Newsmakers – CUNY Podcasts

Félix V. Matos Rodríguez talks about growing up in Puerto Rico, becoming CUNY's first chancellor of color--and everything in between--in the debut of our new CUNYcast podcast.

On December 11, 2018, Medgar Evers College President Dr. Rudy Crew sat down with former President of South Africa Kgalema Motlanthe. On the 60th anniversary of Chinua Achebe’s classic novel, Things Fall Apart, they discuss the enduring qualities and lasting impact of his seminal work. Their conversation touches on how the struggle for liberation and education equality in Africa mirrors the struggles of African-Americans in the United States.

From its first Supreme Court case in 1915 to today’s voter-suppression and gerrymandering, the NAACP has been on the front lines of the battle for the most fundamental American right. In The Voting Rights War: The NAACP and the Ongoing Struggle for Justice, lawyer, legal commentator and John Jay College professor Gloria Browne-Marshall tells the story of the organization’s courageous – and continuing – work in federal courtrooms, state capitols and city streets.

What makes us special? “Being a public university in New York with a majority population of students of color gives CUNY a very, very special mission in the context of American life, something that most other universities do not share,” says Zujaja Tauqeer, who started at Brooklyn College and Macaulay Honors College, won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford, England, and is now at Harvard Medical School. “In the grand scheme of American life, it is very unique...What a privileged experience it is to be a New Yorker and go to a university with the kind of student population we have.”

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams urged Brooklyn College graduates to explore the world in all its forms. “Go visit a mosque, or synagogue, or Buddhist temple,” said Adams, who served in the NYPD for 22 years and holds a B.A. from John Jay College of Criminal Justice. “Understand how diversity helps us to develop our full personhood and become great people.”

Stephen Sommerstein covered the historic 1965 march for voting rights as a student photographer for the City College newspaper. Fifty years later, his evocative photographs are on exhibit at the New York Historical Society and those five days in Alabama are still vivid in his memory.

Standing committee meeting of the Board of Trustees, Committee on Student Affairs and Special Programs, April 6, 2015.

CCNY's Spitzer School of Architecture hosts an unprecedented exhibition on Antoni Gaudí's "unfinished masterpiece" — Sagrada Família, the basílica in Barcelona that generations of architects and builders have continued since Gaudí's death in 1926. George Ranalli, dean of the architecture school, talks about the world's longest-running construction project and how he brought to New York this rare collection of original drawings, plaster casts and other architectural artifacts that have never been out of Spain.

In a NY1 interview with Sam Roberts on The New York Times Close Up, Chancellor James Milliken discussed CUNY's plans to expand programs that boost student success. Success, he noted, includes graduating with a two-year degree: "There are great opportunities for high-paying jobs for two-year graduates," he said, noting that to meet the needs of the city's tech industry CUNY should be offering more "short courses, certificates or two­-year degrees in programs teaching software development, coding and gaming. There's a big market out there."

John O’Keefe (City College, 1963) describes his discovery of the brain’s “internal GPS,” which won him a 2014 Nobel Prize, and discusses his formative years as a CUNY undergraduate. The son of Irish immigrants, born in Harlem and raised in the South Bronx, he transferred to CUNY from a private college that he had attended at night while working to support himself during the day. But at CUNY, he could afford the day program with far less time devoted to outside work. Deeply curious, O’Keefe explored philosophy and film courses, among others, graduating with more than 40 credits beyond the requirements of his psychology major.