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This was originally published at The Rumpus on April 24, 2017.
By mid-morning, it was so hot her breath felt as if it were being drawn back into her. She took the tin washbasin out to the front yard, filled it with cold water, and shampooed her hair. If she turned her head, she could watch her reflection in the kitchen window as she leaned over the tub. Her hips seemed so wide in that position, tapering down from the wraparound skirt to legs that were girl-like. She watched her hair turn from yellow to brown with the wetness.
Around noon, with her hair now sticking to the back of her neck with perspiration, she heard the screen door slam once, then again. It was odd for him to come home in the middle of the day.
She went to the kitchen but he was already gone. This was the way he did things. She looked at the kitchen table for a box, some sign of the gift she was sure he would sneak in and leave her just as he had every anniversary. She heard his truck backing down the dirt drive. There was no chance she’d catch up with him.
This time of day, the sun came in through the slatted windows and settled on the yellow linoleum in stripes. Now she saw it. There lay her gift, basking in the sunlight. A gray-green lizard the size of a shoe. It stood so still she thought it was fake. A joke he had played on her, like the time he told her he was fixing the kitchen faucet and put a gag faucet where the real one had been. She remembered how she ducked and screamed, thinking she would be splashed with water when the new faucet came off in her hands.
But this was not plastic. He had tied a long piece of thick string from one of the lizard’s ankles to the kitchen table. Around the neck was a thin yellow crinkly ribbon that she had seen him pull out of the junk drawer the day before. She had suspected it was to wrap her gift. The ribbon was tied sideways around the animal’s neck in a bow. The lizard squinted as it turned its head slowly to look around the room. Its bulgy, liquid eyes scared her. She moved and the thin plates of skin on its back stood up. Now it turned its head swiftly and the scales rippled as if it were shivering.
She heard herself sigh, rubbed her hands on her skirt, and walked toward the white pine cupboards, making a full circle around the lizard’s body. It watched her. She found an aluminum pie pan under the sink and grabbed the pitcher of cold water from the refrigerator. She put the pan on the floor, poured the water in, and inched it over to the animal with a broom, backing away quickly and waiting to see if it would drink. The lizard sat on its squat legs and narrowed its lids into slits like cat’s-eye marbles. It appeared to be asleep.
Throughout the day, she kept going to the kitchen to check on it, afraid it might get loose in the house. In the late afternoon, she stood a distance away and threw a leaf of Bibb lettuce by the pie pan. She didn’t want anything to do with it, but she didn’t want it to starve. The creature, startled, was set into motion, skittering back and forth, first in one direction, then another, yanking itself back again and again by the string. For a while, she took a seat across from it, leaning forward. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, she said.
She finished cleaning the house and had no choice now but to come back to the kitchen. She had to clear out everything to wash the floor, which meant moving the tables and chairs and putting it somewhere. Outside was where she wanted it. She could tell him it escaped, ran away. But that wouldn’t be honest and if they had promised each other anything when they married, it was honesty. Letting his gift run away, or rather, pushing his gift out the door, wouldn’t be a white lie. It would be flat-out deception.
She moved the chairs into the hallway and tried to untie the string, cursing him for making a knot she couldn’t undo. She went to the junk drawer, took out the scissors and, grasping the string, clipped it quickly and led the lizard toward the kitchen door, then the porch, like a dog on a leash. When she opened the screen door, the lizard tried to run back inside, as if it were afraid of the outdoors. She pulled it along, but it planted all four paws firmly on the floor. Its nails made a pitiful sound on the linoleum, then became stuck on the doorjamb. She gave a tug and over it rolled, like a child’s toy truck. Another tug, and it was up again and furious and ran towards her. It followed her the whole length of the porch until she scooted over the banister and tied it to one of the posts. She walked around to the back of the house and let herself in.
What a gift, she thought. Her present for him was wrapped and put away in a bedroom drawer days before he suggested they skip gifts this year. She had bought him a new jacket and white shirt. She undid the ribbon to look at them, then replaced the clothes and surrounded them with tissue paper. They looked so nice she took the shirt out again and held it up to her cheek. It felt so crisp and cool.
When the day had cooled, she bathed and changed into a fresh cotton dress and lifted her hair away from her neck to pin it up.
*
“What’s it doing out there?” he said when he came home. “Don’t you like it?”
On the table, she had put a candle and the gift box in navy blue paper and the good dishes, but he didn’t look at those.
“What’s it doing?” she said absently, for she had taken him to mean that the thing was doing something interesting or different and that she should go and look.
The lizard stood very still, as if it might be dead. The bow was gone.
“Why’d you put it out there?” he said.
“Because it belongs out there,” she said as she closed the screen door.
From the heat, his black hair had separated into individual strands, making him look older and scraggly.
“You didn’t like it,” he said and began to follow her around the kitchen.
She retrieved his favorite pasta dish from the oven and the salad from the refrigerator and he followed right behind. Their bodies made a shadow on the yellow floor that looked like the silhouette of two shy, hesitant boxers in a ring.
“Oh, I like it,” she said. She was intent on getting the dinner ready and didn’t look at him. “I like it just fine. You didn’t pay any money for it, did you?”
His face looked tight.
She motioned toward the window with her cooking mitt. “It’s just that there’s a million of them out there, and it’s a shame to throw away good money after one.”
“I bought it, all right? Cheap. From a guy at work. I thought you’d like it. I thought you’d think it was funny.”
“I do think it’s funny. I laughed.”
“It’s really neat,” he said, trying to convince her. “It looks prehistoric or something.”
She made him sit through dinner before opening his package.
She expected him to say, I thought we agreed, but he didn’t. Instead, he looked eager, put his glass down, and said, “Well, let’s see what this is.”
He seemed stunned for a moment when he saw the clothes and then whistled low as he lifted them out of the box. He felt the material, ran his fingers down the length of the lapel, and smiled at her. “This is a good one. But what‘s it for? God knows there’s nowhere around here to wear this.” And then he laughed and said, eyes crinkling, “What have you got up your sleeve? I think you must be up to something, baby doll.”
“They’re interview clothes. You’ll need something nice to interview in if you try to get transferred back home or if you go to another company. Isn’t that why we came here? So you’d have a better job after this one? The next step up, you said.”
He went back to examining the jacket, rose half out of his chair and sat down again.
“Isn’t it?” she repeated and motioned with the back of her hand to the open bedroom door. “Try it on.”
He was standing now. He had the jacket on and went to the mirror, looking at himself this way and that, sizing up every angle.
“I told you,” he said. “I’ve got to put in a couple of years first before I’d even try to move on. You don’t just go looking for another job when you’ve hardly been here. You have to pay your dues.” He ran his hand through his hair. “I was hoping that once you were here for a while, you’d like it.”
“What’s there to like?” she said. She began biting some ragged skin on her bottom lip. She fingered the rim of her glass. She knew her voice sounded bitter but she didn’t care. “You told me about the place. Patience, you said. You’d have to be brain-dead to have this much patience. To want to live here. You’d have to be a fool.”
He stepped in front of her. “I’m a fool then,” he said, sticking his hands in his pockets.
“You’re a fast learner. Everyone has always told you that. You’ll find another job. You don’t have to stay at that place.”
“You don’t want me to blow what I have, do you? If they get wind of me applying other places it won’t look good. And if I go in there now and ask the boss for a transfer back to where I came from, they’d die laughing. There are other guys, ahead of me, willing to pay their dues.”
She thought of those other men and what they and their wives must be like to be so patient, so accepting. She found herself wondering, for the first time since they had been together, what other kinds of men she could have married. Maybe I should have waited, she thought. And then she thought, I’ve heard about this. This is how things change.
“You act as if I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “They said I’d have to wait two years for a transfer. At least two years.”
“Oh, great,” she said, fingering the glass again. “I’ll be dead in two years in a place like this.”
He smiled at her. “There she is. My melodramatic sweetheart.”
He removed his jacket and draped it neatly over his chair. He stepped behind her and put his arms around her.
“Look,” he said. “Baby doll. This is nothing. We’ll laugh about this later. It’ll be a story. Like a joke about how many miles we walked to school when we were kids.”
She looked through the window to where there was a thin stream of orange light across the horizon and nothing more. Some people might think the sight was beautiful. To her it had become barren.
“Let’s eat,” she said. “It’s getting cold.”
And in the end, after they had finished dinner and lain together and after she waited for the movements of his body to cause hers to shiver, she turned on her side and closed her eyes. He put his hand on her hip and said in a whisper, “Baby doll? You still awake?”
She was in the lazy space between wakefulness and sleep and, so, didn’t answer. She thought she heard the animal stumbling off the porch, down the steps, and into the night, finally free.
Before she dreamed, an image came to her of the liquid eyes. As she began to fall asleep, her body jerked, quick and hard. She felt as if she were jumping straight up into darkness.
***
Rumpus original art by Aubrey Nolan.
Last week I was introduced to Lagusta’s Luscious’ Rosemary Seasalt Camarels and my life will never be the same. How can vegan chocolate be this good? What? Thank you Tim!
This essay was the overall winner in the Undergraduate Category of the 2023 National Oxford Uehiro Prize in Practical Ethics
Written by University of Oxford student, Lukas Joosten
Most parents think they are helping their children when they give them a very high standard of life. This essay argues that giving luxuries to your children can, in fact, be morally impermissible. The core of my argument is that when parents give their children a luxurious standard of life, they foist an expectation for a higher standard of living upon their children, reducing their lifetime wellbeing if they cannot afford this standard in adulthood.
I argue for this conclusion in four steps. Firstly, I discuss how one can harm someone by changing their preferences. Secondly, I develop a model for the general permissibility of gift giving in the context of adaptive preferences. Thirdly, I apply this to the case of parental giving, arguing it is uniquely problematic. Lastly, I respond to a series of objections to the main argument.
I call the practice in question, luxury parenting. Luxury parenting consists of providing certain luxuries to your child which go beyond a reasonably good standard of living. I will consider this through a framework of gift giving, since luxury parenting can be understood as the continual gifting of certain luxuries to children. While my argument also applies to singular gifts of luxury to children, it is targeted at the continual provision of luxury goods and services to ensure a high standard of living throughout childhood.
Section 1: Preference Screwing
When we discuss harming one’s wellbeing, we are usually referring to taking some action which changes the actor’s situation so that they are further from their preferences. However, a person’s wellbeing can be harmed in the opposite way as well, by changing their preferences away from their situation. Consider the following example.
Wine pill: Bob secretly administers a pill to Will which changes his preferences so that he no longer enjoys cheap wine.
Will has been harmed here in some morally significant way without having received any immediate disbenefit. The harm consists in the effect on future preferences. We can call this type of harming “preference screwing”.
Preference Screwing: Making it more difficult for an actor to achieve a certain level of utility by changing the actor’s preferences so that there is a larger divergence between the preference set and the actor’s option set.
Section 2: Adaptive Preferences and Gift-giving
The theory of adaptive preferences tells us that people tend to return to their baseline happiness after positive or negative shocks to their wellbeing because people’s preferences adapt to their current situation. I argue this process of preference adaptation implies that some instances of gift-giving are impermissible, because consuming a high-quality gift, screws with the preferences of the recipient, so that they derive lower utility from future consumption of lower-quality variants of the good they were gifted.
There exists a vast literature debating the accuracy of adaptive preferences.[1] However, my argument only requires a weak restricted form of adaptive preferences. Namely it simply says that there is some negative impact of consuming expensive goods on the enjoyment of future cheap goods. That such an impact exists is generally empirically supported, even if the strength of the impact is debatable.[2]
It might be objected that if preferences are adaptive, then gift-giving has no long-term harm since, upon returning to the lower-quality good, preferences will adapt downward immediately. There are two independent reasons why this is not a problem for my argument.
Firstly, I don’t assume (and the empirics don’t support) complete adaption, only partial adaptation. This means that once the preferences of an actor have (partially) adapted up after consuming the higher-quality good, then if the actor returns to the lower-quality good, their preferences will adapt down but not completely, so there remains a long-lasting upwards pressure on their preferences.
Secondly, as discussed in section 3, since childhood is a formative life-phase, preferences adapt more quickly and more permanently for children. Luxury parenting thus fixes children’s preferences at a high point, which will take much longer to adapt back down in adulthood.
This allows us to develop a model of gift giving. When A gifts X to B, B’s lifetime wellbeing is affected in two ways. Firstly, there is the immediate positive (or negative if a particularly poor gift) utility derived by B’s consumption of X. Call this the immediate utility. Secondly there is the long-term impact of the gift’s preference screwing. The preference screwing effect is the total harm to the lifetime wellbeing of B incurred by B as a result of the preference screwing caused by consuming X. This allows us to state the following:
Net wellbeing impact of gift giving = immediate utility – preference screwing effect
Now, consider that preference screwing through gift-giving is usually not considered a form of wronging. Consider the following example:
Wine gift: Bob gifts a bottle of Château Latour to Will for his birthday. After thoroughly enjoying the wine, Will no longer enjoys cheap wines as much
In wine gift, we would not say that Bob has wronged Will. There are two distinctions between wine gift and wine pill which explain why gift giving to adults is generally permissible.
Firstly, wine gift is not necessarily a net negative for Will’s lifetime utility. The spike in utility of drinking the gifted bottle may outweigh the loss in utility from the future discounted happiness of drinking cheap wines. In wine pill, there is only a negative impact on Will’s utility (ignoring the health effects).
Secondly, and crucially, Will consents into receiving the gift. Generally, we think that a person’s potential complaint versus a particular action is much weaker when they consented into that action being conducted upon them.
This allows us to say that the permissibility of gift given is a function of the following two parameters:
The weight given to each is going to vary with one’s background intuitions on paternalism. Anti-paternalists might thus completely disregard the first parameter, arguing that given sufficient consent, gift-giving is always permissible. My argument is inclusive to a broad pluralism on this matter, since it avoids the 2nd parameter altogether, as discussed in section 3.
Section 3: Giving Children Luxuries
By evaluating luxury parenting on the two parameters, I argue that many instances of practice are impermissible.
Firstly, consider level of consent. Children are usually thought to lack the required capacities for autonomous decision making, such as critical thinking, time-relative agency (ownership of future interests) and independence[3]. This means that children, generally, cannot consent into receiving luxuries from their parents.
As such, we must adapt the model of consent for children. Brighouse suggests that the autonomy rights of children express themselves as fiduciary duties upon parents.[4] Parents thus have the authority to make decisions for their children, but this authority is limited by the duty to act in the child’s best interest. This means that both parents can permissibly give gifts to children, but only when those gifts appear to be in the best interest of the child. Assume now that, ceteris paribus, the non-welfare interests of children are unaffected in cases of gift giving. Given this assumption, we can say that the permissibility of child gift giving boils down to the expected net impact.
Luxury parenting is thus usually impermissible since it is particularly likely to lead to a negative expected net impact. This is because the preference screwing effect is likely to be strong, while the immediate benefit is small. Children are particularly vulnerable to preference screwing from luxury parenting for four reasons.
Firstly, childhood is an especially formative stage in life. Due to the ongoing development of the brain, the patterns children learn are going to be extra lasting. [5] This means that if preferences are formed to expect a high standard of living, these preferences are going to be especially sticky. If the child’s standard of living drops upon reaching adulthood, those preferences will likely adapt down less quickly and won’t adapt down completely.
Secondly, when children experience certain goods, they often experience them for the first time. If the first time they experience a particular good or service, they are experiencing an expensive variant of that good, they are likely to calibrate their future expectation on this expensive good, because they have no cheaper variants to compare it to.
Thirdly, children generally will have a lesser appreciation of the uniqueness or scarcity of the goods they experience at a high standard of living. In wine gift, Will is acutely aware that his drinking of Château Latour is a unique and temporary experience. This awareness can deter the preference adaptation. However, children are less likely to be aware of the fleeting nature of the standard of living and so are not protected from preference adaption in this way.
Lastly, the effect is going to be especially strong because the luxury gifts are provided for an extended period of time. If parents provide a luxurious standard of living for multiple years, that gives a very long time for the child’s preferences to be pushed upwards and solidify there.
On the flip side, the immediate utility effect is going to be smaller for children. The satisfaction people receive from luxuries often goes beyond the direct experiential joy of the good or service. There is also the novelty of the experience, the secondary reflective happiness from knowing that you are consuming something special. Children are much less likely to appreciate the novelty of the experience since they are likely, as argued above, to be less aware of the uniqueness of the experience.
In sum, luxury parenting has strongly negative preferencing screwing effects while it offers a limited positive immediate utility. In turn, luxury parenting is likely to have a negative expected net impact on children, meaning that luxury parenting is often impermissible.
Section 4: Objections
Objection 1: Symmetry Implications
If it is impermissible to give a luxurious standard of life to children, this could imply that it is morally required to give a miserable existence to children instead. If childhood suffering will push preferences down such that children will be happier in the long run, this may be better for the child. This implication would be so clearly unacceptable that it would condemn the whole argument. However, the implications of the model are asymmetrical. This is because children are generally thought to have significant rights, which ought to be respected. They have rights against being physically harmed and to a reasonable standard of living. Parents cannot impose suffering on their children even if it is a net-positive on lifetime wellbeing because this would violate these rights protections.
On the flipside, parents can permissibly withdraw these luxury goods, since children generally are not thought to have a right to luxury living.
Objection 2: Shared Time
One might argue that luxury parenting is permissible because it is necessary for parents to give themselves a high quality of life. Parents are generally thought to be under an obligation to spend quality time with their children because a healthy parental relationship is crucial for the child’s development. This is problematic since many opportunities for quality time are also opportunities for parents to spend money on themselves, such as restaurants, vacations, or entertainment. So, if we think parents should be permitted to spend money on themselves, this could make luxury parenting permissible. There are three responses to this objection.
Firstly, there are still many ways parents can spend on themselves without spending on their children. Parents can spend money on activities without their children or they can spend money on themselves while shielding their children from the same luxury expenditure, for instance by ordering a lobster for yourself and the pasta for your child.
Secondly, the magnitude of this sacrifice, being unable to spend on oneself, directly correlates with the level of wealth parents have. This makes the sacrifice a less significant problem because the wealth of parents reduces the required sacrifice of parenting significantly in other contexts. Wealthy parents can afford babysitters, summer camps, and meal boxes. This means that the sacrifice of giving up luxury is balanced out by the diminished sacrifice in other facets of parenting.
Thirdly, parents are routinely asked to make sacrifices for their children in determining how they spend their time. They can only watch child-friendly movies, avoid bars, and go to child-friendly holiday destinations. It’s unclear, for instance, how giving up luxury is materially different from forcing parents to go on vacation to Disneyland.
In sum, a parent’s interest in treating themselves is insufficient for making luxury parenting permissible.
Works Cited:
Bagenstos, Samuel R., and Margo Schlanger. ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’. Vanderbilt Law Review 60, no. 3 (2007): 745–98.
Brighouse, Harry. ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’, 1 January 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0003.
Coleman, Joe. ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’. In The Moral and Political Status of Children, edited by David Archard and Colin M. Macleod, 0. Oxford University Press, 2002. https://doi.org/10.1093/0199242682.003.0009.
Russell, Simon J., Karen Hughes, and Mark A. Bellis. ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’. BMJ Open 6, no. 1 (1 January 2016): e007770. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen-2015-007770.
[1] Bagenstos and Schlanger, ‘Hedonic Damages, Hedonic Adaptation, and Disability’.
[2] Bagenstos and Schlanger.
[3] Coleman, ‘Answering Susan: Liberalism, Civic Education, and the Status of Younger Persons’.
[4] Brighouse, ‘What Rights (If Any) Do Children Have’.
[5] Russell, Hughes, and Bellis, ‘Impact of Childhood Experience and Adult Well-Being on Eating Preferences and Behaviours’.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Saint Louis University received a five-year $2,830,00 grant from the National Cancer Institute for programs to increase HPV vaccination and HPV screening to lower incidents of cervical cancer among girls and women in Nigeria. Currently, in Nigeria, only 10 percent of eligible women have been screened and 14 percent of girls are vaccinated for HPV. The project is under the direction of Juliet Iwelunmor, a professor of global health and behavioral science and health education in the university’s College for Public Health and Social Justice. Dr. Iwelenmor holds a Ph.D. in bio-behavioral health from Pennsylvania State University.
Spelman College, the historically Black liberal arts educational institution for women in Atlanta, received a $10 million gift from Rosemary K. and John W. Brown to support STEM educational programs at the college. The Browns’ gift will support the architectural, construction, and equipment costs for the college’s new Center for Innovation & the Arts, scheduled to open in the fall of 2024. John Brown is chairman emeritus of Stryker Corporation, a multinational medical technologies corporation based in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Rosemary K. Brown is a long-time educator.
The School of Medicine at the University of Louisville in Kentucky received a $1.2 million grant from the Humana Foundation that will support cardiac disease screening and nutrition-based interventions to address cardiac health disparities among older Black adults in Louisville.
Historically Black Bowie State University in Maryland received a $1,589,014 Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program Grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programs to recruit and prepare Black male educators in early childhood/special education, elementary, or secondary education who can provide effective, culturally relevant/responsive instruction.
The Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, a historically Black educational institution in Los Angeles, received a $150,000 grant Grifols, a biopharmaceutical solutions company. The funds will support a scholarship in nursing and the university’s Saturday Science Academy program. The Saturday Science Academy exposes pre-K through 12th-grade students to fun and engaging science material in an effort to motivate them to move into the healthcare field after graduating high school.
Mississippi State University received a $347,959 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities for development of a hands-on, research field school for students to help preserve a historic Black cemetery near campus. The cemetery was used by the Black community in Starkville from the late 1800s to the mid-1950s, with the oldest marker dated 1882. Students will learn Geographic Information System and Ground-Penetrating Radar analysis while also delving into archival searches and oral histories within the community. The project is under the direction of Jordon Lynton Cox, an assistant professor of anthropology
Coppin State University, the historically Black educational institution in Baltimore received a $2 million grant from Truist Financial Corporation to establish the Truist Hub for Black Economic Mobility. The hub will enhance the quality of advising, programming, and technology related to educational opportunities and career pathways for Coppin students. The $2 million grant is the largest corporate commitment in Coppin’s history.
Historically Black Fayetteville State University in North Carolina received nearly $400,000 from the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services to enhance the Collegiate Recovery Community Program. The funding will create the Bystander and Mental Health First Aid training programs, enhance alcohol/drug-free social activities for students, and increase involvement of student groups and peer mentorship.
Saint Augustine’s University, the historically Black educational institution in Raleigh, North Carolina, received a $490,000 federal grant to fund the Public Health Education Center at the university. The Public Health Education Center will support health and wellness education, student research regarding the long-term effects of COVID-19, and related programs. Funding will also support faculty, establish smart classrooms for students, and purchase research and lab equipment.
The University of Georgia received a $5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development for the implementation of a program entitled Higher Education Conservation Activity in the Republic of Liberia in Africa. The program aims to strengthen forest management and conservation in Liberia through education, training, and technical assistance.
Historically Black Morgan State University in Baltimore was awarded a $420,000 grant by the Army Research Office to conduct pioneering, interdisciplinary research integrating mathematics with computational science, mechanical engineering, and medical research in the study of respiratory conditions and other lung diseases. Using high-performance computing, including mathematical equations, and lung geometry, researchers in the School of Computer, Mathematical and Natural Sciences will pursue simulations of respiratory mechanics that can replicate the condition of lungs, and provide knowledge about respiratory patterns and rates that lead to pulmonary fibrosis, as well as asthmatic, chronic breathing conditions.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is partnering with eight historically Black universities on research projects involving data science. The awarded projects – totaling $11.7 million – have up to three years to establish institutes and partnerships to increase the number and research capacity of STEM students at HBCUs, accelerate innovation in a wide range of NASA science, technology, engineering, and mathematic research areas, and prepare the future workforce for data-intensive space-based Earth sciences.
The HBCUs participating in these research projects are:
Bethune-Cookman University
Fayetteville State University
Florida A&M University
Lincoln University (Missouri)
Morgan State University
North Carolina A&T State University
North Carolina Central University
Prairie View A&M University
“We’re pleased to make progress through awards like this to intentionally build the STEM pipeline of the future, especially in communities of color,” said NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy. “It’s fitting that we make this tangible step to build on the talent pool at HBCUs in our ongoing work to bring to the table all the talents and perspectives we’ll need to send humans to the moon, Mars, and beyond, and do amazing science throughout the solar system.”
“NASA is tackling how to use the latest techniques in data science combined with the volumes of data produced by our missions to answer questions about our changing planet,” added Steven Crawford, senior program executive for scientific data and computing. “Working with students from HBCUs will not only engage the generation that will be most affected by these subjects but will help NASA scientists and engineers address these challenges.”
These laundry buddies made me laugh. (They supposedly remove pet hair and lint from your laundry.)
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has announced more than $12 million in funding to support 26 colleges and universities across the nation mounting social justice-related research or curricular projects.
The foundation invited proposals from institutions exploring three distinct topical categories — Civic Engagement and Voting Rights, Race and Racialization in the United States, and Social Justice and the Literary Imagination — in an effort to help illuminate the significance of voting rights controversies in U.S. history from numerous humanities perspectives; demonstrate the complex import of race and racialization within U.S. culture and society; and highlight the role of the literary imagination in making and remaking worlds and societies, past and present.
Open to any accredited, non-profit, four-year liberal arts degree-granting institution in the United States with more than 1,000 full-time degree-seeking undergraduates and multiple humanities degree programs, the call generated more than 280 submissions from 150 institutions. From the initial applicant pool, 26 institutions were selected to develop full proposals and were confirmed to receive funding.
Several historically Black universities will participate in these grant programs including North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, Prairie View A&M University, Morgan State University, and North Carolina Central University.
A complete list of the 26 grants can be viewed here.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Clemson University in South Carolina received a $3,445,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the creation of a Black Heritage Trail on campus and in the cities of Seneca and Clemson. The Black Heritage Trail will feature walking trails that connect heritage sites with interactive signs, artwork, and digital content that share the stories of local Black history and South Carolina historical markers at significant historic sites. The Black Heritage Trail project on the Clemson campus will be led by Rhondda Thomas, the Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature and the faculty director of the Call My Name research project, which for more than 15 years has researched and shared the stories of Black people throughout Clemson University history through books, tours, exhibits and more. Professor Thomas holds a master’s degree in journalism from the University of Georgia, a master’s degree in literature from the University of New Hampshire, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Maryland.
Historically Black North Carolina Central University received a $1.1 million grant from the U.S. Department of Education to train teachers to work with special-needs children. Thirty-two teacher candidates will earn a teaching license in a special education-adapted or general curriculum, as well as training to improve the outcomes of students who have high-intensity needs in the classroom. High-intensity needs include a complex array of disabilities, including significant cognitive, physical or sensory disabilities, significant autism, or significant emotional or learning disabilities, including dyslexia. This population also includes students with disabilities that require intensive, individualized interventions.
Coppin State University, the historically Black educational institution in Baltimore, received a $3.9 million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration that will be used to fund a collaborative broadband internet pilot program that will improve connectivity and access for economically disadvantaged and underserved communities in Baltimore. Coppin State University students will be recruited to become Digital Navigators who will help low-income community members locate affordable broadband services and devices. They will also assist community members with learning to use broadband-enabled technology to foster greater digital inclusion. Nearly 30 percent of households in West Baltimore are without a computer. In addition, roughly 46 percent of households are without a broadband subscription.
The Toro Company is joining with the Atlanta University Center Consortium and its dual degree engineering program to expand opportunities for Black students to pursue careers in engineering. The Toro Company, headquartered in Bloomington, Minnesota, has committed $375,000 to fund scholarships for engineering students from Atlanta University Center Consortium member institutions. The grant includes financial assistance for tuition and indirect costs associated with student scholarships. In addition to scholarships, the company will provide paid internship opportunities for students in the dual degree engineering program to gain deeper experiences across its many businesses.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Renã Robinson, the Dorothy Wingfield Phillips Chancellor’s Faculty Fellow and professor of chemistry at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, received a $2,040,000 grant from the National Institutes of Health to start a program that will help underrepresented minority faculty further their success in STEM. The program aims to support underrepresented minority faculty members at predominantly White institutions and provide them with the tools and resources needed to be successful biomedical scientific leaders. The programming will explore how to cope with race-related stress, avoid burnout, set boundaries, and more. The initiative also will provide training in publications and grant writing to increase NIH grant submissions and awards to underrepresented minority faculty. Professor Robinson joined the faculty at Vanderbilt University in 2017 after teaching at the University of Pittsburgh. A graduate of the University of Louisville, Dr. Robinson holds a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry from Indiana University.
Alverno College in Milwaukee has been awarded a five-year, $2,890,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Education for programs to increase the number of highly trained, bilingual, and racially and ethnically diverse school-based mental health professionals. “There is a need for school psychologists who represent the communities they serve, especially in Milwaukee,” said Jessica Willenbrink, an assistant professor in the educational specialist training program for school psychologists at Alverno and the project director. “There are significant financial and scheduling barriers to complete a school psychology program, especially for underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups. Through this grant, we will be able to offer students scholarships, provide mentorship, and place them in a job in a high-needs school district. We hope that this, in combination with our flexible hybrid program that offers all courses on the weekend, breaks barriers that individuals from underrepresented groups face.”
Historically Black Bowie State University in Maryland received a $2.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation for programs to increase the number and diversity of individuals entering the cybersecurity workforce. The Cyber Scholarship for Service Program at Bowie State will recruit, educate, mentor, and train three computer science majors and two transfer students from community colleges each year over five years. In addition, the undergraduate students will be engaged in research while enhancing their technical skills in critical information infrastructure protection.
Morgan State University, the historically Black educational institution in Maryland, has received a $500,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to launch Black Queer Everything (BQE), a pioneering initiative that seeks to enrich the discourse of race and racialization nationwide with a specialized focus on the interplay of racialized blackness in the LGBTQ+ community. The goal of the program is to develop innovative research opportunities, humanities-centered collaborative projects, and transformative teaching and curricula to provide meaningful experiences, training, and mentorship opportunities to the next generation of scholar-activists in Black queer studies. The program is under the direction of Anika Simpson, an associate professor in the department of philosophy and religious studies at the university. Dr. Simpson is a graduate of Spelman College in Atlanta, where she majored in philosophy. She holds a master’s degree in elementary education from Ohio State University and a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Memphis.
Here is this week’s news of grants or gifts to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Historically Black Tennessee State University has received a grant of nearly $5 million from the U.S. Department of Agriculture for sustainable hemp fiber research that will promote market development of industrial hemp supply as a climate-smart commodity through incentives to underserved Tennessee growers enrolled in the program. The funds will be used to provide support and incentives to historically underserved farmers owning up to 500 acres to grow fiber hemp. The fiber hemp will then be processed and supplied to the motor vehicle industry as raw materials for manufacturing critical motor vehicle parts such as fabrics and bioplastics The project is being led by Emmanuel Omondi, assistant professor of agronomy at Tennessee State. Dr. Omondi is a graduate of the University of Nairobi in Kenya. He holds a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in agronomy from the University of Wyoming.
African Americans are more likely to be living with HIV than other racial and ethnic groups. One of the significant factors related to HIV disease management is smoking status, as smoking negatively impacts HIV treatment, and people with HIV are more likely to smoke relative to the general population. The University of Houston received a $1.3 million grant from the National Institute on Drug Abuse for the development of a mobile intervention for Black American smokers who are infected with HIV.
The Quantum Biology Laboratory at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., received a $1 million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Researchers in the lab will use the funding to build upon its previous work in modeling and measuring how quantum optical effects in cytoskeletal networks enable living matter to process information in ultrafast communication channels. The lab seeks answers to questions such as: How do living systems arise from nonliving matter? How does life organize from biomolecular building blocks? What is the role that light plays in the origins of life itself? The lab is under the direction of Philip Kurian, who holds a Ph.D.from Howard University.
Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, has received a $399,000 grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a three-year applied learning research curricular project on voting rights. Bard College is collaborating on the project with three historically Black universities — North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University, Tuskegee University, and Prairie View A&M University – and the Andrew Goodman Foundation. The crux of the project will study how the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18 and outlawed age-based voter discrimination, impacted voter disenfranchisement while also focusing on the role of college communities in the fight for voting rights.
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