Gail O. Mellow, president of City University of New York LaGuardia Community College, is an expert on the American community College
Most of the students at LaGuardia Community College are immigrants, or first generation in America, from more than 160 countries. As president of the college, which is part of the City University of New York, I try to understand their life experiences. The sheer scope is remarkable, from the Kazakh student who was “bride-napped” to the Colombian student whose family was murdered by a guerrilla group.
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Gail O. MellowLaGuardia CC
Gail O. Mellow, president of City University of New York LaGuardia Community College, is an expert on the American community College
Most of the students at LaGuardia Community College are immigrants, or first generation in America, from more than 160 countries. As president of the college, which is part of the City University of New York, I try to understand their life experiences. The sheer scope is remarkable, from the Kazakh student who was “bride-napped” to the Colombian student whose family was murdered by a guerrilla group.
I recently finished In the Light of What We Know, by Zia Haider Rahman. The novel has deepened my understanding of what it means to bridge two cultures. The protagonist, Zafar, is a young Bangladeshi-British man who, despite an elite education and financial success, struggles with the complex life of an immigrant.
Mr. Rahman writes of how Zafar wrests himself from the given order of things, “engaged in something unnatural and subversive,” not merely against his parents “but also against the expectations of the world.”
While Zafar appreciates how the American “persistence of the myth of the clean slate is itself the guarantor of an optimistic faith in human freedom” to “forge something new,” he struggles against the “gathering mass and momentum” of rage building within him over unjust treatment because of his immigrant status. Yet he also understands that “to relinquish my passionate, undirected grievances would be to abandon myself.”
The book illuminates the grace and toil of our students as they knit together a new world.
