Worth NotiNgAugust 27

First Day of Classes for the Fall 2012 Semester

Campus-wide

September 4-6 — 11:00 AM – 3:00 PM

JJ Rocks the VOTE!

Voter information and registration. Sponsored by the Office of Student Life, Urban Male Initiative, Women’s Center and the John Jay Student Government. Call 212.237.8738 for more information.

Kroll Atrium

September 5

First Day of Classes for the Prison-to-CollegePipeline Program

Sponsored by the Prisoner Reentry Institute. Call 646.557.4534 for more information.

Otisville Correctional Facility, Mt. Hope, NY

September 6 & 10 — 8:40 AM – 1:00 PM

Emergency Action Plan Directors Program

Presented by the Fire Science Institute

Advance registration required. Call 212.237.8650 for more information.

Room 615 BMW

September 10 — 9:00 AM – 5:00 PM

Event Security Course

Presented by the Security Management Institute

Advance registration required. Call 212.237.8638 for more information.

Room 615 BMW

September 20 — 5:30 PM

Book Launch:

Failed Evidence: Why Law Enforcement Resists ScienceBy David A. Harris

Location TBA

@ John Jay is published by the Office of Marketing & DevelopmentJohn Jay College of Criminal Justice899 Tenth Avenue, NY, NY 10019www.jjay.cuny.edu

Submissions should be faxed or e-mailed to the Office of Communications,899 Tenth Avenue, NY, NY 10019fax: (212) 237-8642e-mail: pdodenhoff@jjay.cuny.edu

August 2012

The John Jay College Division of Student Affairs is in the hands of new leadership for the 2012-2013 academic year, following the departures of Vice President Berenecea Johnson Eanes and Dean of Students Wayne Edwards.

On July 16, President Jeremy Travis announced the appointment of Dr. Thomas Stafford as Interim Vice President of Student Affairs. He will serve in the position while a search is conducted for a permanent replacement for Eanes.

Stafford has an extensive résumé in student affairs, having served for the past 25 years as Vice Chan-cellor for Student Affairs at North Carolina State University. In that role he oversaw such program-ming as building an athletics program, student leadership development and international student activities. He served on the Defense Advisory Committee Interim Vice President for Student AffairsThomas Stafford.

on Women in the Services that advised the U.S. Secretary of Defense on issues relating to women in the military.

Stafford, who holds a doctoral degree from Florida State University, has published widely on student retention, campus diversity, residential

life and student leadership, and has lectured frequently on issues of student life and the inte-gration of student affairs and academic affairs.

Working with Stafford will be Dean of Students Kenneth Holmes, who comes to John Jay from the University of Bridgeport, where he held

the same position. Holmes has also served as Assistant Vice President for Student Life at Binghamton University, and also held student-affairs positions at Oberlin College and St. Mary’s College of Maryland.

Dana Trimboli has been promoted to Senior Director of Student Affairs, a role in which she will oversee orientation programs and commencement, the Children’s Center, Women’s Center, Accessibility Services and the development of a Veter-ans Center. Danielle Officer has been named Interim Director of Student Life.

John Matteson, John Jay College’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Professor of English, has been named as a University Distinguished Profes-sor by the City University Board of Trustees. Matteson becomes the eighth member of the John Jay faculty to hold that rank.

“We congratulate Professor Mat-teson on this great honor,” said President Jeremy Travis. “He has combined outstanding scholar-ship and engaging writing to produce works that have enlight-ened scholars, students and the general public. He continues to make significant contributions to the study of literature as well as to the overall academic life of the College.”

Matteson was awarded the 2008 Pulitzer Prize

Welcome (Back) to John Jay!

in Biography for his book Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father.

“For the longest time,” said Matteson, “humanities were not what sprang to mind when people thought about John Jay. It’s wonderful to see how perceptions are changing. I am absolutely delighted to be the first English professor at John Jay to become a distinguished professor, but it’s also a great honor to belong to a truly dis-tinguished department.”

Matteson, who joined the John Jay faculty in 1997, is a leading scholar of 19th-century American literature and is recognized internationally for his work on Herman Melville, Bronson

and Louisa May Alcott, and Margaret Fuller, the latter of whom is the subject of Matteson’s most recent work, The Lives of Margaret Fuller: A Biography. Matteson was the first academic director of the John Jay College Honors Program, and is currently deputy director of the Leon Levy Center for Biography at the CUNY Graduate Center.

The title of Distinguished Professor is conferred in recognition of exceptional scholarly achieve-ment, and is reserved for faculty with records of outstanding performance by national and inter-national standards of excellence in their profes-sions. Matteson, who holds a Ph.D. in English from Columbia University and a law degree from Harvard, joins Blanche Wiesen Cook, Gerald Markowitz and Michael Wallace (History); Saul Kassin, Steven Penrod and Cathy Spatz Widom (Psychology), and Jock Young (Sociology) as Distinguished Professors at John Jay.

Distinguished Professor John Matteson

Matteson Named Distinguished Professor of English

New Student Affairs LeadershipTeam Thinks ‘Students First’

Student Satisfaction Ranks Among Highest in CUNYThe latest Performance Management Process re-port from the City University of New York shows the satisfaction levels of John Jay students with administrative and academic support services to be the highest in CUNY. The College also ranked first in student satisfaction with access to com-puter technology, and was a close third in the rankings of satisfaction with student services.

“This is a wonderful bit of news to receive as we get ready for another academic year,” said President Jeremy Travis. “It shows that our faculty and staff are very student-centered and service-oriented.”

The extensive biennial report is based on a stu-dent-experience survey conducted by the CUNY Office of Institutional Research and Assessment and comprises a variety of metrics by which the University measures progress toward targets and goals. Explaining the satisfying results, As-

sociate Provost James Llana said: “We pay a lot of attention to putting students first. We know that, like all CUNY schools, we’re being held account-able, and we always want to do better.”

The report marks the first time that John Jay is being classified with and measured against other senior colleges: Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter,

Lehman, Queens and York. Students are asked to report their satisfaction level on a scale of 1-4, with 4 indicating “very satisfied.”

John Jay scored highest in the category of satis-faction with academic support service, with a 3.16 rating, access to computer technology, 3.18, and tied for the highest score in satisfaction with

administrative services, 2.92. The College was also among the leaders in satisfaction with stu-dent services, with the third-highest score of 2.91.

The complete Performance Management Process report can be accessed online at www.cuny.edu/about/administration/chancellor/performance-goals.html.

‘Wonderful News’ Greets Start of New School Year:

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On BoardAdam Stone (Enrollment Management) was announced as John Jay’s new Registrar on June 12, succeeding Cheuk Lee, who had held the po-sition on an interim basis. Stone, who has more than 25 years of experience in higher education, including 10 as a registrar, comes to John Jay from City College, where he helped implement a number of systems that will be coming to John Jay, most notably PeopleSoft, which is the basis of CUNYFirst.

Vivian Todini (Marketing and Development) has been named as John Jay’s Executive Director of Communications and Marketing. A veteran com-munications strategist with strong management skills, Todini had been Executive Director of Institutional Advancement at the CUNY School

of Law, where she managed the communica-tions, development and government relations functions. She has been the principal of her own consulting firm, VT Consulting, and was the Communications Director for NOW Legal Defense and Education Fund for seven years.

The Printed PageThe J Journal – New Writing on Justice, the Col-lege’s literary journal, has won a 2013 Pushcart Prize for Fiction for “The Fall of Punicea,” a short story by Paul Stapleton that was published in the journal’s Spring 2011 issue. With this rec-ognition, along with two Special Mentions in the 2011 Pushcart Anthology, The J Journal joins the ranks of the best literary journals in the United States. “We are starting to set the foundation for an enduring contribution to the literature of

justice,” said journal co-editors Adam Berlin and Jeffrey Heiman (English).

Angelique Corthals (Sciences) has published an article in the open-source journal PLoS ONE, “Detecting the Immune System Response of a 500 Year-old Inca Mummy,” in which she reports on the first-ever use of proteomics to detect immune system response from a frozen Incan mummy. Corthals, a forensic anthropolo-gist, worked with colleagues from Stony Brook University in using proteomics, a method that decodes proteins rather than DNA, to profile im-mune system response from degraded samples taken from 500 year-old mummies. The study, published July 25, found that the Incan mummy suffered from a bacterial lung infection at the time of its death.

Scott Atran (Sociology/Center on Terrorism) has co-authored an article, “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict,” that appeared in the May 18 issue of Science. Atran, a Presiden-tial Scholar in Sociology, noted that while sacred values “sustain intractable conflicts like those be-tween the Israelis and the Palestinians that defy rational, business-like negotiation … they also provide surprising opportunities for resolution.” The article was written with Jeremy Ginges of

the New School for Social Research.

Eugene O’Donnell (Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration) had his op-ed article “Son of a City” published in the New York Post on July 28. The commentary examines recent shootings and homicide rates in New York and Chicago.

GrantsmanshipDavid Kennedy (Criminal Justice) recently announced a two-year, $750,000 grant to the National Network for Safe Communities from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Assistance to sustain two highly successful crime-reduction strategies — the group-violence reduction strategy and the drug-market intervention strategy. The NNSC is a project of the Center on Crime Prevention and Control, led by Kennedy, and is co-chaired by Kennedy and President Jeremy Travis.

RecognitionRosemarie Maldonado (Assistant Vice Presi-dent/Counsel) has been appointed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg to the New York City Panel for Educational Policy, the 13-member board that sets policy for the New York City Depart-ment of Education. While serving on the board, Maldonado will remain in her current role at the College. Prior to joining John Jay in 2004, Maldo-nado was Chief Administrative Law Judge for the New York City Human Rights Commission.

Jeremy Travis (President) won the 2012 Maud Booth Correctional Services Award presented by the Volunteers of America, a philanthropic hu-man services organization. The award, presented in Denver, CO, on July 23, honors leaders in the correctional field whose work shows compassion and belief in the human potential of offenders and ex-offenders.

FACULTY/STAFF NOTES

Caroline Stoessinger, an adjunct professor of mu-sic and artist-in-residence at John Jay, recently won the 2012 Norman Mailer Center Commenda-tion for Preserving the History of Our Time, for her new book A Century of Wisdom: Lessons From the Life of Alice Herz-Sommer, the World’s Oldest Living Holocaust Survivor (Random House, 2012).

The book chronicles the life of Herz-Sommer, a courageous 108-year-old Czech woman who in 1943 was deported along with her husband and their 6-year-old son from their home in Prague to the Nazi concentration camp in Terezin. She was already an acclaimed pianist, and remains one to this day, still practicing three hours a day.

Herz-Sommer’s husband died at the Dachau concentration camp six weeks before the end of the war in 1945. After the war, she immigrated to Israel, where she befriended Golda Meir and many other leading Israeli figures. Her son, a noted cellist, died while on a concert tour in

2001 at age 65. “Yet despite all she has seen and suffered,” said Stoessinger, “Alice is victorious in that she has forged a life without bitterness. She is a happy soul.”

The Mailer Award was presented on April 30 at the National Arts Club in New York, in a cer-emony that featured a reading from the book by Academy Award-winning actress Ellen Burstyn, a performance by the Amphion String Quartet with Stoessinger accompanying on piano, and the award presentation itself by renowned vio-linist Itzhak Perlman.

A Century of Wisdom, which includes a foreword by the late Vaclav Havel, the former president of the Czech Republic, has been widely acclaimed by the likes of Gloria Steinem, Elie Wiesel, Pat Conroy and John Jay Distinguished Professor Blanche Wiesen Cook, who called the book “an extraordinary, enchanting, entirely inspiring book—most timely and needed now.”

Caroline Stoessinger and her subject, Holocaust survivor Alice Herz-Sommer.

The John Jay College Foundation Board has added four new trustees, all of whom have com-piled stellar credentials in law, public service and international business.

Paula Howell Anderson, a partner in the firm of Shearman & Sterling LLP, is a John Jay alumna who was valedictorian of the Class of 1998 and went on to earn a law degree from Harvard Law School. She has built an international reputation in such areas as Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigations, commercial litigation, bankruptcy litigation, antitrust and international arbitra-tion. Anderson has also done extensive pro bono work training prosecutors at the United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda and at the International Criminal Court.

Another John Jay graduate joining the board is Richard J. Koehler, who earned his bachelor’s degree from John Jay in 1973 and went on to earn a master’s degree from Hunter College and a law degree from Fordham Law School. Following a distinguished career in public service, including appointments as the NYPD’s Chief of Personnel and New York City Correction Commissioner, Koehler became a founding partner of Koehler & Isaacs LLP, representing numerous public- and private-sector employee unions. Koehler has also been a member of the John Jay faculty in the Department of Law, Police Science and Criminal Justice Administration.

Peter J. Beshar is Executive Vice President and General Counsel of Marsh & McLennan Companies, where he supervises the Legal, Government Relations and Risk Management departments. Beshar, who earned his law degree from Harvard, is a former Assistant New York State Attorney General, who led the Attorney General’s Task Force on Illegal Guns.

Dr. Alexander Rovt, a native of Ukraine who immigrated to the United States in 1985, is the President of IBE Trade Corporation, a world leader in the production, sales and marketing of agricultural fertilizers. Rovt, who holds a PhD in International Economics from Lvov Institute of Trade & Economics in Ukraine, has also diversi-fied into New York real estate, with a portfolio of 14 buildings.

Professor Wins Mailer Book Prize forStory of Centenarian Holocaust Survivor

A $250,000 gift from the vice chair of the John Jay College Foundation Board and his wife will help support the Vera Fellows Program at John Jay. In recognition of the gift, the College has named the new rooftop terrace the Elizabeth and Arthur J. Mirante II Faculty Dining Terrace.

Mirante, is a former CEO of Cushman & Wake-field, the commercial real estate firm. In 2012 he became a Principal and Tri-State President of Avison Young, Canada’s largest independently-owned real estate services firm.

The Mirantes are staunch financial supporters of the Vera program, which provides a unique in-ternship and academic experience for outstand-ing undergraduate students with a demonstrated commitment to social justice and public service.

The College recently launched the Campaign for the Future of Justice, a $50-million fundraising effort that coincides with John Jay’s upcoming 50th anniversary in 2014. For information on the campaign and how you can support the College, contact Whitney Hedberg, Director of Major Gifts, Office of Marketing and Development, 646.557.4469; whedberg@jjay.cuny.edu.

Foundation Board Adds Four Trustees

Arthur and Elizabeth Mirante are joined by President Jeremy Travis at the dedication of the new faculty dining terrace, in recognition of the Mirantes’ gift to support the Vera Fellows Program.

Longtime Supporters Step Up for Vera Fellows

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