I made my final visit to York College (as a faculty member) on Thursday. After handing in my keys and ID, and before meeting with the dean and my chair one last time, I took a walk around the Jamaica neighborhood in which York sits.  It was fitting that I strolled up Archer Ave by the Jamaica bus stop. It was a gorgeous day for a walk, though the city was under a heat advisory. When I hit the entrance to York that runs under the LIRR, I couldn’t help but reminisce about my first days there.  The picture I took of the entrance captures so much about the continuity and change in Jamaica, and at York.

Archer Avenue Entrance to York College (2010)

This image has all the elements to it, save the heavy crunch of traffic normally running down Archer and the mass of residents waiting to catch the buses that line up at the stop.  (The absence of these core elements of Archer make the photo seem a little creepy.) When I started at York, a grafitti artist was painting the “Project Pick Me Up” mural on the wall.  I watched as each of the faces, and the background emerged over a week or two. For most of my time at York this entrance to the college was but a plan on the architect’s desk. There was no branding, and no opening to the fence.

Some years later, soon after the Sean Bell shooting occurred around the corner, someone painted the mural with Mr. Bell sitting on a cloud wearing a sweatshirt with the words “50 Shots” on it. An image of Mr. Bell and his fiancee, dressed for their wedding, look up at the cloud.

Sometime after that, York College actually branded the entrance to the school with a very nice, stainless sign above the underpass and the York College and CUNY logos as bookends. The semi-open stainless steel fence  captures much of the college’s relationship with the neighborhood – open, but not quite. Even with this awkward fence/gate, this entrance is so much more inviting than it was even 4 years ago.

And, in keeping with its tagline, York College remains On the Move.

I was blown away at our last department meeting when it concluded with a farewell cake and much well-wishing as I prepare to leave York College for a new position at the University of New England in the fall. The cake was beautiful and delicious, and the card everyone signed left me sad to leave my colleagues. They’re just wonderful.

Deep took some pictures and sent them to me, and I’m posting them here so I’m reminded of my soon-to-be-former colleagues with each posting.

On March 3, I presented an assessment-based picture of writing at York College/CUNY. This talk was something I had been looking forward to for more than four months, and is a much more elaborated version of a talk I gave at the Provost’s 2010 Academic Leadership Retreat in late January. Following the talk, it was suggested that I make the talk available. So here it is.

Snow day all around! The call was for 6-20″ of snow in the NY Metro area.  I think we had perhaps 6″, though it was probably more like 4. But the college closed its doors for the day, and so did the kids’ school.

I managed to get out of the office, away from the computer, and into the backyard for an hour or two to help the kids build a monster snow fort. It looks a little like a white chocolate Hershey’s Kiss from the front and it stands about 7 feet tall at the peak.

The snow was pretty wet and heavy, which perhaps explains the limited accumulation and our ability to shape a fort out of it using giant snowman-like snowballs.

The great thing about winter is that it brings out the kid in everyone, or it should. We didn’t hit the sledding hill today because of the roads and the wind, though we talked about it.

The challenge with a snow project on this scale is the cold and the kids’ interest. Snowball-fight breaks and general shenanigans help a lot. But by the time the fort was built we were pretty much ready to head in to warm up! And then it was back upstairs to the desk for me.