City University of New York System
Weinshall Leaving for CUNY Job
Her last day is April 13th.
A statement from Weinshall, wife of Senator Chuck Schumer, is after the jump.
-- Azi Paybarah read more »
DOT Commissioner Weinshall Resigns
The Mayor's statement after the jump. read more »
- Matthew SchuermanThe Spitzer Chair
The chair was created by a $2.1 million gift the Spitzers gave to the school, where Bernard graduated in 1943.
School spokesman Ellis Simon said the position was created for the purpose of attracting scholars in the field of international politics.
The first Spitzer Chair is Dr. Randall C. Forsberg, a nonproliferation specialist who was appointed by Bill Clinton to the Advisory Committee of the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.
-- Azi PaybarahEvents for December 1, 2006
The First Lady of Zambia delivers the keynote address and receives the International AIDS Trust and World Vision New York's 2006 award at Tavern on the Green.
CUNY hosts a conference on the Spellings Commission report on higher education at John Jay College.
Baruch College hosts conference titled "An Avian Flu Pandemic: How Would Business Respond?"
The Assembly holds a hearing on the consolidation of the health industry and its impact at 250 Broadway.
Assemblyman Karim Camara and day care providers protest the closing of day care centers at the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building.
100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care and the mother of Timothy Stansbury (fatally shot by police in 2004) light a candle at the site where Sean Bell was shot by police.
The wake for Sean Bell will be held at Community Church of Christ in Jamaica.
John Bolton speaks at the New York Synagogue.
Marty Golden hosts the Christmas tree lighting ceremony in McKinley in Brooklyn.
—Nicole BrydsonEvents for October 20, 2006
At 8:30, the Consul General of Mexico and CUNY co-sponsor a conference on Mexican immigrants in New York at Baruch College.
At 9 a.m. the federal funding cuts and their impact on the future of public housing is discussed at the Lighthouse International Conference Center on 59th St.
At 9:30 am, Eliot Spitzer campaigns with Congressman Dan Maffei in Rochester.
At 12:30 p.m., Spitzer visits his headquarters in Syracuse.
At 6 p.m., Jane Fonda speaks speaks at The Children of Armenia Fund's annual "Save a Generation Awards Dinner;" at Cipriani on 42nd St.
And Happy Hour starts at 7 p.m., when Hillary Clinton and John Spencer debate.
-- Azi PaybarahNOTE: Due to an idiotic administrative error, these events were posted this morning instead of yesterday. We apologize.
Screw J-School: Transom Seeks College No-Gos, Drop-Outs for Digital Apprenticeships
Another speaker was Richard Wald, the Trib's last managing editor, who observed that the school "will try to do a lot of things that you can't do anymore. You can't do an apprenticeship at a newspaper anymore. You've got to go to school."Well, screw that noise! The Daily Transom—who didn't go to no frickin' college, much less no filthy j-school—would like to hereby throw open its digital pages to those young reporters who find themselves unable or unwilling to take part in the ludicrously expensive and/or ludicrously time-wasting and ultimately intensely stupid system called "higher learning."
(Does anyone else remember when diversity was supposed to cover more ground than just ethnicity? Even The New York Times at least made an effort to encompass sexual orientation in its plans—and then immediately, after the preamble, dropped that idea from its report on newsroom diversity.)
College drop-outs and never-applieds are invited to pitch or send, for consideration, stories to The Daily Transom at csicha@observer.com. Written is fine; if not, a good pitch—since you don't have no prof to tell you—is about three sentences long, contains the nugget of news obtained or sought, shows flair, and has nothing to do with any of the following:
· Celebrity poker · Food-eating competitions · Ryan Adams · MisShapes · Janice Dickinson · Stunt karaoke · The Museum of Sex · Speed-dating · "9/11" · MySpace · A strange coincidence.
Email any questions. Proof of non-attendance is required. Pay is somewhere between "a pittance" and "sure better than a day's work digging ditches." Opportunities for advancement not un-possible. — Choire SichaMore Ratner in Brooklyn
-Matthew Schuerman (via No Land Grab)
Pataki's Parting Gift for Wiesenfeld
A spokeswoman for Senate Republicans, Lisa Black, blamed the hold-up on a technicality: Wiesenfeld's name, she said, was sent too late on Friday for the chairman of the higher education committee, Kenneth LaValle of Long Island, to schedule a meeting on it. And since the appointment wasn't taken up by the committee, it wasn't passed on to the senate for a vote.
Pataki had reportedly been reluctant to reappoint Wiesenfeld because of opposition from the CUNY faculty union.
Now, because of the last-second nomination, Wiesenfeld's appointment will have to wait for the next time the senate is called into session -- which likely won't be until Pataki is gone and, by the looks of things, a Democrat named Eliot Spitzer is running the show.
All of which either means that the Pataki folks were guilty of a innocent-but-clumsy bureaucratic error that could potentially cost Wiesenfeld his trusteeship, or that the hold-up was a deliberate way of sinking the reappointment without appearing to do so.
Theories?
Update: State Senator Liz Krueger has more on Pataki's appointments over at Room 8. -- Azi PaybarahTuesday: Chinatown Sinks, East New York Rises, and Silvercup Goes Green
- Few New York neighborhoods have suffered so distinctly--and so quietly--as Chinatown. Has lower Manhattan's most densely populated locale dealt with the "social, environmental and psychological problems" that arose after 9/11? CUNY has chronicled first-person accounts of local pollution, the "crippled" restaurant business, and a widespread identity crisis.(City Limits)
- Remember Silvercup Studios? Among other things, it's the billion-dollar development in Long Island City, a place Metropolis calls "one of those up-and-coming neighborhoods for more than a quarter-century." It also has 26 million square feet for "green-roof technology," so 20 years from now there will be a pseudo-Central Park streched over Queens. (Metropolis)
- It's horrifying that there's a sub-1% vacancy rate throughout the entire island of Manhattan (except for those unliked wastelands called Midtown East and the Upper West Side). And it's horrifying that a sub-1% vacancy rate is barely newsworthy anymore. (The Real Deal)
- How do we know East New York is gentrifying? Because Apollo Real Estate and Taconic Investment Partners have paid $90 million for about 1,000 residential condos in the Brooklyn neighborhood, and is pumping nearly half that number into improvements--but mostly because a Taconic prinpal says: "We do not envision this as a gentrification project, but rather as the revitalization of a community." Of course. (Crain's, via R.D.)
- Though Mr. Bloomberg's office swears he's never heard Jerusalem of Gold, the tastefully-titled luxury condo development in Israel boasts that "the Jewish mayor" is about to sign a contract for a penthouse apartment. Is there a contract? Not so much. Is there worldwide love for Mayor Mike? Yessir. (NY Sun) - Max Abelson read more »
The True Definition of Privilege: Protestants and Jews Sharply Underrepresented in U.S. Military
As any fool knows, there is a "moral hazard" in our society's imbalance. When the elite make the big decisions, say to go to war, and are immunized from the second-heaviest duty of citizenship—getting the knock on the door that Cindy Sheehan got, and David Grossman—there's something very undemocratic about that, and wrong.
And because we know it's wrong, this issue is gnawing at our public life. In Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore went after congressmen for not having kids at risk. Last night on Charlie Rose, the usually-equable Richard Holbrooke spat at the neocon militarist Bill Kristol, who wants us to take on Iran and Syria, that unlike Holbrooke, Kristol had never been shot at. In his latest column for the Israel Policy Forum, M.J. Rosenberg goes after neocon hawk Charles Krauthammer over Krauthammer's urging Israel to go even harder at Lebanon.
Krauthammer, who lives in Maryland, does not have to see the faces of the boys he is so cavalier about sending into battle against fanatical terrorists.
Readers of this blog know that I often look at the American power structure in religious and tribal terms: I think that the new establishment is basically affluent WASPs and affluent Jews, working happily together. (Just thumb through the Almanac of American Politics.) So: let's look at the composition of the American armed forces in religious terms.
Watch out, here come the statistics! Non-geeks are encouraged to jump over the next two paragraphs.
[According to CUNY's American Religious Identification Survey, Episcopalians make up 1.7 percent of the adult population (18 and over), Presbyterians make up 2.7 percent, Lutherans 4.6, Methodists 6.8 percent. That's my Protestant sample. Then there are Baptists (evangelical Protestants) at 16.3 percent, Mormons at 1.3 percent, and Catholics at 24.5 percent. Jews make up 1.3 percent of the adult population.[Now turn to the Armed Forces. This will be a little rough; (because the two bowls of statistics, the military's and CUNY's, don't quite line up, and I have therefore thrown out the Unknowns in the Defense Department's tables because they are not a category in CUNY's tables) but let's consider the universe of 1,254,000 people in uniform who say something about their religious preference, including the 20 percent or so who say None.]
You'd expect there to be 21,000 or so Episcopalians in uniform. There are only 9,600. You'd expect 33,000+ Presbyterians. There are 13,000. Lutherans, you'd expect 58,000. There are 35,000. Methodists? 83,000 expected. 44,000 in fact. Jews: 16,000 would be predicted by the CUNY percentage—there are 3,973 Jews in the military. Indeed, there are more Buddhists in the military, 4400, than there are Jews!
As I say, it's rough (and a little unfair to the Protestants; I haven't factored in the 53,000 Protestants the military calls nondemoninational) but that's my Establishment pool. Note that Episcopalians and Presbyterians (who I think of as the more affluent) are sharply underrepresented, showing up at about 40 percent of expected numbers; and Jews at about 25 percent.By the way, Muslims are also underrepresented, by about half. You'd expect 6270. The military says it has 3,459 in uniform.
Compare these numbers to Catholics, Baptists and Mormons. You'd expect 307,000 Catholics in uniform; there are 291,000. Underrepresented; but close. Baptists should weigh in at 204,000. There are 219,000 of them. (I imagine that other evangelicals and Pentecostals, whom I don't have the patience to even try and sort out in these conflicting tables, are even more overrepresented). And then there are Mormons. You'd expect 16,000. There are nearly 18,000.
What does this all add up to? Just what we knew: the privileged make out bigtime. What's the answer? What Charlie Rangel has always said: a draft. Then maybe our leadership might show a little more imagination about how to deal with the so-called clash of civilizations.
Another Day Older and Farther Behind
'Howl,' Ginsberg's Time Bomb, Still Setting Off New Explosions
Debating Kelo
As The New York Times reported this week, there are plenty of critics in both parties.
In a rare display of unanimity that cuts across partisan and geographic lines, lawmakers in virtually every statehouse across the country are advancing bills and constitutional amendments to limit use of the government's power of eminent domain to seize private property for economic development purposes.
Of course, the Gray Lady's editorial page has not been all that critical. (Perhaps, that has something to do with a certain company's headquarters currently being built in Manhattan).
Regardless, the Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation--known for sponsoring brainy battles--just announced an upcoming debate on Kelo.
- Michael Calderone The full release is after the jump. read more »
