CUNY Confab Puts Forth Wrong ‘Image’

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The New York Sun

A trustee of the City University of New York chastised the CUNY Graduate Center for renting out space to an anti-capitalism conference scheduled this weekend that will feature a speech by Lynne Stewart, a New York lawyer accused of aiding an Islamic terrorist.


Trustee Jeffrey Wiesenfeld said it was inappropriate for the Graduate Center, CUNY’s doctorate-granting institution, to be hosting the “Life After Capitalism” conference, at the school on Saturday and Sunday.


Mr. Wiesenfeld said Graduate Center officials assured him the school is not spending public money on the event and organizers have agreed to reimburse the school for the cost of using its facilities.


But he criticized the Graduate Center for accepting money to host the conference. “It’s better to forego the small amount of income – even in a time when we want to maximize fund-raising” than to host a conference that “does not lend itself to the kind of image we want to put forth,” he said. “If they had to do it all over again, they would be more discerning.”


Organizers of the conference, in which participants will “envision” a world without capitalism, list the Graduate Center as a co-sponsor.


Ora Wise, a 23-year-old Hunter College student handling publicity for the conference, said the Graduate Center’s department of Continuing Education and Public Programs has been “very, very helpful” and is “providing many of the resources,” including “logistical support.”


She would not say how much conference organizers paid the Graduate Center to use its space.


Steven Gorelick, vice president for institutional advancement at the Graduate Center, said the school “does not endorse in any way the content of the conference” and hosts “a variety of extraordinarily diverse conferences at all places of the ideological spectrum.”


According to a Graduate Center information hotline, the department’s next five programs of its fall season are “An Evening with Ram Dass: Service as a Spiritual Path,” “Win Back America: A Counter-Convention and Celebration,” “Historians Against the War,” “Nature of New York: Its Natural History and Environment,” and “Reading Marx’s Capital.”


The conference kicks off at Hunter College tonight with an event titled, “Beyond Bush: An Evening of Visionary Resistance.” Meredith Halpern, a spokeswoman for Hunter, said the Graduate Center asked Hunter if it could host the first night of the conference. “We said we would help out our sister school,” she said.


On Sunday at the Graduate Center, Ms. Stewart will be speaking about “law and obedience after capitalism,” according to Ms. Wise. Ms. Stewart is on trial in New York for helping Omar Abdel-Rahman, an Egyptian sheik convicted in 1995 of terrorism, communicate with a terrorist group.


Mr. Wiesenfeld, vice president at Bernstein Investment Research and Management, recommended that CUNY students not attend “Life After Capitalism.”


“There is no added value to any of the crap that will be spouted at this conference,” he said. Students “would be wise to stay away from these stupid influences.”


The New York Sun

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