{"id":4098,"date":"2005-02-24T00:00:00","date_gmt":"2005-02-24T04:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/yfiledev.uit.yorku.ca\/2005\/02\/24\/york-student-sends-in-the-clowns\/"},"modified":"2025-04-01T11:52:56","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T15:52:56","slug":"york-student-sends-in-the-clowns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yorku.ca\/yfile\/2005\/02\/24\/york-student-sends-in-the-clowns\/","title":{"rendered":"York student sends in the clowns"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Kedma, an international student organization, initially approached York first-year history student Shira Stanleigh<\/B> to coordinate its health projects during a year abroad in Israel, she thought of blood drives and bone marrow donor recruitment, not medical clowning, she wrote <\/B>in the Canadian Jewish News<\/I> Feb. 23. \"\u2018You\u2019re kidding, right?\u2019 I asked. \u2018You expect a bunch of recently graduated 18-year-olds to agree to dress up in brightly mismatched, oversized attire, strap on a clown-nose, smear pink blush on their cheeks, and ultimately believe that they\u2019re doing all this to benefit humanity?\u2019 I guess even the coolest post-adolescent sometimes yearns to periodically have social permission to be silly. And there was a popular appeal, mostly a derivative of the film Patch Adams. After some 10 hours of rigorous training and endless visits to clown supply stores, 60 new clowns were ready to hit the wards. The children\u2019s hospital wards in Israel are filled with a varied demographic of the Israeli population. From haredi <\/EM>to Arab children, the spectrum is vast. Despite the differences in personal background, all the kids I saw seemed to have the same response to the clowns \u2013 unrestrained joy,\" she wrote.<\/P>
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Ryerson\u2019s new president earned his stripes at York<\/P><\/B>
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The turning point in Sheldon Levy<\/B>\u2019s life as an academic occurred shortly after he started teaching mathematics and computer science at York University, his alma mater, in 1973, reported the Canadian Jewish News <\/I>Feb. 23 in a profile of Ryerson University\u2019s new president. \"The story is that the dean of the faculty of arts was looking for someone to help put his budget on this newfangled apparatus called a computer,\" explained Levy, who holds an MA in mathematics. \"I was interested in technology, so I had a bit of skill to offer. Or maybe I just didn\u2019t know enough to be reluctant to try. The rest is history. I kept teaching, but it was soon pretty evident that there would not be enough time to do both.\" Thanks to his talents, Levy rose quickly in the ranks as an administrator. At York, Levy managed a budget of $700 million, oversaw a building program that yielded a sports stadium and a sportsplex, restructured all academic and administrative systems and upgraded its computer infrastructure.<\/P>
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On air<\/P>
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