Gertrud Lenzer is Professor of Sociology at Brooklyn College and a member of the doctoral faculty in Sociology at CUNY’s Graduate Center. In 1991, she founded the sociology of children as a new field and section of the American Sociological Association and was designated its founding chair. In the same year, she founded the interdisciplinary field and program of children’s studies at Brooklyn College, where she is also director of the children’s studies center. She has published several books and articles, particularly on the U.N. convention on the rights of the child and children’s studies. Professor Lenzer has been the recipient of a number of prestigious awards, grants and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, the National Humanities Center, and the Institute for Advanced Study.
Here’s an excerpt from her address from the 2007 CUNY Baccalaureate Program Commencement Ceremony:
For many years, I have had the good fortune to serve as mentor to numbers of CUNY BA students, who have chosen as their concentration the interdisciplinary field of Children’s Studies which include wide-ranging interests from education, the human rights of children, and children and youth at risk and extend all the way to children and the arts…Such examples, however, represent only a small fraction of the manifold interests which you, our older and seasoned students, bring to the individualized academic CUNY BA program in which you create your own major and curriculum under the guidance of a faculty mentor.
The CUNY BA Program can proudly claim 700 current students and 6000 alumni. The impressive accomplishments of this Program and its students are further exemplified in numerous academic honors which range from inclusion on the Dean’s List and Dean’s Certificates for Academic Excellence to the awards of numerous distinguished and diverse academic fellowships and scholarships, such as the Thomas W. Smith Academic Fellowship, the Diego Hildago Fellowship, and the CUNY BA/BS Alumni Scholarship. Among this 2006/2007 class as well, many of you are being graduated summa cum laude and magna cum laude.
On behalf of all faculty mentors, I am happy to convey to you today our congratulations on your accomplishment. A day like today testifies to the best the City University of New York brings to its students and its students bring to the City University of New York. As Benjamin Disraeli said 150 years ago: “A University should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning.” Although, according famously to Francis Bacon, “knowledge itself is power,” I would like to add that with knowledge comes to us the responsibility for all those who are not as fortunate as you and I are to participate meaningfully in this “place of light, liberty, and of learning.” For all of us also have the mission to bring light and liberty and the fruits of learning to others, to our communities and our nation.
