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Welcome to the Shark Tank: Long Island University Chooses the Shark as New Mascot

Long Island University students and alumni made history Wednesday by choosing the Shark as the mascot of its expanded NCAA Division I program, which will unite the Brooklyn and Post campuses. The movie Jaws made us fear the shark, and television shows like Shark Tank, Shark Week, and Sharknado are staples of popular culture. Long Island University is the first NCAA Division I program on the East Coast to make the Shark its mascot.

LIU teams will compete as the Sharks beginning this September. The Shark is an animal which embodies strength, resolve, and brilliance, all qualities that embrace the spirit of LIU and the individuals who comprise our extraordinary University.

The Shark was selected as the favorite mascot from among three finalists by a vote of LIU students and alumni. Voting was held from April 23, 2019 through May 14, 2019, with the Shark beating its competitors, the Eagle and the Falcon.

“Long Island University students and alumni took the opportunity to set a distinct path by choosing the fearsome Shark as our mascot,” Long Island University Director of Athletics Debbie DeJong said, “As we elevate LIU’s campuses into a single, stronger, Division I program, we will join together proudly as Sharks.”

LIU’s united NCAA Division I program builds on a foundation of excellence and tradition. In LIU’s history, its teams (LIU Brooklyn Blackbirds and LIU Post Pioneers) have combined for 23 national championships, 215 conference titles, and 362 All-Americans. The colors of the new LIU Sharks will be blue and gold— chosen to honor and unite the traditions of the University.

The announcement drew early interest from local New York news media. Both Newsday and the New York Post reported the news.

What the new mascot will look like remains to be seen, but plans are underway to reveal the Shark soon when the waters clear.

Shark Facts:

  • Defender of the Island
  • Feared animal of the sea
  • Celebrated predator
  • Relentless, powerful and intelligent
  • Sharks have lived in the oceans for more than 400 million years—200 million years before the dinosaur set foot on land
  • Sharks can weigh up to 50,000 lbs.
  • More than 400 species of sharks: it’s very diverse
  • Detect prey 3,000 feet away
  • Powerful jaws can generate up to 40,000 pounds of pressure per square inch
  • The bite force of a great white shark is 4,000 PSI—four times stronger than a tiger’s bite

For questions contact:

Casey Schermick, Director of Athletic Media Relations
Email: Casey.Schermick@liu.edu
Phone: 516-532-0852

More Than 2,300 Students Receive Their Degrees at LIU Brooklyn’s Commencement

(Photo courtesy Trey Pentecost/The Brooklyn Paper)

Dr. Spiridon (Spiro) Spireas, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board and Chief Executive Officer of SigmaPharm Laboratories, and Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, Ph.D., an award-winning serial entrepreneur, clinical psychologist and clinical hypnotherapist, each received honorary degrees at LIU Brooklyn’s commencement ceremony this year, which took place on May 14, 2019 at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn.

On an unseasonably chilly morning in mid-May, the exuberant participants were grateful the graduation ceremony took place indoors at the sports facility up the street from the LIU Brooklyn campus. A total of 1005 undergraduates received their Baccalaureates; 947 students received their Master’s Degrees; 73 received their Dual Baccalaureate/Master’s Degrees; and 249 students received their Doctorates. Thirty-one students earned their Advance Certificates. The ceremony was the joint commencement of LIU Pharmacy (Arnold & Marie Schwartz College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), LIU Brooklyn, LIU Global, and LIU Hudson of Long Island University.

A tenured Professor of Pharmacy at LIU Pharmacy, Dr. Spiridon Spireas was the keynote speaker. He received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from LIU President Dr. Kimberly R. Cline. He is the inventor and author of more than 130 international and domestic patents and patent-publications, and 200 scientific papers, books and other publication in the fields of industrial pharmacy, pharmaceutical technology, pharmacokinetics and analytical chemistry. He is also the inventor of several newly developed proprietary drug delivery systems used by the Pennsylvania-based company.

Founder of The Soor Center for Professional Therapy and Assessment in Kuwait, Dr. Naif Al-Mutawa, who also spoke, received an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree. A licensed psychologist in New York State, Dubai, Qatar and Kuwait, he is a member of the American Psychological Association and the American Association of Sexuality Educators, Counselors and Therapists. He has a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology from LIU, where he also earned a Master’s Degree in Clinical Psychology. Dr. Al-Mutawa has done extensive clinical work with former prisoners of war in Kuwait as well as with the Survivors of Political Torture Unit at Bellevue Hospital in New York City. He is the author of a children’s book that won a UNESCO Prize for Literature in the Service of Tolerance, and the creator of THE 99, the first group of comic superheroes born of an Islamic archetype, which drew praise from Forbes magazine as well as President Barack Obama.

When the last degree was given two cannons on opposite sides of the gymnasium floor blasted clouds of confetti into the air as the newly minted graduates cheered  with pent-up relief that they’d finally made the grade.

With $100 million in scholarships and financial aid awarded annually, LIU has 19 Schools and Colleges, 400 academic programs, a 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio, and 110 student-run clubs and organizations.

Payscale has ranked LIU Brooklyn as the “Best in the Nation for Health Professions” and one of the “Top 50 Colleges in the Northeast for Salary Potential.” Forbes ranked LIU in its Top Ten “Hot Colleges in the Making Under Innovative Management.”

Library of Congress Hosts LIU Alum Art Beltrone’s Vietnam War History Project

Part of "Marking Time: Voyage to Vietnam," Art and Lee Beltrone's traveling exhibit

World War II was in the past and the Vietnam War lay in the future when Art Beltrone (Post ’63, B.A.) first came to the Brookville campus in 1959. In the years to come, this former Long Island public relations man and ex-Newsday reporter, now residing in Keswick, Virginia, would come to play a key part in preserving the memories of the brave men who fought in those two epic battles. His unique veterans’ projects have drawn nationwide coverage in the Washington Post, The New York Times, CBS and NPR, to name a few media outlets that reported on his ongoing efforts to keep their history alive.

On May 17, 2019, the Library of Congress plans to host a special presentation of “Marking Time: Voyage to Vietnam,” a traveling exhibit by Art and Lee Beltrone, the husband and wife co-founders of the Vietnam Graffiti Project, at its prestigious Packard Campus’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Currently the exhibit is on display at the Heinz History Center in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, through September before it moves to the National World War I Museum and Memorial in Kansas City, Missouri, where it will remain until next May.

Of course, Beltrone had many other things on his mind freshman year—in particular the lack of an FM radio station like the one he’d been actively involved with at Sewanhaka High School in Floral Park. He liked broadcasting so much that he’d gotten a summer job at NBC after he finished high school. But he soon realized that delivering mail wasn’t going to get him on the air. So, he decided to go to college instead and become an English teacher.

As senior class president in 1963, Art Beltrone was on hand to greet New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller when he visited the Post campus.

Hoping to get a radio station off the ground at Post, he met with Dean of Students Fred DeMarr, who was cool to the idea at first until Beltrone suggested that the station could get sponsors and that he’d look into his NBC contacts about obtaining unwanted radio equipment. And that’s what happened. Years later, Beltrone would be honored by other radio alumni with a plaque as the founder of WCWP.

“One of the things that I still remember—and I really appreciate so much—was the encouragement of the Post faculty,” Beltrone said. This experience propelled him over the years to keep striving to accomplish something new.

“That’s what I learned as a Post undergraduate,” Beltrone explained. “When you have an idea you feel is worth pursuing, jump in and do whatever it takes to make it happen.”

In senior year, Beltrone took two elective journalism courses while playing varsity baseball. After class one day, his teacher, Tony Insolia, an esteemed Newsday editor, asked him to wait around. As Beltrone recalled the conversation, Insolia said, “ ‘Look, you play baseball, right?’ I said yes. So he says, ‘Why don’t you come to Newsday and take a look at us. Come for an interview.’ And this is the important part: He said, ‘If you get a job with us, we would like you to play softball on our softball team.’ I was a ringer!”

So he got the entry-level job and was quickly promoted to full-time reporter. It’d helped his cause that while he was an undergrad at Post he’d continued to work summers and weekends during the school year at NBC as a copy clerk in their news department, often pulling all-night shifts. Beltrone had only been at the Long Island paper about five months when he received a letter from the government telling him to report for his Army physical.

“Oh, my gosh, I’d just gotten this great job and I’m being drafted!” Beltrone recalled thinking. He followed a colleague’s advice and joined the Marine Corps Reserves, which had a battalion headquartered in Garden City, so he could remain at Newsday and fulfill his military obligation. He was never called to active duty, which added to the responsibility he felt when he later took on the veterans’ projects.

TWO RED SPORTS CARS

One summer night in 1963 after putting the paper to bed, he decided on a whim to stop at a different Garden City restaurant from his usual routine on his way home to Elmont. He parked his red Triumph Spitfire right behind a red MG midget that he couldn’t help noticing, since both convertible sports cars had their tops down.

“Lo and behold, there’s Lee sitting at the bar with her date,” said Beltrone about his future wife, a music major whom he’d known in high school. “We renewed our acquaintance and somehow the conversation got around to what vehicles we’re driving.” It turned out that he’d parked right behind her car. They got married in 1965 and eventually had two children—a son Brent and a daughter Laurel—who later got drafted into helping Art and Lee document their Vietnam Graffiti project.

Beltrone credits his late parents, Arthur and Marie Beltrone, for encouraging his life-long interest in military history when he was young. They’d take him to big family dinners at his grandmother’s house in Bay Ridge, where a German officer’s sword and medal from the Second World War hung on the wall of the dining room. “It was so intriguing! I would position myself at the table so I could look at them,” said Beltrone, adding that one of his uncles, an Army medic, had brought them back as souvenirs.

Beltrone’s first venture beyond studying war history and collecting military artifacts started in the early 1990s when a friend sent him a journal that had belonged to a captured American airman held prisoner during WWII.

“Its pages were covered with carefully placed poetry and collections of information, as well as pencil drawings and vibrant watercolors,” Beltrone later wrote in what would become “A Wartime Log,” published by Howell Press of Charlottesville, Va., to commemorate the 50th anniversary of D-Day. He called it “a collective memoir of life behind barbed wire.”

Beltrone learned that the Y.M.C.A. had produced these logbooks for their distribution to American POWs under the Geneva Conventions’ rules of war so the U.S. Army Air Force pilots and crewmen locked up in the prison camps could use them as journals, knowing that whatever they wrote would have to pass muster with German censors. After several years of research and thousands of miles of travel, Art and Lee Beltrone found more than a dozen diaries that had survived the war as well as the prisoners’ release—many journals had been burned for warmth on the Americans’ long march to freedom. An accomplished photographer and editor, she photographed them to illustrate this poignant volume. As Beltrone put it: “They all share a number of common characteristics: the prisoner’s patriotism, his sense of humor, his creativity, and his will to survive.”

Beltrone also contributed to an exhibit at the Intrepid Sea Air Space Museum in Manhattan called “The Wartime Log,” which opened Sept. 16, 1995. Among the POW artifacts accompanying the show was a violin that a skilled prisoner had crafted out of bed slats and a table leg, with sheep gut used for the strings.

A decade later Art and Lee collaborated on another vitally important book, “The Vietnam Graffiti Project: Messages From a Forgotten Troopship,” published in 2004 by Howell Press. How it came to be is a story for a movie. In fact, it was Beltrone’s friendship with his Virginia neighbor, Jack Fisk, a motion picture production designer as well as the husband of actress Sissy Spacek, that led the two men to go on a reconnaissance mission to an old troopship moth-balled in the James River and slated for the scrap heap. Fisk had been hired by Terrence Malick to ensure that “The Thin Red Line,” a film about Guadalcanal, was historically accurate. One of the scenes called for the interior of a WWII troopship.

So, on a chilly February morning in 1997, Beltrone and Fisk boarded the General Nelson M. Walker, a troopship commissioned in 1945 that was more than two football fields long and able to hold up to 5,000 troops. As they strolled below decks, they noticed that on the beds’ canvas bottoms men had written graffiti during their voyage overseas. Looking closely, Beltrone realized that the markings dated between 1967 and 1968. These soldiers were heading to Vietnam. One poignant record was a seven-line inscription left by an Army Specialist who apparently was influenced by the then-popular Buffy-Sainte-Marie song, “Universal Soldier”: “You’re the one who must decide who’s to live and who’s to die/You’re the one who gives his body as a weapon of the war—and without you all this killing can’t go on.” Another asked simply: “Will I return???”

Through Art and Lee Beltrones’ efforts ultimately 300 of these graffiti-inscribed canvases were saved from the ship before it was reduced to scrap metal in Texas in 2006. The canvases have been donated to the Smithsonian Institution and the Library of Congress as well as the Navy, Army and Marine Corps museums. An eight-bunk berthing unit became part of an exhibition called “The Vietnam War: 1945-1975”, curated by the New-York Historical Society. For their Vietnam Graffiti Project, the Beltrones mounted two exhibits—one for museums west of the Mississippi, the other for museums east of the river—under the same title, “Marking Time: Voyage to Vietnam.” Along the way, they have reconnected with a hundred of the veterans who had left their mark on board that ship. The exhibits have travelled for almost 15 years to over 70 venues.

“I knew the graffiti-covered canvases and other artifacts aboard the ship must be preserved,” Beltrone said, who today works as a military artifacts appraiser. “They were part of America’s military and social history.”

And thanks to Art and Lee Beltrone’s dedication, that history will live on.

LIU Post Holds its 61st Annual Commencement Ceremony

Eric Krasnoff

Eric Krasnoff, the retired chairman, president and CEO of Pall Corporation, received an honorary Doctor of Business degree at LIU Post’s commencement ceremony held on May 10, 2019 at the Pratt Recreation Center at LIU Post.

Because rain was in the forecast, ceremonies for Bachelor’s Degree candidates started indoors at 10 a.m. in the Pratt Recreation Center’s gymnasium, and the graduate and doctoral ceremony took place there at 1:30 p.m. when a brief round of showers finally did arrive.

All told, as reported in Newsday, 797 undergraduate students from LIU Brentwood, LIU Post and LIU Riverhead received their Baccalaureate Degrees, 748 students got their Master’s Degrees, one student earned a Dual Master’s and Bachelor’s Degree, 43 received their Doctoral Degrees, and 182 students earned their Advanced Certificates.

“From the day you enrolled at Long Island University, you joined an elite global community,” Dr. Kimberly R. Cline, President of Long Island University, told the graduating students seated before her in the gymnasium. “Today, you will join 260,000 alumni, spread throughout the world, many of whom have achieved the highest levels of success in their field. Take advantage of what it means to be part of that unbroken chain of alumni making a positive impact in the world. Keep in touch with them, learn from their accomplishments, and become and active and engaged member of our alumni association.”

Mr. Krasnoff was being recognized for his service to LIU, as a business leader who has promoted technological advances in the life sciences, and as a philanthropist who has continuously and generously supported his local community. An inventor with a patent for a novel approach to blood processing, Mr. Krasnoff is also the former chairman of the National Blood Foundation. He continues to serve on the board of The Nature Conservancy.

The highly philanthropic Krasnoff family established the Krasnoff Family Endowed Scholarship as well as the annual Abraham Krasnoff Memorial Award for Scholarly Achievement, which honors LIU faculty for outstanding scholarly achievement. He and his wife, Sandy, also recently supported the renovation of the Krasnoff Theater on the LIU Post campus. He has served on LIU’s Board of Trustees since 1992. He was elected Chairman of the Board of Trustees in 2014.

“Now in his sixth year as Chairman of the Board of Trustees of Long Island University, Eric Krasnoff’s leadership is marked by a wealth of executive experience and four decades of personal connection to the University,” proclaimed Dr. Randy Burd, LIU Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs, in his introduction. “Long Island University gratefully honors a leader whose vision has improved our world, our local communities, and our University.”

“For me, LIU has been a thread woven into the fabric of my life,” said Eric Krasnoff from the podium, adding that getting his honorary doctorate was “a terrific honor.”

With $100 million in scholarships awarded annually, LIU has 19 Schools and Colleges, 400 academic programs, a 12:1 student-to-faculty ratio, and 110 student-run clubs and organizations.

The Princeton Review rated LIU Post as one of the “Best in the Northeast.” For 15 consecutive years, LIU Post’s College of Management has been named to The Princeton Review’s list of “The Best Business Schools.” Forbes ranked LIU in its Top Ten “Hot Colleges in the Making Under Innovative Management.”

Mary M. Lai Model of Faith Award Dinner Raises Almost 24 Grand for LIU Post Campus Ministry

Mary M. Lai

By all accounts, the 24th Annual Mary M. Lai Communion Dinner was a remarkable success.

Held at the Interfaith Chapel in late April, the event raised almost $24,000 to support the ongoing community outreach programs launched by the Newman Catholic Campus Parish at LIU Post. This year the Model of Faith Award was presented to long-time volunteer Eileen Paterson, who started working at LIU in 1987 in the development office.

“The award has honored countless lay men and women and clergy, who demonstrated heroic virtue worthy of emulation within our University community,” said Father Michael Duffy, University Chaplain. “This year we are tremendously blessed for the opportunity to enroll Eileen into this prestigious list of recipients. We pray that by honoring Eileen with the Model of Faith award, she may continue to be an inspiration to all of us, especially the students and faculty of LIU Post.”

“It was such a pleasant experience to know that people really recognize what you do,” said Eileen Paterson after the ceremonial dinner. “I enjoyed every bit of it.”

Under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Rockville Centre, the Newman parish club supports Sunday Mass, Confirmation classes, community mission trips and spiritual retreats. They also sponsor ski outings, special excursions to Broadway shows and seasonal barbecues and other social events that include people of all faiths.

Marked by its high dome and stately pillars upholding the pediment above at its main entrance, the Interfaith Chapel resides on a knoll overlooking Gold Coast Road. Built from 1968 to 1971, the center cost more than $1 million to construct. Its neoclassical style was designed by architects Alfred Shaknis and Peter S. Van Bloem, who had done previous work on campus. Embedded in the white marble panel above the doorway are the Yin-Yang symbol, the Star of David, the Cross of Christianity, and the Star and Crescent Moon of Islam.

From its inception, Mary M. Lai, Senior Advisor and Treasurer Emerita, played an integral role. As the University’s first chief financial officer, Lai was one of the first women in America to reach that rank in higher education after beginning her long career here as a temporary bursar.

“In 1967, we had decided we were going to have an interfaith chapel,” said Lai (Brooklyn ’42, B.S. in Accounting), who recently recounted what it took to get the project off the ground. “I loved the idea myself. I’m one of the original contributors.”

Dr. R. Gordon Hoxie, University president from 1964 to 1968, had raised $650,000 for it, but that sum turned out to be insufficient by $350,000 when the bids came back higher. Complicating matters, Hoxie was on his way out by the time the ball got rolling.

“So here I am. I have to raise the money now, but how?” Lai said. “First thing I thought of was that Mrs. Post had given us $300,000 for the law school. We had a dean but he resigned when Hoxie left in 1968… Acting President George Stoddard said forget the law school. So I call Mrs. Post and I ask her if we could use her gift for the chapel and she said yes.”

But they were still coming up short. Then fate intervened. Owners of a nearby estate slated for demolition had contacted the administration.

“They said we could take what we wanted before it was torn down completely,” Lai recalled. One of the more interesting acquisitions turned out to be a pipe organ, which Post people retrieved and stored in the maintenance building after it proved too big to fit in the chapel then under construction. Fortuitously or not, the maintenance building caught fire. “I didn’t start the fire!” Lai laughed. They estimated that the organ was worth $50,000, and the insurance company came through with a check that answered their prayers.

“It was all done with gifts—and without touching tuition,” said Lai with pride.

And so the work of the Interfaith Chapel at LIU Post gladly continues to this day and beyond.

LIU Football Star Athlete Jake Carlock Signs With the New York Giants

The New York Giants have signed LIU Pioneers defensive back Jake Carlock as a free agent following the 2019 National Football League Draft.

The reigning Northeast-10 Conference Defensive Player of the Year caps off his outstanding final season at LIU by continuing his football career at the highest level. Carlock helped lead the team to an undefeated regular season, winning 10 straight games and a conference championship.

“This has been a dream of mine since I first picked up a football,” the 6-3, 225-pound cornerback told the Greater Babylon community paper after the reportedly lifelong Giants fan signed the deal with his favorite team. “Words can’t describe how excited I am.”

In fact, he told an interviewer for NFL Draft Diamonds that the one person in the world he’d like to have dinner with would be Tom Coughlin, who was the head coach for the New York Giants for 12 seasons—including two Super Bowl trophies—before joining the Jacksonville Jaguars as their executive vice president of football operations.

With Carlock on the team, the Pioneers set a new program record with 15 consecutive wins dating back to the 2017 season, leading to head coach Bryan Collins being named the Northeast-10 Coach of the year.

“We are all very proud of Jake,” said Coach Collins. “He practiced as hard as he played and was a leader by example. His ability to affect a game on the defensive side of the ball—whether rushing the ball, defending the run or in coverage—all these qualities will translate to the next level, and teams are also excited about his ability to play special teams as well as snap the football.”

Along with Carlock’s impressive performance on the gridiron, his teammate, defensive back Nazir Streater, made a sensational one-handed interception that snagged the No. 1 spot for Week 6 on ESPN’s SportsCenter’s broadcast of the Top 10 College Football Plays of the Week. As the game reel reveals, Carlock’s unrelenting pressure on the opposing quarterback played a part in his rushing the throw.

Carlock showed in the 2018 season that he is a high impact player. He led the Pioneers with 67 total tackles, 11 pass breakups, and three fumble recoveries. In the Northeast-10 championship game against New Haven, he recorded seven tackles, one interception, one fumble recovery and one pass breakup.

The son of Donald and Robert Carlock, Jake grew up with seven siblings in Babylon, N.Y., where he played varsity football at Babylon High School and helped his team capture back-to-back Long Island Class IV Championships. His prowess also earned him USA Today All-State honors along with his being named to the All Long Island and All Metro First Teams.

Majoring in physical education with a minor in health, Carlock aspires to coach football and basketball, and become a physical education teacher someday. But those goals will have to take a back bench as he pursues his dream—and maybe help the Giants reclaim their winning ways in the seasons to come.

All told, it’s been a sensational season to remember for the LIU Post Pioneers. And an unforgettable start for the next chapter in Jake Carlock’s career in professional sports.

Governor Andrew Cuomo Celebrates Earth Day with Historic Bill Signing at Long Island University

Gov. Andrew Cuomo took to the stage at the Tilles Center to make his announcement on Earth Day that New York will ban single-use plastic bags. (Photo by Rita Langdon, LIU)

New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo came to the campus of Long Island University to celebrate the 49th anniversary of Earth Day on April 22 when he signed historic legislation to ban single-use plastic bags. The law goes into effect next March.

More than 200 people attended the bill signing ceremony held at the Tilles Center for the Performing Arts at LIU Post. On hand for this memorable occasion were LIU Chairman of the Board of Trustees Eric Krasnoff, LIU President Dr. Kimberly R. Cline, Nassau County Executive Laura Curran, Suffolk County Executive Steve Bellone, State Senators Jim Gaughran, John Brooks and Anna Kaplan, as well as dozens of students and faculty.

As reported in Newsday, Cuomo said that single-use plastic shopping bags litter our highways and waterways. He conceded that shoppers will have to remember to bring along reusable bags when they go shopping but he called it “a minor inconvenience” and added that “in the scope of life it’s such a trivial thing.”

But left unchecked, plastic bags add up to a big environmental problem. Experts predict that by the year 2050, there will be more plastic than fish, by weight, in the world’s oceans. Governor Cuomo noted that nationwide, Americans use an estimated 100 billion single-use plastic bags each year. An average American family typically discards 1,500 single-use plastic bags annually.

“The banning of plastic bags is something we have been talking about for years,” Gov. Cuomo said. “This bag issue is not in isolation. You would have to be blind not to see the impact of climate change. You would have to be blind not to see the impact of extreme weather everywhere. We are literally destroying the planet and we know it.”

The time for action was clear, the governor said.

“It’s about making a change and making a change fast,” he said. “New York has always been a leader when it comes to leading on the tough problems. We lead the way on the environment once again.”

He announced this new policy at LIU because it’s a demonstrated national leader in the area of sustainability. The University has also been named by The Princeton Review as one of America’s top Green Colleges.

 

LIU Brooklyn Student Gets Chance of a Lifetime to Attend a Leadership Conference at West Point

LIU Brooklyn student Sidra Shabbir recently went upstate to a leadership conference at West Point.

For political science major Sidra Shabbir (Brooklyn ’20, B.A.), getting to meet Denis McDonugh, President Barack Obama’s White House Chief of Staff, was the icing on the cake when she recently represented Long Island University at the 7th Annual McDonald Conference for Leaders of Character held at West Point, the U.S. Military Academy.

“I was freaking out! I had no idea he was going to be there,” said Shabbir, who grew up in Dyker Heights and graduated from New Utrecht High School in Brooklyn.

“I was on my own completely, miles away from home, so obviously I was really intimidated and also very scared,” Shabbir admitted. “But after the four-day weekend I made so many friends and made so many connections, and networked so much, I feel that I learned a lot of life lessons from this experience.”

Named after Robert A. McDonald, the former chief executive officer of Procter & Gamble, the leadership conference brings together “top undergraduate student leaders from diverse backgrounds to participate in a team-based, experimental and analytical exercise,” as the mission statement says, “that bolsters leadership skills, fosters critical thinking and collaboration, and develops potential strategies for addressing pressing global issues.”

“Sidra’s an extraordinary young woman and a phenomenal student,” said Scott Krawczyk, Ph.D., Dean of the LIU Brooklyn Richard L. Conolly College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. After applying to the program in the fall, he learned in February that the University had been offered to send one exceptional student to the leadership conference with all expenses paid.

“This was a remarkable opportunity for one lucky LIU student,” he said. “It helped to shine a bright light on LIU within an array of highly distinguished students from some of the finest academic institutions in the world.”

After Dean Krawczyk consulted with Dr. Nathaniel Bowditch, Dean of the LIU Post College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, he said that “Sidra was the clear top choice.”

And so in late March, Shabbir was one of 60 students gathered on the banks of the Hudson River from across the country and around the world. Among the speakers at the four-day conference on the theme of leadership and technology was Jack Ma, co-founder and current chairman of Alibaba Group, a Chinese multinational conglomerate specializing in e-commerce, retail, Internet and technology. A former school teacher in eastern China, he started Alibaba out of his apartment and became one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs.

“He was so down to earth,” she said. “I was not expecting that!”

Each day of the conference was filled with panel discussions and special speakers. “There were a lot of Type A personalities up there,” Shabbir said, with a laugh, adding that sometimes the debate could get “a little heated,” but she took it upon herself to play a mediating role, which she found very rewarding.

When Denis McDonough was seated on a panel, she brought up the issue of drones. “So I decided to ask that in light of technology and innovation, do you believe that the ethical boundaries have become blurred, and if so, how do we make them clearer?” He took the mic, applauded the question, and responded energetically. Afterwards, she mustered the confidence to introduce herself.

“He told me, ‘We need more minds like yours in the White House!’ Wow, I was floored! He was so nice!”

Following McDonough’s footsteps to the West Wing is not in Shabbir’s current plans, however. After she graduates, she wants to go to law school and specialize in immigration and civil rights. She had nothing but praise for the preparation she’s gained at LIU Brooklyn. Out of high school she spent her freshman year at Hunter College, part of the City University of New York, in mid-town Manhattan.

“The faculty really didn’t care about the students,” she said. “I didn’t like the community there.” Her older sister, Iqra, a first-year student at LIU Pharma, recommended that she transfer to LIU Brooklyn because the classes were smaller and the faculty more engaged.

“At Hunter there were these huge lecture halls, sometimes with 500 kids,” Shabbir said. “It wasn’t for me.”

Her time at LIU has been very rewarding. In fact, she was elected sophomore governor of her class.
Now that she’s been to the conference at West Point, she enthused, “I want to go to more conferences! That was the best experience. I made so many friends! I feel I’m going to keep these connections for a very long time!”

LIU Brooklyn to Host MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Winner John Keene at This Years’ Paumanok Lecture

John Keene, celebrated author and upcoming Paumanok Lecture speaker

Acclaimed fiction writer and 2018 MacArthur Fellow John Keene will deliver this year’s prestigious “Starting from Paumanok” lecture at the LIU Brooklyn’s Kumble Theater on April 10, starting at 7 p.m.

This year’s annual event, which takes its name from a poem by Walt Whitman, comes a month before the 200thanniversary of his birth on May 31, 1819. The lecture’s title invokes the Native American word for Long Island and acknowledges the University’s geographic and cultural connection to one of Brooklyn’s—and Long Island’s—foremost literary figures. Among those who’ve previously appeared here are the novelists Sandra Cisneros, Gary Shteyngart and Edwidge Danticat; the poets Claudia Rankine and Tracy K. Smith; and the playwright Lynn Nottage.

Winner of the American Book Award and the Windham Campbell Prize in Fiction, John Keene received an A.B. from Harvard University and an M.F.A. from New York University. Currently he is a professor and chair of the Department of African American and African Studies and a professor in the Department of English at Rutgers University-Newark.

Keene was a member of the Dark Room Collective and a graduate fellow of Cave Canem. He is the author of the novel “Annotations”; the poetry collection “Seismosis,” an art-text collaboration with artist Christopher Stackhouse; and the short-fiction collection, “Counternarratives.” His writing has appeared in TriQuarterly, the Kenyon Reviewand Ploughshares, among other journals. He translated Brazilian author Hilda Hilst’s novel, “Letters from a Seducer,” from Portuguese.

Following the talk by John Keene, Parsons Family University Professor of Creative Writing Erica Hunt will join him on stage for a short interview before taking questions from the audience. Afterwards, he will sign books in the Kumble Theater lobby, thanks to a partnership with Greenlight Books in Brooklyn. The lecture is free and open to the public.

“John Keene just got a MacArthur as well as the Windham Campbell award—these are the two big prizes in literature outside of the Nobel. It’s really quite something,” said Professor Hunt, who knows Keene well. “He’s a modest guy. But this is the chance to see an individual whose mark on literature is at the level of a Toni Morrison, a James Baldwin or a William Styron.”

She sung his praises for his latest book, “Counternarratives.”

“If history is written by the victors, what he’s done is re-center the story and question whether the victors really had command over the story,” she explained. “He helps us see old stories anew. In a way, he has transformed what is possible in literature. We get a sense of the lives that were lived and perhaps lost, but he has recovered them for us. We see them fresh and bracing, and in them, he provides a script for ourselves about how we might depart from the dead end of the present time.”

The Paumanok Lecture is presented by the Department of English, Philosophy and Languages at LIU Brooklyn, with ongoing support from the Mellon Foundation Fund and LIU’s John P. McGrath Fund.

“Walt Whitman set out to be a poet of American democracy, and insisted in all of his works on the goodness of Americans and our nation’s capacity to embrace people of all walks of life,”said Leah Dilworth, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Philosophy, and Languages at LIU Brooklyn. “He saw himself as almost literally embodying every aspect of American life and as a medium who sang the ‘varied carols’ of all Americans. Now, more than ever, we need a voice like Whitman’s, and I for one am comforted by his words to future Americans at the end of his epic poem ‘Song of Myself’: ‘Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,/ Missing me one place search another,/ I stop somewhere waiting for you.’

“In this spirit,” Dilworth continued, “every year the Paumanok Lecture celebrates poets and writers and thinkers who, like Whitman, sing America.”

Time: 7:00-8:30 p.m.

Date: Wednesday, April 10, 2019

Place: Kumble Theater, LIU Brooklyn,  1 University Plaza, Brooklyn

For more information on the Paumanok lecture series, contact Leah Dilworth, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Philosophy, and Languages at LIU Brooklyn, 718-488-1050; Leah.Dilworth@liu.edu

For more information on Paumanok Lecture speakers, click here.  (with bios and dates of lecture)

 

 

LIU Announces Winners of 70th Annual George Polk Awards in Journalism

Long Island University’s announcement of the George Polk Awards was broadcast live on C-SPAN from the National Press Club followed by a panel discussion, with (from left to right) Sarah Gonzalez, Planet Money; Bill Siemering, radio pioneer and founding board member of NPR; Madeleine Baran, reporter for In the Dark: Season Two; and Margaret Sullivan, The Washington Post.

Washington, D.C. — Elevating one of the most prestigious awards in journalism, Long Island University (LIU) held a nationally televised event in the First Amendment Lounge at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., to announce the winners of the 70th Annual George Polk Awards.  The ceremony, which was broadcast live on C-SPAN2, cited reporting that exposed miscarriages of justice and wrongful dealings in politics and business at home, and the massacre and starvation of innocent civilians abroad.

Among the journalists honored for their work in 2018 were two Reuters correspondents imprisoned in Myanmar after uncovering the slaughter of Rohingya villagers, a writer who risked his life in Iraq to document revenge heaped upon questionable ISIS collaborators, and two of Jamal Khashoggi’s Washington Post colleagues who sought to hold Saudi Arabian authorities accountable for his murder. To see highlights of the awards ceremony, click here.

The event included opening remarks by LIU President Dr. Kimberly R. Cline and a special panel discussion on the role of the press moderated by Washington Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan.

“I am immensely proud of how this award has remained relevant despite an ever-changing journalistic landscape,” said Dr. Cline. “It is for this reason and the integrity and thoughtfulness of the men and women who painstakingly judge the hundreds of submissions that the George Polk Award has become one of the most highly regarded journalism honors in the country.”

The George Polk Awards are conferred annually to honor special achievement in journalism. The awards place a premium on investigative and enterprising reporting that gains attention and achieves results. They were established in 1949 by LIU to commemorate George Polk, a CBS correspondent murdered in 1948 while covering the Greek civil war.

Reporters won in 16 categories. One revealed how a federal prosecutor now in President Donald Trump’s cabinet helped a wealthy sexual predator avoid a lengthy prison sentence in Florida. Another amassed evidence of ballot fraud in a disputed North Carolina Congressional election.  A third trekked to the far reaches of war-torn Yemen to provide visual proof of rampant famine and death.

A team of reporters in Louisiana showed that convictions from split juries disproportionately impacted non-white defendants. Another team in Arizona combed records to reveal false claims and insider deals in the charter school industry. A third converged on the southern border and then spread across the country to show the traumatic effects of separating children from parents and other relatives under the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” policy of immigration.

Reporters analyzed a voluminous trove of documents to trace President Trump’s personal wealth to gifts from his father rather than to his own business acumen. Others documented how the social media giants of Silicon Valley misled regulators and the public, and empowered hucksters and propagandists as they followed the quest for ever larger growth. In medical news, winners demonstrated that widely marketed medical devices subject to lax federal oversight endangered patients. In local news, two reporters forced changes at a prestigious Florida hospital after reporting the deaths of 11 young heart patients in 18 months, three in one week.

For the first time, the twelve Polk judges awarded a prize for a podcast. It went to “In the Dark, Season Two,” which cast grave doubts on the guilt of an African-American currently on Mississippi’s death row who was tried six times for the same crime.

“The Polk Awards recognize the changing landscape of news,” said John Darnton, curator of the awards and recipient of two Polk Awards and a Pulitzer for his work with The New York Times. “The story of a person who in all likelihood is wrongly convicted is tried and true. But the podcast, as a delivery vehicle spread over multiple episodes that makes listeners feel it is unfolding in real time right before their ears, is a new and exciting reincarnation.”

Darnton noted that the judges had reviewed 554 submissions, a record number since the Polk Awards began. “Few years have been as fruitful as this one,” he added. “These winners tell us that the best of our journalists remain resilient, courageous, dedicated and undeterred by attacks on their ability and integrity.”

Bill Siemering, 84 years old, a pioneering force in public radio who wrote the initial mission statement for National Public Radio and was instrumental in launching such enduring programs as “All Things Considered” and “Fresh Air,” will be the 37th recipient of the George Polk Career Award.

Below are the winners of the 2018 George Polk Awards:

Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo of Reuters receive the award for Foreign Reporting for “Massacre in Myanmar,” establishing that paramilitary police executed 10 Rohingya Muslims in the village of Inn Din. They located a mass grave filled with bones sticking out of the ground and found photos of the execution. Faced with such evidence, Myanmar authorities announced that seven soldiers had been sentenced to 10 years in prison for their role in the massacre, to this date the only government admission of wrongdoing against the Rohingya minority. The reporters, members of the Buddhist majority, were convicted of violating their nation’s official secrets act and are serving seven years in prison despite global efforts to free them.

The award for National Reporting goes to the staff of The New York Times for a series of investigative reports focusing on how social media titans like Facebook maximized profits and misled regulators as well as the public with little regard for the consequences of failing to monitor misuse that included the widespread dissemination of hate-mongering, invasion of privacy and filing false reports. The Times’ stories prodded governmental action across the globe and caused millions of consumers to rethink their use of the Internet.

Jeff Adelson, Jim Mustian, Gordon Russell, John Simerman and the staff of The Advocate of New Orleans receive the award for State Reporting for a data-driven investigation of the roots and impact of a Louisiana law allowing 10-2 jury verdicts instead of the unanimity required in 48 states. Reporters found that 40% of that state’s felony trial convictions were by split verdict contributing to a staggering imprisonment rate, especially for blacks who comprise a third of Louisiana’s population but two-thirds of its inmates. Seizing on the findings, legislators and then voters amended the state constitution to change the law.

The award for Local Reporting is awarded to Kathleen McGrory and Neil Bedi of the Tampa Bay Times for “Heartbroken,” an investigative series revealing that 11 patients at Johns Hopkins All Children’s Hospital in Tampa, Fla., had died during and after heart surgery in an 18-month span, three in one week. They traced some deaths to such shoddy work as burst sutures and failed patches despite futile pleas by frontline medical staffers that the hospital was risking young lives. After the series was published, six administrators lost their jobs and the hospital’s Baltimore-based parent institution ceased such surgery in the Florida hospital pending an independent investigator’s report.

David Barstow, Susanne Craig and Russ Buettner of The New York Times are honored for PoliticalReporting for an 18-month study of President Trump’s financial history revealing that, far from the product of his business acumen, Trump’s personal wealth derives from his inherited fortune and what the paper called “dubious tax schemes.” Starting with three pages from a 20-year-old tax return, the reporters produced a 13,000-word account demonstrating the mythology of Trump’s persona as a self-made business leader who turned a $1 million loan from his father into a fortune. In fact, the paper reported, starting when he was just three years old, Donald Trump inherited at least $413 million.

The award for Medical Reporting goes to Kirby Dick, Amy Ziering and Amy Herdy for “The Bleeding Edge,” a documentary aired by Netflix that delved into the failure of risk-prone medical devices brought to the market without clinical trials and implanted in patients by physicians who can lack appropriate training for the surgical procedures involved. This documentary, which attributed numerous deaths and injuries to corporate greed as well as lax government regulation, was especially critical of the birth-control device Essure, which was developed with funding from a former FDA commissioner. The Bayer Corporation pulled Essure from the market days before “The Bleeding Edge” first aired.

Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald is honored in the Justice Reporting category for “Perversion of Justice,” a series that solved an old mystery: How did Jeffrey Epstein, a wealthy hedge fund manager who sexually abused under-age girls as young as 14 and lured them into prostitution, wangle a plea deal allowing him to serve 13 months on local work release rather than serious federal prison time? Brown traced the deal to a secret meeting between Alexander Acosta, then a federal prosecutor, and a former colleague of Acosta’s in a prestigious Washington law firm. Following the meeting, Brown reported, Acosta initiated a non-prosecution agreement for Epstein that played down the nature of his crimes and essentially shut down a pending FBI investigation. Brown identified 80 victims, tracked down 60 of them and persuaded eight to go on the record.The Herald’s series evoked a huge outcry that cost Acosta, now U.S. Secretary of Labor, any chance of attaining his next career goal as President Trump’s Attorney General.

The staff of ProPublica wins the award for Immigration Reporting for “Zero Tolerance,” a series of reports that dramatically altered the conversation about the Trump Administration’s strategy of separating children from adults accused of entering the U.S. illegally along the southern border in a thinly veiled deterrence effort. By June, some 2,300 of them had been separated in two months when a ProPublica reporter obtained an audio recording of the cries of 10 Central American children screaming for their parents while a Border Patrol agent joked, “We have an orchestra here. What’s missing is a conductor.” Subsequent stories revealed intolerable conditions at federal shelters, including hundreds of allegations of sex abuse that, abetted by reporting from other news organizations, forced the end of family separations as part of the “zero tolerance” policy.

The award for Education Reporting goes to Craig Harris, Anne Ryman, Alden Woods and Justin Price of The Arizona Republic for initially disclosing insider deals, no-bid contracts and political chicanery that provided windfall profits for investors in a number of prominent Arizona charter schools, often at the expense of underfunded public schools that educate all but 30,000 of Arizona’s 1.1 million students. Subsequent reports revealed that the state’s charter schools had evolved from locally supported alternatives to large chains, including two with business ties to Gov. Doug Ducey that received inordinate state support. The reporters found that charter schools used up nearly two-thirds of $143 million in low-interest state construction loans established for all schools, spent more on administration and less on classroom teaching than public schools did, and failed to outperform neighboring public schools. Legislative reform is on the horizon; even Ducey, a strong charter school advocate, has called for change.

Photojournalist Larry C. Price along with contributing reporters for Undark Magazine, a non-profit online publication, is honored with the award for Environmental Reporting for “Breathtaking,” a series of reports from seven countries on five continents illustrating the sources and effects of deadly particulate pollutants. Price’s striking photos and videos were accompanied by text from authors in India, Bangladesh, China, Chile, Nigeria, Macedonia and the U.S. (from California’s San Joaquin Valley, where fine airborne particles are byproducts of farm practices by agribusinesses that produce a quarter of America’s food supply). Undark, which made the reports available to major publications across the globe at no cost, received support from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting for the project.

The award for Magazine Reporting goes to Ben Taub of The New Yorker for “Iraq’s Post-ISIS Campaign of Revenge,” a firsthand account of the detention of more than 100,000 Iraqis and summary execution of hundreds, mostly members of the country’s Sunni minority, found to have collaborated with ousted ISIS occupation forces by vengeful Shiites in sham trials featuring confessions extracted by torture. In one stunning example, after a man made a persuasive case that he was a victim of mistaken identity, it took nine minutes for a Shiite tribunal to convict him anyway. Repeatedly threatened and detained by militias during his three weeks in Iraq, Taub pressed on to document an important story largely ignored in the West. Taub was also honored last year for his account of the devastating effects of Lake Chad’s shrinkage, making him the eighth back-to-back Polk laureate and the first in 20 years.

PBS NewsHour special correspondent Jane Ferguson wins the award for Foreign Television Reporting for her graphic reports portraying victims of the humanitarian disaster resulting from the proxy war fought between forces allied with Saudi Arabia and Iran in Houthi-controlled northern Yemen. Ferguson flew into southern Yemen and slipped away from Saudi authorities who had barred reporters from going north. Garbed in Yemeni woman’s attire to avoid detection, she crossed areas dominated by Al Qaeda fighters to reach places where famine and disease were taking their highest toll in what she characterized as the weaponization of hunger as a tool of war in her PBS dispatches as well as a New Yorker Magazine essay.

The award for Local Television Reporting goes to Joe Bruno of WSOC-TV in Charlotte, N.C., for stories that helped establish with certainty that McCrae Dowless, a Republican political consultant, orchestrated a plot to destroy some properly cast absentee ballots and fraudulently include others in a rural North Carolina Congressional race that the GOP candidate led by 905 votes. His interest piqued by a state election board’s initial refusal to certify the results, Bruno and his crew travelled well out of the station’s normal coverage area to locate unsuspecting victims who had handed their ballots to Dowless’s operatives and subsequently found two women who confessed to the election fraud in interviews aired across the nation and online. Well into 2019, the election result was still unsettled.

Reporter Madeleine Baran and senior producer Samara Freemark of Minnesota-based APM Reports are honored for “In the Dark: Season Two.” Baran and Freemark’s work make a detailed and compelling case for the innocence of death-row inmate Curtis Flowers who has been tried and convicted a sixth time (following five successful appeals) for the 1996 murder of four people in a furniture store in the tiny Mississippi town of Winona, a crime he swears he did not commit. Buoyed by evidence the AMP reporters had uncovered that includes a key witness recantation, Flowers’ lawyers gained a rare writ of certiorari from the U.S. Supreme Court, which will hear his appeal this spring.

A Special Award is presented to columnist David Ignatius and Global Opinions editor Karen Attiah of The Washington Post for their eloquence and resolve in demanding accountability from the Saudi Arabian government and candor from the Trump Administration in the wake of the gruesome murder of their colleague and friend, Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In column after column, nine in all, Ignatius hammered home the Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s likely role in Khashoggi’s death and dismemberment, a connection U.S. intelligence agencies established despite President Trump’s equivocation, and Attiah, who had recruited Khashoggi as a Post contributor and hired him as a columnist, came out from behind her editor’s desk to wage a public campaign on behalf of the truth.

Bill Siemering, the Career laureate, began broadcasting at the University of Wisconsin student station, WHA. He then spent eight years as general manager of WBFO on the SUNY Buffalo campus, transforming it into a reliable chronicler of Vietnam-era dissent and a valued forum for dialogue and debate. After passage of Public Broadcasting Act of 1967, Siemering joined the founding board of NPR and became its first director of programming. In later years he fostered the establishment of independent radio in nations across Africa.

Winners of the 2018 awards will be honored at a luncheon ceremony at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on Friday, April 5. The journalist and author Charlayne Hunter-Gault will read the award citations and will also moderate this year’s David J. Steinberg Seminar of the George Polk Awards, “After 70 Years, Still Honoring Reporters Who Seek to Right Wrongs,” on Thursday evening, April 4, at LIU Brooklyn’s Kumble Theater for the Performing Arts. Several of this year’s award winners are expected to take part in the seminar, which starts at 6:30 p.m. and is free and open to the public.

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