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After Columbia’s decision to cancel this year’s commencement ceremony amid fears of disruption from protests, students have been vocal about their disappointment and frustration with university officials. 

Commencement activities, usually held in tandem with program-specific graduation ceremonies, would have been held this week. The abrupt decision to cancel followed weeks of battle between student protesters and the university over divestment from Israel. This year, the university had announced that it would instead focus on the main individual graduation ceremonies for each program and opt out of the annual commencement ceremony on the main lawn that usually accompanies them and features all of the graduating classes.

Students expressed frustration not only with the decision to cancel but with the fact that the school made no official communication directly to students when it was announced. 

The university announced the cancellation through a campus alert message on the school’s website; many students did not learn of the news until they were notified by email later that day, either from deans or student affairs for their programs, long after it had already been widely reported by international outlets, including the New York Times and CNN, and spread rapidly on social media.

Michelle Quarshie, 22, a graduating senior biology student at Columbia, said she was “shocked” when she heard the news, first seeing it posted on Instagram from the Columbia Spectator, the college newspaper.

She called the decision not to email students “cowardly.”

“I was like, ‘Wow, they couldn’t even have the guts to say it to our face,’” Quarshie said. “They had to go to shady means to make sure the student body would spread the rumor that commencement was canceled.”

For weeks, Columbia students were receiving regular updates about matters such as the protests and the level of access for the campus. 

The last few weeks have been difficult for Quarshie in terms of being able to focus on school work and enjoying her last days as a student. She said everything that has happened has been a distraction from finishing some of her work.

“It’s definitely hard to focus on academics when my mind is on my friends who are in the encampment or my friends who were in Hamilton Hall that night,” Quarshie said.

With limited access to the campus in recent weeks, Quarshie said it has been a “bittersweet” end for her time as a student. She remembered how cheerful the campus felt during graduation season last year.

“It was a very happy time. You can tell there was joy on the campus, but that has been entirely erased,” Quarshie said. “I want to get out of here because of what’s going on, but it’s the end of my undergraduate experience. I’m not feeling the sweet feelings and nostalgia right now.”

Graduations are happening throughout the week at Columbia, including for students in the School of Journalism School scheduled for May 15. Some were particularly frustrated with the fact that they had not been notified directly by the school and had to find out from professional news outlets. 

“It’s almost like the university just forgot to email us about canceling commencement—‘I’m sure they’ll hear it on the news’ kinda attitude,” Meghnad Bose, a master’s student, wrote in a group chat. 

Julia Coccaro, a master’s student in the journalism school, said that while she supports the student protesters, she believed canceling the ceremony is “necessary.”

“There would have been some disruption in some form. It wouldn’t have gone smoothly and it wouldn’t have been able to play out in full, no matter what,” Coccaro said.

Coccaro said she would have felt differently if the actual class graduations were halted instead of the larger ceremony. From having experienced a previous commencement at Columbia, “it’s pretty much just a bunch of speeches. Given that it is mostly just ceremonial, I don’t think it is all that big of a deal,” Coccaro said.

Columbia is not alone in its decision to suspend or alter commencement activities this year. Other schools have followed suit in canceling large ceremonies in response to potential protests and disruption, including the University of Southern California, while Emory University in Atlanta moved its commencement activities off campus.

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* This article was originally published here

The Cuban poet Nancy Morejón has been visiting the United States for the last month and a half. During her trip she gave a reading at California’s San Francisco State University and conducted a literary workshop at the Instituto Cervantes in Chicago, Illinois. She also traveled to the University of Missouri to take part in the “2024 Symposium: Afro-Cuban Legacies” and read some of her poetry on a recent evening at Manhattan’s The People’s Forum. 

It’s been an exhausting trip, the famed writer confessed, but an interesting one.

“It’s nice. It’s a tight program, which I loved,” she said. “Let me tell you, it was very rich, very spontaneous, lots of people and many new readers. There were people that approached who knew my name, but not my poems. So, I started just to communicate with them.”

Morejón has been a world-renowned poet for decades now. She has won the international Struga Golden Wreath, was named Cuba’s National Poet in 2018, and has had her work translated into English, French, Portuguese, Italian, German, Russian, Polish, and Dutch. Morejón has also served as president of Cuba’s Writers’ Union; worked with and written a book about the famous Afro Cuban poet-journalist Nicolás Guillén; and served as a senior adviser for Casa de las Américas and the Teatro Nacional de Cuba.

Morejón’s accolades come because she has a way of sanctifying words. She says that her basic practice of reading and being informed is what pushes her to create, and she does not do any research or create long plot lines before writing her poetry. Her work is based on memory.   

“The very first thing is memory,” she said. “For instance, my very famous poem, ‘Mujer Negra / Black Woman,’ I did not make a research; it was just a dream I had. I wanted to tell the story of the Black woman I saw in my dream: to fix her memory and to fix the memory of the passage for those Black women everywhere.” 

In one section of “Mujer Negra” (as translated by Kathleen Weaver) Morejón writes:

I still smell the foam of the sea they made me cross.

The night, I cannot remember it.

The ocean itself could not remember that.

But I can’t forget the first gull I made out in the distance.

High, the clouds, like innocent eyewitnesses.

Perhaps I haven’t forgotten my lost coast,

nor my ancestral language.

They left me here and here I’ve lived.

And, because I worked like an animal,

here I came to be born.

How many Mandinga epics did I look to for strength.

Influential Black writers in Cuba

Morejón said that when she returns to Cuba from this trip, she’s getting back to work on writing her memoirs. “Yes, I will be writing my memories. All of these stories about how I fell in love with French and then I studied French, and my specialization in French.” She said her memoirs will also look at influential Black writers in Cuba like Guillén, the poets Gastón Baquero and Rafaela Chacón Nardi, and folklorist/researcher Rogelio Martínez Furé. 

Born in Havana in 1944 to Angélica Hernández Domínguez and Felipe Morejón Noyola, Morejón said her parents were labor activists who quickly realized that she was a precocious child. They believed she deserved to have the opportunity to live the life of an intellectual.

“I’m telling you; my father was––I have talked about this––my father was a poor man. He was a sailor, he used to work in the harbor. He had to carry heavy things from the ships to land. And he was so worried because I was a good pupil. They realized, my parents, that I was a little bit smart and intelligent. And he was very worried because he did not have the money to take me to the university. Because it was 100 pesos, my father did not have the 100 pesos.” 

After years of worrying about how he could pay to further his child’s education, Felipe Morejón got angry and started to complain. “But complaints didn’t allow me to get into the university,” Morejón said. “But [in] 1959, both of them, my parents, they were trade unionists. They had, in a way, a role: they participated. And finally, education became free, so I entered into the university [for] free. So, it may seem silly or whatever, I don’t care. That’s my story, my personal story. I wouldn’t have been a writer; I wouldn’t have been a professional of literature without that revolutionary process. Because for us, it was completely impossible. My father could not afford, my family could not afford the entrance to the university. So those anecdotes are very strong because they are my life.” 

Life for Afro Cubans is often difficult, but its joys also remain profound, Morejón said. And during this trip, she saw that the University of Missouri’s “2024 Symposium: Afro-Cuban Legacies” put some of those joys on display. Morejón was proud to point out that the symposium exhibited several works of art by Afro Cubans, and some of her favorite was the photography of Roberto Chile, a photographer who is known for coming into close contact with the faces of his Afro Cuban subjects and emphasizing the importance of their everyday actions. 

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* This article was originally published here

Protect and serve or tweet and delete?

The Office of the Inspector General for NYPD (OIG) launched an investigation into the social media conduct and policies of the city police force last week after a series of inflammatory posts from leading department officers targeting department critics. 

The probe comes after requests made by City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams and the Legal Aid Society, pointing specifically to April 30 posts from NYPD Chief of Patrol John Chell over X (formerly known as Twitter) made in the wake of protests at Columbia University. Chell fired off—and later deleted—offenses targeting City Councilmember Tiffany Cabán, who criticized Columbia University administrators, Mayor Eric Adams and the NYPD for raiding and arresting pro-Palestinian students. Chell also accused the councilmember of encouraging criminal activity and suggested that those who wanted change to “seek the change you want by getting involved. Then you know what to do…” Speaker Adams believes such a suggestion implies political activity on an official public servant account, which may violate city policy. 

Chell later doubled down in a second post, calling the deletion “an accident” and added that he “started to read this garbage and quickly realized this is coming from a person who hates our city and certainly does not represent the great people of NYC,” in reference to Cabán’s post. 

Speaker Adams’s office told the AmNews that it began independently monitoring the NYPD’s social media outbursts late March when Chell went on an X rant against lawyer Olayemi Olurin after her viral Breakfast Club takedown of Mayor Adams. In an April interview, she told the AmNews she welcomed Chell’s posts “because it says this is what they do to journalists and media and attorneys because they do their job. Imagine what they are doing to regular, everyday New Yorkers who critique them.”

Now Speaker Adams questions whether Chell is in violation of rules set for public officials around commentary on political activity. A spokesperson from Speaker Adams’s office said there’s concern that such attacks not only aim to silence Cabán, but undermine trust in police for New Yorkers who identify with her. The Queens councilwoman is a prominent democratic socialist and staunch proponent of abolitionism and decarceration. She also boasts Puerto Rican heritage and is proudly queer. 

On May 3, Speaker Adams penned her letter to the OIG requesting an investigation into the NYPD’s social media practices, citing Local Law 70 of 2013 which established the office over a decade ago. She called the posts “unprofessional and unbecoming for public officials,” with concerns that they violated city policy and riled up threats against those named. 

The spokesperson for Speaker Adams’s office directed to the NYC Conflict of Interest Board’s political activity outline, which states that “public servants may not use any City time or City resources (including a City computer, email account or phone) for any political purpose.” The OIG investigation would likely determine whether NYPD officials violated such a rule. There’s also hope the probe will bring to light the department’s internal social media policies for high-ranking members on official accounts.
Adams’s letter also pointed to concerns about disinformation, specifically citing Chell misidentifying a judge by name in an accusation of her setting “free a predator back into the community, who may be on your next train, or walking the streets of our city, looking for his next victim.” The tweet remains up as of press time. 

The Legal Aid Society backed Speaker Adams’s request, calling the police officials’ social media conduct “completely inappropriate for a police department that purports to exude ‘courtesy, professionalism and respect.’” 

The OIG, headed by Inspector General Jeanene Barrett, investigates the NYPD’s policies and practices. It cannot, however, discipline individual NYPD members or force the department to implement recommended procedures.

There are more than 250 of these NYPD official social media accounts ranging from police chiefs like Chell to precinct commands. Ownership of the accounts is passed down to whoever assumes the corresponding role, and while officials can delete what their predecessors post, the contents are archived by the Department of Records & Information Services (DORIS). Such accounts typically keep the public informed on anything from arrests and attacks to street closures and events. 

During a city council hearing May 14, the NYPD officials did not answer many of Speaker Adams’s questions, including on whether Chell’s post was reviewed before posting, with Deputy Commissioner of Legal Matters Michael Gerber saying it was “precisely” one of “the factual issues” she asked DOI to look into and that the department “would respect that process.” Adams took that response as a “no.”

However, the NYPD did reveal that there are six individuals assigned to review social media: a sergeant, a detective, three police officers and a “civilian” employee.

The NYC Department of Investigation (DOI), the parent agency of the OIG, provided a statement confirming the probe but declined to comment further.

“DOI is in receipt of the May 3 letter from the City Council Speaker and the May 6 letter from the Legal Aid Society,” said a spokesperson over email. “In light of the requests, DOI has begun an investigation of the relevant social media use and exchanges, as well as applicable City policies.”

Cabán and NYPD officials were not available for an interview this past week. The PBA, which represents rank-and-file NYPD members under Chell, declined to comment.
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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* This article was originally published here

Since New York State passed its smaller class sizes law in 2022, education advocates have repeatedly called out city officials for not fully keeping up with newly enacted budget mandates that require the city to prioritize classroom headcounts in its spending.

The class size law (S9460), sponsored by Senator John Liu, required the city to reduce class sizes over a five-year period in public schools. All classes were to be capped at 20 students in kindergarten through 3rd grade, 23 students in 4th through 8th grade, and 25 students in high school. The five-year phase-in required at least 20% of city schools classes to comply by the 2023-2024 school year.

“Since the class size law was passed, City Hall and the DOE [Department of Education] have maintained that it can’t be done, usually claiming a lack of space. Our analysis of the DOE’s own documents prove that in fact these schools have the room,” United Federation of Teachers (UFT) President Michael Mulgrew said in a statement. “We don’t need any more excuses. With a $38 billion DOE budget and $10.7 billion in NYC surplus for FY24 and FY25, the funding is available to bring our class sizes into line with schools in the rest of the state.” 

Pushing for smaller class sizes in New York City has long been seen as a racial justice and equity issue stemming from a history of rampant segregation in our public schools.

Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Phipps Clark, who founded the Northside Center for Child Development in Harlem and whose psychological studies of Black children were instrumental in the Brown v. Board of Ed case that desegregated schools, were staunch education advocates since the 1940s. Dr. Kenneth Clark was the first Black person elected to the New York State Board of Regents where he passionately led efforts to racially integrate schools, upgrade facilities in the poorest neighborhoods, and reduce class sizes. 

“Children can achieve if they have the proper tools,” said Renee Freeman, an educator and  paraprofessional that’s worked in schools in Queens. “When we’re asking for smaller class sizes, we’re asking people to look at the bigger picture. With our high schools, they promised us smaller class sizes when they broke up [co-located] the schools. But those schools are overcrowded.”

In her experience in Far Rockaway and Jamaica school districts, she said that she’s seen as many as 32 students in a class in the past. She said that hinders a teacher’s ability to give them the academic and social-emotional help they need. “We need equity,” said Freeman. “The racism in this country continues and it’s impacting our children.”

The city has released its Class Size Reduction Plan for 2025, the second annual plan, in compliance with the state law earlier this month. As of 2023, about 40% of all classes—with the exception of performing groups and physical education classes—meet the class size requirements, with schools serving populations of students with higher poverty levels prioritized, reported the city. 

The plan doesn’t propose significant enrollment caps but it does mention the possibility of reducing enrollment at “high-demand schools” in future years if necessary. It states that the city has identified “roughly 540 schools” that need additional physical space in order to comply with the class size law. Based on a UFT survey, Mulgrew said there are 856 Title 1 or low-income schools across the boroughs with enough space to reduce class sizes by the start of the school year this September.

“New York City Public Schools is actively working to implement this law across the city. We are in full compliance this year and will be in full compliance next year with the steps we are proposing,” the city’s Department of Education (DOE) said in a statement. 

“As shared in our recent class size plan, we are proposing investing an additional $180 million in school budgets for Contracts for Excellence and class size reduction in particular—enough to support over 1k teachers—and asking superintendents and principals to find ways to make progress towards specific numerical goals across the city. But, to be clear, multiple independent analyses of the law indicated that it would prioritize funding and staffing away from our higher need communities and towards our better off communities.”

Besides the need to address physical space in city schools, most advocates the Amsterdam News reached out to said that hiring more teachers was critical. The city currently employs about 76,000 teachers. 

The UFT is a huge proponent for hiring more teachers and rebalancing classes as a method of reduction, estimating that the education department will need to hire at least 3,000 teachers to lower class sizes in the coming school year. In the long-term, the reduction plan notes that the city may need to hire between 10,000 to 12,000 teachers, especially in shortage areas like special education, English as a Second Language courses, Career Technical Education (CTE) and Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).

Still, the city’s reduction plan has not pleased everyone.

“Any plan worth its salt must provide information on what actual, effective steps will be taken next year and over the following three years to meet the mandates in the law,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters.
She also slammed the DOE. “Any plan worth the paper it is printed on must project how many classes will be reduced each year, using which levers, and with what results. This document fails on every account.”

Haimson said that the plan would cut funding for new school construction by over $2 billion compared to the existing five year plan and the $137 million allocated for staffing will not be sufficient. She also pointed out the city’s financial plan and the Mayor’s executive budget call for a counterproductive hiring freeze on teachers. 

She suggested that the DOE adhere to the recommendations of the Class Size Working Group, which includes adjusting enrollment between nearby schools, or moving some 3K and PreK programs to neighborhood community-based organizations.  

Ariama C. Long is a Report for America corps member and writes about politics for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep her writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.

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* This article was originally published here