Max Valcourt, ’03 and Rena Jordan, ’02

When things get complicated, Max Valcourt and Rena Jordan place a call to the “Cunningham Crisis Hotline.” On the other end of the line is Professor of Africana Studies George Cunningham, giving the newlyweds advice on navigating the choppy waters of graduate school. Both are earning their doctorates in history on full scholarships: Valcourt was awarded a McCracken Fellowship to study Atlantic world history at New York University, and Jordan is studying twentieth-century American history on a Presidential Fellowship at Princeton University.

     It makes sense that Valcourt and Jordan should call their old professor¾it was Cunningham who suggested they seek careers in academia. “Professor Cunningham pulled me aside before a class started,” Valcourt recalls. “He said, ‘You know, that paper you submitted was the best in the class. You should think about applying for graduate school’.” With Jordan he was even more direct: “Professor Cunningham called me into his office and said I had talent, and I should consider making a career in academia,” she recounts.

     Married since last August and living in married student housing in Princeton, the two recent Brooklyn College graduates met in Professor Gunja SenGupta’s class Racial and Sectional Crisis. “He just sat down next to me in class and we started talking,” Jordan says. Rena had worked for ten years as a promotions director in New York City radio for a succession of a half-dozen stations before coming to Brooklyn College. Max was a seventeen-year veteran of United Parcel Service, where he had worked since graduating from high school. Originally he intended to get an engineering degree - UPS was paying his tuition - but after classes with Ray Allen, Lynda Day, and Richard B. Bernstein, he knew he wanted to study history. Rena’s inspiration was Barbara Winslow's class Political Economy of Women in United States Society.

     When Rena and Max's relationship became serious and Max proposed marriage, the wedding was sure to have a Brooklyn College flavor. Last August, in the Princeton University Chapel, they were wed. In attendance were Professors Cunningham, SenGupta, and Patricia Antoniello, of Health and Nutrition Sciences. The reception was held in the Prospect House, Woodrow Wilson's home when he was president of Princeton. “It was kind of ironic to have the reception there,” says Max. “Considering his racial attitudes, if Woodrow Wilson knew that people of color were having a wedding reception in his home he would be turning over in his grave!”