Mount Holyoke News AN INDEPENDENT STUDENT NEWSPAPER SINCE 1917 THURSDAY SEPTEMBER 17, 2020
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College welcomes class of 2024 with virtual Convocation BY LIZ LEWIS ’22 PUBLISHER & NEWS EDITOR
“This, Mount Holyoke, is not how Convocation is supposed to be,” said Mount Holyoke College President Sonya Stephens, addressing a virtual crowd on Monday, Sept. 7. “Or at least, it is not Convocation as we have known it.” Mount Holyoke’s 183rd Convocation took place, like much of the semester so far, over Zoom. As students virtually filtered in, photos of past Convocations and calls to “Make some noise for the class of 2021!” flashed across the screen. A short montage of photos submitted by students and other community members followed. Convocation marks the College’s official welcoming of the class of 2024, represented by the blue lion, into the Mount Holyoke community. The College has yet to publicly release the annual set of statistics for the incoming class. The program officially opened, as Convocation does every year, with a performance from the Five College West African Dance Ensemble. The drummers, all of whom were masked, were spaced several feet apart. Following the performance, Vice President for Equity and Inclusion and Chief Diversity Officer Kijua Sanders-McMurtry began with a land acknowledgment before speaking on the goals outlined by the new Anti-Racism Action Plan, which the College rolled out in the wake of this summer’s nationwide racial reckoning. “Every day, we must work towards building a world where the racial injustices that we’ve seen in the United States this year are behind us and we can finally eliminate the racial hierarchies that are ever present,” Sanders-McMurtry said. Next to speak was Chair of the Board of Trustees Karen Strella ’90. She was followed by Stephens, who began by acknowledging the visible difference between this Convocation and Convocation as it has always been. Rather than seeing this event as a stripped-down version of the beloved tradition, Stephens urged students to allow traditions to evolve during these unprecedented times. “Engaging in Mount Holyoke traditions, like this one, is to ask
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how you might engage creatively with them, and to see in them the opportunities for our future and for our community,” Stephens said. Much of Stephens’ speech revolved around the problem of how to approach tradition during this historical moment. Many traditions are impossible to recreate virtually, but beyond that, Stephens believes it is vitally important to view a shared past through a creative lens rather than a rigid one. “Without rediscovery, without ... invention and reinvention, traditions do not live on or grow, and they become history rather than legacy,” Stephens said. “Interrogating our history and traditions opens up new possibilities and horizons.” To Stephens, the Mount Holyoke community must continue an “examination and renewal of our most beloved traditions — to bring new vision to what we know, to bring new questions to the legacies of history and time, to reject certain kinds of traditionalism in order to renew tradition.” Stephens believes this historical moment requires a flexible outlook on tradition, routine and community. “Instead of perpetuating traditions through adaptations that diminish their experiential value, I challenge our class to build our own new ones,” she said. “Let’s create new ways of being members of the same community.” This sentiment resonated with Michela Marchini ’22, a member of the virtual audience. Though Marchini thought the event was well-handled, she also acknowledged that some traditions “need to be on campus.” “I think we [should] see if we can make new traditions that are more suitable for a virtual environment, [but] trying to force traditions into a space online makes them lose a lot of what’s special,” Marchini said. Director of the Miller Worley Center for the Environment Olivia Aguilar was the next speaker. As a relative newcomer to the College, Aguilar empathized with those trying to orient themselves CONTINUED ON PAGE 3
6 GLOBAL: Uighur Muslim suppression
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Photo by Kate Turner ’21 In the fall of 2019, students celebrated the beginning of the year at Mount Holyoke’s 182nd Convocation.
National Scholar Strike protests racist police violence BY KATIE GOSS ’23 STAFF WRITER
“We are calling for a Scholar strike ... on September 8-9 2020 to protest ongoing police violence and murders in America,” tweeted Anthea Butler, a professor of religious studies and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, on Aug. 26. Butler’s tweet introduced the Scholar Strike to a larger audience. Inspired by the NBA and WNBA strikes against racial and social injustice in the United States and in response to recent protests against police brutality and racial injustice, the strike was designed to “raise awareness of and prompt actions against racism, policing, mass incarnation and other symptoms of racism’s toll in America,” according to the official Scholar Strike website. Faculty and students across the United States participated in the strike from Sept. 8 to Sept. 9. Canadian students participated on Sept. 9
9 FEATURES: Remote STEM courses, labs
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and Sept. 10. In an article written for CNN by Butler and Kevin Gannon, the director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning and a professor of history at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, the writers stated that the Scholar Strike is “a two-day action on September 8-9 where professors, staff, students and even administrators will step away from their regular duties and classes to engage in teach-ins about racial injustice in America, policing, and racism in America.” The Canadian Scholar Strike website stated that “Many of the Black, Indigenous and racialized academics who work in Canadian universities are precariously employed; hired on only part-time or short-term contracts. The few that have been hired into full-time faculty and staff positions have found it difficult to remain in those jobs, they CONTINUED ON PAGE 4
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11 BOOKS: Increased reading levels