As finals week once again rolls around, stressed faces, messy hair and sweat shirts and pants grace our campus. Yet another semester is coming to a close and oh what a semester this has been. To start it off, President Iadarola announced her retirement after presiding as president of Cabrini College for the past 16 years. After years of building this college community and allowing much-needed growth to occur, she will step down and hand off the reigns to someone new.
As the search for a new President went underway, an incident occurred which shook the emotions of the campus community. Yet another stabbing; which was the second in two years, occurred in the early hours of a Saturday morning in October.
One event everyone should look out for next semester is Ishmael Beah, author of “A Long Way Gone,” a personal account of his life as a boy soldier in the Sierra Leone will be speaking at Cabrini.
In this week’s issue of the Loquitur, we are breaking a story about The Iraqi Student Project. Still in the very beginning stages, a professor of law from Villanova University is working to have colleges and universities around the United States bring over an Iraqi student and provide them with full tuition, room and board.
Americans take for granted the amount of opportunities we are able to achieve just by living in this country. As a result of the War in Iraq, Iraqi students are no longer able to attend Universities. The violence had become such an issue in Iraq that students’ attendance rates were drastically dropping.
According to a report released last year by NGO Save the Children, 818,000 primary school-aged children, representing 22 percent of Iraq’s student population, were not attending school. The number of attacks on schools as well was also a reason as to why the schools had such a decline in students.
Although much more information is to come in the upcoming months, there are still automatic opinions by people when learning about the opportunity to bring Iraqi students to America. Some may think it’s an amazing opportunity for those people to be given a second chance since their education system has been shut down. Others may feel that it’s not fair to give free tuition, room and board to anyone but American students.
Colleges and universities are giving full tuition, room and board to many people from many different countries. ?
Although mostly for sports scholarships, it still is a fact that the United States gives a person from another country an amazing opportunity to come here and get a great education.
The holidays are a time to give thanks for what you have, and to work on certain aspects of your life that you want to improve. Attending Cabrini College is a wonderful opportunity for everyone and definitely something to be thankful for. We have to look at the situation in Iraq and give thanks that our education system has not been shut down.