Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Graduate Student Advocate, December 15, 1989, Vol. 1, No. 3, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

CUNY Chancellor Will Resign (p. 1)

Committee for Cultural Studies Plans Doctoral Program: Student Involvement Encouraged (p. 1)

A Veiled Affair. Binita Mehta (p. 1)

Table of Contents (p. 1)

Around and About The Center

The Doctoral Students’ Council: A Report (p. 2)

Illustration: Post-Modernism (p. 2)

Enhancement Funds for Students with Disabilities (p. 2)

Photograph: International Students Association (p. 2)

In Search of the Missing Rib. Ed Marx (p. 3)

Dear Mr. Update (p. 3)

More Rooms Available in West Hall (p. 3)

Masthead (p. 4)

Editorials & Letters

Voted In or Out of Business? (p. …

Workplace Boundaries: Conceptions And Creations, Cynthia Fuchs Epstein

Publications and Research

Social analysts have long been concerned with the changing workplace and its consequences for society and for individual workers. Today as well, under conditions of global technological and organizational transformation, work and its contents and discontents pose new questions for research and social policy.

To Tell The Truth: The Lesbian Herstory Archives: Chronicling A People And Fighting Invisibility Since 1974, Polly Thistlethwaite

Publications and Research

A portrait of the Lesbian Herstory Archives by a volunteer, describing the archive in its original home in Joan Nestle's Upper West Side New York City apartment that she shared with Mabel Hampton. Originally published in Out/Week Magazine.

The Graduate Student Advocate, September 1989, Vol. 1, No. 1, Advocate

The Advocate

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

International Students: A Quality Resource (p.1)

Doctoral Student Council Elects New Officials (p. 1)

Michael Harrington: The Last Humanist? (p. 1)

Around & About The Center

Remembering Michael Harrington: Being a Socialist. Will Petrie (p. 2)

Carina Yervasi of the Doctoral Students' Council Welcomes New Students (p. 2)

Cartoon. Brian Biggs (p. 2)

Arbitrary Judgements (p. 2)

Services for Disabled Students (p. 2)

The Deskilling of an Ancient Honorable Craft. Brooklyn Slim (p. 3)

Dining with Inka (p. 3)

Dear Mr. Update (p. 3)

Editorials & Letter (p. 4)

Miracle on 42nd Street

Soldiers of Misfortune: CUNY, …

Herders, Gatherers And Foragers: The Emerging Botanies Of Children In Rural Sudan, Cindi Katz

Publications and Research

The range of children's knowledge of plants and their uses in an agricultural village in Sudan is presented in a context of ecological and economic change. Children participated in procurement of vegetation for food, fodder and fuel needs. In some areas, knowledge of plants was gender and task-specific. Participant-observation and ethnosemantic interview techniques were used to elicit knowledge and construct a children's taxonomy of plant material

Neurological Soft Signs And School Achievement: The Mediating Effects Of Sustained Attention, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, David Shaffer, Joseph E. Barmack

Publications and Research

Citation:

Schonfeld, I. S., Shaffer, D., & Barmack, J.E. (1989). Neurological soft signs and school achievement: The mediating effects of sustained attention. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 17, 575-596. doi:10.1007/BF00917723

Psychology And City College, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Five 1988 winners of APA Awards attended City College and one award winner taught chiefly at City College. Morton Deutsch, who won one of the Awards for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, and Robert Glaser, who won the Distinguished Scientific Award for the Applications of Psychology, are City College alumni. Three of the winners of the Awards for Distinguished Professional Contributions were students at City College. Lenore Walker earned her master's degree at City College, although she did her undergraduate work at City's sister institution, Hunter College. Alfred Wellner was a City College alumnus. Hans Strupp attended City College before moving to …

Serial, Parallel And Delay Strategies In The Processing Of Structurally Ambiguous Language Constructions, Harvey Slutsky

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Through a set of two experiments, the present study attempted to determine which of three language processing strategies, that is, serial, parallel or delay is employed in parsing two kinds of structurally ambiguous visually presented sentences (transitive and verb complement). The study used a relatively new technique, a self paced syntactic decision task whose sensitivity to local parsing complexity was demonstrated in the first experiment through a partial replication of Ford's (1983) work with relative clause sentences. The findings showed Object relatives to be harder to process at the position of the main verb. The same findings from a followup …

Children's Video Usage: A Comparative Study Of Nine To Eleven-Year-Olds Living In London And New York, Seth P. Welins

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this cross-cultural study identifies which video and non-video related activities are selected by nine-to-eleven year old children living in New York and London, England. Four hundred children were surveyed and interviewed about their television and VCR viewing habits and their use of computers and computer/video games as well their after-school, non-video activities.

A uses-gratifications approach provides a general framework for the analyses of the data. These data show that there is a complex interplay between children's activity choices and the occupational status of the child's parents, the child's race/ethnicity, gender, ecological environment, family structure and social structure. …

Lesbian And Gay, Polly Thistlethwaite, Daniel C. Tsang

Publications and Research

"The time is past when librarians can assume no patron is lesbian or gay, or that there is no interest in gay research," Dan Tsang and Polly Thistlethwaite wrote in the introduction to the 'Lesbian and Gay' section of Katzes' 1989 edition of Magazines for Libraries. This title review of the queer periodicals of the day was intended to serve as a guide and justification for 'mainstream' libraries' collection building. The number and range of titles in Thistlethwaite and Tsang's collaborative entries (1989, 1992, and 1995) far exceeded any mainstream library collection known to either of the authors who …

Political Participation Of Puerto Rican Women: Mapping A Research Agenda, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

This article reviews the theoretical approaches used to study Hispanic women in politics and highlights their inadequacies for studying the political behavior of low-income Puerto Rican women, who are used as a case in point. It is not an in-depth study but an effort to develop appropriate research questions and to suggest strategies for the systematic collection of data. In general, community groups are the basic arena for the political activity of Puerto Rican women in New York City. Thus, new theoretical approaches are necessary to capture Hispanic women’s modes of influencing public policy.

College Library Friends Groups In New York, New Jersey, And Connecticut, Janet Munch

Publications and Research

Friends of the Library groups are largely undocumented in the professional literature at non doctoral-granting colleges and universities. Through a survey of Friends activities at colleges and universities in the tri-state area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut, this study fills a gap in knowledge about these groups.

Enhancing Undergraduate Achievement In Educational Psychology With Instructional Objectives, Irvin Sam Schonfeld, Eric Rasmussen, Rosemary Nieto, Cheryl Sims

Publications and Research

Two quasi-experiments were conducted to assess the effects of exposure to instructional objectives on the achievement of undergraduates enrolled in an educational psychology course. Students enrolled in morning and afternoon course sections during the fall semester did not receive objects. Comparable students enrolled in morning and afternoon sections of the course during the subsequent spring semester did. Regression analyses that controlled for age and past achievement indicated that among afternoon classes, exposure to objectives improved performance on the midterm and final exams by at least 7 points. No significant effects were found for the morning classes. It was argued that …

Attitudes About Disabled People And Evaluations Of A Disabled Or Nondisabled Task Partner After Success Or Failure, Joan Weisenfeld Bailey

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examined the issue of ambivalence-induced behavioral amplification as applied to physically disabled individuals. The theory maintains that: (a) attitudes toward the disabled tend to be ambivalent rather than hostile, sympathetic or indifferent; (b) under certain conditions behavior toward disabled individuals may be more extreme than behavior toward nondisabled individuals; and (c) the extreme behavior is mediated by individual differences in ambivalence about disabled people in general. These three notions were tested. Internally consistent, independent scales of pro and anti attitudes toward the physically disabled were developed, supporting the notion of a high potentiality for ambivalence in attitudes toward …

Prediction Of Treatment Response In Chronic Pain Patients: The Relationship Between Illness Behavior And Self-Concept, Andrew Bruce Rosenblum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated self-concepts held by chronic pain patients. It was hypothesized that self schemas of probable and ideal levels of control, dependence on medical care, physical vulnerability, affiliation and conflict with physicians would predict response to treatment.

At intake into a three week in-patient program 72 pain patients were given a self perception scale which measured these five dimensions across three "possible selves" (now self, probable self and ideal self). Patients were also given at intake, and at follow-up (5 weeks after discharge), a battery of psychological and behavioral measures. Control, dependence on medical care, and vulnerability (CDV) were …

Cold Type: Computerized Typesetting And Occupational Subcultures In The New York City Newspaper Industry, Eve Fay Hochwald

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Using a framework drawn from recent social science discussions of the labor process and from the anthropological literature on culture as the generative basis through which people adapt to or transform their social circumstances, this dissertation analyses the changes occurring in the occupational subcultures and political organization of printers, journalists, and computer service workers in the New York City newspaper industry since the introduction of computerized typesetting in the mid-1970s. One consequence has been a restructured labor force, entailing a shift of skilled, traditionally male, manual craft jobs to, on the one hand, clerical "women's work," and, on the other, …

A Comparison Of The Symbolic Function In Delicate Self-Mutilators With Joyce Mcdougall's Conceptualization Of The Symbolic Function In Psychosomatic Illness And Sexual Perversion, Thomas Richard Negron

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The syndrome of delicate self-mutilation is reviewed with emphasis on the psychoanalytic interpretations that have been offered to explain this behavior. These interpretations generally find a symbolic meaning in this symptom, while also noting the pre-verbal level of development that is a marked aspect of these patient's functioning. The alternate hypothesis is offered that delicate self-mutilators suffer from a deficit in their capacity to create symbolic symptoms.

The work of Joyce McDougall with patients manifesting sexual perversions and psychosomatic symptomology is reviewed. She hypothesizes that these patients suffer a deficit in their capacity for symbolic functioning, and she coins the …

Music In The Funeral Traditions Of The Akpafu, V. Kofi Agawu

Publications and Research

"Nna lo senu kuwe, fie oresire somoloo?" ("Who laid a mat for him, so that he slept so deeply?") With this rhetorical question, the Akpafu of Southeastern Ghana initiate a period of public mourning occasioned by the death of one of their number.1 The philosophic significance of death in Akpafu culture is twofold. First, it marks the completion of the earthly cycle of existence, birth-circumcision-puberty-marriage-death. Second, it opens the door to a higher, spiritual realm in which the deceased, as an ancestor, takes his place alongside the lesser gods and the Supreme Being in the higher reaches of the hierarchy …

Indexing For The Online Catalog, Arthur B. Chitty

Publications and Research

The proliferation of online public access catalogs (OPACs) requires some systematic rationale for the comparative evaluation of their designs. Considered as an indexing application, the OPAC can be analyzed by three features: the varieties of bibliographic data processed, the kinds of indexes constructed, and the ways in which the indexes are searched. No one configuration applies to every library research project with equal efficacy or likelihood of satisfying queries. However, the rationale proposed can compare and evaluate alternative library computer catalogs in terms of the library's understanding of the relationship between the library's collections and their use.

Silencing In Public Schools, Michelle Fine

Publications and Research

Demands for silencing signify a terror of words, a fear of talk. This essay examines these demands as they echoed through a comprehensive public high school in New York City. The silencing resounded in words and in their absence; the demands emanated from the New York City Board of Education, book publishers, corporate sponsors, religious institutions, administrators, teachers, parents, and students. In the odd study of what's not said in public schools, one must be curious about whom silencing protects, but vigilant about how silencing students and their communities undermines fundamentally the vision of education as empowerment (Freire 1985; Shor …

The Experience Of Public Art In Urban Settings, Roberta Degnore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The sine qua non for an artwork in the urban realm is neither its judged "goodness" nor the ability of audiences to perceive it "correctly," but is the total experience the work contributes to as part of the fabric of interlocking meanings that places have in people's lives.

In urban settings, the physical attributes and private intentionality of a work do not stand alone. As carefully as an artist installs his/her pieces in a gallery, the same concern for their working together and with their total environment must be applied to artworks in complex public settings, where choice to be …

Precursors Of Creativity: Metaphor, Symbolic Play And Categorization In Early Childhood, Jay A. Seitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Four and 6-year-olds were presented with seven different types of metaphorical relationships in both pictures and words. The core task consisted of a metaphor comprehension task of identical triads (target, nonliteral match, literal match) comprising perceptual/color, perceptual/shape, physiognomic, cross-modal, collectional, psychophysical and taxonomic matches. Children matched items based either on nonliteral similarity or literal contiguity. A series of symbolic play tasks were given to half the subjects at each age group and were hypothesized to facilitate the comprehension of metaphor because of an underlying structural similarity common to systems of reference invoked in both the act of metaphor comprehension and …

Evaluation Issues In A Quasi-Experiment On Teaching Thinking Skills, Irvin Sam Schonfeld

Publications and Research

Comments on the method used by R. J. Herrnstein et al (see record 1987-08654-001) to evaluate an educational intervention that was designed to advance the thinking skills of 7th graders. It would seem preferable to adopt multiple linear regression techniques, rather than the t-test, as the chief analytic tool.

Puerto Rico: Colonialism Revisited, Sherrie Baver

Publications and Research

Because Puerto Rico is not systematically consulted on issues central to its development and because this situation has become so obvious to all island officials during the last decade, elites across the entire Puerto Rican political spectrum felt pressured to ""come out of the colonial closet," tentatively in August 1977 and forthrightly in 1978.3 Every summer since, spokespersons from all political parties have gone before the UN Decolonization Committee to protest the status quo in Puerto Rico. Before 1977, only Puerto Rican Independentistas (who win only a small percentage in island elections), Cuba, and the Soviet Union had labeled Puerto …

Social Security, Savings, And Labor Supply Of The Elderly In Japan, Tetsuji Yamada

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The study examines the controversial, inconsistent empirical results of the effect of social security on personal savings and analyzes the interdependency in the context of social security between the personal savings and labor supply behavior of elderly workers.

Very few studies in this field have been done, and it has not theoretically and empirically been accomplished yet in Japan. Time-series data are used for 1946-1982, and the methods of technique are ordinary least squares and a simultaneous-equation model in the life cycle framework.

The study finds that social security affects personal savings and that the benefit effect dominates the retirement …

The Impact Of Presentence Investigations On Plea Bargained Dispositions In Kings County Supreme Court, Joseph G. Enright

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study examines the presentence function of probation from an historical and empirical perspective which argues that the purported diminution of the role of the presentence report (PSR) in the sentencing process–as a result of sentence bargaining–is more reflective of a prevailing disenchantment with the rehabilitative ideal than any thoroughly considered, reliable validation of the PSR's dispensibility. It is demonstrated, through a review of the literature, that poorly conceived, polemically biased empirical research has helped to perpetuate the notion that these reports have little value. A survey of studies and inquiries conducted in New York over the past twenty years …

Israeli, Palestinian And Egyptian Explanations Of Political Actions In The Middle East, Bethamie Horowitz

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This study investigated how people affiliated with different parties in an international conflict understand their own actions and the actions of their adversaries. Using data gathered in the Middle East in 1982, the study examined the explanations offered by 1336 Israeli Jews, Palestinians (living in Israel) and Egyptians to three political events in the Middle East: 'Israeli Air Force conducts a raid on Beirut,' 'Palestinians attack a bus on the Haifa-Tel Aviv highway,' and 'A peace treaty is announced between Israel and Egypt.'

The study, an exploratory analysis, was carried out in a sequence of stages. First, the analysis involved …

Nazi Doctors, Psychology, And Evil, University Faculty Senate

CUNY UFS Publications

University Faculty Senate, Annual Dinner Meeting, Dec. 16, 1986

V. .Dessert/Guest Lecturer: Distinguished Professor Robert J. Lifton -"Nazi Doctors, Psychology, and Evil." Professor Lifton was appointed to John Jay College, the Graduate School and University Center, and the CUNY Mt. Sinai School of Medicine.

This talk was produced and distributed after the meeting Minutes.

Dora María Téllez Interview, Marc Edelman

Publications and Research

1986 interview with Nicaraguan Sandinista leader Dora María Téllez, who describes growing up under the Somoza dictatorship, developing a political consciousness, the FSLN's armed struggle against Somoza, the problems of governing after the revolutionary triumph, and other topics.

A Tour Of Country Programs, Ron Nigh, Liliana Madrigal, Juan Carlos Navarro, Aldemaro Romero Jr., Ernesto Barriga, Teresa Ortiz, Carlos Ponce, John E. Earhart

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.