Director
Marilyn Gittell
The Staff of the Howard Samuels Center must regretfully announce that the Center's Founding Director, Professor Marilyn Jacobs Gittell, died on February 26, 2010.
William Kelly, President of the City University of New York's Graduate Center, where Professor Gittell was on faculty for many years, had this to say:
A longtime member of the doctoral faculty in political science, Marilyn was a renowned scholar and highly respected social activist. She wrote extensively on urban politics and the politics of education and, from the time of its founding in 1988, directed the Howard Samuels Center, which specializes in applied and comparative research on local, regional, national, and international policies and politics, and places a high priority on training researchers and scholars.
Under her leadership, in an effort to promote diversity in the social sciences, the Samuels Center has made a particular point of seeking out talented women and minority graduate students interested in urban policy and provided dozens of graduate students with hands-on experience in the field.
In 2001, Marilyn established the "Marilyn and Irwin Gittell Fellowship," which will provide an annual award to a dissertation-level minority student from among the anthropology, history, political science or sociology programs at the Graduate Center for research focusing on urban policy. Her family has asked those wishing to express their sorrow to contribute to this endowed fund through the Graduate Center's Office of Institutional Advancement.
Marilyn was a great friend and colleague. She will be profoundly missed by our community.
On March 12, 2010, the New York Times, in its obituary ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/13/nyregion/13gittell.html?scp=1&sq=gittell&st=cse)
described Professor Gittell's prominent work in the 1960s on education reform in New York City:
Professor Gittell, who had conducted studies that found New York's school system hidebound and hopelessly top heavy, was an ardent proponent of transferring control of schools to local communities.
With T. Edward Hollander, Professor Gittell conducted a study of the city's school system for the City University Research Foundation. Released in 1967, it charged the system with inertia and called the Board of Education a "congested bureaucracy."
The same year, as a prelude to decentralization, the city set up experimental, locally controlled school districts in East Harlem, the Lower East Side of Manhattan and Ocean Hill-Brownsville. As the director of the Institute for Community Studies at Queens College, Professor Gittell administered Ford Foundation grant money to the three districts.
Professor Gittell will be missed.
Marilyn Gittell, the Director of the Samuels Center, also serves
as a professor of Political Science at the Graduate School and University
Center of the City University of New York. Under the Center's mandate,
Professor Gittell has produced an enormous body of scholarly work,
trained scores of graduate students, received numerous awards and
served as a consultant to several private and voluntary sector institutions.
Ms. Gittell has written extensively on the politics of education,
higher education for low-income women, state politics, and community
development. Her books include: Choosing Equality: The Case for
Democratic Schooling; The New Federalism in State Politics; Limits
of Citizen Participation; and her most recent book, Strategies for
School Equity: Creating Productive Schools in a Just Society, Yale
University Press, 1998. She most recently was co-editor and author
of a chapter in a special edition of the American Behavioral Scientist
entitled Higher Education Today: The Impact of State Politics and
Policies on Access and Economic Development, Sage Publications,
April 2000. In August 2001 Ms. Gittell received the Norton Long
Career Achievement Award in Urban Politics from the Urban Politics
Section of the American Political Science Association. Organizations,
published in September 1999.
Deputy Director Bill McKinney
Dr. Bill McKinney is the Deputy Director at the Howard Samuels
State Management and Policy Center. He holds a Ph.D. in anthropology
from Temple University and an M.A.A. (Masters of Applied Anthropology)
from the University of Maryland, College Park. Recently Dr. McKinney
has served as Co-Pi on several studies; Increasing Resources To
Meet the Needs of NYS’s Older and MRDD Population; Economic
Status of Working Women in New York State Project; and Constituency
Building of Affirmative Action in Texas and Michigan. In addition
to participating in all of the center's different projects, Dr.
McKinney is spearheading efforts to involve the center in research
addressing, grassroots organizing, civic engagement in Botswana,
Youth Organizing/Civic Engagement, as well as the role of Settlement
Houses and Public Libraries as points of civic engagement. Dr.
McKinney has been actively involved in a diverse array of research
for the past 15 years as an Ethnographer and Evaluator on topics
such as: Youth Organizing, Violence (Youth Violence Reduction
Partnership), Public Libraries (Urban Libraries Project), Public
Health (Children's Futures and the Cultural Systems Analysis Group),
and Settlement Houses (the Lighthouse). In addition to Dr. McKinneys
work at the HSC he is also the co-founder of the Youth Music Exchange
after-school program, and Ethnomatters, a research/evaluation
group in Philadelphia.
Bmckinney@gc.cuny.edu
Research Associate Ricardo Gabriel
Ricardo Gabriel is a Research Associate at the Howard Samuels Center and a Ph.D.
student in Sociology at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He
is an alumnus of Hunter College, where he double-majored in Africana & Puerto Rican/Latino
Studies and Political Science. His current research interests include Puerto Rican
politics and social movements in the Diaspora; the ethnic studies movement and
diversity/affirmative action in higher education; secularism and religion in American
politics and society, as well as secularism in communities of color; and the sociology
of sports and fitness, with an emphasis on the martial arts and combat sports such as
Western boxing and mixed martial arts (MMA). Ricardo is also a faculty member at the
Edward T. Rogowsky Internship Program in Government and Public Affairs at the City
University of New York, where he works with public high school and college students
in the Program's Model NYC Council and Model NYS Senate Projects. His work at the
Howard Samuels Center focuses on the Affirmative Action/Access to Higher Education
Project funded by the Ford Foundation.
rgabrielnyc@gmail.com
Research Associate Anthony Johnson
Anthony Johnson is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He holds a Masters degree in African-American studies from the Institute for Research in African-American Studies at Columbia University. He is also a research associate at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy Center in the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he has carried out research on state policy initiatives on access to education and affirmative action programs. His research interests include housing rights, urban anthropology, cultural history and African-American Studies with a strong regional focus on U.S. cities and post-apartheid South Africa. He has taught courses in cultural anthropology and African-American studies. Mr. Johnson has helped to coordinate two major conferences at the Howard Samuels Center that have focused on affirmative action and access to higher education. He is also the co-author of "The Politics of Affirmative Action: Access to Higher Education in the States" a comprehensive report on higher education and affirmative action policy initiatives.
ajohnson1@gc.cuny.edu
Research Associate Veronica Momjian
Veronica Momjian is a Research Associate at the Howard Samuels Center and a PhD student in Sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center. Veronica currently holds a Masters of Arts in religious studies from Union Theological Seminary, as well as a Master of Arts in Sociology from Fordham University. Her research interests include religion, public health, sport and sociology as applied science. During her time at Union Theological Seminary, she took particular interest in Latin American and indigenous religions and made a short documentary called Witches as Therapists. In 2006, while working towards her masters at Fordham, Veronica presented her paper Socioeconomic Status and the Influence of Religious Participation on Political Participation in Montreal, Canada at the Association for the Sociology of Religion. Recently, she presented her paper Employment, Mental Health and the Economic Crisis in New York City at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Research Symposium in May 2010. Veronica is also currently in the pre-production stages of her latest documentary on women weight lifters and is looking forward to further exploring sport through visual sociology.
vmomjian@gmail.com
Research Associate Michael Partis
Michael Partis is a Research Associate at the Howard Samuels Center. Michael is a doctoral student in Anthropology at the CUNY Graduate Center and a Graduate Researcher for the Bronx African American History Project, where he conducts research on public housing residents in the South Bronx. Michael has been involved in grassroots activism around Hurricane Katrina recovery in New Orleans, community organizing on education issues in New York City, and youth work through numerous workshops and speaking engagements for Black and Latino urban youth. He is the co-founder and co-director of The Bronx Brotherhood Project, a community-based youth program designed to provide college awareness and adult male mentorship to poor and low-income Bronx Black and Latino high school males.
mpartis@gc.cuny.edu
Research Associate and Sara Miller-McCune / SAGE Publications Fellow Yuxiu Zhang
Yuxiu Zhang is a Research Associate at the Howard Samuels State Management and Policy
Center and the Center's Sara Miller-McCune / SAGE Publications Fellow. She is a Ph.D.
candidate in the Economics Department of the Graduate Center of the City University of
New York and holds an M.S. (Master of Economics) from the Graduate Center. Her main
duties at the Howard Samuels Center include conducting statistical research using
census data for the Center's Economic Status of American Women project. Yuxiu's
research interests concern health economics and labor economics, and she has also been
involved in research on such issues as women and children's obesity, the impact of
abortion legalization, and changes in the sex ratio in population. Her dissertation
topic is women's childbearing behavior and health outcomes in the 1990s. Prior to coming
to the Howard Samuels Center, Yuxiu worked as a research assistant in the New York
office of the National Bureau of Economics Research, the International Longevity Center
and the Research Foundation of CUNY. She has taught microeconomics and macroeconomics
as an adjunct lecturer at several CUNY campuses, including Baruch College, Queens College
and City College. Her working papers include: "Prevalence of Obesity and Overweight
among Native American Infants and Children in WIC: 1996-2006" (2009, with Ce Shang),
"Changes in Teen Fertility Following Access to the Pill and Abortion in the Early 1970s"
(2010, with Ted Joyce and Ruoding Tan) and "The Impact of Legalized Abortion on Teenage
Childbearing in the Next Generation" (2010).
Yuxiu909@gmail.com
Research Assistant Mitchell Glodek
Mitchell Glodek is Marilyn Gittell's personal assistant and a
research assistant at the Samuels Center. He helped coordinate
the National Conference "Welfare Reform and the College Option"
in 1999. In 1998, he provided research assistance for "The Benefits
of College Attendance: A Case Study of BMCC." He also provided
editorial assistance for "The Benefits of College Attendance:
A Case Study of BMCC," "Community Colleges Addressing Students'
Needs: A Case Study of LaGuardia Community College," the Welfare
Conference summary and the forthcoming study of state and local
level school politics.
mglodek@gc.cuny.edu
Center Administrator Georgina Pierre-Louis
Georgina Pierre-Louis is the Office Manager of the Howard Samuels
Center. In addition to managing all of the Samuels Center's grants,
Georgina Pierre-Louis handles all of the Center's administrative
duties, including budget, personnel and purchasing, assuring the
smooth and efficient operation of the Center.
gpierre-louis@gc.cuny.edu
