Sonawane was taking a seminar last year titled, "The Peopling of New York," when she had her epiphany. Maskovsky says he designed the course to upset students' notions of the city "as this wonderful melting pot."
"One of my challenges was to get students like Anita to think beyond Pollyanna ideas, and gain a serious, scholarly understanding of how different groups have unequal access to economic power and how they struggle between them," he said.
After Sonawane completed the course, one of her advisors and Maskovsky helped her secure an internship with then-Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton.
"Our goal," the professor says, "is to take these diamonds in the rough -- kids brimming with possibility who haven't had private SAT training or top high school prep -- and challenge them to think broadly about their futures."
For a while this mission had fallen by the wayside out of a commitment to another public policy ideal: affirmative action. In the early 1970s, CUNY dropped admission standards; but in 2001, new leadership set aside money to create an honors college, naming it for a wealthy graduate, William E. Macaulay, who donated $30 million to turn a Manhattan townhouse into a center for CUNY's cream of the crop.
There is Sameen Farooq, 21, a premed student whose parents were doctors in Pakistan but now run a dollar store in Brooklyn. He is a frenetic volunteer and this year went to South Africa to help homeless children. "We see our future, and we're chasing it at 100 miles per hour," he said.
There is Ilya Ryvin, 19, a film production major who'd like to be the next Martin Scorsese. His advisors have pressed him to take more classes and volunteer. Next winter, he'll study film in Japan. He has not left the country since he arrived, at age 4, from Belorussia, now known as Belarus.
Many students, in fact, are driven academically but have to be encouraged to broaden their interests, says Pamela Degotardi, a Macaulay advisor. Some hold themselves back; others have parents worrying about them.
Degotardi recalls persuading parents of an Orthodox Jewish student, an English lit major, to let her to study at Oxford. It would be great for her academic standing, Degotardi told them. It turned out that sharing the adventure with a Christian girl and an African American boy was also important for her personal growth.
Degotardi says Macaulay students often have a sense of having achieved little through birthright and everything through self-transformation -- and struggle: "I keep a well-stocked supply of Kleenex in my office -- and chocolate."
Throughout the sprawling CUNY system, there is some resentment that at a time of budget cuts, a mere fraction of its 400,000 students are receiving such treatment and precious resources. But supporters say that by recruiting the city's top high school students for seven of CUNY's 11 campuses, Macaulay is not only elevating intellectual life throughout the system but also boosting CUNY's reputation nationally.
Since Macaulay's first graduating class in 2005, it has had Truman, Ford, Goldwater and Fulbright fellowship winners. And at graduation this week, among the class of 2009 is a Rhodes scholar.
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geraldine.baum@latimes.com
