Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a wonderful article/interview with Mildred Spiewak Dresselhaus, a professor of physics and engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  Dr. Dresselhaus research focuses on the fundamental properties of carbon — “carbon as graphite, the dark, flaky mineral with which our pencils are pointed, and carbon as liquid, the element with the highest melting point in nature; carbon that is insulator one moment, superconductor the next.”

Her accomplishments included inventing breakthrough techniques for studying individual layers of carbon atoms. She discovered ways to capture the thermal energy of vibrating particles at well-defined “boundaries,” and then to use that heat to make electricity. She devised carbon fibers that are stronger than steel at a fraction of steel’s weight. In sum, her research helped “usher in the age of nanotechnology, the wildly popular effort to downsize electronic circuits, medical devices and a host of other products to molecular dimensions.”

Dr. Dresselhaus just recently won the 2012 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, a $1 million honor that matches the purse size and Scandinavian provenance of a Nobel, if not quite the status. The new award joins a very long list of laurels, among them the National Medal of Science, the Enrico Fermi Award, the presidencies of the American Physical Society and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Dr. Dresselhaus is from New York City, the daughter of immigrants.  She was raised in the Bronx and attended Hunter College High School and received her undergraduate degree from Hunter College where she studied physics with another science luminary, Nobel laureate, Rosalyn Yalow.  Dr. Dresselhaus brings great pride to Hunter and CUNY.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Nocera applauds the role of the community colleges in his New York Times column today.  Nocera quotes Eduardo Padron, the President of Miami-Dada Community Colleges (enrollment of 174,000 students),  who states:

“Community colleges are the great American invention in terms of education,” …Their raison d’être has always been to help grease the wheels of social mobility. But, in their earlier incarnation, they were primarily seen as a passageway to a university degree… Now with the skills gap such a pressing problem — and a high school education so clearly inadequate for the modern economy — the task of teaching those skills is falling to community colleges. There really isn’t another institution as well positioned to play that role.”

Padron then makes the point that we need to be investing in community colleges:

“I wish I could say that state legislatures were pouring resources into community colleges, but, of course, I can’t. Many state governments have ravaged the budgets of their community college systems, just as they have for many state university systems. In Florida, said Padrón, community colleges have seen their state support drop by 21 percent in three years. “State support used to account for 75 percent of our budget,” he said. “Now it is only 45 percent.” As a result, tuition at Miami Dade is $3,000 a year — a lot of money for people of little means. Given what’s at stake, it would be hard to imagine anything more shortsighted than paring back support for community colleges.”

Shortsighted indeed.

Tony