July 2007

Dear Friends,

As the first of our two summer sessions draws to a close, I would like to update you about the state of Baruch College and provide an overview of where I see the College headed in the year to come.

New Faculty and Staff Join the College

Since 2004 when I became President, we hired 68 new tenure track faculty across all disciplines, and this fall, we expect an additional 50 new faculty to join the ranks of Baruch College.  While some of these 118 individuals are replacing faculty who have retired or departed, 25 represent new faculty lines to permanently increase the number of full time faculty to a total of 486. This represents a 5% increase in faculty lines in the past two years, the first time in over a decade that the College has added significant new positions.

In the Weissman School of Arts and Science, we anticipate the arrival of three new faculty in Financial Engineering, two in Journalism, four in Natural Sciences, and five in Psychology as well 14 more in other departments. In the Zicklin School of Business, the Stan Ross Accountancy Department will add four new members, Economics and Finance will add four, Law two, Statistics/CIS two and one each in Management, Marketing, and Real Estate.  The School of Public Affairs will welcome two new scholars in nonprofit policy and administration and one in housing policy.

Today, Baruch has 486 full time faculty and, of course, benefits from the numerous adjunct faculty who come to us from industry and government and other fields to teach and interact with students.  We are proud to have attracted so many new faculty to the College over the span of three years and believe that their enthusiasm will match that of their more senior colleagues who have dedicated their lives to teaching and researching at Baruch. In the fall, we will have several receptions to welcome the faculty to Baruch.

We also welcome some significant new members to the administration of the College. Dr. James McCarthy, the College’s new Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, began work on Monday, June 18.  Jim comes to us from the University of New Hampshire where he was Professor of Health Policy and Management and Dean of the School of Health and Human Services.  Prior to his appointment at UNH in 2001, he was at Columbia University, Trinity College Dublin, and Johns Hopkins University.  Jim’s main research interests are in demography and adolescent and reproductive health.

David Dannenbring will continue to serve the College as a special assistant to the president and has moved to the Newman Vertical Campus.  David will apply his vast knowledge of academic and operational issues to new challenges. We also welcome Mary Beth Murphy, new AVP for Admissions, Brian Hoeft, Executive Director of Leadership Giving, and Shamik Mitchell, the new legal assistant. Professor Myung-Soo Lee, from the Department of Marketing and International Business, has been selected as the new Associate Dean in the Zicklin School.

The College continues to add new academic programs and innovate in curricula design. The new MS in Real Estate was approved by the CUNY Board of Trustees and awaits NYS approval this summer. A new Non-Profit Center will be established in the School of Public Affairs and a journalism major will soon be finalized. Under the new Provost’s leadership, the college will begin to reexamine its core curriculum to identify areas for improvement. External reviews were completed last year in Entrepreneurship, Finance, Psychology, Sociology/Anthropology, and Fine and Performing Arts. Results from those reviews will be used to guide additional improvements. Reviews are scheduled next year for Accountancy, Management, Natural Sciences, Political Science, and Philosophy. The School of Public Affairs will be undergoing accreditation review by the National Association of Schools of Public Affairs and Administration (NASPAA).

The Baruch College freshman reading program, commonly known as the freshman text, is one approach we take to help our students to develop the analytical skills and power of argument to learn how to think independently. This year, the freshman text is Mountains Beyond Mountains by Tracy Kidder, a winner of the Pulitzer Prize. The book is the story of Dr. Paul Farmer and his passion to cure infectious diseases in third world countries. 

Faculty Honors

Our faculty continue to win honors. Most recently Linda Allen, Carol Berkin, and Steve Savas were selected as the college’s first three Presidential Professors. The bestowing of the designation of Presidential Professor honors members of the faculty who exemplify the College’s commitment to excellence and who have distinguished themselves by significant contributions recognized both at Baruch College and in the world at large. The title and honor carry with them prestige, research support, and released time for scholarly activity.

Additional faculty were recognized with Presidential Excellence Awards at commencement. Professor Robert C. Smith in the School of Public Affairs received the award for Distinguished Faculty Scholarship. Seth Lipner in the Law Department received recognition for Distinguished Faculty Service. The Distinguished Teaching Awards went to Ted Henken in the Sociology and Anthropology and Black and Hispanic Studies Departments and Annette Gourgey, an adjunct in the Statistics and CIS Department.

Anne Swartz, a professor of music at Baruch College’s Weissman School of Arts and Sciences, has been awarded a 2007-2008 short-term grant from the Kennan Institute of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars for her original project "Piano Makers in Russia in the Nineteenth Century."

The Library Instruction Round Table of the American Library Association has selected an article by two members of Baruch College’s Newman Library faculty, Professor Louise Klusek, head of reference, and Professor Jerry Bornstein, deputy chief librarian for public services, as one of the top twenty publications of 2007 in the area of information literacy/library instruction.

Robert C. Smith in Baruch’s School of Public Affairs, is the winner of the 2007 Robert E. Park Book Award for his work Mexican New York: Transnational Lives of New Immigrants (University of California Press, 2006 given by the American Sociological Association's Community and Urban Sociology Section. Mexican New York won accolades from the ASA when Rob received the Thomas & Zaniecki Award from the International Migration Section.  Next year, Professor Smith will be a Russell Sage Foundation Scholars with a year to Program, which enables scholars to conduct research at the Foundation.  

Facilities Upgrades and Technology Improvements

We are adding more “smart” classrooms over the summer, which will be ready for fall.  Campus Facilities and Operations has begun to direct new energy on making the entrances and lobby spaces of each of our buildings welcoming, clean, and efficient.  One of the improvements that you will notice is year-round landscaping.  We are also adding color to the walls of our conference space and student seating areas. 

Many of you noticed that we had some problems with our systems this spring, and Art Downing provided a detailed explanation of the causes and corrective action BCTC is taking. We have to replace some servers and switches that we did not anticipate and will do so this summer. Fortunately, we received a donation of $360,000 from the City Council to assist us with our equipment upgrade, and we hope that by fall our services will return to their normally excellent state. I thank everyone for their patience as we work on this problem.

The College Works to Increase Visibility

Corporate social responsibility and all its economic, environmental, and human rights implications was the theme of Globalization and the Good Corporation, a three-day international conference to be held at the College on June 26–28. Organized by Professor S. Prakash Sethi through the International Center for Corporate Accountability, the conference brought together several hundred stakeholders and analysts from major corporations, international financial organizations, non-governmental organizations, and universities. Participating individuals and organizations came from as far away as Australia, South Africa, Thailand, China, Mexico, Bolivia and India. Major corporations such as ABN AMRO, BP, Chevron, Hewlett-Packard, Merck & Company, Inc., Ford Motor Company, Xerox Corporation, Pfizer, took part in the event.

On June 30th Channel 13 aired the PBS program CEO Exchange which featured the CEOs of SONY and Best Buy -- Sir Howard Stringer and Brad Anderson -- sharing their opinions at Baruch College, where the show had been taped. A live audience of 500, including many Baruch students, attended the taping at Baruch’s Mason Hall.  CEO Exchange made a special short film starring a graduate to introduce Baruch to the viewers.  Ricardo Rezk MBA ’03 led a tour for the cameras of Baruch College and spoke about how his Baruch education helped him become an entrepreneur and found his own business, Rico’s Empanadas.

Baruch College’s web presence is essential to achieving the strategic plan’s visibility and branding goals.  The Office of Communications and Marketing and BCTC have spent the last several months redesigning the home page and improving the site’s top-level navigation, with a launch date expected this summer.  The mission is to elevate the overall perception of the College through its website and introduce a unified look and feel as well as to improve the functionality of the site through simple and clear navigation.   

Many of the College’s faculty members are media savvy and are quite effective in positioning themselves well with reporters as analysts, subject matter experts, and researchers.  This visibility benefits both the public reputation of the individual as well as that of the College.  This spring we offered our faculty the opportunity to participate in media training to hone their skills.  Eighteen faculty members and staff attended media training and will now play a leadership role in enhancing the visibility of Baruch College in the media.

Record-Setting Philanthropic Growth

Thanks to the efforts of our Office of College Advancement and others, our fundraising activities have been record setting. The College began the quiet phase of the Baruch Means Business capital campaign this January and as of June 30, 2007 raised $30 million in new gifts and pledges. The assets of The Baruch College Fund now reach $125 million compared to $50 million in 2004. We are particularly grateful to Walter Banadarian, Max Berger, Larry Field, David Krell, Bill Newman, Rickie Rackow, Dov Schlein, Larry Simon, Sandy Wasserman, and Larry Zicklin for their generosity and commitments of new gifts to the College.

Thanks go to all of you who assisted our fund raisers in writing proposals and meeting with donors.  We use this money for faculty support and development, including summer research funding, graduate assistantships, learning outcomes assessment, conference support as well as for student scholarships, student counseling, advisory services to international students, and career development. Even the implementation of DegreeWorks, our online system that allows students to audit their own progress toward graduation, benefits from private support.

We expect to continue our outreach to alumi with an alumni weekend this October and with other events in California and New York to move our campaign forward.

I wish a good summer to all of you.  I am glad that I’ll see many of you on campus.

Sincerely,

Kathleen Waldron