closes July 21.

While the regulations address many of the concerns administrators had about the program, others issues can be dealt with only through legislation, such as requirements that greatly diminish the number of students eligible for the program. Of the approximately 413,000 current full-time State and City University students, about 31,300 would be eligible after income and credit requirements, according to SUNY figures.

Further concerns may crop up as students apply for the scholarship and institutions begin to implement it.

"A college education has become a necessity, and with the Excelsior Scholarship, all New Yorkers, no matter where they come from or how much money their families make, will have access to a higher education," Cuomo said in a news release Thursday.

Here are the main takeaways from the regulations:

Awards The scholarship provides up to $5,500 towards the cost of tuition for eligible students.

The program is “last dollar,” coming after state tuition assistance and federal grants, as well as other educational grants and scholarships.

Administrators previously expressed concern that the inclusion of institutional aid reduces the amount of Excelsior dollars students will receive. Some administrators have said this could penalize students who earn merit scholarships and therefore will receive fewer Excelsior dollars.

The regulations do clarify that the award does not include consideration awards exclusively granted for non-tuition expenses such as books, fees and board in the last dollar calculation.

Some donors and schools may decide to focus institutional or other scholarship aid on reducing costs other than tuition, so students receive full Excelsior awards.

Students who fail to meet the credit requirements must repay their last semester, but not the entire year. Once they are ineligible, they cannot regain eligibility even if they get back on track to graduate on time.

The strict July 21 application deadline may reduce the number of students who apply, potentially leaving out community college students who don’t typically enroll until July and August.

The application period will re- open in the fall for students applying for the spring 2018 semester, according to HESC.

The board did not discuss whether the application for the 2018-19 school year will be earlier in the year, prior to the May 1 decision day deadline. Doing so would allow schools the chance to include the Excelsior awards in financial aid packages to incoming students. HESC spokeswoman Anne McCartin Doyle told POLITICO New York “application periods for future years are still being considered.”

Credit requirements

The scholarship requires students to take at least 12 credits per semester, and complete 30 per year, following the student’s start date. The start date is defined in the regulations as whenever matriculated students first attend the institution, providing further flexibility for nontraditional students who, for example, begin in the spring semester and would therefore have until the next spring to complete 30 credits.

The goal is to increase on-time completion rates, officials said.

HESC officials at the meeting said credits earned during the summer or winter sessions will count towards the 30, but it was unclear whether the summer semester is defined as following the spring semester, or preceding the previous fall. If the latter, then students in spring could realize they have not met the requirements but are not able to make it up after the fact.

Non-credit bearing courses, which include remedial courses, do not count towards the requirement, according to the regulations.

College credits earned during high school, or as a non-matriculated status, count towards the 30 credits, but don’t necessarily have to be used in the first semester, HESC officials said. A student may, for example, choose to use their incoming credits in their junior and senior year, but they must notify the school that they are doing so.

Transfer credits, if accepted by the institution, also count towards the 30.

If students in their final semester of school have already met most or all of a program’s graduation requirements, they still must take a full 12 credits to be eligible for the award. One of the courses must be in the student’s program of study, while the others don’t have to be related.

The regulations also provide flexibility on full-time credit requirements for students with disabilities.

Students will be allowed to take a temporary leave due to circumstances including, but not limited to, death of a family member, medical leave, military service, services in the Peace Corps or parental leave.

There are no specific GPA requirements, but students must maintain good academic standing, abiding by their school and program requirements.

A grace period

The regulations include a grace period for current freshmen, sophomores and juniors if they are short by six or fewer credits. Those students will have the ability to make up those credits in the 2017- 18 school year, and be eligible for the Excelsior scholarship for the 2018-19 school year. They would not receive the scholarship this upcoming year.

There was some discussion at the meeting about whether or not students can make up the six credits this summer and still be eligible for 2017-18.

HESC officials said students must be on track to graduate before they apply, otherwise they will be notified that they do not qualify.

Some board members expressed concern as many schools offer July and August summer sessions — neither of which would be completed and credits put in the system by the time students need to apply.

As there will be a lag time between the application and credit verification, HESC officials said they would work with colleges and universities, and would also make a note in the frequently asked questions posted online. Students in some cases may have to apply closer to the July 21 deadline waiting until their credits are verified, or notify their college so they can review the situation.

Repayment, residency requirements

Under the law, students who accept the Excelsior scholarship aid must agree to live in New York State for the same period of time as they received the award, and if they’re working during that time they must also be working in New York. There is a six-month grace period between when students complete their last term and when they have to begin repayment.

The regulations allow military personnel for whom New York State is their legal state of residence to be considered as residing in the state regardless of where they are stationed or deployed.

Those who are no longer eligible to receive the award but are still in school in New York State as an undergraduate, graduate student or completing a medical residency will be credited for that time lived in the state.

If award recipients fail to stay in the state for the duration they received the award, the award money will be converted to a 10- year student loan without interest, according to the regulations.

If recipients go out of state to complete undergraduate study, graduate school or medical residency at least on a half-time basis, the residency requirement may be deferred.

If a recipient demonstrates extreme hardship as a result of a disability, labor conditions or other circumstances, the corporation may postpone the conversion to a loan, temporarily suspend repayment or discharge the amount owed, according to the regulations.

SARSOUR DRAMA LATEST: Hundreds of Trump supporters protested outside CUNY Central in opposition to the School of Public Health’s selection of Linda Sarsour as commencement speaker on Thursday afternoon. Many wore Make America Great Again caps or were carrying American or Israeli flags. Assemblyman Dov Hikind addressed the rally, as did Milo Yiannopoulos and Pamela Geller. Vice co-founder Gavin McInnes was also present at the protest. Sarsour will speak next week, June 1.

Preliminary Analysis of President Trump’s FY 2018 Federal Budget

MAY 25, 2017

On Tuesday, May 23, the White House released President Trump’s proposed budget for Federal Fiscal Year 2018, which will begin October 1st. The plan outlines $1.7 trillion in net reductions to federal programs over the next 10 years. The proposal will be evaluated and revised by Congress before any actions are adopted into law.

What follows is our evaluation of the impact (on an annualized basis) of proposed cuts, based on major savings and reforms outlined in the budget. Our analysis finds that programs targeted for elimination and reduction would result in a loss of at least $850 million in the City’s FY 2018 budget. Additional cuts would accrue to New York City residents who benefit from federal assistance programs and to other non-city entities, including non-profit service providers, arts organizations, and research institutes.

Direct NYC Budget Impacts

(Figures indicate amount budgeted in the City’s Executive Budget for FY 2018)

• Eliminates Community Development Block Grant The City has budgeted $298 million in CDBG funds in City FY 2018. Over 30% of the City’s CDBG funds are used to fund almost 80% of the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) housing code enforcement activities, including 693,000 housing inspections, emergency heat and hot water repairs, and lead-paint mitigation and removal.

o CDBG funds almost 30% of the Department of City Planning budget and supports a multitude of other programs, such as senior centers and meals, family shelter, vacant lot cleaning, adult literacy programs, and many others.

• Eliminates the HOME Investment Partnership ($12 million), which provides funding to support development of housing for low-income families and underserved populations. The City uses this funding in the HPD expense budget to support its housing development programs.

• Eliminates the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which helped some 770,000 New Yorkers keep their homes warm this winter ($23 million).

• Eliminates $108 million in Title II grants to the Department of Education (DOE) that help increase the number of highly-effective teachers and principals in schools.

• Eliminates 21st Century Community Learning Centers grants ($21 million) that funds after-school programs for low-income students.

• Eliminates Impact Aid ($5 million) that compensates school districts for tax-exempt federal property.

• Eliminates the Community Services Block Grant ($48 million), which funds rental assistance, summer youth employment (SYEP), and adult literacy programs.

• Eliminates the Senior Community Service Employment Program ($4 million), which funds more than 50% of the Department for the Aging’s Senior Employment and Benefits programming.

• 39% reduction to Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act (WIOA) grants, which fund 98% of the Department of Youth and Community Development’s (DYCD) In-School and Out-of-School Youth programming, and 75% of funding for the Department of Small Business Services’ Workforce One Centers, which serve nearly 105,000 unique jobseekers each year ($26 million).

• 10% reduction to Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) grants, which fund public assistance grants for roughly 370,000 city residents and a variety of other eligible programs, including $490 million for Department of Homeless Services (DHS) family shelters – 54% of family shelter spending.

• Eliminates the Social Services Block Grant ($68 million), which helps fund a variety of programs and services, including $26.5 million for Adult Protective Services in the Human Resources Administration (HRA) and $17.8 million for HRA Domestic Violence Services, which supports non-residential services for 1,900 domestic violence victims and 840 families in domestic violence shelter programs every day; and $20.6 million for senior centers, meals, and services in the Department for the Aging (DFTA).

• Eliminates the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which reimburses the Department of Correction for the cost of incarcerating certain categories of criminal aliens ($6 million).

• Reduces Department of State grants ($13 million) for the protection of foreign dignitaries. • Requires a 25% non-federal match for Homeland Security Grants that support the NYPD’s counterterrorism work ($27 million).

• Eliminates DOT TIGER grants, which have provided $58 million in capital funding to projects around the City since 2009, including $35 million for Vision Zero projects. It is also the source of $83 million in funding for the Moynihan Station project.

• 50% reduction to the Federal Work-Study Program, which benefits 22,400 students at New York City schools, including 6,880 CUNY students, with $41 million in annual awards.

'Abolition of Whiteness' course offered at Hunter College

Hunter College will offer students an “Abolition of Whiteness” course this fall to discuss how “white supremacy and violence” influence individual identity. The course, taught by Women and Gender Studies Professor Jennifer Gaboury, is cross-listed for both her department and the Political Science Department, where it fulfills one of four required courses in the “4 subfields of political science” under the umbrella of POLSC 204: Contemporary Issues in Political Theory.

While the school’s official course catalog discloses very little about what is actually discussed in the course, a flyer advertising a previous iteration of the class from the fall of 2016 describes it as “an overview of whiteness studies in the United States,” specifically “focusing on concepts of consciousness, in/visibility, disavowal, and resentment.”

“We’ll be examining how whiteness—and/or white supremacy and violence—is intertwined with conceptions of gender, race, sexuality, class, body ability, nationality, and age,” the description continues, adding that “a petition for this course is on file with the College Senate so that it fulfills Pluralism and Diversity Parts B, C, or D,” referring to mandatory courses that focus, respectively, on “the historical conditions, perspectives and/or intellectual traditions” of ethnic minorities in the U.S., women and those with non-traditional sexual orientations, and Europeans. As of press time, “Abolition of Whiteness” does not appear to have been added to the list of courses that satisfy the “Pluralism and Diversity requirement,” though at least 30 other Women and Gender Studies courses are included, including one course on “Feminist Political Theory” and a special topics course on “body politics.”

Notably, students earn 3 academic credits for completing the course. Thus far, 15 students have already registered for the fall course out of a maximum enrollment of 25.

Campus Reform reached out to Gaboury for further elaboration on her course, but did not receive a response in time for publication.