THE GRADUATE CENTER with 365 FIFTH THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK | folio Fall 2009 UNDERSTANDING ISLAM an interview with Chase F. Robinson Dancing in the Dark from the book by Morris Dickstein Taking Dylan at His Words TABLE OF CONTENTS MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT FEATURES UNDERSTANDING ISLAM 6 In this interview, Distinguished Professor Chase F. Robinson, Graduate DEPARTMENTS Center provost and his generation’s leading expert on early Islamic history, suggests that one reason we in the West so often come up with the wrong answers about Islam may be because we are asking the AT 365 .................................................... 3 wrong questions. News of public programs and other highlight events at the Graduate Center TAKING DYLAN AT HIS WORDS 11 CENTERS............................................... 5 At this first in the series Elebash Presents: Concerts & Conversations, What’s happening at the centers and the focus was on the lyrics of Bob Dylan in musical settings by other institutes composers. HONORS ............................................... 6 Awards, prizes, and other distinctions for faculty, students, and alumni DANCING IN THE DARK 14 GRANTS .............................................. 17 In this excerpt from his popular new cultural history of the Great A summary of recent grants received Depression, Distinguished Professor Morris Dickstein takes a long look by the Graduate Center at the role an emerging national popular culture played in defining and shaping its time and ours. BOOKS ................................................. 18 A listing, with brief descriptions, of recently published faculty books SHHHH 16 ALUMNI............................................... 20 A few words about “Silent Pictures,” an exhibition of art with the Brief reports of where our alumni are defining characteristic of wordlessness and what they are doing BULLETIN BOARD......................... 21 Items of institutional interest and importance with 365 FIFTH | Fall 2009 folio | THE GRADUATE CENTER | The City University of New York FOLIO | with 365 Fifth is a publication of WILLIAM P. KELLY IRA MOTHNER BARRY DISMAN The Graduate Center of the City University of President Editor, Folio Director of Graphic Design New York. © 2009. RAYMOND C. SOLDAVIN JANE HOUSE DONALD CHERRY Visit our website: www.gc.cuny.edu Vice President for Director of Publications Graphic Designer Institutional Advancement Editor, 365 Fifth Send comments and questions to: ALEX E. IRKLIEVSKI FOLIO | with 365 Fifth DAVID MANNING Senior Writer: Graphic Designer Office of Public Affairs and Publications Director of Media Relations KC TROMMER The Graduate Center and Marketing MIRIAM RODRIQUEZ Typesetting 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, 10016 Contributing Writers: email: [email protected] KRIS DILORENZO ELIZABETH FRASER JACKIE GLASTHAL Editorial Support Cover Alison Wright/National Geographic/Getty Images MESSAGE FROM THE PRESIDENT There’s a parallel between high finance and higher education, between giant banking enterprises and great public universities. Simply stated, the wealth of the nation depends upon the health of both. I was struck by the parallel this summer when I prepared an address on the future of American higher education for the Sun Valley Writers’ Conference. I began my remarks by noting how expanding mandates, spiking costs, and chronic underfunding threatened the well- being of public universities. I recalled how rapidly the nation had responded to the self- inflicted wounds of a fragile Wall Street. Intemperate partisan politics were suspended, and both the Bush and Obama administrations moved with uncommon alacrity to bolster a tottering financial system. Might the nation move with similar speed and purpose, I wondered, to preserve the unique character and capacities of our great public universities? The threat to them is just as real and the long-term consequences no less devastating. That is so because the future of our economy rests on the transformative capacity of higher education. Ours is an era in which knowledge has replaced material resources as the engine of economic development. Prosperity, social stability, the very sustainability of the planet depend upon our capacity to generate new knowledge and to expand educational opportunities. “Prosperity, social stability, This is not to say that colleges and universities will wither away. But, faced with diminishing resources and spiraling costs, public universities, which educate more than 80 percent of the the very sustainability nation’s students, will lose the capacity to support the scholarship and teaching on which the future is built. of the planet depend upon This problem is almost uniquely American. In most of the world, national governments our capacity to generate underwrite public universities. Here, support of higher education is primarily the responsibility of the states. And, as we know all too well, states face growing financial burdens new knowledge....” and are subject to the priorities of aging and tax-resistant populations. Consequently, per capita public investment in higher education has declined over the past two decades. Public universities have become increasingly dependent upon tuition, philanthropy, and sponsored research. As critical as these components are to the health of public universities, they are neither constant nor inexhaustible sources of revenue. The gap between income and expenditure grows ever larger. Our nation continues to lead the world in scholarship, innovation, and academic creativity, but we are entering an era in which high-end research may be confined to a handful of wealthy private universities. Publics who seek to keep pace must do so by raising tuition and by displacing low-income students with out-of-state applicants who pay much higher fees. When one considers that the great publics have generated a disproportionately large share of American research, and further, have been the primary agents of social mobility, the problem becomes profoundly unsettling. Given the risk to our intellectual capital, we must rethink our nation’s commitment to public higher education. We’ve done so before. The Morrill Act, the G.I. Bill, the establishment of the national academies, the Pell Grants, all yielded rich dividends. These measures were not “bailouts” but strategic investments in the American future. Ideas about how to renew and recast that strategy are plentiful, but to date, discussion has not advanced to meaningful stages at either the state or the federal level. That’s distressing, because this is not a problem that can wait. William P. Kelly President The Graduate Center THE GRADUATE CENTER | The City University of New York 1 AT 365 rean theatre artists. Segal Center’s “Prelude ‘09” Hentschker, who is passionate about bridging Previews the Season’s the gap between the academic and performing arts communities, emphasized how thrilled he is with Cutting-Edge Performances the GC’s continued involvement in the festival. “It shows what an active role the university can play within the theatre com- munity,” he noted. The Segal Center’s fall program also includes evenings with Iranian playwright Amir Koohes- tani, Austrian perform- ance and installation artist Kurt Hentschläger, and director Andrei Şerban; collaborations with the PHOTOS: A. POYO PERFORMA festival fo- He is doggedly faithful to getting things right in his cusing on Polish Futurism books, whether by spending the night in a sleeping and with the Lincoln bag on a ranch in Texas Hill County in order to bet- Center Library for the ter understand Lyndon Baines Johnson’s childhood Performing Arts celebrat- loneliness, or by interviewing former residents of PHOTO: JUSTIN BERNHAUT Company of Radiohole in “WHA!? Whatever, Heaven Allows” ing the Center’s newest East Tremont in the Bronx, whose lives were dev- publication Playwrights Be- astated by the construction of the Cross Bronx Ex- “It’s a laboratory and a platform for ideas.” That’s fore the Fall; and CUNY Arts Fest ’09 pressway, the brainchild of Caro’s first subject, the how Dr. Frank Hentschker, executive director and (www.cuny.edu/cunystages). Initiated several years legendary urban planner Robert Moses. director of programs at the Martin E. Segal Theatre ago by the Segal Center, CUNY Arts Fest ’09 will Caro’s incisive scholarship and desire to com- Center, described Prelude ’09, the sixth annual feature over thirty CUNY performing arts municate what he has learned to his readers has Prelude Festival and Symposium, held at the GC events—music, dance, and theatre—in seventeen made him a pre-eminent contemporary biographer. from September 30 to October 3 and attended by venues throughout the City’s five boroughs. For For the past three decades, he has, along with 2,500 people. the Center’s full schedule, see http://web. gc. cuny. his wife Ina, researched the life of Lyndon Baines The event, which highlights visionaries of New edu/mestc. Johnson. Before he began his work on the 36th York City’s theatre and performance scene, offered —Jackie Glasthal President of the United States, Caro had already an advance look at some of the most anticipated spent seven years researching and writing his 1974 performances of the 2009–10 season and beyond. Pulitzer Prize-winning biography The Power Bro- This year’s theme, Ecologies, Economies, and En- Robert Caro Tells How ker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (Ran- gagement, coined by co-curators Andrew Horwitz, dom House). When he approached his publisher Geoffrey Scott, and Morgan