Pace University is adding an advanced degree to its offerings --- a new doctoral program in School Psychology on its New York City campus.

The Department of Psychology launched the program this fall, in part, to meet the growing demand for school psychologists. With a greater awareness of mental health and the importance of supporting students emotionally, socially and academically, school psychologists play an important role in learning. In fact, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects the field to grow by 8 percent over the next decade.

“The PhD in School Psychology is an invaluable degree that prepares skilled professionals to meet the needs of the public,” said Tresmaine R. Grimes, dean, Dyson College of Arts and Sciences and School of Education. “With a special focus on the developmental processes of children and youth within the context of schools, families, and other systems, this program will provide our graduates the training and knowledge required to address a range of psychological services that serve as an integral component in support of the mental well-being of our children, which is greatly needed in today’s world.”

Housed in the Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, the program is designed to train school psychologists who are equipped to assume leadership, academic and research roles within the field. The program will train students to conduct research, provide indirect service delivery in areas such as preventive mental health and program development and evaluation, and function as doctoral-level school psychologists. It is designed to provide education and training in school psychology within a scientist-practitioner model.

“Graduates of the program will be critical forces in identifying the mental health needs of youth, families, and schools during and after the COVID-19 pandemic,” said Anastasia Yasik, PhD, program director and psychology professor. “They will not only be equipped to identify risk but will also be skilled in establishing and evaluating programs to address these risk factors. In addition, our graduates will be key players in combatting issues of social injustice within schools and communities.”

“I decided to pursue Pace University’s PhD in School Psychology because of the resources they provide to prepare students for the field and the opportunity to learn from renowned faculty,” said Ji Hoon Park, first-year student. “With their extensive experience and knowledge, Pace faculty help students integrate their interests into thesis and dissertation topics that are relevant to current trends in research.”

These doctoral-level, licensed school psychologists will be called upon to develop prevention as well as intervention services, provide supervisory services, and consult with educators, other healthcare providers, and parents. The program’s curriculum will provide students with the education, experience, and training necessary to provide first-rate school psychological services.

Students will gain the skills to address educational and developmental problems bearing upon school achievement, adjustment, specific disabilities/disorders, chronic or acute situations or conditions that influence learning or mental health, school crises, and difficult social conditions that elevate risk to healthy development. The program prepares students to develop competencies in psychological assessment, measurement, and intervention, act in accordance with professional values consistent with the highest ethical standards, properly use and benefit from supervision, and implement evidence-supported practices in intervention.

Through the promotion of research and scholarship by faculty and students, the PhD in School Psychology program will broaden the scope of knowledge in school psychology by addressing individual, group, and system issues along with biological, developmental, environmental, psychological, and social factors affecting well-being. The program emphasizes scientific research pertinent to the recognition of distinctions among, and effective preventions and interventions for, young individuals facing the many types of risk that compromise developmental potential. Graduates will also be equipped to analyze efficacy in the educational system, as well as pediatric healthcare and other systems, and to inform policy creation in education and mental health care.

Graduates of this program will have opportunities for professional careers in teaching, research, and educational settings. They also will be qualified to function as licensed psychologists and certified school psychologists.

The PhD Program in School Psychology joins the Psychology Department’s long-standing, highly regarded, APA-accredited PsyD Program in School-Clinical-Child Psychology and recently approved PhD in Clinical Psychology (Health Emphasis). The PhD program is open to applicants with a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree who show evidence of potential to excel in realms of scientific research and practice.

For more information about the program, visit the website. To learn more, please contact the Office of Graduate Admissions at (212) 346-1531.

About Dyson College of Arts and Science’s Department of Psychology (NYC)

A leader in the field of education and professional training, the Department of Psychology (New York City downtown campus) offers a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology, and an MA in Psychology with three research tracks: Behavioral and Social Sciences, Global Psychology, and Industrial and Organizational Psychology. An MSEd in School Psychology, as well as a PsyD in School-Clinical-Child Psychology, PhD in School Psychology, and a PhD in Clinical Psychology (Health Emphasis) are offered.

About Dyson College

Pace University’s liberal arts college, Dyson College offers more than 50 programs, spanning the arts and humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and pre-professional programs (including pre-medicine, pre-veterinary, and pre-law), as well as many courses that fulfill core curriculum requirements. The College offers access to numerous opportunities for internships, cooperative education and other hands-on learning experiences that complement in-class learning in preparing graduates for career and graduate/professional education choices. Visit .

About Pace University

Since 1906, Pace University has educated thinking professionals by providing high quality education for the professions on a firm base of liberal learning amid the advantages of the New York metropolitan area. A private university, Pace has campuses in New York City and Westchester County, New York, enrolling nearly 13,000 students in bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral programs in its Dyson College of Arts and Sciences, Lubin School of Business, College of Health Professions, School of Education, School of Law, and Seidenberg School of Computer Science and Information Systems.

Columbus Day isn’t on Pace’s academic calendar this year! In fact, it was removed for the first time in 2019. It’s understandable if my colleagues haven’t noticed, because the University holds classes as usual on the second Monday of October, which has been a federal holiday associated with Italian American heritage since 1937. However, let me note that Indigenous Peoples’ Day isn’t on our University’s calendar, either. As another way of remembering the settlement and colonization of the Americas, Indigenous Peoples’ Day is what a growing number of individual states and municipalities have officially renamed this federal holiday since 1990. [1]

Of course, we could choose to remember Indigenous people every day by introducing into our campus culture the convention of the land acknowledgment, a public statement that “inserts an awareness of Indigenous presence and land rights in everyday life.” [2] It names our relationship to the people whose traditional lands we occupy, and it typically includes an event- or audience-specific reflection on the meaning or challenge of decolonization in the immediate context.

Pace University is located on the unceded land of the Lenape people. We acknowledge the Lenape community, their elders past, present, and emerging, and that our work is situated on the island of Manhattan (Menohhannet or On the Island), traditional lands of the Munsee Lenape, the Canarsie, Unkechaug, Matinecock, Shinnecock, Reckgawanc and the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. We respect that many Indigenous people continue to live and work on this island and acknowledge their ongoing contributions to this area. This acknowledgement is part of our commitments to dismantle the ongoing legacies of settler colonialism and white supremacy. [3]

This land acknowledgment has been developed by Dyson Associate Professor Emily Welty, PhD, who directs our Peace and Justice Studies program, drawing on the work of the Safe Harbors New York City Indigenous Collective (SHNYCIC), whose decolonizing mission for the world of theater and the performing arts starts with rebuilding our relationships to Native artists and communities. In our case, the complexity of our relations to Indigenous land begins with the displacement of the Lenape people from Pace’s environs by William Penn and other Quaker settlers in the 17th century. Their diaspora survives today as the Delaware Tribe of Nations in Oklahoma and Kansas, the Delaware Nation in Oklahoma, the Stockbridge-Munsee Band in Wisconsin, and the following First Nations in Ontario: the Munsee-Delaware Nation, the Delaware Nation at Moraviantown, and the Delaware of Six Nations. Lenape communities that have not been federally recognized include the Ramapough Lenape Nation and the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape Tribal Nation in New Jersey, and the Lenape Nation of Pennsylvania.

Imagining what decolonization could mean at Pace has begun with our curriculum: a new course in Native and Indigenous Peoples Studies created by artist and educator Ty Defoe (Giizhiig, Ojibwe, and Oneida Nations) is now being offered every semester. It’s part of the Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies track of our American Studies program, which partners with Latinx Studies, African and African American Studies, and Global Asia Studies on campus in teaching students that critical thinking about race/ethnicity does not pursue “correct” answers, expect easy solutions, or rest on received knowledge. Together with programs such as Peace and Justice Studies, we are currently developing an Antiracist Education (ARE) core undergraduate requirement to address the educational gaps created by legislation banning critical race theory in a growing number of states.

Indigenous Studies started emerging in universities around the world in the early 2000s, and it changed how colonization was understood in the previous century. As Lorenzo Veracini explains it, “if I come and say: ‘you, work for me,’ it’s not the same as saying ‘you, go away.’ This is why colonialism is not settler colonialism.”[4] As opposed to the Indian subcontinent where the British ruled and then left, the “India” that Columbus thought he’d found in the Caribbean (or West Indies) was settled thoroughly, and the original inhabitants of the land were made to “go away” through policies of genocide and physical displacement by immigrants and forced migrants in patterns of occupation that continue in this hemisphere today.

In the words of one of my students, Janvi, an Art and American Studies double major, learning about Indigenous Studies at Pace has “expanded on my personal spiritual views. I was intrigued to learn about Mahu and Two-Spirit people, how sexuality and intimacy are respected and taught, and their views on earth and healing.” Abby, another student studying Musical Theater at Pace and taking an introduction to critical race theory with me, says that what “changed my perspective the most is learning how the US lumps Indigenous peoples into the idea of multiculturalism.”

As an example of the weighty lesson that Abby phrases with such clarity, and as an illustration of the challenge that Indigeneity poses to politics-as-usual, let me share a real exchange with a fellow professor—someone I describe as a conscientious and reliable white ally to people of color. Wanting to expand the social justice impact of our land acknowledgment, this professor suggested that we also mention our campus’s proximity to the African Burial Ground, a national monument marking the gravesites of more than 400 free and enslaved people of African descent unearthed with downtown construction in 1991. While I feel that recognizing anti-Black racism is a daily essential, I decided to encourage this coworker not to add anything to our land acknowledgment that might take the emphasis off Indigenous land rights. Even their symbolic recognition can prove controversial, disruptive, and revealing in important ways, as we learned when a recent proposal to open faculty meetings with a land acknowledgement was voted down by colleagues who worried that officially mentioning Indigenous land rights could expose our university’s real estate holdings to future liability.

Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies scholars today are more resistant than ever to blurring the distinctions between this nation’s relationship to stolen bodies and the stolen ground in which they are buried. Black and Indigenous scholars respectively have observed that an ethic of multicultural inclusion cannot hope to redress or repair the non-ontological status—or the political nonexistence—of Blackness and Indigeneity. Afro-pessimism names such a school of thought that has flourished across academia, the art world, and activist discourse, and which creates powerful conversations in Pace classrooms today. The civil society we seek to perfect, and which disproportionately fails people of color, is dependent on the ongoing colonization of Indigenous people on the American continent, in the Caribbean, and in the Pacific. These injustices are neither equivalent nor comparable, and we should question under what circumstances or from whose standpoint they can be mentioned in one breath.

While we may have retired Columbus Day from the academic calendar, we’ve also gained another symbolic holiday in the form of Veterans’ Day, which is always November 11. There’s a neat parable for American Studies here: Notice how over-determined or, in other words, how easy the shift from honoring those sacrificed in America’s wars to remembering that the frontier was the first front line, and Indianness is both alive and dead in US military culture (e.g., Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters, “in[dian]-country”).[5] What we might mistake for an abstaining silence on the status of Indigenous Peoples’ Day on our calendar turns out to be an opening for acknowledging Indigeneity daily, because as First Nations hip-hop artist Drezus (Plains Cree) tells us, decolonization is also a culture war that needs us all combat-ready.

About the author: Stephanie Hsu is an associate professor of English and program director of American Studies at Pace University; a board member of Kyoung’s Pacific Beat peacemaking theater company; an editorial collective member of the Q+ Public book series with Rutgers University Press; and a co-founding member of Q-WAVE, a grassroots organization for queer women and trans people of Asian/Pacific Islander descent in New York City.

Footnotes

1. For the first time this year, the New York City Department of Education is jointly recognizing “Italian American Heritage/Indigenous Peoples Day.”
2. “Territory Acknowledgment,” Native Land Digital, http://native-land.ca/territory-acknowledgement.
3. Thanks to Dr. Emily Welty for permission to share this land acknowledgment which draws on the work of SHNYCIC, and to Linda Chapman of the New York Theater Workshop for sharing their work.
4. Lorenzo Veracini, “Introducing Settler Colonial Studies,” Settler Colonial Studies 1 (2011): 1.
5. See chapter 4 of Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz’s An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 56–77.

Header image from the Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape 40th annual pow wow.

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Professor Leslie Y. Garfield Tenzer delivered the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law Memorial Lecture on Wednesday, October 6, on "Social Media and the Common Law." Dean Horace Anderson appointed Professor Tenzer as the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2019-2021 term. During the holder's term, the James D. Hopkins Professor delivers a lecture that is open to the entire law school community and members of the public.

"Social Media is the technology that connects people." Professor Tenzer opened her Hopkins lecture with this statement. The lively and well-attended lecture, with over 100 audience members in person and over 80 watching remotely, was presented in three parts. The first part covered the History of Social Media, the second discussed Social Media Wrongs and the Law Courts Use to Resolve Them, and the last covered the Benefits and Burdens of Relying on Precedent. Throughout the lecture, Professor Tenzer noted that the framers of the United States Constitution and those who created the early common law were no strangers to printed media. However, they could not have anticipated the widespread ability of average citizens to communicate instantaneously with large audiences via platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter. The lecture acknowledged that despite this, these early eighteenth-century laws provide an excellent foundation for resolving issues at the intersection of social media and the legal system in the twenty-first century.

Professor Tenzer concluded her lecture by noting that "while we are losing the opportunity to regulate social media through courts – and legislators and Congress have kind of dropped the ball in acting – the one good takeaway is that our judicial system is doing what it is intended to do, which is relying on cases they have decided before in reaching its new conclusions."

After the lecture, audience members had an opportunity to comment and ask questions. Many members of the audience, including numerous law students, shared their concerns. Most questions focused on the future of litigating social media claims.

Professor Tenzer's presentation centered on much of her research agenda, which focuses on regulating conduct in the digital age. Before coming to Pace, Professor Tenzer was a legislative attorney in the Legal Division of the Council of the City of New York. At Haub Law, she currently teaches and writes in Commercial Law, including Contracts and UCC Article 2, Criminal Law, Torts and Social Media Law Law. Professor Tenzer's most recent scholarship focuses on issues concerning emotional harm and the impact of the Internet on the law. In addition to her regular teaching at Pace, Professor Tenzer is the host of Law to Fact, a podcast for law students. Professor Tenzer regularly lectures nationally, most often on issues concerning Affirmative Action and Social Media Law.

The Hopkins lecture is the culmination of Professor Tenzer’s two year endowed chair title as Hopkins Professor. The title of James D. Hopkins Professor of Law is awarded to a member of the faculty for a two-year term in recognition of outstanding scholarship and teaching. The designation is among the Law School’s most significant faculty honors. The Hopkins Professor is selected by the Dean in consultation with the former holders of the Hopkins Chair. Professor Noa Ben-Asher was appointed as the James D. Hopkins Professor of Law for the 2021-2023 term.