NEW YORK — After completing a freshman seminar about immigration in New York, Anita Sonawane, a brainy undergraduate who happens to be a New York immigrant, had a transformative aha moment. It was something the professor said.
"Oh, come on, Anita, you know you're not going to be a doctor," Jeff Maskovsky, an urban studies professor at Queens College, told her, hoping to challenge the idea that the only way to succeed in America was to practice medicine.
No, she was not destined to be a doctor, she later realized. "Whenever I started talking, I couldn't help myself, politics just came into the discussion," says Sonawane, 18, a budding community activist and economics major.
Six years ago Sonawane arrived here from Dubai, United Arab Emirates, with her Indian parents and nowhere to live. They ended up moving in briefly with the taxi driver who picked them up at the airport. The family has since bought an apartment in Queens, and her father has found work.
And today Sonawane is getting a first-rate education, same as any pedigreed New Yorker, but without the Ivy League price tag. She is among 1,200 scholars who attend for free the Macaulay Honors College at the City University of New York, the nation's largest urban public university.
This city has long created public institutions to educate immigrants and their sons and daughters, turning generations into doctors, lawyers and entrepreneurs, not to mention Nobel Prize winners and Rhodes scholars. Now, that tradition is having a renaissance.
In recent years, many U.S. universities have established honors colleges, but CUNY's has an extra goal of turning ambitious immigrants and the children of the working class into worldly New Yorkers with a heart for public good.
Macaulay scholars are required to take a series of seminars about New York and clock 30 hours of public service. They each get a laptop, $7,500 to study abroad or defray costs during an unpaid internship and a "passport" to New York arts and cultural venues. Each student is also assigned four advisors who push and coddle, strategize and negotiate, with the intention of getting these least-entitled students on equal footing with the elite.
Ann Kirschner, Macaulay's dean, says that a decade from now, one way she'll know the Honors College is a success is if she reads that a graduate is elected mayor of New York: "It's not that we think New York is the only place to live -- well, secretly we do -- but we want our students to have a sense of themselves as people who can both achieve academically and become engaged New York citizens."
