Author and journalist Alyssa Katz will serve as the Jack Newfield Professor
in the spring semester, offering a course in urban investigative journalism to
selected students in Film & Media, Integrated Media Arts and Urban Affairs.
Admission is by department permission. Applications to join the class are
being accepted now.
The course is an extraordinary opportunity to explore how New York’s future
will be shaped with an award-winning writer.
Titled “Who Owns Public Housing?” the class will employ first-person
interviews, intensive document research, and an extensive use of old-fashioned
shoe leather to take stock of the public housing system as it weathers the
severest challenges it has ever faced.
Students will work individually and in teams to prepare a series of articles
for the Newfield website and neighborhood and citywide publications, exploring
such issues as:
• the increasing segregation of New York City’s poor into public housing, and
how this affects life in the projects and the city as a whole;
• the ways in which developers and contractors have turned housing subsidies
and management contracts into big business;
• the low representation of immigrants in public housing and the struggles of
new arrivals to get access to it;
• crime and law enforcement in and around public housing, and the tensions
between preserving public safety and civil liberties.
The class will meet on Tuesdays from 3:10-6 p.m. Interested students
should send a brief statement of what they hope to gain from the class to Prof.
Bernard L. Stein at bstein@hunter.cuny.edu as soon as possible, and should ask a
teacher who knows their work to forward a recommendation to Prof. Stein.