CUNY this year unveiled an ambitious plan for transforming into the nation’s foremost student-centered university system by the end of this decade. One of the ways the “CUNY Lifting New York” strategic plan is getting off the ground is with the help of a new Office of Transformation created by Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. The office’s leaders, Rachel Stephenson and Cathy N. Davidson, join the CUNYcast to offer a glimpse of CUNY’s transformation from the front...

Sidik Fofana started out writing rap songs as a kid, but it was fiction that really took hold when he was in college. It was a passion, if not a realistic career ambition, and so he kept at it while earning a masters in education at City College, and when he became a high school teacher in Brooklyn. Last summer, more than a decade later, Sidik finally got his first book published —  a collection called “Stories from the Tenants Downstairs.”  And then this spring came big news: He was a winner...

As CUNY’s first director of inclusive and adaptive sports, Ryan Martin has quickly built a program featuring men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams that compete against colleges from around the country. Martin is a national leader and advocate for adaptive sports and a veteran wheelchair basketball player himself. Born with spina bifida, he lost both his legs when he was two years old but went on to play in college and then professionally in Europe.  His focus is on bringing athletes...

  Queens College alum Nira Burstein spent six years making “Charm Circle,” an intensely personal documentary that took Burstein and her camera inside her childhood home in Flushing on a quest to understand the emotional chaos of her parents’ lives. Burstein is one of Filmmaker Magazine’s 25  New Faces of Independent Film, and “Charm Circle” has been hailed at film festivals around the world for its unflinching examination of her family’s struggles with mental illness and her own journey in...

  An ambitious new exhibition at Queensborough Community College’s renowned Kupferberg Holocaust Center offers a new way  to understand the enormity of Nazi genocide by documenting the staggering number of sites across Europe where Hitler’s murderous army carried out his Final Solution. “The Concentration Camps: Inside the Nazi System of Incarceration and Genocide” is an immersive multimedia exhibit that includes first-person accounts by local Holocaust survivors, hundreds of images from the...

Nearly six decades after he reluctantly dropped out of City College, Ciro Scala went back in 2016 and earned both an undergraduate and master’s degree from CCNY’s Colin Powell School for Civic and Global Leadership. Now he’s fulfilling his lifelong dream of becoming a teacher, and he’s giving something back. He created a workshop program to help first-generation college students navigate some of the same kinds of challenges that sidetracked his own degree when he was a young first-gen student...

“West Side Story” is beloved for its music, dance and romanticism but has long been dogged by criticism of its stereotyping of Puerto Rican characters and the casting of white actors to play them in the 1961 movie. When Steven Spielberg set out to make a reimagined version, he and screenwriter Tony Kushner tapped Brooklyn College professor emerita Virginia Sánchez Korrol to help them portray New York’s Puerto Rican community of the 1950s with more authenticity and nuance. As a leading scholar...

In the aftermath of this summer’s U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the return to power of the Taliban, thousands of Afghan families are still trying to evacuate  their country and come to the United States. Zohra Saed (left), a poet, editor and distinguished professor at Macaulay Honors College who was born in Afghanistan, has rallied her literary peers and friends in New York’s community of Central Asian immigrants to rescue one such imperiled family — a writer, his sister and father and...

John Mogulescu is affectionately regarded as the founding father of many of CUNY’s most innovative and consequential programs of this century. He’s been an unstoppable force and a guiding spirit bent on breaking down educational and career barriers for New Yorkers of all backgrounds. “I’ve never believed in the status quo,” he says. “I think that’s just boring.” This spring, after a prodigious career spanning nearly 50 years, he announced his retirement. To many, CUNY won’t be the same...

The nation’s supply of Covid vaccines is opening up rapidly, but will vaccine hesitancy –and refusal– prevent us from reaching the 75 to 85 percent vaccination rate needed to end the pandemic? The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy has launched CONVINCE USA, part of a global project to reduce ungrounded fears and misinformation about the new vaccines and persuade the resistant that the shot is safe, effective–and necessary.  CUNY SPH’s Dr. Scott Ratzan, the co-founder and...

The turmoil of 2020 was a canvas for Derek Fordjour’s provocative multidisciplinary art. An alumnus of Hunter College’s MFA program, Fordjour had a breakthrough year with two critically acclaimed exhibitions. The first, aptly titled “Shelter,” was shown at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis, his first solo museum exhibition. It featured a corrugated tin shack that viewers walked through to view his work. The other was a triptych of Black mourning titled “Self Must Die” at the Petzel...

A new year conversation with Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health and Health Policy on the state of vaccines, the threat of the mutated virus and what the Biden administration needs to do to turn the tide of the pandemic. Dr. Lee is an MD, public health researcher and writer who has been widely quoted and written incisively on COVID for Forbes.com since the pandemic began nearly a year ago. He is also the founder and executive director of the Public Health Informatics,...

Stan Wolfson saw it all through his lens: John F. Kennedy running for president at Herald Square. Snap. David Berkowitz getting booked for serial murder in Brooklyn. Snap. Martin Luther King Jr. riding a bicycle on Fire Island. Snap. Stan spent 18 years as a New York newspaper photographer before a helicopter crash ended his days in the field and began his four decades as a photo editor, the last 16 years overseeing photography for CUNY’s print and digital publications. Stan retired recently,...

Walter Mosley was a 35-year-old computer programmer when he enrolled in the graduate writing program at City College in 1987. Just three years later–while still a student–he  published “Devil in a Blue Dress,” the debut novel that established him as a new force in American fiction. This week–three decades and 60 books later–Mosley receives the National Book Foundation’s 2020 Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. The lifetime achievement award—whose previous recipients...

Jessica Harris never set out to become the country’s foremost authority on African American cuisine. Her doctoral dissertation was about French Theatre in Senegal, and she went on to a 50-year career as an English professor at Queens College. But along the way, she wrote a dozen acclaimed books about the food of Africa and what happened to it when it got to this continent. She’s a beloved figure in the food world and earlier this year, Jessica Harris was honored with the James Beard...

When the pandemic came in March, Harrison Sheckler, a pianist in the masters program at the Conservatory of Music at Brooklyn College, went home to Iowa to wait it out. And then he had this idea. He started asking his friends to sing the Broadway classic “You’ll Never Walk Alone” together remotely for a little video. By the time he was finished, there were 300 singers and musicians from 15 countries and a viral video that’s had 1.1 million views on YouTube. And then a follow-up this summer:...

CUNY TV’s third virtual town hall special on COVID-19 is a conversation on CUNY’s transition to distance learning–the challenges of he challenges of making it happen almost overnight midway through the spring semester and questions ahead amid the uncertainties of the continuing pandemic. Host Mike Gilliam talks with Executive Vice Chancellor and University Provost José Luis Cruz (bottom row center); Lehman College Provost Peter Nwosu (top right); Cathy N. Davidson, director of the Futures...

In CUNY TV’s second virtual town hall special on COVID-19, host Mike Gilliam talks with Anthony Ciampa of the New York State Nurses Association; Angie Kamath, University Dean for Continuing Education and Workforce Development; Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy; Micheal Lawrence of the Engineering Technology Department of Queensborough Community College; and students Sofia Fugon of Baruch College, Michael DeBartolo of the College of Staten Island...

We’re all in this together. So how are we dealing with it?  Since mid-March, researchers at the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy have been conducting a weekly tracking survey that’s revealing a lot about the impact of the pandemic on New Yorkers–and a few things about their impact on the pandemic. How do they view their own risk? How are they responding to the extreme measures of social distancing? (A term no one had heard of six weeks ago.) What’s been the effect on...

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, CUNY’s leading expert on the spread of the coronavirus, talks about the latest: What the last two weeks tells us about the next two and beyond. Why social distancing is so critical right now, how some Asian countries have used it to stop the virus and what we can learn from them. (For one thing, New Yorkers need to stop doing this.) What to make of  stories about treatments and vaccines. And more. Lee is an MD and professor in the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health &...

Dr. Bruce Y. Lee of the CUNY School of Public Health, one of our top  experts on the outbreak and a member of the task force guiding the University’s response, offers a frank and up-to-date assessment of the state of the emerging pandemic – and some good advice for protecting yourself and everyone else. Related Links CUNY Coronavirus Page: Complete up-to-date information for students, faculty and staff More about Dr. Bruce Y. Lee, including his coronavirus columns on Forbes.com Dr. Lee on...

Seven years ago, Anuz Thapa hit the lottery–the U.S. Diversity Immigrant Visa lottery. He and his new wife, Dipika Shrestha, left successful media careers in Nepal and came to New York, where they’ve both since earned graduate degrees at CUNY (she at Baruch, he at the School of Journalism). And for the past two years they’ve been hosting At the End of the Day, a weekly podcast to help other immigrants navigate life in a new land and make the jump from “survival jobs” to professional careers....

CUNY School of Public Health Dean Ayman El-Mohandes says the next few weeks should reveal a lot about how widely the COVID-19 virus might spread. His advice for now: Stay calm, wash your hands (which you should be doing anyway) and check the CDC website for advisories on travel and other important updates about the coronavirus. Related Links Up-to-date coronavirus information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Forbes.com: CUNY SPH’s Bruce Y. Lee on the challenges for...

A conversation about the causes and consequences of growing rates of depression and anxiety among students, and how CUNY is taking on the issue. Featuring Nicholas Freudenberg of the School of Public Health and Health Policy, Wendy Paulino of the Lehman College counseling center and Lehman student Azeez Amini.