Digital Commons Network^™

Is “Just Googling It” Good Enough For First-Year Students?, Maureen Richards

Publications and Research

This study analyzes citations by first-year students to determine what content they were citing and whether it was available through the open web or the library. Examining the role of these two places as content providers for academic work fills a gap in the literature. Most of the cited works were available through the library and the open web. As the line between content providers continues to blur, these results can help academic libraries prioritize what to teach students about information literacy, where to focus collection development efforts and how to promote the discovery of library resources.

Committee On Academic Standing Minutes February 24, 2021, Bronx Community College Committee On Academic Standing

BCC Governance Archives

Minutes for the meeting of the Committee on Academic Standing on February 24, 2021.

Women In Public Administration In The United States: Leadership, Gender Stereotypes, And Bias, Sofia Calsy, Maria J. D’Agostino

Publications and Research

In the public and private sectors, women continue to address multiple hurdles despite diversity and equity initiatives. Women have made tremendous strides in the workforce but are still a minority in leadership positions worldwide in multiple sectors, including nonprofit, corporate, government, medicine, education, military, and religion. In the United States women represent 60% of bachelor’s degrees earned at universities and outpace men in master’s and doctoral programs. However, a significant body of research illustrates that women’s upward mobility has been concentrated in middle management positions. Women hold 52% of all management and professional roles in the U.S. job market, including …

Class Act: Symbolic Revolution And The Meaning Of College In Prison, Ruth E. Delaney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The United States has gone through two transformations in the meaning of higher education in prison and the value of access for people in prison in the last 50 years and is now moving towards a third. The establishment of Pell grants in 1972 allowed for widespread access to higher education in prison, while the removal of those grants in 1994 effectively ended access. Federal policy makers are now poised to restore access to Pell grants to a broad swath of people in prison (Green, 2019; Krieghbaum, April 22, 2019; Krieghbaum, October 11, 2019). In this paper, I interpret the …

Reimagining Post-Secondary Training, Community College, And Welfare Supports, Aaron Azerad

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This paper seeks to study the income patterns at the sub-bachelorette level through community colleges and workforce training programs. Using 2018 U.S. Census PUMA microdata, this thesis not only explores which fields of study, industries, and occupations have a sufficient number of observations to determine whether they provide incomes which are commensurate with a middle class livelihood but, also whether these jobs are plentiful in number.

The second goal is to evaluate the effects of the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act (the Clinton era welfare reform) and how it has influenced Giuliani era ‘work requirement’ initiatives tied …

Education Faculty As Knowledge Brokers: Competing For Access To New York State Print Media And Policy Influence, Gary Anderson, Nakia Gray-Nicolas, Madison Payton

Publications and Research

In an environment in which new policy entrepreneurs and networks are influencing policy and public opinion, many university faculty are increasingly seeking ways to mobilize knowledge beyond academic conferences and journals. Using New York state as a case, we searched Access World News to compare the level of media access of academics with other knowledge brokering organizations (KBOs; e.g. think tanks, teachers’ unions, advocacy organizations, etc.). Our data shows relatively low levels of access for academics and provides profiles of those academics with high levels of access and what we might learn from them. We provide a discussion of the …

Incentivizing Injustice: Why No High-Level Executive Prosecutions From The Financial Crisis?, Sari Krieger Rivera

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

More than ten years after the financial crisis of 2008, which sparked America’s Great Recession, many citizens are still asking why no high-level bank executives were prosecuted for criminal fraud. This question becomes even more perplexing when they remember that many powerful executives did face jail time during the Enron-era accounting scandals of the early 2000s and the savings and loan crisis of the early 1990s. This sense of injustice Americans felt in the wake of the biggest economic disaster of their lifetimes has had reverberating political consequences, such as populist movements like Occupy Wall Street and populist political campaigns …

The Different Components Of Active Shooter Incidents: Examining The Co-Occurrence Of Offender And Incident Characteristics, Jeffery R. Osborne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The present dissertation examined 198 United States single-offender active shooter incidents and thematically differentiated cases based on 1) offender backgrounds, 2) precipitating stressors, 3) offender routine activity, 4) crime scene location, and 5) incident characteristics. Doing so contributed to the increasing number of studies that have stressed the importance of creating empirically-based models to better understand active shooter incidents and the offenders who are responsible. To structure this investigation into active shooter incidents, concepts within Environmental Criminology and Crime Analysis were paired with analytical methodologies seen in Offender Profiling and Investigative Psychology research.

The findings illustrated that offenders could be …

Investigative Decision Making And Its Association With Critical Thinking Skills, Thinking Styles, And Law Enforcement Experience, Teresa Curmi

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Decision making is an important aspect of the investigative work performed by law enforcement officers. The processes involved, though, including the collection, interpretation, and use of evidence, can be influenced by biases in thinking and reasoning such as confirmation bias. This issue could contribute to missed leads on the offender responsible for committing a crime when investigative efforts become focused on the wrong individuals. This study is interested in whether law enforcement officers with certain thinking skills and individual characteristics are better equipped to avoid such issues. More specifically, the study was designed to analyze whether there is an association …

Antecedents Of Borderline Personality Disorder And Antisocial Personality Disorder: An Examination Of Gene X Environment Interactions, Amy L. Medina

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Current thinking suggests that genotypes associated with impulse-control disorders and negative emotionality, such as monoamine oxidase-a (MAOA), interact with negative early environmental factors like childhood maltreatment and develop into the disorders know as Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) and Antisocial Personality Disorder (ASPD). Using existing data from a prospective cohort design study of the consequences of child abuse and neglect, participants (N = 896 represent individuals with documented histories of child abuse and neglect and a matched comparison group that were followed up into adulthood and interviewed. A subsample of 631 participants gave permission for DNA extraction and analyses during …

Teaching Choral Music Of The African Diaspora In The United States: Toward A “Living Black History”, H. Roz Woll

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In higher education choral curricula, the opportunity to study the breathtakingly rich scope of music rooted in Africa and the African diaspora with rigor and depth is often marginalized, neglected, or missing. If studied, it may be framed in the context of “other music” in contrast to music of the Western European canon, creating an oppositional framework rather than an interdependent one. Moreover, opportunities to study the political economy of this music in relationship to race, class, gender, and religion are lacking. This has multiple ramifications for music students’ preparedness to engage in global habits of citizenship in support of …

Single-Cell Fluidic Force Microscopy Reveals Stress- Dependent Molecular Interactions In Yeast Mating, Marion Mathelié-Guinlet, Felipe Viela, JéRôMe Dehullu, Sviatlana Filimonava, Jason M. Rauceo, Peter N. Lipke, Yves F. DufrêNe

Publications and Research

Sexual agglutinins of the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae are proteins mediating cell aggregation during mating. Complementary agglutinins expressed by cells of opposite mating types “a” and “α” bind together to promote agglutination and facilitate fusion of haploid cells. By means of an innovative single-cell manipulation assay combining fluidic force microscopy with force spectroscopy, we unravel the strength of single specific bonds between a- and α-agglutinins (~100 pN) which require pheromone induction. Prolonged cell–cell contact strongly increases adhesion between mating cells, likely resulting from an increased expression of agglutinins. In addition, we highlight the critical role of disulfide bonds of the …

Effect Of Age And Sex On The Discrimination Of Monozygotic Twins Using Cg18562578 Dna Methylation In Saliva, Carla Pierre Louis

Student Theses

DNA methylation is a type of epigenetic modification that impacts gene expression without disturbing the genetic nucleotide sequence. DNA methylation has the potential to be included in the daily forensic analysis because among other uses, it has the potential to be applied to discrimination of monozygotic (MZ) twins that currently cannot be differentiated via forensic DNA profiling. In previous research, our group showed that DNA methylation at the cg18562578 site in chromosome 3 could be used to discriminate MZ twins. Because studies have shown that DNA methylation measures can be influenced by demographic factors such as sex and age; here, …

Restorative Relationships And 'Radical Help': Reimagining Welfare-To-Work Beyond The Market-Family Divide, Lynn D. Lu

Publications and Research

The unprecedented global lockdown in response to the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the extreme vulnerability of “essential” yet underpaid workers, the vast inequality between the wealthy and the less fortunate, and the bottomless pit facing those without a social safety net. While the crisis has laid bare the near-universality of human susceptibility to disease and unemployment in a world in which few can safely work, it has also highlighted the disproportionate precarity experienced by low-wage and contingent workers, people of color, and non-citizens. Well before the pandemic, rampant socioeconomic and racial inequality, high underemployment and concentration of wealth, and technological advances …

Response To There Are No Hard-To-Serve Learners, Only Ill-Served Ones By Erik Jacobson, Montclair State University, Joni Schwartz

Publications and Research

A decade and a half ago, the community of adult educators to which I belonged called the phenomenon that Jacobson describes in There Are No Hard-to-Serve Learners as “creaming.” This is the practice of choosing to serve certain students, in this case those with high scores on their initial GED® practice test or students with advanced TABE® scores, so that we fulfilled our performance objectives and more easily demonstrated employability. We knew what we were doing. The reasons were economic; we needed to show outcomes that would continue to make our adult education program eligible for funding.

Graduate Bulletin 2021-2022, Cuny John Jay College

College Bulletins

Covers academic year 2021-2022

Undergraduate Bulletin 2021-2022, Cuny John Jay College

College Bulletins

Covers academic year 2021-2022

Movement Lawyering During A Crisis: How The Legal System Exploits The Labor Of Activists And Undermines Movements, Tifanei Ressl-Moyer, Pilar Gonzalez Morales, Jaqueline Aranda Osorno

City University of New York Law Review

There is increasing recognition that the ableist trope “Justice is Blind” is a decades-long gaslighting of the American public, a distraction from the reality that our entire judicial system has always had a strict adherence to white supremacy. In the United States, the highest court continues to erode civil rights protections that were hard fought by Black Americans, many whose lives were taken during the journey. The legislature has codified laws that simultaneously extract wealth from communities of color and criminalize poverty. And the legal profession is one of the least diverse of any professional industry. Impartiality of legal systems, …

Ethnic Conflict In Côte D’Ivoire, Ayouba Doumbia

Dissertations and Theses

Since the early days of independence, the African continent has been the theatre of many ethnic conflicts. While people, in general, assume these conflicts to be political and blame the conflicts on authoritarian regimes, they dismissed the fact that conflict between ethnicities is a phenomenon that has occurred for hundreds of years and in all corners of the Earth. Entire countries have been devastated by years of ethnic strife. Once ethnic conflict breaks out, it is difficult to stop. Conflicts in the Balkans, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq, and Darfur are among the deadliest examples from the late 20^th and early …

Roberto Bolaño’S 2666, The Funneling Effect Of Capitalism, And The Production, Consumption, And Proliferation Of Violence For Profit, John Timlin

Dissertations and Theses

Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 is a realist text, one that reflects the simple fact that in contemporary capitalism, the physical destruction of female bodies is a profitable enterprise; one that forces its readers to confront their complicity or outright participation in violence against women; and one that relates directly to violence against women as consumable entertainment in American mass culture.

Tracking The Racial Validity Of Placement By Probability, Annie M. Del Principe, Lesley Broder, Lauren Levesque

Publications and Research

Any placement decision is a gamble on the validity of the mech- anism used. The better the placement mechanism matches the actual pro- ficiencies required for success in a future, real-life context, the more accu- rately it will place students into the best classes for them and the more valid it will prove to be. But what happens if the most obvious, commonsensical approaches to placement that would appear to have the strongest validity— writing tests for placement into writing classes—prove unreliable? Rather than accurately placing students into the “right” class for them, we now know that writing placement tests …

The Rosalía Polemic: Defining Genre Boundaries And Legitimacy In Flamenco, Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

In 2018, Spanish singer Rosalía attained international popularity with her innovative flamenco-fusion album El mal querer. Within the flamenco world, the Rosalía vogue provoked vehement and ongoing polemics, involving whether or not her music should be regarded as “flamenco,” whether she had the social credentials to be accepted as an innovator, and whether it was proper for her to adopt the persona of a ghetto-girl Gypsy in her hit music video, “Malamente.” These controversies reveal much about flamenco culture, and especially about the tensions inhering to its status as both a concert art form and a traditional idiom embedded …

Civility And Its Discontents: Subway Etiquette, Civic Values, And Political Subjectivity In Global Taiwan, Anru Lee

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Transgender And Gender Non-Binary Healthcare Coverage In State Medicaid Programs: Recommendations For More Equitable Approaches, Robin Kempf, Nicole M. Elias, Alonso J. Rubin-Desimone

Publications and Research

Transgender and gender non-binary (TGNB) individuals face discrimination in healthcare settings and barriers to healthcare access, resulting in health disparities. These inequities are compounded by the intersection of lower socioeconomic status and geography. To understand the differences in how states provide healthcare to TGNB individuals in poverty, we ask: What are state Medicaid programs offering TGNB residents, and how can coverage be more equitable across jurisdictions? To answer these questions, we examine medical services covered by 15 diverse Medicaid programs and compare them to the services recommended by the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH). Unsurprisingly, the analysis reveals …

Covid–19 As A Catalyst For U.S. Child Care Policy Reform: Factsheet, Maria J. D’Agostino, Nicole M. Elias

Publications and Research

The burden of child care in the wake of widespread K-12 school closures has disproportionately harmed women, communities of color, and lower income families -- a clear indicator that now is the time to adopt a federally-subsidized childcare system in local communities that goes beyond public schools. Current proposals must address regulatory and financial challenges to child care centers and home-based providers, allow for local government involvement and discretion, and maintain flexibility for parents with non-traditional work schedules.

Beyond Bostock: Implications For Lgbtq+ Theory And Practice., Sean Mccandless, Nicole M. Elias

Publications and Research

The recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling in Bostock v. Clayton County is a landmark piece of case law that offers fundamental rights to LGBT persons. This essay reflects on how this case arrived at the Supreme Court and its implications for theory and praxis. The overall conclusion is that cautious optimism is warranted.

Musical Borrowings, Copyright, And The Canard Of “Cultural Appropriation", Peter L. Manuel

Publications and Research

This essay reviews the basic contours of the cultural appropriation controversies as they have been waged in reference to music in both academic and vernacular circles. It discusses some of the debates that have involved white performers’ musical borrowings from African-American culture, and also musical flows outside the Euro-American mainstream. It explores relations of these ethical polemics to notions of copyright and argues that these can provide a moral guide to the propriety of many cultural interactions. It further critiques the terminological and conceptual distortions and obfuscations that have tended to plague discussions, both on scholarly and popular levels. These …

Students And Parents: How Academic Libraries Serve A Growing Population, Marta Bladek

Publications and Research

In recognition of the critical role libraries play in the educational lives of parenting students, there has been a noticeable trend in academic libraries to offer services and spaces for students and their children. This article reviews recent LIS literature on student parent initiatives in academic libraries, with the emphasis on the United States. The purpose of this synthesis is to highlight demographic data, research findings, and case studies that, considered together, may significantly expand the profession’s knowledge about the barriers parenting students face in accessing the library and its services. The first part of the article lays out the …

Gender In Emergency Services: Foundations For Greater Equity In Professional Codes Of Ethics, Sebawit Bishu, Sean Mccandless, Nicole M. Elias

Publications and Research

The lack of gender equity in the public sector is a critical issue, especially for emergency services. We explore the gendered nature of firefighting and policing at both professional and organizational levels. We assess gender equity by asking the following questions: (1) How have understandings of gender in emergency services evolved over time? (2) What are the normative implications of emergency services' lack of gender equity? We draw from feminist literature to critique the lack of progress and examine firefighting and policing histories along with the professional ethics codes of the U.S. Fire Administration and the International Association of Chiefs …

Online Or In-Person? Examining College Decisions To Reopen During The Covid-19 Pandemic In Fall 2020, Jacob Felson, Amy Adamczyk

Publications and Research

When coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) became a major impediment to face-to-face college instruction in spring 2020, most teaching went online. Over the summer, colleges had to make difficult decisions about whether to return to in-person instruction. Although opening campuses could pose a major health risk, keeping instruction online could dissuade students from enrolling. Taking an ecological approach, the authors use mixed modeling techniques and data from 87 percent of two- and four-year public and four-year private U.S. colleges to assess the factors that shaped decisions about fall 2020 instructional modality. Most notably, the authors find that reopening decisions about whether …