Daily Lumina News 070921

Many college students and professors will return to their physical campuses this fall, and it’s tempting to think things will return to “normal” when they do. But given the events of the past 15 months, what happens in the classroom come September is likely to be anything but normal.
Mays Imad of the Teaching & Learning Center at Pima Community College reflects on what students and instructors experienced over the past year and how they can prepare to teach, learn, and support each other this fall.

In mid-May, the fraught fight over Nikole Hannah-Jones’s tenure at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill spilled into public view. Shortly after that, the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist had her first conversation with Wayne A. I. Frederick, the president of Howard University.
The conversation set in motion a series of events that unfolded behind the scenes with remarkable speed for the worlds of academe and philanthropy—and culminated in the announcement this week that Howard had hired Hannah-Jones.

The coronavirus pandemic will direct a record-setting amount of federal higher education aid to the country’s colleges and universities. Nationwide, 5,177 colleges will share more than $69 billion from the relief bills, with about half of the money tagged for direct aid to students.
A new interactive online tool details this funding and spending for institutions across the country.

As momentum grows around providing students with supports that foster retention and completion, a bill to address one of the biggest hindrances in bringing these types of programs to community colleges has been reintroduced in the Senate. And a path forward appears to be clearer than in years past.
The Community College Student Success Act was reintroduced last week by Democratic senators Brian Schatz of Hawaii and Sherrod Brown of Ohio to provide what many community colleges need most to develop robust student support services: funding.

When the pandemic first began to unfold, health experts worried that colleges and universities would become hotbeds of COVID-19 transmissions. In reality, researchers say, many schools have been models for containing the virus.
With the fall semester approaching, one key strategy is mandating vaccinations. But what does this mean for international students who may not have access to the vaccines currently authorized by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration?

For years, Black students and faculty members at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have expressed frustration with the way they are treated, from disproportionate scrutiny by campus police to the scarcity of Black professors and staff.
UNC’s Black student and faculty groups presented a list of demands to the institution at a news conference earlier this week. Many of their issues centered on eliminating structural barriers Black students face, such as formalizing access to resources that some students only learn about through word of mouth.