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.

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.