Beacon award recipients announced: The Rev. Nontombi Tutu speaks on higher education

By Francisco Omar Fernandez Rodriguez Arts & Features Editor

By Sarah Daponde Asst. Arts & Features Editor The Division of Diversity, Inclusion and Community Engagement (DICE) hosted the third annual MLK Commemoration Lecture and Beacon Awards on Jan. 29. Four recipients were chosen out of nine nominees for the Beacon Awards. Jerome Burke, director of the CIE, and the Beacon Awards Committee announced the winners. “The Beacon Awards are given to members of the FSU community who have gone above and beyond their responsibilities to make noteworthy contributions to help advance inclusive excellence at FSU,” said Burke. The Beacon Award winners are senior Laila Jenkins, president of the Black Student Union; Andrew Frimpong, community resource officer; Ishara Mills-Henry, associate professor of biochemistry, chemistry, and food science; and Cara Pina, associate professor of biology. Jenkins said, “Sometimes you have to be your own support system and that has to be enough. You can’t ever let yourself give up.” Pina said, “Equity and inclusion on our campus are really important to me. … One of the reasons I work at Framingham State is because I’m really passionate about ensuring that our first-gen students, our students of color, our low-income students - all of whom didn’t always get a chance to go to college - have a great college experience.” This year the keynote speaker was the Rev. Nontombi Tutu, daughter of the late South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Tutu said she was given the theme “Unfinished Business for Higher Education” and decided that it’s impossible to focus solely on that “because higher education is an integral part of all of society.” Part of the problem in our society is “our attempt to create silos, create areas that work on their own toward their own goal, and then we are surprised when our society is fractured,” Tutu said. She said it’s impossible to build a fair and just society while staying in boxes, and that everything is connected. “If we are talking about unfinished business, let’s talk about the unfinished business of a just world,” Tutu said. While growing up in Apartheid, her parents would have students from the University of Fort Hare over for social events, she said. But these events usually ended up having political discussions, she added. “I met students who were 12, 13 years older than me, who were thinking about what they wanted our country to be,” Tutu said. While she couldn’t understand a lot of the discussion, she thought it sounded empowering, she said. Tutu said being in higher education means “paying attention to life. It means paying attention to who is in the room and who isn’t. It means paying attention to how politics determines our access to education, to healthcare, to everything.” Simply being a student or professor in higher education is already a privileged position and is an opportunity to meet people who are different from us, she said. She’s gotten several responses to her past presentations where someone argued that they don’t see the difference between various people, that they just see humans, she said. “Why would we want to make ourselves all the same?” Tutu asked. She shared a story about how her mother plants different flowers in her garden and takes meticulous care of them. If someone tried to say they didn’t see any difference, “that person would be feeding the flowers,” she said. Higher education is meant to expose people to new ideas and perspectives, she said. It is supposed to encourage students to imagine a better world, she added. “Young people on college campuses have historically made it clear that they recognize their time, their responsibility to be a part of moving our world forward in terms of human rights and justice,” Tutu said. She said it was students who led the movements against the Vietnam War and Apartheid. And today, it is “students who are the most vocal about the horrors that we have seen in Gaza and the West Bank,” Tutu said. It is the responsibility of institutions to encourage students to question the way the world is, she said. “Sometimes that questioning makes us uncomfortable, because we are a part of the power structure,” Tutu said. She shared a story about an experience she had at another university, where there was a student movement against Israel. The students wanted to divest from companies supporting Israel, she said. During the conversation at that university, one of their administrators said they wouldn’t “be able to offer scholarships in the same way” if they divested from those companies, she said. A student at that university said they understood that but knew their school could be doing better, to which Tutu gave a standing ovation, she said. “We can build bridges that will make us think about different ways of funding scholarships, that will make us think of different ways of making an impact on the lives of disadvantaged students here while not being a part of a genocide there. That, I think, is the unfinished business of higher ed,” Tutu said. When she was growing up, she was told that Apartheid couldn’t end because the West supported it, she said. But support against Apartheid came from college campuses forced to divest by students, she said. Tutu said she speaks as a Black immigrant who carries her U.S. passport to prove her citizenship. “I grew up in Apartheid South Africa when Black people had to carry passports. I never imagined that in my 60s, in the US of A, I would be carrying a passcard,” Tutu said. It is important for someone to not stop at just imagining a better world but to also do the work needed to make change, she said. “We are the ones we have been waiting for. There is no one. There is no one coming to save us but ourselves,” Tutu said. She said in times of crisis, the wise seek out help in the unknown. “They reach out into new places, new communities, to get new eyes on a problem, to get new thoughts on how to deal with what we are facing, because clearly, the eyes and ears and hearts that we have used so far have not dealt with the problem,” Tutu said. Tutu said she dreams of a world where her daughters can walk anywhere at any time without fear, of a world where her son can call her without warning and she doesn’t start worrying that he got arrested, and of a world where children aren’t left trapped in cars or taken by immigration officials. She said while growing up, she had to take her report card around her neighborhood to either get money and candy for good grades or lectures for bad grades. One time she complained to her grandmother about working so hard in school when the system they lived in wouldn’t let them get good jobs anyway, she said. “And my grandmother always used to say in response, ‘This is not the end of the story. What you are preparing yourself for is not today. It is for the day that we are working for,’” Tutu said.