But she never forgot the compassionate treatment she received during the twilight of her teaching career, which was a direct result of policies implemented by Chancellor Macchiarola.
After leaving the chancellorship, Dr. Macchiarola served as the dean of Yeshiva University’s Cardozo Law School in Manhattan and the president of St. Francis College in Brooklyn. None of the ten schools chancellors under whom I taught has enjoyed – or will enjoy – such a distinguished academic career after his or her stint at the Board of Education.
Dr. Macchiarola ranks with the greatest New York City educators of the past 140 years, who include: Dr. William Maxwell, the first superintendent in 1898 of the city’s consolidated school system; Dr. Morris Raphael Cohen, the influential philosopher at the City College of New York; Julia Richman, the district superintendent for the Jewish Lower East Side during the first decade of the 20th century; Dr. Isidor Isaac Rabi, the great physicist and professor at Columbia University; Dr. Morris Meister, the founding principal of the Bronx High School of Science and the first president of Bronx Community College; and Dr. Diana Ravitch, the education historian.
May Dr. Macchiarola’s memory always be a blessing. Hopefully, an aspiring doctoral student or professor at Columbia University (he earned a law degree and a doctorate in political science from that renowned university) will commit to writing a comprehensive biography of this great New Yorker.