2 | CITIZEN | Chatham Southeast | Week of Nov. 11, 2020
NEWS briefly EDUCATION COLLABORATION SEEKS TO ELIMINATE BARRIERS FOR STUDENTS PURSUING GRADUATE DEGREES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE The Center for Minorities and People with Disabilities IT (CMD-IT) Future Leadership in Computing (FLIP) Alliance ensures that students without GRE scores have the opportunity to pursue graduate studies and contribute to inclusive innovation, paving the way toward greater diversity in academia. The Alliance serves to increase diversity in the professoriate in computing at research universities as a way to achieve greater diversity across the field. The CMD-IT FLIP Alliance includes the following institutions, which were found to be the largest producers of computer science faculty at research universities: Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Stanford University, University of California at Berkeley, University of Texas, University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign, and University of University. Most of these universities currently have an existing policy to ignore or forbid consideration of GRE scores in computer science Ph.D. admissions. For 2020-2021 admissions, some of the universities will make the GRE optional for Ph.D. admissions. Applicants should check each institution’s official website for details. To learn more about CMD-IT FLIP Alliance, visit flipalliance.org.
HEALTH
NEW BOOK CALLS ON WORLD LEADERS TO UNITE IN RESPONSE TO HEALTH THREATS At the occasion of the World Health Summit 2020 and the 75th anniversary of the United Nations, a new book has been launched that calls on world leaders and politicians to unite in their response to the COVID-19 pandemic and other threats to health and the global economy. Health: A Political Choice – Act Now, Together is the latest in a series of titles published by the Global Governance Project in collaboration with the World Health Organization (WHO.) Dr Tedros, WHO Director-General, said: “It has never been clearer that health is a political and economic choice. In the past 20 years, countries have invested heavily in preparing for terrorist attacks, but relatively little in preparing for the attack of a virus – which, as the COVID-19 pandemic has proven, can be far more deadly, disruptive and costly.” The first book in the series Health: A Political Choice. Delivering Universal Health Coverage 2030 was launched in 2019.
LAW & POLITICS
TOP-TIER LAWYERS HONORED WITH 21ST ANNUAL JOHN PAUL STEVENS AWARD The Chicago Bar Association has selected five influential attorneys who stand out in their respective areas of practice as recipients of the association’s top legal award, bestowed to lawyers who demonstrate the highest commitment to integrity and public service. Named in honor of the legendary Supreme Court Justice and native Chicagoan John Paul Stevens, the awards were recently presented by The Chicago Bar Association and The Chicago Bar Foundation at the 21st Annual John Paul Stevens Celebration which was hosted virtually on October 28. This year’s recipients were Marisel Hernandez, Partner at Jacobs, Burns, Orlove & Hernandez and Chairwoman, Chicago Board of Election Commissioners; Jennifer Nijman, Founding Partner, Nijman Franzetti; Terry Murphy, Retired Executive Director, the Chicago Bar Association and Judge E. Kenneth Wright, Jr. The awards recognize lawyers and judges who best exemplify Justice Stevens’ commitment to integrity and public service in the practice of law. Stevens retired from the High Court in 2010 after 35 years of distinguished service and died in 2019.
Black Heroes Matter seeks recognition of DuSable Continued from page 1 BY TIA CAROL JONES
Jean Baptiste Pointe DuSable was a Haitian settler and trader who had an outpost at what is now 401 N. Michigan Avenue, near the mouth of the Chicago River. Although DuSable’s name appears on a high school, African American History Museum, Harbor and Bridge, a group – Black Heroes Matter – has been formed to ensure his accomplishments and contributions to Chicago are recognized even more. Martins International Foundation, owned by Ephraim Martin, spearheads Black Heroes Matter. Valerie King is the public relations director for Martins International Foundation. “We feel this man, who founded Chicago, set the territory settlement for Chicago, has really not received his just due,” she said. “There’s so much that we should know and that we need to know, and we should be informed about what this man did.” King said Black Heroes Matter feels that DuSable deserves to be recognized with a 25-foot monument, a significant portion of Lake Shore Drive named after DuSable and a city holiday in his honor. “We have presented this to city council, with Alderman Moore helping to
lead the structure of our proposal, with Ephraim Martin, as well as presenting this to the city’s mayor, Mayor Lightfoot,” she said. King said Black Heroes Matter feels that recognizing DuSable can bring balance and equity to people who look like DuSable. She said his story is very compelling. “When you really think about this man had amassed a great deal of wealth, he was very prosperous, in terms of his settlement, and that wealth was restructured, or it was taken from him and the places he settled in this city are renamed for white men, and we still recognize those men today,” she said. “People that have set forth and paved the way, they also deserve a revisit of what they did, and revisit to what they gave us, and we feel it should be rightfully justified and rightfully stated who they were and who benefits from that.” Shaka Barak, president of the Marcus Garvey Institute, is a supporter of Black Heroes Matter. Barak said that DuSable’s post sets the groundwork in terms of fur trading and the grain industry. “On those 800 acres, there were smokehouses, bakeries, hen houses and the trapping that was being done was sent to Europe,” he said. “To know that DuSable was not an ordinary man, he had
extraordinary ability. He was a linguist, he spoke French, he spoke Spanish, he spoke English and he spoke several dialects. He was a man of peace and he could bring the tribes together.” Barak said if it were not for DuSable, there would not have been a lot of different varieties of industry in the city of Chicago. “Anytime a person is that significant to a city, that city owes them the honor of putting things in place, so that the children, and the future children of that city know who that man was,” he said. Barak said while there is a bust of DuSable on a bridge, it is so hidden that people pass by and don’t know it is there and that this is the location of where DuSable’s post once stood. Black Heroes Matter is supported by 80 organizations, including the Haitian Lawyers Association and the Haitian American Museum of Chicago. Stanmorr Sports, Inc., Illinois’ first and only Black-owned Gun Range, is matching all the current GoFundMe donations. “We will not give up. We know this movement is really important, so we’re in it for the long-term, even though it is a marathon. We won’t tire,” King said. For more information, visit blackheroesmatter.org.
COMMENTARY
Testing, Testing, One, Two, Zero BY JOEL SCHLOSBERG
For this fall’s college freshmen, standardized tests weren’t as crucial in determining their selection as they would have been before 2020. Hundreds of educational institutions waived exam requirements when COVID prevented on-site administration. Some even excised the tests from the application process entirely. Yet Jeffrey Selingo reports that “something strange happened: Teenagers continued to sign up for the exams” (“The SAT and the ACT Will Probably Survive the Pandemic—Thanks to Students,” The Atlantic, September 16). This devotion to getting an edge into colleges has remained persistent even a year after the Operation Varsity Blues investigation revealed how much of the admission
criteria were being exaggerated or outright fabricated. With colleges replacing their on-campus offerings by remote video instruction — and online course materials like those long made accessible for free by initiatives like MIT’s OpenCourseWare — elite colleges have much less to offer in return for the tens of thousands in annual tuition they still charge. How has their draw remained so persistent? Maybe it’s less that their wares are uniquely valuable than that they’ve closed off alternatives. Kevin Carey explains in The End of College that “the higher-education industry receives hundreds of billions of dollars every year in the form of direct appropriations, tax preferences, and subsidies for their customers in the form of government scholarships and guaranteed student loans.
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The only way to get that money is to be an accredited college. And the accreditation system is controlled by the existing colleges themselves, who set the standards for which organizations are eligible for public funds.” Standardized tests provide the accreditation monopoly with the data the top-down system needs to function. As anthropologist James C. Scott observes, “those at the greatest distance from ground zero of the classroom” particularly benefit from having “an index, however invalid, of comparative productivity and a powerful incentive system to impose their pedagogical plans.” When Steven Levy’s Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution became one of the earliest journalistic accounts of the culture of computer programmers, Levy noted their insistence on evaluating
each other by the quality of their programs, eschewing what they considered “bogus criteria such as degrees, age, race, or position.” In an addendum to a 2010 reissue of his book, Levy found many of its personalities had retained that spirit, as expressed by Bill Gates: “If you want to hire an engineer, look at the guy’s code. That’s all. If he hasn’t written a lot of code, don’t hire him.” Higher learning — and its certification — can follow computer power’s path out of elite institutions to everyday ubiquity. If its participants can win the freedom to choose, share and exchange, the process can become more equitable as well as less bogus. The Garrison Center’s Joel Schlosberg wrote his SAT essay on freedom in the science fiction of Eric Frank Russell.