Part Two

Instead of actions that aid its too many, largely unadvised and unassisted students, several years ago, OSU changed the long-time traditional requirement that first year students live on campus in university-operated dormitories as part of their transition from home and socialization to college. With little advance notice and no responsible operational planning, one year became two years of mandatory on-campus housing and required university food contracts for all students who do not live with their families.

This was partly foreshadowed when OSU more than twenty years earlier removed full-time faculty from regular student advising. Only a handful of departments now assign new majors to faculty or have majors select their own advisors. For almost all students, as in first- and second-year general education, advising is conducted by full-time, non-teaching advisors. Many students, concentrating in certain colleges and departments, never or seldom speak to an advisor. Waiting time can be months not days or weeks and months.

On August 24, 2023, Ta'Kiya Young was murdered by the police. This fund is to help her family with burial and funeral expenses. 

Give to GoFundMe here

Give to CashApp here: $ChelleeBoo2887

Harold Pinter was a prolific playwright and screenwriter. I enjoyed the 1960s films he’d written the screenplays for, The Servant and Accident, which were directed by that refugee from the Hollywood Blacklist, Joseph Losey. After being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, Pinter’s rather heroic, 2005 noble Nobel Lecture dared to challenge the prevailing pro-war propaganda, excoriating the Iraq War. Although he was too sick to travel to Scandinavia, the hospitalized 75-year-old British man of letters videotaped his 46-minute frontal assault on U.S. foreign policy that was screened at the Swedish Academy. (See: https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/2005/pinter/lecture/.) Pinter did the best thing one can do with status, using it as a platform to be a scourge of the status quo, an implacable enemy of social injustice.

Earlier this year, at a Kroger on the far Southside, a store manager was undercover. And a customer, a middle-aged white woman wearing a pant suit, a COVID mask and a floppy hat, was about to the leave the store.

Suddenly the undercover store manager yelled “Drop It!” The white woman, who looked more Dublin than Southside, scoffed at first. But then spilled her plastic grocery bags’ contents onto the floor. Out came organic juices, dog bones, and makeup. Caught red-handed. She was marched by the manager to the customer service desk.

There, a security guard made her raise her right hand and sign a document. She said she would never shop in that store again and walked out a free woman. A Free Press reporter witnessed all of this firsthand.

The Open Shelter still is in need of groups that can provide sack lunches for those we serve every month; homeless men, women, children, and families.

We are in definite need of sack lunches for 9/22 & 9/28.

Due to increased demand, we can use sack lunches for any weekday but need sack lunch groups for the 1st Tuesday, 4th Thursday, and 4th Friday of each month in addition to any 5th Tuesdays or 5th Fridays.

Feel free to give us a call at 614-222-2885 or email us back if you can help or have any questions.

Many groups that have helped say it is a fun and rewarding activity. YOUR support can help fill the bellies of the 250+ homeless and marginally housed men, women, and children we see each weekday. Thank you!