Shifting gears a bit, although still reporting on issues of access and equity, Diverse goes international as we report on India’s Supreme Court’s recent ruling on quotas in higher education for historically oppressed Indians. India’s public universities have reserved 27 percent of their seats for lower-caste and historically oppressed Indians, and the court upheld a stay against the quota system, a ruling that upper-caste Indians support and the lower-caste Indians consider a blow to educational equality. Read more about this battle between the have and have-nots in Jonathan Sidhu’s “A Tale of Two Indias.�

Correspondent Patricia Valdata in “Creativity In Its Most Pure Form,� reports on a summer program at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, which brings high school students onto the campus for a few intense days of poetry and fiction writing, panels and more. The four-day workshop led by SIU professor Allison Joseph might actually expand to a week next year at the suggestion of students, many of whom return year after year. One student said she hadn’t been able to turn off the inspiration since the work began, just as Joseph and her colleagues hoped.

Says Joseph: “The focus is not just on how to become a writer; most of the kids we see are very much writers in their own minds. [The question is] how do you feed that fire? How do you stay enthusiastic about what you do?�

And, lastly, remembering Asa Hilliard. Don’t miss Dr. J. Herman Blake’s tribute to this scholar who will be very much missed.

Hilary Hurd Anyaso
Editor