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Flash Back September 2007: Who Are The Board of Trustees…And Why You Should Care

by Advocate Staff

Who are the CUNY Board of Trustees and what is their role in the gov­er­nance of the uni­ver­sity?
The Board of Trustees of the City Uni­ver­sity of New York is made up of exactly sev­en­teen mem­bers. Of these sev­en­teen, ten of the mem­bers are appointed by the gov­er­nor, with only per­func­tory advise­ment form the state senate […]

Lessons in Terror at John Jay

by Abe Walker

Marc Sage­man and Charles B. Strozier at an Octo­ber Cen­ter on Ter­ror­ism Seminar

In the normally-restrained world of aca­d­e­mic dis­course, the 2007 annual meet­ing of the Amer­i­can Anthro­po­log­i­cal Asso­ci­a­tion stands out as a break with the dom­i­nant cul­ture of self-abrogation and humil­ity. Dur­ing the course of this meet­ing, a fierce and impas­sioned debate broke out over a pro­posed revision […]

The GC Advocate Guide to the 2009 NYC Mayoral Elections

by Advocate Staff

Let’s face it. The pick­ings in this year’s may­oral race are pretty slim. Bloomberg has out­spent every other can­di­date in the field by a good $60 mil­lion, and the Democ­rats have hardly put their best foot for­ward by nom­i­nat­ing the lack­lus­ter under­dog Bill Thomp­son. Mean­while, the Greens have cho­sen a celebrity can­di­date who may or not actually […]

Intellectual Leadership: Plato’s Dream, Popper’s Nightmare

by Charles Pasternak

Author of Quest: The Essence of Human­ity (John Wiley, 2003; paper­back 2004)
Mens cuiusque is est quisque (What a man’s mind is, that is what he is)
Good lead­er­ship, the world over, is in short sup­ply. Ter­ror­ism or its threat lurks every­where; the prob­lems in the Mid­dle East grow by the hour; cen­tral African chiefs con­tinue to prac­tice geno­cide instead […]

Defending the UN

by Andrew Bast

Like beauty, the value of the United Nations lies in the eye of the beholder. Case in point, David Rothkopf’s recent screed on For­eign Policy.com (“You Can’t Spell Unpro­duc­tive With­out the Let­ters U and N”) against the world’s largest mul­ti­lat­eral orga­ni­za­tion, the lat­est in a long line of vit­ri­olic — and largely mis­in­formed — attacks on the insti­tu­tion.
Only a few years ago, […]

W. B. Ofuatey-Kodjoe

by admin

W. B. Ofuatey-Kodjoe

Ofu­atey was a proud man. He was proud of his accom­plish­ments, of his cul­ture, and of his fam­ily. Yet he was also a mod­est man. In rela­tion to his fac­ulty, the role of an Exec­u­tive Offi­cer is very much the first among equals, and this is how Ofu­atey inter­acted with his col­leagues. I would say that the love he inspired among his stu­dents will become leg­endary. In rela­tion to me, Ofu­atey pretty much gave me free reign in man­ag­ing the office. He always enter­tained my ideas as to how we could improve man­age­ment of the pro­gram, and there was great syn­ergy to our rela­tion­ship. Of course there were times when Ofu­atey and I dis­agreed, but in any good work­ing asso­ci­a­tion, it’s nat­ural. The key fac­tor to our rela­tion­ship was the knowl­edge that, dur­ing a cri­sis, Ofu­atey and I would back each other up.

Foul Play at Bard?: Controversy Ensues After College Terminates Kovel

by JBoy

As con­tin­gent work­ers in the CUNY sys­tem, many mem­bers of the Grad­u­ate Cen­ter com­mu­nity have become inured to the con­stant threat of los­ing their teach­ing posi­tions at short notice. Fol­low­ing Gov­er­nor Patterson’s bud­get cuts last sum­mer, many long-serving adjuncts found them­selves out of a job as depart­ment chairs bal­anced bud­gets on their backs. So it may […]

Midlife Crisis for a Movement Icon: At 95, the ‘Peace Pentagon’ building is hardly in its dotage; is it nonetheless nearing the end of its days?

by JOtrompke

The year was 1997 when Molly Klopot first entered the build­ing at 339 Lafayette in Man­hat­tan, and like many peo­ple, she was ini­tially struck by the amount of activ­ity that went on in there.
“When I first came into the room, I met a very stately and tall old woman who rep­re­sented our orga­ni­za­tion at the United Nations meet­ing on […]

Academic Labor Under Siege: Towards a Politically Engaged Professionalism

by HGiroux

I do not believe that a stu­dent of human real­ity may be eth­i­cally neu­tral. The sole choice we face is one between loy­alty to the humil­i­ated and to beauty, and indif­fer­ence to both. It is like any other choice a moral being con­fronts: between tak­ing and refus­ing to take respon­si­bil­ity for one’s respon­si­bil­ity. – Zyg­munt Bau­man1
In his […]

Two Or Three Things I know about Him: Eeverything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard

By Richard Brody (Metropolitan Books, 2008, 720 pages)

by M. Lau

Two or Three Things I Know About Her, Godard’s 1966 film inspired by news­pa­per accounts of bour­geois women tak­ing up pros­ti­tu­tion for the dis­pos­able income, con­tains one of my favorite scenes in all his movies. In it a young boy tells his mother Juli­ette (Marina Vlady) about a dream he’s had. “I was walk­ing all alone along the […]