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Pamela E. Scott-Johnson was named provost and vice president for academic affairs at Spelman College in Atlanta, effective August 1. She has been serving as provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Monmouth University in West Long Branch, New Jersey. Before joining Monmouth, Dr. Scott-Johnson served as the dean of the College of Natural and Social Sciences at California State University, Los Angeles. She spent nearly 15 years on the psychology faculty at Morgan State University in Baltimore. Earlier, she held a tenured faculty post at Spelman College.
“I am thrilled to be returning to my alma mater as a member of the leadership team to help shape and enhance the academic landscape through which women of Spelman develop as change agents,” said Dr. Scott-Johnson. “Spelman has been and will continue to be a special place for women of African descent and how they impact the world. I look forward to guiding additional pathways for advancing faculty, at all levels, and delivering innovation in student success from retention to graduation.”
Dr. Scott-Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Spelman College. She holds master’s and doctoral degrees in psychology and neuroscience from Princeton University in New Jersey.
Allyson L. Watson was appointed provost and vice president for academic affairs at Florida A&M University. Dr. Watson, who came to the university in 2019 as dean of the College of Education, has served as interim provost and vice president for academic affairs since December 2022. Before she arrived at Florida A&M University, Dr. Watson served as the interim chief academic officer and dean at the University of South Florida, St. Petersburg. Earlier, Dr. Watson spent nearly 14 years on the faculty at Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where she held the Eddings Endowed Chair for Urban Education, Outreach & Research.
“Florida A&M University is an institution of academic excellence. I am honored to represent the significance of our history and the academic contributions we have accomplished and be at the helm of such an important time for our future,” Dr. Watson said. “Our future is bright, and I look forward to leading with vision, tenacity, and innovation.”
Dr. Watson holds a bachelor’s degree in elementary education from Bethune-Cookman University in Daytona Beach, Florida. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in educational administration, curriculum, and supervision from the University of Oklahoma.
Ana Hunt was named provost of the University of Arkansas-Pulaski Technical College. She has been serving as interim provost and previously was interim chancellor of the college. She joined Pulaski Tech in 2019 as registrar. Earlier, she was registrar at National Park College in Hot Springs, Arkansas. From 2012 to 2016, Dr. Hunt was registrar and enrollment coordinator at Baptist Health College in Little Rock, Arkansas.
“I’m humbled and very grateful that the search committee chose me,” Dr. Hunt said. “I look forward to collaborating with my colleagues to offer the best educational experience in Arkansas.”
Dr. Hunt is a graduate of the University of Arkansas at Monticello. She holds a master’s degree in college student personnel from Arkansas Tech and a doctorate in educational leadership and management from Capella University.
A lawsuit targeted a school district and the State of Florida over restricting access to a book about a penguin family with two fathers.
Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, has threatened to reconsider his state’s relationship with the College Board.
Amanda Gorman reciting a poem during the inauguration.
Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida at a bill-signing event this month.
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Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida has campaigned against what he has described as “woke indoctrination” in the classroom.
Two elephants came to live in Miami Beach with resort guests in the 1920s, troubling the divides between humans and animals, work and play. Anna Vemer Andrzejewski examines the ambiguous role these elephants occupied in Florida's leisure landscape.
The post Work, Play, and Elephants in South Florida’s Leisure Landscape appeared first on Edge Effects.
Enlarge / Florida surgeon general Joseph Ladapo speaks at a press conference. (credit: Getty | Paul Hennessy)
Florida health officials deleted key data and statistics from a state analysis on the safety of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines, falsely making them appear unsafe for young men, according to draft versions of the analysis obtained by the Tampa Bay Times through public records requests.
The final analysis, which was widely criticized for its poor quality and dubious conclusions, was the basis for a statewide recommendation by Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo last October that young men, ages 18 to 39, should not receive an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine. The analysis—posted on the Florida Department of Health's website with no authors listed—claimed to find "an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination."
Ladapo, who has a history of fearmongering about COVID-19 vaccines, touted the analysis, saying in a press release at the time that "these are important findings that should be communicated to Floridians.”
Here's a helpful compilation of "every horrible bill proposed by DeSantis's Florida GOP this year." It's infuriating to read, but it's important that we are informed of the awful things happening down in Florida (and all over the country, really). The list (which is subtitled: "Homophobes, racists, billionaires, and white nationalists rejoice?") — Read the rest
A current first grade history lesson in use in Florida.
A Florida charter school is inexplicably backing an oddly behaving board member over a beloved principal. Board member Jeff Peters of the Choices in Learning Elementary Charter School went to campus during school hours to deliver presents to his children. When the school clerk turned him away Peters engaged in a series of strange behaviors, such as demanding permission to wander the campus solo and began conducting a campaign to dismiss the school's principal. — Read the rest
Peter Gitau was named vice chancellor for student affairs at the Spokane campus of Washington State University. Most recently, Dr. Gitau was the vice president for student services at Butte-Glenn Community College in Oroville, California. He has also held executive leadership positions at Utah Technical University, Northern Kentucky University, and Southern Illinois University.
Born and raised in Kenya, Dr. Gitau received his bachelor’s degree in secondary education from Kenyatta University in Nairobi. He earned a master’s degree in educational administration from Eastern Illinois University and a doctoral degree in higher education administration from the University of Kansas.
Donald Miles is the new executive director of the Office of Institutional Research, Assessment, and Analytics at the University of South Carolina. He joined the staff at the university in 2012.
Miles is a graduate of the University of South Carolina-Aiken, where he majored in political science. He holds a master of public administration degree from Augusta University in Georgia.
Pat Kendrick was appointed interim executive director of athletics and recreation at Xavier University in New Orleans. She has been the head women’s volleyball coach at the university for the past six years. Prior to joining the staff at Xavier University, she served in various roles as a coach and instructor with USA Volleyball.
A native of Lorton, Virginia, Kendrick is a graduate of George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, where she was a two-sport athlete in volleyball and track & field.
Joseph O. Montgomery is the new interim associate vice provost for enrollment management at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University. He was vice president for enrollment management and student success at Tuskegee University in Alabama.
Montgomery is a graduate of what is now Voorhees University in South Carolina, where he majored in biology. He holds a master’s degree in adult education from North Carolina A&T State University.
Brittney Johnson was named senior associate athletic director for compliance and senior woman administrator at Florida A&M University. Before joining FAMU, Johnson served as the associate athletic director for student-athlete development and academic success at the University of South Alabama.
Johnson earned a bachelor’s degree in health sciences from the University of Alabama in 2007. She holds a master’s degree in foods, nutrition, and wellness studies from Alabama A&M University and is working on a doctorate from Walden University.
The Dan David Prize is awarded by the Dan David Foundation at Tel Aviv University in Israel to up to nine early and mid-career scholars and practitioners in the historical disciplines. The honor comes with a $300,000 prize. The prize was established in 2001 by Dan David, who lived through Nazi and Communist persecution in his native Romania before becoming a global business leader and philanthropist. The prize has the goal of rewarding and encouraging innovative and interdisciplinary research that cuts across traditional boundaries and paradigms. The prize is given in recognition of the winners’ contribution to the study of the past and to support their future endeavors.
Of this year’s nine winners, two are Black scholars with university affiliations in the United States.
Saheed Aderinto is a professor of history and African and African diaspora studies at Florida International University. Professor Aderinto describes himself as a serial methodologist and decompartmentalizing historian who adopts multiple disciplinary tools in understanding the past while blending different genres of history to reveal the complexities of people and events that came before us.
Dr. Aderinto has written a number of books, including When Sex Threatened the State: Illicit Sexuality, Nationalism, and Politics in Colonial Nigeria, 1900-1958 (University of Illinois Press, 2014), Guns and Society in Colonial Nigeria: Firearms, Culture, and Public Order (Indiana University Press, January 2018), and Animality and Colonial Subjecthood in Africa: The Human and Nonhuman Creatures of Nigeria (Ohio University Press, 2022). He is currently writing a book and making a documentary about the history of Fuji music in Nigeria.
Professor Aderinto is a graduate of the University of Ibadan in Nigeria. He holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is the Chancellor’s Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley. She is a historian who explores women’s social, economic, and legal relationships to enslaved people and to the slave trade in the trans-Atlantic world. Dr. Jones-Rogers’ research has been primarily concerned with women and slavery, but her work also explores the evolution and development of early systems of law, especially as they pertain to women, bondage, and the slave trade.
Dr. Jones-Rogers is the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South (Yale University Press, 2019), which draws on the testimonies of enslaved and formerly enslaved individuals, legal, financial, and military records as well as an array of other narrative sources to show how White married women – a group historically seen as legally disempowered and economically dispossessed – exercised extraordinary power in and over enslaved African-Americans’ lives.
Dr. Jones-Rogers earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology, a master’s degree in American history, and a Ph.D. in history all from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Parents of students at New College in Sarasota, Florida want to be sure the rest of the United States sees how Florida Gov. Ron Desantis is attacking their school. In addition to banning books and dictating what teachers can discuss with their students, DeSantis is appointing members to school boards to take his big white eraser to their curriculum. — Read the rest
There is a moral panic about transgender issues sweeping America. While it is raging most viciously in the Republican Party — see: the odious speeches at CPAC last week; Tennessee banning drag shows and gender-affirming health care for minors; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis requesting information from public colleges about students who have sought hormone treatment and reassignment surgeries — the panic’s tentacles extend much further. There is no better moment, then, to read historian Brandy Schillace’s piece about the Institute for Sexual Research, a groundbreaking facility in interwar Germany that heralded a just, humane future for gay, trans, and non-binary individuals, until fascism arrived. Schillace is at work on a book about the institute, and you can also listen to her talk about it on a recent edition of NPR’s All Things Considered:
That such an institute existed as early as 1919, recognizing the plurality of gender identity and offering support, comes as a surprise to many. It should have been the bedrock on which to build a bolder future. But as the institute celebrated its first decade, the Nazi party was already on the rise. By 1932 it was the largest political party in Germany, growing its numbers through a nationalism that targeted the immigrant, the disabled and the “genetically unfit.” Weakened by economic crisis and without a majority, the Weimar Republic collapsed.
Adolf Hitler was named chancellor on January 30, 1933, and enacted policies to rid Germany of Lebensunwertes Leben, or “lives unworthy of living.” What began as a sterilization program ultimately led to the extermination of millions of Jews, Roma, Soviet and Polish citizens — and homosexuals and transgender people.
When the Nazis came for the institute on May 6, 1933, Hirschfeld was out of the country. Giese fled with what little he could. Troops swarmed the building, carrying off a bronze bust of Hirschfeld and all his precious books, which they piled in the street. Soon a towerlike bonfire engulfed more than 20,000 books, some of them rare copies that had helped provide a historiography for nonconforming people.
The carnage flickered over German newsreels. It was among the first and largest of the Nazi book burnings. Nazi youth, students and soldiers participated in the destruction, while voiceovers of the footage declared that the German state had committed “the intellectual garbage of the past” to the flames. The collection was irreplaceable.
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Unsatisfied with their 15-week ban on abortion, Florida Republicans, with the support of Presidential hopeful Gov. Ron DeSantis have introduced legislation seeking a 6-week ban. DeSantis has already announced he'll sign further restrictions on women's access to healthcare.
— Read the restFlorida Republicans moved Tuesday to restrict abortion even more by proposing bills to ban the procedure with few exceptions after six weeks of pregnancy.
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