CUNY Graduate Center

As artificial intelligence transforms higher education, the CUNY Graduate Center is taking a different approach to managing the technology. Rather than focusing on restrictions and penalties, the institution is encouraging thoughtful discussion, responsible experimentation, and shared decision-making.

Provost Joel P. Christensen and Luke Waltzer, director of the Teaching and Learning Center, are helping lead this effort and spoke about it on The Thought Project podcast with Tanya Domi.

Kandice Chuh, the CUNY Graduate Center’s new associate provost for academic affairs and dean for the humanities and social sciences, joins The Thought Project for a conversation about race, ethnicity, education, and the public value of scholarship. As an academic leader, she supports the humanities and social sciences programs and helps implement the Graduate Center’s strategic plan.

Speaking with host Tanya Domi, Chuh discusses responsibilities that include academic and fiscal oversight of graduate programs, centers, and institutes, along with dissertation fellowships and graduate assistantships. She connects that work to questions central to her scholarship: Who decides what counts as knowledge and whose histories and experiences have been excluded.

Drawing on ethnic studies, Black studies, and queer theory, Chuh explains why understanding America requires looking across disciplines and examining how its past shapes its present. Amid political pressure on universities, she argues that curiosity, careful research, and openness to others are especially urgent.

Chuh also reflects on teaching as a source of new ideas, where differences enrich discussion. She brings those principles to hiring, curricula, and student support, guided by a commitment to fairness, honesty, and shared well-being. Her goal is to help programs create conditions for scholarship that benefits society.

On The Thought Project, CUNY Graduate Center History Ph.D. candidate Rachel B. Tiven talks to host Tanya Domi about the organizing, public protest, and electoral pressure that secured women’s suffrage. Tiven investigates why members of Congress changed their minds and agreed to amend the Constitution over a century ago.

The findings reveal a movement that commanded headlines and made opposition politically costly. Women who already voted in Western states threatened to unseat politicians whose party blocked a federal amendment. Outside the White House, the “Silent Sentinels” confronted President Woodrow Wilson with his own promises of democracy, continuing their protests despite attacks, arrests, imprisonment, and force-feeding during hunger strikes.

Tiven explains why lobbying and nonviolent civil disobedience were both essential, even when the leaders pursuing those strategies disagreed. She also challenges the familiar explanation that women’s wartime service persuaded Congress to recognize their political equality.

The conversation, based on Tiven’s doctoral dissertation, connects this history to contemporary struggles over voting rights and women’s citizenship, asking how the suffragists’ persistence, leadership, and political strategies can inform efforts to defend those rights today.

What Odysseus and Alexander the Great Teach Us About Leadership by CUNY Graduate Center

New York’s Revolutionary Past Comes Alive by CUNY Graduate Center

In this episode of The Thought Project, host Tanya Domi speaks with Eno Agolli, assistant director of the Saul Kripke Center at the CUNY Graduate Center, about bringing philosophy out of the ivory tower and into public conversation.

Agolli is helping expand the reach of the Saul Kripke Center, named for the late Saul Kripke, a former distinguished professor at the Graduate Center who is considered one of the greatest American philosophers of the last half-century. One of Agolli’s newest initiatives is the Analytic Salon, a public series designed to make analytic philosophy accessible, lively, and welcoming. The salons require no homework and no background in philosophy. Instead, participants gather to consider big questions, about artificial intelligence, skepticism, morality, knowledge, and free will, through clear, jargon-free discussion.

The salons are carried out in the spirit of Kripke’s own philosophical practice, centered on sharp puzzles, rigorous reasoning, and questions that can be stated clearly in ordinary language. The response has been striking. The salons, capped at 35 people, have filled quickly, sometimes within minutes, and draw many repeat attendees. For Agolli, that enthusiasm points to a real public hunger for philosophy, and for spaces where people can think together.

In this episode of The Thought Project, host Tanya Domi speaks with Mordechai Levovitz, M.S.W., a Ph.D. student in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center, about being queer and Jewish, and about the search for safety, support, and acceptance within Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities.

Levovitz founded and served as executive director of JQY, Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides crisis, communal, and clinical support for LGBTQ+ and queer teens growing up in Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish families. He discusses how LGBTQ+ Jews, including transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people, often face isolation when coming out, especially when family, religious law, and community expectations appear to leave little room for a queer life.

His work grows out of his personal experience and years of helping queer Jews find support, language, safety, and community. He entered the Social Welfare Ph.D. program to deepen that work through research, advocacy, and policymaking, with a focus on the needs of LGBTQ+ people in religious communities.

The conversation also explores how Judaism contains a more expansive history of gender than many people realize, including rabbinic discussions of seven or eight gender categories. For Levovitz, that history matters. So does the ability to change one’s name, an act that can affirm identity, dignity, and the right to be fully seen.

Professor Robert C. Smith of the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College and Manuel Castro, the former New York City commissioner of immigrant affairs and a Baruch graduate, join The Thought Project for a timely conversation about immigration policy at a moment of deep uncertainty. Smith draws on decades of research on Mexican migration, legal status, and intergenerational mobility, as well as his legal advocacy on DACA and birthright citizenship, to explain how current policy choices are reshaping the lives of immigrant families.

Castro brings the perspective of a former undocumented immigrant, longtime advocate, and city official who has worked at the center of New York’s response to immigrant communities. Together, he and Smith argue that today’s crisis did not emerge overnight: Comprehensive immigration reform has remained out of reach for years, leaving millions vulnerable to shifting enforcement priorities and legal uncertainty. They discuss asylum, mixed-status families, the limits of local protections, and why expanding access to citizenship and legal status remains essential. The episode connects scholarship, public service, and lived experience in a clear call for reform grounded in both policy and human consequences.

From mushroom leather to algae-based garments, Elizabeth Wissinger, a professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and of social sciences at Borough of Manhattan Community College, explores whether bio-based materials can offer a real alternative to synthetic fabrics, fast fashion, and clothing waste.

On this episode of The Thought Project, she discusses the rise of bio-couture, the environmental problems driving interest in biodegradable textiles, and the ethical questions raised by using living organisms in design. She also examines the challenges these materials still face, including durability, scalability, and the possibility that, if they are made for short-term use and quickly discarded, they could reproduce the same wear-once, throwaway logic that defines fast fashion.

As Earth Day approaches, Ashley Dawson returns to The Thought Project for a sobering conversation about climate politics at a moment of global instability. Dawson, a distinguished professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, is a member of Public Power New York, a movement for a just, publicly controlled energy transition in New York. He was also the 2025 Climate Justice Fellow at the arts organization Culture Push, where he worked on a series of photographs and short films about the struggle to abolish polluting power plants, and he is currently a resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City, where he is co-curating an exhibit on the infrastructure of energy transition in the city. In conversation with host Tanya Domi, Dawson examines renewed fossil fuel dependence, weakened environmental enforcement, and the battles over climate policy in New York and California, while also pointing to public power, offshore wind, and community-led solar as part of a more just and resilient future.