Nonprofits

Author(s):  
Frank Blanchard

The door swung wide open and a dozen faces turned my way. The interview was for a science education story, but now it felt like a surprise party and I was the guest of honor. I had never been greeted for an interview by so many people. Here was a crowd around a long table. At the head was a woman with a big smile welcoming me to Xavier University of Louisiana in New Orleans. My traveling companion, a consultant experienced in representing charities, private foundations, and other nonprofit organizations, took this in stride and spoke right up. He introduced us as representatives of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Bethesda, Maryland, which at the time was the nation's largest philanthropy, a $5.2 billion enterprise. The Institute had given this relatively small college, which led the nation in sending black students to medical school, a $1.8 million grant to support its undergraduate science program. Xavier, the only historically black Catholic university in the United States, was doing something extraordinary. We wanted to tell the story. As a science writer for the Institute, I had made arrangements to interview the faculty member who ran the program and a few participating students for anecdotes to enliven the story. I thought I had made this clear on the telephone weeks before the trip, but the program director had other ideas. She had built an itinerary that could have stood as a first-class defense of the grant. Faculty members, support staff, anyone who could bolster the case for funding was in the room. After meeting with the group, I was to speak with the university president and others, later I would have a chance to talk with students. It was going to be a long day. It was also going to be a waste of time. We were there to gather specific information for a news article. We were not there to monitor progress under the grant. We had no money to offer them, and we were in no position to cut their funding. Finally, as this began to sink in, the teachers headed back to their classrooms.

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 67-75 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara E. Goodman ◽  
Karen L. Koster ◽  
David L. Swanson

In response to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute/Association of American Medical Colleges Scientific Foundations for Future Physicians (SFFP) report and a concern for better preparing undergraduates for future doctoral programs in the health professions, the deans of the College of Arts and Sciences and Division of Basic Biomedical Sciences of Sanford School of Medicine of the University of South Dakota formed an ad hoc Premedical Curriculum Review Committee with representatives from the science departments and medical school. The Committee began by reviewing the university's suggested premedical curriculum and matching it to the proposed competencies from the SFFP to document duplications and deficiencies. The proposed changes in the Medical College Admission Test for 2015 were also evaluated. The Committee proposed a stronger premedical curriculum, with the development of some new courses, including an inquiry-based physiology course with team-based learning, to more fully address SFFP competencies. These analyses convinced the university that a new major would best help students achieve the competencies and prepare them for admission exams. Thus, a new Medical Biology major was proposed to the South Dakota Board of Regents and accepted for its initial offering in 2012. The new major has been broadly advertised to future students and is successful as a recruiting tool for the university. This article details the process of evaluating the curriculum and designing the new major, describes some of the difficulties in its implementation, and reviews outcomes from the new major to date.


2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (22) ◽  
pp. 2608-2610
Author(s):  
Ahna R. Skop

I am deeply honored to receive the American Society for Cell Biology (ASCB) Prize for Excellence in Inclusivity made possible through a grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. This generous award of $5000 will go toward travel and registration support for underrepresented students from the University of Wisconsin–Madison to attend the ASCB and SACNAS (Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science) conferences. In this essay, I have woven together a few stories on how my life experiences have shaped my passion for diversity and inclusion in STEM.


2018 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 228
Author(s):  
George M. Bodner ◽  
Provi M. Mayo

<span>Those of us who teach chemistry at the college or university level in the United States are faced with the problem of conveying our course content to an increasingly number of students for whom English is a second language; a problem that has been faced by our colleagues in Latin America for generations. We therefore conducted a study designed to probe the conceptual knowledge of bilingual students who studied chemistry from English language textbooks in a classroom environment in which the language of discourse was Spanish. Interviews were done with undergraduate science majors enrolled in general chemistry at the University of Puerto Rico and with graduate students in the Department of Chemistry at Purdue University. Analysis of the interview data led to the creation of five categories: (1) use of Spanish, (2) avoidance of communication, (3) confusion of terms; (4) use of examples and new words, and (5) use of terms without mastery.</span>


2011 ◽  
Vol 51 (3) ◽  
pp. 296-329 ◽  
Author(s):  
Timothy Reese Cain

In September 1915, Minne Allen traveled from her native Germany to the United States, where her new husband Edward was set to begin a position as math instructor in the University of Michigan's College of Engineering. Although Minne was nervous about moving from cosmopolitan Berlin to a small college town and worried about the war ravaging Europe, she was excited to begin her married life. Four years later, the University of Michigan Board of Regents initiated dismissal proceedings against her husband, alleging that he had supported Germany in the recently concluded war. Even before Edward's removal, Minne had grown tired of the constant suspicion and surveillance that the university and her hyper-patriotic neighbors forced her and her husband to endure. She wrote to her mother: The unwillingness to subscribe voluntarily to the purchase of war bonds was and is still enough to dismiss an employee, especially if he is an independently thinking and acting employee who dares openly to criticize and to make suggestions for an honorable government policy and to work for peace and reconciliation…. Forced by many considerations, the educational institutions, which should have the greatest freedom of thought, have become places of silence and cowardice.


Author(s):  
Santiago DE FRANCISCO ◽  
Diego MAZO

Universities and corporates, in Europe and the United States, have come to a win-win relationship to accomplish goals that serve research and industry. However, this is not a common situation in Latin America. Knowledge exchange and the co-creation of new projects by applying academic research to solve company problems does not happen naturally.To bridge this gap, the Design School of Universidad de los Andes, together with Avianca, are exploring new formats to understand the knowledge transfer impact in an open innovation network aiming to create fluid channels between different stakeholders. The primary goal was to help Avianca to strengthen their innovation department by apply design methodologies. First, allowing design students to proposed novel solutions for the traveller experience. Then, engaging Avianca employees to learn the design process. These explorations gave the opportunity to the university to apply design research and academic findings in a professional and commercial environment.After one year of collaboration and ten prototypes tested at the airport, we can say that Avianca’s innovation mindset has evolved by implementing a user-centric perspective in the customer experience touch points, building prototypes and quickly iterate. Furthermore, this partnership helped Avianca’s employees to experience a design environment in which they were actively interacting in the innovation process.


1996 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-24 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Rodger

This article is the revised text of the first W A Wilson Memorial Lecture, given in the Playfair Library, Old College, in the University of Edinburgh, on 17 May 1995. It considers various visions of Scots law as a whole, arguing that it is now a system based as much upon case law and precedent as upon principle, and that its departure from the Civilian tradition in the nineteenth century was part of a general European trend. An additional factor shaping the attitudes of Scots lawyers from the later nineteenth century on was a tendency to see themselves as part of a larger Englishspeaking family of lawyers within the British Empire and the United States of America.


2015 ◽  
Vol 36-37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-183
Author(s):  
Paul Taylor

John Rae, a Scottish antiquarian collector and spirit merchant, played a highly prominent role in the local natural history societies and exhibitions of nineteenth-century Aberdeen. While he modestly described his collection of archaeological lithics and other artefacts, principally drawn from Aberdeenshire but including some items from as far afield as the United States, as a mere ‘routh o’ auld nick-nackets' (abundance of old knick-knacks), a contemporary singled it out as ‘the best known in private hands' (Daily Free Press 4/5/91). After Rae's death, Glasgow Museums, National Museums Scotland, the University of Aberdeen Museum and the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, as well as numerous individual private collectors, purchased items from the collection. Making use of historical and archive materials to explore the individual biography of Rae and his collection, this article examines how Rae's collecting and other antiquarian activities represent and mirror wider developments in both the ‘amateur’ antiquarianism carried out by Rae and his fellow collectors for reasons of self-improvement and moral education, and the ‘professional’ antiquarianism of the museums which purchased his artefacts. Considered in its wider nineteenth-century context, this is a representative case study of the early development of archaeology in the wider intellectual, scientific and social context of the era.


1992 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-245
Author(s):  
Winton U. Solberg

For over two centuries, the College was the characteristic form of higher education in the United States, and the College was closely allied to the church in a predominantly Protestant land. The university became the characteristic form of American higher education starting in the late nineteenth Century, and universities long continued to reflect the nation's Protestant culture. By about 1900, however, Catholics and Jews began to enter universities in increasing numbers. What was the experience of Jewish students in these institutions, and how did authorities respond to their appearance? These questions will be addressed in this article by focusing on the Jewish presence at the University of Illinois in the early twentieth Century. Religion, like a red thread, is interwoven throughout the entire fabric of this story.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ani Eblighatian

The paper is an off-shoot of the author's PhD project on lamps from Roman Syria (at the University of Geneva in Switzerland), centered mainly on the collection preserved at the Art Museum of Princeton University in the United States. One of the outcomes of the research is a review of parallels from archaeological sites and museum collections and despite the incomplete documentation i most cases, much new insight could be gleaned, for the author's doctoral research and for other issues related to lychnological studies. The present paper collects the data on oil lamps from byzantine layers excavated in 1932–1939 at Antioch-on-the-Orontes and at sites in its vicinity (published only in part so far) and considers the finds in their archaeological context.


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