Daily Lumina News 052821

Commencement speakers offer graduates a range of sage advice from different perspectives. This graduation season, Dr. Anthony Fauci talked about lessons from the pandemic. Ruby Bridges has shared her wisdom from the civil rights movement.
At Pitzer College's graduation, Yusef Pierce spoke about forgiveness, perseverance, and seizing future potential. For Pierce, who is the first person to graduate with a bachelor's degree from the Inside-Out program at Pitzer College, the remarks represented his personal success story after a decade in prison.

On this episode of The Key, Beth Akers of the American Enterprise Institute and Claude Pressnell Jr. of the Tennessee Independent Colleges and Universities Association offer contrasting views about the wisdom of using economic outcomes as the primary determinant of whether a college, university, or academic program has "value."

When Samantha Maltais steps onto Harvard's campus this fall, she’ll become the first member of the Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe to attend its prestigious law school. It’s a “full-circle moment” for the university and the Martha’s Vineyard tribe, she says.
The call for colleges to prioritize the needs of students like Maltais comes at a critical time. During the pandemic, Native American students experienced the sharpest college enrollment decline of any racial or ethnic group, as economic hardships, health disparities, and the challenges of remote learning in isolated tribal communities forced many students to quit school.

This year has been a trying time for Lesley Del Rio. Cramped together with her 10-year-old son in a small Denver apartment during the pandemic, the normal boundaries between her roles as a single mother, college student, and working adult came “crashing down."
Many student parents like Del Rio don’t know about campus mental health resources or don’t think they can afford them, according to a new report. Instead, they feel isolated and disconnected from campus.

The sudden switch to remote learning because of COVID-19 exposed a deep digital divide between students with reliable access to the internet and those without.
In this interview, the president of East Central College talks about the effect of the pandemic on community colleges, the flexibility that needs to be adopted going forward, and what institutions can do to reconnect with students and get them back on track.

Lawyers representing Nikole Hannah-Jones told state leaders in North Carolina on Thursday that they were “evaluating all available legal recourse” against the University of North Carolina and its board after the investigative journalist’s stalled tenure bid prompted outrage from alumni, scholarly groups, and journalists across the country.
Hannah-Jones’s prize-winning journalistic work, which examines race in society, has become a political flashpoint amid a conservative effort to restrict how history and racism are taught in colleges and schools.