Top of the Class: Some of NYC’s Leading Professors Share Their Secrets (New York Observer - 1/21/15) #HarlemEd: Columbia University in the City of New York, The City College of New York, Columbia Journalism School EXCERPTS: Valerie Purdie-Vaughns, Associate professor of psychology, Columbia University At six feet tall, Valerie Purdie-Vaughns is imposing. “There’s always a huge crowd around her at conferences, and she’s a head above everyone else,” says Nick Camp, who managed Ms. Purdie-Vaughns’ diversity lab at Columbia for three years and is now pursuing a Ph.D. in psychology at Stanford. (Ms. Purdie-Vaughns got her doctorate at Stanford as well.) She also electrifies her lab, which focuses on the psychology of outsiders. “She gets excited by ideas and is very supportive when you’re starting out and not sure if it’s going to work,” Mr. Camp explains. “She helps people take an idea they’re passionate about and turn it into a psychological question or something to test.” For one project, lab members went to Fire Island to recruit gays and lesbians for a study of outsiders who conceal their identities in the workplace. The lab has studied white dancers in a black troupe, as well as why some people seize up when a black man approaches. Ms. Purdie-Vaughns’ mom taught third grade. “You’d be amazed by the similarities between third graders and college students,” the Columbia professor recalls. “They both have short attention spans, and if you don’t figure out how to engage them right away, you’ve lost them.” As her mom did, she gets involved with students, co-publishing papers, throwing them parties. “We’re all in it together,” she says. Last spring, Ms. Purdie-Vaughns won a $25,000 teaching award, some of which got spent on summer camp. “If I believe in diversity,” she says with a laugh, “I’ll send my black child to a Jewish camp.” . . . Kevin Foster, Associate professor, chair, economics and business, City College of New York Despite having a Ph.D. from Yale and teaching such abstruse subjects as econometrics, Kevin Foster is known as a man of the people. He is “awesome, dedicated and good at explaining things,” says Denisse Olivarez, a former student who got a dual B.A. and M.A. in economics from CCNY in 2008 (at her mentor’s suggestion) and now works for a large international bank. Mr. Foster goes out of his way to alert students about conferences and job opportunities. According to Ms. Olivarez, he is “always looking out for the benefit of his students” and, if students don’t understand a problem he assigns, he’ll revise it. “I try to get students excited and interested in the topic,” says Mr. Foster. “In this age of Google, if a student is motivated to learn something, I try to clue them in that this is a cool topic.” Rather than impose “silly demands” to meet in person, he often communicates through texts and phone calls—which he feels that students who are “juggling things in any of the boroughs” deserve. He co-authors substantive research with his protégés to get them on the path to Ph.D.s and academia. And he attributes his love of teaching to his own mentors, who inspired him to “pay that back, infecting students with the same disease.” . . . Marguerite Holloway, Associate professor and director, science and environmental journalism, Columbia University School of Journalism Not long ago, Lina Zeldovich, an editor at the science magazine Nautilus, called her former professor Marguerite Holloway to say she’d be dropping by. Ms. Holloway, who teaches science reporting at Columbia’s J-school, often assigns readings from the annual Best American Science and Nature Writing collection. Ms. Zeldovich had a surprise: a story she had edited, Justin Nobel’s Ants Go Marching, had been published in the 2014 best-of collection. The author, another former Holloway student, was in town and the two wanted to thank Ms. Holloway for her inspiration. Whatever the topic is, Mr. Nobel says, the professor encourages students to find something “exciting” in it and “run with your interests.” When he pitched a personal story about getting attacked by fire ants to Ms. Zeldovich, her response was, “Pursue that scientifically”—just what Ms. Holloway would say. “You can always find something in an assignment you really connect to,” explains Ms. Holloway, who loved the surprise visit. “If you find a topic you are passionate about, you can make it yours and make it new to the world.” The professor found an engaging subject in John Randel, Jr., the 19th-century surveyor who developed Manhattan’s street grid. Her Randel biography, The Measure of Manhattan, was published in 2013. As an editor, Ms. Holloway says, she’s hand-on: “I often say, ‘Here’s another possible way of doing it. Explain the background, get more voices, give people a sense of the essential elements that they need.’ I hope to become a little voice in their heads.”
Posted on: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 12:37:10 +0000
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