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Section: Opinion

The Struggle for Tuition Equality

Should public institutions make undocumented state residents pay out-of-state tuition? In Michigan, Western Michigan, Wayne State, and Saginaw Valley State allow non-citizens to pay in-state tuition. Yet, its flagship campus—the University of Michigan—does not. “We just want tuition equality.” That is the proclamation of Daniel Morales, a freshman at U-M, who recently co-founded the Coalition […]

April 12, 2012

Wanted: More Under-represented Minority Professors in the Life Sciences

If you ask minority high school students interested in biology what they want to do as a future career, they typically tell you that they want to be a physician or dentist. Unfortunately, what they don’t tell you is that they want to be a professor or researcher. This lack of interest is often due […]

April 1, 2012

Probing the Comparison – Trayvon Martin/Mass Incarceration and Emmett Till/Segregation

Protests are blooming this spring. Black Americans are enraged and emboldened, shouting entreaties for justice, justice, justice. Stoking even more rage—or rather placing the rage in historical context—has been the continuous comparisons made between the unarmed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin, murdered recently by a neighborhood watchman of a majority White gated community in Florida who is […]

March 30, 2012

Until Justice Weighs Down — Trayvon’s Story

Trayvon Martin has really been weighing heavily on my mind. I thought of him as I watched my daughter and her little elementary school classmates recite their winning oratories at their Speech Meet earlier this week. I sat there thinking that what happened to Trayvon could happen to any one of those little Black boys […]

March 19, 2012

Commentary: Until Justice Weighs Down — Trayvon’s Story

Trayvon Martin’s story should be the proverbial smack across the face that most Americans need to disabuse them of the notion that we are somehow living in a “post-racial” or “post-Black” era.

March 15, 2012

Using Dr. King’s Leadership to Extend Black History Month

“This will be the day when all of God’s children will be able to sing with new meaning, “My country, tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim’s pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring,” said Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We have […]

March 14, 2012

The Case for Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education

Every day, it seems — and rightly so — there are new calls to strengthen and diversify the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) pipeline by leaders from across the political spectrum. The education community knows this cause well. As many researchers will tell you, interest in STEM majors and careers by underrepresented students is […]

March 13, 2012

When Teachers Are Publicly Questioned

How the Untied States decides what a “good teacher” is and what we do with that information has gained national attention in the past two weeks. The controversy involves “value-added” measurements of teacher effectiveness, which evaluate teachers based upon their students’ one-time standardized test scores. In places such as New York City and Los Angeles, […]

March 10, 2012

Commentary: The Case for Transforming Undergraduate STEM Education

Of all Black, Native American, and Hispanic students who seek a STEM degree in their first college year, just 19 percent, 20 percent and 22 percent, respectively, graduate in a STEM discipline, UCLA researchers report.

March 8, 2012

Dr. Lorelle Espinosa

How to Excel at Elite Institutions: A Guide for Students of Color

Note: This post was co-authored by Ufuoma Abiola, a graduate student in the Higher Education program at the University of Pennsylvania. Elite research institutions with myriad resources can be wonderful places to gain an education; they also can be daunting for a student unfamiliar with the surroundings. We offer the following strategies for student success. […]

February 27, 2012

‘The Help’: Let Them Eat Pie

My mother and I swore that we would never watch the “blockbuster” movie sensation “The Help.” My reasoning, quite frankly, had to do with my own rejection of yet another movie that portrays Blacks as a deficit, culturally “capital-less” group that needs to be “empowered,” saved, and are rescued by the “kind,” “smart,” and “important.” […]

February 26, 2012

Bereft – Whitney Elizabeth Houston, Shared Loss, and Full Circles

I love Whitney Houston. It seems like yesterday when I first heard her spine-tingling rendition of “I Will Always Love You.” I was in Bellevue, Wash., in my little used, red Mazda 626, headed to the old Group Health Credit Union. The year was 1992. As I waited at a stoplight, the song came onto […]

February 25, 2012

The Complex Simplicity of Black Male Success in College

The Center for the Study of Race and Equity in Education at the University of Pennsylvania recently released its inaugural publication. Titled “Black Male Student Success in Higher Education: A Report from the National Black Male College Achievement Study,” researchers, led by the center’s director, Dr. Shaun R. Harper, have attempted to reframe the spirited […]

February 25, 2012

On Roland Martin – Twitter is Not Your Friend

I last wrote about a CNN personality and perceived homophobia in my article, “Don Lemon’s Assumption on Black Women Challenged.” Lemon had alleged in his memoir that Black women are the primary source of prejudice against gay Black men. Ironically, it is now Lemon’s African-American male colleague Roland Martin who now faces termination for alleged […]

February 13, 2012

Red Tails: A Missed Opportunity

I went to see Red Tails with one of my students. She is a graduate of a historically Black college. Given my research and her undergraduate institution, we were excited to see the depiction of a Black college and its contributions in the film. Although we both enjoyed the movie, I was disappointed that the […]

February 12, 2012

Today’s Current College Freshmen Are More Academically Conscious

Read the following. Students are having intense study sessions taking notes in class registering for more demanding courses less likely to show up drunk or late to class The following conclusions are from a recent article written by Mary Beth Marklein in USA Today. The results are from an annual survey conducted by UCLA’s Cooperative […]

February 2, 2012

Selling Out the Truth to Thwart Affirmative Action

I admire the glorious intellectual endeavor to discover and reveal the ever-changing, ever-remaining, ever-complicated, ever-simple fountain of truth—the sociological truth, the economic truth, the biological truth, the historical truth (to name a few). But too often, too many academics sell out the truth. They sell the truth for causes, for careers, for funds, for conservatism, […]

January 26, 2012

It Just Doesn’t Add Up: Barriers to STEM Higher Education

A small flurry of conversation on Twitter and elsewhere followed a recent proposal by two university presidents that students seeking science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM, degrees pay more tuition than those in other academic majors. While it’s not surprising that public college presidents — and indeed other policymaking officials — are seeking new […]

January 25, 2012