Widespread protests over the death of George Floyd swept the nation for a second week, with tens of thousands of mostly peaceful protestors vowing that his death at the hands of Minneapolis police would at last spark change.
The protests that have occurred in hundreds of cities, including in the Cedar Valley, have placed a powerful spotlight on racist practices endemic in American society. The message was clear: institutions, including college campuses, must respond.
The COVID-19 pandemic and resulting lockdown has had a profound impact on the economy. Many people have lost their jobs and some businesses have shuttered permanently, facing decreased demand and strict regulations meant to help prevent the spread of the virus. Now, as Iowa begins to reopen, UNI associate professor of economics Bryce Kango discusses how to balance business with the well-being of our communities.
How has the coronavirus changed how we do business in the US ?
The speech that won University of Northern Iowa junior Hannah Haisman a first-place finish at a recent national competition was inspired by a lesson learned during a summer internship: “When the going gets tough, the tough stay joyful.”
Haisman, a communications major who will start her senior year at UNI this fall, took first place in the speakers’ competition at the national convention for Pi Sigma Epsilon, a national co-ed professional fraternity for students interested in sales and marketing.
For Jeremy Rosel, the transition to college life was a bit different than most students.
Instead of dealing with the challenges of leaving home for the first time, he was leaving five years of military service as a combat medic with tours in Iraq and Germany.
It was an abrupt transition. He left the rigid structure of military life to enter the more relaxed atmosphere of a college campus, and he struggled to adapt.
The impact UNI professors make isn’t just in the classroom, but also in the field. For several UNI public health professors, that has meant traveling to COVID-19 hotspots across the country, working to help keep some of the most vulnerable communities safe. Michele Devlin recently traveled to the Navajo Nation in Arizona, which currently has the highest rate of COVID-19 infections in the United States.
The COVID-19 pandemic has forced many of us to move our social lives online, which can make a major impact on our real-life relationships. Here, UNI communications faculty Lori Johnson and Sarina Chen join psychology professor Helen Harton to discuss how communication and technology are changing — and changing us — in the era of social distancing.
With so many of us in quarantine, almost all of our communication has shifted online. What impact does this have on our relationships?
When COVID-19 first started making waves in the United States and colleges across the country began moving to online instruction, Jaycie Vos, special collections coordinator and university archivist at UNI’s Rod Library, turned to the university archives for a sense of what was to come. She searched the stacks for information on how the 1918 Spanish Flu impacted campus life at UNI but didn’t find much.
That inspired her to launch a new project to document how the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting daily life throughout the UNI and Cedar Valley communities.
While COVID-19 forced an unimaginable end to the semester, our graduating seniors continued to impress with their academic brilliance, strong relationships with faculty and other students, and wide variety of out-of-class experiences to create a strong foundation for their future. These are but a few of our promising Class of Spring 2020 graduates:
The University of Northern Iowa prepares students for many avenues of success, including in graduate school. Here we highlight a few talented members of the Class of 2020 whose UNI experience helped them achieve their goals in higher education.
The outbreak of COVID-19 has shuttered most of the University of Northern Iowa’s campus services, but a small, dedicated group of dining services workers have continued to work through the pandemic to provide three meals a day to the tiny population of students still living on campus.
Name: Molly Cline
