Faculty Senate to vote on increasing Senate representation
February 10, 2021
Even though NU gave the Asian American Studies and the Latina and Latino Studies Programs the ability to hire, promote and tenure faculty in 2018, those faculty are still not all represented on the Faculty Senate. Tomorrow, the Senate will vote on a proposition to base Senate representation on tenure home units in addition to departments.
“There are currently 97 Senate seats and so if we did this, that would bring us up to 98,” Economics Prof. Mark Witte said at the January Faculty Senate meeting. “It doesn’t particularly change the value of the franchise, but it does seem like the cleanest way to make sure that everybody has at least some Senator they can go to with their concerns.”
But her name Sharda always gave her away.
All her life, Sekaran has searched for other “Blindians” people with one Black and one Indian parent. The closest she came was the couple in “Mississippi Masala,” she says, a 1991 movie about a Black man and an Indian woman who fall in love.
In 2010, she says, she heard about a woman running for attorney general in California. She looked Black. But her name gave her away.
Vice President-elect Kamala D. Harris will make history in a lot of different ways when she is inaugurated on Jan. 20. The daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, she will be the first Black vice president and the first Indian American vice president, as well as the first woman to hold elected office in the White House. Her racial identities are often discussed separately, heralded as a win for two different groups. But Harris also exists at a unique cultural intersection: Both Black and Indian, she will elevate a community that has struggled for
Kamala Harris has elevated the Blindian community: ‘It’s a validation of the identity I’ve had to fight for’
With a Black father and an Indian mother, Harris is part of a group that has struggled for acceptance. (Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty; Julia Rendleman for The Washington Post; Lily illustration) Caroline Kitchener
Jan. 12, 2021
Sharda Sekaran was raised by a single Black mom. She went to mostly Black schools as a child, in mostly Black neighborhoods. Looking at her, she says, some people assume she’s Black.
But her name Sharda always gave her away.
All her life, Sekaran has searched for other “Blindians” people with one Black and one Indian parent. The closest she came was the couple in “Mississippi Masala,” she says, a 1991 movie about a Black man and an Indian woman who fall in love.