QView #166 | November 14, 2023

CUNY Trustee Henry Berger (second from right) joined students for lunch.

In conjunction with Election Day, CUNY Trustee Henry Berger—a former New York City Council member and an expert on election law—visited and toured the campus on Tuesday, November 7, talked to students and met with faculty. They discussed CUNY-related topics as he answered questions in his role as chair of the Board of Trustees Committee on Fiscal Affairs. 

From left: President Frank H. Wu, Vice President for Communications and Marketing and Senior Advisor to the President Jay Hershenson, Berger, and Aaron Copland School of Music Associate Director Edward Smaldone tour the Music Building.

Members of QC’s First Gen Community gathered in the Patio Room on November 8 for lunch and a faculty panel discussion, moderated by students.

From left: Veteran and Military Support Services Associate Director Dennis Torres, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran; Jarred Times of the U.S. Marine Corps; William Amato of the U.S. Army; President Frank H. Wu; Corrine Alpert of the U.S. Navy; Assemblymember Samuel Berger; Distinguished Lecturer James Vacca; and Henry Yam, chief of staff for New York City Council Member James Gennaro.

Current and former members of the armed forces were saluted at QC’s annual Veterans Day luncheon on November 8, attended by New York State Assembly Member Samuel Berger and Henry Yam, chief of staff for New York City Council Member James Gennaro.

Above left: Student Association President William Barron and President Frank H. Wu. Above right: QC Nurse Terri Calhoun, Vice President for Student Affairs and Enrollment Management Jennifer Jarvis

The CDC recommends annual flu shots for everyone older than six months. Setting an example for faculty, staff, and students, President Frank H. Wu and others rolled up their sleeves.

“Unbanning Our Schools: Legalizing the Right to Truth, Justice & Freedom in Public Education” was the theme of NYC Men Teach’s fifth annual Innovation in Education conference, hosted by Queens College on November 10. Jarvis R. Givens, a professor of education and African & African American studies at Harvard University, was the guest speaker; Soribel Genao, professor of educational leadership at Queens College, moderated. Audience members received free copies of Givens’ book, Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching, autographed in person by the author. 

Jazz harpist Brandee Younger played to a sold-out house at LeFrak Concert Hall on Saturday, November 11. Her mother, Linda Younger, is a proud Queens College alumna.

Greg Robinson, a professor of history at l’Université du Québec À Montréal who specializes in North American ethnic studies and U.S. political history, gave a lecture on Monday, November 13.

Champions! Men’s Soccer Wins First-Ever ECC Title

The Queens College men’s soccer team made school history last Saturday, winning their first-ever East Coast Conference (ECC) Championship after defeating the University of the District of Columbia, 1-0.

Freshman Tommy Gunn, who scored the game-winning goal in the final seconds of the semifinal match last weekend, was the hero in this contest as well. Gunn fired a shot into the bottom of the left corner of the net in the 79th minute of play for the only goal of the match, and Queens goalkeeper Austin Matthews stopped three shots in goal to preserve the victory.

With the win, the Knights have earned an automatic bid into the NCAA Division II Tournament. Their first-round matchup was announced late Monday evening and was not available at the time of publication.

As a bonus, earlier this week, five members of the Knights were named to the All-Conference team. Senior Adolfo Martinez Paquet and sophomore Jose Mendez were selected to the First Team while sophomore Harry Cooke, senior Leo Pinto, and sophomore Kevin Johnson earned Second-Team honors.

While the men’s soccer team celebrates their title, the women’s volleyball team is preparing for a championship run. The Knights concluded the regular season last week, finishing with a record of 13-10 overall and 7-5 in the ECC and have earned a spot in the ECC playoffs, which will take place Friday, November 17, and Saturday, November 18. The first-round matchups had not been announced at the time of publication.

Be sure to check https://queensknights.com/ for updates on the men’s soccer NCAA tournament and women’s volleyball ECC playoffs.

Day of Giving

Is your closet cluttered with once-worn jeans and never-worn sneakers? Bring them to the Knights Giving Room—in the Student Union lower level, next to the Knights Pantry—on Wednesday, November 15, from 10 am to 4 pm. That’s when the Office for Student Development and Leadership will hold a Day of Giving. School supplies, books, toiletries, and nonperishables as well as clothing are being collected for donation to the Knights Table Food Pantry/Armory and the Pomonok Community Center.  

Queering the Archives for a Night

The rich history of LGBTQ activism by Queens College students will be celebrated tomorrow—November 15—with Queering the Archives, the latest campus project involving the documentary theater troupe What Will The Neighbors Say? (WWTNS). The troupe has been collaborating with QC for five years. This time, the source material is decades-old student journals in the Gender, Love and Sexuality Alliance collection in the Queens College’s Special Collections and Archives. Current students have been working with WWTNS to create and present a verbatim stage piece.

Queering the Archives will take place in Rosenthal 230, with a reception at 7 pm, followed by the performance at 8 pm. Admission is free.

This event is generously supported by the CUNY LGBTQIA+ Consortium.

QC Hosts NYC Premiere of The Claddagh

The Claddagh, a film written and directed by Woodside native Brendan Lee, will make its New York City debut in Rosenthal 230 on Thursday, November 16, at 5:30 pm.

Funded through Kickstarter and shot mostly in Queens, Claddagh is based on the real-life romance between Lee, an Irish American writer, and Adriana Aponte, a Colombian photographer he met when she was visiting the city for the first time. Aponte is the movie’s cinematographer.

“What better place than Queens College to debut a film about an unlikely romance born in Queens?” commented Lee, a former FDNY firefighter. Aponte added, “The film is primarily about friendship, loyalty, and love. Values that cross all cultural lines.”

This screening is co-sponsored by the Irish Studies, Latin American and Latino Studies, and Media Studies programs. Admission is free, but seats must be reserved today, November 14; email [email protected] or call 718-997-5393.

Honoring a Legendary Professor

The life and work of Music Professor Emeritus Alexander Kouguell, who passed away in October 2022 at the age of 102, will be celebrated with a memorial concert on Sunday, November 19, from 3 to 5 pm, at LeFrak Concert Hall. Kouguell’s friends, colleagues, and former students will perform and share memories of a celebrated cellist who devoted 68 years to Queens College, established a cello scholarship at the Aaron Copland School of Music, and bequeathed the school his instruments, bows, music, and memorabilia. Admission is free; RSVP here.

Next Business Breakfast

Adam Behlman ’90, president of Starwood Property Trust’s Real Estate Investing & Servicing segment as well as president of Starwood Mortgage Capital, will speak at the last business breakfast of the month, taking place November 30, 8:30 to 10 am, at the Q-Side Lounge. Behlman is also past chairman of the Commercial Real Estate Finance Council, the leading trade organization for the commercial real estate finance industry.

The breakfast, co-sponsored by the School of Business and QC’s Blackstone LaunchPad entrepreneurship program, is a free networking opportunity for students, alumni, and faculty. To attend, register here.

Alumna Pursues Justice as a Lawyer and a Poet

It’s surprising—often pleasantly so—when we discover that someone recognized for accomplishments in a particular field of endeavor also possesses gifts that allow them to excel in another that may seem completely unrelated. To those familiar with her work as a social justice advocate and civil rights attorney, Sunu P. Chandy’s first published volume of poems may be providing that revelation.

Having won the 2021 Terry J. Cox Award, My Dear Comrades was published in March of this year by Regal House. (The award honors the publisher’s late father who held a lifelong love of poetry.) For Chandy, who received her MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Queens College in 2013, the volume brings together poems spanning before, during, and after her MFA studies, some three decades.

Examples of Extraordinary

In her poems Chandy demonstrates a particular talent for revealing the extraordinary by way of the ordinary. She can take a thing or situation that seems commonplace and familiar and with her selection of words evoke thoughts and images that turn it into a portal to a greater understanding of a complex issue. Thus, in one of her poems the meteorological condition sleet becomes a metaphor for the slippery nature of finding family acceptance with one’s having come out as gay.

As part of an online launch event for My Dear Comrades conducted in July by Charis Books, the South’s oldest independent feminist bookstore, Chandy was interviewed by her longtime friend Rev. Winnie Varghese to discuss how her poems reflect her experiences as a queer woman of color, attorney, parent, partner, and daughter of South Asian immigrants.

“National origin, immigration, queerness, disability access, miscarriage . . . So many issues are ideas that we don’t get to talk about,” observed Varghese. “How do you think to say the things nobody’s saying?”

“I think there’s writing and there’s sharing,” Chandy responded. “Writing is the way I make sense of things—when I’m scared, when I don’t know what to do, when I’m torn, when I feel like I want justice but I also am empathetic for where the other person is coming from . . . I write poems to try to grapple with when I’m torn, when I don’t know what the path forward is.” 

Reached recently at her home in Washington, DC, Chandy says that her lifelong concern about issues of social justice can be attributed to having been raised as a Quaker: “I grew up in Quaker meetings, and they always had a social justice committee. There were elders who were really mentors to me around how to be activists in our world for all the range of social causes that require activism: whether it’s poverty, sexism, racism . . . or just inequality in our society as it continues.”

Roots of Activism

She mentions early activism while a student at Mother McAuley High School in Chicago with an organization called Action Reaction that she helped to revive: “And at that time, some of the fights were against apartheid in South Africa. or just the beginning of pushing recycling and environmental justice . . . I also started an Amnesty International chapter in my high school.”

My Dear Comrades is composed of poems from before, during, and after her MFA. “It really does span the 30 years that I’ve been writing poems. There are poems from my time in Boston and New York City, poems about my journey to becoming a parent, and poems that were written during the pandemic, about the pandemic. And poems that grew out of workshops, prompts, and during the [MFA] program as well.”

The title of the book is taken from her experience going through fertility treatments: “It’s addressing people going through that or other medical treatments. There are also many poems about adoption which ended up being my ultimate pathway to parenthood.”

While her subject matter can address topics some may consider taboo, Chandy says that’s not really her goal, but it is often the outcome: “The goal is to be able to tell the truth about our lives and not to live in the shadows, whether it’s about being LGBTQ+, facing a sexual assault, or any number of things that we’re not supposed to talk about, but most people have gone through. I think being able to be our full selves in the world and to be honest about the pain of that, the joy of that, is what we are here to do. The more people do that, the less it is a taboo or stigma. Connection is what breaks stigma. That is what I hear and that is what I know to be true.”

Chandy, whose parents emigrated to the United States from Kerala in South India in the 1970s, relates that her father has a PhD and her mother has three master’s degrees, but neither is educated in anything remotely related to her field, the law. Consequently, she had no family support structure or other advantages in her path to her law degree. In fact, she faced many challenges due to her inexperience and institutional biases. Her poem “The successful candidate should hail from a well-regarded law school” recounts her journey and serves to call attention to the obstacles others like her may encounter. The title comes from an actual job posting.

Moving Minds 

Poetry can tug at the heart, she believes, describing how someone called her from a law firm to ask her for her poem about affirmative action because she was trying to get a partner at the firm to take a different approach when it came to hiring. “Your poem is going to move him,” she’d said, “more than any bar, or graph, or chart can do because it tells the human story about what it means to not know what you don’t know.”

“I do think that poems can serve to actually bring change, change of heart on social justice issues,” says Chandy. “They can serve to build communities, so people don’t feel so alone as they’re going through a number of different experiences. But also, I wrote the poem for me: I share the poem to build that community, and it is maybe one of many things that help lead to a better society, overall.”

Like the law, poetry also was not an inherent part of Chandy’s upbringing: “I read a lot. I loved going to the library. I was an only child for much of my childhood. Books were my best friends growing up. I started writing poems in high school when I encountered experiences that I didn’t know how to make sense of.”

The first poem she remembers writing was called “The Moment.” It reflects the feelings she experienced as part of a group of volunteers helping the unhoused, particularly the children. She says, she felt the children enjoyed playing with her and the other student volunteers: “But we leave, and their life is the same. Is this worthwhile, and what are we doing this for?”

Torn, she found herself wondering was the experience more to benefit the unhoused children or the student volunteers: “The poem was about the importance of that moment and the limitations of that moment.” Children, she says, can see the inequities. Ultimately invoking a theme that runs through her work to this day, she says, “We have a collective responsibility to take care of each other in our society, and how do we do that?”

Court Cases

Chandy recently joined a legal nonprofit organization, Democracy Forward, as a senior advisor..In her former role as legal director of the National Women’s Law Center in Washington, DC, Chandy has filed many amicus briefs, about a dozen of which have been filed before the Supreme Court over the last six years. She knows how to use words persuasively--in legal briefs and her poems. Often political in nature—sometimes subtly so—her poems, too, might be seen as arguments before a jury of readers (or panel of judges), ways to bring them around to seeing something in a light they might not have otherwise considered.

“I think these [poetry and the law] are both areas where nuance is very important,” Chandy observes. “For instance, in the 303 Creative Case, the Supreme Court said if a company wanted to do a ‘custom-designed’ wedding website, it could turn away an LGBTQ couple. Making sure everyone has the word ‘custom’ in there, right? Even though it’s a horrendous decision, it’s a limited decision. It’s not just about goods and services, generally.”

Chandy earned her BA in Peace and Global Studies/Women’s Studies from Earlham College. Following her graduation from Northeastern University of Law, she began her legal career in New York City in 1998. This was also the period when she began more formal studies of poetry, taking classes led by former U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith and attending workshops at the 92 Street Y. She met Kimiko Hahn (English) at a class the award-winning poet was teaching for Cave Canem, an organization for Black poets that occasionally runs multicultural programs.

With Hahn’s encouragement, she enrolled in QC’s MFA program, which she completed in three years while working full time as an attorney in Manhattan.

“There were many programs in Manhattan, but for the diversity of the student body, diversity of faculty, and the price, Queens College was by far the best option for me.” Chandy says, noting that she was admitted at other MFA programs, including some low-residency programs, some with well-known reputations. “But they were extremely expensive.”

“They were down the block, literally. Instead, I took a subway and a bus two nights a week because I thought this was the right program for me,” she says. “It was refreshing to be there having worked in lower Manhattan for 15 years. To be able to go somewhere where you could actually see the sky. And I like the architecture of the buildings. It felt like I was in a different head space, but also a different physical space. I remember walking across the campus and seeing the sunset. It was a nice shift from day lawyer job to poetry classes in the evening.”

My Dear Comrades cover design by Ragni Agarwal

Teaching Other Teachers

Queens College produces extraordinary educators, and the Empire State agrees. Last week, Governor Kathy Hochul announced the newest cohort of the New York State Master Teacher Program. Of the 147 public school teachers who were just named master teachers, 12, or eight percent, are QC alumni.

The master teacher program was launched in 2013 to recognize outstanding K-12 public school STEM teachers and enlist them in professional development efforts. Participants are chosen through a multi-step process and commit four years to the program. During that time, they engage in peer mentoring and professional development opportunities; work closely with pre-service and early career STEM teachers; and join in and lead professional development sessions. In return, they are eligible for a $15,000 stipend for each of the four years.

Joseph Bochner ’73

Joseph Bochner, a professor at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf at the Rochester Institute of Technology (NTID/RIT), passed away on October 22. He was 73.

After graduating from QC, Bochner earned a master’s in English and a PhD in language and audition, both from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. A faculty member at NTID/RIT for 49 years, he held research patents and published extensively.

He is survived by his wife of 45 years, Nancy, and their two children, two granddaughters, and family dog.  

Alan Hevesi ’62

Politician Alan Hevesi, a Queens College political science professor who reached statewide office died on November 9. He was 83.

Hevesi had been teaching at QC for several years when he was first elected to the state assembly in 1971. After representing Forest Hills for about two decades, he became New York City comptroller.

Recounting his legislative record, the Times Union reported that he supported Medicaid funding for abortions, barred hospitals from turning away indigent New Yorkers, and fought against the return of the death penalty. The paper also noted that as New York City comptroller, he prevented Mayor Rudy Giuliani from privatizing the city’s water system and, in collaboration with state officials across the country, achieved a settlement that forced Swiss banks to pay $1.25 billion in restitution to Holocaust survivors. (Hevesi’s Hungarian-born parents met each other in Queens after escaping Europe in 1938; many of their relatives perished in Auschwitz.)

In 2002, Hevesi, who by then had left the QC faculty, won his first term as state comptroller. He was re-elected once.

Predeceased by his wife, Hevesi is survived by his sons Andrew, an assembly member from Queens, and Daniel, a former state senator; a daughter, Laura Hevesi; and three grandchildren.

Darrell Taylor

Darrell Taylor, a member of the philosophy faculty at Queens College, died on October 18 at the age of 87.

Before matriculating at Anderson College, Taylor was employed at a cardboard box factory, work that sensitized him to blue collar issues. At college, he sang with gospel quartets, performing across the country. Attending graduate school at the University of Southern California on a Danforth Scholarship, he covered his living expenses with jobs ranging from cantor and choral conductor to delivery man. 

Joining the QC faculty, he taught more than 30 courses, in film theory and history, politics, and 19th and 20th century European philosophy. Retiring in 1991, he moved to Maine, bought a sailboat, and with his wife sailed to Florida and back. Something of a renaissance man, he also founded a web development business and created digital photo collages that were exhibited in Portland-area galleries.

Taylor is survived by his wife and their children and grandchildren.

Mona Kleinberg (Political Science) published an article in the Journal of Communication (the International Communication Association’s flagship journal) on August 30 . . . . Alicia Melendez (Biology) NIH R21 Award of $458,510 with Lei Xie (Hunter College) AI-powered cross-level cross-species omics data integration to elucidate mechanisms of exceptional longevity . . . . Yoko Nomura (Psychology) received three NIH grants totaling over $12 million in direct costs . . . . Vanessa Perez (Political Science) received a PSC-CUNY grant for her book project, Who Are the New Latino Republicans? How Race and Ethnic Identities Shape Partisanship . . . . Carolyn Pytte (Psychology) received a $300,000 NIH grant for Epigenetic rescue of age-related deficits in auditory processing of vocal communication signals . . . . Morris Rossabi (History) has been invited to give a lecture series at Cambridge this fall on Mongolian and Inner Asian Studies . . . . Gregory Sholette (Art) will giving the morning keynote on November 19 for the Arts in Times of Crisis symposium at the Thomas Mann Haus in Los Angeles . . . . Maral Tajerian and Sebastian Alvarado (Biology) received an NIH U-Rise (Undergraduate Research Training Initiative for Student Enhancement) Award of $135,120 . . . . John Waldman (Biology) received a $41,409 Hudson River Foundation Award for Assessing the Historical Role of the Upper Hudson River as a Spawning and Nursery Habitat for American Shad, with Daniel Stich (SUNY Oneonta) . . . . President Frank H. Wu was honored by the Museum of Chinese in America at its Legacy Awards Gala on Wednesday, November 8. The Daily News published Wu’s op-ed, “Colleges must welcome debate: But hate and antisemitism must be called out,” on November 12 . . . . The Godwin-Ternbach Museum received a $74,000 grant from the Pine Tree Foundation for the museum’s permanent collection cataloguing initiative. The award will go toward the salaries of two part-time museum fellows, collection preservation equipment, and supplies, and serve as seed funding for a multiyear project to improve access to the G-T’s collections.