Roberta Brown, Composition Coordinator and Assistant Professor of English Composition at WNMU, recently participated in the Hannah Arendt Humanities Network Co-Laboratory on Racial, Economic, and Educational Inequalities. Meant to develop proposals aimed at reducing educational inequalities at the college level, it was a Structured Democratic Dialogue led by figures from the Open Society University Network and Bard College in New York over the course of a few weeks.
“After President Shepard asked faculty and staff to increase enrollment to 4,000 students by the fall of 2022, I stumbled to this program in the hope that I could learn how to remove barriers to attending WNMU and attract new students to our university,” she said.
Just one of 20 participants selected to join the conversation, Roberta said she had a number of takeaways. “Access to higher education is a global problem. Many of the educational challenges we face in New Mexico are not unique. Scholarships, early college pipelines, support for students who are parents, and outreach to rural communities are some of the most powerful ways to reach students who otherwise might not be able to attend college,” she said.
As an open access, minority-serving institution, WNMU is dedicated to serving a population that may not pursue higher education elsewhere.