CUNY Lecture Series – CUNY Podcasts

Citing President Obama's intent to strengthen community colleges, "second lady" Jill Biden told the 2009 graduates of Kingsborough Community College the two-year schools are "one of America's best-kept secrets," and "the education gained on campuses like this one will provide the knowledge that will power the 21st century." Dr. Biden, an adjunct professor at Northern Virginia Community College who taught English full-time at a Delaware community college for 16 years, referred to Obama's higher education proposal, which includes a community college initiative to better prepare students for the job market and encourages their transfer to four-year schools. "The president wants the U.S. to have the highest proportion of college graduates (in the world) by the year 2020...and he knows community colleges will play a major part in achieving this goal." Listen Now

Since 1963, U.S. students have been “very bad at tests and very good at life,” Fareed Zakaria says, noting that during the same period of time the United States has “dominated the world of science, technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, economic growth.” The U.S. tradition of students receiving “a broad general education that prepares you not for your first job, but for your sixth job” accounts for U.S. dominance, the CNN host and author of In Defense of a Liberal Education tells the Graduate Center.

In this message-oversatuartion era, marketers have to “pick an audience and superserve them,” says branding guru Alan Goodman, who teaches a marketing master class at Macaulay Honors College. At MTV, where he developed the logo and the iconic animation IDs, Goodman says he saw the network as more than just a music video channel, and identified the audience as young people and proposed to reach them by offering programs that would annoy their parents. The campaign for Nickelodeon, he says, took the kids’ network from the lowest-rated basic cable network to the highest in nine months without changing programming. One tool he used in his Nick campaign was doo-wop, which people told him was a mistake because it was out of style. Kids responded to it, he says, because it was different.

Hashtag politics gives people who don’t have big money to donate to candidates a way to compete with big donors, or so says social media guru Alan Rosenblatt in a talk at Baruch. Hashtags like #BlackLivesMatter aggregate conversation and opinion, creating “powerful social capital” to compete with financial capital, Rosenblatt says. The hashtag has made it easier for likeminded people to affiliate across physical distances and interact, says assistant professor Katherine Behar, who noted that this presidential race has been called the first social media election. “One thing we are seeing as never before,” Behar says,” “is the strange sight of news media covering social media.” The hashtag makes interaction with the candidates easier. When Donald Trump is tweeting, says Rosenblatt, he’s “actually interacting directly with a voter who might not have had any opportunity to meet the candidate.”

The cyber currency created in 2009 as “a plaything for hackers,” will be used by governments by 2023 and consumers by 2027 by some estimates, Nathaniel Popper, author of Digital Gold: Bitcoin and theInside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money, tells a Baruch audience. The digital dough wasn’t worth anything until 2011, adds Popper, when it was adopted by users of the now defunct Silk Road website — to buy and sell heroin and marijuana without the transactions being trackable. Bitcoins, which exist as entries on a digital ledger, had an exchange rate value of more than $500 in September 2016. “Most of the general public still thinks of this as some sort of weird Tamogatchi pet or Pet Rock or something, but this is something that basically every Wall Street bank has a team working on right now,” Popper says.