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Chalk! It Up
At commencement last year, I spoke about the thousands of rush hour commuters on a Washington DC subway platform who never noticed, much less stopped, while world-famous violinist Joshua Bell played Bach. Yet here, on the Seventh Avenue sidewalk outside FIT—at almost any time of day or night—busy passersby are stopping, or at least slowing down, as they notice…
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Claudia Rankine Visits FIT
Poet, playwright, and social commentator Claudia Rankine shared a little inside information with the audience of students and faculty when she appeared in a packed Katie Murphy Amphitheater at FIT to give a talk entitled “The Creative Imagination and Race.” As a high-school student, Ms. Rankine told the rapt audience, she had travelled from her…
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Student Ideas Resonate at Clinton Global Initiative University
At every turn at FIT, I find a reason to be proud. It is approaching end of semester and our corridors and lobbies are starting to radiate with outstanding examples of student (and faculty!) work. In too many disciplines to name, our students are being selected for exceptional awards. Last week I posted about two…
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Goodbye, Winter!
It is hard to believe that daylight savings time has arrived. Just the other day we had to close the college early—yet again—because of the treacherous snow-driven weather. But now Accuweather tells us that all that snow will be melting—it is predicting temperatures in the 40s and 50’s, and even the 60’s over the next…
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“Snow” Nice to be Back at Work
I do not envy Mayor De Blasio or Governor Cuomo today. One “failed” snow storm—and they are criticized, castigated, berated, and blamed for making what their fault-finders call a bad decision. As we all know, the city was shut down late Monday and Tuesday—the roads closed and, in an unprecedented move, the subways shut down…