Member News

Through Northwestern University’s Northwestern Prison Education Program, 16 students from the Stateville Correctional Center were conferred degrees in front of nearly 300 attendees, including friends and family, Northwestern faculty and fellow Northwestern Prison Education Program students last week. Everyone in attendance witnessed these students participate in the age-old ritual of walking across the stage to receive their diplomas, handed out by Northwestern University Provost Kathleen Hagerty. 

The U.S. Department of Education has cut off federal student financial aid to Union Institute & University and will fine it $4.3 million over multiple allegations, including that the private nonprofit college illegally took in more aid than it was entitled. The Ohio institution repeatedly “misused Title IV funds to the detriment of its students, the department and taxpayers,” the U.S. Department of Education wrote in a letter earlier this month. The department is fining the university for multiple violations of federal law.

Max Kenner, founder and executive director of the Bard Prison Initiative at Bard College (NY), writes:  A change taking place right now has the potential to do more good within U.S. prisons than any policy in a generation — good that will extend far beyond the realm of criminal justice. With a 2020 law finally taking full effect, people who are incarcerated can for the first time in decades get Pell Grants, the federal tuition aid for low-income students. The grants are small, but they are critical to rebuilding one of the most important tools we have to reduce crime and mitigate the harms of mass incarceration: college education. Those of us who have been on the front lines pressing for this change now face a new challenge. We spent 26 years advocating so that what’s known as college-in-prison could be. Now is the time to figure out what it should be.

In a stunning shift, Columbia University (NY) announced on Monday a sweeping series of changes to address the school’s failures to protect patients who were sexually assaulted by a Columbia doctor. A ProPublica investigation, published in collaboration with New York Magazine, found that Columbia had failed to act on years of warnings as Robert Hadden, an OB-GYN, abused at least hundreds of patients during his 25-year career at the university. In 2012, administrators allowed Hadden to continue seeing patients even after he was arrested for assaulting a patient.

Magdalen College of the Liberal Arts, a small Catholic institution in New Hampshire, will close at the end of the academic year due to low enrollment and financial challenges, WMUR 9 reported. The local ABC affiliate reported that Magdalen currently enrolls about 60 students.