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Nanette Shaw
New York Public Library President Paul LeClerc will be the speaker at the year 2000 commencement of The Graduate Center of The City University of New York on Thursday, June 1. The program begins at 11 a.m. and will be held at the Manhattan Center, 311 West 34th Street (between 8th and 9th Avenues.) Two hundred ninety-two doctorates and 13 master's degrees will be awarded. Honorary doctorates will be presented to Dr. A. Jess Shenson, philanthropist; Dr. Anna Jacobson Schwartz, economist; and Dr. Walter Turnbull, director of The Boys Choir of Harlem. Among those receiving doctoral degrees will be a retired Graduate Center professor who returned as a student to get a second Ph.D. and a student who began the road to her Ph.D. with a GED (high school graduate equivalency diploma) after dropping out of school at age 13. The professor, Frank Rosengarten, is receiving a Ph.D. in French, having received his initial Ph.D. in Italian literature. The student, Abby Stein, found her academic bearings in the CUNY Baccalaureate Program and went on to The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Criminal Justice. (See attached stories). Dr. Paul LeClerc became President and Chief Executive Officer of The New York Public Library on December 1, 1993. Founded in 1895, The New York Public Library, with four research libraries and 85 branches in Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island, serves a more varied set of constituencies and has a broader mission than any library in the country. Dr. LeClerc is a scholar of eighteenth century French literature, especially the French author Voltaire, and he is the author or co-author of five books on Voltaire and the French Enlightenment. After an undergraduate education at the College of the Holy Cross, he attended the University of Paris before earning a master's degree and a doctorate, with distinction, in French at Columbia University. Prior to joining The New York Public Library, Dr. LeClerc spent his entire career in higher education, ultimately serving as President of Hunter College of The City University of New York from 1988 to 1993. Born in San Francisco, California, Dr. A. Jess Shenson received his A.B. and M.D. at Stanford University. He practiced internal medicine for more than 40 years, was affiliated with Saint Francis Memorial Hospital, and is Clinical Instructor Emeritus of Stanford University School of Medicine. Along with his late brother, Ben Shenson, he established over eleven endowed funds to support students and young artists in the arts and music, and annually supports Jewish causes, schools and museums of art, philharmonic orchestras, homes for the aged and other causes throughout the country. He has generously contributed to the Art History Fellowship fund at The Graduate School Center. Dr. Anna Jacobson Schwartz, an economist who is one of the leading female pioneers in the field, is a leading authority on economic history, monetary economics, international monetary systems and monetary statistics. In 1941, she joined the National Bureau of Economic Research, where she has done most of her research and writing. Dr. Schwartz’s writing and research were the major force in reorienting the economics profession’s thinking after World War II about the importance of the stock of money in cyclical fluctuation. She is most widely known for three monumental books on American and British monetary history, coauthored with Milton Friedman. She is currently a member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Monetary Economics and the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. A multifaceted artist and educator, Dr. Walter J. Turnbull, D.M.A., founded The Boys Choir of Harlem in 1968 and The Girls Choir of Harlem in 1979. He has built an international reputation through these innovative programs which help transform the lives of young urban boys and girls through music. A native of Greenville, Mississippi, Dr. Turnbull received his Master’s in Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees from the Manhattan School of Music. A talented performing artist in his own right, Dr. Turnbull has performed in operas and as a tenor soloist with the New York Philharmonic and the Philadelphia Orchestra, gives recitals at Merkin Hall in New York City, holds master classes for artistic and educational organizations throughout the country, and lectures frequently on education and the arts. The Graduate Center is the doctorate-granting institution of The City University of New York, the largest urban university in the U.S. The only consortium of its kind in the nation, The Graduate Center draws its faculty of more than 1,700 members mainly from the CUNY senior colleges and cultural and scientific institutions throughout New York City. Established in 1961, The Graduate Center has grown to an enrollment of nearly 4,000 students in 31 doctoral programs and seven master's degree programs in the humanities, social sciences, and sciences. The Graduate Center also houses 28 research centers and institutes and administers the CUNY Baccalaureate Program. According to a recent National Research Council report, more than a third of The Graduate Center's rated programs rank among the nation's top 20 at public and private institutions, nearly a quarter are among the top ten when compared to publicly supported institutions alone, and more than half are among the top five programs at publicly supported institutions in the northeast. Further information on The Graduate Center's programs and activities can be found on its Web site at: www.gc.cuny.edu. Beneath the Cap and Gown: Two June Graduates from The Graduate Center, The City University of New York Abby Stein: From GED to Ph.D. Abby Stein was a 13-year-old eighth grader at Hunter Junior High School when she ran away with her 16-year-old boyfriend. His family was about to move out of town, and her explanation was and is simply that they were "in love and didn’t want to be separated." They stayed in New York, got by, broke up, got back together, and in 1984 the couple married. (Along the way, Abby had a career as a stand-up comic for a while, something of a female pioneer in the field. She formed a union for comedians, and even performed in Europe and on TV.) In 1987, at the age of 30, Abby got her GED. She then entered the CUNY Baccalaureate Program – a special undergraduate program administered by The Graduate Center that is particularly well-suited to students like Abby returning to college as adults. Along the way, she found herself attracted to forensic psychology -- vocationally, avocationally, and academically. As a result of a paper encountered in one of her classes, she tracked down a female mentor, for whom she worked while pursuing her degree. She graduated summa cum laude in 1992 and entered The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Criminal Justice, where her faculty mentor became the eminent psychiatrist and author, Robert Jay Lifton. Over the next eight years, in addition to her doctoral studies, she taught at John Jay College of Criminal Justice – where she is currently on the faculty – and started a family. (She now has two children, one five years old and one 16 months.) On June 1 – at the age of 43 years and 30 years after she dropped out of junior high school -- she will receive her Ph.D. The title of her dissertation is "Dissociation and Crime: Abuse, Mental Illness, and Violence in the Lives of Incarcerated Men." Frank Rosengarten: From Ph.D. to Ph.D. When Frank Rosengarten retired in 1992, he took up a lifelong interest that his job, almost by definition, kept him from pursuing: the serious study of French literature. Furthermore, he decided the best way to study French literature was to pursue a Ph.D. at the CUNY Graduate Center. What makes Rosengarten’s story somewhat unusual is that this would be his second Ph.D. and he would receive it from the same institution from which he had retired as a member of the faculty. He had received his first Ph.D. in 1962 from Columbia University in Italian literature and it was his career as an Italian literature scholar on the faculty of The Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in Comparative Literature (and at Queens College) that had precluded the serious study of French literature. So on June 1, Frank Rosengarten, at the age of 73, will receive his second Ph.D., this time in French, from the CUNY Graduate Center, where he remains an emeritus member of the faculty. His dissertation is titled "Literary Text and Ideology in the Writings of the Young Marcel Proust (1885 -1900)," and it will be published by Peter Lang Publishers, Inc., early next year. |