This article is part of our Campus Made Clear series. You can read the whole series here.
First-year students that need assistance with registration, records, or degree requirements, or transfer students that need to see if they can get credit for that “Feminist Perspectives: Politicizing Beyoncé” class at Rutgers, need to contact the Registrar’s office. UK graduate Michelle Rawlings is the Transy Registrar, with ’09 Transy alum Ashley Coons serving as the Associate Registrar.
Michelle Rawlings is the Registrar. Photo via transy.edu.
Michelle was previously the registrar at Sullivan University, where she got her MBA. At Transy since 2009, Michelle handles AP/IB exam credit, high school dual enrollment credit, requests for exemptions, enrollment transfer credit, statistics, degree audit, curriculum, and preliminary schedules.
Michelle also manages TNet, which handles schedules and allows students to view financial information. Through TNet, students must also set up a FERPA PIN to verify their identity or if they need someone else to access their information.
Ashley was a Transy work-study employee before becoming a full time employee in 2010. She takes care of needs like transcript requests, enrollment verifications, class schedule maintenance alongside your advisor, Veterans Affairs certifying, the University catalog, the curriculum and program committee, replacement diplomas, degree audits, and summer classrooms.
Transfers, you may get credit for “Politicizing Beyonce” if it’s from a regionally accredited school and you earn a C- grade or better. The Registrar will even check with your program director whether that credit can count towards your major. Alongside your academic advisor, the Registrar maintains the academic integrity of a student’s degree, and keeps them on track for on time graduation.
The office is open between 8:30am and 5:00pm at Old Morrison in Room 100, Suite A. They can be contacted by phone at (859) 233-8116 or fax at (859) 233-8221, or by emailing registrar@transy.edu.
In order to have a rewarding college experience, students should build a constellation of mentors.
This constellation should be a diverse set of faculty, staff and peers who will get students out of their comfort zones and challenge them to learn more – and more deeply – than they thought they could. Students should begin to build this network during their first year of college.
Those are some of the key takeaways from a new Elon University Poll of a nationally representative sample of more than 4,000 U.S. college graduates with bachelor’s degrees. These are points two of us plan to explore more deeply as co-authors of a forthcoming book on mentoring in college.
The Elon University Poll and the Center for Engaged Learning examined the nature and qualities of relationships that matter most for college students. The poll found that graduates who had seven to 10 significant relationships with faculty and staff were more than three times as likely to report their college experience as “very rewarding” than those with no such relationships. Similar effects were found for peer relationships in college.
The first year of college is crucial in establishing the foundation for these relationships, which will not only influence students’ time in college but a large part of the rest of their lives. In the Elon Poll, 79 percent of graduates reported meeting the peers who had the biggest impact on them during their first year of college. And 60 percent reported meeting their most influential faculty or staff mentors during that first year.
The classroom is the most common place that students say they encountered both influential faculty members and peers.
This Elon Poll builds on a rich body of research on the power of relationships with peers, faculty, advisers and other mentors, and how those relationships influence student learning, a sense of belonging and achievement.
For instance, in the landmark 1977 work “Four Critical Years,” Alexander Astin of UCLA noted that “student-faculty interaction has a stronger relationship to student satisfaction with the college experience than any other student involvement variable.” Another pioneering researcher, Vincent Tinto of Syracuse University, documented how the most effective undergraduate experiences “enable the faculty and staff to make continuing, personal contact with students.” Sociologists Daniel Chambliss and Christopher Takacs offered this sage message after their 10-year examination of students at Hamilton College: “Spend your time with good people. That’s the most important thing.”
Relationships make a big difference
Following up on a 2014 Gallup-Purdue national survey, the Elon Poll found that more than 80 percent of respondents reported their most important faculty or staff relationship formed in college was with someone who made them excited about learning, cared about them as a person and encouraged them to pursue their dreams.
Having even a very small number of meaningful relationships made a big difference. Forty-six percent of respondents with just one or two significant faculty or staff relationships rated college as “very rewarding,” as compared to just 22 percent of those with no such relationships. Similarly, 48 percent of respondents with one or two significant peer relationships rated college as “very rewarding,” as compared to 25 percent who lacked those types of connections. When it comes to relationships in college, quality matters more than quantity.
These findings make plain that the best undergraduate education – for all students at all types of institutions — is one in which students form sustained relationships with peers, faculty, staff and other mentors.
What colleges and universities do matters
Unfortunately, not all students form the kind of relationships that are key to a rewarding college experience. Indeed, the Elon Poll suggests that some who are the first in their family to attend college often don’t have as strong of a mentoring constellation as those with at least one parent who attended college.
Significantly, 15 percent of first-generation graduates reported zero influential relationships with faculty or staff while in college, as compared to only 6 percent of those with a college-educated parent. And 29 percent of graduates with a college-educated parent reported more than seven significant relationships with faculty or staff, compared to 17 percent for first-generation students.
Students have an important role in building these constellations, but so do colleges and universities.
Initiatives like Elon University’s Odyssey Scholars program for first-generation students put faculty, staff and peer mentors in place from the start of college. Odyssey Scholar director Jean Rattigan-Rohr reports an 89 percent four-year graduation rate for the two most recent groups of scholars. This rate exceeds the rate for the student body as a whole. Similarly, but at a much bigger institution, the Texas Interdisciplinary Plan (TIP) at the University of Texas at Austin provides peer mentoring and expert advising to at-risk incoming students. Thanks in part to these relationships, more TIP students have GPAs above 3.0 than their non-TIP peers.
Since contact with faculty early on is critical for all students, the Elon Poll reinforces existing scholarship that urges colleges to place their best teaching faculty in first-year classes. A study of some two dozen colleges and universities demonstrates that frequent and meaningful student-faculty interactions significantly improves student motivation and achievement.
You can find mentors in many places
The poll also found that not all of the most influential mentors are professors. Notably, one-third of our respondents identified a staff member – that is, an administrator, student life worker or support staff – rather than a professor as their most influential mentor.
Every staff person on a college campus – from gardeners and janitors to secretaries and office assistants – shapes the learning environment and many have significant contact with students. In an effort to recognize and celebrate the contributions these personnel make to students’ lives, Georgetown alumnus Febin Bellamy founded Unsung Heroes in 2016. The program should remind students to look in unexpected places for people who can make a difference in their lives.
Find your people
Establishing a network of mentors takes a sense of purpose and initiative. Granted, forming relationships with mentors and peers may come more easily to some students than others. But a constellation of mentors does not need to have dozens of people in it. Instead, a few positive relationships with peers, faculty and staff will make a powerful difference for the college experience and beyond.
To make this happen, students should make simple gestures to connect with potential mentors. Some students have also mentioned that they enjoy using write my college essay for me services because it gives them some additional reference for their academic approach which they can further discuss with faculty. Talk with a faculty member after class. Invite a professor to have coffee. Ask an advanced student in your major for advice. Small steps like these can uncover mutual interests and shared passions and, ultimately, lead to the kinds of relationships that make a big difference in college – and for a lifetime.
In the book, legal scholars Devon Carbado and Mitu Gulati argue that in the “post-racial” era, white-controlled organizations prefer to hire “‘good blacks’ who will think of themselves as people first and black people second.”
“They will neither ‘play the race card’ nor generate racial antagonism or tensions in the workplace,” the book contends. “They will not let white people feel guilty about being white; and they will work hard to assimilate themselves into the firm’s culture.”
This lets an employer realize the benefits of diversity without having to deal with issues of race, Carbado and Gulati argue.
Their critique made me wonder: Do America’s colleges and universities act the same way toward black students in the admissions process?
Based on a recent nationwide study that I conducted, the answer is: yes.
What I found is that historically and predominantly white institutions are more likely to embrace black students who don’t profess interest in racial justice.
Preferences at play
In other words, similar to how the authors of “Acting White” argue that white employers like black employees who see themselves as people first, and black people second, my study found that white colleges like black students who see themselves as students first, and black students maybe second or third or fourth, if at all.
Portland’s Resistance co-founder Gregory McKelvey speaks on why protest is important.
My research suggests that black students who state that they plan to fight for these kinds of things might never get the chance to set foot on campus of the college of their choice.
Racial hostility on campus
It also matters because this is a time when black students are facing hostile environments on campus. At Yale, for instance, earlier this year a white student called police on a black student who was napping in a common area. I would argue this is a time when America’s college campuses need more students eager to fight racism, not just acquiesce.
It’s not that white colleges don’t want black students – many do. A 2014 report showed that nearly all enrollment leaders at hundreds of public and private historically and predominantly white institutions indicated a goal to enroll “diverse students.” Research shows this often means black students.
However, what my study shows is that these institutions are more likely to screen out black students who vocalize opposition to racism.
I refer to this expectation of a public, post-racial posture and politics as the color-blind imperative. Deviating from it can result in negative consequences, especially for blacks, as such individuals are often seen among many whites as divisive, racial rabble-rousers, as I myself have been.
To investigate whether white admissions counselors were screening black high school students who don’t adhere to the color-blind imperative, I conducted a nationwide audit study. I began by generating and testing a list of distinctly black names, such as Lakisha Lewis and Keshawn Grant, that would signal to white admissions counselors that the students who were emailing them were black. I then created an email account for each name.
Next, I created four email templates that represented black students interested in 1) math and English, 2) environmental sustainability, 3) African-American history and culture, and 4) anti-racism. In each one the fictitious student asked if he or she would be a good “fit” for the school based on their interests and activities.
I sent a random sample of 500-plus white admissions counselors at the same number of private, historically and predominantly white colleges across the United States, two of the four emails from two fictitious black high school students approximately one month apart. I selected small or medium-sized colleges and universities from U.S. News & World Report’s 2013 list of best colleges.
To identify white admissions counselors, a research assistant and I used profile pictures from college websites or websites such as LinkedIn and Facebook. Only those counselors who both of us independently agreed appeared white were classified as white.
My findings revealed that white admissions counselors were, on average, 26 percent less likely to respond to the emails of black students whose interests and involvements focused on anti-racism and racial justice. The gender of the counselor and the student also mattered. White male counselors were 37 percent less likely to respond to anti-racist black students. And when black women students committed to anti-racism were emailing white male counselors, they were 50 percent less likely to receive a response.
The most extreme finding was the difference in the response rate for white male counselors responding to black women. Black women interested in environmental sustainability got a response rate of 74 percent, while those who presented the anti-racist narrative got a response rate of 37 percent. Stated differently, white male admissions counselors were twice as likely to respond to black women if they were committed to fighting environmental degradation instead of white racism. This indicates that it was not activism that depressed the response rate of anti-racist black students, but rather the focus of their activism.
Degrees of race consciousness
Minneapolis South High School protests the Ferguson grand jury ruling on the Michael Brown killing. Photo by Fibonaccia Blue under a Creative Commons License.
Noteworthy, too, is the finding that white admissions counselors were just as responsive to moderately race conscious black students who participated in culturally resonant activities, such as a jazz band and gospel choir and who mentioned the phrase “cross-cultural understanding,” as they were to black students who revealed no interest in racialized involvements. This suggests, in other words, that it was not simply race consciousness, but a critical race consciousness – one that unequivocally challenges the validity of color-blind ideology – that seemed to be unappealing to some white admissions counselors.
Importantly, the screening pattern I uncovered doesn’t necessarily show that admissions counselors are purposefully discriminating against anti-racist black students, but it doesn’t preclude it, either. Whatever the case may be, there are clear, concrete and immediate steps that administrators can take to curtail this racially discriminatory practice.
Policy solutions
Some may think the solution is for black students who actively fight racism to masquerade as something that they are not. One problem with that approach is it’s difficult, if not impossible, to be vocal against racism and not leave evidence of one’s anti-racist activism in their digital footprint. For that reason, I focus my solutions on what institutions can do, not how black students should comport themselves to fit into a white environment.
Second, schools should institute policies requiring admissions counselors to respond to all inquiry emails. Currently, the National Association for College Admission Counseling doesn’t have any best practices for email or inquiry response, according to an association official I spoke with for this article.
Third, the chief admissions administrator should develop a system whereby all admissions staff emails are randomly audited for responsiveness, content and tone.
Fourth, and most importantly, as with employment discrimination, there must be appropriate sanctions and consistent enforcement to maximize compliance. Such a system would incentivize admissions counselors to act in a non-discriminatory manner toward not only black students but all students committed to fighting against white racism and white supremacy.
Might this intervention come at a financial cost to colleges and universities? Perhaps. But it should not be a prohibitive one. Either way it is necessary. If some white admissions counselors don’t even respond to an inquiry email due to a black student’s commitment to racial justice, how can they be trusted to treat these students fairly at the application stage?
This story was originally published by ProPublica, and is republished here under a Creative Commons license. The story was written by Melissa Sanchez & Helga Salinas. Read the original story here.
A few weeks ago, I was catching up on my Facebook and Twitter feeds when I noticed a story from a reporter at Hoy, the Spanish-language sister publication of the Chicago Tribune. Jackie Serrato had covered the arrest by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents of a man getting gas with his teenage daughter at a service station in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood. Video of the incident went viral on social media after a bystander captured it on Facebook Live.
But I realized I hadn’t seen the story reported in English-language media, so I tweeted it out in English so more people would see this was happening on Chicago’s “sanctuary city” streets. That tweet received more than 200 retweets, including many from immigration reporters across the country.
This reminded me of my own experiences as a Spanish-language reporter in Miami, writing stories that mattered to Spanish-speaking communities but weren’t always covered, translated or even acknowledged by the English-language press. It was frustrating, as if my work wasn’t good enough.
When I mentioned this to my colleagues, we decided to interview Jackie about how she views her work. She was born and raised in Chicago, the daughter of immigrants from the Mexican state of Guanajuato. She previously freelanced for WBEZ and DNAInfo in Chicago, and runs a popular Facebook page with original reporting from Chicago’s Little Village neighborhood.
Helga Salinas
Like Jackie, I’ve worked in both English- and Spanish-language media. Here are some takeaways from our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
On bridging the gap between immigrant communities and local coverage:
I feel like traditional outlets do their reporting from the top to bottom. First, they talk to officials, look at numbers and official statements, then they seek out the input of an average resident, while someone like me does bottom-up reporting. We go to the community first, and then we reach out to people we consider experts.
I saw there was a disconnect [between] what mainstream outlets covered and the things we found important as immigrant communities. So I started a Facebook page for my neighborhood, La Villita Chicago, which now has over 125,000 likes. I just wanted a space on the web for Mexican-Americans and Latinos in Chicago.
I realized this was a very much-needed space. We were talking about gang violence, ward politics, threat of gentrification and what people were witnessing on their blocks. When I shared links to news stories [from mainstream outlets] in this group, I could tell these articles were very hard to relate to. They were number-heavy, harsh and included very few interviews with locals. Perspectives in the stories seem one-sided.
My focus at Hoy is to cover immigrants and Mexican-Americans in Chicago. I do it to alert people of what’s going on. This process is the essence of journalism.
I have always been fascinated by matters relating to immigration in the US. There are a lot of misconceptions out there surrounding getting a Green Card and filling out immigration forms like i-765 for example. Did you know for instance that foreign nationals working in the United States are required to obtain an employment authorization document (EAD), more commonly known as a work permit? To do so, you need to complete and file form i-765. If you would like further information, there are resources online such as the Nova Credit website that explain the immigration process in rich detail.
On the challenges of working in Spanish-language media:
Many companies that offer both English- and Spanish-language content tend to silo each language. There’s not much collaboration or flow between both languages. Good journalism will be good journalism no matter what language it’s in.
English-language media has more access to politicians, government agencies – more access in general. For example, if I call for an interview and I say I’m with Hoy, they sometimes hesitate. But if I say I’m calling from Hoy, the Spanish-language paper of the Tribune, they transfer me to that person right away.
At English-language outlets where I’ve worked, whenever I pitched stories, I’ve felt like I was perceived as biased because I wanted to cover my neighborhood, cover people who spoke my language and who had a similar background. As if I would be throwing softball questions or advocating for them. Yet white reporters can cover their own neighborhoods and ours with authority.
On engaging readers and building trust:
With these ICE cases, a lot of times these families are mixed-status families. There will be other family members who don’t have papers or who are DACA recipients, so they don’t feel comfortable talking to a white person or someone who speaks English, and who probably isn’t sensitive to their status as immigrants.
Over the years, I’ve gained people’s trust. If someone shares something with me that is confidential, it is confidential. If a person wants to be anonymous, I respect that. But I also walk the streets regularly, and I build relationships with community members that tell them I won’t just be there for 20 minutes and then leave. I’m there because I’m concerned about what’s happening and I care to learn the full story and get multiple perspectives. I totally understand if they don’t trust me because I’m part of the media.
On what readers can do to be smarter consumers of journalism:
Be critical. If the story doesn’t seem complete, don’t be afraid to write to the reporter and editors to make your voice heard. As reporters, we depend on our readership. If you’re a good journalist, you’ll listen to your readership.
ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for their newsletter.
At the start of this academic year, we at The Rambler wanted to find new ways of reaching out into our communities to bring you, the readers, more content that you would find engaging and relevant. That discussion is ongoing, and we encourage you to write in with your own ideas & suggestions.
One of the first results of that discussion is the creation of our new vertical, Further Reading. This space will play host to articles published by other news organizations with which The Rambler has a republishing agreement, or whose articles are published under a Creative Commons license. You can find some of the first articles published under this framework already.
There are also a great many news organizations in Kentucky that do the vital work of informing the community about the world around us and of playing host & moderator to the discussion that animate and impact the Commonwealth. This is also the space in which we’ll engage with those organizations.
In short, Further Reading is a portal for the Transy community to find a jumping-off point into a wider world of media & civic engagement, and we at The Rambler are going to curate that experience with the same care and dedication that we bring to the rest of our coverage. We hope you’re as excited about this new development as we are.
Here’s This Thing is a new weekly column where Rambler editors share their favorite obscure pop culture and explain what makes it so great. For the first week of the column, News Editor Rebecca Blankenship writes about avant-garde Soviet Filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris.
If I were to invite you over to watch a three-hour long Soviet science fiction epic by avant-garde director Anderi Tarkovsky, I hope you would regard that as an interesting invitation—if not, okay then, we’ll watch Star Wars, but don’t touch me. Sit, like, three feet away. Thanks.
Listen, Solaris (1972) is good. The pain of a thousand yearnings, good. The collision of that violent desire for love with the equally earnest hope you never have to look upon another starry-eyed nice-looking human because they betray you, every time, good. That tearing-inside feeling you can’t stand and can’t escape for long, if ever, good.
I’m going to tell you enough about it that this piece will serve as an interesting primer and supplement for the film; I’m not going to spoil it much, and I’m not going to give you any reason to feel like you’ve seen it, but hopefully you’ll watch it and later approach me in Carpenter to admit I did you a solid.
The premise is this: a hundred years have passed since the discovery of a planet called Solaris. This is in what Stanislaw Lem, the novelist whose book became this film, somewhat humorously calls “the glorious communist future.” Like today, a group of academics have become almost worryingly specialized, and together have named their new field “Solaristics.”
In probably an amphetamine fueled psychosis, Philip K. Dick once wrote the FBI accusing Stanislaw Lem (pictured) of being a communist committee. Photo by Aleksander Jalosinski (Fair Use).
The new planet is maddeningly enigmatic. Its atmosphere, its surface, its orbit—all of this is not only utterly unlike any other planet’s, it’s not even consistent. Things change on Solaris almost hourly, without any warning and without explanation. The logic of these changes is inscrutable, and the world government that funds the operation is ready to abort it. Then Solaris Station goes silent, and a man goes to check it out.
Derrida reminds us that form and content are the same, so we should observe that Andrei Tarkovsky, it’s not even a digression, is just a little off-balance delivering us this exposition. Although the latter film has much overlap with 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the odd and surreal poetry of Solaris’s first shots recalls David Lynch’s introduction to Blue Velvet (1986). Smell the fog in the willow trees; there’s a horse somewhere. A bridge. The world is beautiful, truly peaceful, but lonely and just-sub-menacingly disjointed.
In his book on film, Sculpting in Time, Tarkovsky says that “[t]hrough poetic connections feeling is heightened and the spectator is made more active.” All his films follow the same poetic pacing, the contemplative soaking in images; in his film Stalker (1979), there are only five cuts in the first eighteen minutes, and though Solaris is less radical, what Paul Schrader called the “transcendental style” persists. Each image is linked to the next through the logic of poetry and association: fresh shots flow in quasi-logical sequence, so that the film’s inmost feelings pour slow, viscous, and translucent like brown syrup, pure and unrefined.
“If you still want to watch Star Wars, I’ll literally harm you,” he whispered. Photo from Solaris (1972).
The cuts are rare, but each one takes us deeper into some layer of the film’s Idea. Which through the floating, ever-calm camera that takes us all the way to Solaris Station, gradually unfurls itself: our memories are already also our future, and other people are not not us. Take a long coffee break this weekend, and let your spirit drift beyond: someone out there—maybe you—wants the pain of knowing you, for a while, and never forgetting you. Even when they want to.
And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
Hey y’all! I’m Taylor, the new Managing Editor for The Rambler. I’ll be continuing last semester’s tradition of weekly playlists, along with a short blog on updates and events happening around campus. Every week will have a different vibe, so check back for some chill beats.
Arts Events
September-October, MFA Morlan Gallery
The most recent work by Claire Ashley, Jacklyn Mednicov, Susanna Coffey, and Maryam Taghavi is on display at the Mitchell Fine Arts Morlan Gallery! This exhibit was curated by Trevor Martin. The gallery is open weekdays from noon to 5 pm.
Tuesday, September 18th in MFA Carrick Theater @7:30pm
We’ll have a guest pianist named Sylvia Thereza who will be playing romantic piano literature by Chopin and Brahms!
New to campus and confused about…well, everything? Don’t worry, The Rambler has you covered with a set of explainers for all the campus services you might need in your time at Transy. You can find all of our explanations for campus services here!
This series will be updated through the coming weeks. Check back for more!
This article is part of our Campus Made Clear series. You can read the whole series here.
As the Dalai Lama once said, “Once a year, go someplace you’ve never been before.” At Transy, most of the travel arrangement can be made through the University’s Study Abroad Office.
According to Kathy Simon, the Director of the Office, the purpose of studying aborad is to “get students outside of the Transy bubble. The goal is for the students to gain experience, knowledge, and global competence.”
Students can study abroad in summer, fall, winter term, or even over winter break. In the past students have traveled to Spain, Greece, Austria, Ireland,Tanzania and many other countries.
The first step is to contact the Study Abroad Office and let them know that you have an interest in studying abroad. Next, connect with a professor within your major or your academic advisor to have a one-on-one meeting, to make sure a course is picked that goes towards a degree.
The third step is going over program costs and financing, and discovering what is the most affordable option for the student to study abroad. The Study Abroad Office offers a number of programs whose expenses can be paid by students’ Transy financial aid.
Last, students fill out an application for the desired program, and continue to work through the Office for help before the program begins.
Simon said, “We want to encourage, promote, publicize, and help students have an academic experience outside of the US.” As students prepare for their professional careers, their future employers will be looking for the skills students develop from studying abroad.
If you’re planning on studying abroad, you might want to consider looking for advice from other people who have also made the decision to leave the US and study elsewhere. Some people are releasing books, like these people here for example, to help students who might be hesitant about living and studying in a different country. Resources like that could be beneficial to look over before your move.
The Study Abroad Office is located at Old Morrison office 100B. They are open weekdays from 8:30-5:00. You can email Kathy Simon at ksimon@transy.edu, or contact her through through Twitter, Facebook, or TNotes.
