Wake Forest apologizes for benefitting from enslaved people
Each February, the Wake Forest University community gathers for Founders’ Day Convocation to observe the founding of the University in 1834. At this year’s event, Wake Forest President Nathan O. Hatch acknowledged the University’s participation in the institution of slavery. He offered an apology for how Wake Forest benefitted from the labor and sale of enslaved people.Categories: Happening at Wake, Inclusive Excellence
Sixty years ago, a group of students from Winston-Salem State University were joined by students from Wake Forest University to protest segregated lunch counters in Winston-Salem. A community commemoration vigil will be held Feb. 23 at 3 p.m. in downtown Winston-Salem to mark the anniversary of the historic sit-in.
As the oldest of four siblings, Lainey Drake takes credit for leading the astronaut games they played as children – swinging into space on their tire swing and dashing around galactic obstacles in the universe. This summer, thanks to the Brooke Owens Fellowship, Drake will help pioneer commercial space travel as an engineering intern at Virgin Galactic.
What can we learn from the past? Wake Forest University legal scholar and Associate Provost Kami Chavis explains, “If you want to have a transformative institutional change, you have to begin examining the past and the root causes of underlying issues to know what you need to do in the future.” Chavis is also co-chair of the Steering Committee of Wake Forest’s Slavery, Race and Memory Project.
The people who could benefit most from the newest antidepressant therapies – those at risk for suicide – are most often excluded from the clinical trials that test those drugs for safety and efficacy, according to new research published Feb. 4 in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry.
The course “Classics Beyond Whiteness” was originally limited to 15 students. Twenty-six registered. “I couldn’t turn students away,” said classics professor T.H.M. Gellar-Goad. The fall class was one of several planned courses, events and programming focusing on “Classics Beyond Whiteness” - a multidisciplinary collaboration that examines a misleading and damaging tendency to focus on white scholars and perspectives in claissical studies while excluding black voices.
When they moved into a women’s residence hall in 1969, Beth Norbrey Hopkins and Deborah Graves McFarlane simply wanted to obtain a good education and weren’t thinking about making history as the first African American women to come to Wake Forest as resident students. But they did.
With the first case of human-to-human transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus reported in the U.S., Wake Forest University virologist Pat Lord offers a word of caution: “We don’t need to be fearful. We need to be aware.”
Wake Forest University Professor of Music David Levy, author of “Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony,” has been engaged in Beethoven scholarship throughout his 44-year academic career. He is available to comment during the year-long celebration of Beethoven's 250th birthday.
Each year, first-year students write their career interests on colorful paper airplanes and launch them in Wait Chapel during a New Deac Week session led by the Office of Personal and Career Development team. The activity marks the end of the career portion of orientation and the beginning of their college-to-career journeys.