The Graduate Center of the City University of New York is a public American research institution and post-graduate university based in New York City. It is the principal doctoral-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. The school is situated in a nine-story landmark building at 365 Fifth Avenue at the corner of 34th Street in the Midtown neighborhood of Manhattan, across the corner from the Empire State Building. The Graduate Center has 4,600 students, 31 doctoral programs, 14 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes. A core faculty of approximately 140 is supplemented by over 1,800 additional faculty members drawn from throughout CUNY's eleven senior colleges and New York City's cultural and scientific institutions.
The Graduate Center is categorized as a "Doctoral University - Highest Research Activity" in the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education. The Graduate Center faculty include recipients of the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Science, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Fellowship, the Schock Prize, the Bancroft Prize, the Wolf Prize, Grammy Awards, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences.
In addition to academics, the Graduate Center extends its intellectual and cultural resources to the general public, offering access to a wide range of events, including lectures, symposia, performances, and workshops.
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History
CUNY began offering doctoral education through its Division of Graduate Studies in 1961, and awarded its first two Ph.D.s to Daniel Robinson and Barbara Stern in 1965. Robinson, currently a professor of philosophy at the University of Oxford, received his Ph.D. in psychology, while Stern, late of Rutgers University, received her Ph.D. in English literature.
In 1969, the Division of Graduate Studies formally became the Graduate School and University Center. Mathematician Mina S. Rees served as the institution's first president from 1969 until her retirement in 1972. Rees was succeeded as president of the Graduate Center by environmental psychologist Harold M. Proshansky, who served until his death in 1990. Political scientist Frances Degen Horowitz was appointed president in September, 1991. In 2005, Horowitz was succeeded by the school's provost, Professor of English Literature William P. Kelly.
During Kelly's tenure at the Graduate Center the University has seen significant growth in revenue, funding opportunities for students, increased Distinguished Faculty and a general resurgence. This is in accordance with three primary goals articulated in the Graduate Center's strategic plan. The first of these involves enhancing student support. In 2013, 83 dissertation-year fellowships were awarded at a total cost of $1.65 million. The Graduate Center is also developing new programs to advance research prior to the dissertation phase, including archival work. The fiscal stability of the university has enabled the chancellery to increase, on an incremental basis, the value of these fellowships. The packages extended for 2013-14 year increase stipends and reduce teaching requirements. In 2001, the Graduate Center provided 14 million dollars in student support, and, in Fall 2013, 51 million in student support.
On April 23, 2013, the CUNY Board of Trustees announced that president Kelly would serve as interim chancellor for the City University of New York beginning July 1 with the retirement of Chancellor Matthew Goldstein. GC Provost Chase F. Robinson, a historian, was appointed to serve as interim president of the Graduate Center in 2013, and then became president in July 2014.Joy Connolly became Provost of the Graduate Center in August 2016.
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Campus
The Graduate Center's main campus is located on the corner of 34th Street and Fifth Avenue, adjacent to the Empire State Building, in the Midtown Manhattan neighborhood of New York City. Housed in the former flagship store of B. Altman and Company, the Graduate Center shares the Fifth Avenue building with both and the New York Public Library's Science Industry and Business Library and Oxford University Press. The Graduate Center has occupied its current location since 2000, before which it was housed in Aeolian Hall on West 42nd Street across from the New York Public Library Main Branch.
Mina Rees Library
The Mina Rees Library, named after former Graduate Center president Mina Rees, supports the research, teaching, and learning activities of the Graduate Center by connecting its community with print materials, electronic resources, research assistance and instruction, and expertise about the complexities of scholarly communication. Situated on three floors of the Graduate Center, the library is a hub for discovery, delivery, and digitization, as well as a place for solitary study. The library offers many services, including research consultations, a 24/7 online chat service with reference librarians, and workshops and webinars on using research tools.
The library also serves as a gateway to the collections of other CUNY libraries, the New York Public Library (NYPL), and libraries worldwide. It participates in a CUNY-wide book delivery system and offers an interlibrary loan service to bring materials from outside CUNY to Graduate Center scholars. The main branch of NYPL is just a few blocks up Fifth Avenue, and NYPL's Science, Industry and Business Library is just around the corner. Graduate Center students and faculty are NYPL's primary academic constituents, with borrowing privileges from NYPL research collections. NYPL's participation in the Manhattan Research Library Initiative (MaRLI) extends borrowing privileges for CUNY Graduate Center students to NYU and Columbia libraries as well.
The Mina Rees Library is a key participant in the Graduate Center's digital initiatives. It supports the digital scholarship of students and faculty, and promotes the understanding, creation, and use of open access literature. Among its special collections is the Activist Women's Voices collection, an oral history project focused on unheralded New York City community-based women activists.
Cultural venues
The Graduate Center houses three performance spaces and two art galleries. The Harold M. Proshansky Auditorium, named for the institution's second president, is located on the concourse level and contains 389 seats. The Baisley Powell Elebash Recital Hall, located on the first floor, seats 180. The Martin E. Segal Theatre, also located on the first floor, seats 70.
James Gallery
The ground floor of the Graduate Center houses the Amie and Tony James Gallery, also known as the James Gallery, which is overseen by the Graduate Center's Center for the Humanities. The intention of the James Gallery is to bring scholars and artists into dialog with one another, as well as serve as a site for interdisciplinary research. The James Gallery hosts numerous exhibitions annually, and has hosted solo exhibitions by notable American and international artists such as Alison Knowles and Dor Guez.
Academics
Across the institution's PhD programs, 18% of applicants were offered admission to The Graduate Center in Fall 2016. The latest edition of US News and World Report Best Graduate School Ranking ranked The Graduate Center PhD program in English 20th, its Sociology PhD program 28th, and its History doctoral program 34th best in the nation. The GC's PhD program in Criminal Justice was ranked 10th best Criminology graduate program in that category's most recent US News ranking, in 2009. The Graduate Center PhD program in Mathematics was ranked 39th. In the 2016 edition of QS World University Rankings, the Graduate Center's doctoral program in Philosophy was ranked 44th globally, and the 2018 Philosophical Gourmet Report lists the program as 16th in the English-speaking world.
Faculty members regularly receive prestigious honors and awards. Some recent examples include the Nobel Prize, Pulitzer Prize, the National Humanities Medal, the National Medal of Science, the Schock Prize, the Bancroft Prize, Grammy Awards, the George Jean Nathan Award for Dramatic Criticism, Guggenheim Fellowships, the New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Science and Technology, the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, and memberships in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences. Many departments are recognized internationally for their level of scholarship.
Courses in the social sciences, humanities, and mathematics, and courses in the sciences requiring no laboratory work convene at the Graduate Center. Due to the consortial nature of doctoral study at the Graduate Center, courses requiring laboratory work, courses for the clinical doctorates, and courses in business, criminal justice, engineering, and social welfare convene on CUNY college campuses.
The CUNY Graduate Center pioneered the CUNY Academic Commons in 2009 to much praise. The CUNY Academic Commons is an online, academic social network for faculty, staff, and graduate students of the City University of New York (CUNY) system. Designed to foster conversation, collaboration, and connections among the 24 individual colleges that make up the university system, the site, founded in 2009, has quickly grown as a hub for the CUNY community, serving in the process to strengthen a growing group of digital scholars, teachers, and open-source projects at the university. The project has received awards and grants from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Sloan Consortium and was the winner of the 2013 Digital Humanities Award. It continues to be in the forefront of scholarly social media.
Also affiliated with the institution are four University Center programs: CUNY Baccalaureate for Unique and Interdisciplinary Studies through which undergraduates can earn individualized bachelor's degrees by completing courses at any of the CUNY colleges; the CUNY School of Professional Studies and the associated Joseph S. Murphy Institute for Worker Education and Labor Studies; the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, which offers a master's degree in journalism; and Macaulay Honors College.
Research
The Graduate Center describes itself as "research-intensive," and is classified by the Carnegie Classification of Institutions of Higher Education to be an R1 or have "highest research activity." The Graduate Center's primary library, named after Mina Rees, is located on campus; however, Graduate Center students also have borrowing privileges at the remaining 31 City University of New York libraries, which collectively house 6.2 million printed works and over 300,000 e-books. Beginning in 1968, the Graduate Center maintains a formal collaboration with the New York Public Library that allows faculty and students access to NYPL's extensive research collections, regular library resources, as well as three research study rooms located in the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building. Further, as of 2011 Graduate Center students have access to the libraries of Columbia University and New York University through the NYPL's Manhattan Research Library Initiative. The Graduate Center library also maintains an online repository called CUNY Academic Works, which hosts open-access faculty and student research.
Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC)
The CUNY Graduate Center's Advanced Research Collaborative (ARC) program conducts research in seven core areas of study:
- Inequality - Research on the structural foundations of increasing inequality across our society and ways to mobilize communities around various alternatives.
- Immigration - Interdisciplinary research on the social, cultural, and political impacts of international migration, with special attention on the role of immigration in New York City and comparative studies on how immigration and ethnic diversity are experienced in different nations.
- Multilingualism - Interdisciplinary research on complex social, cultural, and policy issues raised by multilingualism.
- Digital Initiatives: Research in a broad range of digital projects and digital resources, including data mining and the digital humanities.
- Urban Studies: Critical issues facing large cities around the world and the role played therein by public, nonprofit, and business organizations.
Initiatives and committees
The CUNY Graduate Center does additional work through its initiatives and committees:
- Futures Initiative
- Graduate Center Digital Initiatives
- Initiative for the Theoretical Sciences (ITS)
- Revolutionizing American Studies Initiative
- The Committee for the Study of Religion
- The Committee on Globalization and Social Change
- The Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies
- Endangered Language Initiative
- Intellectual Publics
Centers and institutes
With over 30 research institutes and centers the CUNY Graduate Center produces work on a range of social, cultural, scientific and civic issues.
Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality
The James M. and Cathleen D. Stone Center on Socio-Economic Inequality was launched on September 1, 2016. The Stone Center expanded and replaced the Luxembourg Income Study (LIS) Center, which opened its doors at the Graduate Center in 2009. The mission of the Stone Center is to build and disseminate knowledge related to the causes, nature, and consequences of multiple forms of socio-economic inequality. The Center's associated faculty and students share a commitment to scholarship that is quantitative, data-driven, interdisciplinary, and policy-oriented, and that addresses questions that are cross-nationally comparative and/or global in scope.
Advanced Science Research Center
In the Spring 2017 semester, the Advanced Science Research Center, CUNY's premier scientific research institute, formally joined the Graduate Center. The partnership works to catalyze the sciences across CUNY and New York City alike, enhancing graduate education and the potential for scientific discovery. The ASRC houses five initiatives: Nanoscience, Structural Biology, Neuroscience, Environmental Sciences, and Photonics. The ASRC facility is a 200,000-square-foot, state-of-the art building on the southern edge of City College's campus in Upper Manhattan, which promotes a collaborative, interdisciplinary research culture.
Faculty
The Graduate Center utilizes a unique consortium model, which hosts 140 faculty with sole appointments at the Graduate Center, most of whom are senior scholars in their respective disciplines, as well as draws upon 1,800 faculty from across the other CUNY schools to both teach classes and advise graduate students.
In 2001, the Graduate Center initiated a five-year faculty recruitment campaign to hire additional renowned academics and public intellectuals in order to bolster the institution's faculty roster. Those recruited during the drive include André Aciman, Jean Anyon, Mitchell Duneier, Victor Kolyvagin, Robert Reid-Pharr and Saul Kripke.
Other notable faculty members include:
Student life
Students at the CUNY Graduate Center have the option of living in Graduate housing, located in East Harlem. The eight story building includes a gym, laundry facilities, lounge and rooftop terrace with views of the Midtown skyline. The Graduate housing was opened in the Fall of 2011 in conjunction with the construction of the Hunter College School of Social Work.
The Doctoral Students' Council is the sole policy-making body representing students in doctoral and master's programs at the Graduate Center.
There are over forty doctoral student organizations ranging from the Middle Eastern Studies Organization and Africana Studies Group to the Prison Studies Group and the Immigration Working Group. These chartered organizations host conferences, publish online magazines, and create social events aimed at fostering a community for CUNY Graduate Center students.
Doctoral students at the Graduate Center also produces a newspaper funded by the DSC and run by a committee of editors from the various doctoral programs. The paper, entitled The GC Advocate, comes out six times per academic year and is free of charge for students, faculty, staff, and visitors.
References
Sources
- Anderson, Michael (2011). Fifty Years at the Center: A History of The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York from 1961 to 2011 (PDF). New York: The Graduate Center.
External links
- Official website
Source of article : Wikipedia
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