Howard Students Want Demands Met Hundreds of Howard University students, who participated in a loud protest rally outside the main administration building at the historically Black campus on Friday, gave university officials until this week to respond to their demands. Among the diverse complaints lodged by students were the slow pace of financial-aid paperwork, too-little on-campus housing, poor student services and questionable labor practices. “We love Howard,” Corey Briscoe, a 20-year-old junior and the director of student advocacy for the Howard University Student Association, told The Washington Post. “But this impinges on academic freedom.” Protestors, who threatened to sit in at the administration building until they got acceptable answers from university leaders – a formal response, in writing – gave them until Wednesday. Classes at the Washington, D.C., campus began two weeks ago. “I can [now] go to class,” junior Vanessa Ray, told Myfoxdc.com. “But there will be a purge date, and, if I’m still not validated at that time – if they haven’t certified my loan by that time – I’ll be kicked out of school.” That was also Najauna Muschetta’s complaint. “I think… day to day, okay, am I going to be purged?” she said. “Am I still going to be able to go to my classes? Will I still be able to live in my room? And, you know, that’s stressful!” Britney Wilson, a sophomore from Brooklyn who has cerebral palsy, said that she finds it difficult to access most of the buildings on campus in her electric scooter because the power buttons to open the doors rarely work. Administrators have met with student leaders and said they are taking the students’ concerns “very seriously.” President Sidney Ribeau has promised to meet with some of the protesters today.

Howard University will get the largest bloc of grants in its history to help prepare future engineers and technologists. Siemens PLM Software, a Plano-Texas-based software provider says that its $150 million gift is designed to help strengthen the curriculum of Howard, which is known as the “Capstone of Black education.” The chunk of grants will help the historically Black university with engineering software and student and instructor training, plus specialized certification programs. The award was announced at the Business Software Alliance CEO Forum in Washington, D.C., where Howard is based. Siemens provides PLM technology to more than a million students each year.

Health officials Monday added a student at historically Black Howard University in Washington, D.C., to the list of those stricken with the rapidly spreading swine flu. While experts warned Sunday that overreaction and panic to the new strain of the virus can be just as detrimental as the actual illness, the number of cases continued to rise. Read the rest.

The university community was relieved when the Metropolitan Police Department (MPD) announced on April 14 that missing Howard University student James Duncan III had been found. According to a university press release, Duncan was located Tuesday unharmed in an undisclosed location.  More here.

 Dr. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s former pastor, may not be the spiritual adviser in the new White House, but he still knows how to draw a crowd. Thousands of churchgoers poured into Howard University’s Cramton Auditorium Sunday to hear the Chicago preacher, whom Obama cut off during the presidential campaign following several controversial comments. And the throng waited more than two hours to hear Wright deliver the traditional sermon before Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. He has preached the service, run by clergy at Howard’s Rankin Chapel, for the past five years. Attending the overflow service was such Black notables as opera singer Jessye Norman and Robert Michael Franklin Jr., president of Morehouse College in Atlanta. On this particular day, Wright had nothing to feed the bloodlust of the media sharks. He preached an uplifting message about possibilities and proclaimed, “No more seeing ourselves through the eyes of people who don’t look like us. How does God see us?”

Howard University is a haven for crime. With at least a dozen Howard University students getting jacked on campus in the past month and two others getting raped, the school’s police department wants everybody to carry the dispatch number and keep their cell phones at the ready. “I urge students to call the dispatch number, since most students have cell phones,” Campus Police Chief Leroy K. James told Jessica Lewis of Black College Wire. “[Use your cell phone so] that when you’re in a situation where you need help, you get help.” Nearly half of the robberies occurred on the historically Black campus in Washington, D.C. The number of robberies and assaults is likely even higher than the number reported by campus police, because the figures do not include unreported crimes, Lewis writes. The number to the dispatch is (202) 806-1100 and is to be used whenever students find themselves in a situation requiring police assistance.

Atlanta accused murderer was a slick one, deputy testifies. Accused mass murderer Brian Nichols is one slick criminal, a Fulton County Sheriff’s deputy testified Wednesday. During Nichols’ trial, on charges that he killed a judge and three other people in a daring escape from an Atlanta courtroom in 2005, Deputy Sharon Pauls told jurors that the defendant had warmed up to Deputy Cynthia Hall and eventually convinced her to escort him to court without shackles before overpowering her and brutally beating her. She was left brain-damaged from that whipping and won’t be testifying, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports. Pauls said that Hall, who escorted Nichols to court each day for his rape trial, chatted with him daily like he was a friend. “Deputy Hall stated we didn’t need to place leg irons on him,” Pauls testified. Two days later, the Journal-Constitution reports, “Nichols beat Hall after she removed his handcuffs so he could change from his ‘inmate blues’ to his civilian clothes for trial.” There were other times when Nichols displayed his cunningness, Pauls said, pointing to an occasion when the defendant allegedly tried to get jurors to see his handcuffs while being escorted to his initial rape trial, knowing full well that such an event could have caused a mistrial. Jurors aren’t allowed to see defendants in shackles or cuffs because jail jewelry makes them look more like dangerous criminals and could prejudice the jury against them. “The defendant told his attorney that he thought a juror saw him,” said Pauls, who now is a patrol officer for Clayton County Police. “It was concluded that she [the juror] did not see the defendant.” On two other occasions, she was forced to warn Nichols about trying to carry ink pens out of the courtroom in his Bible, she said. Inmates can only have rubber ink pens, because the others can be used as weapons. “I said ‘Nichols, I told you before not to take pens out of your courtroom. And he said I don’t have a pen. I said, Yes you do. It is right there in your Bible.”