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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].
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