A Year in Review: Headliners

Headliners

Howard University’s School of Communications was renamed the John H. Johnson School of Communications in recognition of a $4 million contribution from the legendary founder of Johnson Publishing Co., which produces Ebony and Jet magazines.

University of Virginia student Daisy Lundy, a student of African American and Korean background, reported being assaulted in February by a White male who told her, “No one wants a nigger to be president.” Lundy was in the runoff for the presidency of UVA’s student council. Despite the reward for $22,000, no one was ever charged in the case.

The University of Tennessee’s Kara Lawson and University of California-Riverside’s Nathan Irvin were named Black Issues In Higher Education’s Arthur Ashe Jr. Sports Scholars for 2003. Lawson played basketball for the Lady Vols and was later drafted to play for the WNBA’s Sacramento Monarchs. Irvin, a track and field athlete, has aspirations to attend medical school. Both student-athletes carried cumulative 3.8 grade point averages.

A study conducted by the Hartford Courant in August suggested that graduates of Howard and Meharry medical schools were among the nation’s most reprimanded physicians, calling into question the historically Black medical schools’ academic quality and competence of graduates. Both schools, as well as several medical associations, questioned the study’s methodology.

Researchers were alarmed by a recent outbreak of the HIV virus among college students in North Carolina in which 53 male students — most of them Black — had contracted the virus. UNC-Chapel Hill and state researchers say the figures for the first time in two decades of HIV research identify college campuses as high-transmission areas for the virus that causes AIDS.

The U.S. government awarded a $14 million grant to Tuskegee University to complete its National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. The center is the nation’s first bioethics institute dedicated to addressing issues that involve African Americans and other underserved populations. It was created in 1999 with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in part to address the legacy of the syphilis study that took place from 1932 to 1972 in Macon County, Ala.

Hampton University officials confiscated the Oct. 22 edition of the student newspaper the Hampton Script when the newspaper staff ran a story on cafeteria health-code violations on the front page. The acting president had requested her letter addressing the violations appear on the front page. Ultimately, the Script had to republish the edition with the front-page letter. The story received quite a bit of attention from several media organizations who raised First Amendment concerns.

Continued at International Education

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