Published Monday, September 29, 2003
Noguera Recruited to NYU; Students Follow
By Andrew Mandel
APPIAN STAFF WRITER

Leslie Rubin, Ed.M. ’04, remembers sitting in the second row of her Urban Education module this summer when her professor, Pedro Noguera, announced he would be leaving the Harvard Graduate School of Education (HGSE) for New York University (NYU).

“My stomach dropped,” said Rubin, who had first heard Noguera speak at the University of California at Berkeley and was drawn to his focus and broad experience in city school systems. “During the break, I went up to him and said, 'I came here because of you.'"

The conversation turned into a rare opportunity that speaks both to Noguera's popularity and what students say is his intense commitment to teaching. The professor agreed to meet with Rubin -- and four other similarly passionate members of her cohort in the Teacher Education Program -- once a month in New York City to discuss agreed-upon readings, whether or not HGSE would grant credit for this unique independent study.

The quintet made their first bus trip to Manhattan a week ago Friday, sharing Mexican food with Noguera and finalizing their syllabus for a course on race and school reform. The group will prepare a packet of material for other students to benefit from the conversation.

"It goes to show: you ask, and you can receive," Rubin said.

NYU applied the same principle in luring Noguera away from the tenured position at Harvard as the Dimon professor of communities and schools. Initially one of two finalists for the deanship at the NYU Steinhart School of Education, Noguera was ultimately tapped to found and head the school's research center on urban schools.

Noguera called NYU President John Sexton “a dynamic and progressive university president” who phoned Cambridge four or five times to recruit the 44-year-old professor, committing five years of university funding to the new urban schools center. This money will help the new leader spend his time developing the vision, structure and human resources for the center, rather than chasing after donors.

Having the opportunity to collaborate with a critical mass of scholars around issues facing urban schools was a big attraction.

"Here [at NYU], there is a lot more support for the work that I do," Noguera said in a phone interview last week. "At Harvard, I was more of a one-man operation… Had I been more tied with other colleagues, it would have been much harder for me to leave.”

This was the case in non-academic settings as well. It seemed like every time there was a recruiting event for students of color, Noguera recalls, he was asked to speak.

“My overuse is a reflection of a lack of faculty studying many of the important issues facing disadvantaged communities,” he said. “The need for Harvard to recruit a diverse faculty is great. There are major holes.”

The holes, in Noguera’s opinion, include the gender studies center that lost traction at Harvard after Jane Fonda withdrew her $12.5 million donation to the HGSE last February. Noguera said he hopes to work with former Graham Professor of Gender Studies Carol Gilligan, who left Harvard two years ago, to develop a gender studies center at NYU instead, another reason to make the move south.

New York City also appealed to Noguera and his wife because their son attends St. John’s in Queens, and their daughter is a first-year student at New School University’s Eugene Lang College, a few blocks from their new home.

In an e-mail message, HGSE Dean Ellen Condliffe Lagemann expressed disappointment about Professor Noguera’s decision to leave Cambridge. But being “a real New York chauvinist” herself, she said the city was an understandable draw for him – given his family’s personal connections there and the particular priorities at NYU.

“NYU is a very different university from Harvard,” said Lagemann, who was the chair of the NYU’s Department of the Humanities and the Social Sciences, as well as director of the Center for the Study of American Culture and Education in the School of Education, from 1994 to 2000. “Harvard is much more concerned with curricular coherence than NYU. While NYU is proliferating centers, Harvard is trying to consolidate them.”

Lagemann agreed that faculty diversity is a “very high priority” at HGSE, and she noted that the subject is the first agenda item on the senior faculty meeting scheduled for today.

Noguera officially takes his post in January and will not begin teaching courses until next September, but he is already taking steps to build a presence in the city to which he’s returning after years in Cambridge and Berkeley.

Earlier this month, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation gave the New York City Board of Education $51.2 million in grants to establish dozens of small public high schools throughout the city, a move aimed to lower dropout rates and raise test scores.

As part of his work in developing public partnerships for NYU, Noguera will begin consulting with several of these schools in the Bronx next month, helping school officials to collect data about students to make informed institutional decisions.

It would serve Harvard well, Noguera said, to make stronger inroads in the communities of Cambridge and Boston.

“Harvard will be increasingly criticized if it continues its development while doing very little for schools and communities in the area,” Noguera said, referring to the University’s purchase of hundreds of acres of land in Allston and Brighton across the John F. Kennedy Bridge. “It makes Harvard open to the charge that it’s soaking up resources and not making a commitment to the communities it’s in.”

Lagemann said she envisions that, if the Ed School were to move to Allston, the new community would be “a prime research/practice site…a place where our faculty [would] do clinical research and our students [would] find rich internship opportunities,” and HGSE could partner with the School of Public Health to offer outreach and prevention services.

But for some students, that vision for the future – as well as ongoing discussions between the Communities and Schools concentration and the Risk and Prevention program to collaborate and expand their work – does not make up for the fact that Noguera has left Harvard three years after he joined the faculty.

Liz Wilson, Ed. M. ’04, is one of the five students who took the $10 Chinatown bus to attend Noguera's independent study course a week ago Friday. Over the summer, she was impressed by the way Noguera handled delicate conversations about race in education, skillfully navigating the different views and emotions that students expressed.

“I want to be able to handle a discussion just like the way he did,” she said.

“So much of it is mentoring. You have one chance to find a really good mentor, and you want to follow him when you do,” Rubin said. “I'm not saying it's like a rock band, but you do want to be inspired. With him, I am.”

Andrew K. Mandel is an Ed. M. candidate in the Technology in Education program.