Three days ago, Good Black News shared an article about Washington D.C. wunderkind Avery Coffey, who was accepted to five Ivy League colleges. Today, 17-year-old New Yorker, violist and aspiring physician Kwasi Enin went one better – make that three better – and earned acceptance to all EIGHT Ivys!
According to usatoday.com, the acceptances began rolling in over the past few months, and by late last week when he opened an e-mail from Harvard, Enin found he’d been accepted to every one. School district officials provided scanned copies of acceptance letters from all eight on Monday. Yale confirmed that it was holding a spot for Enin.
The feat is extremely rare, say college counselors — few students even apply to all eight, because each seeks different qualities in their freshman class. Almost none are invited to attend them all. The Ivy League colleges are among the nation’s most elite.
“My heart skipped a beat when he told me he was applying to all eight,” says Nancy Winkler, a guidance counselor at William Floyd High School, where Enin attends class. In 29 years as a counselor, she says, she’s never seen anything like this. “It’s a big deal when we have students apply to one or two Ivies. To get into one or two is huge. It was extraordinary.”
For most of the eight schools, acceptance comes rarely, even among the USA’s top students. At the top end, Cornell University admitted only 14% of applicants. Harvard accepted just 5.9%.
Posts tagged as “Yale University”
WASHINGTON – This is the college acceptance season — frequently a nervous time for high school seniors. But D.C.’s Avery Coffey can relax. He applied to five Ivy League universities and all five accepted him.
Coffey attends Benjamin Banneker Academic High School, a D.C. public school with strict rules. None of the 439 students at Banneker is allowed to bring a cell phone into the building. They are also not allowed to go to their lockers during the school day. (That has spawned the peculiar tradition of piling up textbooks at the base of lockers, so kids can switch books between classes without violating the locker rule.)
The strict rules at Banneker have fostered a rather serious academic environment. Principal Anita Berger says year after year after year, 100 percent of Banneker graduates are accepted into post-secondary institutions. Among these brainy and motivated public school students is 17-year-old Coffey who, like a lot of kids, enjoys sports. What does he play?
“Baseball, basketball, tennis, soccer,” Coffey told us.
He also enjoys academics, and he has a 4.3 high school report card average, adjusted for the demanding International Baccalaureate courses he takes. Coffey scored very high on standardized tests also. He calls himself a “determined” student.
Coffey applied to five Ivy League universities, and, amazingly, has been accepted at all of them: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown. And four of the five universities have already offered very generous financial aid packages. (Harvard is still formulating its offer.)
Tricia Rose, professor of Africana studies at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, was selected as the next director of the university’s Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America. The Center was established at Brown in 1986.
In accepting the appointment, Professor Rose stated, “My goal is to make the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America a vibrant, historically grounded, yet forward-looking campuswide, nationally recognized site for critical analysis and public engagement on the ways that race and ethnicity shape American culture, society, and policy.”
Professor Rose is the author of the award-winning book, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Wesleyan University Press, 1994). She is also the author of Longing to Tell: Black Women Talk About Sexuality and Intimacy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003) and The Hip Hop Wars: What We Talk About When We Talk About Hip Hop — And Why It Matters (Basic Civitas, 2008).
Dr. Rose is a native of New York City. She is a graduate of Yale University and holds a Ph.D. in American studies from Brown University.
article via jbhe.com
Monday at Yale University, civil rights lawyer Michelle Alexander condemned mass incarceration of African-Americans as a form of legalized discrimination. (Photo/Maria Zepeda)
Michelle Alexander, a civil rights lawyer who gained national renown after publishing the book “The New Jim Crow,” spoke to students and faculty at the Yale Divinity School Monday afternoon about the phenomenon of mass incarceration in the United States, which she described as a legalized form of racial discrimination. Because African-Americans make up a large percentage of America’s prison population, Alexander said millions of African-Americans nationwide are deprived of basic human rights to housing and employment, adding that the prisoners have fallen victim to the kind of racial discrimination that existed at the time of Jim Crow.
“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it,” she said. “This is a system that has literally turned back the clock on racial progress in the U.S.”
Alexander said a series of American government campaigns to curb the illegal drug trade, commonly referred to as the war on drugs, is causing an unprecedented number of incarcerations, especially of people of color. More than 45 million people have been “swept into the system” for drug offenses, Alexander said, adding that the number of people currently incarcerated for drug offenses surpasses the number of people incarcerated for any one reason in 1980.
“We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it,” she said. “This is a system that has literally turned back the clock on racial progress in the U.S.”
Alexander said a series of American government campaigns to curb the illegal drug trade, commonly referred to as the war on drugs, is causing an unprecedented number of incarcerations, especially of people of color. More than 45 million people have been “swept into the system” for drug offenses, Alexander said, adding that the number of people currently incarcerated for drug offenses surpasses the number of people incarcerated for any one reason in 1980.
One of the earliest writings of Jupiter Hammon, the first African-American poet to be published, has been found. Born into slavery in Long Island, New York, he was allowed to explore his master’s library. Hammon went on to publish his first work, “An Evening Thought,” in 1760.
Julie McCown, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Arlington, was researching several libraries for a particular poem and found success at Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library in Connecticut. The poem, published in 1786, is telling of Hammon’s evolved thoughts on slavery in America, according to Cedrick May, a UTA professor.
Julie McCown, a doctoral student at the University of Texas at Arlington, was researching several libraries for a particular poem and found success at Manuscripts and Archives at Yale University Library in Connecticut. The poem, published in 1786, is telling of Hammon’s evolved thoughts on slavery in America, according to Cedrick May, a UTA professor.
Image courtesy of Cowan’s Auctions, Cincinnati, Ohio.
Fordham University is launching a project to create a database which lists the burial grounds of enslaved African-Americans in the United States. Sandra Arnold, a history student in Fordham’s School of Professional and Continuing Studies, has been leading the ambitious project, reports Fordham University’s eNewsroom.
Irma Watkins-Owens, Ph.D., is the co-director and an associate professor of history and African-American studies at Fordham. The two are working closely with advisers from several other American universities, including Emory, Yale, and the College of William and Mary.
Philanthropists Joanna and Daniel Rose have donated funds to Yale University to create the Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lectures. Professor Gates is a 1973 alumnus of Yale and currently serves as Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and is director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University.
The first Henry Louis Gates Jr. Lecture was delivered by Kwame Anthony Appiah, the Laurence S. Rockefeller University Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, and a close friend of professor Gates. Speaking at the inaugural event, Dr. Gates stated, “It is difficult for me to think of a greater honor in the life of a Yale alumnus than to have one’s alma mater create a lecture in one’s name.”
article via jbhe.com
(L to R) Joy A. Buolamwini, Rhiana E. Gunn-Wright, and Nina M. Yancy
The Rhodes Scholarships, considered by many to be the most prestigious awards given to U.S. college students, were created in 1902 by the will of Cecil Rhodes, an industrialist who made a vast fortune in colonial Africa. Each year, 32 Americans are named Rhodes Scholars. The scholarships provide funds for two or three years of graduate study at Oxford University in Britain. Rhodes Scholars from the United States join students from 14 other jurisdictions including Australia, southern Africa, Kenya, India, and Canada. All told, about 80 Rhodes Scholars worldwide are selected each year for study at Oxford. In 1978 Karen Stevenson of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was the first African-American woman selected as a Rhodes Scholar. This year, three African American women were among the this year’s group of Rhodes Scholars.
Joy A. Buolamwini is a graduate of the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she majored in computer science. She is currently working at the Carter Center in Atlanta. She has founded or co-founded three businesses. She plans on a degree in African studies at Oxford.
Rhiana E. Gunn-Wright is a 2011 graduate of Yale University. She holds a bachelor’s degree in African-American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. She has been working at Women’s Policy Research in Washington, D.C. Her plan is to obtain a master’s degree in comparative social policy at Oxford.
Nina M. Yancy is a senior at Harvard University where she majors in social studies. Yancy grew up in the Dallas area but her family recently moved to Chicago. Yancy has had internships at CNN, the Center for American Political Studies and in the British House of Commons. She is a member of the Harvard Ballet Company. She plans on pursuing a master’s degree in global health science as a Rhodes Scholar.
History was made this past Tuesday (Oct. 16) when Judge Wilhelmina Wright was sworn in as the first African-American woman to serve on the state’s Supreme Court. Wright joins Justice Alan Page as the only two African-American Minnesota Supreme Court justices. Page was elected to the Court in 1992 by the votes of the state. Wright was appointed by Gov. Mark Dayton to fill the vacancy created with the stepping down of Justice Helen Meyer.