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MAY 2005

College President’s Series
Queens College:
President James L. Muyskens
By Joan Baum, Ph.D

Needless to say Dr. James L. Muyskens, who will have been president of Queens College for three years this July, is delighted with the just-released Princeton Revie annual report on the Top Ten Best Value Colleges in the country for 2006, a list that includes Queens and Brooklyn, and is based on an evaluation of academics, tuition, financial aid and student borrowing. Queens has been high in other rankings as well, including those that take into account diversity and graduation rates. The articulate, reflective and measured-toned president is anything but complacent, however, as he carefully considers Queens’s strengths as a 70-year-old liberal arts college and his vision for the next few years. He notes that for him the college’s motto – “global education, great campus, real community” – is not a collection of nice-sounding watchwords. “Global,” he explains, refers not just to the 40% of freshmen who come to the college from other countries but to a curriculum that is interdisciplinary, collaborative, and responsive to effective technology. Indeed his membership on the board of the Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching signifies his particular interest in how “blended learning” (hybrid courses) can enhance particular kinds of instruction. By “great campus” he means a commuter school with a residential feel, space for students to linger, hang out, check in with each other, by way of the laptops and wireless technology. And by “real community” he indicates his desire to have the college always an essential presence in the borough, using its spectacular performance spaces for music, theatre and other public programs.

Of course, President Muyskens knows that many institutions of higher education have missions that sound alike, and he ought to know. Before taking up the presidency of the college, he served in numerous high-level administrative roles at the Gwinnett University Center /University System of Georgia and the University of Kansas in Lawrence. A graduate of Central College in Iowa, he went on to earn a Master’s of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Michigan. In the `80s he took his expertise to Hunter College, where his positions included Associate Provost, Acting Provost, Chair of the Department of Philosophy, and Director of the Religion Program – at the same time that he was writing books focused on ethics, especially in regard to health care. This fall, this extraordinary president will put his background in the foreground when he teaches an introductory philosophy course in ethics for freshmen that will include not just classical but contemporary problems, such as those that swirled around Terry Sciavo. The course will meet on Fridays but the President will be meeting with students often by way of Blackboard, the computer management system the college has adopted.

His studies in religion have also made him particularly eager to explore ways to bring diverse cultures together, especially when the issues are challenging, even explosive. He points out that the student body president is a young man who is an Orthodox Jew and that the vice president is Pakistani Muslim. And he takes great pride - and “joy” - in the success of Professor Mark Rosenblum’s  course, “The Middle East and America: Clash of Civilizations or Meeting of the Minds,” with its requirement that each student learn about and be able to express opposing views. He also notes that the second floor of the Student Union is deliberately structured so that Hillel is across from the Muslim Club and the Newman Center is right down the hall. The world is complex, students must have the capacity to think critically and the will to communicate clearly and fairly, he says.

The President is also, obviously, an activist. Though he’s waiting for the conclusion of a national search for a director, he’s already instituted an Institute to Nurture New York’s Nature, a research center dedicated to promote sound management of the city’s natural resources and serve as a nucleus for scientists and government officials. The Institute will also welcome school children and their projects and develop appropriate-level online courses for different educational and public policy constituencies. “I just love this place,” he says and is delighted that the place is growing. With the arts and humanities Townsend Harris High School already on campus, John Bowne nearby, the college is moving with Gates funding to establish an “early college high school” for average students and then move them through accelerated programs in math and science. He would go on but one senses that the teacher and the researcher in him—as much as the administrator—are reclaiming his interview time.#

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