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James Curbeam
More than half of all college students in the U.S. are first-generation college students, according to recent findings from Forbes Advisor.Sarah E. Whitley
First-generation college students – defined in the report as students whose parents are without four-year college degrees – make up 56% of the nation’s postsecondary students, the report found.
These students are distinct in other ways as well. They are more likely to come from low-income or minority backgrounds and more likely to be a parent, caregiver, veteran, or first-generation American. They are also less likely to use career-planning services and to engage in formal leadership roles, research with faculty, paid internships, and study abroad opportunities.
The publication also breaks down the demographic in terms of categories such as race, sex, immigration, and age.
Report authors found that, overall, historically marginalized groups were more heavily represented among first-gen students, with less than half of these students (46%) identifying as white – 61% of continuing-generation students identified as such. A quarter of the first-gen population identified as Hispanic, 18% as Black or African American, and 6% as Asian, according to data from the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators (NASPA).
And looking at specific racial and ethnic groups revealed stark numbers of first-gen students among certain communities. For instance, most Hispanic or Latino students (60%), Black or African American students (59%), and American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander (54%) students were first-gen.
Meanwhile, for white students, only 36% were first-gen.
A solid portion (28%) of first-gen students are 30 or older. And, as of 2016, the majority of first-gen students are female (60%), compared to 52% of continuing-gen students, according to NASPA.
As for immigrant status, the report found that 10% of first-gen students are first-generation immigrants and 23% are second-gen – at least one parent is foreign-born.
Tracking by school type, first-gen students at nonprofit four-year schools enrolled more frequently at lower-cost, less-selective public schools, but support and outcomes are often better for the demographic at more selective ones, the report found.
Given that many in the first-gen student population come from disadvantaged backgrounds, future earnings are a significant consideration. According to the report, the effects of being first-gen doesn’t end after college. Income disparities between first-gen and continuing-gen students often persisted even after school.
Looking at heads of household with degrees as of 2019, those with bachelor's-graduate parents earned a median annual income of $135,800, but those with parents without degrees made a median $99,600, according to the Pew Research Center.
“As more institutions identify and support first-generation students, they are increasingly recognizing the substantial assets these individuals bring to campus: grit, ambition, fresh viewpoints that enhance the broader academic community,” said Sarah E. Whitley, vice president of NASPA initiative Center for First-Generation Student Success. “We must ensure that we’re putting the same effort into supporting first-generation students on campus as we do getting them to campus. This is how we can change outcomes for these students – helping them to graduate and gain success after graduation.”
Kansas City University (KCU) has launched its Harry M. Cornell Center for Dental Education, a response to addressing a growing dentist shortage, particularly in southwest Missouri, southeast Kansas, northwest Arkansas, and northeast Oklahoma.
"We know poor oral health leads to poor overall health," said KCU President Dr. Marc B. Hahn. "In fact, poor oral health has been found to promote a host of other illnesses, including cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and even Alzheimer's. KCU is proud to lead an effort to erase disparities in oral health care and improve health outcomes for people in rural areas."
Missouri has an estimated shortage of more than 700 dentists, Oklahoma 166, and more than 100 each for both Arkansas and Kansas.
Instruction at the center – located on KCU’s McIntire-Farber Campus – will focus on integrating basic sciences with clinical knowledge so students are prepared sooner to care for patients.
Students will have access to technology such as simulated patients, virtual reality, 3-D printing, intra- oral camera, digital teeth-scanning, and an Oral Health Center for hands-on learning through giving dental services under faculty supervision.
"Students will be treating patients in their second year of study," said Dr. Linda Niessen, founding dean of the College of Dental Medicine. "Faculty members share a strong desire to serve our community right away and will soon see individuals who have had difficulty obtaining needed dental care through referrals with local nonprofit agencies."
The Department of Education’s (ED) Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has concluded its investigation into a Montgomery College professor accused of sexually harassing multiple female students, Fox 5 reported.
"We appreciate the thorough investigation conducted by the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights in regards to this matter. The College fully supports the determinations and resolutions outlined in its final report, made public this week," a Montgomery spokesperson said.
The three-month investigation found that the community college professor created a hostile environment – at the school’s Takoma/Silver Spring campus – by asking at least 11 female students to remove their shirts down to their sports bras in some sort of class demonstration and commented on their breasts, "ostensibly to demonstrate a medical assessment despite the fact that the assessment did not require the clothing removal, or the bodily commentary."
The professor was later placed on administrative leave and never taught there again, according to college officials. The school also helped a student who failed the course allegedly due to harassment re-enroll for free; gave tuition reimbursement; or paid for some students to retake the course.
But it is unclear whether the issue was referred to police and why the professor and class remain unnamed.
"I wouldn’t expect anybody to release anyone’s name until there’s been an investigation,” said Montgomery County Executive Marc Elrich. “If it’s not a police matter, if it’s like discipline, a personnel matter, personnel things don’t get discussed."
Montgomery County councilmember Will Jawando, chair of the council’s Education Committee, said the professor should be named and will push for that.
Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy will become the first woman president of Wayne State University, effective Aug. 1.Dr. Kimberly Andrews Espy
Espy – a licensed clinical psychologist – is currently provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at the University of Texas at San Antonio (UTSA). Previously, she was senior vice president for research at the University of Arizona; vice president for research and innovation and dean of the graduate school at the University of Oregon; and faculty at Southern Illinois University School of Medicine.
“Wayne State University is a national model for student success, is recognized for its community impact, and is respected across the nation and around the world for its scholarship and health services, particularly in addressing health disparities in major cities,” Espy said. “I am honored that the board has chosen me to be this university’s next leader, and I am excited to begin charting the journey we will all take together to continue to create and advance knowledge for our community and our world.”
She is an elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Psychological Association and has been a board member for organizations such as the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities (APLU) and the Government-University-Industry Research Roundtable. In 2022, Espy was a San Antonio Business Journal Women’s Leadership Award winner.
Espy holds an undergraduate degree in psychology from Rice University and her M.A. and Ph.D. in clinical neuropsychology from the University of Houston.
Despite the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling against President Biden’s student debt relief program, his administration is still putting forth other efforts to support borrowers.President Joe Biden and Education Secretary Dr. Miguel Cardona
These efforts come in the form of a rulemaking process for an alternative path to debt relief; a new repayment plan; and a 12-month repayment “on-ramp” – Oct. 1, 2023 to Sep. 30, 2024 – so that borrowers who miss monthly payments during this period are not considered delinquent.
There will be a virtual public hearing Jul. 18 about the rulemaking effort, where individuals can submit written comments.
The repayment plan, Saving on a Valuable Education (SAVE), will half the amount undergraduate loan borrowers have to pay a month from 10% to 5% of discretionary income; make it so that borrowers earning under 225% of the federal poverty level won’t have to make monthly payments under this plan; forgive loan balances after 10 years of payments for those with original loan balances of $12,000 or less; and not charge borrowers with unpaid monthly interest.
The plan will be open to borrowers this summer before monthly payments are due.
A new study finds that anti-LGBTQ+ policies are linked to depression in Black and Latinx youth in the United States. The study analyzed discriminatory policies, such as “Don’t Say Gay” laws and other indicators that may affect this group and found that LGBTQ+ Black and Latinx youth are more likely to be depressed than their peers in the most LGBTQ+ affirming states.
Conducted by lead author Dr. Skyler Jackson, an assistant professor of Public Health, the data takes into account individual experiences of bullying based on race and ethnicity or sexual orientation. Dr. Skyler Jackson
“We felt the study was necessary because we know that groups that face stigma and discrimination face it not only in their everyday lives, but also because of unjust laws and policies that shaped their everyday lives," said Jackson. "And we wanted to design a study that allowed us to capture the compounding and sometimes intersectional effects of all of these forms of discrimination in their lives.”
The research found that Black and Latinx LGBTQ+ youth in states without protections – such as anti-bullying legislation and conversion therapy bans – are 32 percent more likely to experience symptoms of depression.
For Jackson, it was necessary to take a nontraditional approach to this research that often starts with the broadest population and then overtime, hone in on specific subgroups. He said that his team began with a specific group and researched and analyzed the unique needs, barriers, resiliency and challenges that they face.
“Nearly every day there are laws being considered or passed that are impacting the lives of queer and trans individuals,” said Tyler Harvey, program administrator at the Yale School of Medicine’s SEICHE Center for Health and Justice and co-author of the study. “And what this study shows in addition to the very limited existing evidence, is that those laws and policies with social environments in which queer and trans people exist within have very real impacts on their health, and in this case, their mental health.”
The study includes a map that researchers believe is the first youth-focused U.S. state-level measure of anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma, said Jackson. On the map, states are ranked based on nine anti-LGBTQ+ structural stigma indicators specifically relevant to youth. The indictors that were considered harmful included “Don’t Say Gay” laws and anti-LGBTQ+ community attitudes. .
Harvey said that gender-sexuality alliances were an interesting and important indicator of the mental health of youth. Regardless of participation, having an alliance near this subgroup acts as a symbol of affirmation of the school supporting youth’s gender or sexuality.
The Trevor Project, a youth LGBTQ centered organization, revealed that LGBTQ youth who found their school to be LGBTQ affirming, reported lower rates of attempted suicide. This survey also showed that 45 percent of LGBTQ youth have seriously considered suicide in 2022. Last year, 16 percent of Latinx LGBTQ youth attempted suicide as well as 19 percent of Black youth in comparison to the 12 percent of white youth.
Dr. Kirsty Clark, an assistant professor of Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University, said that by taking an intersectional angle to this study, the researchers have advanced the understanding of these different identities.
“It is important we consider the experiences of youth holding multiple marginalized identities including Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth,” said Clark, who added that much of the research to date that examines the influence of factors like social policies and bullying on LGBTQ youth mental health, has been conducted in majority-white samples ."Research that takes an intersectional approach by centering the identities and experiences of Black and Latinx LGBTQ youth can help to advance understanding of how multi-level influences can work to harm youth mental health,” she added.
Veronica Fernandez-Alvarado can be reached at [email protected]
The impact of the Supreme Court’s decision in Students for Fair Admissions, SFFA v. Harvard College and SFFA v. University of North Carolina, will stretch far beyond the freshman lecture hall.
While the 6-3 decision will certainly have a negative impact on undergraduate campuses, the Supreme Court decision to strike down race-conscious admissions practices in most colleges and universities will be felt in all aspects of industry and civil leadership. It will also have a serious negative impact on the legal profession. In a blistering dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said, “the devastating impact of this decision cannot be overstated.”
As widely predicted, the ruling reversed 40 years of legal precedent that protected race-conscious admissions in higher education. Earlier decisions allowed schools to use race as one of many factors that college admissions officers could consider when conducting a holistic review of applicants. But last Thursday’s decision found that affirmative action in higher education violates the Constitution. The majority ruled that the admissions policies at Harvard and UNC violate the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. Rather than protecting programs that advance equity in education and opportunities, the increasingly polarized Supreme Court has now banned them.Olympia Duhart
The decision will harm diversity at the undergraduate level; in turn, it will also harm diversity of law school classes and other professional programs. By decreasing the number of Black and Brown students admitted to graduate schools across the country, the SFFA decision strips students of educational opportunities and blocks their path to professions and civil posts.
It will certainly shrink an already narrow pipeline for law school. The ruling undermines the progress that we have made toward an inclusive legal profession that reflects the nation’s diversity. And even that progress has been slow and stunted. The legal profession is already grappling with diversity.
While a 2022 survey by the American Bar Association found a growing number of women, Asian-American, Hispanics and mixed-race people in the legal profession, the number of Black lawyers remained stagnant. Even among groups experiencing growth, the numbers fall short of the US population demographics. Women are still underrepresented. Asians make up 5.5% of all lawyers. Black attorneys are underrepresented -- making up only 4.5% of practicing attorneys. Hispanics represented only 5.8% of all lawyers. Native Americans represented the smallest racial or ethnic group among lawyers; less than one percent of lawyers in the United States are Native American. In several important ways, the demographics of the legal profession fail to reflect the demographics of the population.
This failure will only be exacerbated by the SFFA ruling. As Justice Sotomayor has warned: “The Court subverts the constitutional guarantee of equal protection by further entrenching racial inequality in education, the very foundation of our democratic and pluralistic society.”
While some affirmative action proponents have argued that the Court’s ban on affirmative action will mostly impact highly-selective elite schools, the fact is that this small group of schools play a significant gate-keeping function both in private businesses and government, and especially in law. Even the composition of the Supreme Court bears this out. Among the nine justices who issued the SFFA decision, eight attended Harvard or Yale law school. Even the lawyers most likely to argue before the Supreme Court remain white and male.
From 30,000 feet up, the Court imagined a world with no color considerations or race-based structural inequities. But here on the ground, college admissions officers and applicants are left to grapple with persistent structural inequities that plague education in the United States. Testing performance, access to Advanced Placement tests, likelihood of school suspension and other categorical inequities are marked along racial lines. These inequities translate to fewer students in the pipeline for law school. ABA data shows that only 19% of the nation’s lawyers are people of color – this is less than half of the total US minority population of 40%.
The lack of meaningful representation among lawyers impacts everything from charging decisions to cultural competency in dealing with diverse clients. As Boston University law dean Angela Onwuachi-Willig noted, the small pool of lawyers of color perpetuates a "cycle of inequality in all aspects of the justice system.”
While pipeline programs and recruitment at diverse colleges have played a role in increasing law school diversity, affirmative action has been cited as the critical component to helping law schools attract more students from diverse backgrounds. Now stripped of one of the most effective tools used to increase diversity, admissions officers are especially challenged to ensure that their classrooms reflect the diversity of the communities they serve.
The Court’s SFFA decision just made this task harder.
Olympia Duhart is a Professor of Law at Nova Southeastern University’s Shepard Broad College of Law. She is the Co-President of the Society of American Law Teachers (SALT). SALT was one of 22 organizations that joined Equal Justice Society and California ChangeLawyers in filing an amicus brief in SFFA supporting race-conscious admissions.
Kimberly Hogan
Katrina Spencer
A Tarleton State University doctoral student and U.S. Army veteran Nicole Burkett has recently been named the inaugural recipient of the U.S. Army Women’s Foundation’s 6888th Scholarship, The Flash Today reported.Nicole Burkett
The $2,500 award is in honor of the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion – nicknamed the “Six Triple Eight” – a Women’s Army Corps (WAC) regiment of 855 women, primarily Black but some Hispanic, who deployed during WWII to sort and route millions of pieces of unprocessed mail the Army could not get to front-line troops.
The 6888th – the only all-female unit in Army history – was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in March 2022.
Burkett’s scholarly work traces the trajectory of Black women in the military. Pursuing an Ed.D. in educational leadership with an emphasis on higher education, Burkett wants to advocate for unheard voices and share stories of the vulnerable and underrepresented.
“As women veterans, sometimes we are not considered ‘real veterans’ because it is a mostly male-dominated organization,” Burkett said. “Additionally, as a Black woman in the military, you are sometimes seen as a commodity because of what you can do and not as a person because of who you are. Combat exposure has a way of changing your mindset to survive and also detach you from those you love.
“There is a preponderance of research about male veterans and some about women veterans; however, there is limited research about Black women veterans and even less about combat Black women veterans. In a growing culture of diversity, equity and inclusion, these stories have to be shared. The goal is to help more understand and see them as real people, not commodities.”
During her 24 years in the military, Burkett was stationed in countries including Korea, Japan, and Afghanistan.
Burkett holds three degrees, including a degree in healthcare administration and public administration with an emphasis on human resources. She also holds an associate degree in supply chain logistics.
Two Tennessee Colleges of Applied Technology (TCATs) – Crossville and McMinnville – have earned VETS Campus certification, signaling commitment to efforts to help veterans succeed academically.
The 2014 Tennessee Veterans Education Transition Support (VETS) Act – which established the VETS Campus program – requires schools to meet a set of seven programs, requirements, and qualifications to be certified by the Tennessee Higher Education Commission.
Such requirements include efforts such as mentoring and support programs; assessments of prior learning that gives academic credit to veterans for training and experience from military service; annual surveys of student veterans’ perspectives and needs; and special orientation programs.
“We’re delighted that TCAT Crossville and TCAT McMinnville have achieved this important milestone and made their campuses even more welcoming to our veterans than ever,” said Regina Watkins, director of veteran enrollment and benefits in the College System of Tennessee’s Office of Student Success. “It is an honor to have veterans at our institutions. We have a duty to serve them as they served us.”
These two recent certifications mean that 17 colleges in the College System of Tennessee are VETS campuses. The Tennessee Board of Regents (TBR) and the Office of Student Success aim to get all TBR colleges certified by the end of 2023.
The U.S. Air Force has eased body fat restrictions for recruits as of April 1, The New York Post reported. The percentage of body fat allowed has increased from 20% to 26% BMI (Body Mass Index) for males and 28% to 36% for females. These changes will allow up to 100 more recruits to join the Air Force a month.
The new body fat standards are part of several the Air Force initiatives to appeal to more candidates without lowering the branch’s standards, Air Force Recruiting Service spokeswoman Leslie Brown said.
“The Air Force is looking to open the aperture on qualifying a broader pool of young Americans for service in the Air Force. These changes bring the Air Force in line with DOD (the Department of Defense) policy,” Brown said.
The military has been facing issues with recruitment given national body weight trends. One out of three adults ages 17-24 is too overweight to enlist, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.. And since 2018, 71% of U.S. adults are not eligible to enlist due to weight, level of education, or criminal record.
“The military has experienced increasing difficulty in recruiting soldiers as a result of physical inactivity, obesity, and malnutrition among our nation’s youth. Not addressing these issues now will impact our future national security,” retired Army Lt. General Mark Hertling said.
To note, of U.S. active-duty service members, 19% of military personnel were reported to be obese in 2020, according to the CDC. It costs the DOD almost $1.5 billion annually to address obesity-related healthcare costs of service members and their families, including replacing military personnel removed from service due to their weight.
Col. John P. Lloyd, commander of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) North Atlantic Division (NAD), signed the updated Advancing Minorities’ Interest in Engineering (AMIE) program management plan April 6.Col. John P. Lloyd
AMIE is a diversity-promoting non-profit that USACE has been partnered with since 1996.
“The update to the AMIE program management plan shows a continued top-down commitment from NAD,” said Keysha Cutts, AMIE enterprise program manager and program manager with the military integration division at the South Atlantic Division. “This will serve as the enterprise template for the other divisions to actively recommit and reengage.”
The update focuses on campus engagement and presence, incorporates human resources best practices, and includes partnership alliance goals.
“Diversity in the workforce brings diversity of thought,” Lloyd said. “We need people who can relate and have the engineering background to solve problems in all types of communities. This partnership takes all of us to work, and I thank everyone for dedicating their time outside of their regular duties to do this. I look forward to seeing the good work we do and the great engineers we can support and work with.”
Christina Castillo
The U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory and Brookhaven National Laboratory are partnering with University of Puerto Rico-Río Piedras (UPRRP) to expand UPRRP’s environmental sciences program and attract minority students underrepresented into the atmospheric and Earth system sciences and new energy workforce.Dr. Yan Feng
The four-year project is one of the four awards selected by the Biological and Environmental Research program as part of DOE’s 2023 Reaching a New Energy Sciences Workforce (RENEW) Initiative, which aims to support historically underrepresented groups in science, technology, engineering ,and mathematics and diversify American leadership in energy and climate. To that end, it supports internships, training programs, and mentorship opportunities at historically Black colleges and universities and other minority-serving institutions.
“The two national laboratories bring significant expertise to this collaboration,” said Dr. Yan Feng, a principal atmospheric and climate scientist from Argonne’s Environmental Science division. “Argonne is bringing to the table our work on the aerosol and Earth system modeling. Brookhaven is bringing their strong experience in atmospheric aerosol and cloud measurements. We are excited to help prepare the undergraduate and graduate students at UPRRP, a minority-serving institution that is predominantly Hispanic, for careers where they can contribute to and address the science challenges of DOE programs.”
Argonne and Brookhaven researchers will visit UPRRP annually to teach workshops, help set up the observational site, aid faculty in designing two new courses – one on aerosol modeling and data science and one on atmospheric aerosol instruments.
“We plan to introduce the students and faculty to the DOE high performance computing capabilities at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility, and to the Advanced Photon Source for imaging particles. We will also train students to operate the instruments and use the long-term atmospheric datasets available at the Atmospheric Radiation Measurement user facility,” Feng said. “The UPRRP faculty and students are excited for the opportunity to have hands on experience at these world-class facilities.”
Applications for the second round of FY2023 funding for DOE RENEW is open until April and May 2023.
The Colorado Community College System has announced transfer agreements with two historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs): Saint Augustine’s University and Texas Southern University .
Come Fall 2023, this partnership will make SAU and TSU the only two HBCUs and first out-of-state transfer options in the community college system's Bridge to Bachelor’s Degree Program, which gives new, first-time students admission to participating four-year institutions upon associate degree completion.
Program participants get access to early advising from their college of choice, academic counseling, and financial aid, while not having to face specific tests or transfer application fees.
SAU will also offer scholarships to Bridge to Bachelor’s students.
This agreement also creates SAU’s third national HBCU Urban Access Hub.
“I am thrilled to collaborate with Chancellor Joe Garcia and open new pathways for CCCS graduates to access opportunities offered at Saint Augustine’s University,” said Dr. Christine Johnson McPhail, SAU's president. “Through the creation of the SAU HBCU Access Hub at CCCS, our institutions will successfully bridge the geographical access gap and bring the HBCU experience to Colorado students.”
The U.S. Department of Education (ED) has released a notice of proposed rule-making (NPRM) regarding Title IX athletic eligibility and participation of transgender students in school sports.
Under the proposed rule – it applies to public K-12 schools, colleges, universities, and other institutions receiving federal funding – policies that categorically ban transgender students from participating on sports teams consistent with their gender identity would be in violation of Title IX. However, the rule allows for policies that impose limits to the participation of trans students.
“The proposed rule would provide schools with a framework for developing eligibility criteria that protects students from being denied equal athletic opportunity, while giving schools the flexibility to develop their own participation policies,” according to an ED fact sheet, U.S. Department of Education's Proposed Change to its Title IX Regulations on Students' Eligibility for Athletic Teams.
Such criteria will have to account for the type of sport, level of competition, and grade or education level. And they will have to “minimize harms to students whose opportunity to participate on a male or female team consistent with their gender identity would be limited or denied," ED stated.
ED aims to give schools flexibility to make rules that serve “educational objectives,” such as fairness in competition or preventing sports-related injury, according to the department's fact sheet.
“Taking those considerations into account, the Department expects that, under its proposed regulation, elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for a school to justify excluding students immediately following elementary school from participating consistent with their gender identity,” the fact sheet stated. “For older students, especially at the high school and college level, the Department expects that sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students may be permitted, in some cases, when they enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition, and meet the proposed regulation’s other requirements.”
This comes as some states have implemented policies on sports participation of trans students in recent years. Nineteen states, such as West Virginia, have banned trans student athletes in the last three years, according to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The NPRM will be open for public comment for 30 days from date of publication in the Federal Register.
When Brown University released its landmark 2006 report documenting the institution’s historical involvement in slavery, many of its recommendations were one-time fixes: revising the university’s official history, creating memorials, and the like. Some, however, required longer-term engagement, such as the creation of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice (CSSJ), a research hub focusing on the history of slavery and its contemporary impacts.
For Dr. Ruth J. Simmons, the former president of Brown who commissioned the report, these sorts of projects are particularly significant.Dr. Ruth J. Simmons is former president of Brown University.
“If you want to take this history seriously, one of the most important things to do is to acknowledge it in an ongoing way,” Simmons said at the time. “We ought to say to ourselves, what can we do to incorporate it into what we do as a university?”
CSSJ has succeeded beyond expectations, becoming an international leader in the way that slavery and its legacies are taught and understood. Newly re-named for Simmons, it recently celebrated its 10th anniversary and a $10 million endowment.
“It’s been really gratifying to see the center grow from an idea in a few lines of a report to something that is having an impact in ways that we couldn’t have imagined,” said Dr. Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown.
Part of what has distinguished the center is a refusal to limit its work to the history of slavery in the United States.
“The issue of racial slavery was not just an American affair,” said Dr. Anthony Bogues, Asa Messer professor of humanities and critical theory and director of the CSSJ. “We have never told that story as a global story, as a story that made the world that we live in. We thought it was important in the 21st century to begin to connect those dots.”
One of the Center’s major undertakings to this end has been the Global Curatorial Project, a network of scholars and curators from museums around the world focused on showing the worldwide interconnectedness of the slave trade and its afterlives. The project is working on an exhibition tentatively titled In Slavery’s Wake— Slavery, Freedom, and the Making of Our World that is scheduled to debut at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History & Culture in December 2024 before traveling the world.
The center also maintains a strong focus on public engagement — making sure that people in the local community and wider world are getting to interact with its work. CSSJ sponsors arts initiatives that are open to the public, walking tours about the history of slavery at Brown and in Rhode Island, and a civil rights-themed after-school program for students at public high schools in Providence. It also provided research for a forthcoming four-part documentary series about the transatlantic slave trade that will air on PBS.
“For us, the question of racial slavery could not just be an academic affair,” said Bogues. “How could you have a center that would just be confined to a group of scholars talking to a group of scholars? We had to find ways in which we could engage the public.”
The most complete model
The center has served as an example for other universities seeking to reckon with their relationships to slavery. Over the past decade, schools including Harvard, Georgetown, and the University of Pennsylvania have investigated their own entanglements with slavery and had to decide how to respond to the findings.Dr. Anthony Bogues is director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University.
“The work at Brown stands as the gold standard of how you do this. It’s the most complete model at any university of how to actually commit resources to a present-day justice mission,” said Dr. Kirt von Daacke, assistant dean and professor at the University of Virginia, and the managing director of Universities Studying Slavery, which has a membership of over 100 schools in six countries.
“You’re seeing schools now going, ‘We’ve done the research, we’ve done the acknowledgment , we’ve done some basic atonement, but how do we institutionalize this and turn it into something that lives beyond the walls of the university?” said von Daacke. “Everyone looks at what Anthony Bogues and CSSJ have been doing.”
As the CSSJ enters its second decade, its work has become more relevant than ever.
“Given the times we’re in now, when there’s something of a backlash against teaching about the history of slavery in America, it couldn’t be more important,” Paxson said.
In addition to after-school and summer programs for teenagers, the Center has worked to create K-12 curricula about slavery. CSSJ is also studying present-day human trafficking, as well as modern legacies of slavery, such as the mass imprisonment of Black men.
“We’ve been grappling with how we think about policing, how we think about incarceration, how we think about systemic racism,” Paxson said. “These are things that the Center is in the middle of and very prepared to address.”
Although the center that now bears her name is having a worldwide impact, Simmons is most pleased that the CSSJ has shown that tackling tough questions is not only possible, but a fundamental part of the mission of higher education.
“When we took this on, it was criticized heavily, because it was thought to be something that one couldn’t touch without creating immense division,” she said. “[The CSSJ] showed that we can confront difficult issues, histories, and questions in an entirely appropriate way. I think I’m proudest of that.”
Jon Edelman can be reached at [email protected].
Leana E. Amáez
FreshRSS 