Hunter faculty and friends gathered May 13 to toast Andrew Polsky, who is stepping down after 11 years as the Ruth and Harold Newman Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences.
Polsky, a political scientist who has written books on wartime presidents and coercive human services and articles on political parties and American political development, will spend next year on leave as he writes his next book, Distant Dangers: The Politics of Future Crises. Even as he leaves, he got in a few licks at the foibles of academia and especially CUNY.
With his signature irreverent humor, Polsky thanked a long list of people who, he said, had given him the wherewithal to survive a job that “would prove to be an inexhaustible source of material for absurdist comedy.”
He praised the Dean’s Office staff for keeping Hunter running despite recurring budget crises, pandemics, and leaking ceilings: They “find solutions – mostly legal – to every problem.”
Department chairs, meanwhile, have the hardest job at Hunter, Polsky said, because “academic departments are like large families in which the adult children never leave home – and sometimes don’t grow up.”
He even poked fun at himself.
“The world has been waiting for my next book for more than a decade,” he said, “even if the world doesn’t know it yet.”
On a serious note, however, he said that Hunter must do more to support its faculty hires and must find new ways to promote the arts and humanities “in an era when students think their future lies elsewhere.”
Hunter President Ann Kirschner announced that the college had created the Dr. Andrew J. Polsky Scholarship, which will be given annually to the student who shows the greatest year-over-year GPA improvement. Polsky will remain on the Political Science faculty, where he has taught for 40 years. He will be succeeded as dean by Senior Associate Dean Erica Chito-Childs, a sociologist.
