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Volume 52, Issue 51 | thursday, november 16, 2017 | ndsmcobserver.com
University establishes military resource Office of Military and Veteran Affairs will provide support for military-connected students, families By KELLI SMITH News Writer
The University announced the establishment of an Office of Military and Veteran Affairs (OMVA) in a press release Wednesday. According to the release, the office will expand the University’s support for Notre Dame-enrolled veterans and their families, active-duty and ROTC students and those who are dependents of service members. The office will be led by Regan Jones, who, according to the OMVA’s website, is a United States Marine Corps veteran who came to Notre Dame in 2014. Jones said he was hired as the director of the OMVA in September, and since
then has accomplished “a lot of work” through collaboration with various resources, offices and departments at the University. “The creation of this office is really special because I’m in a position to help foster sort of this connective tissue amongst pockets of excellence to create an ecosystem and ensure that these [militaryconnected] students have a robust Notre Dame experience,” Jones said. Provost Thomas G. Burish said in the press release that the Military and Veteran Initiative Steering Committee, an organization Jones said he was involved with for 10 months before the OMVA’s establishment, led the initiative to create the new office.
“With this new [OMVA], we will further strengthen our commitment to serving those who have given so much to our nation and the University,” Burish said in the press release. According to the release, the new office will focus on growing the military-connected undergraduate and graduate student populations and developing targeted services to meet their unique needs. Jones said his immediate goals for the office are centered on “infrastructure and capacity.” “An important first step includes things that may not seem very exciting: how do we tag and track these types of [militaryconnected] students on campus,
NOVO system crashes during junior registration By COURTNEY BECKER News Editor
The course registration process was more stressful than usual for many Notre Dame juniors Wednesday morning when the NOVO registration system unexpectedly malfunctioned. Chris Corrente, the manager of student solutions in the Office of Information Technology (OIT),
said the amount of traffic during registration overloaded the system. “The University’s class registration system runs on two servers in order to help distribute load during heavy usage,” he said in an email. “This morning, it appears the load was not properly distributed, resulting in one of the servers becoming overloaded with traffic.”
The lack of access to NOVO resulted in students registering well after their assigned registration time slots. Junior Madeline Petrovich, who had a 7 a.m. time slot, said she “wasn’t really stressed” about registering for classes until she realized none of her friends could access the system before her time slot. When
News Writer
Give the gift of literacy to someone you know today, and the gift will also be shared with others. That is the aim of the ninth annual Usborne Book Fair which will be held Thursday and Friday in the atrium of the Student Center at Saint Mary’s. This fair is held to assist The Learning Tree, a resource education center in Madeleva Hall open to
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both college students and the wider community. Half of the sales from the book fair will be returned to The Learning Tree in the form of free books. Jayne Fogle, The Learning Tree’s director, said the fair has contributed many books to its library throughout its existence. As the center operates without a budget, these contributions are critical. “We have a children’s literature library, textbooks … educational game packets … a laminator,
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with different stakeholders depending on what program we’re talking about,” Jones said. “So looking with the enrollment division and our deans to think about how we can structure not only our financial aid, but also more development and recruitment strategies to attract [military-connected students] for undergraduate, graduate and professional degrees.” Jones said when he considers the community aspect of the OMVA, he believes it is important to both integrate the students into the campus community and ensure that they have a network they can meet and connect with in a “really deep and meaningful way.” see VETERAN PAGE 4
Lecture explores racism, oppression
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Book fair to benefit Saint Mary’s learning center By SARA SCHLECHT
what’s the success rate and what programs are they interested in,” Jones said. “That’ll tell us a little bit about not only how to support the students we have but how to attract more.” Jones said the OMVA will also expand existing programs such as The Warriors Scholar Project, a program designed to help service members pivot from the battlefield to the classroom, and the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC), among others. As an example, Jones said, the OMVA is working with the enrollment division to further support ROTC students through financial aid for room and board. “We’re going to leverage all of the available resources and work
poster board, cardstock and lots of other types of paper. We also have machines that punch out shapes and letters for bulletin boards,” Fogle said. These tools are useful to a wide range of students, not just education majors and professors. Students use The Learning Tree’s resources for class assignments as well as personal projects, such as making birthday cards. The center offers see BOOK FAIR PAGE 4
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RUNJIE PAN | The Observer
Dr. Carol Anderson gives the second lecture of the Race and Ideas Lecture Series on Wednesday, discussing racism and oppression. By CIARA HOPKINSON News Writer
Following the backlash against a lecture given by political scientist Charles Murray last spring, the department of Africana Studies initiated the Race and Ideas Lecture Series in partnership with several other academic departments. The second speaker in that series, Dr. Carol Anderson of Emory University, spoke on Wednesday night about her most recent book, “White
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Rage: The Unspoken Truth of Our Nation’s Divide.” Anderson explained that racism does not always manifest itself in expected ways. “White rage is not about the way we often think about racism,“ Anderson said. “White rage is not overtly violent. It’s not a [Ku Klux] Klan cross burning. White rage works smoothly, calmly, efficiently, through the legislature, through the courts, through the see LECTURE PAGE 4
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