If you weren’t familiar with Oakland University before Thursday night, you weren’t alone. Not far from campus, even locals at a Detroit bar, watching the team shock No. 3 seed Kentucky in the first round of the NCAA tournament, asked if “that was Oakland, California” or the Michigan suburb of Rochester . (It’s the latter.)

On Friday, after Oakland’s 80-76 victory as a No. 14 seed, students and graduates enjoyed the university’s moment in the March Madness sun. Among them is John Hendley, class of 2005, who watched the game from Florida with his wife, Melissa, also a graduate.

“If people didn’t know who the Oakland University Golden Grizzlies were last night, they sure do now,” Mr. Hendley said.

For all but perhaps the university’s closest followers, a brief introduction may be in order: the university was founded in 1957 through a donation to establish a satellite site for Michigan State University. Initially the campus was known as Michigan State University-Oakland, but in 1970 the name became Oakland an independent university.

In 1997, Oakland University moved its athletics program from NCAA Division II to Division I. A year later, things changed his mascot from the Pioneers to Golden Grizzliesaccording to the university’s website.

Oakland University’s campus feels more like a sprawling corporate park, and that makes sense. There are many nearby, such as the international headquarters of Stellantis (formerly known as Chrysler) and other automotive suppliers.

The university is surrounded by shopping centers with fast food chains and a golf course. Of the approximately 16,000 currently enrolled students, only 2,500 live on campus. And that’s by design. There are few if any public transportation options in the area, reflecting the mentality of a Motor City built for cars first and pedestrians second.

Even Golden Grizzlies coach Greg Kampe commutes from his home in Detroit.

The university is a smaller option compared to the state’s two major public institutions: the University of Michigan and Michigan State University, both of which are about an hour’s drive from Oakland. But for Oakland supporters, the campus felt a little bigger on Friday.

University President Ora Hirsch Pescovitz, who boasted Friday about correctly filling out her NCAA bracket during the Oakland-Kentucky game, said she was “over the moon.”

“It’s really exciting for us,” she said, adding that the national attention was great “for athletics and for our university and for universities like ours.”

James Wissbrun, a 21-year-old computer scientist in Oakland who grew up nearby and has been going to Golden Grizzlies games since childhood, traveled to the Pittsburgh game on a charter bus the university rented for students. He returned at 4 a.m. Friday and got only a few hours of sleep before going to work at his 7 a.m. job with the City of Rochester Hills grounds crew.

“It was worth it,” he said. “I’ve been coming here for a long time, and to actually be a student here and see how far we’ve come is just incredible.”

Mr. Wissbrun said he planned to take the bus provided by the university to watch the team play No. 11 North Carolina State on Saturday, again in Pittsburgh.

Giovanni Moceri, a 22-year-old mechanical engineering major, will also be on the bus. He has hosted watch parties for Golden Grizzlies games in an effort to create a sense of community on campus. Sometimes it can be a challenge.

“Many students here don’t even know we play sports here,” Mr Moceri said.

That wasn’t the case the night before at RJ’s Pub in Rochester Hills, one of the local bars, where the atmosphere during the game was “rocking,” said Russell Luxton Jr., who operates the bar and is an Oakland graduate.

Lights and sirens went off every time Jack Gohlke, one of the team’s stars, hit a three-pointer, Mr. Luxton said, adding that for every three-pointer Gohlke made, “the crowd got louder.”

Who knows what will happen in Saturday’s game? But until then, Golden Grizzlies fandom is reaching a fever pitch.

“We are thriving,” Mr. Kampe, the coach, said after the victory, adding that “everything is in place to get this program off the ground, and maybe this is the impetus for it.”

The Israeli bombing of Gaza is “genocidal,” the newspaper’s homepage said Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Such a statement would be considered political and would be prohibited, according to a new proposal from the University of California regents.

Under the proposal, academic departments would not be allowed to post political statements on their home pages. And any political statement issued by a department – ​​in any location – would have to meet stricter guidelines.

The regents will vote as early as Wednesday on the plan, which would apply to the UC system’s 10 schools, including Santa Santa Cruz, UCLA and Berkeley.

Higher education is rich with opinions on current events, from Black Lives Matter to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But since the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel and Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, universities have been under pressure to impose stricter limits on their speech, sometimes in ways that have alarmed supporters of academic freedom.

The state’s progressive politics have generally insulated the University of California from some conservative attacks on colleges. But the regents’ proposal, some teachers and students worry, could mark a sea change at a time when the language used to describe the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is deeply contentious.

Many Jewish students, teachers and alumni have accused some pro-Palestinian protesters and teachers of anti-Semitic statements. Last month in Berkeley, an event with an Israeli speaker got cancelled after a crowd of protesters smashed doors in what Chancellor Carol Christ described as “an attack on the fundamental values ​​of the university.”

Berkeley political science professor Ron Hassner has staged a sit-in at his office to protest what he says is the administration’s inaction regarding anti-Semitism on campus. And more than 400 professors signed a letter they denounce the way the university system’s ethnic studies departments posted material on their homepages that “defames Israel, rejects the characterization of the Hamas massacre as terrorism and calls on the UC government to ‘end the call for boycott, divestment and sanctions to endorse.’”

On Tuesday, Rep. Virginia Foxx, chair of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, sent a letter to university officials requesting documents and information about Berkeley’s response to anti-Semitism on campus.

According to Jay Sures, the regent who developed the proposal, banning such statements on a department’s homepage does not restrict academic freedom. Professors and students have many other forums to express themselves, he said, but their opinions on department homepages can be misinterpreted as representative of the University of California.

“The faculty can have access to their Twitter accounts,” Mr. Sures said at a regents meeting in January. “They can do social media. They can publish peer studies. There are so many other ways.”

Some universities have already tightened their rules.

There has also been intense debate over whether universities should adopt the University of Chicago’s famous policy of “institutional neutrality,” meaning the university does not take a position on issues that are not central to the university’s functions .

The debate at the University of California is not quite that. The president, board chair and others who speak as the university’s official voice would not be affected by the regents’ proposal.

In fact, a statement from the university sparked the battle between Mr. Sures and the ethnic studies faculty.

On October 9, Michael V. Drake, the president of the University of California, and Richard Leib, the chairman of the board, issued a statement condemning the Hamas attack as ‘terrorism’ and ‘sickening and incomprehensible’.

A week later, the university’s Ethnic Studies Council, which represents hundreds of the discipline’s faculty members across the system, decided objectedwriting in a letter that the official statement lacked “a full understanding of this historic moment” and contributed to anti-Muslim and anti-Palestinian sentiment.

“We call on the UC administrative leadership to withdraw its charges of terrorism, strengthen the Palestinian freedom struggle and oppose Israel’s war crimes, ethnic cleansing and genocide of the Palestinian people,” the council said.

Mr. Sures called letter “horrible and disgusting.”

He responded that he would do everything in his power “to protect our Jewish students, and for that matter everyone in our extended community, from your inflammatory and insensitive rhetoric.”

The UC system had already considered the issue of political statements. In 2022, a Committee for Academic Freedom argued against the ban of political statements from departments.

Departments, the report said, should instead set guidelines on when to make statements, be transparent about whose views are represented, and also consider whether they can cool the speech of those who disagree.

For the time being, political statements are allowed, as long as they do not end up in electoral politics.

But the regents’ proposal would limit the departments’ home pages to day-to-day operations, including course descriptions, upcoming events and the release of new publications.

Opinions would be allowed on other university websites. But any political statement would need a disclaimer stating that the views are not necessarily those of the university.

The regents’ proposal adopts other recommendations from the 2022 academic freedom report. It would require department members to vote before issuing a political statement, with ballots collected anonymously to protect dissent. Departments should develop and publish guidelines on the process.

The proposal failed to address the concerns of many faculty members, who say it was politically motivated.

The regents’ proposal “delegitimizes the work we do in ethnic studies,” said Felicity Amaya Schaeffer, Santa Cruz department chair.

The Ethnic Studies Department’s statements are, she said, “based on the academic expertise of almost everyone in the department and especially our faculty who work on Palestine.”

James Steintrager, chairman of the university’s academic senate, expressed concern that the proposal would be an invitation for outsiders to enter academia.

“It’s not just about outright political statements about certain events in the world,” he said in an interview, “but also about things like climate change, vaccine science and things like that.”

But Ty Alper, a Berkeley law professor who led the 2022 Academic Freedom Committee, was pleased that the proposal adopted the recommendations. Mr. Alper said he was less focused on rules about department home pages.

“I’m more concerned,” he said, “about ensuring that teachers have the individual and collective right to make statements on matters of importance.”

At Maysville High School in Maysville, Missouri, population 1,100, classes can be a bit tough for the squeamish. Coursework may involve assigned reading and algebra, but also a fair amount of blood and guts.

In 2022, the high school, an hour’s drive north of Kansas City, added a farm-to-table elective taught by a family and consumer sciences teacher, Amy Kanak, who works with an agriculture teacher, Brandi Ellis. Students have already learned to harvest and process livestock and game in their agriculture classes, and to dissect the organs in their science classes. The new course gives them the opportunity to prepare meals with the harvested meat, a logical conclusion to the hard work of students in other classes. Ms. Kanak provides instructions on the tail end of the nose-to-tail process, on meal prep, returns, budgeting and bulk cooking.

But it all starts with the hardest and messiest part: culling animals and breaking them down. For many students, it is the first time they have held a knife and slaughtered. Ms Kanak hopes students will complete her course with an understanding of where their food comes from.

Ms Ellis, who believes the lessons are crucial at a time when grocery bills are rising, said: “It forces them out of their comfort zone a bit.”

Garrett Bray, then a senior at Maysville High School, pulled a freshly shot doe from the woods on his family’s property in 2022. Garrett learned to hunt from his father and has been hunting from a young age.

Max DeShon, right, helps drag two young animals out of Garrett’s pickup. Normally, Garrett would have field-dressed the deer himself, but he delivered them so students could learn processing and butchering.

Sophia Redman, a 2022 freshman, makes a first cut on a doe during an agriculture class.

Kaleb Jestes, left, processes venison and sorts it into different cuts during a farm-to-table food course. A single deer weighs an average of 60 to 70 pounds of processed meat, making it an affordable option if you know how to hunt and process the animal yourself. Deer permits in Missouri starting in 2024 will start at $7.50 for antlerless deer, or $18 for each deer. Youth tags cost even less.

Cindy Eggleston, an eighth-grade science teacher, shows her students, from right, Keely Hardin, Makenzie Mason and Kella Morris, freshly harvested deer organs that will be part of an anatomy lesson on the heart and lungs.

Max Heintz retrieves a rooster from a shed outside the agricultural building at the start of the school day in December 2023. ​​A local resident called Mrs. Ellis and asked to donate seven overly aggressive roosters to the program. Mrs. Ellis teaches students how to cull and process chickens every year, often after raising them at school.

Culled roosters bleed into garbage bins in the agricultural building.

Makenzie set out in 2023 and took the temperature of the water while her classmates Nathan Schnitzer, center, and Bo May held their culled chickens during an agriculture lesson. Various classes take part in the entire process throughout the day: culling, gutting the carcasses by first dipping them in boiling hot water, and preparing the birds for cooking and eating by removing organs and legs.

Keagan Reeder, left, and Cooper Ray, center wearing hats, stand by as Colton LeMunyon, in Buffalo Bills hoodie, grills chicken the students have marinated.

Colton dug into a fried drumstick from a rooster that had been culled by a class that morning. Students noted how tough the meat was, likely due to the age of the roosters.

From right we see Kameron Keesaman, Robert Stinley Jr. and Bo Zeikle put on their aprons at the start of a cooking class.

Frying chicken livers from the roosters that the agricultural classes had cleared and processed the week before.

Charlee Kimbrell, left, Robert Boucher, center, and teacher Amy Kanak “cheer” their fried chicken livers before tasting.

Fried venison steak with chicken, topped with gravy and fried potatoes and green beans, prepared and served in Ms. Kanak’s classroom, the end of a process that started in the back of a pickup truck.

Katie Currid contributed reporting.

Tommy Orange sat at the front of a classroom in the Bronx and listened as a group of high school students discussed his novel “There There.”

A boy with blue glasses raised his hand. “All the characters have some kind of disconnect, even trauma,” says Michael Almanzar, 19. “That’s the world we live in. That’s all around us. It’s not like it’s in a far away land. That is literally your neighbor.”

The class broke into a round of finger-snapping, as if we were at an old-fashioned poetry slam on the Lower East Side and not an English class at the Millennium Art Academy, on the corner of Lafayette and Pugsley Avenue.

Orange took it all in with a mixture of gratitude and humility – the semicircle of serious, committed teenagers; the bulletin board decorated with words describing ‘there there’ (‘hope’, ‘struggle’, ‘mourning’, ‘discovery’); the shelf of well-thumbed copies with dust jackets in various stages of disintegration.

His eyebrows shot up when a student wearing a sweatshirt that read “I Am My Ancestors’ Wildest Dreams” compared the book to Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” When three successive students talked about how they related to Oranje’s work because of their own mental health issues, he was on the verge of tears.

“That’s what attracted me to reading in the first place,” Orange said, “the feeling of not being as alone as you thought you were.”

It’s not often that an author walks into a room full of readers, let alone teenagers, talking about characters born into his imagination as if they were living, breathing people. And it’s rare for students to spend time with an author whose fictional world feels like a refuge. Of all the classroom visits he has made since “There There” was released in 2018, the one at the Millennium Art Academy earlier this month was, Orange later said, “the most intense connection I have ever experienced.”

The catalyst for the visit was Rick Ouimet, an energetic ponytailed English teacher who has worked in the fortress-like building for 25 years. Ouimet is the kind of teacher students remember, whether for his contributions to their literary vocabulary – synecdoche, bildungsroman, chiasmus – or for his battered flip phone.

He first heard about “There There” from a colleague whose son recommended it during the pandemic. “I knew from the first paragraph that this was a book our children would identify with,” he said.

The novel follows twelve characters from indigenous communities as they lead up to a powwow at a stadium in Oakland, California, where disaster strikes. “Orange leads you over the drawbridge, and then the span begins to rise,” wrote a critic for The New York Times, Dwight Garner, when it came out. The novel was one of The Times’s 10 best books of 2018 and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. According to Orange’s publisher, well over a million copies have been sold.

Ouimet’s suspicion turned out to be true: “Students love the book so much that they don’t realize they are reading it for English class. That is the rare find, the gift of gifts.

Some relevant statistics: Attendance rates op Millennium art are below the city average. Eighty-seven percent of students come from low-income households, which is above the city average.

In the three years since Orange’s novel became a mainstay of the Millennium Art curriculum, pass rates for students taking the Advanced Placement literature exam have more than doubled. Last year, 21 of 26 students earned college credits, exceeding state and global averages. The majority of them, Ouimet said, wrote about “There There.”

When three students in the school’s art-decorated hallway were randomly asked to name a favorite character from “There There,” they all responded without hesitation. It was as if Tony, Jacquie and Opal were people they might encounter at ShopRite.

Briana Reyes, 17, said, “I connected with the characters so much, especially because I had family members with alcohol and drug abuse.”

Last month, Ouimet learned that Orange, who lives in Oakland, would be in New York to promote his second novel, “Wandering Stars.” An idea started to percolate. Ouimet had never invited an author to his class before; Such visits can be pricey and, as he noted, Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston are unavailable.

Ouimet wrote a message in his head for over a week, he said, and on Monday, March 4, just after midnight, he sent it to the Penguin Random House Speakers Bureau.

“The email felt like a rough draft, but I wasn’t worried,” he said. “It was my midlife college essay.”

The 827-word missive is written in the style Ouimet encourages in his students’ work, full of personality, texture and detail, without the business language that infiltrates so much important professional correspondence.

Ouimet wrote, “In our 12th grade English classroom, in our diverse corner of the South Bronx, in a tight but vibrant urban neighborhood not unlike the Fruitvale, you are our rock star. Our more than rock star. You are our MF Doom, our Eminem, our Earl Sweatshirt, our Tribe Called Red, our Beethoven, our Bobby Big Medicine, our email to Manny, our ethnically ambiguous woman in the next stall, our camera pointing into a tunnel of darkness . ”

Orange, he added, was a hero to these children: “You changed lives.” There was Tahqari Koonce, 17, who drew a parallel between the Oakland Coliseum and the Roman Coliseum; and Natalia Melendez, also 17, who noted that a white gun symbolized the oppression of indigenous tribes. And then there was 18-year-old Dalvyn Urena, who “said he had never read a whole book before ‘There There,'” and now compared it to a Shakespearean sonnet.

He ended with, “Well, it was worth a try. Thank you for taking the time to read this – if it ever finds its way to you. In appreciation (and awe), Rick Ouimet.”

“I took a chance,” Ouimet said. And why not? “My students take a chance every time they open a new book. There is a sigh and they open the page. To see what they gave this book? The love was palpable.”

Within hours, word reached Orange, who was in the middle of a 24-city tour with multiple interviews and events every day. He asked Jordan Rodman, senior director of publicity at Knopf, to do whatever she could to get Ouimet’s class into the mix. There would be no compensation involved. Knopf donated 30 copies of ‘There There’ and 30 copies of ‘Wandering Stars’.

In a large, busy school full of squeaky soles, walkie-talkies and young people, moments of silence are difficult to find. But when Oranje opened his new novel, you could have heard a pin drop.

“It’s important to pronounce things, to pronounce them, like the way we learn to spell by saying words slowly,” Orange read.

He continued: “It is just as important for you to hear yourself speak your stories as it is for others to hear you speak them.”

The students followed along in their own copies, heads bowed and necks looking vulnerable and strong at the same time. Their meaning proved that books, like the spiders described in “There There,” contain “miles of stories, miles of potential home and trap.” On this inconspicuous gray Thursday, Oranje’s work offered both.

After the 13-minute lecture, the questions came, fast and furious, with refreshing bluntness: “What even inspired you to write these two books?” and “Did Octavio die?” and perhaps most pressing: “Why did ‘There There’ end like that?” Not since ‘The Sopranos’ has an ambiguous ending caused more consternation.

“We were like whaaaat?” said one student, keeping the last word in a high pitch.

“It was a tragic story,” said Oranje. “Some people hate it, and I’m sorry.”

He admitted that he had not been a reader in high school: “No one gave me a book and said, this book is for you. There was also a lot going on at home.” He talked about how he staves off writer’s block (by changing his point of view), how he reads his drafts out loud to hear what they sound like. Orange shared his Cheyenne name – Birds Singing in the Morning – and introduced a childhood friend who travels with him on tour.

Despite all this, Ouimet stood quietly at the side of the room. He cast a soft, stinking glance at a group of talkative girls. He used a long wooden pole to open a window. Usually he beamed like a proud parent at a wedding where everyone was dancing.

The truth is that ‘There There’ didn’t just enchant his students: it also had a profound effect on Ouimet himself. When he started teaching the book, he had just retired from coaching football and softball after 22 years.

“I was afraid: If I don’t get coaching, will I still be an effective teacher? ‘There there’ was a renaissance of sorts. “I don’t want to get too sugary,” he said, “but it saved my career somehow.”

Finally the bell sounded. The students stepped back from their desks and lined up to have their books signed by Orange, who took a moment to chat with everyone.

Over the din, Ouimet shouted to anyone still listening, “If you love a book, talk about it!” If you like a story, let other people know about it!”

Tommy Orange has joined a salon of classes in the Bronx and a group of secondary students discussing his novel Ni aquí ni allí.

A Chico that uses a fixture is of great importance. “All our personalities already have some form of deconexy, including trauma, from Michael Almanzar, at the age of 19. “This is the world in life. It’s rodea. It’s not like you’re going into a lugar muy lejano. Es literal u vecino de al lado”.

The class comes as a round of students, as an anticipatory proof of poems on the Lower East Side and not a class of Inglés at the Millennium Art Academy, near Lafayette and Pugsley.

Orange loves it with great gratitude and modest father: the semicircle of serious and dedicated adolescents; the announce table is decorated with a palette that is written on Ni aquí ni allí (“esperanza”, “esfuerzo”, “duelo”, “descubrimiento”); The copying of manoseads is done with the cubes at different levels of disintegration.

If we ever did a study that is a sudadera in English, “Soy loses many more locomotives of the previous years” compare the libro with The Carretera, by Cormac McCarthy. Because three students are another person who identifies with the person of Orange, who struggles with his mental problems, he is placed at the limit of the lagrimas.

“It is true that I do the lesson at the bottom of my life,” says Orange, “the thrill of no solo creation.”

It is not often that an author deals with a study lesson, menos and adolescents, that naive characters live in their imagination as living human beings. Yes, it is unusual for the students to be an author of a world of refuge fiction stories. Most visits are done as is Ni aquí ni allí In 2018, the Millennium Art Academy published one of Orange’s key principles, “the connection was more intense when he experimented”.

The catalyst was the visit to Rick Ouimet, an English professor with caballo-cola, who worked in this building with fortaleza aspects 25 years ago. Ouimet is a tipo of the professor who has gathered the alumni, who want to contribute to their literary vocabulary – sinécdoque, bildungsromanquiasmo—or por su maltrecho telefono plegable.

Supo de Ni aquí ni allí Thank you very much for a colleague he will recommend during the pandemic. “Because of the first time there was a libro with the new chicos on a connection,” you say.

The story of 12 indigenous communities in the previous period of a trip in a stadium of Oakland, California, the tragedy began. “Orange is one of many levadizo players bringing attention to the world’s arcane history,” described a critical look from The New York Times by Dwight Garner, who heard the message. The novel is one of the Times’ ten best books of 2018 and the final of the Premio Pulitzer. When Orange’s editors publish, more than a million copies are sold.

The result of the Ouimet result is approximately: “The students’ enthusiasm is not as great as it is for the language of English. This is the raro hallazgo, the regalo de regalos”.

Algunas estadísticas relevantes: the auxiliary indices a Millennium art están por debajo del promedio de la ciudad. The 87 of the old alumni who follow the family of the bajos will receive a notification from the promedio of the city.

In many years of transcurridos in the field of the novella of Orange has been explored one of the pillars of the plan of the Millennium Art studios, the research on the literature of the new year has become more double. Over time, 21 of the 26 alumni have received university student loans, increasing their real estate and global education promotions. La mayoría de ellos, dijo Ouimet, sobre described Ni aquí ni allí.

When they are shown by three former students decorating with art that is their personal favorite in their era, Ni aquí ni allí, all answers sin dudar. There are times when Tony, Jacquie and Opal are a character that might end up in the local supermarket.

Briana Reyes, 17 years old, said: “Have a lot of contact with our personalities, now that we are comfortable with problems of alcoholism and drogadicción”.

Once I was in Orange, who lived in Oakland, Nueva York’s promotion for his second novel, Walking stars. Empezo an idea. Ouimet nunca before inviting an author of a certain class; These visits could result in both Shakespeare and Zora Neale Hurston becoming unavailable.

You can read a message over a period of more than a week, and on Saturday, March 4, after being up in the middle of the night, you heard Penguin Random House’s conference call department.

“The electronic correo creates a gross profit, but I can’t do anything about it,” he said. “Era mi ensayo universitario de la mediana edad”.

Most of the 827 palabras are described with most of the time that our alumni, personal people, texture and details, infiltrate the company in important professional correspondence.

Ouimet describes: “A new class of English-speaking duos, in a different part of the Bronx, in a city neighborhood with sometimes recurring animations, not much different in Fruitval, there is now another rock. It’s more of a rocky outcrop. There is nuestro MF Doom, nuestro Eminem, nuestro Earl Sweatshirt, nuestro Tribe Called Red, nuestro Beethoven, nuestro Bobby Big Medicine, nuestro electronic equipment for Manny, now there is a double ambiguity in the lado crowd, now the camera is on a dark way of looking”.

Orange, añadió, era un héroe para estos chicos: “Has cambiado vidas”. When Tahqari Koonce, at the age of 17, founded a paralelo between the Coliseo de Oakland and the Romano Coliseo; and Natalia Melendez, at age 17, observed a blank arm that embodied the uprising of the indigenous tribe. And he is Dalvyn Urena, the 18, who now says he has led a full libro Ni aquí ni allí”, and you can compare it with a Shakesperiano.

Conclusion with: “Bueno, valía la pena intentarlo. Thank you for learning this time, it is always so that we can do this. With appreciation (and admiration), Rick Ouimet”.

“Me arriesgué”, dijo Ouimet. Yes, why not? “My students have started finding a new libro. Hay lamentos, en abren la page. Where is the animal a libro? El amor era palpable”.

At the end of the horas, the mensaje is placed in Orange, which is a medium time for 24 ciudades with different entrepreneurs and events. Pidió by Jordan Rodman, director of Knopf’s publicity, who could possibly include the Ouimet class in the agenda. No tendría que pagar nada. Knopf has 30 examples of this Ni aquí ni allí y 30 examples of Walking stars.

And a great escuela and bulliciosa, llena de suelas chirriantes, walkie talkies And while you’re young, moments of silence can be hard to come by. If Orange has a new novel, it might be a bit crowded.

“It is important to see the cosas at a higher level, the sonar must be heard and the pronunciation is removed from the palabras,” said Orange.

And continued: “It is important that you question your history when it comes to old conversations.”

The alumni are confronted with the wonders of their own propios, with the cabeza agachada and the cuello die lucia al mismo tiempo vulnerable en fuerte. If you do this, it will be described as its description Ni aquí ni allí, the libros contain “kilometers of history, kilometers of potential hogares and trampas”. In these young years, Orange’s place is one of the best offers.

During the 13-minute lecture of the preguntas, fast and furious formulas with refrescante franqueza: “¿En qué se inspiró para escribir estos dos libros?”, “¿Octavio murió?”, y, quizá la más apremiante, “¿Por wat Ni aquí ni allí acabo así?”. Desde Loose SopranoThere is an ambiguity that cannot cause consternation.

“Dijimos ¿queeeee?”, commented a researcher, who knows the last word on another note.

“Era una historia trágica”, dijo Orange. “Hay gente que la odia, y lo siento”.

Admit that there is no lecturer in secondary school: “Nadie me dio un libro y me dijo: este libro es para ti. Además, pasaban muchas cosas en mi casa”. It is possible to leave the writing pad (the display points) and use your boradores more and more to continue working. Orange is his favorite cheyenne – Pájaros cantando por la mañana – and presents a childhood friend who talks viaja to the gira.

You can pause for a while at a lado del aula todo the time. Lanzó a soft mirada asesina a puñado de chicas parlanchinas. Use a large piece of bark to create a vent. So it’s a matter of an organ father and a boda in the baila world.

The verdad is que Ni aquí ni allí not only for its alumni: you have a profound effect on the propio Ouimet. While he was a libro player, he started playing football and softbol from the age of 22.

“My question: is there no soy entrepreneur, is this an effective professor? Ni aquí ni allí look at a special renaissance. No quiero ponerme demasiado cursi”, dijo, “pero en cierto modo salvó mi carrera”.

The last sound is the timbre. The students are learning and working to keep Orange sticking to their libros. It’s a moment to chat with one of the people.

On hearing the estruendo, Ouimet gritós a dos los que seguían escuchando: “If you experience a libro, you have the opportunity. If you experience a history, “hagan que otros lo sepan!”.

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A jury found James Crumbley guilty of involuntary manslaughter late Thursday after about 11 hours of deliberation, holding him partly responsible for failing to prevent his son from carrying out Michigan’s deadliest school shooting.

Mr. Crumbley’s wife, Jennifer Crumbley, was convicted of identical charges last month in the same courtroom in Pontiac, Michigan, after a jury deliberated for about the same amount of time. The trials became a lightning rod for issues of parental responsibility at a time of high-profile gun violence by minors.

Each defendant’s parenting skills were closely monitored, as was the shooter’s access to a gun his father had purchased. Now two separate juries have taken the unusual step of holding a parent criminally responsible for a child’s heinous crimes.

Oakland County prosecutors charged the Crumbleys three days after the Nov. 30, 2021, shooting at Oxford High School, where their son, Ethan, who was 15 at the time, killed 17-year-old Madisyn Baldwin; Tate Myre, 16; Justin Shilling, 17; and Hana St. Juliana, 14, and injured seven others.

“James Crumbley had the easiest and most striking opportunities to prevent the deaths of these four students,” Oakland County Prosecutor Karen McDonald said in his closing argument Wednesday. “And he did nothing.”

Mariell Lehman, Mr Crumbley’s lawyer, urged the jury to take into account how much Mr Crumbley could not have known until it was too late. “You have heard no testimony, and you have seen no evidence, that James had any knowledge that his son was a danger to anyone,” she said.

Mr Crumbley has been in prison since December 2021. He and his wife requested separate trials and unlike them, Mr. Crumbley chose not to testify in his own defense. Both will be convicted later and face up to 15 years in prison.

Their prosecution was seen as part of a national effort to hold some parents responsible for enabling deadly violence by their children. In recent months, parents in other states have pleaded guilty to charges of reckless endangerment or neglect after their children injured or killed others with weapons.

The witness lists in the two Crumbley trials were similar, but there were a few key differences in the evidence presented. During Ms. Crumbley’s trial, lawyers delved into her communications with her son, including months of text messages, as prosecutors tried to portray her as a distant and neglectful mother.

But in Mr. Crumbley’s case, testimony focused less on his parenting and more on the Sig Sauer pistol that prosecutors say he bought his son as an early Christmas present four days before the shooting.

Law enforcement officers who searched the Crumbleys’ home shortly after the attack testified this week that they found the gun storage case open on the parents’ bed, along with an empty box of ammunition. They said there was no indication the case had been closed.

In her closing argument Wednesday, Ms. Lehman said that Mr. Crumbley did not know before the shooting whether his son was aware of the gun’s hiding place. During her rebuttal, Ms. McDonald put on a pair of gloves, picked up the murder weapon and a cable lock and demonstrated for the jury that the gun could be locked in seconds.

Prosecutors also walked the jury through several entries in the shooter’s diary, including one that appeared to have been written the day before the shooting. “I have access to the weapon and ammunition,” the entry said. “I am now fully committed to this.”

It was not clear whether either of the shooter’s parents had seen the journal entries before the shooting. But they were called to school on the morning of November 30 after a teacher saw their son making violent drawings. Those drawings included an object resembling the gun Mr Crumbley had bought, and phrases such as ‘help me’ and ‘blood everywhere’.

Neither the Crumbleys nor school officials searched the teen’s backpack, which contained the gun.

Mr Crumbley, dressed in a gray suit and blue tie, appeared somber and shook his head slightly on Thursday evening as the jury’s four guilty verdicts – one for each charge of involuntary manslaughter – were announced. Sheriff’s Department officers then handcuffed him and led him out of the courtroom.

Prosecutors called 15 witnesses in Mr. Crumbley’s trial, including people who saw the shooting and law enforcement officers who investigated it. The defense called only one witness: Karen Crumbley, the defendant’s sister. She said she had never seen a reason to be overly concerned about her cousin until the shooting.

According to his lawyer, neither did Mr. Crumbley.

“He didn’t know,” Ms. Lehman told the jury. “He didn’t know what was going on with his son. He didn’t know what his son was planning to do.”

Ethan Crumbley pleaded guilty to 24 charges stemming from the shooting, including the first-degree murder of his four classmates. He was sentenced last year to life in prison without the possibility of parole and has not testified in any of the trials against his parents.

There are certain motifs in Jonathan Kozol’s half-century of writing about America’s failure to adequately educate poor black and Hispanic children, which began with “Death at an Early Age,” a blistering account of his year teaching at Boston Public Schools.

Dilapidated school buildings with dirty bathrooms and leaky ceilings. Students dumbfounded by scripted curricula and endless exam preparation. Gloomy city neighborhoods with neglected parks, crumbling apartments and harried, underpaid teachers. The desperation is punctuated by bright and lively children, who bluntly notice the obvious unfairness that adults have taught themselves to overlook.

‘Death at an Early Age’, published in 1967, made him the kind of widely read public intellectual that is hardly present anymore.

Now, at 87, he has published An End to Inequality, his fifteenth book – and his last, he says. It is an unapologetic cri de coeur about the shortcomings of the schools that serve poor black and Hispanic children, and thus about the nation’s moral inability to end the inequality he has documented for decades.

Critics have long said that Mr. Kozol has focused too much on everything that is wrong with American public education, and not enough on models for success. They point to the charter schools, charismatic principals and early reading programs that are creating change, even in some deeply segregated neighborhoods.

But Mr. Kozol characterizes these as marginal reforms designed to fit into a system that is inherently unequal. And in his long career, he has seen decades of national reform efforts — “A Nation at Risk,” “No Child Left Behind, Race to the Top, Every Student Succeeds” — come and go, while some problems remain largely the same.

Educational opportunities are still largely determined by parents’ ability to pay for housing in desired zip codes. Some aging school buildings are still laced with lead. Black and Latino students are still disproportionately subjected to harsh forms of discipline: quiet hallways, insulation cabinets, even physical disability.

“I will not tolerate forced optimism at this time,” Mr. Kozol said in an interview. “When we talk about Black and Latino children in our public schools, I think it’s unrealistic to be optimistic.”

He spoke from an armchair in the living room of his canary-yellow colonial home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he lives alone, aided by several young assistants. He was briefly married and divorced in the 1970s, had no children and devoted years to compelling reporting. He spent his days in schools and homeless shelters, writing by hand late into the evening — still his favorite time to work, he said, sipping an iced coffee at dusk.

The room was full of teddy bears – he started collecting them when he became too weak to care for dogs – and old issues of left-wing magazines like The Nation and The Progressive. A nearby coffee table was covered with memorabilia intended for a possible acquisition of Mr. Kozol’s papers by the New York Public Library.

They include an autographed photo of Langston Hughes, which the poet sent in 1965, after Mr. Kozol, then 28, was fired for teaching a class of mostly black fourth-graders Mr. Hughes’ poem.Ballad of the Landlord‘—then considered a subversive work by Boston administrators.

In “An End to Inequality,” Mr. Kozol uses bold language to make his point.

He rejects the idea, popular in some education circles, that focusing on the problems of racially segregated public schools is tantamount to encouraging a kind of deficit thinking in which black, Latino and Native American children are regarded more for what they lack than for what they lack. for what makes them resilient.

“It is a delicate dilemma,” writes Mr Kozol. “If we cannot speak of victims, if the word is in disgrace, what other language can be used to speak of children who face cognitive oppression in almost every aspect of education?”

He continues: “If there are no victims, no crime has been committed. If no crime has been committed, there can be no reason to demand reparation for what these children suffer from sequestration in their schools. Avoiding an unfavorable word cannot erase reality.”

The solution, he argues, is still the yellow school bus, which transports poor children to opportunities in more affluent neighborhoods and cities, where they can learn alongside upper-middle-class peers and enjoy some of the benefits their parents provide for have secured for them: rich arts programs, foreign language classes, science labs, vibrant libraries.

The system we have now is nothing less than ‘apartheid’, writes Mr Kozol. The continued existence of lead paint and pipes in poor children’s schools is a “cerebral genocide,” he adds, and budget cuts are evidence of a “war on public schools.”

Mr. Kozol, who grew up the son of a doctor and a social worker in the affluent Boston suburb of Newton, credits Archibald MacLeish, the modernist poet who taught him at Harvard, with helping him develop his writing style.

“He encouraged me to use strong words,” he recalls. ‘There is a tendency to assume that the extremes of speech are always wrong, and that truth, by its own preference, likes to live in the middle. It doesn’t always live in the middle.”

After college and a stint as a failed novelist in Paris, Mr. Kozol had planned to pursue a Ph.D. in the literature.

His life changed in 1964, when civil rights activists James Chaney, Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman were murdered in Mississippi.

“What am I doing here,” he remembered thinking, “hanging out in Cambridge and talking about the metaphysical poetry of John Donne?”

Soon after, he taught in Roxbury, a predominantly black neighborhood in Boston, and organized with parents who wanted to enroll their children in higher-quality schools, first in Boston and eventually in the suburbs.

Their activism helped create a voluntary busing program called METCOwhich still exists and transports 3,000 students annually from Boston to suburban schools. Research shows that students who are admitted to the program achieve higher test scores and have better academic and career outcomes than students who apply to METCO but do not win a spot in the randomized lottery.

The big idea in Mr. Kozol’s new book is a massive federal and state investment — “reparations” — to expand voluntary bus programs like METCO. Another model is voluntary roundtrip transit, which uses thematic magnet schools to attract middle-class students. to poorer neighborhoods, freeing up seats in middle-class schools for low-income children.

While Mr. Kozol is anything but dry, his understanding of education research has always been careful and rigorous, says Gary Orfield, co-director of The Civil Rights Project at the University of California, Los Angeles, an institute that provides data on the survival of the segregation of schools by race and class.

Dr. Orfield credited Mr. Kozol with not being distracted by the kind of technocratic school reforms often favored by politicians, such as increasing high-stakes testing.

“He’s just ruthless,” said Dr. Orfield. “He is angry and offended by the reality that he continues to see. And no one cares.”

Mr. Kozol is far from the only voice asking the nation to refocus on school segregation and inequality between rich and poor districts. Multiple new organizations in Washington are committed to these issues and have attracted influential supporters.

But Mr. Kozol is baffled that mainstream Democrats rarely support major investments in school desegregation. And he said he is not interested in other forms of school choice, such as charters or vouchers, which also help low-income students escape underperforming schools. Like many traditional liberals, he views these options as financial leeches for the public school system and is skeptical of their support from Republicans and conservatives.

He started writing An End to Inequality before the Covid-19 pandemic, and the book barely mentions how the crisis upended education politics as schools in the country’s most liberal cities were closed for the longest , while low-income students of color ranked even lower. further behind.

Nor does he address the fact that in the wake of the pandemic, parents — including some of those he cares most about — have become more probably to support school choice.

This omission irritates some education activists, even those who admire Mr. Kozol.

“You can’t pay reparations to the system that has harmed people,” said Derrell Bradford, president of 50CAN, a group that supports the expansion of charter schools and vouchers. “You have to give it to the people the system has harmed.”

But Mr. Kozol sticks to the traditional idea of ​​public education: one system for all. “A democratic nation needs a truly democratic, well-funded public school system,” he said.

There was a framed picture on a table next to his armchair drawing, now faded, of a sun peeking over the horizon. The artist, Pineapple, was a tenacious girl who appears in several of his books, describing the trials of growing up in the South Bronx in the wake of the crack and AIDS epidemics.

“I asked her, ‘Does the sun rise or set?” Mr. Kozol recalled. “And she looked at me and said, ‘You decide.’”

There were only days left to process a batch of applications for federal financial aid when Department of Education officials made a fateful discovery: 70,000 emails from students across the country, containing large amounts of vital data.

They sat untouched in an inbox.

That discovery last week set off a panicked, three-day scramble by more than 200 department employees, including Richard Cordray, the nation’s top student aid official, to read through each of the emails one by one and to extract crucial identifying information needed for the investigation. financial help. The future of the students depended on it.

“It needs to unravel,” Mr. Cordray told his staffers on Thursday, according to recordings of two consecutive meetings obtained by The New York Times. “So, you know, I’m getting pretty impatient.”

An exasperated employee replied, “We worked all night – literally – all night.”

It was another setback in the botched rollout of a new version of the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, known as FAFSA, that millions of families and thousands of schools rely on to determine how students will pay for college. Three years ago, Congress directed the Department of Education to revamp the new form to make it simpler and more accessible. It has been anything but.

For nearly six months, students and schools had to navigate a bureaucratic mess caused by serious delays in launching the website and processing crucial information. A series of department blunders — from a haphazard rollout to technical glitches — have left students and schools in limbo and thrown into disarray the most critical phase of the college admissions season.

‘Hanging on by their fingernails’

In a normal year, students would be sorting through their financial aid offers by now, giving them plenty of time to prepare for the traditional May 1 decision day, when many schools expect commitments.

But this is not a normal year.

Due to the delays in the FAFSA rollout, schools do not have the information they need from the government to put together financial aid offers. Students have had to postpone decisions about where to go to college because they have no idea how much help they will receive.

Many schools are shifting their enrollment deadlines to give students more time to get their finances in order, throwing college budgets and waiting lists into chaos.

The Ministry of Education has pledged to meet Friday’s self-imposed deadline to send students’ financial information to schools. A Biden administration official, who requested anonymity to discuss details of the process, said the department had begun sending out “small batches” of data this weekend.

But the task ahead is monumental. The department is working with 5.7 million applications to date, but it is expected that more than 10 million additional applications will be received as students work their way through the process. still not functioning without delays.

“Financial aid offices across the country are hanging on by their fingernails right now,” said Justin Draeger, the CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators.

A broken system

The goal of the updated FAFSA system was to simplify the notoriously baffling form by reducing it from more than 100 questions under 40 years of age and more accessible to lower-income students.

But it wasn’t ready to roll out in October, when the FAFSA form usually becomes available for students to provide their family’s financial information to the government.

At the end of December, when the system was finally launched, the problems were immediately apparent.

Due to technical glitches, many students were unable to access the form on the website. Students reported being repeatedly kicked out or locked out, or hanging up after waiting 30 minutes to three hours for someone to answer the department’s helpline.

The botched rollout has upended a crucial function of the federal student aid process.

The government needs the FAFSA information to calculate how much federal aid students should receive. The schools, in turn, need that number to make their own calculations about how much a student should expect to pay at that specific college or university, after adding up tuition and any additional scholarships.

For many students, the FAFSA estimate, sometimes received before they even hear from one of the schools they applied to, is the first sign of hope that college is within reach.

Students in limbo

Andrea, a senior at KIPP Denver Collegiate High School in Colorado, will be the first person in her family to attend college. She has her sights set on Duke University.

But first she has to navigate the FAFSA.

“It’s painful,” said Andrea, 17, who asked to be identified by her first name to protect her parents, who immigrated to the United States from Mexico and are undocumented. “It goes deeper than a form. It is our future.”

Her case encountered perhaps the most pernicious flaw in the rollout: The new form froze applicants who couldn’t provide a Social Security number for themselves or their parent or guardian, something that wasn’t a problem with the old form.

To get students with missing social security information approved, the Ministry of Education asked applicants like Andrea to submit photos of a driver’s license, ID card or other documents that would verify their identity by email. As the department prepared to announce last week that the Social Security number issue had been resolved, officials realized the inbox and its 70,000 emails had gone untouched.

That prompted Mr. Cordray to put together emergency teams of volunteers who had to work overtime to clear the backlog.

The students, he said, trusted it.

“These are a lot of Dreamers, new immigrants and the kind of people who, if they can just lend a hand in the higher education process, can find their way to this country,” Mr. Cordray said. “We want them to be able to do that.”

Although the previous FAFSA form was long and complex, seniors at Andrea’s school were able to complete their forms without many incidents in recent years. KIPP Colorado, part of a network of public charter schools with some of the highest acceptance rates for low-income students in the country, hosts an annual FAFSA night, where families gather to fill out the form together.

This year, only about 20 percent of students at FAFSA night were able to complete the form — a huge change from previous years, school officials said.

Karen Chavez, assistant director of college and careers at KIPP Colorado, said she usually tried to reassure students that college was within reach.

But she is having difficulty with that message this year.

“It’s hard for us as counselors to have to pay attention to what I say or how I say things,” she said, “because I want to guard their hearts and manage their expectations.”

Who is to blame?

The Government Accountability Office has started one research in the rollout of the FAFSA at the request of Republicans, who say it took a back seat to other priorities, such as President Biden’s student debt forgiveness programs.

Several senior White House and Department of Education officials have cited unreasonably short timelines, contractors who missed deadlines and insufficient funding. The officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the issues openly, acknowledged that other key orders, such as restarting federal loan repayments and reopening schools after the coronavirus pandemic, were draining vital resources.

“It’s not like anyone here didn’t realize how important this project is or how big this project is,” said James Kvaal, deputy secretary of the Department of Education. “And it has been a top priority for us at the very highest levels of the department for a year and a half.”

There were obvious misses, such as a lack of robust user testing needed to catch dozens of major technical issues. And the Department of Education only realized in November that it had failed to adjust the critical income formula, which would have denied more than $1 billion in aid to students.

Even as the department tried to express optimism about progress, officials privately harbored doubts.

On February 13, Miguel A. Cardona, the education secretary, told reporters that once the technical issues were resolved, FAFSA would be a “15-minute process” and a “net win” for students and schools.

A week later, at a staff meeting, Mr. Cordray had a different assessment: “It’s really bad,” he said, according to people who heard the comments. “It could get worse.”

In response to a request for comment on this article, Mr. Cordray said the Department of Education’s focus was on providing an updated and streamlined FAFSA.

“Our team is not focused on pointing fingers,” he said, “but on getting more federal student aid to deserving students and families.”

Commitment

There is growing concern that FAFSA issues will disproportionately impact traditionally underserved communities, particularly Black, Latino, first-generation, and low-income students.

For many of them, the most important factor in choosing a university is how to pay for it.

Student advocates fear that many of them will simply give up, skip college or rely on expensive loans to pay for college.

“The equity stakes are enormous,” said Kim Cook, CEO of the National College Attainment Network. “The later those letters come, the more the conversation shifts from where to go or where to go.”

This month, the Ministry of Education began deploying personnel across the country to conduct a so-called… concierge service, supported with $50 million from the department’s budget to provide technical support to colleges struggling with the delays.

But as of last week, officials had met in person with only 20 of the 180 schools that had requested additional support, a senior department official said.

Lodriguez Murray, the senior vice president for public policy and government affairs at the United Negro College Fund, said the impact of the FAFSA delays could be similar to the devastation historically black colleges and universities experienced in 2011, when the government made it more difficult. for parents to obtain loans to help pay for their children’s education. Enrollment at HBCUs dropped by 40,000 in one year when aid flow was cut off.

“It is a crisis that seems unnecessary,” Mr. Murray said of the fallout from the FAFSA, “and one that we hope can still be averted.”