Daily Lumina News 031920

African Americans may be overrepresented in the United States military, but not in the officer corps: Only nine percent of officers are Black, compared with 19 percent of enlisted troops.
To right this imbalance, the Pentagon wants to expand its training programs on historically black college and university campuses. Other paths to improving the pipeline of future military leaders lie in social media campaigns targeted at minority communities.

With the growing outbreak of COVID-19 around the globe, American higher education continues to find itself in the headlines. College and university leaders are being forced to make up rules on the fly as they shutter face-to-face classes, create plans for online or remote learning, and try to strike the right balance between the need for social distancing and other considerations of their campus constituents.
In this podcast, a provost at a regional public university and a faculty member at a private college talk about what it’s really like to turn a residential campus into a virtual one almost overnight.

In many ways, Lyle C. May is an ordinary Ohio University alumnus and a member of the Alpha Sigma Lambda Honor Society. He’s also a convicted felon, awaiting the death penalty for a double homicide committed in 1997.
May says higher education is a basic human need—and the opportunity should be available to anyone who pursues it. He writes about life as an incarcerated student—and the impact of prison education programs—in this essay.

By now, COVID-19 has upended the lives of countless college students. For some, the situation is far more dire. Many students depend on normal campus operations for their basic needs, from housing to access to food. As schools shut down, these students are left scrambling to find alternatives that may not exist.
Even when things return to normal, students in precarious positions may not come back to finish their educations. Anastasia Lee, a 23-year-old senior at St. Norbert College in Wisconsin, is now facing this reality. Lee depends on a scholarship, but it only covers eight semesters. If she falls behind, she may never finish.