College Announces Major Measure

By COLlive reporter

Medgar Evers College, a senior college of The City University of New York (CUNY), located in Crown Heights will accept and transfer Yeshiva and Seminary credits towards one’s degree.

This major development will allow men and women who learned in the Orthodox Jewish education system to pursue baccalaureate and associate degrees as part of the OPAL program.

People involved in the effort told COLlive.com this move had done following a 3-year effort between community activists and heads of the college that was established in 1970.

The college will be hosting an Open House for members of Crown Heights Jewish community on Tuesday, April 17th, from 6-9pm.

Ahead of the announcement, Dr. Rudy Crew, President of Medgar Evers, sat down to answers questions from COLlive.com, explaining why prospective students should consider it over other potential schools.

President Crew, thank you for taking the time to meet. Let us begin with understanding a little about Medgar Evers and its background.

In some ways, there are interesting parallels. This college was both named after and grew out of the Civil Rights era. The college was named after Medgar Evers who was slain during that era. Ageing in this era drove my own interest in civic advocacy that led me to take on roles like the President of the Black Student Union at my college. It was a time where it was all about community investment and community involvement. Creating opportunities for people who were left behind in the American Dream. Now this work is framed as social justice, but in reality, it started out as civil rights. Where people, who are trying to improve upon democracy, are having to concern themselves with civil rights at large. Whether it be here in Brooklyn or around the world. It is really about what Medgar stood for- the right for people not only to have access to college but high-quality schooling, high-quality medical care, high-quality opportunities that are available for them to enter the economy. That is what college is. That is what we try to do. That’s how we define ourselves in the space we want to occupy by going forward.

A lot of readers would be wondering why MEC is interested in accommodating Jewish students and making them welcome.

We have long since needed to have a conversation in higher-ed, not necessarily just at Medgar about the incredible set of experiences/life experiences that people bring long before they matriculate into a degree program or a college. That is to say, they have a great deal of experience, and we should be looking at ways to convert these intro credits, and OPAL does just that. It particularly gives older students an opportunity to feel that the mountain they have to climb is not that high from the standpoint of their college earned credit. Getting them as close to and as quickly into a degree track as they possibly can. So the program really serves to find and grant credit for life experiences. I know, some faculty have been really strong advocates for this within the college for some time. We need to do it. It makes complete sense to me that people having rich professional cultural, and in some cases, military experiences have got to be codified in a way that transacts these experiences into college credits.

How is MEC distinctive among CUNY and or private schools? Can you please discuss and describe the OPAL program, too?

Making the transaction is a unique effort in itself, but by having an institution like Medgar where the staff is willing to realize the undeniable reality that the people bring diverse intelligence to their work as a college student is even more unique. That intelligence is often overlooked. These experiences are often overlooked. And so, Medgar is a place where we’re in a more holistic way of thinking of learning, where we’re basically saying that we don’t want to overlook it, but instead, want to count it where it can be counted, and appropriately give you the opportunity to thread the needle knowing that it is part of your life’s fabric.
The second part of this is that Medgar is unique because it fundamentally cares about human being’s development. It’s necessarily not just about earned credit. It’s about human development. It’s about your ability to have the whole other domain of learning beyond your academic course experience. Yes, these are important, and they will lead you to have course credit, and hopefully getting you to graduate on time and so forth. But there is a whole other set of learning that we want to try and stress. There is a notion of civic learning/civic advocacy. The idea that you belong to a community. The community here at Medgar is a community where we stress the belonging of students to the Medgar family. Is it perfect? No. there are places where it falls down from time to time, but that is virtually true in any context. This isn’t about being perfect.

The other domain of learning that is important to me is occupational. How are our students, upon graduation, getting a job? How helpful is the college in being able to get them a job? How is the ability to create a network for them to move into various fields whether it be law, medicine, accounting, teaching or whatever it maybe? The college actually got to create sort of a scaffolding into the world of work, and in that, there is an inherent need to learn how do I actually appreciate work? How do I understand the value of work? How do I understand what I bring to the work environment? And what are the rules of the road? These are all part of the learning that we think will be critical here.

So, in essence, Medgar is different in the sense that it has an explicit and intentional focus on these other domains of learning. So that, it is not so much about getting a degree. It’s learning the skills of entering the world, and in fact, changing the world. How you get to do that, by virtue of practicing it here, is through student government. Through students having internships. Through enabling students going to various countries and various parts of the world to do international study. All of that is what Medgar was trying to espouse as being very different.

Is the OPAL program targeted and focused only on the Jewish community?
It really is about the entire community. It is not about one particular person or persons learning or journey. It’s about how we understand the development of people. The learning they bring to the table, and how we codify that in a way that it becomes useful for them as they move through a degree program. All we’re saying is A- it should be done, and B- there is a mechanism by which to do that. There is a translation from the learning that you had in working in international communities regardless of discipline, but just the cultural exchange, just the ideas that have come to the floor, these ideas are really important to grant people credit for these experiences that they had before coming to Medgar.

I understand that MEC is planning an open house to be held within the community. What is the goal/purpose of the open house?

We’re a unique institution, and we need to reach out to the community around us to express how unique we are. Frankly, there are people within the Jewish community who don’t know very much about the college, and I hope that the open house will accomplish a number of things, but the chief among them is the idea to share the knowledge about the college. The things that we offer. The ways and means we offer. The kind of people and faculty that we have. The experiences that you can get here. The uniqueness of the campus. It is about being able to do that, and the open house is a great first step.

Two years ago, there was an incident where a Jewish student was assaulted. How would you respond to concerns about the safety of Jewish students at MEC?

Sadly that did happen, but to the benefit of the college and to the credit to the students involved, the response was more powerful than the incident. The idea that a Muslim student, who observed this, was the first to beyond the list of people talking to the police about what she saw, and the willingness by which they did, that’s the sort of righteousness in which a stance was taken. It was exactly what you saw here not long ago with the March for Our Lives. It’s about people being empowered to say what is right and what is wrong, and operating off that premise. It’s not about are you Jewish, are you African American, Muslim, are you this or are you that. We are a human community long before we are any other definition. The question comes from the standpoint of our collective faith, which is are you willing to make your college have the kind of culture that arguably stands for that? Stands for the righteousness of the goodness for all people? Gives opportunity to people independently if they look or speak the same language, or pray to the same g-d? These are things that are important skills to learn. I take none of this for granted. I think people have to experience this and often times thought of it as being brave. I don’t think of it as necessarily being brave, as I do it just being completely honest and righteousness in front of whoever g-d you pray too. That becomes important to us to symbolize as activists in a movement. This is a college that came out of that movement. It was about keeping the faith. It was about being dutiful to the ideal of human respect and compassion. I do not think it is very far afield from what these students did to make sure this doesn’t happen again. What the administration did, what the faculty did as a way to make sure this doesn’t happen again is far more compelling in my mind than the sadness of the incident that took place.

Is there a numeric goal for enrolling Jewish students?

We have a desire to bring the enrollment of the campus to something close to ten thousand students. Those students need to reflect this community. That said, it means that this is open to everybody who will express an interest in pursuing an education as part of their lives. So there is no numeric goal per group, nothing like that. But we do have a college-wide strategic sort of goal of trying to grow the college and its enrollment and were moving in that direction. The college is growing quite steadily both in number of people who are expressing interest in wanting to come, and then ultimately matriculating by virtue of actually coming.

Besides OPAL and walking distance to MEC, what else can you tell us as for why prospective students should consider MEC as their college of choice?
There are words that I would pitch. One word is family. You will belong to a family here, and a family that works for you to actually have you get to know yourself; who is not going to leave you feeling stranded and vulnerable because what you come to know is different, or is more or is better than something or somebody else, or in some way, cast you in a different light.

A second word, I would use to pitch Medgar, would be that it is rigorous. It’s going to ask you to climb the social ladder of how you come to know yourself and other people around you. Many of them do not look like you or speak your tongue, or as I said, pray to your g-d, but it’s going to ask you to do that. The rigor is not necessarily just expressed in terms of academic work, that is true as well, but the rigor is going to be for you to understand who you are in the humanity in this kind of multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-linguistic environment.

The third word that I would use is rapidly changing. It mirrors the economy around us shaped in part by globalisation and technology. However, the college is really changing daily, and part of it is the human curriculum that walks in the door as students. The fastest growing population on the campus is Hispanic. So what does that mean now as to what we will have available to us in the context of the culture of this campus? What does it say as we start to see students coming from Asia? How will we start addressing the issue of more and more Jewish students coming to the campus? What does it mean for the students who are from right here in Crown Heights that are African American, but were born in the Caribbean and are coming here? It means we actually need to be comfortable being who we are in front of each other, and learning how to be part of a family.

So I think it is exponentially changing in ways that are all for the good. I think it comes with tension, and there are no “if,” “and” or “but” about it. But I am absolutely clear that the way forward it is through learning, and that it is led by people who really have this in their heart. This is now a matter of the heart of the campus. This is not the head talking; this is about what’s in your heart. And we will lead in the future of Medgar. We will lead with our heart, and that is what I think is the pitch for Medgar. Do you want to belong to a family that has a heart? Then come to Medgar.

There will be a concern by potential Jewish students who lack the formal background or education in areas like college-level math or reading. This fear may prevent them from applying. How would you address this concern?

Some so many students come here who actually, upon coming within their freshman year, do not have the proprietary background for whether they will participate in math, in reading, in science and or in writing to be here, and they struggle. And so what we have done is provide additional support for people who need that extra support in these content areas. This support is going to make them very successful at being able to take freshman courses. We don’t do it in a way that stigmatizes people. We don’t do it in a way that makes them feel inadequate in some way. It is about building their confidence. The work they will get. The kind of support they will get. The kind of counseling and guidance they will get. The kind of advisors they will get. Faculty advisors who will help them. Their tone is not the tone of an accusation; it’s the tone of support. And as I said the watchword for me is family. You don’t isolate someone from the family just because they do not do something in preparation for say a religious service. You simply make sure that they know how to do it next time. I really do believe that is what the ethos is for this entire campus. And as I said, we’re imperfect and it’s not always true to form, but it’s the idea that we are moving towards. I would pitch this as a place where this would be something where the students, coming here from Yeshiva’s, are trying to figure out whether or not the college is for them, in spite the fact that there may be folks in their family who are really worried that this might not be the kind of secular education they want them to have. I would say that there are transitions in people’s lives that they are going through, that you will need help to be able to make it to the other side. There are people here who will help you with that.