Letters
by Advocate Staff
Violent crime at CUNY
This matter is urgent!
That CUNY has lost even one student to violent crime is unacceptable. That we have lost both Romona Moore of Hunter College, and Imette St. Guillen of John Jay College, in the last few years, and have not altered our registration practice for incoming students to require mandatory personal safety training is inexcusable.
Memorials with pictures and flowers are not enough. It is incumbent on us to take appropriate action.
We have the “best” criminal justice program in the world. Surely the faculty could create a useful, effective, sensible way to teach incoming CUNY students personal safety basics, from dealing with student bullying to internet stalking to behaving safely in New York City. What we seem to forget is that many students, however street-smart and slick their veneer, come to us as children on the verge of adulthood. That we provide no serious training about dealing with danger implicates us as a university in these tragic events.
It is a matter of utmost urgency that we devise an ongoing plan of action which includes mandatory personal safety training for incoming students, and implement it, if not for this term than, at the latest, for the next term. A few notes in the student bulletin is not enough.
Both Columbia and New York University have implemented institution-wide programs in response to student suicides in recent years. The homicide of our students also demands institution-wide reform and response.
Andrea Siegel
There’s more to the urban ed story
This letter is in response to the recent article A GC Refugee Finds Respect — in Canada by Tony Monchinski. While I think Professor Kincheloe and Tony Monchinski raise important concerns about the experiences of working class students and students of color in the Urban Education program, I don’t think they present the entire picture. Specifically, Kincheloe expresses the belief that the “point” of the Urban Education program is to give an opportunity to “indigenous New York students that Columbia and NYU weren’t giving them.”
The express mission of the CUNY Urban Education program is that it “prepares leaders in educational research and policy analysis who have a broad understanding of the complex issues facing urban education and are well prepared to contribute to the knowledge base needed to improve educational practice.” Part of understanding the complexity of urban education is that the program admits students like myself — from a Southern, working class background, but educated at Yale and Columbia. Having the cultural capital and intellectual ability to do well in the program was not my concern coming in. I was interested in being in an educational environment that had a diverse student population and that drew from a diverse range of academic traditions.
The difficulty I’ve experienced in the Urban Education program actually centers on (despite course descriptions posted on the Urban Education site that promised readings from African-American and female theorists) the predominantly, white, male, “critical” perspective in which urban education issues are framed. I find that scholars like Kincheloe take the position of arguing for the working class and people of color, but, in the end, don’t seem to have a nuanced perspective of the people they are arguing for. When I raised this issue in a section with Kincheloe, he responded adamantly, “You can’t tell me that African-American women don’t share the same experience!” That is exactly what I am saying. Would anyone make this assertion about white men? What exactly is involved in this African-American female experience? I anxiously await a book by a white, male scholar to find out…Sarcasm aside, in the program I’ve felt bombarded with “critical” images of the experiences of working class students and students of color that feel just as limiting and frankly, as racist and classist, as those of some conservatives.
Patrina Huff
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