Guttersnipes' and 'Eliterates': City College in the Popular Imagination

Young people go to college not merely to equip themselves for competition in the workplace, but also to construct new identities and find a home in the world. This dissertation shows how, in the midst of wrenching social change, communities, too, use colleges in their struggle to reinvent and re-situate themselves in relation to other groups. As a case study of this symbolic process I focus on the City College of New York, the world's first tuition-free, publicly funded municipal college, erstwhile "Harvard of the Poor" and birthplace of affirmative action programs and "Open Admissions" in higher education. I examine five key moments between 1940 and 2000 when the college dominated the headlines and draw on journalistic accounts, memoirs, guidebooks, fiction, poetry, drama, songs, and interviews with former students and faculty to chart the institution's emergence as a cultural icon, a lightning rod, and the perennial focus of public controversy. In each instance a variety of actors from the Catholic Church to the New York Post mobilized popular perceptions in order to alternately shore up and erode support for City College and, in so doing, worked to reconfigure the larger New York public. The five episodes consist of the following: (1) In 1940 a state judge barred the philosopher Bertrand Russell from joining the faculty and a sweeping "investigation" followed that resulted in a purge of fifty allegedly Communist professors from the faculty. (2) Ten years later seven members of City College's national championship basketball team, all of them Jewish or black, were convicted of consorting with professional gamblers to fix games. (3) Then in 1969, in the midst of a mayoral primary, black and Puerto Rican students seeking greater access for members of the surrounding Harlem community seized control of City's South Campus and shut down the college for two tense weeks that were followed by a series of violent racial clashes. (4) Those events in turn ushered in the school's radical and hotly contested experiment with "Open Admissions" along with a decade of relentless media attacks, nostalgia for an imaginatively constructed golden age, and series of dramatic cuts to the college's budget and staff that occasioned the end of its century-old tradition of free tuition. (5) Finally, in 1991 one Afrocentric professor's outrageous remarks about Jews coupled with an accident at a student-sponsored fundraiser in the college gym that claimed nine young lives came---through the offices of the mass media---to stand for the anarchy and physical danger that seemed to be engulfing not only the institution but the city itself. Taken together these five moments, with their attendant tabloid scandals, ritual sacrifices, and manufactured crises, foreground the cultural dimension of City College's history and the construction---including the self-construction, even performance---of particular varieties of student and teacher, both past and present. Newspapers and their various publics were central to---indeed, constitutive of---the process by which different communities claimed disparate meanings for the institution and deployed those meanings toward their own, distinctive ends. The press provided the main stage upon which to enact bitter struggles and excommunication ceremonies and encouraged readers to use the college to reimagine themselves and their place in the changing city and nation

New York Law School Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 1

Features: New York Law School Kicks off its 125th Anniversary Celebration NYLS and the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School Join Forces NYLS Ties Run Deep in Brooklyn The Center for New York City Law Celebrates 20 Years In memoriam: Kathleen Grimm ’80 Cynthia Senko Rosicki ’86 Launches London Fellowship in Law and Dramatic Arts To view online version, click here.https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/alum_mag/1015/thumbnail.jp

Richmond Law Magazine: Summer 2011

Features: Embracing New Opportunities \u27Your Honor\u27 Health Care: Why Jurisdiction Matters Connecting the Worldhttps://scholarship.richmond.edu/law-magazine/1032/thumbnail.jp

New York Law School Magazine, Vol. 34, No. 1

Features: New York Law School Kicks off its 125th Anniversary Celebration NYLS and the University of Rochester’s Simon Business School Join Forces NYLS Ties Run Deep in Brooklyn The Center for New York City Law Celebrates 20 Years In memoriam: Kathleen Grimm ’80 Cynthia Senko Rosicki ’86 Launches London Fellowship in Law and Dramatic Arts To view online version, click here.https://digitalcommons.nyls.edu/alum_mag/1015/thumbnail.jp

‘Is it good for the Jews?’: Jewish intellectuals and the formative years of neoconservatism, 1945-1980

This thesis re-evaluates the emergence of the neoconservative critique of American post-war liberalism from 1945 to 1980. Its original contribution to the scholarship on neoconservatism lies in the claim that a particular understanding of Jewishness fundamentally shaped the neoconservatives’ right turn, as well as neoconservative ideology. Few scholars have recognised the primacy of Jewish identity politics in the evolutionary history of neoconservatism. Those who have, have done so inadequately and unmethodically. Therefore, my thesis systematically analyses the Jewish dimension of early neoconservatism by placing particular focus on its two principal mouthpieces, Commentary and The Public Interest, while drawing on autobiographical writings, personal papers and oral interviews. Reconsidering neoconservatism from this angle also contributes to a reevaluation of modern Jewish political history by debunking the myth that the American Jewish community is governed by consensus based on political identification with liberalism. My thesis shows that neoconservatism not only contributed to the rise of conservatism and the fall of liberalism on a national level, but also played an important role in post-1945 Jewish intra-communal contentions about which political affiliation best expresses modern Jewish American identity. Accordingly, it demonstrates that Jewish political culture is more diverse than is usually appreciated and that neoconservatives draw on a tradition of Jewish conservatism, which has so far received little attention from scholars of modern Jewish history

Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon

Aemilia Lanyer was a Londoner of Jewish-Italian descent and the mistress of Queen Elizabeth’s Lord Chamberlain. But in 1611 she did something extraordinary for a middle-class woman of the seventeenth century: she published a volume of original poems. Using standard genres to address distinctly feminine concerns, Lanyer’s work is varied, subtle, provocative, and witty. Her religious poem “Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum” repeatedly projects a female subject for a female reader and casts the Passion in terms of gender conflict. Lanyer also carried this concern with gender into the very structure of the poem; whereas a work of praise usually held up the superiority of its patrons, the good women in Lanyer’s poem exemplify worth women in general. The essays in this volume establish the facts of Lanyer’s life and use her poetry to interrogate that of her male contemporaries, Donne, Jonson, and Shakespeare. Lanyer’s work sheds light on views of gender and class identities in early modern society. By using Lanyer to look at the larger issues of women writers working within a patriarchal system, the authors go beyond the explication of Lanyer’s writing to address the dynamics of canonization and the construction of literary history. Marshall Grossman, professor of English at the University of Maryland College Park is the author of The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry. This is a fine collection of essays about a poet who deserves her new-found fame. —Choice Important because it offers a portrait of the emerging official Aemilia Lanyer now in the process of being absorbed into our teaching and our understanding of literary history. —Early Modern Literary Studies This excellent volume is the first anthology of scholarship and criticism on an important poet and provides many rich cultural contexts for Lanyer\u27s work. —Elaine V. Beilin Lanyer should not be taught without this varied collection of important essays. —Notes and Queries A thoroughly high quality collection of essays that allows the reader to consider a variety of scholarly questions about the importance of Lanyer. —Renaissance Quarterly The essays\u27 diverse perspectives on recurring issues create a productive dialogue across the volume and highlight the richness of Lanyer\u27s texts. —Seventeenth-Century News Many of these essays break new ground and, together, they examine the whole of Lanyer’s oeuvre from theoretically and historically informed perspectives. —Years Work in English Studies Succeeds in altering the context in which we read the largely male literature of the period. —Bibliotheque d\u27Humanisme et Renaissancehttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1013/thumbnail.jp

Nekrolog jako gatunek tekstu : analiza wydania internetowego The New York Times

The thesis presents an analysis of the death notice as a genre, which has been conducted by applying the research models of genre analysis designed by John Swales and Vijay K. Bhatia, and taxonomy of Polish death notices by Jacek Kolbuszewski. This in-depth structural analysis is based on a large corpus of texts (1843 texts consisting of 210,021 words), containing all death notices published in the online edition of The New York Times in a threemonth period (October 1st, 2012 – December 31st, 2012), and downloaded from Legacy.com (the leading global provider of online obituaries and death notices). The analysis involves identifying subgenres of the death notice and their communicative purposes, applying the Move and Steps analytical model to investigate the macrostructure of each subgenre of the death notice and its variants, and carrying out a register analysis, based on lexical and syntactic study with the aim of discovering patterns and lexemes characteristic of each move and/or step. Contrary to the well-researched staff-edited obituary, the genre of American death notice, written by non-professional authors (e.g. relatives, friends, employers or colleagues of the deceased) has not been thoroughly investigated; therefore, it is believed that the thesis will not only make a valuable contribution to the understanding of the genre in question, but it can be used as a reference manual helping prospective writers create a death notice in accordance with the American traditions and rules of the genre. The thesis consists of a theoretical part (Chapters One to Four) and a research part (Chapters Five to Eight). Chapter One revolves around the concepts of discourse, text and genre, and presents an overview of their theories. Chapter Two investigates the American discourse of death; it concentrates on the issue of death as a language taboo and various ways of coping with it, and provides a historical overview of numerous genres commemorating the dead. Chapter Three focuses on the both genres in question; it outlines their origin and evolution in the early British press, and summarizes contemporary research into them. Chapter Four introduces the research part as it discusses the corpus and principles of its division into subcorpora, the research model and applied methodology, and presents the discourse community and communicative purposes. Each of the four chapters constituting the research part deals with the Move and Step analysis of one of four subgenres of the death notice: informative (Chapter Five), farewell (Chapter Six), condolence (Chapter Seven), and anniversary (Chapter Eight); their lexico-structural analysis is illustrated with numerous excerpts from the respective sub-corpora. The Conclusion summarizes the research, and provides implications for future projects. The research has shown that the death notice is a highly conventionalized genre, deeply rooted in American culture and funeral tradition. While presenting biographies of the deceased (always in a positive way, according to the classical rule de mortuis nihil nisi bene), the American death notice emphasizes those specific periods and aspects of their lives (education, professional, political or military career, private life), accomplishments and traits that are valued and respected, and should be imitated by other members of the community. A notice usually contains a lengthy hierarchical list of relatives, both the predeceased and survivors. Each subgenre can be characterized by a specific set of communicative purposes, which are accomplished by a sequence of moves and steps. The commonest subgenre, the informative notice, continues the oldest traditions of the genre by informing the community about a person’s death (optionally its circumstances) and the date and place of the funeral and other services. The style and content of the farewell notice and the condolence notice depend on authorship: highly conventionalized formal institutional notices contrast with more original and intimate private ones. Their authors, whether representatives of an institution or relatives, friends, colleagues, etc., express their loss and grief, praise lives and deeds of the deceased, emphasize their importance for the authors or institution, and, in the case of the condolence notice, they offer their sympathy. The anniversary notice, the rarest subgenre, commemorates the anniversary of decedent’s birth or death, and frequently reminds the community about never-ending love and remembrance of its authors. A significant number of farewell and anniversary notices are addressed to the deceased themselves, the ‘virtual readers,’ which affects their structure and style. The register analysis displays a high level of intertextuality: non-professional obituarists tend to use conventional and stereotypical lexicon, phrases and structures, or even templates (they may copy or imitate other texts and study models provided in obituary manuals). There is no substantial evidence that the Internet has affected the genre: only few texts include hyperlinks that direct to the memorial sites at Legacy.com, where particular groups of the dead are commemorated (e.g. war veterans, university graduates, breast cancer victims)

Inventing Intelligence: On the History of Complex Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence in the United States in the Mid-Twentieth Century

In the mid-1950s, researchers in the United States melded formal theories of problem solving and intelligence with another powerful new tool for control: the electronic digital computer. Several branches of western mathematical science emerged from this nexus, including computer science (1960s–), data science (1990s–) and artificial intelligence (AI). This thesis offers an account of the origins and politics of AI in the mid-twentieth century United States, which focuses on its imbrications in systems of societal control. In an effort to denaturalize the power relations upon which the field came into being, I situate AI’s canonical origin story in relation to the structural and intellectual priorities of the U.S. military and American industry during the Cold War, circa 1952 to 1961. This thesis offers a detailed and comparative account of the early careers, research interests, and key outputs of four researchers often credited with laying the foundations for AI and machine learning—Herbert A. Simon, Frank Rosenblatt, John McCarthy and Marvin Minsky. It chronicles the distinct ways in which each sought to formalise and simulate human mental behaviour using digital electronic computers. Rather than assess their contributions as discontinuous with what came before, as in mythologies of AI's genesis, I establish continuities with, and borrowings from, management science and operations research (Simon), Hayekian economics and instrumentalist statistics (Rosenblatt), automatic coding techniques and pedagogy (McCarthy), and cybernetics (Minsky), along with the broadscale mobilization of Cold War-era civilian-led military science generally. I assess how Minsky’s 1961 paper 'Steps Toward Artificial Intelligence' simultaneously consolidated and obscured these entanglements as it set in motion an initial research agenda for AI in the following two decades. I argue that mind-computer metaphors, and research in complex information processing generally, played an important role in normalizing the small- and large-scale structuring of social behaviour using mathematics in the United States from the second half of the twentieth century onward