QView #137 | October 12, 2022

For the Jewish holiday of Sukkot, QC Hillel usually sets up a hut, or sukkah, on campus. Construction took place near the Music Building with the help of President Frank H. Wu. Sukkot began on the evening of Sunday, October 9. During the holiday, people eat meals inside the hut.

Staff from CUNY’s Asian American / Asian Research Institute visited campus on October 5. From left: Antony Wong, program coordinator; Soniya Munshi, interim executive director; Steven Raga, outreach liaison.

Laci Weeden, director of Parent and Family Programs at Georgia Institute of Technology, was the keynote speaker at Student Affairs' Welcome Back Breakfast on Tuesday, October 11.   

Symposium participants, from left: Fred Gardaphe, QC; Rev. Frank Williams; Jessica Barbata Jackson, Colorado State University; George De Stefano, independent scholar; Mark Reid, University of Florida; Joseph Sciorra, Calandra Institute; John Gennari, University of Vermont. Anthony Tamburri, dean of the Calandra Institute is speaking at right. 

Members of the LGBTQIA+ community shared their coming-out stories at Klapper Circle as Queens College observed National Coming Out Day on Tuesday, October 11. (The date commemorates the anniversary of the 1987 March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights.)

QC’s Coming Out Day event, which was recorded and archived at the LaGuardia and Wagner Archives as part of the CUNY Public LGBT History Project, was made possible through the generous support of the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium in partnership with the New York City Council. Co-sponsors included the CUNY Office of Student Inclusion Initiatives and, at QC, the Center for Racial, Ethnic and Religious Understanding/CERRU, the Peer Counseling Program, the Women and Gender Studies Program, the Student Association, the Alliance of Latin American Students/ALAS, the Office of Student Development and Leadership, and the Division of Student Affairs.

QC Starts the Semester with New Faculty, New Programs, and Part-Time TAP

In a celebratory return to campus, Queens College has announced the appointment of 27 new tenure-track faculty, 21 new lecturers, and five administrators of student services. In addition, it has introduced many new courses and degree options, and is rolling out state-funded tuition assistance for part-time students.

“Queens College is an absolutely essential institution for New Yorkers, and we want to ensure that it stays relevant and viable going forward,” says President Frank H. Wu. “Despite this challenging economic environment, we are proud that we are responding to students’ changing needs, supporting innovative scholarship, and adding exciting new student and faculty voices to our campus. We are committed to building the foundations for future success of our college and graduates.”

New faculty have been hired across the college: 16 in the social sciences, 15 in math and natural sciences, 13 in arts and humanities, and 4 in education. They bring a wide array of backgrounds and research interests to the campus community.

Besides new faculty, the college has approved new minors and courses, expanding students’ paths to graduate school and careers. Among the degree changes are new minors offered in anthropology—useful either as specializations for anthropology majors or in combination with other majors in the humanities, social sciences, STEM fields, or education. The minor in health and culture—which has much to offer students in the health sciences and social work—shines an anthropological lens on the social and biological underpinnings of health, beliefs about disease and the body, and the roots of health disparities. The minor in human ecology, which addresses urgent questions of how humans relate to the environment, should appeal to students in many areas of science, policy, law, and health. The minor in power and inequality is a perfect fit for students intending to pursue law, policy, data analysis, or social activism. The minor in cultural heritage and memory addresses relationships between history, identity, and preservation; it is designed for students going into fields ranging from law and policy to museum and library studies.

New courses keep the college curriculum fresh and up to date. Computer Science 381/780, Applied Data Science, offers students the chance to learn advanced data science techniques using real-world data; organized as a practicum, it helps students become independent researchers and analysts of complex data on real-world problems.

To help needy students complete and thrive in college, QC has appointed new administrators to the Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Management headed by Vice President Jennifer Jarvis. This division provides crucial economic, safety net, and health services—such as grant-funded programs for low-income and disabled students, the Child Development Center, the Counseling, Health, and Wellness Center, and many others. Sean Pierce has been chosen to serve as interim assistant vice president for student affairs. Dwayne Jones is the new interim dean of students. Kristen Berkley is the assistant director of student development and leadership. Tim Chin is the new director of housing and residence life. Ethan Jenkins serves as coordinator of immigrant student support.

Under an unprecedented expansion of New York State’s Part-time Tuition Assistance Program (TAP), proposed by Governor Kathy Hochul and passed by the New York State legislature, Queens College is launching an ambitious effort to help its part-time students secure much-needed grants. Such funds do not have to be repaid and are especially helpful to working students with families, who may not be able to attend college full time. Students taking only 6–11 credits per semester may apply so long as they meet TAP’s income and residency requirements.

Centered on Students

Services launched this semester by the QC Hub expand the functions students can perform online, without visiting the Dining Hall. 

Want to talk to staff at Financial Aid and the Registrar? The QC Navigate app allows students to set up appointments. After opening QC Navigate on a mobile device, select “Make an Appointment” and then Financial Aid & Student Records. At that point, the user can choose the desired service and schedule an appointment. (Those who don’t have QC Navigate can download the app at here.)

Tech issues can be now be followed through the Fresh Service Helpdesk. After submitting a ticket at http://support.qc.cuny.edu, students will be able to track who is handling their inquiry, what is happening, and when they can expect their problem to be resolved.

FAFSA information can be corroborated online, too. Students who are asked to verify their FAFSA documents can upload them electronically through the new Student Forms service in CUNYFirst Student Center accounts. Go to the To Do List section, click on “Verify My FAFSA” and follow the instructions for creating an account. Additional information is available here.

Good Sports 

Knights teams racked up wins in conjunction with several special campus events.

Women’s soccer hosted Youth Appreciation Day while beating Lincoln University 8-0 on October 8 https://youtu.be/kb75kmUddJQ. The doubleheader continued as Men’s Soccer hosted Autism Awareness Day, defeating UDC 2-0 https://youtu.be/zMi6RGwwrns. Volleyball honored the late QC Hall of Fame coach and alumna Aline Pascale Lubin on Sunday, October 9, sweeping the match 3-0 https://youtu.be/-Q1SgNNDc-4.

Hurricane Relief Efforts

Powerful storms continue to ravage coastal communities this season. To help survivors of Hurricane Fiona in Puerto Rico, or support relief work that’s just started in states devastated by Hurricane Ian, visit the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). If you have been affected by the hurricane and want to talk to a counselor, don’t hesitate to contact [email protected]. 

Special Collections and Archives Announces 2022–23 Fellows

Benjamin S. Rosenthal Library’s Department of Special Collections and Archives has announced its fellows for the 2022­–2023 school year: Dani Stompor, Pamela Padilla, and Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn.

Fellows are selected from the Graduate School of Library and Information Studies (GSLIS) and/or its dual degree program with the History Department and work under Annie Tummino, head of Special Collections and Archives. Fellows receive hands-on archival experience, a stipend, and funding for professional development. Each fellow is tasked with a different project throughout the school year.

Dani Stompor

Stompor is this year’s Freda S. and Chester Johnson Civil Rights and Social Justice Archives Fellow. Stompor pursued theater and performance studies at Northwestern University in Chicago and moved to Queens after graduation. Now in their third year in the library science and history dual program, Stompor hopes to obtain a PhD with the goal of teaching gender and sexuality studies, while also continuing archival work. Stompor finds the personal nature of archiving appealing. 

“It’s a deeply intimate relationship with the creator of that material,” said Stompor. “As much as possible, I try to be mindful of the dynamics of that relationship—making that person’s material contextually in a way that honors its original intentions, as best as possible, while also allowing future researchers to grapple with it on their own terms.”

As a fellow, Stompor will work with the Queens Gender, Love, and Sexuality Alliance (GLASA) Journals, which span the late 1980s to the 2000s and preserve an extraordinary record of LGBTQ student life. Additionally, Stompor will process transcripts for oral histories related to social justice, including interviews with Lesbian Herstory Archive founder Joan Nestle—a QC alumna who taught in the Percy Ellis Sutton Search for Education, Elevation and Knowledge (SEEK) Program—and other faculty/staff associated with SEEK. This fellowship is generously funded by the Freda S. and J. Chester Johnson Endowment. 

Pamela Padilla

Padilla, this year’s Shirley Klein Rare Books and Manuscript Fellow, is in her second year in the library science and history program and is pursuing a certificate in archives and preservation of cultural materials. She previously studied at CCNY, earning her BA in English and art history. She has interned at the Hispanic Society and the Library of Congress, in addition to working as a grant writer for a non-profit in Oregon.

Padilla will be working on archiving the personal papers of late Professor Emeritus Alexander Kouguell (see In Memoriam, below), a world-class cellist who taught music at QC for more than 40 years. She will also solicit quotes from conservators for potential repair of select items from the rare book collection. This fellowship is generously funded by Shirley Klein. 

“I find interesting how personal [archiving] can be,” said Padilla. “We all have our own stories and our own experiences that we hold near and dear. When a person gives their life’s work to the archives, it feels very special to be a part of the preservation process.”

Sarah Barlow-Ochshorn

Barlow-Ochshorn is a Master of Library Science student and is pursuing a certificate in archives and preservation of cultural history materials. She came to QC after receiving her bachelor’s degree from Barnard College, where she studied English and gender studies. She has a wide range of archival experience, having worked previously at the American Museum of Natural History, the American Folk Art Museum, the Willem de Kooning Foundation, and the Reed Foundation Library at Poets House.

Barlow-Ochshorn will process and publish a finding aid for the papers of former Queens College women’s basketball coach Lucille Kyvallos. A trailblazer for women’s sports. Kyvallos took QC to the national championship game in 1973; two years later, she coached Queens at the first-ever women’s college basketball game played at Madison Square Garden. In addition to her success on the court, Kyvallos was at the forefront of the Title IX movement and positioned women's basketball on the national sports media scene. The fellowship is generously funded by Kyvallos and the Department of Recreation and Athletics.

Barlow-Ochshorn will also curate a selection of Kyvallos’ materials for a show to be presented in the Pine Tree Foundation Special Collections exhibit area during Women’s History Month.

“I really love seeing people’s relationships through the records they leave behind,” noted Barlow-Ochshorn. “You get the day-to-day life view that you wouldn’t necessarily get with a history textbook or a documentary and it really gives you the texture of someone’s life.”

Keeping Companies on Course

Calling all entrepreneurs: the Tech Incubator at Queens College offers classes that can enable you to bolster your business. 

Find Your Best Customers, held on Monday and Wednesday evenings from October 12 through November 7, will help you figure out who your customers are and what they want.

The following Monday-Wednesday cycle, 30-Day Sales Growth, starting on November 9, focuses on ways to increase revenues while reducing the expenses of finding customers.

Entrepreneurship and Career TUNE-UP talks  take place on the second Thursday of every month from 7 to 8 pm; attendance is free. Sign up for the first session, “Effective Listening, on October 13.

Joining the Club

Women are underrepresented in the tech sector. To increase the pool of future female engineers, the Tech Incubator at Queens College is once again hosting a Girls Who Code Club . The free program targets sixth to 12th graders. Sessions are scheduled on Saturdays from 10 am to 11:30 am, from October 29 through December 10. Would-be participants can apply at here.

Anne Foner ’41, a member of Queens College’s first graduating class, passed away on September 28 at age 101. Foner continued her education two decades after she received a degree from QC, earning a doctorate in sociology from New York University. At Rutgers University, where she taught for years, she served as sociology chair and published widely on topics involving aging and society. The widow of longtime labor leader Moe Foner, she is survived by their children, granddaughter, and great-grandchildren. 

Alexander Kouguell, professor emeritus of music and ACSM benefactor, died on Sunday, October 1.

Born in Russia, Kouguell graduated from the Ecole normale de music de Paris and then majored in comparative literature at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. After doctoral studies at Columbia University, he taught for a year at the Peabody Conservatory of Music, at the same time serving as assistant principal cellist of the Baltimore Symphony. Moving to New York, he became principal cellist of the National Orchestral Association, the Musica Aeterna Orchestra, and the Clarion Music Society of New York. He also joined QC’s music department, where he would teach for nearly seven decades, returning as an adjunct following his retirement.

As a performer, Kouguell toured extensively in the United States, Europe, and the Near and Middle East, his travels enhanced by his command of Russian, French, and Arabic. He recorded for the Columbia, Decca, Monitor, Nonesuch, and CRI labels.

Dedicated to the college and the Aaron Copland School of Music, he established, with his wife, the Alexander and Florence Kouguell Cello Scholarship for a talented cello soloist at QC who excels academically and also participates in chamber music and the Queens College Orchestra. Subsequently, he gave all his cellos, bows, music, and memorabilia to ACSM, accompanied by a generous donation.

Sonia Handelman Meyer ’41, a photographer noted for her resonant black-and-white shots of Harlem residents and recently arrived refugees, died on September 11. She was 102.

The daughter of Eastern European Jewish immigrants, Handelman was born in Lakewood, New Jersey, and raised in New York City. An English major at QC, she first picked up a camera after college, while stationed in Puerto Rico as a civilian employed by the Army Signal Corps. Coming back to New York, she studied at the Photo League, a cooperative that saw photography as a means to change the world, and answered the phones as its secretary. The league shut down amid the Red Scare. Handelman, by then married to biomedical engineer Jerome Meyer, packed up her photographs and negatives and reinvented her career, taking less controversial jobs in publishing and public relations.

At 87, Meyer was living in Charlotte when she saw her photo of the Weavers, a folk music quartet, used without credit on a postcard. Trying and failing to get the error corrected, her son brought examples of Meyer’s work to a local gallery—which gave her a show in 2007 and sold many of her pictures at $500 apiece. Today, her photography is in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Jewish Museum in New York.

Meyer’s husband predeceased her. She is survived by their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

James Lowry (GSLIS) and his co-author Riley Linebaugh were awarded the Archival History Article Prize by the Archival History Section of the Society of American Archivists for the article “The Archival Colour Line: Race, Records and Post-Colonial Custody,” published in Archives and Records in 2021 . . . . Yoko Nomura (Psychology) continues to get attention for research, published last month in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 8, that identifies earlier onset and higher rates of developmental psychopathology among children whose mothers were pregnant with them during the hurricane. Recent coverage includes articles in EcoWatch, Huffpost, Physician’s Weekly, and the Washington Post  . . . . 

Nathaniel Page ’21 was recognized at CUNY’s 17th Annual Black Male Initiative (BMI) Conference on September 30. BMI named Page a Stellar Scholar; he was also a City Council Honoree . . . . Johnathan Thayer (GSLIS) and GSLIS alumnus Erik Pagan co-authored “Accommodating and Enabling Anxiety Disorders and Agoraphobia in Digital Access Systems for Cultural Heritage,” a chapter in Curating Access: Disability Art Activism and Creative Accommodation . . . . Mal Waldron, a celebrated jazz pianist and composer educated at ACSM, is the subject of documentary that got a rave review in the Washington Post . . . . Kyra Wolfe, a GSLIS alumna, was named School Librarian of the Year last spring by the New York City School Librarians’ Association. Wolfe works at M.S. 88 Peter Rouget . . . . 

Congresswoman Grace Meng’s visit to campus on October 3, when she presented a facsimile check for $1.850,000 in federal funding to the QC WETLAB and saw demonstrations of its work, was covered by QNS, the Queens Chronicle, and other outlets . . . . the Big Ideas video “Waste, Not: Sewage Holds Evidence of COVID-19,” [LINK-TK] is a finalist in the Nor’easter Video Contest  held by the Alliance for Community Media’s Northeast Region. “Waste, Not,” which debuted on QC’s YouTube channel in February 2021, reports on waste water analysis conducted by virologist John Dennehy (Biology), and why his work is important. The video was submitted to the contest by QPTV, which has been airing the Big Ideas series . . . . Artists from Queens College will be providing the entertainment tomorrow—Wednesday, October 12—when the Alliance for Flushing Meadows Corona Park (FMCP) holds its annual fundraising gala beneath the Unisphere. The Hina Oikawa Jazz Trio, presented by the Queens College School of the Arts, will get the party started, performing from 6 to 7 p.m. After brief remarks by community leaders at 7 pm, Basement Bhangra sensation DJ Rekha, a QC alumna, will get everyone dancing from 7:30 to 9:30 p.m. This year, FMCP is honoring NewYork-Presbyterian Queens, LIJ Forest Hills – Northwell Health, and Elmhurst Hospital and their health care workers for their outstanding contributions to the park and its neighborhoods during the COVID-19 pandemic.