The CUNY Baccalaureate Blog

Jonathan Shannon is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Hunter College and a member of the doctoral faculty in both Anthropology and Music at CUNY’s Graduate Center. He earned his Ph.D. in Anthropology from the City University of New York Graduate Center. His areas of interest include Cultural Anthropology, Aesthetics, Ethnomusicology, Postcolonial Studies, Psychological Anthropology, Religion, The Middle East, Islamic Society. His research focuses on musical aesthetics and cultural politics in the Arab world and Mediterranean. He has conducted field research in Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Morocco, and Spain. His book, Among the Jasmine Trees: Music and Modernity in Contemporary Syria, was recently published by Wesleyan University. He was recently awarded a Fulbright Regional Grant for the Middle East, a multiple country award that he is using for ethnographic field research in Syria and Morocco.

Here’s an excerpt from his address from the 2005 CUNY Baccalaureate Program Commencement Ceremony:

When I graduated from college, one of my professors encouraged us to prepare for “the real world.” For you, students of this twenty-headed hydra of an academic beast known as the City University of New York, earning your degree has been very much a part of “the real world.” You live in New York City, Capital of the World (or so we like to think), with its amazing riches and tragedies, opportunities and hurdles, and real life staring at you (or shouting) from every corner, every subway platform. And you are CUNY students, navigating a system full of gems hidden in decayed gardens. To borrow a metaphor from the world of technology, I like to think of CUNY as the Windows 98 of the academic world: out-of-date, clumsy, too large, and prone to frequent crashes. Yet out of this unwieldy operating system you have managed to carve for yourselves a program of study that is - to stretch the metaphor - the Mac OS X of the University: smoother, sleeker, and much more user friendly (in large part due to the work of the CUNY BA Program staff, I should add). It still crashes once in a while, but that’s the nature of the game. I think that the CUNY Baccalaureate Program is remarkable, not only because of the enormous diversity of potential instructors and courses made available to you CUNY-wide, but because of the remarkable diversity of your interests, interests that chafe at the rigid pigeon holes of traditional majors, which are too often cookie cutter degrees for cookie cutter students. You break that mold and by doing so help to transform the system itself, to give it much needed upgrades.