Category: News

Being First and the Honors Center are collaborating to offer a potential new scholarship, exclusively for honors students who are the first in their families to attend a four-year college.

The director of the IPFW Honors Center, Farah Combs, announced the possibility for the new scholarship at her talk “Are You Honors Program Material?” on Sept 21 in Walb Student Union.

Combs said the application for the first-generation scholarship will hopefully be available soon, following more discussions with HPC members to finalize the decision. Once students are accepted into the honors program, they must complete three credits in an honors or H-option course to apply for scholarships, which can reach $1,000, Combs said.

Aside from scholarship opportunities, Combs said benefits to joining the honors program include early registration for freshmen and sophomores, access to the Honors Center, and making students more marketable after graduation.

Despite these benefits, Julie Creek, director of the Office of Diversity and Multicultural Affairs, said Being First events about the Honors Center have significantly lower attendance than their other workshops. She said the first time they did the workshop over a year ago, nobody showed up.

“I think a lot of what we are dealing with is that whole impostor syndrome thing that first-gen students frequently deal with,” Creek said. “They can’t conceive of themselves as possibly being honors students, so, you know, why would I bother to go to something that doesn’t apply to me?”

Combs said she thought the talk went well but wished more students came. She said the Honors Center definitely needs to reach out to first-generation students more to make them aware of what the university can offer them.

Many first-generation students who attended the event said they would have considered joining the honors program if they had known more about it sooner. Thaigo Amaral, a junior mechanical engineering major from Piracicaba, Brazil, was one of them.

“If I knew all this information from the beginning I could have considered joining, but now I’m a junior so it’s too late probably,” Amaral said.

Creek said Being First will have to figure out better ways to get people to show up to these workshops. She said she considered having outdoor programs where people walking by can just join in.

“I think the feeling sometimes is that if I walk in that door they’ve got my soul and we don’t,” Creek said. “I mean, we don’t want anyone’s soul. We just want to help them get through school and have the absolute best experience possible. But they ultimately have to be the ones that step up and say, ‘Yes, I want to do this.’”

Being First will hold more workshops throughout the semester on topics such as the library, Facebook, studying abroad and impostor syndrome. Dates for these events can be found on the IPFW website.

 

The Color Stomp was to take place on Tuesday, but has been postponed to a later, unknown date.

IPFW Intramural Sports and Student Life will host the Color Stomp sometime this semester, taking place near the IPFW baseball and softball fields.

It costs participants five dollars to run in the event. Runners will also receive a free t-shirt at check-in, complimentary dinner, and a color stomp towel. All the money from the run goes to Erin’s House for Grieving Children in Fort Wayne.

The run’s route will take place throughout campus with multiple “color stations”, where volunteers will blast the runners with a color-dye as they run through.

Andrew Kreager senator for IPSGA, who has sponsored the event in the past, said with budget cuts affecting their sponsorship of the event, they could not co-fund it this year.

“Student Life didn’t necessarily need us to help fund it this year,” Kreager said. “I know there was a conversation between Student Life and Student Government asking if they really needed our funding this year, and they said they had leftovers from years past that they could fund it with.”

Kreager said IPSGA will still be showing their support because it is a special event with proceeds going to a good cause.

Andrew Meyers, graduate assistant for Intramural Sports, said their biggest goal is to increase participant numbers.

Meyers said that with participant numbers going down in the past couple years, they plan on increasing the numbers through promotions on social media prior to the run.

According to Meyers, last year’s color stomp had approximately 50 participants. Meyers said if they see any increase at all, they will be satisfied. But, to put on the event, they desperately need people’s help.

“So right now, we really need volunteers,” Meyers said. “We’ve only had a few people contact us, and we need about thirty to forty people to help.”

Meyers said it’s important for volunteers and participants to come out because the run is a great way to get students to come together and interact in a positive way.

“I think that’s the biggest draw for me to help make it a good event,” Meyers said. “It gets the university some exposure and it just helps students have a better experience here at IPFW.”

The Dean of Helmke Library will introduce to Purdue University’s provost a three-year plan-of-action of how IPFWs library will stand alone with its own catalog, policies and contract amid separating from Indiana University.

Helmke’s Dean Alexis Macklin said the split creates an opportunity for Purdue to construct a library system that is more personal for each campus’ needs, while also focusing on sharing among their individual library collections.

“We’re putting our efforts on other ways we could be working together to provide more resources, more efficiently,” Macklin said.

The meeting takes place on Oct. 17 in Macklin’s office, who is also head to the Purdue System Library Working Group. It comprises representatives from the Office of the Treasurer, the provost’s office, and from each Purdue campus: West Lafayette, Northwest, and soon to be Fort Wayne.

Macklin said the meeting will deliver a proposal of library systems and vendor contracts, how the campuses will share collections, and suggest working groups that look to improve the library system throughout the future.

According to the provost’s website, the new system will be running by July 1, 2018, which is also when IPFW will officially be Purdue Fort Wayne.

Macklin said IPFW could not sign the same contract as the West Lafayette and Northwest campuses because it is not solely affiliated with Purdue yet. Therefore, IPFW had to produce their own strategy for which library management system to commit to.

Also, Macklin said with West Lafayette’s interim library administration, it causes some difficulties because they may not want to make huge, system-wide decisions without a permanent team on board.

Macklin said these challenges give IPFW a chance to show how it can be independent so no student or faculty member on campus will feel pain from actions on the administration’s part

Overall, Macklin said the only differences in the library’s system will be how its pages look because it will not be from IUs vendors, but resources will remain the same.

“I’m confident that it’s going to be less hairy than what people were afraid it was going to be,” Macklin said.

“Let us learn” is the message IPFW students and faculty want the administration to consider before suspending liberal arts programs, but that message has resulted in harassment from other students and the community.

Protests, calls for resignations, and sexual harassment have been products of the USAP report in October, leading to backlash between students, administration, and the community.

The three major departments being slated for suspension at the start of the 2017 calendar year are women’s studies, philosophy, and geology.

Not In Our Future, student and faculty-run organization started in May against Purdue and IPFW’s decision to cut liberal arts programs being suspended Jan. 1^st of next year.

The group held protests at the obelisk between Kettler Hall, Neff, and the engineering building on Oct. 26 and 27 in cold and cloudy conditions.

Janet Badia is a professor and director of the women’s studies program at IPFW, and is one of the many school professors who were at the protests last month in support of the students.

“I am here to help them, support them, make sure their voices get heard,” Badia said, “amplify their voices, second what they have to say, and help them make the arguments they want to make.”

Cody Fuelling, an IPFW student associated with Not In Our Future, said women’s studies students and professors have been sexually harassed.

“There is a study lounge (associated with women’s studies), and Dr. Badia has a door, and these doors have been covered in sharpie of male genitalia,” Fuelling said, “and this has happened to women’s studies before, and it’s continuing now.”

At one point, there were Twitter accounts made to troll Not In Our Future, but Fuelling said many of them have since been deleted.

The group is comprised with others on campus who feel that the cuts could lead to bigger problems.

“It doesn’t affect me directly,” Jalyn Ely, an IPFW communications major said, “I’m afraid of how it’s going to affect the community in the future.”

Not In Our Future’s Facebook page, which as of yesterday has 1,504 page likes, describes itself as, “IPFW students, alumni, and Fort Wayne community members resisting Purdue leadership and complicit members of IPFW administration as they attempt to deprive Northeast Indiana of access to affordable, comprehensive education.”

As a result of the backlash surrounding the USAP report, many at IPFW have shifted blame toward the university’s chancellor, Vicky Carwein, resulting in an official document, “A Faculty Notice of No Confidence in Chancellor Carwein.”

In the document, the faculty states that Carwein has failed the campus as followed: failure to represent the interests of the campus, lack of commitment to the stated mission of IPFW without the ability to articulate a clear vision or rationale or changing the mission, mismanagement of USAP and lack of commitment to operationalizing the 2014-2020 Strategic Plan, and damage to the campus morale by creating a culture of fear.

The full document can be read here: statement-of-no-confidence.

These claims have led people in the community to criticize the protests in the comment sections on Facebook posts related to the issue. Many believe the protestors are just being immature and do not understand these cuts are happening for a good reason.

“Get over it,” one Facebook user said, “change your major to something that has meaning in the REAL world.”

In an email sent to students from Chancellor Carwein on Nov. 15, she made it clear that harassment has no place at IPFW.

“It’s all being magnified, because women’s studies is being slated for elimination,” Fuelling said,” women’s studies says, ‘Hey don’t eliminate us.’ And then people who want to see women’s studies go away now have this opportunity to voice that it should be eliminated.”

A common concern for students and alumni is that the changes now will lead to bigger ones down the road, and the IPFW brand will be terminated. Leaving the 52-year history of the school in limbo.

Alexander Sanderson, an IPSGA officer, says that kind of thinking is wrong, because “IPFW will never die.”

Not in Our Future plans to hold more events by the end of the school year as the women’s studies, philosophy, and geology are suspended.

The women’s studies department is being cut, but all women are being affected.

IPFW is losing a number of academic programs and departments at the end of this school year as a result of the the University Strategic Alignment Process (USAP).

The USAP recommendations propose cuts of the philosophy, women’s studies, and geology programs, along with as two dozen other majors within larger departments.

“They called it a recommendation, but as soon as they made the recommendation, they suspended admissions to our program. So you can no longer sign up for a philosophy major here,” says Charlene Elsby, assistant philosophy professor.

Elsby is one of nine female professors whose job is in danger come Jan. 1, when the preliminary cuts take place, eliminating three departments entirely. She is not directly involved with women’s studies, but these cuts affect the livelihood of herself and others.

“My dad says I can move back in with him,” Elsby says with a nervous laugh.

Laura Laudeman, a junior theatre major, is also beginning to feel the ripple within her department, one not even on the long list of cuts.

“We’ve even decided that for this upcoming season, instead of focusing on shows, selecting shows that they thought would be beneficial to students,” Laudeman says, “one of the major factors in choosing the shows was, ‘Will they make money?’”

Money seems to be a driving factor in all of the decisions that will force change on students.

In 2015, 7,106 women were enrolled at IPFW, compared to 5,703 men. Women have been the majority of students on campus since before 1985, according to the annual IPFW Statistical profile.

Janet Badia, professor and director of the women’s studies program, realizes that it’s not just her colleagues or students that are feeling the changes.

“The students who are impacted in the other majors,” Biday says, “I see them around, they go to our events, I go to their events.”

One thing is agreed upon by many: the community will change because of USAP.

Jalyn Ely, a senior communication major, says this makes her look at the university in a different light.

“There are people who care about this,” Ely says, “There are people who are genuinely affected by this, who are seeing their hopes and their dreams and their career paths destroyed.”

Ely’s family members who were previously considering attending the university have decided not to in the wake of the cuts.

Worse yet, community members feel they are out of the loop regarding the changes affecting them.

Professors like Elsby and Badia, whose jobs are on the line, have known about the changes for almost a year, but students only recently found out details about the USAP recommendation in a campus wide email blast from Chancellor Vicky Carwein.

“They keep talking about, ‘we’ve tried to be really open and communicative about this,’” Laudeman says, “but I feel that there’s been a real lack of transparency.”

Laudeman is not wrong. In fact, a freedom of information on open records request regarding details of the USAP process and recommendations has been denied by university lawyers.

The recommendations have been the central focus of campus for weeks as IPFW approaches the first leg of USAP eliminations.

The university is also undergoing Legislative Services Agency (LSA) recommendations to repurpose the Fort Wayne campus. The process will put more of an emphasis on certain departments and could possibly mean major changes to the curriculum and programs offered.

Reasons given for the LSA changes by administration are budget adjustment and best-serving the purposes of the Fort Wayne community.

Mitch Daniels is the president of Purdue University and a driving force behind the LSA recommendations.

“He has underestimated the value of our campus and all that we do here when he says that the point of a regional campus is to train our students to be good employees,” Elsby says. “That negates their possibilities to become the innovators or the good employers.”

Tensions are rising around campus as the true consequences of the recommendations come to light. Women are beginning to realize the 22 students seeking degrees in women’s studies are not the only people affected.