News
Ethan Long

College Newspaper Round-Up highlights the best of student-journalism in the Boston area.


MIT Looks at Olympic Involvement

  • The bid for Boston 2024 has been released to the public, giving residents and students a look at the proposed venues that would be built if the city does, in fact, host the Summer Olympic Games. Alexandra Delmore at the Tech writes about MIT being a prospective host for fencing and archery, while Nathan P. Press and Samuel E. Stone of the Harvard Crimson report on the multiple venues at Harvard which have been considered to host events.

Tufts Fights for Trans Rights

  • Tufts University students held “Enough is Enough: Rally for Trans Rights,” where members of the Tufts community spoke out against transphobia, according to Emma Steiner of the Tufts Daily.  Prompted by last month’s suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen, students and faculty shared personal experiences and spoke out against hatred. The article shares some of those experiences that students have gone through, including problems with the university’s health plan policy towards gender surgery and how professors use of pronouns in the classroom. 

“According to Hyde and Strelevitz,” Steiner writes, “Changing day-to-day interactions is essential to ending transphobia. These changes in attitude go beyond simply being aware of preferred pronouns, [Jaquelyn Hyde, an organizer of the rally] explained; they include eliminating assumptions about gender, combating heteronormative stereotypes and changing beauty standards for women and trans women alike.

Emerson Explores Diversity in School History

  • The Berkeley Beacon this month launched “A half-century of race relations at Emerson,” a feature that includes several articles focusing on diversity at the college. According to the introduction paragraph, Emerson’s Black Organization with Natural Interests, EBONI, was founded in 1968, the year Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated. According to David A. Bumpus, EBONI, in 1969, “sent a list of 10 proposals to the school’s administration detailing changes they said would increase the number of black students and improve their campus experience.” Bumpus’s article “Students of color still say campus climate has room for improvement” interviews Mooneye Jackson-Amis, a former student and the first president of EBONI, who describes walkouts and sit-ins that occurred that year. 

Laura King writes in “Makeup of student body still falls short of advocates’ 1969 goal” that “In 2012—the latest year for which Emerson published freshman class demographics—only 3 percent of new students reported their race as black, or roughly 26 of the 863 total.”

In “White allies must find courage to listen more,” Willie Burnley writes that “Oftentimes, conversations about allyship move immediately to how supposed allies often become unhelpful by making the movement about themselves. Nowhere have these behaviors been more prominently on display in recent months than in the social media responses to #BlackLivesMatter.”

He continues, “Students interested in allyship ought to think critically about the true—and often difficult and self-reflective—implications of how their whiteness, by its nature, benefits them with privileges at the expense of others. They should listen to people of color when they talk about how racism is being perpetuated, and use their own privilege to amplify others’ voices rather than dismissing them.”

 


 

The Student Immigration Movement Raises Voice on BU Campus

  • Paige Smith of the Daily Free Press reports on a rally held Tuesday by the Student Immigration Movement, which recently launched “Dare to Dream,” a campaign calling for state-support of undocumented students who hope to graduate school, but whose hopes may be impeded due to lack of aid. One such student featured in the article is Valeria Dovale, a teenager living in West Roxbury, who says “I have no way of going to college unless I get financial aid, and there are very few scholarships that I can possibly apply for and receive that would give me enough money to attend a four-year college.” The Student Immigration Movement hopes to push an education equity bill through the Massachusetts legislature.

BU Faculty Consider Unionizing