Addendum To A College Bulletin (1970s)

[Music] e [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] workers in America used to get their education in what they called the School of Hard Knocks the students in those opening scenes you just saw are the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of those workers the Millions for whom labor was the only learning believe it or not they were shown in Queen's College classrooms studying underwater mapping electronic music and mass communications they're getting an education not only in conventional classroom settings but like their grandparents in the infinite laboratory of the city and the country itself my name is Ralph hag and I graduated from Queens College in 1950 back in those days the Queens College B was one slender volume today there are many Queens College cataloges they reflect not only the fact that enrollment has more than doubled and that graduate and specialized programs have been added but also an exciting variety flexibility and quality of choice in the undergraduate curriculum for those of you who are students here the owls and Jefferson Hall must seem familiar but the owls look out on a campus where growth and change startle the traditionalist and worry campus conservationists trying to hold on to some vesage of space and Greenery Queens College and its students are much a part of the city that supports and sustains the giant City University of New York in the next 10 years the red roofed Spanish style buildings will give way as a $200 million building program implements the college's master [Music] plan students come on campus often parochial unreflective uncritical and here they reflect and argue and open their minds they meet foreign students older students students from American minority groups and from many areas of the Caribbean and Latin America like all New Yorkers ingeniously they find ways to be alone in a crowded and abrasive [Music] environment like all college students they find fun love friends and they play [Music] like all youth they explore and Sample and are drawn by the unique and by the Primitive sensuality of ritual and music [Music] in the past year or so students have assumed mature responsibility in voting for their own representatives to the chief legislative body of the college the academic Senate here in the Senate students young faculty and Senior professors painstakingly write the laws that govern almost every phase of the college's life and curriculum in this chamber has been hammered out a curricular freedom that for example lifted college-wide although not departmental requirements for the bachelor's degree at Queen's College a freedom that has made it possible for some 2,000 out of 177,000 full-time undergraduates to enroll in some kind of specialized program in honors or interdisciplinary or tutorial studies queens has matured from its Beginnings in 1936 7 as a small somewhat provincial teaching school into a major university related institution with a national reputation yet Queens puts heavy emphasis on teaching still requiring all its faculty to teach even its young President Joseph Murphy remains Professor Murphy a political philosopher who meets a class every week after hours in his office the full-time faculty numbering about 1300 has attracted some leading academic figures economists Abal Lerner and Michael Harrington physicist and oceanographer Taro Takahashi mathematician Edwin Moise critic Eric Bentley Joseph Brodsky the Soviet poet in Exile sociologist Edgar Borgata political scientist Andrew hacker and boros scovi founder and director of many opera theater groups at Queens The Faculty from the most recent lecturer to the academic star teaches here in the classroom is daily evidence of the faculty's concern with what happens inside the students head with their growing awareness of Their Own attitud udes and understanding of other realities of the effect these have on their decisions and their morality in small classrooms in lecture halls in groups and alone teaching and learning is the reason for Queen's college and this end is clear what often is not clear for the student is which of the dozens of roots to that end he or she should choose in an institution catapulted within a decade into several schools and graduate divisions and now founding the city University's first school of law selecting courses and programs becomes a test in itself of a student's ability to accumulate data and draw [Music] conclusions registering 30,000 students takes a lot of computer terminals but for the individual those punched out program cards represent hours of Agony and decision registration formally was a matter of skillfully fitting a group of required courses into a time schedule that was fairly civilized that avoided such problems as the 7 a.m. bus and a 4our Hiatus between Friday afternoon classes and those pitfalls still exist but now students May select within departmental requirements among a list of courses numbering into the thousands besides this honors and interdisciplinary programs make it possible to construct a major for example in biology art or in chemistry anthropology individual honors work has always been part of the curriculum students like this sophomore do re search under faculty guidance but because she could begin such research long before her senior year and because students need not major in a discipline for honors work the effect is a curricular variation that is distinctly different the subject of this particular project is attention span in primates suie a rees's monkey watches a TV monitor and as a reward for paying attention it's a drink of orange [Music] Kool-Aid some monkeys are raised from infancy in the psychology Labs at Queens making it possible to study their tactile reactions and development [Music] these undergraduates are constructing organic Crystal models from crystals which they grow themselves in the physics Labs a class of research which is unusual as in the past most research has been on inorganic crystals in the low temperature Laboratory students study various Quantum effects in solids here filling a chamber with liquid nitrogen and then with liquid helium which produces a temperature of -45° just right for experiments that demand cold clear reasoning up in the attic of one of the college's original 1910 buildings students assist a member of The Faculty who is constructing a microwave [Music] lab physical education is associated with sports but at Queens today student researchers explore such areas as the response of the heart to stress during a running exercise and measuring the amount of oxygen used by the muscles during a workout on an exerciser tests critical to physiologists and [Music] cardiologist the individualized ba is an extension and a controversial one of the traditional honors project for the IBA as it is known students write their own course outline for a single semester or an entire year one of the Iva students is a musicologist doing research on manuscripts in the the college's special collection after approval by a three- member faculty committee an IBA project can generate up to 32 credits for a Year's work taken on or off campus undergraduates come in all ages and this junior is part of a research project in speech therapy working with puppets in order to help young stutterers sometimes objections to this kind of independent work stem from varying concepts of academic standards sometimes the objection evolves from the nature of the project itself for example a student whose interests lie in the area of American Labor Relations spent a year with the United Farm Workers Union observing and participating in their organizing activities the concept of Permitting students freedom to explore on their own under faculty guidance is not a totally new one hardware and instructional resource equipment however lately introduced into the humanities and social sciences have altered both the look and style of these disciplines foremost among the catalysts has been the computer at Queens a sigma 7 capable of doing up to 500,000 additions per second speeds through student research queries such as when and how how it will be possible to put computer terminals in everyone's home and how to analyze word permutations in poetry music is a way of life at Queens which has one of the country's outstanding music departments both in the Performing Arts and in musicology the skill of this undergraduate quintet practicing at a faculty member's home comes as no surprise [Music] but student performers using an electronic music laboratory do look and sound different from what you might expect the moo synthesizer used here was developed by Charles m a queen's college graduate [Music] students in the field of communications or drama still study argumentation and Shakespeare right Thine Eyes the good years shall devour them flesh and fell a they shall make us weak we'll see him starve first come the curriculum in communication Arts and Sciences also puts undergraduates into an equip filled Workshop as television Crews and directors okay you're on much research and study at the college focuses on that remarkable laboratory the city had those big letters in order to make it easy in the spare quarters of an off-campus facility an oral history class listens to taped interviews made by students of local residents who tell about their life experiences in middle class ghetto neighborhoods 25 years same people are the Le an education major trains on the job in a school in Manhattan that is experimenting with open classroom teaching [Music] techniques in a borrowed Loft on Fourth Street students turn a printmaker Studio into a neighborhood Art Center for children and [Music] adults course related field workor through programs such as action or the college sponsored Community classroom sends well over a thousand students each semester into public and private agencies hospitals prisons storefronts [Music] they serve but they also question and seek to [Music] transform just as here every Saturday they open a world of shapes and colors where the self however young or poor and find and Trace the endless patterns of its own [Music] Visions also on a Saturday near Co-op City in the Bronx other Queen students make Orchard Beach their laboratory for a methods course in geological mapping determining the structures of the rocks and with an alidade the compus orientation of lines and fractures such techniques are required for a summer field course given in eastern [Music] Pennsylvania about 60 students each Summer live on their own resources on an isolated beach near cinnamon Bay in the Virgin Islands to take a course called general science of the ocean not many years ago students in a public City University would have had little hope of studying abroad or of spending a summer in Europe or the Caribbean but private and governmental scholarship a and growing substantial aid from Queen's College alumni help students pay their way on these important field trips they become skilled divers and [Music] sailors underwater the divers working in teams learn to map sediment Distribution on the ocean bottom [Music] the wreck of the ran a British vessel sunk in a hurricane in 1868 yields up some artifacts which the students collect and later will catalog student divers also visit a research apparatus called a techtite which is under the control of the Caribbean Research Institute and in which scientists live for lengths of time to monitor the migrations of lobster and rare [Music] fish undergraduates on campus get set for a weekend field trip for a course in geology that will take place off the coastline of long island formed some 12,000 years ago by streams depositing sand and gravel as they came off melting ice sheets they boarded City University's research vessel the Atlantic twin pulling away from The Dock of the New York ocean science laboratory at Monto point the first mate and a queen's Professor chart the best course for the class's study of Trace elements and metals in sediments which will indicate [Music] pollution this far off the island is one of the few places on the East Coast where the water is relatively free from pollution therefore these sediment tests will give a good basement map of the effects of encroaching pollution students on the trip only half of whom major in geology collect samples from a vanv dredge and place them in special [Music] bags the samples are taken back to campus Laboratories and separated into different proportions [Music] later the whole sample is placed in a nest of cves and agitated in a road tap the results of these analyses are plotted on maps and the variations between Samples used to determine the sedimentary processes suddenly those four rare years of college are over simulating the parades of medieval monks and Scholars centuries ago The Faculty procession followed by the students winds brilliantly around the [Music] campus in a college history begins each year over again the end and the beginning merge the experiment becomes tradition Restless a college searches for truth both inside and outside itself the search brings forth courage and fear skepticism and dogmatism ideologies inventions discoveries Beauty add to the Queen's College bulletin Adventure change add to America another and perhaps different generation [Music]