CUNYcast

NOTE: This podcast was recorded on Wednesday, March 11.  

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 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 Twitter

 

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. It was only natural that we invited the podcasting couple over for a podcast.

 

Related Links

Listen: Dipika and Anuz’s At the End of the Day podcast

Read:  Dipika Wins Women’s Leadership Award

 

 

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

CUNY Coronavirus Guidance

Forbes.com: CUNY SPH’s Bruce Y. Lee on the challenges for scientists

About Dr. Ayman El-Mohandes

About the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy

Rates of depression, anxiety and other mental disorders have doubled in the past decade among college students nationwide– a serious obstacle to academic success and graduation.  CUNY recently held a day-long conference on the issue, in partnership with The Steve Fund, an organization that promotes mental health for students of color. This episode of the CUNYcast features a conversation with Nicholas Freudenberg, a Distinguished Professor of Public Health who was a leader in organizing the conference; Wendy Paulino, a mental health specialist in the counseling center at Lehman College; and Azeez Alimi, a social work major at Lehman who shares his own story of seeking help.

 

 

RELATED LINKS

Learn more at Healthy CUNY

Find information on CUNY mental health services

About The Steve Fund

 

 

Life have you stressed out? Weary of the endless news cycle? City College philosophy professor Massimo Pigliucci has an idea–one that goes back 18 centuries. He’s a leader of a modern movement that’s popularizing the ancient Greek philosophy of Stoicism. Outcomes are not under your control, he says. What is under your control are your intentions, your decisions and your actions.

Pigliucci is the K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at City College. Born in Liberia and raised in Rome, he holds three doctoral degrees: in genetics from the University of Ferrara in Italy, biology from the University of Connecticut and philosophy of science from the University of Tennessee.  He is a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and the author or editor of 10 books.

RELATED LINKS

How to be a Stoic: More about Massimo Pigliucci, his books and talks on the modern Stoicism

 

 

This episode of the CUNYcast features guests who are trying to make journalism and politics more inclusive: Jennifer Choi of the News Integrity Initiative at the Newmark Graduate School of Journalism discusses a project to advance diversity in newsrooms and improve coverage of marginalized communities. And City College/Macaulay student Emilia Decaudin, the first openly transgender member of the New York State Democratic Committee, talks about how she got the state party to change the gender language of its rules.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Less than half the students who start at America’s public colleges make it to graduation. David Kirp, a prominent education policy expert at the University of California, Berkeley, says it’s because few colleges bother to do anything about it. So Kirp went around the country to visit campuses that are doing something. Programs like CUNY’s ASAP, ACE and CUNY Start became an uplifting chapter of his provocative–and prescriptive–new book, “The College Dropout Scandal.”

Related Links

Read David Kirp’s New York Times op-ed about how CUNY is keeping students on track to graduate

Learn about CUNY’s model academic success programs

Read more about David Kirp and “The College Dropout Scandal”

 

The 2020 Census could miss millions of immigrants and others who are historically hard to count, affecting everything from seats in Congress to federal funds for education.  That’s why officials and groups from New York to California are using CUNY’s interactive Census mapping tool to focus their efforts on neighborhoods that will be the hardest to count. Mapping guru Steven Romalewski of the Center for Urban Research at the Graduate Center explains how it works and the difference it could make.

 

Related Links

Explore the Hard to Count mapping tool

From the Harvard Kennedy School: Who Will Count in the 2020 Census? There’s a map for that.

Read about CUNY’s role in the NYC Census 2020 campaign

Learn more about the CUNY Mapping Service  

Allan Wernick founded the nation’s first university-based free legal service for immigrants two decades ago. Since then CUNY Citizenship Now! has helped thousands of New Yorkers become citizens. But now they need both help and hope. Wernick  talks about the obstacles for immigrants of every status in the Trump era.

To learn more, please visit CUNY Citizenship Now!

CUNY’s Yarimar Bonilla, a prominent voice on the volatile politics of her native Puerto Rico, spent the summer in San Juan, immersed in the revolt that led to the resignation of the commonwealth’s governor. Bonilla is back with plenty to say about the historic events and how they’re intertwined with the continuing aftermath of 2017’s Hurricane Maria.

Bonilla is a political anthropologist who teaches at Hunter College and The Graduate Center. She is the co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm​, a collection of essays, poems and photographs published this month by Haymarket Books.

Read more about Yarimar Bonilla here