Me and Ferdinand Verley Earlier this Year

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday I chaired my first doctoral dissertation using  Zoom.  Due to coronavirus, CUNY ordered on Sunday that all non-essential faculty and staff not come to their colleges.  So I asked my doctoral student, Ferdinand Verley, to defend his dissertation scheduled for yesterday via Zoom.  Ferdinand’s defense was entitled, A Quantitative Examination of Black and Hispanic Students’ Time-to-Graduation, and analyzed data for student records for over 700,000 first-time, full-time students who matriculated at CUNY between Fall 2000 and Fall 2016 semesters.   We set up the videoconference on Sunday evening and all worked fine.  Ferdinand, and his committee including Juan Battle and David Bloomfield had no technical problems. This is not the first time I used videoconferencing for a dissertation defense.  A few years ago, I was an examiner and used Skype for a dissertation defense for a student at Southwest University in South Africa.  It worked well then also.  Tomorrow I am chairing another dissertation defense for my student, Vanita Naidoo. 

By the way, Ferdinand passed and he is now Dr. Verley!

Congratulations!

Tony

PS:  The day after I made this posting, the New York Times had an article entitled, We Live in Zoom Now, that reports:

“Zoom Video Communications is a videoconferencing company in San Jose, Calif., that has been thrust into the spotlight over the past week. On Monday morning, its iOS app became the top free download in Apple’s App Store.  On Sunday, nearly 600,000 people downloaded the app, its biggest day ever, according to Apptopia, which tracks mobile apps. While the stock market crashes, Zoom shares have soared this year, valuing the company at $29 billion — more than airlines like Delta, American Airlines or United Airlines.”

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