Social Issues
Educator Jessica Stovall ’14 MA features prominently in Steve James’ 10-part documentary series America to Me, which follows a dozen students through life at suburban Chicago’s Oak Park and River Forest High School. James began filming the project in 2015 as a way to explore how students, teachers and staff are addressing decades-long racial and educational inequities.
Students, from left, Michael Smith ’70, ’72 MA, Steve Colson ’71, Dan Davis ’69, ’78 MA/MS and William Eric Perkins ’70 appear onscreen during the premiere of the Northwestern University Black Alumni Association–commissioned documentary The Takeover: The Revolution of the Black Experience at Northwestern University. The film, which was screened at the NUBAA Summit and Salute to Excellence Gala in May at Chicago’s Swissôtel, examined the May 1968 Bursar’s Office takeover by more than 100 African American students protesting inequitable campus policies and attempting to improve awareness of African American students’ experiences.
The typical Becoming a Man session includes a simple game: One young man tucks a small ball into his palm, while his partner has one minute to do whatever it takes to get it away from him. Often the young men start wrestling, trying to pry open their partner’s hand by force.
In the summer of 1988, Robert Kath ’88 and Paolo Mazzucato ’88 traveled to Moscow to initiate the first cinematic co-production between students in the United States and students in the Soviet Union. Envisioned as an opportunity for cultural exchange, “The Bridge Project” evolved from discussions between Kath, Mazzucato and students at Moscow’s All-Union State Institute of Cinematography.
Four Northwestern professors discuss recent misinformation campaigns and their impact on American democracy.
It’s August 1967. My father is home from a yearlong tour of duty in Vietnam.
Get ready to clutch your pearls! Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications graduate Robin Thede’s late-night show, The Rundown with Robin Thede, with its mix of political commentary, black cultural observations and a body roll or two, is quite possibly the stuff Emmys are made of.
Eli Finkel started out thinking he was writing a requiem for marriage. His book was going to be called The Freighted Marriage, a bleak warning that we are demanding so much from our spouses — that they be everything from our best friends to our romantic ideals to our social networks — that the institution of marriage is buckling under the strain.
In the early morning of May 3, 1968, approximately 100 African American students entered Northwestern’s business office, chained the doors and posted a sign on the revolving door: “Closed for business ’til racism at NU is ended.” Prepared to occupy the building at 619 Clark St. until the University met their demands, the students wanted an African American studies course, a black student union and other measures meant “to counteract the physical, emotional and spiritual strains we have been subjugated to,” as they had written in a petition to University administrators nearly two weeks earlier. Against the backdrop of the civil rights movement, student activism was spreading on college campuses across the country.
Medill alumna Susan Page, the Washington, D.C., bureau chief for USA Today, remembers well the first time she interviewed candidate Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential election. “He said, ‘Susan, I so admire your work,’” Page ’73 recounted in a panel discussion at Medill late last year.
